|F THE .HISTORY OF EDIEVAL THO Ud :-iiais»ii!!it;i!g;gRiiiaiii.'a»'K' ^ANE'^ PCK^IM G. ^. H. 7ZI P'SZ llxo (&mu\\ Ittttivmitg ^x\mxi GOLDWiN Smith Hall FROM TIIE FUND GIVEN B¥ : CSoIdmitt Smith 1909 ir Cornell University Library B 721.P82 1920 Illustrations of the history of medieval 3 1924 014 603 470 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924014603470 ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL THOUGHT AND LEARNING ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL THOUGHT AND LEARNING BY REGINALD LANE POOLE SECOND EDITION, REVISED tONDON SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN ^N O W L E D G E NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY IQ20 3 Si Feinted in Great Britain by Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, PARIS garden, STAMFORD ST., S.E. 1, and BUNGAY, SUFFOLK, PREFACE. To republish, a book after a lapse of thirty-six years can. only be excused by the fact that it has long been out of print and that it is still asked for. When a new edition was proposed to me, my first intention was to issue the book as it stood, with no more change than the correction of obvious mis- takes. But further consideration showed me that a good deal more than this was necessary if it was to be republished at all. Such revision, however, as I have made has been designedly made with a sparing hand, and the book remains in substance and in most details a work not of 1920 but of 1884. Had I written it now, the point of view would not have been quite the same. A large literature on the subjects I dealt with has appeared in the interval, and a fresh examination of the materials would certainly have recommended a different selection of ' illustrations ' from that which I made then. It was indeed fortunate that I gave the book the title of Illustrations, because it made no claim to be a coherent history, though it has sometimes been mistaken for one. The long interval of time which separates the new edition from the original seems to justify some statement as to the manner in which the essays collected in the book came to be written. In 1881 I resigned a post which I held in the department of manuscripts in the British Museum in order to spend two years in study on the Continent. This' plan was made feasible by my election to a travelhng scholarship on the Hibbert foundation, and I cannot too heartily express my VI I-EBFACE. gratitude to the trustees for thus enabling me to begin a course of work which I have carried on ever since. I settled myself then at Leipzig in the autumn of 1881, entered the university, and was ' promoted ' doctor of philosophy in the following January. I started my own work by reading John of Sahsbury, but soon saw that he could not stand as a beginning. I had become acquainted with the venerable Gotthard Lechler, one of the professors in the theological faculty of the place and superintendent in the reformed church, a man well-known in England for his pioneer studies of Wycliffe. He recommended me to read Hermann Renter's Geschichte der religiosen Aufkldrung im Mittelalter, and I took his advice. It would not indeed be true to say that I learned much from Renter's exaggerated and often dis- torted presentment of facts; but I found his references useful, and in planning the first half of my book I followed pretty closely the scheme of his. But it seemed to me that the field which Renter surveyed needed an introduction, and in writing this I derived many suggestions from the essay on The Schools of Charles ike Great by James Bass Mulhnger, whom in after-years I had the pleasure of numbering among my friends. Not much of this work was done at Leipzig. In the spring of 1882 I removed to Zurich, where I took quarters in a cottage at Riesbach about a mile out of the town. There I had the advantage of access to two hbraries well-equipped for my special purposes. Both were established in disused churches; the town library in the Wasserkirche, close by what was then the uppermost bridge over the Limmat, and the university library in the quire of the Dominican church high up on the Hirschengraben. From these two libraries I enjoyed PEEfACE. Vll the privilege of borrowing as many as ten volumes at a time, and I made use of the privilege to the full. The limitations of these libraries were also to my benefit. For example, there was no set of Migne's Patrologia in them, and I had to seek my texts in the Benedictine editions of the fathers, in the Lyons Maxima Biblictheca Patrum, and in the collections of D'Achery, Mabillon, Baluze, Pez, and others ; a process which taught me a great deal on the way. By the time that, working forward from a much earlier period, I had again reached John of SaHsbury, the field of my studies was altered by an extraneous cause. It so happened that in the winter which I spent at Leipzig a society was formed with the object of editing Wyclifie's Latin works, and I undertook the charge of the two treatises On Dominion. It was not that I was particularly interested in Wyclifie ; but I had a young man's ambition to print an editio princeps, to bring to light matter hitherto known only from scanty citations; and the work had a greater attraction for me because it belonged to an early time in Wycliffe's career, before he had come into conflict with authority on questions of theological doctrine. The treatises which I proposed to edit followed in direct sequel the work of other political theorists ; they did not belong to that part of Wyclifie's activity in which he stands forth as a pioneer in the discussion of problems which lay apart from those to which my attention had been directed. Thus after I had completed what I had to say about John of SaHsbury I limited myself to the consideration of political theory ; and this restric- tion prevented me from attempting to include anything which I had contemplated relative to the great period of mature scholasticism. But it was viii PREFACE. necessary to construct a bridge to join the two parts of my book. A bull of Pope Gregory XI at once directed me to trace the political system of Wychffe back to Marsiglio of Padua and to Wilham Ockham ; and an exposition of John of Salisbury's views, in the setting of the type of opinion which he represented, was introduced to form a counter- piece to my summary of the opposed doctrine. On my return to England in the summer of 1883 I apphed myself to fiUing in the gaps in my essays, which needed a larger library than could be found at Zurich, and to completing the last chapters. In the following year I paid a long visit to Vienna in order to examine the Wycliffe manuscripts in the imperial library, and in the course of the autumn my book was published. The title which I gave to it was Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought in the Departments of Theology and Ecclesiastical Politics. ' I have now abbreviated it and at the same time expanded its scope. In revising the text I have specially to thank my friend the Rev. F. E. Brightman, D.D., for his great kindness in reading the sheets and suggesting a large number of improvements both in form and matter. In two chapters only, iv and V, have I made extensive alterations. These were required by the new evidence that has been brought to light concerning Bernard of Chartres, whom I have been compelled to distinguish from Bernard Silvestris,^ and by the discovery of Abailard's early work de Trinitate in 1891.^ But changes and corrections of less importance have been made 1 See my paper on the Masters of the Schools at Paris and Chartres in John of Salisbury's time, printed in the English Historical Eeview, 35. 321-342, July 1920. ^ See my paper on Abailard as a Theological Teacher, in the Church Quarterly Eeview, 41. 132-145, 1895. PREFACE. IX throughout the book, and I have added occasional notes referring to works which have appeared since its first pubhcation. These are distinguished by- brackets. I have not, however, given a false appearance of novelty by altering references to suit recent editions, except in a few instances, such as the second edition of Prantl's Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, and Mr. Webb's edition of the Policraticus. Nor have I changed the plan of naming the place of publication of books quoted, except when English, French, and German works were published at London, Paris, and Leipzig; and of specifying their size, when it was anything but octavo. References to Bouquet are to the Recueil des Historiens des Oaules et de hi France ; those to Pertz indicate the folio series of Scriptores in the Monumenta Germaniae historica, and those to JafEe to the Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicarum. In citations of manuscripts b denotes the verso of the leaf; but when a manuscript is written in double colums A, B, and c, d denote respectively the two columns of recto and verso. R. L. P. Oxford, 24 October, 1920. CONTENTS. ■^ — The Church and Secular Learning ■^■--■The Irish Missionaries . Learning in the Frankish Empire ~ Learning in England . ^-Results on the Continent 1 5 8 14 16 19 Chapter I. Claudius of Turin and Agobard of Lyons 24 Claudius of Turin 25 Agobard of Lyons .... Gottschalk ..... Chapter II. John Sootus The Controversy concerning Predestination John Scotus ..... The Division of Nature John's Influence on Later Opinion — K:!hapter III. The Dark Age . State of Education .... Heresies ...... The Dialectical Movement . Chapter IV. The School of Chartres . Bernard and Theodoric William of Conches .... Gilbert of La Porree .... 34 45 46 46 48 52 65 69 71 79 86 95 100 106 112 Xll CONTENTS. Chapter V. Peter Abailard . — Abailard as a Teacher of Dialectics and of Theology His Condemnation at Soissons ""^His Theological Writings — ^Es Condemnation at Sens . Chapter VI. The Trial op Gilbert op La Porreb Eeason and Authority .... Opinions of Gilbert of La Porree . The Council of Rheims Reputation of Abailard and of Gilbert . Chapter VII. John op Salisbury . His Studies at Paris and Chartres . The Policralicus . . . . IS^TTMn VIII. The Hierarchical Doctrine op the S State ........ The Hirdebrandine "Reforin^ .... ■ John of Salisbury ..... -St. Thomas Aquinas ..... The Donation of Constantine and the Translation o: the Empire ...... Augustin Trionfo ..... PAOK 116 118 123 129 138 143 146 146 156 163 170 176 177 190 198 199 204 210 218 222 Chapter IX. The Opposition to the Temporal Claims op the Papacy 224 Peter du Bois 224 Marsiglio of Padua 230 "~^T?illiain^5ftJcEham 241 Chapter X. Wyclippe's Doctrine op Dominion . 246 WyclifEe at Oxford ...... 249 His Treatises on Dominion ..... 253 His View of Church and State , , . , 263 CONTENTS. xili APPENDIX. PAGE I. Note on the Origin of the Legend respecting John Scotus's Travels in Greece .... 271 II. Excursus on the Later History of John Scotus . 273 III. Note on a Supposed Theological Exposition by • Gerbert 285 IV. Note on the Precursors of Nominalism . . 291 V. Excursus on a Supposed Anticipation of Saint Anselm 293 VI. Excursus on the Writings of William of Conches 298 VII. Excursus on the Interpretation of a Place in John of Salisbury's Metalogicus .... 310 VIII. Note on Abailard's Masters . . . .314 IX. Note on the Second Preface to Gilbert of La Porree's Commentary on Boethius . . . 317 X. Note on Clarenbald of Arras .... 320 Index 323 INTROBUCTION The history of medieval thought falls naturally into introduction. two broad divisions, each of which is brought to a close not by the creation of a new method or system from native resources, but by the introduction of fresh materials for study from without. The first period ended when the works of Aristotle, hitherto known only from partial and scanty versions, were translated into Latin; the second, when a knowledge of Greek letters in their own language made it impossible for men to remain satis- fied with the views of ancient philosophy to which they had previously been confined and upon which their own philosophy had entirely depended. An age of eclecticism, too eager in its enjoyment of the new-found treasure to care to bind itseU, as its predecessors had done, to any single authority, was then followed by an age in which the interests of theological controversy drove out every other interest, until at length in the comparative calm after the tempest of the Keformation, philosophy entered a new phase, and the medieval or traditional method was finally rejected in favour of one common in this respect to both modem and ancient speculation, that it rested upon independent thought, and regarded no authority as beyond appeal. In the two periods of the middle ages we find nothing absolutely original; advance is measured less by the power with which men used their intellects than by the skill with which they used their materials. Still there is a difference between the periods which makes the earher the more interesting to the student of human thought considered as apart from any specific production of it : for while the works of Aristotle were almost totally Introduction, 2 THEOLOGICAL CHAHAOTER unknown to the Latin world there was a wider sphere for the exercise of ingenuity, for something approaching originahty, than there could be when an authoritative text-book lay ready to hand. In the following essay our attention will be mainly directed to these traces of independence, not so much in the domain of formal philosophy as in those regions where philosophy touches reUgion, where reason meets superstition, and where theology links itself with political theory. In the later period we shall limit ourselves exclusively to this last subject, to the attempts made to frame a political philo- sophy, and in particular to reconcile the notion of the state with the existence and the claims of an universal church, or to modify those claims by reference to the necessary exigencies of civil government. The field therefore of our investigation is that of theology, but it does not follow on this account that its produce must also be theological. Theology is no doubt the mode of medieval thought : the history of the middle ages is the history of the Latin church. The over- mastering strength of theology, of a clergy which as a rule absorbed all the functions of a literary class, gave its shape to every thing with which it came into contact. Society was treated as though it were actually a theocracy : politics, philosophy, education, were brought under its control and adjusted to a technical theological terminology. But when this characteristic is recognised, it is found to supply not only the explanation of the distance which seems to separate the middle ages from modem times, but also a means of bridging over the interval. Men thought theologically and expressed themselves theologically, but when we penetrate this formal expression we discover their speculations, their aims, their hopes, to be at bottom not very different from our own; we discover a variety beneath the monotonous surface of their thoughts, and at the same time an unity, ill-defined perhaps, but still an unity, pervading the history of European society. There was indeed never a OF MEDIEVAL THOUGHT. 3 time when the Ufe of Christendom was so confined i«t« oducti om. within the hard shell of its dogmatic system that there was no room left for individual liberty of opinion. A ferment of thought is continually betrayed beneath those forms; there are even frequent indications of a state of opinion antagonistic to the church itself. The necessity of a central power ruUng the consciences of men of course passed unquestioned, but when this immense authority appeared not a protection but a menace to rehgion, it was seldom that it was submitted to in complete silence. When the church seemed to be departing from its spiritual dignity and defihng its ceremonial by the super- stitions and the prodigies of heathenism, or when its pontiffs seemed to have adopted all the vices of secular princes and to have exchanged totally the church for the world, there were rarely wanting advocates of a purer Christian order, advocates whose denimciations might rival in vehemence those of a modem protestant. Even the doctrinal fabric of the church was not always safe from attack; for although no one impugned the truth of Christianity, the attempt was still repeatedly made to clear away the dust of centuries and reveal the simpler system of primitive beUef. Such efforts, until we ap- proach the border-line of modem history, were invariably disappointed. They rarely exerted even a momentary influence over a wide circle. In truth, however generously conceived, however heroically sustained, the aims of the premature reformers were often too audaciously, too wantonly, directed against the beliefs of the mass of their fellow-Christians to deserve success. We may admire their nobihty or their constancy, but an impartial judge- ment can hardly regret that they failed. They troubled the world, it might be for a few years, and left their single memorial in their writings. Yet, though they may occupy but a small place 'in the history of civihsation, the light they cast upon the unusual tendencies of thought, the eccentricities, of the middle ages, , makes them a not unfruitful subject of study. 4 THEOLOGICAL CHARACTER Introduction. ^ g^jn more suggestive line of enquiry is opened in the general history of thought and learning. The masculine spirit and the confidence with which the philosophers of the period carried oa their speculations is hardly suspected by those who are not famihar with the original literature. Men who were least of all in- chned to oppose anything that bore the stamp of traditional authority, displayed a freedom of judgement which could not but tend to consequences in one way or another divergent from the estabUshed system. The methods by which they accommodated the two are indeed evidence of the imperfect grasp they possessed of the inexorable demands of the reasoning faculties ; their theological consciences were equally inexorable in requiring the adjustment; or perhaps more truly, the necessary conformity of reason and authority was so regularly assumed that they were unaware of the act of accommodation; the theological correctness of the conclusion, however arrived at, was the inevitable conse- quence of this implicit identification of contradictory terms in the premises. We are often at Uberty to leave the ultimate reconciliation out of account, as a mode characteristic of the time rather than an argument due to the individual writer. It is the road on which their thoughts travel that retains its interest for the student of philosophical history. The continuous activity of the human reason in Latin Christendom has its witness partly in the opposition, conscious or unconscious, to the tradition of the church, partly in the spirit of its philosophy. Through these currents we may learn the deeper springs which existed in men's minds and which, however often dormant, frozen by the rigid strength of theology, were yet capable of welhng forth to nourish the world. The position held by intellectual studies and by learned men is uniformly the measure of the prevalence of these hberal forces in society; yet since the greatest writers have usually exercised a more powerful influence over posterity than OP MEDIEVAL THOUGHT. 5 over their own generation, it is chiefly from their works imtr qducti on. that we can estimate the power which the stimulus once given to learning and thought could gain in a few minds outstripping their fellows. The history of learning there- fore not only supphes the links that connect the several divisions of the first part of our enquiry, but also the groundwork on which its argument must be constructed. It is well known that the rise of the western church was accompanied by a rapid decline in the study of classical letters.^ Learning, such as it was, became restricted to the clergy and the monks, and these became more and more inclined to elevate their pro- fessional study at the expense, or to the condemnation, of every other. The rhetorical schools which had kept ahve, however poorly, the tradition of classical learning were suffered themselves to die out, and their place was only in a small part taken by the seminaries which gradually grew up about different cathedral or monastic establishments. The grammarian was expelled by the scholastic, and the scholastic had little interest or httle power to imbue his disciples with more knowledge than was required for the performance of the offices of the church. Those who aspired to lead others would seek to advance to an acquaintance, seldom profound or ex- tensive, with the writings of the fathers; and might thus obtain an indirect and distant view of that country from which Augustin and even Jerome had not been able, however desirous, to shake themselves free. But since the day when the expiring paganism of Rome had entered its last conflict with Christianity, the church had granted no terms to the system she had displaced. It was not alone that the philosophical spirit had proved inimical ^ In preparing the following sec- to A. F. Ozanam's Civilisation tion for the press I have derived ohretienne chez les Francs, ch. ix, much help from the first chapters 3rd ed., 1861 (being the fourth of M. Haureau's Histoire de la Phi- volume of his Oeuvres). See also losophie scolastique, 1872, anii of S. R. Maitland's remarks on the Mr. James Bass MuUinger's essay attitude of the church towards on The Schools of Charles the secular learning, in The Dark Ages, Great; 1877. I am also indebted xi,pp.l71-187(cf,p.403n,2),1844. Introduction. O THE ASCENDENCY OF THE CHURCH to orthodoxy : TertuUian's famoiis saying, »■ Haereticorum viufopp.^™5°B, pcttriarchae philosophi, expresses but a portion of the ed. Cologne 1617 tj^^}j_ ^ij^g g^^jj-g classical tradition, all learning in its large sense, was treated not merely as irrelevant to the studies of the Christian, but as a snare from which he was taught to flee as from a temptation of the evil one. Such an antagonism inevitably tended to limit the aims and to narrow the character of the Christian church. It is not necessary here to trace its immediate result upon her doctrine and ceremonial; the fact by itself suffices to show that as Christianity extended its sway among the nations that had overwhelmed the empire, it could not bring with it those refining influences by which it would have been attended, had it absorbed and purified the culture of Eome. As it was, the church was built upon the ruins of a subjugated society; its fabric was but a step less barbarous than that of the Teutonic civihsa- tion by which it was confronted. If we confine our view to the literary aspect of the question, the marks of retrogression are clear and un- mistakeable. Among the few who still cultivated learning oratory degenerated into panegyric, poetry occupied itself with mean or trivial subjects. With the rest the Latin language itself lost its nerve ; idiom and even syntax were forgotten : it was enough if a writer could make himself understood at all. If down to the fifth century we find rare examples of an opposite ten- dency, the hostihty of the church towards classical letters is thenceforth strongly marked. In the sixth century indeed Cassiodorus labours to prove that secular learning is good and profitable, utilis et non refugienda cognitio, and anxiously supports his argument by a catalogue of learned men downwards from Moses to the fathers : ^ but the apology itself implies the discredit into which " De institutione divinarum ubi virorum talium multiplex litterarum, xxvii, xxviii; 0pp. praeoedit exemplum ? scientes 2. 