t1 1 , * > JJ j\ (', * i,t;v',M>v,j President White LiBRAi^Y CORNEl>L UNiVERSiTY CORNELL UNIVERSrTY LIBRARY 3 1924 092 522 345 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://archive.org/details/cu31924092522345 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND A HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT AND AMOTION IN THE MIDDLE AGES BY HENRY OSBORN TAYLOR, Litt.D. IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II SECOND EDITION MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1914 COPYRIGHT First Edition 191 1 Second Edition 1914 CONTENTS BOOK IV THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL: SOCIETY {continued) CHAPTER XXV Parzival, the Brave Man slowly Wise . PAGE 3 CHAPTER XXVI The Heart of Heloise .... 29 CHAPTER XXVII German Considerations: Walther von der Vogelweide 55 BOOK V SYMBOLISM CHAPTER XXVIII Scriptural Allegories in the Early Middle Ages ; Honor lus of Autun . ■ 67 vi THE MEDIAEVAL MINE) CHAPTER XXIX PAGE The Rationale of the Visible World: Hugo of St. Victor 86 CHAPTER XXX Cathedral and Mass; Hymn and Imaginative Poem . 102 I. Guilehnus Durandus and Vincent of Beauvais. II. The Hymns of Adam of St. Victor and the A7tticlaudianus of Alanus of Lille. BOOK VI LATINITY AND LAW CHAPTER XXXI The Spell of the Classics 133 I. Classical Reading." II. Grammar. III. The Effect upon the Mediaeval Man; Hildebert of Lavardin. CHAPTER XXXII Evolution of Mediaeval Latin Prose . 176 CHAPTER XXXIII Evolution of Mediaeval Latin Verse . . .215 I. Metrical Verse. II. Substitution of Accent for Quantity. III. Sequence-Hymn and Student-Song. IV. Passage of Tiiemes into the Vernacular. CONTENTS vii CHAPTER XXXIV PACK Mediaeval Appropriation of the Roman Law . . 260 I. The Fontes Juris Civilis. II. Roman and Barbarian Codification. , II. The Mediaeval Appropriation. IV. Church Law. i V. Political Theorizing. BOOK VII ULTIMATE INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS OF THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CEN- TURIES CHAPTER XXXV Scholasticism: Spirit, Scope, and Method . * 313 CHAPTER XXXVI Classification of Topics; Stages of Evolution . . 341 I. Philosophic Classification of the Sciences ; the Arrangement of Vincent's Encyclopaedia, of the Lombard's Sentences^ of Aquinas's Suyrtma theo- logiae, II. The Stages of Development: Grammar, Logic, Meta- logics. CHAPTER XXXVII Twelfth-Century Scholasticism 368 I. The Problem of Universals : Abaelard. II. The Mystic Strain : Hugo and Bernard. III. The Later Decades: Bernard Silvestris ; Gilbert de la Porree ; William of Conches ; John of Salisbury, and Alanus of Lille. viii THE MEDIAEVAL MIND CHAPTER XXXVIII PAGE The Universities, Aristotle, and the Mendicants 408 CHAPTER XXXIX Bonaventura ... .... 432 CHAPTER XL Albertus Magnus ... 4 So CHAPTER XLI Thomas Aquinas L/463 I. Thomas's Conception of Human Beatitude. II. Man's Capacity to know God. III. How God knows. IV. How the Angels know. V. How Men know. VI. Knowledge through Faith perfected in Love. CHAPTER XLH Roger Bacon .... 514 CHAPTER XLHI Duns Scotus and Occam -539 CHAPTER XLIV The Mediaeval Synthesis: Dante ... 555 INDEX 591 BOOK IV THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL SOCIETY [Continued) VOL. II CHAPTER XXV PARZIVAL, THE BRAVE MAN SLOWLY WISE The instances of romantic chivalry and courtly love reviewed in the last chapter exemplify ideals of conduct in some respects opposed to Christian ethics. But there is still a famous poem of chivalry in which the romantic ideal has gained in ethical consideration and achieved a hard-won agreement with the teachings of mediaeval Christianity, and yet has not become monkish or lost its knightly character. This poem told of a struggle toward wisdom and toward peace ; and the victory when won rested upon the broadest mediaeval thoughts of life, and therefore necessarily included the soul's reconcilement to the saving ways of God. Yet it was knighthood's battle, won on earth by strength of arm, by steadfast courage, and by loyalty to whatsoever through the weary years the man's increasing wisdom recognized as right. A monk, seeking salvation, casts himself on God ; the man that battles in the world is conscious that his own endeavour helps, and knows that God is ally to the valiant and not to him who lets his hands drop — even in the lap of God. Among the romances presumably having a remote Breton origin, and somehow connected with the Court of Arthur, was the tale of Parzival, the priiicely youth reared in foolish ignorance of life, who learned all knighthood's lessons in the end, and became a perfect worshipful knight. This tale was told and retold. The adventures of another knight, Gawain, were interwoven in it. Possibly the French poet, Chretien de Troies, about the year 1170, in his re- telling, first brought into the story the conception of that 3 CHAPTER XXV PARZIVAL, THE BRAVE MAN SLOWLY WISE The instances of romantic chivalry and courtly love reviewed in the last chapter exemplify ideals of conduct in some respects opposed to Christian ethics. But there is still a famous poem of chivalry in which the romantic ideal has gained in ethical consideration and achieved a hard-won agreement with the teachings of mediaeval Christianity, and yet has not become monkish or lost its knightly character. This poem told of a struggle toward wisdom and toward peace ; and the victory when won rested upon the broadest mediaeval thoughts of life, and therefore necessarily included the soul's reconcilement to the saving ways of God. Yet it was knighthood's battle, won on earth by strength of arm, by steadfast courage, and by loyalty to whatsoever through the weary