523 sq., ed. J. Garet., Venice plane . . . reotam veramque 1729 folio. Quis enim, Cassiodorus soientiam Dominum posse con- concludes, audeat habere dubium, cedere. Introduction. OPPOSED TO CLASSICAL STUDIES. 7 learning had fallen. A little later that discredit was completed when Gregory the Great employed his mi- t6o4. rivalled authority to denomice all secular learning. The common story that the pope burned the Palatine library, because, as i> John of Sahsbury hints, he had a greater b Poiteat. viu interest in the holy Scriptures, is no doubt false; but it ^,^c.'c.'jV°' not inaccurately represents the attitude Gregory took i^' Sfiib? up in regard to classical studies. The "letter which he "kp^ rx.''54V*'^' wrote on the subject to Desiderius, bishop of Vienne, S'senedlfpSs has been often quoted, but it is too characteristic to be ^''°^ '°''°' omitted here. The bishop, it seems, had ventured to teach grammar and read the poets. Gregory's remon- strance is as follows : A report has reached us which we cannot mention without a blush, that thou expoundest grammar to certain friends ; whereat we are so offended and filled with scorn that our former ojyinion of thee is turned to mourning and sorrow. The same mouth singeth not the praises of Jove and the praises of Christ.^ Think how grievous and unspeakable a thing it is for a bishop to utter that which becometh not even a religious layman. . . . If hereafter it be clearly established that the rumour which we have heard is false and that thou art not applying thyself to the idle vanities of secular learning — nugis et secularibus litteris, a significant hendiadys, — we shall render thanks to our God who hath not delivered over thy heart to be defiled by the blasphemous praises of unspeakable men.* ' The words, ' In uno se ore the score and the tally, thou hast lovis laudibus Christi laudes non caused printing to be used; and capiunt,' have been misunder- contrary to the king, his crown and stood : see Mullinger, p. 77. I dignity, thou hast built a paper- have no doubt that the phrase is mill. It will be proved to thy face borrowed from saint Jerome, that thou hast men about thee ' Absit ut de ora Christiana sonet that usually talk of a noun, and a lupiter omnipotens,' &c. : Ep. verb, and such abominable words ad Damas., 0pp. 4(1) 153, ed. as no Christian ear can endure to Bened., Paris 1706 foho. hear : ' 2 King Henry vi. iv. 7. * M. Haureau, 1. 6, wittily com- ' On le voit, I'imagination du pares the language of Jack Cade poete n'a pu rien aj outer au texte to lord Say : ' Thou hast most de la lettre pontificale.' Un- traitorously corrupted the youth speakable, ' nefandus,' we may of the realm in erecting a grammar- notice, was a favourite word with school : and whereas before our Gregory, to whom the Lombard forefathers had no other books but was regularly nejandissiinus. 8 THE IRISH MISSIONS. Introduction. This then was the policy, if we may so call it, of the church with regard to education, declared by him who has an undisputed title to be called the father of the medieval papacy, and whose example was law to his successors, as indeed it was to the whole of Latin Christendom for many ages. From this authority there was however one comer of Europe practically exempted.^ Ireland had as yet remained free from the invasion of foreign barbarians, and had held its own tradition not only of Christian but also of classical culture. Although it did not receive Christianity until the middle of the fifth century,^ the newly-planted religion had grown up with astonishing rapidity and strength.' The Irish, or, to give them their proper name, the Scots, had no sooner been enlightened by the preaching of a foreigTi missionary, saint Patrick, than they pressed forward to make all nations participators in the knowledge of their new faith. Al- ready there was a steady emigration across the north channel into that country which was soon to borrow the civilisation, the very name, of the settlers.* Now, that emigration took a distinctively religious character. The little island of Hy off the coast of Mull became the head- spring from which Christianity was to penetrate among ' M. Haur^au's chapter on the " That there might have been Eooles d'Irlande, in his Singu- and probably were a few Christians larit^s historiques et litt&aires, in Ireland before saint Patrick's 1861, is full of the interest day is not of course denied : see which that author is pecuharly Todd 197. skilful in giving to whatever he ' ' It is recorded by chroniclers, writes. A good survey of the as one might chronicle a good har- Irish missions is contained in a vest, that a.d. 674 Ireland was fuU learned essay by Arthur West of saints : ' Haddan 264. Haddan on Scots on the Continent, * For a long time the name of printed in his Remains, 258-294, Scotland continued to be common O.xford 1876. [Cf. L. Gougaud, to the two countries. Thus saint Les Chretient^s Celtiques, 134- JNotker Balbulus speaks of an event 174, 1911; and W. Levison, Die as occurring in Scotia, insula Hy- Iren und die Frankische Kirche, he.rnia : Martyrolog. o,d v. Id. luii., in the Historisohe Zeitschrift, 109. in J. Basnage, Thesaur. Monum. 1-22, 1912.] For the character eccles. et hist. 2 (3) 140, Antwerp of the ancient Irish church see the 1725 folio. Compare the evidence introduction to J. H. Todd's Saint collected by archbishop Ussher, Patrick the Apostle of Ireland, Britann. l-.cclesiarum Antiquit Pubhn 1864, 380-384, ed. 2, London 1687 folio. IKISH CHRISTIAinTY. 9 the rude inhabitants of the Pictish highlands, or the i"^"""""'"". English of Northumbria or Mercia. But the zeal of the Irish missionaries could not be confined within the compass of Britain. The Celt yielded not to the North- man ia his passion for travel; ^ then as now the poverty of the land was the peremptory cause of emigration : but the ambition of the missionary suppUed a far stronger incentive to distant enterprises than the mere love of adventure or the mere hope of gain; and those who had once been known but as the pirates whose terrible fleets ravaged the coasts of Britaiti or Gaul, became the peaceful colonists of Christianity in nearly every land where the Teuton in his advance westward had established himself. From Iceland to the Danube or the Apennines, among Frank or Burgundian or Lombard, the Irish energy seemed omnipotent and inexhaustible. To account in any sort for this astonishing activity we have to go back to the form in which the Celtic church had grown up, and observe how its loose and irregular organisation left its ministers free to choose their own work where they would. In other countries the diocese had been the basis of Christian organisation : in Ireland it was the monastery. This was the centre of the religious community; the abbat, not the bishop, was its repre- sentative chief. When gifts were made to the church the monastery was the recipient; the abbat was their steward. Round the monastery then the clergy of the neighbourhood grouped themselves as a tribe or clan. The absence of any fixed endowment was an insuperable obstacle to the formation of an ecclesiastical constitution after the common pattern. Almost everywhere the d bishops were untrammelled by the cares of a definite 1^%^.°^^ ^'^' diocese; often a band of many bishops is foimd settled at one place. The lesser clergy were driven to earn a living as they might, in the secular business of the farm or the plough. They had no hopes of ecclesiastical ^ Scotonim, quibus consuetudo coijversa est : Vit. s. Gall. ii. 47 in peregrinandiiam paeneinnaturam Pertz 2. 30; 1829. Introduction. 10 THE IRISH ELEMENT preferment to tempt ttem to stay at home : poverty was tkeir natural lot, and it might be met with as little inconvenience abroad. Thus they poured forth upon the continent, the most devoted, the least self-seeking of missionaries : how poor they were we may learn from the fact that special hostelries were founded for their reception in many places of the Frankish realm by the charity of their wealthier fellow-country- men 10 27 It is not however with the religious work of the Scots that we are immediately concerned : their literary tradi- tion is still more remarkable and characteristic. Isolated in a remote island, the stream of classical learning had remained pure while the rest of Roman Europe had suffered it to be corrupted or dried up in the weary decay of the empire that followed the Teutonic influx. In Ireland it was still fresh and buoyant ; and from the Irish it passed back to the continent in greater and greater waves. Of the means by which their education was ac- quired at home we are but scantily informed. In the 'Hist.ecci.iii. Seventh century, eBede tells us, the Northumbrian nobles, and others too of middle rank, flocked to the schools of Ireland ; and while some faithfully dedicated themselves to the monastic life, others chose rather to pass in turn through the cells of the masters and give their labour to study : and the Scots most readily received them, and provided them daily their food without charge, and books also to read, and free instruction. But we have to guess from a variety of scattered notices and suggestions the precise way in which the Irish tradition of learning differed from that current on the continent. At one moment we read of saint Caimin, a teacher on an island "• At least these ' hospitalia Sco- for the attention of the oounoij of torum quae sancti homines gentis Meaux in 845, can. xl. : Mansi, illiuB in hoc regno construxerunt et Conciliorum amplissima Colleotio rebus pro sanctitate sua acquisitis 14. 827 sq., Venice 1769 folio. The arapliaverunt ' were sufBciently ordinance for their reform was numerous for the abuses by whict sanctioned by a capitulary of the foundations had been diverted Charles the Bald a year later : from their proper purpose, to call Pertz, Leg. I. 390 sq. ; 1835, IN MEDIEVAIj CrVlLlSATTON. 11 of Loughderg, who made a critical edition of the Psalms ; ^^ iwtr oduch om. and there is at all events 'evidence to shew that the 'cf. Haddan Scots possessed, in common with the Britons, a Latin ^ ^ ^''^' version of the Bible distinct from the vulgate. It has been thought too that the e Greek language which had b cf . ozanam almost ceased to be known elsewhere in the west, was '' °"* widely cultivated in the schools of Ireland .^^ But of greater significance is the fact that there reigned, not only among her professed scholars but also among the plain missionaries whom she sent forth to preach the gospel to the heathen, a classical spirit, a love of Uterature for its own sake, a keen dehght in poetry. The very field of study of which the Latin was taught to say, Ji This " James iii. 15. wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish, was that to which the Scot turned with the purest enthusiasm. The gaiety of the Celtic nature made him shew his devotion to the classical poets by imitating them. Saint Columban, the apostle of Burgundy, whom men knew as the stern preacher of an austere discipline ,1* as the haughty febuker of kings, was wont to seek refresh- ment from his rehgious labours in sending his friends 11 On this abbat Caimin of Chartes, 46 (1885) 344 sq.; and Iniskeltra who died in 653 see J. by Mr. M. Esposito in the Pro- Lanigan, Ecclesiastical History of oeedings of the Royal Irish Ireland 3. 11, 2nd ed., Dublin Academy, 32. c. (1913) 78-88.] 1829. Ussher says, Antiq. 503, ^^ [The evidence for this opinion, that he saw a portion of the saint's at least so far as it relates to the work, said to be autograph. It time before the eighth century, is was elaborately noted with the extremely scanty. Cf. M. Roger, usual critical signs, and contained L'Enseiguement des Lettres clas- on the upper part of the page a siques d'Ausone k Alcuin, 1905, collation with the Hebrew, and 268-272.] brief schoUa in the outer margin. " The severity of the Rule put [Ussher's mention of Hebrew is a forth by Columban, in comparison mistake. The Psalter, now in the with that of saint Benedict, is ad- Franciscan convent at Dublin, mitted, though IMilman, History having been moved thither from of Latin Christianity, 3rd ed., the convent of S. Isidore at Rome 1872, 2. 294, seems to imply an in 1871j is assigned by J. 0. West- opposite judgement. Haddan, in- wood, Facsimiles of the Minia- deed, p. 267, goes so far as to tures of Anglo-Saxon and Irish claim an Irish origin for the sub- Manuscripts, p. 88, 1868, to the stance of the entire penitential eleventh or twelfth century. See system. Compare WiUiam Bright, also notes by Count Nigra in the Chapters of early English Church Bibhotheque de I'Ecole des History 96, Oxford 1878. 12 IRISH CULTURE. Introduction. ' Ussher, Vet. Epist. Hibern. Sylloge, 9-18, Dublin 1632 quarto. ^ pp. 10 sq. i letters in verse, now in the rhymed couplets of his own day, now in hexameters. Sometimes ^ the initials of the lines spell an acrostich : once the saint writes a long letter composed of a string of adonics.^* Meagre as his performances may appear, if judged by ancient models, Columban's more serious poems are neither awkward nor ungraceful. All of them are full of conceits and mythological allusions; they read as the work of an entire pagan .^^ Equally they prove the breadth and freedom of the training which he had received at Banchor and which was the pecuhar possession of the Scots. There is a vein of poetry running through the whole lives of these Irish confessors, a poetry of which the stories of their acts are indeed better witnesses than their practical essays in verse-making. They brought imagination, as they brought spiritual force, into a world well-nigh sunk in materialism. Their hghter productions shew one side of the Scottish nature : their earnest, single-hearted pursuit of learning in the widest sense attainable, their sohd hard work as " Accipe, quaeso, nunc bipedali condita versu oarminuloruni munera parva. Afterwards he excuses the eccen- tricity of his metre : Sufficit autem ista loquaci nunc cecinisse carmina versu. Nam nova forsan esse videtur ista legenti formula versus. Sed tamen ilia Troiugenarum incUta vates nomine Sappho versibus istis dulee solebat edere carmen. Then he explains the construction of the verse and concludes with a second apology, this time in hexa- meters, urging the weariness of old age and feeble health as a justifi- cation of his Uoense : XJssher 13-18. [The genuineness of these verses has been questioned, but it is defended by W. Gundlaoh, in the Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft fur altere Deutsche Geschichtskunde, 15. 514^526, 1890.] 1^ M. Haur6au, Singularit^s 12 sqq., rightly dwells on this charac- teristic. I have not noticed the poem ascribed to saint Livinus, whom tradition makes the apostle of Brabant in the seventh century ; because the hkehhood is that these elegiacs (printed in Ussher 19 sqq.) are as spurious as the biography, called saint Boniface's, with -which they appear to stand plainly con- nected. The poetry of the Scots is however far from being Hmited to these two examples : Ussher prints another piece, pp. 36 sq. ; and in later times instances, as that of John Scotus, are not un- commpn. IRISH SCHOOLS ON THE CONTINENT. 13 scholars, is not less characteristic. Ireland was once the introduction, university, the i Hterary market not only, as we have ' a. camden, seen, of northern England, but also ^oi the Frankish ed'Snd. 1607 realm ; and if its progress at home was arrested after » Aidheim. Ep. the fatal inroad of the Northmen in 795,^^ the seed which gj'c, l^^isl's-. the Scots had sown in other lands grew to a nobler maturity '^ ' '^*" * '" than it had ever reached on its own soil. " Wherever " c£. Haddan they went they founded schools. Malmesbury, the house of which saint Aldhelm was a scholar and ultim- ately abbat, took its origin from the company of disciples that gathered about a poor Scottish teacher, o Mailduf , » w. Maimesb. as he sat in his hut beside the walls of the old castle of flSm v.°pp'.' Ingelborne. The foundations of saint Columban, Luxeuil, ??.¥.%'. a.' and Bobbio,!' long remained centres of learned activity cf jBrfght 259°' in Burgundy and Lombardy ; the settlement of his BoS^md comrade, saint Gall, rose into the proud abbey which yet ^"'*^i-' ^^^^- retains his name, and which was for centuries a beacon- tower of learning in western Europe; the sister-abbey of Reichenau, its rival both in power and in cultivation, also owed its fame, if not its actual establishment on its island in the lower lake of Constance, to Scottish teachers. Under the shelter of these great houses, and of such as these, learning was planted in a multitude of lesser societies scattered over the tracts of German colonisation; and most commonly the impulse which led to their formation as schools as well as monasteries is directly due to the energetic devotion of the Scottish travellers. ^° For the date see Todd, intr. to written by the bishop's son John, The War of the Gaedhil with the Ussher, in his preface to the Syl- Gaill, pp. xxxii— xxxiv; 1867. The loge, infers that there was a re- earlier invasion by the Northum- vival of the Irish schools after the brian Ecgfrith (Bed. iv. 26) was Danish invasion; since the verse little more than a momentary relates to about the middle of the raid : the vikings on the con- eleventh century : but of this trary settled in Ireland, plundered further proof is wanting. [Com- the churches, and destroyed all pare Dr. H. J. Lawlor's intro- the special tokens of Irish oivihsa- duction to the Psalter of Elec- tion ; see J. R. Green, Conquest of march, 1. pp. x-xiii, 1914.] England, 65 sq. ; 1883. From a i' On their foundation see poem describing how Sulgen, after- Bede's Ufe of Columban, x and wards bishop of Saint David's ivii xxix, 0pp. 3. 283, 304 sq., ed. ad Hibemos aophia mirahile daros, Basle 1563. z8i. 14 THE STORY OF CHABLES THE GREAT Introduction. ^ jjg^ epochi in their labours abroad is opened in the empire of Charles the Great, whose hearty goodwill towards scholars and whose zeal for the promotion of learning are as characteristic and well-known as his skill as a warrior or as a king. If his reign marks the dividing line between ancient and medieval history, it is not only by virtue of its pohtical facts but also because it begins the age of the education of the northern races, fitting them in time to rule the world as the Eomans had done before them. In this great work the Scots, instead of toihng humbly by themselves, were now welcomed and recognised as indispensable cooperators. Their entry into the Frankish realm is related in the Acts of Charles ike Great, written by a monk of Saint GalP* towards the end of the ninth century, whose account, however much p cf. Haddan coloured by legendary ornaments, may still p contain some features of a genuine tradition ; at the least it points rightly to the main source from which the impulse of learning was communicated afresh to the continent. 1 Gest. Kar. 1 When, says the monk, the illustrious Charles had begun to Pertz'z.' 731. reign alone in the western 'parts of the world and the study of letters was everywhere well-nigh forgotten, in such sort that the worship of the true God declined, it chanced that two Scots from Ireland lighted with the British merchants on the coast of Gaul, men learned without compare as well in secular as in sacred writings ; who, since they showed nothing for sale, Icept crying to the crowd that gathered to buy. If any man is desirous of wisdom, let him come to us and receive it ; for we have it to sell. This therefore they declared they had for sale, since they saw the people to traffic not in gifts but in saleable things, so that they thus might either urge them to purchase wisdom like other goods or, as the events following show, turn them by such declaration to wonder and astonishment. At length their cry being long continued was brought by certain that ivondered at them or deemed them mad, to the ears of 18 [Identified with Notker Bal- Georg Waitz gewidmet 97-118, bulus : see K. Zeumer, in Histo- 1886 ; and L.Halpheii, in the Revue risohe Aufsatze zum Andenken von historique, 128 (1918) 293-298.] AMD THE lElSH SCHOLARS. 15 Charles the kitig, always a lover and most desirous of wisdom ; who, when he had called them with all haste into his presence, enquired if, as he understood by report, they verily had wisdom with them. Yea, said they, we have it and are ready to impart to any that rightly seek it in the name of the Lord. When therefore he had enquired what they would have in return for it, they answered. Only proper places and noble souls, and such things as we cannot travel without, food and wherewith to clothe ourselves. Hearing this he was filled with great joy, andfvrstfor a short space entertained them both in his house- hold : afterwards when he was constrained to warlike enterprises, he enjoined the one, by name Clement, to abide in Gaul ; to whom he entrusted boys of the most noble, middle, and lowest ranks, in goodly number, and ordained that victual should be provided^ them according as they had need, with fitting houses to dwell in. The other ^^ he dispatched into Italy and appointed him the monastery of Saint Austin beside the Ticinian city, that there such as were willing to learn might gather together unto him. Now, adds the biographer, a certain Albinus, the name is an accepted classical adaptation of Alcuin, by race an Englishman, when he heard that the most religious emperor Charles was glad to welcome learned men, he too entered into a ship and came to him. Here we are no doubt still wider of historical accuracy : it was not in this manner that Alcuin made acquaintance with the Frankish king, nor is it probable that the arrival of the Irish scholars was 1' ' Alteram vero nomine : ' two pear in the quotation of the pas- manuscripts add the name ' Albi- sage given by Vincent of Beauvais, num ' ; the rest of those collated Speculum historiale, xziil. 173, by Pertz leave a blank space after Nuremberg 1483 folio. I notice ' nomine,' while the copies from this because M. Haureau, De la which JafEe prints, Bibhotheca Philosophie scolastique, 1. 14, ■Rerum Germ. 4. 632, 1867, omit 1850 (the passage seems to have 'nomine' as well. Possibly 'Albi- been omitted in the new edition num' stood in the original text, and of his book, — the Histoire), states was excluded because the sequel the contrary. The legend there- showed that the person intended fore says nothing of the English could not be the same with the Alcuin, certaialy nothing of John well-known Alcuin, while no con- Scotus, ornaments added by later temporary scholar of the name writers, which even M. Haureau, was known. It may be observed in his earher work, confounded that the ' Albinum ' does not ap- with the original story. Introduction. 16 LEAteNEt) STOtotES Introduction. rcf. Mullinger 6g. ** Encycl. de litt. colend., Pertz, Legg. I. 52 sq. : c£. MuUinger 97 sqq., 102. ' Vit. Car. xxi. Jaff6 4. 528. A.D. 668-9. >■ Bed. iv. I : cf. Bright, Chapters 219 sqq. ^Bed. iv. 2; Bright 237 sq. attended by the picturesque circumstances which the monk relates. Yet, however httle there be of truth in the fable, it is still valuable as evidence of the clearness with which a subsequent generation seized the main fact of Charles's indebtedness to the British islands, and also with which it expressed, as an accepted and natural relation, the notion of affinity between learning and godhness which it ^ was the work of Alcuin and still more of the Scots to inculcate upon their age. Through their influence it was that the king sent forth the s famous capitularies of 787 and the following years, which enforced the estabhshment of schools in connexion with every abbey in his realm, and laid the new foundation of medieval learning.^" Amahat peregrinos is said almost to Charles's reproach by his biographer tEinhard; yet the strangers whom he welcomed are in truth the first authors of the restoration of letters in Francia. The name of Alcuin introduces us to another element in this work. For England had also been for some time the scene of a literary life, less independent indeed and more correct in its ecclesiastical spirit, but hardly less broad than that of the Scots. A singular fortune had brought together as the second fathers of the English church, 1 a Greek of Tarsus and an African, Theodore archbishop of Canterbury, and Hadrian, abbat of Saint Peter's in that city, the one from Eome, the other from the neigh- bourhood of Naples. While Theodore worked to reduce the church of England into a nearer conformity with cathohc discipUne, the two friends had their school at Canterbury, where one might ^c learn not only the know- ledge which made a good churchman, but also astronomy and the art of writing verses, and apparently even medicine. '" A variety of notices respect- ing the schools of the time is col- lected by the Benedictines in the Histoire litt^raire de la France, 4. 12 sqq.; 1738 quarto. They concern chiefly Lyons, Orleans, Fulda, Corbie, Fontenelle, Saint Denys, and Tours. It was to Tours that Alcuin withdrew, as abbat of Saint Martin's, in 796. A. F. Gfrorer comments on the importance of the schools of Aquitaine, Concha, Galuna, and Aniane : Allgemeine Kirchenge- schichte, 3. 702 sqq., Stuttgart 1844. IN ENGLAND. 17 But the previous experience of the teachers enabled them '"troduction to extend their lessons into a field still less in conformity with the accustomed routine of monastic schools : they made their pupils learn Greek so thoroughly that more than half-a-century later Bede says that some of them still remained who knew Greek as well as their mother- tongue. yAn Englishman too, Benedict Biscop, the y Bed. hist. friend of Wilfrid, who had attended Theodore on his road muth.'iii?^^ from Rome to Canterbury and had held for a while the abbacy to which Hadrian succeeded, helped forward the advancement of his countrymen in another way. He was a sedulous collector of books and took advantage of re- peated journeys to Rome to return ^ laden with purchases "ibid. or the gifts of friends, gathered thence or from places on the road. With these he endowed the abbey which he erected at Wearmouth; and among his last charges to the brethren of his house we read that * ' he enjoined them » cap. ix. to keep jealously the precious and very rich hbrary, indis- pensable for the learning of the church, which he had brought from ^om.e,-^i>ibliothecam quam de Roma nobilissi- mam copiosissimamque advexerat, ad instructionem ecclesiae necessariam, — and not to suffer it through carelessness to decay or to be dispersed abroad.' The example of these three men was not lost upon the EngUsh. ^ Aldhelm who, pedant as he was, ranked t Bed. Hist. among the most learned men of his time, passed from his Scottish master at Malmesbury to the school of Hadrian at Canterbury; and "a. goodly band of other scholars <= see Bright (Greek is their peculiar qualification) went forth from '^''^'^' this latter place to spread their knowledge over England. But it was in the north that the new learning took deepest root. At Jarrow, the offshoot of Benedict Biscop's monas- tery of Wearmouth, hved and died Bede, the writer who sprang at once into the position of a father of the church, and whose influence was by far the greatest and most unquestioned of any between saint Gregory and saint Bernard. He is a witness to the excellence of Benedict's collection of books : for though, ^ he says, I spent my " ^is'- ecci. v, c 18 BEDE AND ALCUIN. Introduction. whole life in the dwelling of my monastery, he shews an extent of knowledge in classical literature and natural science entirely unrivalled in his own day and probably not surpassed for many generations to come. Yet, be it remembered, it was first and foremost as a theologian and interpreber of the Scriptures that the middle ages revered him ; and it is as an historian and the father of English historians that we now see his greatest distinc- tion. Nor can the student of his works fail to recognise that Bede, Uke Aldhelm, combined the current which flowed eastward from Ireland with that which came with Benedict from Canterbury. His genial and versatile learning is no less characteristic than the loyalty in which he held fast to the strict tradition of the Catholic church. A child of Bede's in spirit, though he was probably not A.D. 735. born imtil about the time of the master's death, was destined to take back*his tradition to the continent at the moment when it was first ripe to receive the stimulating influence. 804. Alcuin faithfully carries on the current of learning in the north of England of which Bede is the headspring. In his poem On the Pontiffs and Saints of the Church of »ver. 1300- York ehe describes his master's work in langilage which 121 : cf. ver. shcws US the distinctive quaUties for which his disciples Discere nam que sagax iuvenis seu soribere semper ITervidus instabat, non aegni mente laborana : Et sic profioiens est factus iure magister. Plurima quapropter praeolarus opusoula doctor Edidit, explanans obsoura volumina sanotae Scripturae, neo non metronim condidit artem ; De quoque temporibus mira ratioue volumen. Quod tenet astrorum oursus, loca, tempora, leges, Soripsit, et historicoa claro sermone libellos ; Plurima versifico cecinit quoque oarmina pleotro. Alcuin, hke Bede, was a teacher and an organiser of learning, a man of wide reading rather than of original thought. His position in the church at York had afforded iver.is35- him acccss to a hbrary of unusual compass, fin the T561 pp. 128 . . J t 1 • -,. „ ' , sq. *^ poem ]ust quoted he gives a hst of these volumes; it AliCUIN. 19 can only be a selection of what he thought the most im- iNreomranoN. portant. Among them appear the Greek fathers, Atha- nasius, Chrysostom, Basil, — partly perhaps in their original tongue ; ^^ — ^with a good number of the Latins. Of classical poets are named Virgil, Statius, and Lucan; of their degenerate successors, Seduhus, Juvencus, Arator, and Fortunatus. History is represented by Pompeius Trogus, that is, in the abridgement which we know as Justin, and Bede; natural history by Phny. Cicero is named only as an orator. For logic Alcuin mentions Aristotle, — certainly in a Latin guise,^^ — and the trans- lators and commentators, Victorinus and Boethius; for grammar Donatus, Priscian, and Servius. These are the better known of the authors recited in this interesting poem. Alcuin studied them with the simple purpose of fitting himself to be a teacher. He adopts and adapts, as he thinks most appropriate to his scope ; but he creates nothing. On the problems which were so soon to agitate the schools, the nature of being, and the relation of objects to thought, he has Uttle to say of his own ; his s psychology ^ Haureau 1. 124 is directly derived from saint Augustin, his logic from the abbreviators of Aristotle. Learning in England had indeed begun to decline, but before the process had gone too far, Alcuin transplanted it; and, whatever his intel- lectual Umitations, just such a man was needed to set on foot a sound system of education in tbe Franldsh realm. It has been ^ maintained that Alcuin, at least in his '' Muuinger no- 123. later years, and the Scots with whom he worked held opposed positions in this movement; that Alcuin re- mained true to the tradition of saint Gregory, while the '^ Bishop Stubbs thinks that the . source from which the Utera- York library actually contained ture he mentions was derived; manuscripts both in Greek and He- he does not speak of the brew : Smith and Wace's Die- language. tionary of Christian Biography, ^^ Most probably the reference art. Alcuin, 1. 73 a; 1877. But is to the abridgement of the Alcuin's words, de Pontif. 1535-, Categories then ascribed to saint 1539, Jaffe p. 1 28, need not be Augustin : cf . Haureau 1 . 93- pressed to mean more than the 97. 20 ALCUIN AND Introduction, ggots allowed too great a latitude ill their learned ambi- tion ; that Alcuin treated them as rivals, almost as enemies to the truth. Nor is this view altogether groundless. There was without doubt a certain national jealousy sub- sisting between the Enghsh and the Scots; and Alcuin probably resented the predominance which the latter threat- ened to assume when, as an imaginative writer under 1 v.inira, p. 74 n. Charles's graudsou relates, ^ almost all Ireland, regardless ^^' of the barrier of the sea, comes flocking to our shores with a troop of philosophers. There were also differences of ecclesiastical detail. Even in matters of doctrine more than once the Scots had given cause of offence : kef. Haddan k they had, it should seem, with their Greek learning, 274,284. drawn more deeply from the wells of oriental theology than was approved by the cautious judgement of their A.D. 744. age. One Clement, as 1 saint Boniface reports, had denied 140^' the authority of the fathers and canons of the church, and besides holding some views dangerous to moraUty, had gone so far as to teach that Christ by his descent into hell delivered all its prisoners, the unbeheving with the A.D.748. righteous; 2* and Virgil, bishop of Salzburg, had main- "Ep.ixvi. p. tained the existence of dwellers in the antipodes m'in '''■ defiance of God and of his own soul,' because thus apparently he Hmited the sphere of the Saviour's work of redemption just as Clement had enlarged it. There was clearly a repugnance between the plain, solid English temperament and the more adventurous, specula- tive genius of their neighbours. If it be said with truth now that the two peoples are incapable of understanding one another, it is manifest that they are not likely to have made that acquaintance at a comparatively early date after their first introduction. To hold however that Alcuin and the Irish stood apart in the matter of learning, 2' ' Quod Christus, filius Dei, de- Clement, we are informed, though soendens ad inferos omnes quos in- a priest, apparently a bishop, was femi career detinuitindeliberasset, a married man with a family, oredulos et inoredulos, laudatores and advocated marriage with a Dei simul et cultores idolorum.' deceased brother's wife in con- See saint Boniface's letter to pope formity with the Je^vish law : ep. Zacharias, ep. 1., Jaff6 3. 140. xlviii, p. 133. THE IRISH TEACHERS. 21 that Alcuin despised secular literature and forbade his introduowon. scholars to cultivate it, appears tQ be an unfounded pre- sumption : its sole positive basis lies in a n story told by a ° vit. Aichuin. biographer who was not even a contemporary and who =4 sq. relates the affair simply in order to show the master's miraculous gift of clairvoyance. It was fitting enough that Alcuin 'should have' <> remonstrated with those who ° Epp- cwi pp. . , 713 sq. ccxlui. studied their Virgil to the exclusion or neglect of the p-.'^s; rf. epp. ■n-l 1 1 1 J' • ■ cxix. p. 485, Bible ; but the fact proves nothing as to his general regard ■=<=!"■ p- 803- for letters, and the testimony of his writings and acts is more eloquent than such private admonitions. Alcuin and the Scots, we take it, laboured, with whatever transient p jealousies, in a common love of learning. The old"''=f:.Aicumep. temper which regarded rehgion and letters as irreconcilable sqq. opposites, was clean forgotten ; the spirit is caught up by the rulers of the church themselves ; and soon i a Eoman *-S- *=?• ' 4 Mansi 14. 494. council held under the pope, Eugenius the Second, can make a canon enjoining all dihgence in the search for teachers to be appointed in all places to meet the neces- sities of the age, masters and doctors to teach the study of letters and liberal arts, and tJie holy doctrines which they possess, since in them chiefly are the divine commands tnani- fested and declared.^'^ That such an ordinance as this should have been re- quired proves how much the learning of the new empire ^* See the dissertation of Wil- ao sancta habentes dogmata, assi- helm TOD Giesebrecht, De Litter- due dooeant ; qiiia in his maxime aram Stiidiis apud Italos primis divina manifestantur atque de- medii Aevi Saeoulis, 11, Berhn clarantur mandata : ' Mansi 14. 1845 quarto. The 34th canon of 1008. For 'ao sancta habentes dog- the Roman council, as re-enacted mata 'there is a variant 'habentium in an assembly presided over by dogmata": but though the 'sancta' Leo the Fourth in 853, is as fol- seems required to justify the word lows : ' De quibusdam loois ad ' dogmata,' the genitive ' haben- noa refertur non magistros neque tium ' is perhaps more suitable to ouram invenire pro studiis Ut- the context than ' habentes.' Q'he terarum. Idcirco in universis authoritative admonition was ap- episcopiis subiectisque populis, et pealed to three centuries later by aliis locis in quibus necessitas Abailard, as against the detractors ooourrerit, omnino cura et dih- of secular learning in his day : gentia habeatur ut magistri et Theol. Christ, ii., 0pp. 2. 442; doctores constituantur, qui studia Introd. ad thool. ii., ib. p. 69; ed. litterarum liberaUumque artium V. Cousin, Paris 1859 quarto. 22 DECLINE OF LETTERS Introduction. r Cone. Paris, sext. iii. I2 Mansi 14. 599. tad lost its vigour and its wide diffusion in the troubled years that followed the emperor's death. Indeed barely fifteen years had passed since that event, when the pre- lates of Gaul appealed to Lewis the Pious to carry out the mandate issued by the Eoman council, and to save the ruin into which the educational institutions of the country were already faffing. ^ We earnestly and humbly petitimi your highness, they said, that you, following the ensample of your father, will cause public schools to be estab- lished in at least three fitting places of your realm, that the labour of your father and yourself may not thrmigh neglect (which God forbid) utterly decay and perish : so, they added, shall great benefit and honour abound to God's holy church, and to you a great reward and everlasting remembrance. Still the impulse given to civilisation by the work of Charles, however intermittent its effects may appear, — dying out, as it seemed, by degrees until the second revival of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, — was never whoUy lost. Nor was the dechne of literature so rapid as is frequently supposed ; ^^ the change is rather from an initiating to an appropriating age. In the eager life of Charles's day men had leisure for independent study and production : under his successors they were, as a rule, content with a reputation for learning. To be well-read and to reproduce old material, was all that was asked of scholars; and the few who overpassed the conventional ^' For example, Dr. Hermaim Eeuter, Geechichte der religiosen Aufldaning im Mittelalter, 1. 16, Berlin 1875, has no justification in inferring from the words of Claudius of Turin, ' Neo saeoularis litteraturae didioi studium nee ali- quando exinde magistrum habui ' (praef. in Levit., Jo. MabiUon, Vet. Analect. 90, ed. Paris 1723 folio) that instruction was again becoming limited to the sphere of theology; since Claudius was brought up in Spain, when Chris- tian letters were at a low ebb. Dr. Beuter is equally unfortu- nate in referring (ibid. 1. 15 and a. 7) to the same writer (praef. exposit. in ep. ad Eph., MabiUon 91) for evidence of the general decay of letters. Claudius is speaking of sacred learning; he has no interest in any other. On the state of hterature under the later CaroUnga compare Carl von Noorden's Hinkmar Erzbischof von Rheims, 56, Bonn J 863; a. dissertation written by an his- torical scholar who has but re- cently and prematurely passed from us, and for whose work and memory I would here express my gratitude and my personal respect. AFTER CHARLES THE GREAT. 23 boundary of the republic of letters found that they did it I''*« °°pc"o h. at their peril. Nevertheless, even with these limitations, the age succeeding that of Charles the Great, partly from the very imperfection of its intellectual vision, was able to venture upon enterprises which had perhaps been sup- pressed in their birth imder more regular and better organised conditions. In the first century of Christ- ianity it has been said ^ that ' the disciples of the Messiah "Gibbon, ch. , . . ^v- vol- 2. 74f were indulged in a freer latitude both of faith and practice ^- oximd than has ever been allowed in succeeding ages.' A hke criticism would be true with respect to the progress of thought after Charles's day. Not for many generations did philosophy assume that definite medieval guise in which it remained fixed until the dawn of modem history. The gates of theological orthodoxy were even less closely guarded. Hardly a century will elapse before we see, preparing or already matured, some of the characteristic problems of church-controversy, even then held of para- mount importance, though none could foresee the sway they would hold over the minds of men hereafter. The sacerdotal basis of the church is attacked, the nature of ihe divine Trinity is subjected, to cold analysis; the doctrine of predestination is revived, the doctrine of tran- substantiation is formulated. Such were the imexpected fruit of Charles's and Alcuin's husbandry. In the two following chapters we shall examine a few specimens of the literature and the specjilations of the ninth century. The first examples will be taken from a class of writings but indirectly connected with learned studies, and will illustrate the movement of thought with respect to rehgious, or, it may be, superstitious, usages and behefs : the second chapter will attempt to dehneate the character of the theology of the greatest philosopher whom Ireland sent forth to glorify the schools of continental Europe. CHAPTER I. Claudius of Tuein ajstd Agobard of Lyons. Chap. I. A.D. 794. » cf. Stubbs, Diet, of Christ, Biogr. I. 73 b. A.D. 787. b Milman 2. 391 sqq.; cf. C. J. Hefele, concilienge- scliichte 3. 439 sqq., Freiburg 1858. In the empire of Charles the Great the Latin church advanced to a clearer consciousness of her individuality, as apart from her oriental sister, than was possible before the state as well as the church had a western head. The old points of controversy which had once been common to all Christendom now vanish away. From the time of the British Pelagius, the heresies of the west had oc- cupied themselves with a different class of speculations from those which convulsed the eastern church. Hence- forward we shall find the former almost exclusively represented. The last of the eastern heresies, eastern in spirit if not directly in origin, is stamped out with the condemnation of the Spanish adoptians by. the council of Frankfort, a a proceeding in which Alcuin took a con- spicuous part. The last controversy between the churches is signalised by the repudiation of image-worship at the same council. The immediate antecedents of this decision in the matter of image-worship are worthy of notice. The second council of Nicea, seven years earher, had unani- mously approved the practice. It had decreed, under penalty of excommunication, that images of the Saviour and of his Mother, of angels, and of all saints and holy men, should be everywhere set up, should be treated as holy memorials and worshipped; only without that pecuhar adoration which is reserved for God alone. i^ In this ordinance the pope, Hadrian the First, concurred. The value of the pope's opinion was however now, and remained for several centuries, an extremely variable 24 IMAGE-WOESHIP IN THE WEST. 25 quantity. The famous Caroline Books, wkich (whatever "^^^J- be their actual authorship) indubitably proceed from the court of Charles the Great and from the closing years of the eighth century, o speak with quiet assurance of ^ubr.car.i.a, certain usages as allowed rather by the ambition of Rome d.'^°° ' ' ^°'' than by any apostolical tradition. Nor was this feeling conf^ed to the atmosphere of the court. In the matter of image-worship the council of Frankfort thought nothing of 'placing itseK in direct opposition to the pohcy favoured by the pope. The council too was no mere FranJdsh diet; it was d attended by bishops from all the west, Spain and ^ Miiman 3. England, as well as by papal legates. But the authority ''' of the latter was powerless against that of Charles, and the canons of Nicea were formally rejected. That the Greek contention in the end won acceptance is well known. ^ But the process was silent and without express. enactment, just as in the ^ east the triumph over theeseeH. f. iconoclasts was imperceptibly forgotten and images (in Geo^ePm- the strict sense) came to be unconsciously proscribed. GrelreJ.'ies n. At present, if the subject was discussed, as indeed it I'sjjl ""'""^ was with considerable vehemence, the question was how little, not how much, reverence could rightly be paid to images. The extreme party on this side is represented by Claudius, bishop of Turin .