years the man's increasing wisdom recognized as right. A monk, seeking salvation, casts himself on God ; the man that battles in the world is conscious that his own endeavour helps, and knows that God is ally to the valiant and not to him who lets his hands drop — even in the lap of God. Among the romances presumably having a remote Breton origin, and somehow connected with the Court of Arthur, was the tale of Parzival, the princely youth reared in foolish ignorance of life, who learned all knighthood's lessons in the end, and became a perfect worshipful knight. This tale was told and retold. The adventures of another knight, Gawain, were interwoven in it. Possibly the French poet, Chretien de Troies, about the year 1170, in his re- telling, first brought into the story the conception of that 3 4 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bc^iv thing, that magic dish, which in the course of Us retellings became the Holy Grail. Chretien did not finish his poem, and after him others completed or retold the story. Among them there was one who lacked the smooth facility of the French Trouvere, yet surpassed him and all others in thought- fulness and dramatic power. This was the Bavarian, Wolfram von Eschenbach. He was a knight, and wandered from castle to castle and from court to court, and saw men. His generous patron was Hermann, Landgraf of Thiiringen, who held court on the Wartburg, near Eisenach. There Wolfram may have composed his great poem in the opening years of the thirteenth century, He was no clerk, and had no clerkly education. Probably he could neither read nor write. But he lived during the best period of mediaeval German poetry, and the Wartburg was the centre of gay and literary life. Walther von der Vogelweide was one of Wolfram's familiars in its halls. Wolfram knew and disapproved of Chretien's version of the Perceval ; and said the story had been far better told by a certain Kyot, a singer of Provence.^ Nothing is known of the latter beyond Wolfram's praise. Perhaps he was an invention of Wolfram's ; not infrequently mediaeval poets referred to fictitious sources. At all events, Wolfram's sources were French or Provengal. In large measure the best German mediaeval poetry was an adaptation of the French ; a fact which did not prevent the German adapta- tions from occasionally surpassing the French works they were drawn from. In the instance of Wolfram's Parzival, as in that of Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan, the German poems were the noblest renderings of these tales. As our author was a thoughtful German, his style is difficult and involved. Yet he had imagination, and his 1 As a matter of fact, in those parts of Wolfram's poem which are covered by Chr6tien's unfinished Perceval le Gallois, the incidents are nearly identical with Chr6tien*s. For the question of the relationship of the two poems, and for other versions of the Grail legend, see A. Nutt, Studies in the Legend of the Holy Grail (Folk-Lore Society Publications, London, 1888) ; Birch- Hirshf eld, Die Graal Sage ; Einleitung to Piper's edition of Wolfram von Eschenbach, Stuttgart, Deutsche Nat. Litteratur ; Einleitung to Bartch's edition in Deutsche Klassiker des Mittelalters (Leipzig, 1875). These two editions of the poem are furnished with modern German glossaries. There is a modern German version by Zimrarock, and an English translation by Jessie L. Weston (London, D. Nutt, 1894). CHAP. XXV PARZIVAL 5 poem is great in the climaxes of the story. It is a poem of the hero's development, his spiritual progress. Apparently it was Wolfram who first realized the profound significance of the Parzival legend. Both the choice of subject and the contents of the poem reflect his temperament and opinions. Wolfram was a knight, and chose a knightly tale ; for him knightly victories were the natural symbols of a man's progress. He was also one living in the world, prizing its gifts, and entertaining merely a perfunctory approval of ascetic renunciation. The loyal love between man and woman was to him earth's greatest good, and wedlock did not yield to celibacy in righteousness.^ Let fame and power and the glory of this world be striven for and won in loyalty and steadfastness and truth, in service of those who need aid, in mercy to the vanquished and in humility before God, with assurance that He is truth and loyalty and power, and never fails those who obey and serve Him. " While two wills {Zvifel, Zweifel = doubt) dwell near the heart, the soul is bitter. Shamed and graced the man whose dauntless mood is — ^piebald ! In him both heaven and hell have part. Black-coloured the unsteadfast comrade ; white the man whose thoughts keep troth. False comradeship is fit for hell fire. Like- wise let women heed whither they carry their honour, and on whom they bestow their love, that they may not rue their troth. Before God, I counsel good women to observe right measure. Their fortress is shame : I cannot wish them better weal. The false one gains false reward ; her praise vanishes. Wide is the fame of many a fair ; but if her heart be counterfeit, 'tis a false gem set in gold. The woman true to womanhood, be hers the praise — ^not lessened by her outside hue. " Shall I now prove and draw a man and woman rightly ? Hear then this tale of love — joy and anguish too. My story tells of faithfulness, of woman's truth to womanhood, of man's to manhood, never flinching. Steel was he ; in strife his conquer- ing hand still took the guerdon ; he, brave and slowly wise, this hero whom I greet, sweet in the eyes of women, heart's malady for them as well, himself a very flight from evil deed." Such is Wolfram's Prologue. The story opens in a forest, where Queen Herzeloide had buried herself with her infant son after the death in knightly battle of Prince ^ In other versions of the Grail legend there is much about the virgin or celibate state, and also plenty of unchastity and no especial esteem for marriage. 