^ A Spaniard, bred — ^if we may credit the testimony of his opponents — ^imder one of the leading heretics whom the cotmcil of Frankfort condemned, he seems rather to have recoiled into a more decided, at least a more primitive, orthodoxy than to have been afiected by. his dangerous surroundings. He became a master in one of the royal schools of Aquitaine * 1 Gfrorer has collected the early are his own words, Epist. dedic. in traces of this rapid change, ICir- enarrat. in epist. ad Gal., in the chengeschichte 3. 938 sqq. Maxima Bibliotheca Patrum 14. ' See especially Carl Schmidt's 141 A, Lyons 1677 foho; by the essay in Illgen'a Zeitschrift f iir die pages of which I regularly cite also historische Theologie, 1843 pt. 2. Jonas of Orleans, Dungal, and ' ' In Alvenni cespitis arvo, in Agobard. The school is conjec- palatio pii prinoipis domini Ludo- tured to have been at Ebreuil, His- vici, tunc regis, modo imperatoris,' toire litteraire de la France 4. 223. 26 CLAUDIUS OP TURIN Chap. I. and was so much trusted by the king, Louis the Pious, that when the latter succeeded to the empire of his father Charles, he raised Claudius, about the year 818,* to the see of Turin. His reputation was that of an interpreter of the Bible.' He wrote commentaries on most of the historical books of the Old Testament, on the Gospel according to saint Matthew, and apparently on all the Pauline Epistles. Of these however but one, on the Galatians, has been printed entire. The others are known only by prefaces and extracts; and some are not edited at all.^ It is not hkely that we lose very much by our defective information about his works. He had not the faculty of lucid or graceful, or always even of grammatical, expression; and he repeatedly laments a defect which gave an irresistible opening to the ridicule of his literary enemies.' Far less did he bring the light of speculation or of original genius to bear upon the books he expounded. He compiled from the fathers- — ^Augustin was his chosen * Possibly a little earlier : Nean- der gives the date as 814, General History of the Christian Religion and Church 6. 216, transl. by J. Torrey, Edinburgh 1850. " ' Claudium . . . cui in expla- nandis sanctorum evangeliorum lectiouibus quantulacunque notitia inesse videbatur, ut Italicae plebis (quae magna ex parte a sanctorum evangelistarum sensibus procul ab- erat) sanctae dootrinae consultum ferret, Taurinensi subrogari fecit eoclesiae,' says his enemy, bishop Jonas, praef. in libros de cultu imaginum, 167 c, r; cf. 168 a. ' Few writers have their works ■ scattered through such a variety of collections. The Enarratio in epist. ad Galat. is printed in the Max. BibUoth. Patrum, ubi supra; for the rest we have only speci- mens published in the Vetera Analeota of Mabillon, the Biblio- theca mediae et infimae Latini- tatis of J. A. Fabrioius, and in two collections of cardinal Mai. Some additional extracts are men- tioned by Schmidt, who gives a detailed list of Claudius's known works and attempts a chrono- logical arrangement, p. 44 n. 8, and in his article in Herzog and putt's Beal-En,cykIopadie : see too Mabillon p. 92, ed. 1723. All these pieces, I think, are collected in the hundred -and -fourth volume of Migne. How much besides lies hidden in the Vatican we cannot tell. Cardinal Mai's edition of the preface to Claudius's commentary on the Pauline Epistles is avowedly a specimen which he intended to follow by the whole work. Nova Collect, vet. Scriptor. 7. 274 n. 1, Rome 1833. He mentions also two codices at Rome of the Catena upon saint Matthew, Spicil. Roman. 4. 301, Rome 1840. ' See for instance his preface to the Lib. informationum litterao et spiritus super Leviticum, Mabil- lon, p. 90, and that to his com- mentary on the Ephesians, ib. p. 92, where he alludes to his ' rustic speech,' AS A WRITER. 27 master — for the benefit of those whose leisure or acquire- ^"*''- ' • merits did not suffice for extensive reading. He commented with a view of edification; and seeking an ethical or a spiritual lesson everywhere, he fell willingly into the pitfall of allegory.* His fearless pursuit however of the principles he had learned in the course of a wide, if irregular, study of the fathers, makes Claudius a signal apparition at a time when the material accessories of reUgion were forcing themselves more and more into the relations between man and God. The worship of images, of pictures, of the Cross itself,® the behef in the mediation of saints, the efficacy of pilgrimages, the authority of the holy see, seemed to him blit the means of deadening the responsi- bility of individual men. Claudius sought to quicken this sense. He is sure that if a man has a direct personal interest in his own welfare, if he does not rely on spiritual processes con- ducted by others on his behalf, nor tie his faith to material representations of the unseen, he can be the better trusted to walk aright. The freedom of the gospel he is never tired of contrasting with the bondage of the law, a bondage which he saw revived in the religious system of his day. Faith is incomplete without its corollary, action, or, as he prefers to call it, love. With the wm-hs of the sacerdotal law he will have nothing to do.^" ^Let no man trust ' Apologetic. 7 . . . /. 7 . T T ^P* 3oa. Aurel. ^n the tntercession or merit oj the saints, because except he p. 194 f. h. ' Claudius's allegorising ten- painted figure; but these are not dency has however been exagger- what we call ' crucifixes.' ated. He himself lays down the ^^ De admonitioue et exhorta- Hmit, ' scihcet ut manente veritate tione unde rogasti quod soriberem, historiae figuras inteUigamus,' in ut votum quod voverunt domino Galat. cap. iv. p. 158 B. reddant; . . . nuUam admoni- ' Dr. Renter, Geschichte der re- tlonem meliorem potui invenire ligioseu Aufklarung 1. 17, is surely quam epistulae primae PauU guilty of an anachronism in speak- apostoh, quam misi, quia tota inde ing of the ' crucifix,' of the exist- agitiir ut merita hominum tollat, ence or possibility of which neither unde maxime nunc monachi Claudius nor any of his opponents gloriantur, et gratiam Del com- seem aware. See for example mendat, per quam omnis qui vovit, Jonas 168 h. Kctures of the quod vovit domino reddat : praef. crucifixion there doubtless were, in epp. Pauli, Mai, Nov. Coll. 7. and perhaps crosses bearing a 275 sq. 28 Claudius's principles; Chap. I. hold the same faith, justice, and truth, which they held, he cannot he saved. Men choose the easy way before the eibid. p. 183 hard one which consists in self-sacrifice .^-"^ sGod com- manded men to bear the cross, not to adore it : they desire to adore that which they will not spiritually or bodily to carry with them. So to worship God is to depart from him. The only acceptable service is that, bom of faith and supported by the divine grace, which issues in an all- embracing love. The following short passage contains I'Enarr. in the Bum of his cthical principles. ^Charity, he says, or i6ic,'d.' ' love, is comprehended in four modes. By the first we must love God, by the next ourselves, by the third our neighbours, by the fourth our enemies. Unless we have first loved God, we shall not be able to love ourselves ; that is to say, to abstain from sin : and if we love not ourselves, what standard have we to love our neighbours ? and if we love not our neighbours, much less shall we love our enemies. Whereof this is the proof, that for the sake of God we despise even our salvation, yea, and our very souls. Faith therefore alone sufficeth not for life, except a man love his neighbour even as himself, and not only not do unto him the evil which he would not unto himself, but also do unto him the good which he would have another do unto him ; and so fulfil the universal law, namely, to abstain from evil and to do good. With these thoughts in his heart, and longing to impress them upon his generation, Claudius passed to his diocese of Turin. His fiery and uncompromising temper met opposition and peril as inducements rather than obstacles to action. We are told that he often took up the sword with his lay comrades to drive back the Saracens when they pressed forward from their strong places on the coast of Spain or Gaul to overrun his country .^^ But the paganism, as he held it, which reigned everywhere around him, — ^the offerings and images that defiled all 1^ Quia Tidelioet nisi quis a est : Apol. ap. Jon. p. 184 c. The semetipso deficiat, ad eum qui su- sentence, according to Jonas, is per ipsum est non appropinquat, adopted from saint Gregory, nee valet apprehendere quod ultra '^ Compare his reference to such ipsum est si nescierit mactare quod expeditions, Mai, Nov. Col). 7. 275. Chap. I. HIS ACTIVITY AS BISSOP. 29 the churches/^ — formed the more present evil against which he set himself to do continual battle. ^He called 'Jon. laso. for the utter destruction of all images and pictures through- out his diocese. ^He forbade the observance of saints'" °™sai-Re- sponsa contra davs, and the verv mention of saints in the liturgv. Fore- p^rve^sas ciaudii " •' c>./ Taunn. episc. most in executing the work, he raised a storm about him : sententias, T . . P- 223 F, his life was not safe." iThe people were passionatelv °"°s*'-i'''?p- ■*-■*- ^ "^ zgg d; cf. infra excited, but the protection or favour of higher powers pp- 31 sqq. was probably with him, and his name is not to be added to the roll of martyrs who have perished for lack of sym- pathy with the grosser needs of their contemporaries. Yet the truth is that, with all his fanaticism, Claudius alone of his age grasped the inevitable consequences of its spiritual condition. It was an age of materiahsm, and there was no possibihty that the images could re- main in churches without the people worshipping them, or that if they worshipped them they would understand the nice distinction between this worship and that of God laid down by the second Nicene council.^^ Claudius denounces this inevitable polytheism. If, he says, they worship the images of saints after the fashion of demons, — that is, of course, in the manner of the old gods of the country, — they have not left idols but changed their names }^ He was accused of inventing a new heresy, m Nothing, he " Ap°i-'^p- rephes, can be falser. I preach no sect, but hold the unity ^7°''- and expound the verity of the church. Sects and schisms, heresies and superstitions, I have ever, so far ds in me lay, '' Inveni omnes basilicas, contra " adoration ' ; and- the unique ordinem veritatis, sordibus anathe- relation is only iinplied in ' idol- matum et imaginibus plenas : atry ' and certain hypothetical Apol. ap. Jon. 170 d. derivatives like ' Mariolatry.' " See his complaints in the '* Saint Agobard expresses him- Apologetic, ap. Jon. p. 171 c, and self in almost the same words, De in a preface addressed to Theo- imag. xix. p. 291 o. Claudius pro- demir as late as 823, ap. Mabillon, ceeds : Si scribas in pariete vel Vet. anal. 90; cf. p. 91. pingas imagines Petri et PauH, ^* Ilpo a spiritual rehgion is independent of the sensuous, is dragged down by any attempt to make, it intelhgible to the outward eyes : it looks directly towards God. For this reason he refuses to dwell even upon the humanity of Christ. The man Jesus did his work once for all : , Claudius would turn men's thoughts to their glorified Lord, p When these worshippers of a false religion and superstition say. For the memory of our Saviour we worship, reverence, adore a cross painted and carved in his honour, they take no pleasure in our Saviour except that which pleasured the ungodly, the shame of his passion and the scorn of his death. They believe of him what the un- godly, Jews or heathen, believed, who believed not in his resurrection ; and they know not to think aught of him save as in anguish and dead ; they believe and hold him in their hearts to abide continually in passion, nor consider nor under- stand that which the apostle saith, 1 Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more?-'' Claudius attacks every visible symbol and memorial of the life of Jesus, r You worship all wood fashioned after the manner of a cross, because for six hours Christ hung upon a cross. Worship then all virgins, because a virgin bare him. Worship stables, for he was born in one ; old rags, for he " This verse, it is interesting to was in many respects the uncon- note, was also a favourite with scious disciple of Claudius : De Berengar of Tours, who, in his re- .gacra coena 45, 94, 200, ed. A. F. sistance to materiaUstic opinions, and T. T. Visoher, Berlin 1834. AND PILGRIMAGES : THE APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION. 31 was swaddled in them ; ships, for he ofttimes sailed in them ; ^"*''- ' • asses, for he rode thereon. There is no end to his mockery. He excuses himself for it by the bitterness of the facts he has to withstand. ^Ridiculcms these things all are, anci ■ iWd. p. 178 o, to he mourned rather than written. We are compelled to allege foolishness against the foolish; against hearts of stone we must cast not the arrows of the word, not sage reasons, but volleys of stones. Thus he traverses and_ assails the whole circle of the popular reUgion of the Latin world. About pilgrimages alone he is more reserved. The fashion- able pilgrimage to Eome he cannot indeed approve, but he admits that * it does not hurt every one, nor benefit every tibia, p. iSg a. one?-^ But for the peculiar claims of the see of saint Peter he has nothing but derision. 11 The authority of ° iwd. p. 193 the apostle ceased with his death : ^^ his successors possess 211 b! it just so far as their lives are apostoHc. ^He is not to == Apoi., ap. he called apostolic who sits in the seat of the apostle, hut he °"' ''^ " * ■ who fills the office of the apostle. Of them that hold that place and fulfil not its office the Lord hath said, y The scribes JMatth. xxiii. and the Pharisees sit in Hoses' seat : all therefore whatsoever ■ they say unto you, that observe and do : but do not ye after their works : for they say and do not. With equal clearness Claudius ^ expresses the distinction between the ideal ^ Enarr. in church and the imperfect copy which represents it on earth, m. It was probably opinions like these last which saved Claudius from any rebuke from the emperor for the greater part of his career.^" They pass almost without question even in the controversy raised by the publication of his Apologetic. His other views, too, if they went further than those accepted at the court, were at all events errors ^' The reprint of Jonas's ex- '" I find this inference antici- tracts (see below, p. 33 n. 23), p. pated and extended by Gfrorer, 198 E, presents a variant still more iCirchengeschichte 3. 733. Schmidt, guarded in language. ubi supra, p. 62, thinks it implied ^' It seems doubtful whether by a passage in Jonas, p. 175 ' aliis ' or ' ahis suocedentibus,' just f, g, that Claudius had at one after, can be pressed (with Gfrorer time come under the censure of and Milman) to mean the whole the pope, a supposition not im- episcopal order : I have therefore probable in itself and rather con- omitted the clause, and inter- firmatory than otherwise of the preted the whole sentence in the suggestion which I have made in light of what follows. the text. 32 CLAUDIUS AND HIS OPPONENTS. Chap. I. » De eccl. rer. exord. viii. Mi^e 114. gzS. ° p. l6g c. <= Theodemir. epist. ad Claud., ap. F. A. Zachari. Biblioth. Pistor. 60, Turin 1753 folio. * Dungal 223 H, Jonas 167 D. on the right side ; iconoclasm was less reprehensible than the ' idolatry ' of the Greeks. Those who were hottest in their repudiation of Claudius, used very similar language with regard to the other extreme. a"Walafrid Strabo, who became abbat of Eeichenau in 842, holds a scrupulous balance in the controversy; and Walafrid had been a pupil of Eabanus Maurus, and was in some sort a repre- sentative theologian of his age. How httle, too, the style of argument adopted by his antagonist Jonas commends 'itself to modern cathoUcs may be gathered from the cautions and expostulations with which his Benedictine editors have thought it necessary to accompany him.^^ Claudius was in fact carrying to their logical issues prin- ciples which were virtually recognised by the council of Paris in 825, and which even fifty years later were men- tioned by the papal Ubrarian Anastasius, in a dedication to John the Eighth, as still holding their ground among certain persons in Gaul ^^ at a time when the Greek practice had won nearly universal acceptance in the west. We can therefore hardly take, bishop Jonas at his word when he speaks of Claudius as an enemy of i> all the sincerest churchmen, the most devoted soldiers of Christ, in Gaul and Germany : we know indeed from a ° friend who was also Claudius's opponent in this respect, that in spite of his action in the mattet of images, his commentaries on the Bible were received with eager enthusiasm by not a few of the highest prelates of Gaul. Claudius therefore took no pains to defend himself until he had carried on his warfare during a number of years. His Apologetic — a defiant proclamation of his views — ^he at last addressed to his former friend, the abbat Theo- demir, who had warned him of the perilous course he was taking. The answer was a dcoimcil of bishops held at Lewis's court, and a condemnation; but Claudius can hardly have been much awed by what he is reported to ^1 See pp. 166, 167 h, 193 mg., lorum exoeptis, quibus utique and the pregnant note, Gaute nondum est harum [imaginum] lege, p. 195 h, marg. utilitas revelata ; Mansi 12. ^' Quibusdam dumtaxat Gal- 983 d. CLitrCltrS AND ms OPPONENTS. 33 have termed ^ an assembly of asses. Nor was tis refusal ^"'^^- ' ■ to attend followed by any measure to reduce him to'^^^^'^-"- obedience The emperor, more, it should seem, to con- ciliate these prelates than from any serious intention of controlling Claudius, sent f extracts of the offending 'Jonas 1670, book to Jonas, bishop of Orleans, with the desire that he would refute it. These extracts are all that remain to us of what to the historian is Claudius's most valuable work : ^^ the refutation did not appear until after his death. Meantime, Dungal, a Scottish teacher of Pavia, issued a vehement Reply, e earnestly invoking the sDungaiiggr. imperial aid in suppressing the new heresy. Theodemir also returned to the controversy. Perhaps we may h infer ^ cf. Schmidt from Jonas's unwilUngness to pubhsh his polemic, that " ' ^''^"' ^" *' Claudius as he aged had tempered his fire : more probably Jonas' himself found that the act would not increase his favour with the emperor. Be this as it may, the bishop lived more than ten years after he had sent forth his defence, to all appearance without let or molestation from any one. i His strenuous career was closed not ' f- Ugheii. earlier than 839, but he ^ left behind him disciples enough 1432 a, b, to stimulate controversy. His writings too, with the fauo. exception of the Apologetic, were rapidly multiphed and diffused. Has fame as a commentator secured the survival of a good deal of his pecuhar teaching ; but it is hazardous, if not impossible, to connect him in any direct way with the appearance of similar opinions, whether in the con- gregations of the Waldenses centuries later, or in those isolated puritan outbreaks which repeatedly confront us ia the course of medieval history. In his protest against the invocation of saints Claudius perhaps stood alone, but in the other points in which he separated himself from the current doctrine he had a ^ The fragments are collected consecutive. Moreover the text in two pages of the Maxima Biblio- is so inaccurate and the punctua- theca Patrum 14. 197 sqq., which tion so bewildering that I have give an appearance of continuity preferred to seek the originals in to what is really a string of ex- the pages of Dungal and Jonas tracts by no means regularly themselves. D 34 AGOBAED OF LYONS. Chap^. supporter (there is, indeed, no evidence to place them in actual association) of far greater ability and far wider influence in the person of saint Agobard. Like him, *•"■ 779- born in Spain, Agobard was more fortunate in his educa- tion. He was brought up from an early age in the south of Gaul, at a time when the impulse given to learning by Charles the Great was in its first vigour : of that civilisa- tion Agobard remained the representative when its founders were dead, and its spirit was falhng into decay. Leidrad, archbishop of Lyons, bred him for his successor, made him coadjutor, and after some years secured his appoint- ment to the see when he retired to a cloister in 816.^* Agobard's hfe as archbishop corresponds closely with the reign of Lewis the Pious; he died on the 8th Jime, 840, in the same month as the emperor. Success was prepared for him by others : he deserved it by his contribution to the defence of the orthodox behef against the heresy of the adoptians. But he con- tinued always entirely unaffected by the circumstances of his high position. Independent and regardless of con- sequences, he held to the principles which he enounced, with unconquerable audacity. He saw the masses around him sunk in a state of sluggish creduUty, and instead of leaving them there, as others did, in the opinion that a debased people is the easiest to govern, he laboured hard for their Hberation and attacked unsparingly every form of superstition wherever he found it. His thoughts were wider than Claudius's, but in the matter of images the Galhc and Italian prelates were of one mind. If Agobard was the less active in carrying his views into practice, it was not for want of firm conviction. Cer- tainly he was not withheld by the risk of any opposition he might encounter in the Frankish church. He wrote '* I take the date from a manu- Bouquet, 6. 190 B marg. and note script notice quoted by Mabillon, (1749), infers from the chronicle Iter Italicum 68, Paris 1687 of Ado of Vienue, ». 816 (so also quarto. [So too Monsiguor Du- in Pertz's edition, 2. 320), that chesne, Fastes dpiscopaux de Tan- Agobard;'s elevation took place a oienne Gaule, 2. 172; 1899.] year earlier. mS TREATMENT OF IMAGE-WORSHIP. 