6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv Gahmuret, her husband. The broken-hearted, f ooHsh mother is seeking to keep her boy in ignorance of arms and knights. He has made himself a bow ; he shoots a bird— its song is hushed. This is the child's first sorrow, and childish ignorance has been the cause ; as afterwards youth's folly and then man's lack of wisdom will cause that child, grown large, more lasting anguish. Now to see a bird makes his tears start. His still foolish mother orders her servants to kill them. The boy protests, and the mother with a quick caress declares the birds shall have peace, she will no more infringe God's commands. At this unknown name the boy cries out, " O mother ! what is God ? " " Son, I wiU tell thee. Brighter than the day is He — who put on a human face. Pray to Him in need ; His faithfulness helps men ever. There is another, hell's chief, black and false. Keep thy thoughts from him and from doubt's waverings." Away springs the boy again ; and in the forest he learns to throw the hunting-spear and slay the stags. One day he hears the sounds of hoofs. He waves his spear : " May now the devil come in aU his rage ; I'd stand against him. My mother speaks of him in dread ; but she is just afraid." Three knights gallop up in glancing armour. He thinks each is a god ; falls on his knees before them, " Help, god, since thou canst help so well ! " " This fool blocks our path," cries one, A fourth, their lord, rides up, and the boy calls him God. " God ? — not I ; I gladly do His behests. Thou seest four knights." " Knights ? what is that ? If thou hast not God's power, then tell me, who makes knights ? " " Young sir, that does King Arthur ; go to him. He'll knight you — you seem to knighthood born." The knights gazed on the boy, in whom God's craft showed clear. The boy touches their armour, their swords. The prince speaks over him : " Had I thy beauty ! God's gifts to thee are great — if thou wilt wisely fare. May He keep sorrow from thee ! " The knights rode on, while the boy sped to his mother, to tell her what he had seen. She was speechless. The boy would go to Arthur's Court. So she bethought her of a silly plan, to put fool's garb on him, CHAP. XXV PARZIVAL 7 that insult and scoff might drive him back to her. She also gave him counsel, wise and foolish. So the youth is launched. He rides away ; his mother dies of grief. As his path winds on, he finds a lady asleep in a pavilion, and following his mother's counsel he kisses her, and takes her ring by force ; trouble came from this deed of folly. Then he meets with Sigune, mourning a dead knight. He stops and promises to avenge her. She was his cousin and, recognizing him, called him by name, and spoke to him of his lineage. Then the youth is piloted by a fisherman, till, in the neighbourhood of Arthur's Court, he meets a knight, Ither, in red armour, who greets him, points out the way, and sends a challenge to Arthur and his Round Table. Parzival now finds himself at Arthur's thronging Court. The young Iwein first speaks to him and the fool-youth returns : " God keep thee — so my mother bade me say. Here I see so many Arthurs ; who is it that will make me knight ? " Iwein, laughing, leads him to the royal pavilion, where he says : " God keep you, gentles, , especially the king and his wife — as my mother bade me greet — and all the honoured knights of the Round Table. But I cannot tell which one here is lord. To him a red knight sends a challenge ; I think he wants to fight. O ! might the king's hand grant me the Red Knight's harness ! " They crowd around the glorious youth. " Thanks, young sir, for your greeting which I shall hope to earn," said the king. " Would to God ! " cried the young man, quivering with impatience ; " the time seems years before I shall be knight. Give me knighthood now." " Gladly," returns the king. " Might I grant it to you worthily. Wait till to-morrow that I may knight you duly and with gifts." " I want no gifts— only that knight's armour. My mother can give me gifts ; she is a queen." Arthur feared to send the raw youth against the noble Ither, but yielded to the malignant spurring of Sir Kay, and Parzival rode out with his unknightly hunting-spear. Abruptly he bade Ither give him his horse and armour, and on the knight's sarcastic answer, grasped his horse's bridle. The angry Ither reversed his lance, and with the butt end 8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv struck down Parzival and his sorry nag. Parzival sprang to his feet and threw his spear straight through the visor of the other's helmet ; and the knight fell from his horse, dead. With brutal stupidity Parzival tried to pull his armour off, not knowing how to unlace it. Iwein came and showed him how to remove and wear the armour, and how to carry his shield and lance. So clad in Ither's armour and mounted on the great war-horse, he bids Iwein commend him to King Arthur, and rides off, leaving the other to care for the body of the dead knight. In the evening he reached the castle of an aged prince, who saw the marvellous youth come riding, with the fool garments showing out from under his armom:. Courteously received, the youth enjoyed a bath, a repast, and a long night's sleep. Fortunately his mother had bade him foUow the counsels of grey hairs ; so in the morning he put on the garments which his host had left in his room for him, instead of what his mother gave. The host first heard mass with his simple guest, and instructed him as to its significance, and how to cross himself and guard against the devil's wiles. Then they breakfasted, and the old man, having heard Parzival's story, advised him to leave off saying " My mother bade me," and gave him further counsel : " Preserve thy shame ; the shameless man is worthless, and at last, wins hell. You seem a mighty lord, mind you take pity on those in need ; be kind and generous and humble. The worthy man in need is shamed to beg ; anticipate his wants ; this brings God's favour. Yet be prudent, neither lavish nor miserly ; right measure be your rule. Sorely you need counsel; avoid harsh conduct, do not ask too many questions, nor yet refuse to answer a question fitly asked ; observe and listen. Let mercy temper valour. Spare him who 5delds, whatever wrong he has done you. When you lay off your armour, wash your hands and face ; make yourself neat ; woman's eye will mark it. Be manly and gay. Hold women in respect and love ; this increases a young man's honour. Be constant — that is manhood's part. Short his praise who betrays honest love. The night-thief wakes many foes ; against treachery true love has its own wisdom and resource. Gain its disfavour and your lot is shame." CHAP. XXV PARZIVAL 9 The guest thanked the host for his counsel. He spoke no more of his mother save in his heart. Then his host, remarking that he had seen many a shield hang better on a wall than Parzivars on him, took him out into a field ; and there in the company of other knights he instructed him in jousting, and found him a ready and resistless pupil. The old man looked fondly on him — his daughter Liasse — she is fair — would not Parzival think so, and stay as a son in . the now sonless house ? Fair and chaste was the damsel, but Parzival says : " My lord, I am not wise. If I gain knighthood's praise so that I may look for love — then keep Liasse for me. You shall have less weight of grief if I can lighten it." Parzival's first experience of life and the old man's counsels had changed him. He was no longer the callow boy who a few days before in the forest took the knights for gods, but a young man conscious of his inexperience and lack of wisdom. Perhaps the change seems sudden ; but the subtle development of character had not yet found literary expression in the Middle Ages, and Wolfram here is a great pioneer. So the young knight rode away, carrying secret thoughts of the maiden, and a little pain, his heart lightly touched with love, and so made ready for a mightier passion. His horse carried him on through woods and savage mountains, to the kingdom whose capital, Pelrapeire, was besieged, because it held its queen, Condwiramurs {coin de voire amors). Within the town were famine and death, without, a knightly, cruel foe, King Clamide, who fought to win the queen by sack and ruin. Crossing a field and bridge where many a knight had fallen, Parzival reached a gate and knocked. A maid called out, and finding that he brought aid and not enmity, she admitted him. Armed men weak with hunger fill the streets, through which the maid leads the knight on to the palace. His armour is removed, a mantle brought him. " Will he see the queen, our lady ? " ask the attendants. " Gladly," answers Parzival. They enter the great hall — and the queen's fair eyes greet him. She advances surrounded by her ladies. With courtesy she kisses the knight, gives him her hand, and leads him to a lo THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv seat. The faces of her warriors and women are sad and worn ; but she — ^had she contended with Enit and both Iseults fair, and whomsoever else men praise for beauty, hers had been the prize. The guest mused : " Liasse was there — Liasse is here ; God slacks my grief, here is Liasse." He sat silent by the queen, mindful of the old prince's advice not to ask questions. " Does this man despise me," thought she, " because I am no longer lovely ? No, he is the guest, the hostess I ; it is for me to speak." Then aloud : " Sir, a hostess must speak. Your greeting won a kiss from me ; you offered me your service — so said my maid. Rare offer now ! Sir, whence come you ? " " Lady, I rode this very day from the house of the good, well-remembered host, Prince Gumemanz." " Sir, I had hardly believed this from another ; the way is so long. His sister was my mother. Many a sad day have I and his Liasse wept together. Since you bear kind- ness for that prince, I will tell you our grievous plight." The telling is deferred till some refreshment is obtained, and then Parzival is shown to his chamber. He sleeps ; but the sound of sobbing breaks his slumber. The hapless queen in her need had sought out her guest in the solitude of night ; she had cast herself on her knees by his couch ; her tears fail — on him, and he awakes. Touched with love and pity at the sight, Parzival sprang up. " Lady ! you mock me ? You should kneel to God." In honour they sit by each other, and the queen tells her story, how King Clamide and his seneschal have wasted her lands, unhappy orphan, slain her people, even her knightly defender, Liasse's brother — she will die rather than jdeld herself to him. Liasse's name stirs Parzival : " How can I help you ? " " Save me from that seneschal, who harries me and mine." Parzival promises, and the queen steals away. The day is breaking, and Parzival hears the minster bells. Mass is sung, and the young knight arms and goes forth — the burghers' prayers go with him — against the host led by the seneschal, Parzival vanquishes