35 in the same strong spirit, now of persuasion, now of re- ^"*''- ' • buke, as Claudius; but no controversy ever arose over his utterances. The heads of the church were with him; but at the same time the masses were fast bound by superstition. Agobard may have calculated the injury which the character of an iconoclast would inflict upon his personal influence over them. He may have felt the hopelessness of the undertaking, and held it wiser, and in the end more effectual, to elevate the people gradually by the voice of reason. The difference, therefore, between him and Claudius regards chiefly the means to carry out their common aims. But Agobard is always guided by a calmer and clearer perception than his vehement ally. iHe desires, ' Lib. contra indeed, the removal of all pictures from the churches, stSem^qui but he admits that they are essentially innocent and fma^bus only rendered pernicious by abuse, m The ancients, he adorationis says, had figures of the saints, fainted or carved, hut for the deferendSn T p T • . p 1 , p 1 • J' 7 putant, xxxiii. sake of history, for record not for worsm-p ; as, for example 594 f. the acts of synods, wherein were portrayed the catholics up- p. ag^E^!'™'' held and victorious, and the heretics by the discovery of the falsehood of their vile doctrine convicted and expelled, in memorial of the strength of the catholic faith, even as pictures stand in record of foreign or domestic wars. Such we have seen in divers places : yet none of the ancient catholics held thai they should be worshipped or adored. ^ The pictures in n cap. xxxiii. churches should be looked at just as any other pictures. ^' '^* "' Only the faithlessness of the age, which will find some special virtue in them, forces him to condemn them utterly. " God must be worshipped without any sensuous ° ^p- xxiv. reiDresentations. p Whosoever adoreth a picture or a statue, pcap. xxxi. ■*■ . p. 294 D : cf. carved or molten, payeth not worship to God nor honoureth the ep- ad sarthoi. angels or holy men, but is an idolator : he is beguiled to evil under the fairest disguises of devotion; 'i Satan trans- laCor. xi. 14. formeth himself into an angel of light. The opposition of spirit and matter is as real to him as to Claudifus. He, too, held that r visible objects were a hindrance not ap^^go'^^D'.^"' help to the perception of the invisible, s When faith p!^94™"' 36 AGOBAED AND POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS. Chap. I. * Lib. contra iosulsam vulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruis, xvi. p. 275 B. "^ capp. i., XV. pp. 271 D, E, 274 G. ^ cap. 111. p. 272 H, y cap. XV. p, 274. G. 2 cap. ii. p. 271 F, G. » De grand, vii. p. 272 H sq. is taken from the heart, then is all trust set on visible things. The rule thus stated Agobard proceeds to apply to the ' vulgar errours ' of his day. Want of faith is the root of superstition : it is nurtured by unreason. * The wretched world lies noiv under the tyranny of foolishness : things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe, who knew not the Creator of all. Of the various works which he wrote upon this subject, not the least interesting, and certainly the most curious, is the treatise Against the absurd Opinion of the Vulgar touching Hail and Thunder. It appears that " there was a class of impostors who assumed to themselves the ofSce of ' clerk of the weather.' These tempestarii, or weather-wizards, claimed the power not only of con- trolling the weather, and securing the fields from harm, but also of bringing about hail and thunder storms, ^ and especially of directing them against their private enemies, y Plainly they derived a goodly revenue from a black- mail forced by the double motives of fear and hope. ^ ff^e have seen and heard, says Agobard, many who are over- whelmed by such madness, carried away by such folly, that they believe and assert that there is a certain region called Magonia — ^no doubt the Magic Land — whence ships come in the clouds : the which bear away the fruits of the earth, felled by hail and destroyed by storms, to that same country ; and these sailors of the air forsooth give rewards to the weather- wizards, and receive in return the crops or other fruits. Certain ones have we seen, blinded by so dark a folly, who brought into an assembly of men four persons, three men and a woman, as having fallen from the said ships ; whom they held in bonds for certain days and then presented before an assembled body of men, in our presence, as aforesaid, that they should be stoned. Howbeit the truth prevailed, after much reasoning, and they who brought them forward were confounded. He con- descended to seek evidence of the power of the weather- wizards, but could obtain no accoimt at first hand, a People were confident that such or such a thing had AGOBAED AND POPULAR SXIPEKSHTIONS. 37 been done, but tkey were not present at its performance. ^'"'^- ' • It was this credulous habit of mind that irritated Ago- bard. He disdained to allege scientific reasons to over- throw what was in its nature so unreasonable. He could only fall back on the same broad religious principles which had guided him in his repudiation of images. There he says that our relation to Grod must be direct and without the intervention of sensible obiects : ^ here, conversely, '' capp. ix., xiv. pp. 27^ D that God's relation to nature is immediate and least of 274 f. ' all conditioned by the artifices of men. He acknowledges that ° almost every one, in these regions, noble and simple, °f*PPi'-^^*- citizen and countryman, old and young, believes that storms =?4 >'• are under human control, and attributes the work of God to man. d He spares no words in condemning this in- ^ <=»?■'"• p-^^s fidelity which e believes partly in God, partly that God's °^^p- "^^ ?• words are of men ; hopes partly in God, partly in men. With equal vigour he opposed superstitions which tended to the profit of the church. To his straight- forward vision they were the more dangerous, since they degraded the church with the people, instead of maintain- ing it pure, as a fight shining in darkness. * There was an g^^^j^^^^*"- epidemic at a place, so he writes to bishop Bartholomew !^? i?°™ndam -*■ ^ ^ ^ J- illusione sig- of Narbonne, the causes of which were traced to the ™™"d, i. p. 281 ... . °» ^* activity of evil spirits. The terrified people crowded to the church and lavished offerings of silver and gold and cattle, whatever they possessed, at the feet of saint Firmin. The bishop in perplexity wrote to Agobard for advice :■ his answer was a warning against the faithlessness impHed in trusting to the power of the saint to ward off visita- tions which proceed from the hand of God. The devil no doubt is at work, but not in the way these people sup- posed : his action is far less physical than mental : he is seen to prevail over some men, not so much for the purpose of striking them doivn as of deluding them. It is difficult to overestimate the change which the acceptance of Agobard's view would have caused in the popular behefs of the middle ages. The continual visitations of evil spirits of which the history is full would then have 38 AGOBABD AND POPULAE SUPERSTITIONS. ^"*''- ^ - resolved themselves into the creatures of a disordered imagination; the latter, not the former, being the work of the devil : those who beUeved in his direct visitation, not its supposed victims, were really under his influence. B cap. vii. p. g For his success, Agobard explains, requires a receptivity on men's part, lack of faith or delight in vanity ; and with these favourable conditions he can indeed lead them helplessly to destruction and death. Agobard gives else- iiDe grand, xiv. where a remarkable illustration. ^Afew years since, he says, a certain foolish story went abroad when there was a murrain of oxen : it was said that Grimoald, duke of Bene- vento, sent out men with powder to scatter over the fields and mountains, meadows and springs, forasmuch as he was enemy to the most Christian emperor Charles ; by reason of which powder the oxen died. For this cause we have heard and seen many persons to be apprehended and certain slain. Agobard comments on the absurdity of the tale. He asks why only the oxen and no other animals suffered, and further how the murrain could extend over so large a tract of land, when if. all the inhabitants of Benevento, men, women, and children, each with three wagons full of powder, had been employed, they could not possibly have sprinkled powder enough. But, what, he adds, was most strange, the prisoners themselves bare testimony against themselves, affirming that they had that powder, and had scattered it. Thus did the devil receive power against them by the secret but righteous judgement of God, and so greatly did he prevail that they themselves were made false witnesses unto their own death. But the influence of the devil, in Agobard's mouth, is actually little more than the conventional expression — for Agobard was before all things orthodox — for men's prochvity to unreasoji and faithlessness.^^ Superstition J'^ Dr. Reuter, 1. 30, confesses activity seems conditioned by the himself unable to harmonise the self-deception of men. But he account in the place last quoted has certainly drawn too de&nite and in the epistle to Bartholomew, an inference from Agobard's words Tii, of the appearance of the devil when be represents bim as saying, ' als wirklich" handelnder,' with ' people are deceived because they the other passages in which his deceive themselves,' Agobard in THE ORDEAL AND WAGEE OF BATTLE. 39 might take the form, as we have seen hitherto, of their ^"*''- ' • claiming powers which really belong to God. It was none the less superstition to postulate the intervention of God in cases where human judgement alone was neces- sary. For men to disregard the evidence of ascertained f acts,28 and to call for perpetual i miracles at their behest s^fentfis'di' Kt was impiety of the worst kind, making God in fact the contra damnaw- r J ? o ^ lem opinionem servant of man. It is this argument, supported by copious p?'.™'iV"S *'-. o ' JTjr J J. ^ vini ludlcu veri- citations from the Scriptures, that Agobard alleges against f^'i^^|{'jjf.' the popular customs of ordeal by fire or water and of flictu annorum J^ -^ -^ patenen, ii. wager of battle. Of the two usages the ordeal was p- 301 e. J', discouraged and prohibited by the emperor ;2'' and^^^P'^;^'^"^- Agobard may have deemed it unworthy of serious argu- ^"^^^ 'g^f|; ment. He appKes his forces mainly to the exposure of the wrong — 1 nex, not kx, — ^involved in the test of com- jj^' q^J; ^^ bat. The ordeal indeed was destitute of any feature p- ^^^ "=■ except the superstitious, while combat, as ™Hallam"^™^^^||^j;^_ observes, might be held to be partly redeemed by ' the natural dictates of resentment in a brave man unjustly accused, and the sympathy of a warhke people with the display of skill and intrepidity.' At Lyons, the old Burgundian capital, the ' wager of battle,' resting as it did on a law of the Burgundian king Gundobad, is 1 thought to have been resorted to with peculiar f re- "y^Jf^"'^ ^^ quency. <> Agobard addressed one of his two treatises on •> Lib. adv. leg.' the subject to the emperor and implored him to suppress p. 265 c. the evil. pHe urged not only the rehgious objections, ^"^"^j,^!™'- fact nowhere expresses himseli only confusing, an author's sys- without qualification, either on tern. this head or on that of the devil's '' TJtiUtas iudiciorum constat in actual interference in human discussione causarum et subtiKtate 1 affairs. The words with which he investigationum : Lib. adv. legem closes the story given in the text, Gundobadi et impia certamina offering it as an example ' de quae per earn geruutur, x. p. 265 H inani seductione et vera sensus " It is significant that so repre- diminutione ' (p. 275 e), shew how sentative a churchman as arch- closely connected in his mind the bishop Hincmar of Rheims op- two ideas were. It is uncritical posed this ordinance : Noorden, to hnk a number of detached Hinkmar 173. Gottschalk also phrases or epithets, chosen from challenged the ordeal as a test of different places, and to take the truth of his opinions : ibid, credit for realising, when one is p. 67. 40 AGOBARD S VIEW OF INSPIRATION. Chap. I. 1 Lib. adv. leg. Gundob. 1. c. r cap. IX. p, 265 E, F. that God's judgements are unsearchable and not lightly to be presumed, but also the arguments of common sense. The combat declares not the judgement of God but the right of the strongest, and gives a criminal en- couragement to strife. i The vanquished is cast into despair and loss of faith, while in many cases the con- queror proves his innocence by adding the guilt of murder, ^if the test is worthy of confidence, how came Jerusalem into the hands of the Saracens, Eome to be pillaged by the Goths, Italy by the Lombards? The martyrs 'of the church, the witnesses of truth, waxed strong by dying : the upholders of iniquity by killing perished. With these various weapons, drawn from the armoury of reason, of experience, of religion, Agobard made war upon the superstitions of his age. He took his stand upon the unassailable ground of Christian verity, but. he had his own opinions even in matters Kke the inspiration of the Bible. Thoughtful men over whose minds the authority of the Bible is supreme have always endeavoured to temper its severity by one of two modes of viewing it. Some enlarge its field by erecting an ample superstructure of allegory upon the hteral text, — thinldng that they are laying bare its deep, underlying truths, — a method which allows the utmost freedom or hcense of interpretation upon a servile and uncritical basis. In this way Claudius, and far more John Scotus, were able to bring the words of Scripture into harmony with their own teaching. Others, with a greater fidelity to the scope of the Bible, insist that the letter is subordinate to the spirit, to the general bearing of the book. Among these is Agobard. He re- bukes Fredegisus, abbat.of Tours, for the absurdity of hold- ing that the actual words of Scripture are inspired : ^® its ^* Quod ita sentiatis de pro- phetia et apostolia ut non solum senfsum praedioationis et modos vel argumenta dictionum Spiritus saiictus eis iuspiraverit, sed etiam ipsa corporalia verba extrinseous in ora illorum ipso formaverit : Lib. contra obiectiones Fredeg. abbat. xii. p. 277 E : ■ an argument against all organic theories of inspiration. HIS HOSTILITY TO THE JEWS. 41 sense is no doubt divine but its form is human .2' Ihe same Chap. i. rule must be our guide in its interpretation. We must make it intelligible, even against the grammatical sense, so long as we preserve its spirit ; — ut sacramento rei concordaret. To this mde-reaching hberality there is one exception in the hostility which Agobard bore towards the Jews. But the archbishop's action was not simply that of a bigot, and the motive of the controversy in which he engaged was entirely honourable to him. He set his face against a flagitious custom of which the Jews, the great ^ slave- » h. Graetz, dealers of the empire, had the monopoly. * He forbade juden 5. 246, the Christians of his diocese to sell slaves to the Jews 1860.^ "^ for exportation to the Arabs of Spain, and sought also ludaeonm" ^ to place a variety of restrictions upon the intercourse ^' ^" ''' of the two races. The emperor however supported the Jews, and Agobard could only resort to passionate appeals a.d. 826. to the statesmen of the palace and to the bishops, in the hope of reestabhshing a state of things more consonant with the principles of the church. We are not concerned to defend the curious slanders he repeats in his letter On the Superstitions of the Jews : it is sufficient that he be- lieved them. But the truth was that under Lewis the Pious, particularly after his marriage with his second empress, Judith, the position of the Jews might fairly be held to menace Christianity. Charles the Great had shewn them tolerance; Lewis added his personal favour; and under "^him they enjoyed a prosperity without ex- ample in the long course of the middle ages.^" They formed a peculiar people under his own protection, equally against the nobles and the church; and their privileges '' Usus sanctae scripturae est mark as to the dishonesty of verbis condescendere humanis, Agobard in baptising the slaves quatinus vim ineffabilis rei, hu- of Jews and thus emancipating mauo more loquens, ad notitiam them may be just : but Christians hominum deduceret et mysteria have at all times been not un- insolita solitis ostenderet rebus : ready to stretch their loyalty to ibid. vii. p. 276 e. honour at the call of rehgion, and '" For the following outline I am Agobard asserts that the slaves chiefly indebted to Graetz, 5. 245- begged to be baptised, De bap- 263 [pp. 230-247 in the fourth tismo ludaicomm mancipioTum, edition, Leipzig, 1909.] His re- p. 262 E, F, lud., p. 255 °- 42 AGOBAED AND THE JEWS, Chap. I- ^v^ere guarded by an imperial officer, the Master — he even claimed the title of King ^i— of the Jews. Free from military service, the Jews were indispensable to the commerce of the empire; on account of their financial skill it was common to trust them with the farm of the taxes. Nothing was left undone which might gratify their national or religious prepossessions. They had rights from which Christians were excluded, entire freedom '^Deinsoi. of Speech was allowed, and the very weekly u markets were postponed to the Sunday in order that the ahen race might observe its sabbaths. The Jews built their syna- gogues, and held lands and pastures; they planted vineyards and set up mills, in perfect security. At the court of the emperor they were welcomed with marked distinction. They went there with their wives, and were only known in the throng by the more sumptuou.s display of their apparel. The empress Judith was singularly attached to them, and the coiirtiers, taking up the fashion, attended the synagogues and admired the preaching in them above that of their own clergy. It is evident that some motive nobler than jealousy or intolerance might actuate a churchman in resisting what he was bound to consider inimical to the interests of religion. Agobard's view of it was confirmed by the distrust he felt in the emperor's advisers, and in the empress. But we have not here to do with his position as a leader in the revolt which attempted to place Lothar on his ;tcf. Renter I. fabher's throne, ^ instructive as it may be as illustrating Agobard's application to the field of politics of that clear perception of right and wrong, that fearless and unswerving adherence to his behefs, that we have found elsewhere :^^ '^ The chief rabbi of the syna- power of the ecclesiastical over the gogue of Narbonne asserted that secular estate was caused by his Charles had granted him this conviction of the feebleness of dignity; certainly a street in this Lewis's government. This may place was named Bey Juif : G. B. have decided him, but his modera- bepping, Les Juif s dans le Moyen tion has not the tone of a convert : Age 110, 1845. see for instance his letter to the '' I am not sure that we can emperor, De comparatione utrius- affirm, with Noorden, pp. 38 sq., que regiminis, ecclesiastic! et poll- that Agobard's preference for the tici, especially p. 315 B. 36, INFLUENCE OF SAINT AUGUSTIN. 43 For his courage, as y Gfrorer notes, is even more astonish- ^"*''- ^- ing than the freedom of his vision. In the Ught of ten '^ ™'- 3- «3. centuries we may think his arguments truisms and wonder at the pains he took to demonstrate what seems to us to need no demonstration, to expose what is rmworthy of exposure. But the fact remains that he stood absolutely alone in his generation, with the single exception of Claudius of Turin; and Claudius's interest was hmited to a single branch of superstition, while Agobard undertook the destruction of the whole. In both ahke the influence of saint Augustin is para- mount. It is, indeed, the continual interruption of long extracts from the fathers, and above all from Augustin, that too often defaces to our modem eyes the impression of lucidity and vigour which are the just attributes of Agoba^d's style. Whether or not in direct quotation the presence of the father's treatise On true 'Religion and of the City of God is seldom wanting. Doubtless Claudius and Agobard were here simply following the ■ universal habit of the scholars of their day, with whom Augustin ranked second alone to the Bible; to contradict him, as Paschasius Eadbert said, was impiety.^ But there were few who accepted his spiritual force and left out of account his extravagance of fancy; there were few who chose only his good part and wrought it with such wisdom, as these two did. ^WTiile others in the generation im- ^ of. Reuter i. mediately following heard only the appeal of his less worthy utterances, the incongruous children of his genius, and were led into the opposite extreme, superstition,^* they used precisely those elements of his teaching which had a practical tendency. They found in him a beacon to shed Ught upon the deepening obscurity of the age, a weapon '^ Augustinum quern contra- chasius Eadbert and Ratramnus dicere fas non est : De partu vir- relating to the manner of Christ's ginis ii, in Luc d'Achery's Spici- birth will be found in d'Achery, legium sive Collectio veterum ali- ubi supra, pp. 44 sqq., 52 sqq. quot Scriptorum, 1. 51 a, ed. Paschasius addressed his dis- F. J. L. de la Barre, Paris 1723 quisition to the matron and vir- foho. gins of the convent of Vesona in 8* The curious treatises of Pas- the digcese of P^rigord, 43- 44 AGOBAED AND THEOLOGICAL CONTROVEESY. chapJ[. |.q ' assail and overtlirow its resistance to vital religion ; and with this they were content. To enquire deeper into their master's thoughts, to speculate upon the mysteries of being and of God, was foreign to their purpose. Agobard does, indeed, once venture upon the field of controversy in theological metaphysics ; he wrote a book against Felix of Urgel, the adoptian : but here, too, he is still the theologian, not a philosopher. He recites the testimonies of the fathers, but he cares not to add to them his independent criticism. His reticence was justi- fied by the experience of the years after him, when the "cf. Reuten. attempt was made to ^^ accommodate the spiritual system of Augustin to the concrete doctrines of the church, and the amalgam proved the strangest product of that material- ising age, the definition of the doctrine of transubstantia- tion. No innovation could have been better calculated to promote the decay of the moral individualism of Chris- tianity, and the growth of a servile dependence upon the priestly order. It succeeded, not because it professed a conformity with saint Augustin, but because the age was tending towards intellectual degradation. When, however, some years later, Gottschalk, the medieval Jansen, revived from the same father an unconditional doctrine of predestination, the result was quite different. For this doctrine was as subversive as Claudius's puri- tanism of the newer theory of the church. A stimulus was given to controversy, but the issue was foregone. Latin Christiaiuty had come to acquiesce in a behef which admitted God's predestination of the good, his fore- knowledge only of the wicked ; in the technical phrase of Calvinism, predestination but not reprobation. When Gottschalk affirmed both, the language of saint Augustin had to be explained away. It was impossible that his authority could support tenets which, it was seen, struck at the root of the power of the clergy, not only by the imphed denial of the efficacy of the sacraments, but also of the value of human absolution. Augustin's unseason- able restorer appeared to be guilty of the most hopeless, THE DOCTRINE OF PREDESTDSfATION. 