him, grants him his life, and sends him to Arthur's Court. The townsmen receive the CHAP. XXV PARZIVAL 1 1 victor with acclaim, the queen embraces him. Who but he shall be her lord ? So their nuptials were celebrated, although Parzival felt the reward to be too great ; it were enough for him to touch her garment's hem. Soon King Clamide himself ordered an assault upon the town, only to meet repulse. He challenged Parzival, and, vanquished like his seneschal, was likewise sent to Arthur's Court. Love was strong between Queen Condwiramurs and Parzival her husband. One morning Parzival spoke to her in the presence of their people : " Lady, please you, with your permission, I would see how my mother fares and seek adventures. If thus I serve and honour you, your love is ample guerdon." From his wife and from all those who called him Lord, Parzival rode forth alone. He has to learn what pain and sorrow are ; the first teaching came now, as longing for his wife filled his heart with grief. In the evening he reached the shore of a lake, and saw a fisher in a boat, attired like a king.^ The fisher directed him to a castle, promising there to be his host. Following his directions, Parzival came to a marvellously great castle, where, on saying that the fisher sent him, he was courteously received and his needs attended to. Sadness pervaded the great halls. The banquet-room, to which he was shown, was lighted by a hundred chandeliers, and around the walls were ranged a hundred couches. The host entered and lay down on one of them, made like a stretcher ; he seemed a stranger to joy. They covered him with furs and mantles, as a sick man. He beckoned Parzival to sit by him. As the hall filled with people, a squire entered carrying a bleeding lance, whereupon all present made lament. A procession of nobly clad ladies followed, bearing precious dishes, and at last among them a queen, Repanse de Schoye. She bore, upon a silken cushion, the fulness of all good, an object called the Grail. Only a maiden pure and true might carry it. There also came six other maids bearing each a flashing goblet ; and they set their burdens before the host. Water for the hands was then brought to the host and to his guest, and to the knights 1 The Fisher King {roi pScheur) was the regular title of the Grail kings. See e.g, Pauline Paris, Romans de la Table Ronde, t. i. p. 306. 12 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv ranged on the couches ; and tables were placed before them all. A hundred squires came and reverently took from the Grail all manner of food and wine, which they set before the knights, whatever each might wish. Everything came from the power of the Grail. Parzival wondered, but kept silence, thinking of the old prince's counsel not to ask many questions, and hoping to be told what all this might be. A squire brought a sword to the host, who gave it to the guest : "I bore this sword in all need, until God wounded me. Take it as amends for our sad hospitality. Rely on it in battle." The gift of the sword was Parzival's opportunity to ask his host what had stricken him. He let it pass. The feast was solemnly removed, " Your bed is ready, whenever you will rest," said the host ; and Parzival was shown to a bed- chamber, where he was left alone. But the knight did not sleep uncompanioned. Coming sorrow sent her messengers. Dreams overhung him, as a tapestry, woven of sword-strokes and deadly thrusts of lance. He was fighting dark, endless, battles for his hfe, till sweating in every limb he woke. Day shone through the window. " Where are the knaves to fetch my clothes ? " He heard no sound. He sprang up. His armour lay there, and the two swords — ^the one which he took from Ither and the one given him by his host. Thought he : " I have suffered such pain in my sleep, there must be hard work for me to-day. Is mine host in need, I wiQ gladly aid him and her too, Repanse, who gave me this mantle ; yet I would not serve her for her love ; my own wife is as beautiful." Parzival passed through the castle's empty haUs, calling aloud in anger. He saw no one, heard no sound. In the courtyard he found his horse, and flung himself into the saddle. He rode through the open castle-gate, over the draw-bridge, which an unseen hand drew up before his horse's hoofs had fairly cleared it. He looked behind him in surprise. A squire cursed him : " May the sun scorch you ! Had you just used your mouth to ask a question of your host ! You missed it, goose ! " Parzival called for explanation, but the gates were swung to in his face. His joy was gone, his pain begun. By chance throw of the dice CHAP. XXV PARZIVAL 1 3 he had found and lost the Grail. He sees the ground torn as by the hoofs of knights riding hard. " These/' thought he, " fight to-day for my host's honour. Their band would not have been shamed by me. I would not fail them in their need — so might I earn the bread I ate and this sword which their lord gave me. I carry it unearned. They think I am a coward." He followed the hoof tracks ; they led him on a way, then scattered and grew faint. The day was young. Under a linden sat a lady, holding the body of a knight embalmed. What earthly troth compared with hers ? He turned his horse to her : " Lady, your sorrow grieves my heart. Would my service avail you ? " " Whence come you ? Many a man has found death in this wood. Flee, as you love your life ; but, say, where did you spend the night ? " " In a castle not a league from here." " Do not deceive. You carry stranger shield. There is no house in thirty leagues, save one castle high and great. Those who seek it, find it not. It is only found unsought. Munsalvaesch its name. The ancient Titurel bequeathed it to his son Frimutel, a hero ; but in the jousts he won his death from love. Of his children, one is a hermit, Trevrizent ; another, Anfortas, is the castle's lord, and can neither ride nor walk, nor sit nor lie. But, sir, if you were there, may be that he is healed of his long pain." " Many marvels saw I there," he answered. She recognized the voice : " You are Parzival. Say, then, saw you the Grail and the joyless lord ? If his pain is stilled through you, then hail ! far as the wind blows spreads your glory, your dominion too." " How did you know me ? " said Parzival. " I am the maid who once before told you her grief, your kinswoman, who mourns her lover slain." " Alas ! where are thy red lips ? Art thou Sigune who told me who I was ? Where is fled thy long brown hair, thy loveliness and colour ? " Sigune spoke : " My only consolation were to hear that you have helped the helpless man whose sword you bear. Know you its gifts ? The first stroke it strikes well, at the 14 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv second, breaks ; a word is needed that the sword may make its bearer peerless. Do youJoiow this word ? If so, none can withstand you — ^have you asked the question ? " " I asked nothing." " Woe is me that mine eyes have seen you ! You asked no question ! You saw such wonders there — ^the Grail, the noble ladies, the bloody spear. Wretched, accursed man, what would you have from me ? Yours the false wolf-tooth ! You should have taken pity on your host, and asked his ail — ^then God had worked a miracle on him. You live, but dead to happiness." " Dear cousin, speak me fair. I will atone for any ill." " Atone ? nay, leave that ! At Munsalvaesch your honour and your knightly praise vanished. You get no more from me." Parzival's fault was not accident ; it sprang from what he was — ^unwise. He could atone only through becoming wise through the endurance of years of trial. The unhappy knight rode on, loosing his helmet to breathe more freely. Soon he chanced to overtake the lady Jesute, travelling on a mean horse in wretched guise, her garments torn, her face disfigured. He offered aid, and she, recognizing him, said with tears that her sorrows all were due to him ; she was the lady whose girdle and ring his fool's hand had taken, and now her husband Orilus treated her as a woman of shame. Here the proud duke himself came thundering up, to see what knight dared aid his cast-off wife. Parzival conquered him after a long combat ; and the three went to a hermitage where the victor made oath that it was he who took by force the ring and girdle from the blameless lady. Returning the ring to Orilus, he sent him with his lady, reconciled and happy, to Arthur's Court. Thus Parzival's knighthood made amends for his first fooUsh act. He found a strong lance in the hermitage, took it, and departed. When Orilus and his lady had been received with honour at Arthur's Court, the king with all his knights set forth towards Munsalvaesch to find the mighty man caUing himself the Red Knight, who had sent so many conquered pledges of his prowess ; for he wished to make him a knight of the Round Table. It was winter. Parzival — ^the Red CHAP. XXV PARZIVAL 1 5 Knight — came riding from the opposite direction. As he drew near the encampment of the king, his eye hghted on three drops of blood showing clear red in the fresh-fallen snow ; in mid air above, a wild goose had been struck by a falcon. The knight paused in reverie — red and white — the colours carried his thoughts to his heart's queen, Condwiramurs. There he sat, as a statue on his horse, with poised spear ; his thoughts had flown to her whose image now closed his eyes to all else. A lad spied the great knight, and ran breathless to Arthur, to tell of the stranger who seemed to challenge all the Round Table. Segramors gained Arthur's permission to accost him. Out he rode with ready challenge ; Parzival neither saw nor heard, till his horse swerved at the knight's approach, so that he saw the drops no longer. Then his mighty lance fell in rest, Segramors was hurled to the ground, and took himself back discomfited, while Parzival returned to gaze on the drops of blood, lost in reverie as before. Now Kay the quarrelsome rode out, and roused the hero with a rude blow. The joust is run again, and Kay crawls back with broken leg and arm. Again Parzival loses himself in reverie. And now courtly Gawain, best of Arthur's knights, rides forth, unarmed. Courteously he addresses Parzival, who hears nothing, and sits moveless. Gawain bethinks him it is love that binds the knight. Seeing that Parzival is gazing on three drops of blood, he gently covers them with a silken cloth. Parzival's wits return ; he moans : " Alas, lady wife of mine, what comes between us ? A cloud has hidden thee/' Then, astonished, he sees Gawain — a knight without lance or shield — does he come to mock ? With noble courtesy Gawain disclosed himself and led the way to Arthur's Court, where fair ladies and the king greeted the hero whom they had come to seek. A festival was ordained in his honour. The fair company of knights and ladies are seated about the Round Table ; the feast is at its height, when suddenly upon a gigantic mule, a scourge in her rough hand, comes riding the seeress Cundrie, harsh and unlovely. Straight she addresses Arthur : " Son of King Uterpendragon, you have shamed yourself and this high company, receiving Parzival, whom you call the Red Knight." She turns on 1 6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv Parzival : " Disgrace fall on your proud form and strength ! Sir Parzival, tell me, how