45 unpardonable heresy. It was discovered that his opiaions chap. i. included the most opposite errors, the denial of the freedom of man's will, and of the necessity of divine grace. Few disputes ever had a more accidental origin. Gott- schalk, the son of a Saxon noble, was forced as a child into the monastery of Fulda. When he grew up he rebelled, and denied the obhgation of his father's vow. A council at Mentz, to which he appealed against the a.d. 829. authority of his superior, reversed the sentence. The powerful abbat, it was none less than Eabanus Maurus, brought the case before the emperor and won his cause. The youth was condemned for life to the rule of saint Benedict. But the high-spirited ambition of his birth was quickened, not quenched, by his bondage. The fame he would have made in the active hfe of a noble, he now sought in the adventurous paths of speculation. He removed to the monastery of Orbais near Soissons, and buried himseK ia saint Augustin. The theory he developed in this seclusion had a natural affinity with the morbid cravings, the vindictive passions, of a dis- appointed man. It assuaged his regrets for lost earthly prosperity by the confidence of eternal happiness here- after. It gave him a weapon with which to assail his opponents : their reward was already decided for them. He pressed the certainty of their doom with fanatical violence. The controversy which followed is too purely theological, too unreUeved by any warmth of human sympathy, by any real sense of human needs, to detain us in its dark and weary progress. ^^ It is of importance as introducing us to that astonishing thinker whose aid was rashly invoked against the monk of Orbais. The theo- logical dispute was for a moment merged in the deep sea of philosophy : when it rose again the monk Gottschalk was forgotten ; the voice of orthodoxy on all sides was directed against Johannes Scotus, the belated disciple of Plato, and the last representative of the Greek spirit in the west. S5 The history here only glanced luminous chapter of Noorden's at is related in an admirably Hinkmar 51-100. CHAPTER II. JOHN SCOTUS. Chap. II, A.D, 8^9, The dispute about predestination had long perplexed tKe Frankish world when Hincmar, the great archbishop of Rheims, apphed to John Scotus ^ for help. Gottschalk had received his sentence from the council of Quierzy, and died after a long confinement in the monastery of Haut- vilhers. But the controversy had failed, as controversies usually fail, to secure conviction to either side, and John gladly assumed that the fault lay in the incompetence of theology by itself to decide the profound questions involved. He began his book on the subject ^ by the announcement that true philosophy and true religion are identical; a solution of rehgious problems can only be effected by the aid of philosophy; and true philosophy rests on the basis of the imity of God. The oneness of his essence imphes also a oneness of will, a will that can tend only towards good. To conceive a predestination to evil is to conceive a duality, a contradiction, in the divine nature. But predestination of any sort can only be ^ The biography of John Sootus, which resolves itself mainly into a criticism of scanty and conflicting materials, was first attempted by F. A. Staudenmaier, a catholic professor at Giessen, whose Jo- hannes Scotus Erigena und die Wissenschaft seiner Zeit, Frank- fort 1834, was left unfinished. Its biographical conclusions are for the most part reproduced in the Leben und Lehre des Joh. Scotus Erigena, Gotha 1860, of Dr. Theodor Christlieb, of Bonn. A more sceptital criticism is ap-' plied, in the biography, Johannes Scotus Erigena, Munich 1861, by 46 Dr. Johannes Huber, well known for his spirited action in con- nexion with the oeoumenioal council of 1869-1870. [See also my article in the Dictionary of National Biography, 51 (1897) 115-120.] ' Of the tract De praedestina- tione, to which I had not access when I wrote the present chapter, Huber has given an elaborate ana- lysis in his work cited above, 60- 92. See also the summary in F. C. Baur's posthumous Christhche Kirche des Mittelalters 50-66, Tu- bingen 1861 ; and Gfrorer, Kirchen- gesohichte 3. 867 sqq. JOHN SCOTUS's VIEW Of PREDESTINATION. 47 improperly asserted of God, since he is independent of ^"" " • time. If we connect 'it with any notion of necessity it cannot be asserted of him at all ; since his will is absolute freedom ; and man, as the highest image of God, possesses this same entire freedom of will, which he can use as he pleases for good or evil. There remains but one sense in which we can speak of God's predestination; that is, his permission of what happens in the creature by reason of his free will. He suffers this freedom of will, but when it moves tp evil he knows it not; for God is ignorant of evil. If he knew it he would be the cause of it : we cannot separate his knowledge from his will, which is cause. For God, therefore, evil exists not; it has no cause, it is [simply the negation of good. Sin, therefore, and its 'punishment come not from God. Every misdeed bears its punishment in itself, in the consciousness of lacking good. The eternal fire is a necessary part of God's universe. The righteous will rejoice in it ; the wicked suffer, because they are wicked, just as (he quotes the simile from the Confessions of Augustin) the sunhght hurts the weak while it is harmless to sound eyes. The order of the world sets a Umit within which each creature moves and which it cannot overpass. It sets a boimd to the possibility of wickedness, but for which the wicked would fall into that nothingness which is the nature of evil. In this sense alone is punishment fore-ordained, that wicJcedness be not able to extend itself, as it would, into the infinite. These are some of the arguments which the Scot brings against the contention of Gottschalk. We see at once their starting character. They were no doubt entirely unadapted to their purpose; it was no doubt vain to argue on philosophical grounds with men who rehed exclusively on theology and on a one-sided selection of ' scriptural proofs.' But it is on this very account that the reasoning is memorable. There is nothing in it of the commonplaces of controversy or of theology. It has a terminology of its own. Outwardly, indeed, John Scotus appeals, hke his opponents, to the Bible, to Augustin, to 48 John scotus s neo-platokism. Chap. II. a Jowett, Dial, of Plato 3. 524, ed. 2, Oxford 1875- b supra, pp. 14 sq. the common church tradition. But these strains are actually those which give colour to a web of thought quite dif3:erent in texture. Its material, indeed, is only partly Christian,— and this, as we find it in his matured system, is drawn from the Greek fathers, Origen, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, more than from the Latins, — but most of all it comes from the heterogeneous manufacture of the latest Neo-Platonists, the men who sought to combine a rehgion which failed to satisfy the speculative instinct with the noblest philo- sophy of which they had information. The result was in any case a medley — 'the spurious birth,' it has been a called, ' of a marriage between philosophy and tradition, between Hellas and the East ' — but the attempt was so plausible, so enticing, that it has never wanted de- fenders from the beginnings of Christianity, from Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, to our own- time. Among these Johannes Scotus, called lerugena or Eri- gena,^ is a figure unique not so much for the originality of his views as for the confidence with which he discovered them latent in Christianity. He is unrestrained by the habits of thought of his own age, in which he appears as a meteor, none knew whence. The mys,tery which sur- rounds him is appropriate for his solitary person. From the schools of Ireland he drifted, some time before the year 847, to the court of Charles thfe Bald, ^like those former ' merchants of wisdom ' with whom tradition ' As for the name the f oUowing facts may be accepted as ascer- tained : (1) he was known to con- temporaries as loannes Soottus, Scotus, or Scotigena ; (2) in his translation of Dionysius, and there only, he designates himself loannes lerugena; (3) lerugena is the oldest form that appears in the manuscripts, but it soon alter- nates with Erugena (in a copy of the beginning of the eleventh century, Saint John's college, Oxford, cod. cxxviii) and Eriu- gena; (4) Erigena does not make its appearance until later, while (5) the combination of the three names cannot be traced before the sixteenth century. See Christ- heb 15 sq. On its meaning it is difficult to form a decided opinion. Probably it is derived from Erin or leme and modulated so as to suggest i€p6s. In any case Gale's notion (Testimonia, prefixed to his edition of the De divisione naturae, p. 8) that its bearer came from Eriuven or Ergene in the Welsh marches is to be rejected. JOHN SCOTUS AT THE FRAIJKISH COURT. 49 afterwards associated Mm. The ° welcome he won from ^"'"'- ^ ^- that liberal-minded prince and their intimate comrade- ge^.'ponuf?'*''" ship, the gaiety and sprightly humour of the Irish sage, jjltq.f^a. his removal to England after Charles's death, and his new Hamilton, career as a teacher under the auspices of king Alfred, finally his murder at Malmesbury ; ^ all these things are ^/^"^^p.- 5^ = recounted by later annalists. His own time knows only that he was ' a holy man ' who came from Ireland and had received no ecclesiastical orders.* The king's regard for the sage, which we know also from John's poems and dedications, has its evidence in his employment in the palace school, but the story that this school was regularly estabhshed at Paris is a legend of a much later time.* Yet although the town on the Seine was by no means the ordinary seat of government, it was a favourite and not infrequent residence of the king — he was not yet emperor — ^whose capital lay at Compiegne or Laon. It owed its popularity at first no doubt to its neighbourhood to the abbey of Saint Denis, whose fame had attracted thither the djdng Pippin and made his great- grandson Charles choose it for the burial-place of his house ; * * His birth is ironically touched Concil. 15. 401 o ; and du Boulay, on by an opponent, Prudentius of p. 183, admits that he took it Troyes, ' Te solum omnium acutis- from the collectanea of Naude. simum Galhae transmisit Hiber- There is no doubt that it is merely nia,' De Praedest. contra Ip. Scot, one of those fictions invented for xiv Max. BibHoth. Patr. 15. 534 e; the glorification of the antiquity 1677. [He describes him as ' nuUis of the university of Paris, just as ecclesiasticae dignitatis gradibus a later incident in John Scotus's insignitum,' iii. p. 479 E.] John's fife has been applied to that of the character appears from a letter of university of Oxford. Cf. Leon Anastasius the Hbrarian, ' loan- Maitre, iiColes 6piscopales et nem. . . . Scotigenam, virum monastiques 45, Le Mans 1866. quem auditu comperi per omnia [The words cited from pope sanctum,' Ussher, Epist. Syllog. Nicholas's letter are 'obviously 65. interpolated.' See H. Bashdall, * The statement is founded on a The Universities of Europe in the letter of pope Nicholas the First Middle Ages, 1. 273 n. 2, 1895; in which he calls for John's re- and L. 'Traube, Poetae Latini Aevi moval from Paris ' in studio cuius Carohni, 3. 519 n. 5 1896.] capital iam olim fuisse perhi- ' Mr. E. A. Freeman has well betur,' ap. O. E. du Boulay, Hist, told the history of the revival of Univ. Paris. 1. 184, Paris 1665 Paris in the ninth century : see foho. But this passage in the his essay on The early Sieges of papal letter is not found in the Paris, IDstorical Essays, 1st series, recognised copies, e. g. Mansi, viii. E 50 JOHN SCOTUS S KNOWLEDGE OF GREEK. Chap. II. e V. supra, p. 49, n. 5. ' V. Ritlcr, Geschichte der christl. Philos. 3. 208 & n. I, Ham- burg 1844. e cf. Baur, Die christliohe Lehre von der Drei- einigkeit und Menschwerdung Gottes a. 205, n. 1, TBbingen 1842. and it was possibly this same connexion which gave the Irish scholar the first opportunity for making his value felt. The behef that the foundation dated from the Areopagite Dionysius, the earliest Athenian convert of saint Paul, was at this time universally held; there was as yet no Abailard to contest it. The renown of the abbey added dignity to its supposed author ; and when writings ascribed to him with an equal credulity, were brought into the west,' their purport aroused a natural curiosity, if only a translator could be found to reveal their treasures. Now Greek letters had never wholly died out in the Irish schools,® and John had skill enough to furnish the required version. How far the expebtations of the votaries of saint Denis were satisfied by the work, we do not know. Perhaps the obscurity of the translation limited the number of its readers ; at any rate it does not appear to have excited much attention. When e pope Nicholas the First objected to it and wrote to Charles the Bald demanding that the philosopher's work should be sent to him for correction, it was really not so much from suspicion of its contents ^ as from f hostility, in presence of an angry dispute between the churches, against anything Greek. But the influence of the books upon the mind of the translator was momentous. The Timaeus of Plato he probably knew through the version of Chalcidius already ; but now the bold forgery claiming the name of the Areo- pagite, which won currency in the sixth century, e though the actual date of its writing may be a little earlier, placed him in possession of a metaphysical system ostensibly founded upon works of Plato which were unknown to western Christendom, and elaborated with a speculative Denis some years later : Gfrorer 3. 865. * Compare a letter of Benedict of Aniane, the councillor of Lewis the Pious, in Baluze, Miscellanea 2. ■ 97 b, ed. Mansi, Lucoa 1761 folio. ° What suspicion there was, was probably inferred from the Scot's notoriety in the controversy about predestination. ' It seems that before the present of the Byzantine Michael the Stammerer to Lewis the Pious in 827, Staudenmaier 1. 162 and n. 2, works attributed to Dio- nysius had already made their way westward. Such were sent by pope Paul the First to Pippin in 757 and by Hadrian the Krst to abbat Puldrad of Saint mS TRANSLATIONS. 51 fearlessness equally foreign to its spirit. Another Greek ^'"''- " • writer, the monothelete monk Maximus, supplemented the Scot's knowledge of the ultimate forms of Neo- Platonism, and from him too he translated a commentary on Saint Gregory which was likewise destined for the royal study. It should be remarked in passing that John, imhke the men to whom our attention has hitherto been given, addressed himself to a very select company; it might be to the kmg, whose intellectual sympathies were inherited from his father and grandfather, or it might be to his own hearers in the palace school. Twice only did he emerge into pubUc view, and the es- trangement, the public condemnation, which his utter- ances then on the subject of predestination ^^ and of the nature of the Eucharist ^^ provoked may have naturally confirmed his previous reserve. Of his further life little certain is recorded. He appears to have been in France in the year of the emperor's death.^^ The following a.d. 877. year saw peace reestablished in England, and ii it is ^ v. intra, ^'' His predestination tract was that camo to hand was fathered twice condemned by church conn- upon him. This obvious argu- cils, at Valence in 855 and at ment seems to have escaped nearly Langres some years later. See aU the modem writers who decide Huber 97 sq. and the notes, the point in the negative. The To the former was due the con- penetration of Noorden has further temptuous description of John's discerned certain pecuUarities in arguments as ineptas quaestiun- the views ascribed by contem- culas et aniles pene fabulas, poraries to John Scotus which are Scotorumque pultes ' (Scots' por- inapphcable to Batramnus : see ridge) : cap. vi. Mansi, Cone. 15. his Hinkmar Erzbischof von 6 D. Rheims 103, n. 2. "■ That John took part in the ^^ This is inferred from a poem controversy raised by Paschasius in which John commemorates the Radbert is certainly to be in- foundation of a church dedicated ferred from the title of the work of to the Virgin, which from several Adrevald, De corpore et sanguine points of correspondence is be- Christi contra ineptias loannis heved to be that at Compiegne Scoti, printed in d'Achery, Spici- which Charles began in 877 on the legium 1. 150 sqq. ; ed. 1723. model of his grandfather's church The conclusion is not iuvahdated at Aix-la-Chapelle. As however but confirmed by the fact that in the actual building was delayed after years the book of Eatramnus by the emperor's death John on the subject was attributed to seems to describe not what was the Soot. It was known that he really existing but the plan on had written a treatise, and there- which it was to be built. See the fore the only appropriate treatise quotation in Huber 120 n. 52 THE DIVISION OF NATURE. chap^i. difficult to resist a tradition which held currency through- out the middle ages that he sought retreat here when his old protector was taken away from him, and that his fervour of teaching was only closed when his scholars fell upon him and slew him. The monument that com- memorated the holy sophist was soon destroyed, but repeated orders from pope or council have not succeeded in obliterating his truest memorial which remains to us in his writings, above all in the great work On the Division of NatureP From this last we may, without attempting even in outline to portray his whole system, collect enough of its features to shew what a revelation he made of the dignity of the order of the universe; however much mixed with crude or fantastic ideas, however often clouded in obscurity, yet full of suggestion, full of interest everywhere.^* His reflexions upon the subject of predestination led John Scotus, as we have already seen, to trace his theory of the nature of sin. Augustia^^ and even Athanasius had been led to a similar explanation of the appearance of evil in the world, but how differently had they ap- ^' Its proper title is Greek, edition is not very critically com- nepl tpiaeav fiepKr/nov. The editio piled ; it is corrected with, various prinoeps, which is far better success by the biographers, reputed than Schriiter's reprint of i* The most profound ej^osition 1838, was pubHshed by Thomas of the Soot's system with which I Gale (as appears from the appen- am acquainted, is given by Baur, dix, p. 46), Oxford 1681 foho, Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit 2. whose pages I have added to my 263—344. Baur is especially com- references to the work. In writ- plete in his analysis of John's ing the present chapter I had not relation to his Greek predecessors, access to the edition by H. J. I am also under obligations to the JFloss, which forms the hundred general works of Ritter 3. 209- and twenty-second volume of 296 and Gfrorer 3. 922-937. Of Migne's Cursus, and includes the the biographers Huber is the most rest of the Scot's works, namely philosophical, while ChristUeb loses , (1) the translations of l)ionysius himself in far-fetched speculations' and Maximus and the expositions as to John's affinities to modem on the former, (2) the tract on philosophy. predestination, (3) a commentary ^^ Peccatum quidem non per'ip- and homiUes on the gospel of sum factum est : et manif estum est; saint John, (4) verses, and (5) a quia peccatum nihil est et nihil fragment on the procession and iiunt homines cum peccant : recession of the soul to God. The Tract, i in loh. evang., 0pp. 3 catalogue of lost works printed in (2) 294 c, ed. Bened., Paris 1689 the Testimonia prefixed to Gale's folio. DOCTRINE OF SIN. 53 plied it. With them it is found compatible with a belief chap^i. in the eternity of punishment; to John it means that since aU things proceed from good, so in good they must all be one day absorbed. To this consummation he loves to apply the text, Ero mors tua, mors ; morsus tuns ero, inferne?-^ i To find the cause of sin in God's work ' ce div. nat. he pronounces to be blasphemous.^' tgin, he repeats, ^iib. w.^e,' has no cause because it has no real existence. How sq.%87': '°^ then does it arise ? The answer is given in various forms Hb.aJb^li.'jo which converge upon the central thought that sia is im- eo's V sq!"" ^' plied in the fact of man's free will. He takes the case of two men looldng at a golden vase. There is no evil in the vase, but it may excite in the one feelings only of pleasure and admiration, in the other the passion of covetousness. The one receives the simple impression of a beautiful object; the other colours and deforms it . by his own lawless desire. But this desire, this evil, is I not indigenous to man's nature ; it is the result of the 1 irregular action of his reasonable and free will.^* The senses are deceived by that which appears to be good, hj false good, and. the infection spreads inwardly to the intellect itself. iThus the inner man wherein naturally 'Ub.iv. 16 dwelleth truth and all good, which is the Word of God, the ^' '° ' only-begotten Son of God, becomes corrupt and sins. But this process does not originate in evil. The bodily sense does not desire a thing because it is evil but because it has the show of goodness. ^No vice is found but is the •^nb. its shadow of some virtueP Pride for instance is a perversion " Hosea xiii. 14 in the Vulgate : above p. 47 and compare De div. the Hebrew has an important nat. v. 27 p. 259. difference of meaning. ^' Non ergo in natura humana " Cf. ' Deus itaque malum ne- plantatum est malum, sed in scit; nam si malum sciret, neces- perverse et irrationabili motu sario in natura rerum malum esset. rationabilis liberaeque voluntatis Divina siquidem scientia, omnium est constitutum : ib. iv. 16 p. 206, quae sunt causa est ; . . . ac per cf . v. 36 p. 287. hoc si Deus malum sciret, in aliquo ^' He adds ' by some fallacious substantialiter inteUigeretur, et likeness or contrariety,' giving particeps boni malum esset, et ex however of the ' contrariety ' the virtute et bonitate vitium et single instance " as evil to good.' maUtia prooederent : quod im- This can only be explained on the possibile esse vera edocet ratio : ' assumption that in his first book De divis. nat. ii. 29 p. 84. See John was unwilling to force too 54 John's explanation of the fall ^""- " ■ of a true sense of power— in good men it takes the form of a love of heavenly excellence and of a contempt of "lib.v. 25 earthly weakness; — and nit was from pride that the sin , of man began. It was the first exercise of his free will. In applying these views to the interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis, our Scot has practically to super- sede its historical meaning by the allegorical. He ex- plains any difiiculties that he encounters in the narrative by the theory that it is accommodated to our lower under- "lib.iv. 20 standing. It expresses truth by figures. "The order of time for instance, he says, is so often violated in the Bible itself that there can be no objection to our ignoring p cap. 15 p. 197. it in our exposition. pAdam must have sinned before he was tempted by the devil ; else he would not have been accessible to temptation. The events that are related to have taken place in Eden, that is in the ideal state, really happened on earth and were consequential on Adam's qibid.jcf. V. sin. ^For if paradise is human nature formed after the image of God and made eqiial to the blessedness of the angels, then immediately he wished to leave his Creator, he fell from the dignity of his nature. His pride -began before he con- sented to his wife. By this act man came into the domain riib.ii. 5, 7 of time and space ; r Jience arose the physical distinctions of sex ^" and the rest of his bodily conditions, no less than the diversities of manners and thought that divide the human race. That which was single became manifold. We thus reach the ultimate result of the philosopher's • lib.ii.g.iv. conception of evil. » Sin is contemporaneous with the tcf.Gfrarera' - existeucc of the human body, tit marks the transition 929- many novel thoughts upon the sex as ' the most important con- reader. The theory of evil 'wyiita sequence of the fall.' I am in- f or its complete development until olined rather to think that he the fourth book. As yet he is chose it as the most speaking content to speak of evil in a example, the simplest way of general way as though it actually denoting the material man. Who existed. The contradictions of after Augustin could avoid regard- his work have been exaggerated by ing sex as the distinctive corporeal critics and seldom fail to resolve fact in man's nature ? Compare themselves on a closer scrutiny. on this saUent principle of Au- 2° Baur, 2. 302, considers that gustin, Milman, Latin Christianity the Scot held this separation of I. 161. AMD RESTORATION OF MAN. 55 from the ideal to the actual, from the world of thought to ^""- " ■ the world of matter. John's skill in fitting this theory within the framework of accepted doctrine cannot disguise its essential con- trariety. He supplants the dark dogma of the natural corruption of man, his original destiny to perdition, by the conception of the negative character of evil. "It is, ?.°='i'^"^'- " ^ ^ ^ ' II. 5 p. 49 ; cf . he woiild say with Plato, as httle natural as the diseases Hat. Tim. p. se. of the body : it is the inevitable result of the union of flesh and spirit. But the primal dignity of man's nature must in the end reassert its sway. ^ The soul may forget " oe aiv nat. v. her natural goods, may fail in her striving towards the goal of the inborn virtues of her nature ; the natural powers may move, by fault of judgement, towards something which is not their e7id : but not for ever. For the universal tendency of things is upward ; y and thus from evil is wont to turn good, but in y cap. 25 nowise from good evil. . . . The first evil could not be per- petual, but by the necessity of things must reach a certain bound and one day vanish. For if the divine goodness which ever worketh not only in the good but also in the wicked, is eternal and infinite, it follows that its contrary will not be eternal and infinite. . . . Evil therefore will have its con- summation and remain not in any nature, since in all the divine nature will ivorh and be manifest. Our nature then is not fixed in evil ; . . . it is ever moving, and seeks nought else but the highest good, from which as from a beginning its motion takes its source, and to which it is hastened as to an end. As all things proceed from God, so in God they find their final completion. He is the end of things, the \j- / last of the four forms of nature which make the foundation , - y of the Scot's system. \yy This fourfold division is absolutely John's own pro-^^' I perty and discoverable z elsewhere only in the Indian ^h^t^ ^^^t^g J doctrine of the Sankhya : 'ain the simplicity of liis ^'^^{"f^'^^i^^ I general plan,' it has been truly said, ' he surpasses all the ^^X''^'^'*' 'philosophers of the middle ages.' The scheme breaks into ^^^"^3-21^ two by the distinction of creator and created. The first and fourth forms are the ^ two aspects of the uncreated i^z^^ll^^^' 56 THE FOUR FOEMS OF NATURE. Chap. II. = cf. lib. iii. 10 p. 111. * lib. ii. 36 p. 94. elib. i. I, pp. I, 47. 'lib. iii. 5, 6 pp. 105 sq. elib. i. 16 >■ cap. 23 p. 15. ' lib. iii. 8, 13 p. 106, 119. ^ Monolog. ix. p. 7 D, E, ed. 2, G. Gerberon., Paris 1721 folio, ^ De div, nat. i. 6, 35 pp. 3i 20. unity, according as we consider it as the beginning or as the end of things. The one creates : the other creates not, it is the rest for which nature strives and which consists in the restoration of things to their original unity. Be- tween these terms lie the two forms of created things. They have the same division as the other two. The second creates : the third creates not. The one is the world of ideas, the pattern upon which the other, the sensible universe, is made. It contains the abstractions : d goodness — ^the first of things, — essence, life, wisdom, truth, intellect, reason, virtue, justice, health, greatness, omnipotence, eternity, peace, and all the virtues and reasons which the Father created once for all in his Son, and according to which the order of all things is framed, each considered by itself and apart from sensible objects. These are the primordial causes of things, the » effects of which are manifested in time and place in the third form of nature. But it is impossible to keep the effects apart from the causes; *they are involved in them, and with them eternal, though not eternal as God; for s eternity, Uke every other attribute, can only be predicated of him in an improper sense, he is more than eternal. ^ Place and time exist not with him : he has nothing accidental, cause and effect with him are one. Therefore the i universe, as his creation, is eternal : non erat quando non erant. In such fashion this clear-sighted idealist represented the accepted belief, according to which creation is bringing into being in the sense of bringing into the sensible world : his opinion was perhaps an inevitable deduction from the premises of formal Platonism, and something very like it was k maintained by so correct a theologian as saint Anselm. To John Scotus thought is the only real being, and, philosophically speaking, 1 body has no existence except ■ as dependent on thought.^^ But he chooses to express '"■ It has often been remarked that John has in plain terms the argument of Descartes : ' Wten I say / understand that I am, I prove that I am, that I can un- derstand that I am, and that I do understand that I am ; ' Dum ergo dioo, IntelUgo me esse, nonne in hoc THEOEY OF THE trOTVEESE. 57 truth by alternate affirmation and negation, confirmatory ^""- " • when they appear most contradictory to one another; and so he couples with the assertion that there was no time when the universe was not, the contrary assertion that there was a time when it was not. In a sense that transcends intelligence it exists eternally; in another sense mit began to be when it passed iato the sphere of "lib- "i- 15 time and place. The meaning is in strict correspondence with that which we have found in John's theory of evil. Evil arises by the passage from the spiritual to the material : objective creation by the passage from the eternal to the temporal. Good in the one argument, eternity in the other, is the positive element in the universal system; "matter is the mere concourse of the'ii^-i.^z accidents of being. Such is John Scotus's world. To him as to ° Plato its "Timaeusag j goodness is its essential significance : it begins and ends 1 with thought, with pure being, with God. He fills in the outhne with a confidence, a certainty, of the truth of his speculations. Yet, as though half conscious of their strangeness to the understanding of his age, he is ever anxious to prove that he is continuing, not breaking off from, the fine of thought sanctioned by the greatest of the fathers and by the Bible itself. Authority is stiU a power with him, but limited, expanded, refined. The p name of the fathers, of Ausustin himself, cannot deter ^ ce aiv. nat. him from forming his own conclusions on any subject, pp- 192 sq., lEven the Bible, though necessarily containing nothing « lib- i. 66 but truth, presents that truth with so much accommoda- tion to the bodily senses that it is the J^duty of the philo-'lib.iii.so sopher to endeavour to penetrate beneath its metaphors and bring forth the substance that imderhes them. For uno verbo, quod est intdligo, tria statement of the syllogism, though significo a se mseparabiha ? nam less clearly expressed, appears to et me esse, et posse inteUigere me me to be virtually identical irith esse, et inteUigere me esse, demon- John's ; so that the latter will stro. Num vides verbo uno et hardly deserve the distinction meam oiaiav, meamque virtutem, claimed for it by M. Haureau, et actionem significari ? De divis. Histoire de la Philosophie scolaa- uat. i. 50 p. 27. Saint Augustia's tique ]. 183 sq. p 58 REASON AND AXTTHORITY. ^''*''- ^ '- its sense is infinite, because it is the reflexion of the divine reason; but reason stands above it, is man's sure guide • lib. i. 68 in interpreting the written message of revelation, a If the authority be true, neither can contradict the other, since both proceed from the same source, namely from the divine wisdom. To appreciate this position we must, remember that its object was in no wise to lower the dignity of the Bible, but solely to elevate the concep- tion of the human understanding. Nor was it a new or unheard-of thing. Fredegisus, Alcuin's scholar at York and his successor in the abbacy of Saint Martin at Tours, had made a very similar statement of the relation of reason to authority, and he had felt it compatible with the most Uteral view of inspiration.^^ . Neither he nor the Scot had any doubt of the irrefragable truth of the Bible. But while Fredegisus found it in the hteral sense, John sought for the larger meaning concealed within its depths. 'lib.iv. 5 ,^ tjFor the sense of the divine utterances is manifold and infinite, even as in one and the same feather of the peacock we behold a marvellous and beautiful variety of countless , colours. Like principles, as one apphed them, might lead to a submissive dependence on the letter, or to amplest " V. Reuter i. freedom of rational enquiry. - For in the one writer, re3,son without the support of authority is weak, in the other it I^Dediv. nat. | stands firm ^fortified by its own virtues, and needs not to be \ strengthened by any prop of authority. If we examine more closely the Scot's view of reason it appears that authority is actually related' to it as a species to its genus. In both God reveals not himseK but the forms in which we can conceive him. The d'?o^'^' '^ ^ human reason is the dwelUng-place of the word of God. This manifestation, this theophany (John's technical name for God's revelation to man), is coextensive with the reign of reason and therefore, since reason is every- '^ SeeaboTepp.40sq. Theoorre- rung im Mittelalter 1. 274 n. 21 : spondenoe is plain if we accept the ' primum ratione, in quantum emendation of the place in Frede- hominis ratio patitur, deinde gisus proposed by Dr Reuter, auctoritate, non qualibet sed Geschichte der religioseu Aufkla- rational! {edit, ratione) duutaxat.' p. 205 THE UOTTY OP GOD. 59 thing, it is universally diffused. "It is the. cause ard ^"*''- "• substance of all virtues, » it is a stream that runSvthrough p''j • '■ 9 all nature. i> Intellect . . . and the rest of things mat are jp'^'ii^^' "5.'' said to he, are theophanies, and in theophany really subsist ; ^^'^- ♦ pp- "^ therefore God is everything that truly is, since he maJces all things and is made in all things. The pantheism of the last sentence must be interpreted by John's view of God as apart from nature, a view as important in his system as that of revelation. It is <= impossible for any one who ° <:J- 1^"" 3- fairly weighs his opinions on this subject not to feel that the charge of pantheism has been premature and warranted only by one set of statements, contradicted and at the same time justified by another set no less necessary to the com- , plete understanding of his doctrine. If the reconciliation appear paradoxical we have but to remember that paradox in the philosopher's view is inevitable when we attempt to conceive the eternal. The statement that God is everything stands in juxta- position to the statement that God is the supreme unity. Thie • one bears relation to the world, the other to God himself. The latter is therefore the only strict mode of expression. »< 'The central thought of John Scotus's system is that God's being is absolute, it cannot be de- scribed by any of the categories to which creation is sub- ject; for he transcends them all. ^We cannot without ^oediv.nat.i. a misuse of language affirm of him essence, quantity or quahty, relation, position, or habit, place or time, action or passion. For to affirm these or any of these of God is to hmit the ilhmitable : they are only apphcable by way of accommodation to our earthly understanding, they have a literal meaning to the simple, « to the philo- « capp. 69, 75 sopher they are figures of speech. The rule is stated ItReuteri?' universally, and can admit no exception feven in the iDi'div.nat.i. theological relation of Father and Son. His honesty ' ^' ''" forbade our philosopher to ignore a difficult consequence of his position, even when it seemed to oppose a cardinal point of piety, s He is indeed reluctant to dwell upon s capp. 14, is the subject, but not from any mistrust of his own ^^' ^'■' ^^" J 60 UNITY MANIFESTED IN VAEIETY. chap^i. conclusions. The truth lay, he felt, in a double form : we can only express our thoughts about God by contradic- ^ capp. u, i6, tions ; ^ we affirm and deny the same things of him, and 78 pp. 9, II, ' "^ ^ O J Leire vonder ®^ ^™ ^* ^ higher harmony in which the contradictions Dreieinigkeit, of our humau Understanding are reconciled. For the 2. 274 sqq. _ . _ ° '^oediv.ait.k mystery of the divine Trinity ^ passes the endeavours of human reason and even the purest understandings of celestial essences. We infer from the essence of the things that are, ^ that it exists ; from the wonderful order of things, that it is I— ' } wise ; from their motion, that it is life. As, saith saint Diony- sius the Areopagite, ' The highest and causal essence of all things cannot be signified by any signification of words or names, or of any articulate voice.' For it is neither unity nor trinity, such as can be contemplated by the purest human, by the clearest angelical, understanding^. . . . Chiefiy for the sake of those who demand a reason for the Christian faith . . . have these symbolical words been religiously discovered and handed dawn by the holy theologians. . . . Beholding, in so far as they were enlightened by the divine Spirit, the one unspeakable cause of all things, and the one beginning, simple and undivided and universal, they called it Unity ; but seeing this unity not in singleness or barrenness, but in a marvellous and fertile multiplicity, they have understood three substances of unity. John Scotus traces this trinity in unity in the nature of iib.ii.23 the universe, — tin the Creator, the idea, and the fact of things ; in another aspect, in ovoLa, dvvajAiQ, and evi^yeia, — and in its final resolution into unity. He traces also its 1iib.iii.20 reflexion in man, Un reason, understanding, and sense. p. 128. , OJ , miib.ii.9 For m man is the summing up of nature : ^ he has both a p. 70, p. 51 -lib. iv. 7 heavenly being and a sensible being, ° combines the highest p. 171 p. 49. "lib.ii. 5 and the lowest elements. He is the meeting-point between creation and Creator, and this meeting is summed up in the two-fold nature of Christ. As all nature is con- tained in man, so all humanity is contained in the Word ^' He repeats this almost in the trinitate dicuntur seu oogitantur same words in chapter 35 of the seu intelliguntur, vestigia quaedam second book, p. 93, adding ' quae- sunt atque theophaniae veri ounque de simplioissimae bonitatis tatis.' Chap. II. THE INCARNATION : THE EESTOfeATlON OiF THE WORLD. 61 , of God.^* When we speak of the incamation, we do not 1 mean an individual, historical fact, but p the eternal " v. Bam 2. 307 sqq. '\ connexion of the ideal and actual. Cause and eifect, as has J already appeared, cannot be separated in God ; they ' are imphed in his single creative will. This union is revealed in the incamation, by which ithe Word of God '^jp^is"^'' passed from the region of cause to that of efiects, \ \\- and descended into the sensible world. It was not a I ^ temporal act, but the expression of the necessary reci- i \ procity of temporal and eternal, the immanent relation ' L-oi God and the world. It is the supreme theophany. r By it the light to which no man can approach opened access ' '*''<'• ?• ^ss- to every intellectual and reasonable creature. . . . In Him the visible things and the invisible, that is to say, the world of sense and the world of thought, ivere restored and recalled to unspeakable unity, now in hope, hereafter in fact ; now in faith, hereafter in sight; now by inference, hereafter in experience ; already effected in the manhood which he assumed, hereafter to be fulfilled in all men without distinction. This restoration of the world is the great subject of the Scot's fifth book. The fourth division of nature is its return to primal unity. The body of man is restored to the elements; these elements coalesce in the resurrec- tion into a new body ; and this turns to spirit, the spirit reverts to its original causes, the causes to God. ^ ^or God ' "^p- * p- ^3*- shall be all things in all things, when there shall be nothing but God alone. Is this restoration asserted of man alone or also of his brother animals ? of the good or also of the evil ? finally, of the individual or only of the race ? To these three questions John has his answer. The first gives him no diflficulty. Immortality holds good not only of man, but of the whole animated creation. He will conclude this on a priori grounds : the lower animals have their ' natural virtues,' ^^ they have souls, albeit irra- tional. But the decisive argument is that man is simply ^' Christ therefore united all the ^^ See the curious instances of elements of humanity, of creation : the memory and the chastity of he was not ' vir ' but ' homo." Cf. animals, and of the piety of storks, lib. ii. 6 p. 40. Ub. iii. 41 p. 158. 62 QUESTION OF TEE SUEVIVAL OF EVIL. ^^^^- a species of the animal Mngdom, and that if the genus perish, the species must perish with it. The immortahty of man is the warrant for the immortahty of the whole creation. All nature will return to its first causes. The question about the survival of evil is more em- barrassing, and it cannot be concealed that the Scot does in some places seem to affirm something like a reUque of the doctrine of eternal damnation. But in the first place this doctrine is much less plainly declared in the books of The Division of Nature than in the treatise On Predestination ; and the latter is an occasional work, written for a special purpose and hampered by its con- ditions; the former is the representative book of the philosopher's life. In the second place, when a man makes use of conventional language and also of expres- sions entirely opposed to it and strildngly original, we cannot hesitate as to which is the genuine utterance of t cap. 27 pp. 25? his own opinion : and * the declaration that eternal tor- & 260. ment is totally incompatible with the truth that the whole world is set free by the incarnation of the divine Word, is made in distinct terms and closely interwoven with the fabric of John Scotus's reasoning. An eternity of suffering and evil is irreconcilable with an eternity of goodness and life and blessedness. There is no room for it in his system. He file? away its edges and rounds off its comers until its orthodox shape has disappeared. " capp. 28, 29, u First he denounces the ' irrational ' folly of trvine to 31 pp. 264 sq., . . . ., ./ o 272. combine a sensible hell with a spiritual existence : the punishment of the wicked must stand solely in their memory of past wrong. New evil cannot arise then; they will be pained by the phantasies of their old misdeeds. But, proceeds John, though they be deprived of blessedness, ^ cap. 38 p. 310. something will yet remain to them : ^ the ' natural goods ' in which they were created cannot be taken away. Doubt- less all gifts are made in proportion to man's capacity of receiving ; but the philosopher is sure that this capacity can and will grow and develop until evil is all swallowed y cap. 23 p. 248. up in good, y There may be degrees and stages in happi- THE RETURN TO OEIGDSTAL XJMTy. 63 ness, in the progress toward perfection ; but there is a chap^i. certainty of the final victory of good. If it be otherwise, if there be a sensible world of torments, ^then have t<;e ^ «?• ^s p. 265. laboured in vain, and the sentences of the holy ivriters lohich we have alleged will he turned into derision : which God forbid. The third question involved in John Scotus's view of the return of creation into the Creator concerns the immor- tality of the individual. He answers it by analogies, a The air is still air though it appear to be absorbed into *«?