came it that you met that joyless fisher, and did not help him ? He showed you his pain, and you, false guest, had no pity for him. Abhorred by all good men, marked for hell by heaven's Highest, you ban of happiriess and curse of joy ! No leech can heal your sickened honour. Greater betrayal never shamed a man so goodly. Your host gave you a sword ; you saw them bear the Grail, the silver dishes, and the bloody spear, and you, dishonoured Parzival, were silent. You failed to win earth's chiefest prize ; your father had not done so — are you his son ? Yes, for Herzeloide was as true as he. Woe's me, that Herzeloide's child has so let honour slip ! '* Cundrie wrung her hands ; her tears fell fast ; she turned her mule and cried : " Woe, woe to thee Munsalvaesch, moimt of pain ; here is no aid for thee ! " And bidding none farewell, she rode away, leaving Parzival to his shame, the knights to their astonishment, the ladies to their tears. Cundrie was hardly out of sight, before another shame was put on the Round Table. An armed knight rode in, and, accusing Gawain of murdering his king and cousin, summoned him to mortal combat within forty days before the King of Askalon. Arthur himself was ready to do battle for Gawain, but that good knight accepted the challenge with all courtesy. Parzival's Uneage was first known to the Court from Cundrie's calling him by name and speaking of his mother. Now Clamide, once Condwiramurs's cruel wooer, begged the hero to intercede for him with another fair one, the lady Cunneware. Parzival courteously complied. A heathen queen then saluted him with the news that he had a great heathen half-brother, Feirefiz, the son of Parzival's father by a heathen queen. Thanking her, Parzival spoke to the company : " I cannot endure Cundrie's reproach ; — ^what knight here does not look askance ? I will seek no joy until I find the Grail, be the quest short or long. The worthy Gurnemanz bade me refrain from questions. Honoured knights, your favour is for me to win again, for I have lost it. Me yet unshamed you took into your company ; I release you. Let sorrow be my comrade ; for I forsook CHAP. XXV PARZIVAL 1 7 my happiness on Munsalvaesch. Ah ! helpless Anfortas ! You had small help from me/' Knights and ladies were grieved to see the hero depart in such sorrow, and many a knight's service was offered him. The lady Cunneware took his hand ; Lord Gawain kissed him and said : ''I know thy way is full of strife ; God grant to thee good fortune, and to me the chance to serve thee." " Ah ! what is God ? " answered Parzival. " Were He strong. He would not have put such shame on me and you. I was His subject from the hour I learned to ask His favour. Now I renounce His service. If He hates me, I will bear it. Friend, in thine hour of strife let the love of a woman pure and true strengthen thy hand. I know not when I shall see thee again ; may my good wishes towards thee be fulfilled.'' The hero's arms are brought ; his horse is saddled ; his grievous toil begins. Why should long sorrow come to Parzival for not asking a question, when his omission was caused neither by brutality nor ill will ? when, on the contrary, he would gladly have served his host ? The relation between his conduct and his fortune seems lame. Yet in life as well as in literature, ignorance and error bring punishment. Moreover, to mediaeval romance not only is there a background of sorcery and magic, but active elements of magic survive in the tales. ^ And nothing is more fraught with magic import and result than question and answer. Wolfram did not treat as magical the effect upon his hero's lot of his failure to ask the question ; but he retained the palpably magic import of the act as affecting the sick Anfortas. It was hard that the omission should have brought Parzival to sorrow and despair ; yet the fault was part of himself, and the man so ignorant and unwise was sure to incur calamity, and also gain sorrow's lessons if he was capable of learning. So the sequence becomes ethical : from error, calamity; from calamity, grief ; and from grief, wisdom. With Wolfram, Parzival's fault was Parzival ; failure to ask the question was a symbol of his lack of wisdom. The poet was of his time ; and mediaeval thought tended to symbolism, and to move, ^ E.g. the love-potion in the tale of Tristan. VOL. II C 1 8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv as it were, from symbol to symbol, and from symbolical significance to related symbolical significance, and indeed often to treat a symbol as if it were the fact which was symbolized. At this point Wolfram's poem devotes some cantos to the lighter-hearted adventures of Gawain. This valiant, courtly, loyal knight and his adventures are throughout a foil to the heavier lot and character of Parzival. But when Gawain has had his due, the poet is glad to return to his rightful hero. Parzival has ridden through many lands ; he has sailed many seas ; before his lance no knight has kept his seat ; his praise and fame are spread afar. Though he has never been overthrown, the sword given him by Anfortas broke ; but with magic water Parzival welded it again. In a forest one day he rode up to a hut, where Sigune was living as a recluse, feeding her soul with thoughts of her dead lover, barring all fancies that might disunite her from the dead whom she still held as her husband. Parzival recognized her, and she him, when he removed his helm : " You are Sir Parzival — ^tell me, how is it with the Grail ? " " It has given me sorrow enough ; I left a land where I was king, a loving wife, fairest of women ; I suffer anguish for her love, and more because of that high