■ s p. 234- the light of the sun and to be all light. The voice, of man, or of pipe or lyre, loses not its quality when several by just proportion make one harmony in unity among themselves. Nor is it reasonable to suppose that man will subsist in a spiritual state without a body. •> The body of our '■ <»p- 13 pp. =36 present humanity will disappear, but it will be exchanged for the spiritual body inseparable from the idea of man, the body which he had before he entered into the world of matter. "The whole man is eternal. This therefore "= rap- 20 p. 242 is the end of all things visible and invisible, when all visibhl things pass into the intellectual, and the intellectual into God,\ by a marvellous and unspeakable union ; but not, as we\ have often said, by any confusion or destruction of essences or substances. It is here, in the profoundest and the most original part of his scheme, that the Scot shows most evidently how impossible it would be for him to rest in a purely pantheistic behef . His nature forced him to hold that those virtues, that will, which make man the image of God upon earth, those quaHties which exalt / one man above his fellows, will not become perfect by^,- ■ remergiQg in the general soul.' Perfection imphes their survival " unconfounded and imdestroyed.' His entire conception of the recovery of all things, of a unity into which the trinity of nature is resolved, is certainly the most original feature in the system of the Irish thinker. In dividing up theology on a philosophical basis he achieved a greater discovery than he was per- haps conscious of. He discovered that the doctrine of 64 JOHN SCOTUS'S POSITION-- •^f^fli'" the church was not stationary but progressive ; it was susceptible of development, of indefinite expansion. He discovered in Christianity the germs of all truth. Not only the idea of Christ but all those understood in dogmatic Christianity he apphed and enlarged in such a manner that the result was rather a philosophy of rehgion, than a philosophy of Christianity : and thus to theology he contributed little that it could accept; to philosophy he added not a few of the salient ideas which we connect with the modern schools of metaphysics. His own views were doubtless buried with his writings : they were found out afresh by other men before their pubhcation proved how they had been anticipated. Essentially his system would suffer little if we deducted from it all those Christian elements upon which he supposed it rested; we should find a philosophy in which the idea of God, the idea of evil, and many of its central features, resemble in a remark- able way the thoughts of Spinoza. Yet it would be as I dishonest to reg^,rd these Christian elements as adven- titious, as it would be to ignore the Hebrew antecedents of the great Dutch philosopher. They were necessary to. the Scot because he lived in a tradition of Christian theology, because this was the framework in which his thoughts were trained to move and from which he could not wholly free himself. Nevertheless he advanced so far in the direction of giving new meanings to old phrases that he was, speaking generally, unintelhgible to his age. At the same time the fact of his appearance in the ninth century, the fact of his apparently unbroken favour at the imperial court, is a remarkable evidence of the liberal spirit which remained with the successors of Charles the Great. It is not as though John was kept at the royal school, just as a miracle of learning, in ignorance of what he actually taught. On the contrary, Charles the Bald had received from his mother the empress Judith, the friend of the Jews, the double elements of a com- plete education, wide learning and the scholar's instinct Among gontempoeaioes. 65 of openness to. conviction. He was not a mere patron chap^. of scholars, he was their friend to whom they deferred on difficult points ; ^^ he liked to enter into disputation with them, laid down theses and invited them to discuss them without reserve. ^ As emperor he wished to appear dcf! Reuier i. a loyal son of the catholic church, but he refused to con- * ^'^'^' demn opinions unless they were plainly shewn to be hostile to it, and he was generally discreet enough to hesitate about the proof and to hold his judgement free. The keenness of. his intelligence conspired with a natural elasticity of temper to produce in his political action what certainly degenerated into an habitual irresolution and infirmity of purpose. But the vices of a statesman are often virtues in private fife, and in this view Charles's indecision bears the character of a judicial tolerance, a tolerance to which his continued intercourse with John the Scot is a speaking witness; although it would be unsafe to infer from the scanty notices we have of their relation, that he shared with the philosopher more than a general sympathy with his spirit of free enquiry. John certainly had e disciples, but they cannot have oGfrorerj. 873, been numerous. Among near contemporaries iHeric'seeHaurSau, of Auxerre, and his pupil, saint Eemigius, both teachers 193, 201-204; & of great repute, may be proved to have been indebted Extr^dra Manuscr. 20 (2) 5-20; 1862 '' Heric of Auxerre's epistle opibus aspemantur, vestra potiua luarto. dedicatory to the emperor, pre- magnauimitate delectati, studiis fixed to his Life of saint Germauus allecti, liberahtate confisi : dolet, of Auxerre, shows us, in however inquam, se ohm singulariter mira- exaggerated terms, what contem- bilem ac mirabihter singularem a poraries thought of Charles as a suis destitui : dolet oerte sua ilia patron of learning. Part of it is privilegia (quod numquam hao- well-known (cf . supra p. 22), but a tenus verita est) ad cHmata nostra larger extract will not come amiss transferri. Quid Hibemiam memo- here : Id vobis singulare studium rem, contempto pelagi discrimine, efEecistis,utsioubiterrarummagis- pene totam cum grege philoso- tri floierent artium, quarum princi- phbrum ad httora nostra migran- palem opeiam philosophia poUice- tern ? Quorum quisquis peritior tur, hoc ad pubhcam eruditionem est ultro sibi indicit exihum ; ut undecumque vestra celsitudo con-. Salpmoni sapientissimo famuletur duceret, comitas attraheret, dap- ad votum : Actt. SS. mens. lul. 7. siUtas provooaret. Luget hoc 221 f sq., Antwerp 1731 foho. An Graecia, novis invidiae aculeis admirable characterisation of the lacessita, quam sui quondam emperor is given by Noorden, , incolae iam dudum cum Asianis Hinkmar 116 sqq. F 66 VESTIGES or John's ineluence Chap. II. e Invectiva in Romam, E. Diinimler, Auxilius und Vulgarius 46 n. 1866. b cf. supra, p. 51 n. II. A.D. 1050. ^ cf . Haurgau, Not. et Extr., ubi supra. fc Mullinger, Schools of Charles the Great 35,65. for more than they cared to acknowledge, to the materials provided them in the works of the Scot. But in the dark age that followed, those writings seem to have been almost unknown. Early in the tenth century, indeed, we meet with an s extract from a poem apparently of John's composition, and a passage from the Division of Nature is cited in a theological treatise written a httle later ; 2' but in neither case is the source of the quotation indicated. Then, again, when the Scot's book On the Body and Blood of Christ obtained a sudden notoriety in the dispute raised by Berengar of Tours on the nature of the sacrament, the importance attached to his authority by the opponent of transubstantiation is valuable as evidence of the power that his name still possessed; but it is nearly certain that the i^work to which Berengar appealed, and which was burnt by the council of Vercelh, was the production not of John but of his contemporary the monk Eatramnus. A solitary trace of John's influence may be found in the fact that, probably through some i glosses of his, the S&tyricon of Martianus Capella soon came to take once more that recognised place in the schools which it had held centuries earher in the dark days of ^ Gregory of Tours ; but the acceptance of this meagre compendium only shews how incapable his heirs were of appreciating the treasure he had left them in his own works.^^ *' In the tract De corpore et sanguine Domini commonly as- cribed to Gerbert. See Carl von Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlaude 2. 57 [58] n. 227; 1861 : cf. Huber 434. Neither of these writers adverts to the doubt which hangs over the authorship of the book. See below p. 77 n. 12. "' It has been supposed that the book, of which the full title is De nuptiis Philologiae et Mer- ourii, a tasteless allegory descrip- tive of the seven liberal arts — was the exclusive possession of the Irish : cf . Haddan, Remains 273 sq., 280. In Alcuin the very name does not occur, and Mr Mullinger, pp. 64 sqq., Ill, 118, has elaborated a theory of this writer's studied hostility to Mar- tianus. Had' however such a motive existed I feel confident that it , would have appeared somewhere in Alcuin's writings. His silence has much rather the look of ignorance. Nor can it be said that the work was only read ' wherever pious scruples did not prevent ' (p. 65), in face of abun- dant instances of its use from Remigius of Auxerre to John of Salisbury. ON tATEU THOUGHT. 67 On the other hand, John has been claimed as in some ^"'"- '' • sense } the author of the scholastic debate of the earUer i cf. infra, part of the middle ages. He was the first writer in the Ipp^""*-"- west who systematically adopted a regular syllogistic form of argumentation, and he was continually re- proached with this peculiarity by antagonists such as Prudentius of Troyes. Forgotten for a while, the tradi- tion should seem to have somehow revived, possibly through the studies of Roscehn, and by such an one to have been apphed to trains of reasoning widely diverse rfrom anything suspected by John Scotus. On one side [ he is reputed the father of nominahsm, on the other he \ is thought to have exerted no sUght influence on the theo- 1 logical speculations of Gilbert of La Porree. When, further, we observe that mthe Division q/" iVaiwre was associated in ""Huber 435- the condemnation of the heresy of Amalric of Bene,^^ and a.d. 1209. that it was this work which called forth a " bull of Hono- 1 Aibmc. chr., rius the Third in 1225, enjoining a strict search for all 1211-1214" copies of the book or of any parts of it, and ordering H.^Dmifle, them to be sent to Rome to be solemnly burnt, — any one pa^., i (1889) who knowingly kept back a copy being declared obnox- " ^''' ious to the sentence of excommunication and the brand of heretical depravity, — ^we shall be able to form some estimate of the variety and the intensity of danger which was subsequently discovered in the teaching of the Scot. That such a judgement was warranted by the principles of correct cathoUc opinion will hardly be denied ; but we must not omit to place beside it the fact that there was also Uterary tradition respecting John, so soon as his memory had been recalled to notice, of a gentler and more appreciative character. His translation of Diony sius was not only widely read, as we know from the numerous manuscripts of it that exist, but also com- mented on by a man of the saintly reputation of Hugh of Saint Victor, not to mention many others; and it is ^' See Charles Jourdain's ex- de rAcademie des Inscriptions et amination of the evidence of Belles-Lettres 26 (2) 470-477; Martinus Polonus, in the Memoires 1870. 68 LITERARY TRADITION RESPECTING THE SCOT. chap^i. possible, as o Milman supposes, that it contributed not a cSt ssi".*'' 1^**1^ *o t^e growth of ' Christian mythology.' Wilham of Malmesbury, who was singularly well informed about John and his works', has a good word to say even of the ?4^^' 393"ed' "' I^i'<^ision of Nature, which he describes as p very useful for Hamilton. solving the difficulty of certain questions, albeit he have to be pardoned for some matters wherein, holding his eyes fast upon the Greelcs, he has deflected from the ■path of the Latins. The acuteness of this criticism enhances the value of Wilham's opinion; he was well aware that John had " been deemed a heretic, and he confessed that there are truly very many things in his booh, the which, unless we carefully examine them, appear abhorrent from the faith of the catholics. This temperate judgement is repeated by the most popular of the encyclopaedists of the middle ages, Vincent of Beauvais. There is also evidence that the name of John Scotus was known and honoured not only at Malmesbury but also in that Saxon monastery of Corvey which preserved its Carohngian culture longer > o. 1149. perhaps than any other : so late as the middle of the twelfth century, its abbat, Wibald, writing to Manegold of Paderborn, commemorates the philosopher as closing the hne of great masters of the age which began with Bede the Venerable, and went on with Haimori of Halberstadt and Rabanus Maurus, — men most learned, who by writing and reasoning left in- the church of God illustrious monuments of their genius.^" "" Quid loquar de oaeteris virie dootissimis qui post prediotos in aecolesia Dei scribendo et dis- serendo preolara ingenii sui moni- menta reliqu6runt ? Bedam, dico, et Ambrosium Aupertum, Heimo- uem, Kabanum, loliannem Scot- turn, et multos preterea, quorum opera legimus ; nee non illos quos vidimus, Anselmum Laudunen- sem, Wilhelmum Parisiensem, Albricum Remensem, Hugonem Parisiensem, et alios plurimos, quorum dootrina et soriptis mundus impletus est : Epist. Clxvii, in Jaffe, Biblioth. 1. 278; 1864;. See other instances in Haureau, ffist. 2 (1) 69; 1880. CHAPTER III. THE DARK AGE. . . Chap. Ill If the attempt of John Scotus to change Ghnstiamty into a philosophy failed to make an impression upon the succeeding age, it is the less surprising when we consider that he failed in company with aU the wise men of the ninth century. Their rehgions and their philosophical aims were ahke forgotten, the practices and behefs they combated won a gradual acceptance. In the interval between the dechne of the Carolingian house and the reformation of the eleventh century, CJiristendom sank into a grosser view of reUgion, into an abasement of morals that pervaded the clergy equally With the laity, into an ignorance all but universal. In this Dark Age, as it is well described, it is a thankless task to seek for the elements of enUghtenment of which the vestiges are so scanty. Their existence, however, is proved by the hfe they manifested as soon as the spirit of rehgion was re- awakened. It was the divorce between rehgion and learning, between rehgion and morahty, that signahsed the time ; a divorce that, just as in the seventh century, was conditioned by the helpless confusion of the external order, its effect in turn reacting upon itseK. Yet to speak of the age as consciously reverting to paganism,^ is to misread its character. When the church surrendered her charge of intellectual things, she assimi- lated herseK no doubt to the returning barbarism of the civil state ; and in this process she absorbed a variety of pagan eleriients which came to be identified with the } This is- a conclusion which religiosen Aufklarung 1. 67-78 : vitiates much of Dr Router's view to his references however I am of the period, Geschichte der frequently indebted. 69 70 RELAPSE OF THE TENTH CENTURY Chap. III. t974- " A. Vogel, Ratberius von Verona i. 6g, Jena 1854. ^ ibid. I. 234 sqq., 2. 180 sqq. A.D.939. •^Rather, serm. i. de quadrag. xxix, sqq., in d'Achery's Spicilegium i. 388 b sqq., ed 1723. essence of her religion, and from which her rebelUous children in the sixteenth century were by no means able entirely to liberate themselves. The service of God was merged in ceremonial on the one hand, in superstition on the other. Even those men who had the wish to uphold the principles which the nobler minds of the ninth cen- tury had professed, had not the strength to carry them out consistently. Ratherius, bishop of Verona, a good example of the cultivated churchman of his day and a sturdy enemy of the worldhness and profligacy of his contemporaries, repeats the declamations of saint Agobard against magic. He denounces the credulous spirit of those who assume its efficacy, and yet he himself » re- commends for some ailment a remedy of an entirely superstitious nature. He has a just contempt for the fashion in which fasts, penances, and pilgrimages were undertaken, and^ a very sUght opinion of their value at all imless controlled by a high spiritual motive : yet his protests against materiahstic views of rehgion are com- patible with so hearty an adhesion to the doctrine of transubstantiation that ^the treatise of Paschasius Rad- bert, which first formulated it, was often ascribed to him. Rehgion was fast subsiding into mere superstition or into its kindred opposite, materiahsm. The claim to mysterious powers was the means by which the clergy were enabled to maintain their hold upon the people. Insensibly they were enveloped in the same shadow, and we have actually evidence of a body of Christian priests "in the diocese of Vicenza who worshipped a God with eyes and ears and hands ; they were branded as a distinct order of heretics, anthropomorphites : such wais the result of the popular and authorised image- worship. Nor was it only in the ceremonial of the church or in the medley of Christian and heathen manners and thoughts that the collapse of rehgion made itself felt. Ambitious church- men found their only opening, now that the ambition of Christian learning was forgotten, in the service of the secular state, where they were the more indispensable. INTO SUPERSTITION AND MATERIALISM. 71 since in the north, at least, they formed the only class chapjii. that received any sort of mental culture. But it is one of the contrasts between the northern and southern civihsations that while in the former what schools there were, existed solely for the clergy and did not travel beyond their meagre professional requirements, in Italy the degradation of the church and papacy (the more felt because near at hand) produced so general a contempt for their ordinances and prescriptions that educated men turned away from theology to the more tangible interest of classical learning. The candidates for ecclesiastical orders here mixed with the sons of nobles at ^ schools which were estabhshed ■' see ciese- and conducted, more often than otherwise, by lay pMloso- stud. ap. itai.' phers, for the exclusive purpose of teaching grammar, and vogei i. 40 sq. which to the stricter churchman appeared directly pagan in their bias. One of these teachers, Ansebn of Bisate, e complains that he was shunned as a demoniac, aZmosi ijpist. ad . . . Drogon., as a heretic ; and Anselm, the Peripatetic as he styles him- ?^?^®J' self, is a good, if late, specimen of his class. He was ag^p^t-ig, highly connected Milanese clergyman, a travelled man too, who had visited Mentz and Bamberg. The Rhetori- machia, which he wrote between the years 1049 and 1056, and dedicated to the emperor Henry the Third, is a master- piece of laborious futility. How httle the pedant's vein was in keeping with cathohc notions may be learned from a vision which he relates that he once saw. * The saints ' Rhetonm. II., iDid. pp. 39 and the muses, he tells us, struggled for possession of him, sqq- and he was in the greatest perplexity to which side he should ally himself, for so noble, so sweet, were both com- panies that I could not choose either of them ; so that, were it possible, I had rather both than either. Under such training as Anselm's, the future clergy of Italy gave themselves up to their humanistic studies with an enthusiasm which the theology of the day was impotent to excite in them. There are even a few symp- toms of a declared hostihty to Christianity. One Vilgard of Ravenna is said to have reverenced Virgil, Horace, and 72 EHETORICAL SCHOOLS OF ITALY. Chap. III. B De contemptu canonum i. d'Achery, Spicil. I. 351 a. h Diitnmler, Auxilius und Vulgarius, 44 sqq. • 1 see his letter to Sergius III, ibid. 143 sq. Juvenal as infallible authorities ; ^ but we cannot draw too broad an inference from this- assertion in an age which, we know from the example of e Ratherius, was apt to consider the canons of the church and the forged decretals of Isidore as equally with the Bible and the fathers, the discipline of God? The patriotism of the Itahan seduced him into an error possibly more innocuous than that which approved itself to the orthodoxy of the time. There was a mysterious sanction inherent in written documents which it did not occur to men to criticise or distinguish. In the same way, if any of these scholastics chanced to engage in the controversies of the church, he was in- evitably entangled in a motley confusion of sacred and profane. ^ Eugenius Vulgarius exhausts his classical vocabulary, in language recalhng the most servile rhetoric of the brazen age of the empire, to express the * divinity of that pope whose pontificate, is marked by the deepest ruin of order, the vilest abandonment of decency, that Rome ever witnessed. Yet he dismisses the claims of the apostoho see with a confidence worthy of Claudius of -Turin or of a modem protestant, and maintains that a man can only obtain the authority of saint Peter by deserving it.* The contradiction would be inconceivable but for the mixture of heterogeneous ideas which marks the barbarism of the age. The church refused to be 2 See the somewhat fabulous account of Rodulph Glaber, Hist, ii. 12 in Bouquet 10. 23, 1760. ^ Compare the Discordia inter Ratherium et olericos : Quod vero soriptum invenitur in lege Moysis et prophetis et psalmis, quod in evangeKco, aotibus et praedica- tionibus apostolorum, deoretalibus pontificum et oonstitutionibus canonum, non rursum a Deo tibi elucet inspiratum . d'Achery 1. 364 a. * Itebuerat oerte erubesci homo velle Deo toUere quod suum est. Pater enim omne iudicium dedisse Mlio dicitur, non Romae ; neque Jilius dixit, Tu es Roma et super hanc Romam aedifioabo ecclesiam meam, sed Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram ; non dixit Petrum sed petram, inteUigi volens eius fidei et oonfessionis soliditatem aedi- ficare et firmare immeritorum sub- sequaeium consimilem, non quidem sequacium sine merito : alioquln non est sequax Petri, si non habeat meritum ilhua Petri. Quid igitur ? ostende mihi fidem sine operibus, et ego ostendam tibi sequacem Petri sine merito illius Petri. . . . Num diceudum est pro- fuisse summis saoerdotrbus super cathedram Moysissedisse ? &c. De causa Formosiana xi., Dummler, Auxihus und Vulgarius 130. RHETORICAL SCHOOLS ,0F ITALY. 73 taught, and suffered accordingly. The clergy wto were chap^i. educated in the ItaHan rhetorical schools formed the purely seciilar portion of their order, and led it into more grievous disrepute. If the training of the scholastic was associated with the function of the clerical pohtician, the union was l)ut external : by the asstimption of hterary arms the church as a reUgious body lost more than it gained. It is moreover significant that the schools of Italy preserved a tradition of Roman law possibly uninter- rupted from ancient times.* i^ The special law-school of "^ see Giese- - brecht Gfiscti Pa via dates from the tenth century, and early in the