goal of Munsalvaesch which is not reached. Cousin Sigune, knowing my sorrow, you do wrong to hate me." " My wrath is spent. You have lost joy enough since that time you failed to question Anfortas, your host — your happiness as well. Then that question would have blessed you ; now joy is denied you ; your high mood halts ; your heart is tamed by sorrow, which had stayed a stranger to it had you asked the question." " I acted as a luckless man. Dear cousin, counsel me — but, say, how is it with you ? I should bemoan your grief were not my own greater than man ever bore." " Let His hand help you who knows all sorrow. A path might bring you yet to Munsalvaesch. Cundrie but now rode hence — ^follow her track." Parzival started to follow the track of Cundrie's mule, which soon was lost, and with it the Grail was lost again. CHAP. XXV PARZI VAL 1 9 Without guidance he rode on. He overthrew a Grail knight, and took his horse, his own having been wounded in the combat. How long he rode I know not, says the poet. One frosty morning he met an aged knight un- helmeted, and walking barefoot with his wife and daughters. The knight reproved him for riding armed on that holy day. Parzival answered : " I do not know the time of year ; it is long since I kept count of days. Once I served Him who is called God — until He graced me with His mockery. He helps, men say. I have not found it so.'' " If you mean God who was born of a virgin," replied the old knight, " and believe that He took man's nature, you do wrong to ride in armour ; for this is the day when He hung on the Cross for us. Sir, not far from here dwells a holy man, who will give you counsel ; you may repent and be absolved from your sins." Parzival courteously took his leave. He had regarded his failure to ask that question as a luckless error, had felt that God was unjust to him, and had also doubted His power to aid. Now came wavering thoughts : " What if God might help my pain ? If He ever favoured a knight, or if sword and shield might win His favour — if to-day is His day of help, let Him help me if He can. If God's craft can show the way to man and horse, I'll honour Him. Go then according to God's choosing." He flung the bridle on his horse's neck, spurring him forward ; and the horse carried him straight to the hermitage of holy Trevrizent, who fasted there to fit himself for heaven, his chastity warring with the devil. Parzival recognized the place where he had sworn the oath to Orilus, to clear Jesute's honour. The hermit, seeing him, exclaimed : " Alas ! sir, that you ride equipped in this holy season. Were you sore pressed ? Another garb were fitter, did your pride permit. Come by the fire. If you follow love's adventure, think of that afterward, and this day seek the love which this day gives." Dismounting, Parzival stood respectfully before the hermit : " Sir, advise me ; I am a man of sin." His host promised counsel and asked how he came there. Parzival told of meeting the old knight, and inquired 20 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv whether his host felt no fear at seeing him ride up. " Believe me, no/' answered the hermit ; " I fear no man. I would not boast, but in my day my heart never quailed in the fight. I was a knight as you are, and had many sinful thoughts." Having placed the horse in shelter beneath a cliff, the hermit led the knight into his cell. There was a fire of coals, before which Parzival was glad to warm himself and exchange his steel armour for a cloak ; he seemed forest- weary. A door opened to an inner cell, where stood an altar, bearing the very reliquary on which Parzival had laid |iis hand in making oath. He told his host of this, and of the lance which he had found there and taken. " A friend of mine left it there, and chided with me afterwards. It is four years, six months, and three days since you took that spear ; I will prove it to you from this Psalter." " I did not know how long I had journeyed, lost and unhappy. I carry sorrow's weight. Sir, I will tell you more : from that time no man has seen me in church or minster, where they honour God. I haVe sought battles only. I also bear a hate for God. He is my trouble's sponsor : had He borne aid, my joy had not been buried living ! My heart is sore. In reward of my many fights, sorrow has set on me a crown — of thorns. I bear a grudge against that Lord of aid, that me alone He helps not." The host sighed, and looked at him ; then spoke : " Sir, be wise. You should trust God well. He will help you, it is His office ; He must help us both. Tell me with sober wits, how did your anger against Him arise ? Learn from me His guiltlessness before you accuse Him. His aid is never withheld. Even I, a layman, can read the meaning of those unlying books ; man must continue steadfast in service of Him who never wearies in His steady aid to sinking souls. Keep troth, for God is troth. Deceit is hateful to Him. We should be grateful ; in our behalf His nobility took on the form of man. God is called, and is, truth. He can turn from no one ; teach your thoughts never to turn from Him. You can force nothing from Him with your wrath. Whoever sees you carry hate toward Him will deem you sick of wit. Think of Lucifer and all his comrades. Hell was their reward. When Lucifer and CHAP. XXV PARZIVAL 2 1 his host had taken their hell-journey, a man was made. God made from clay the worthy Adam. From Adam's flesh He took Eve, who brought us calamity when she listened not to her Creator, and destroyed jDur joy. Two sons were born to them. One of these in envious anger destroyed his grandmother's maidenhood, by sin." " Sir, how could that be ? " " The earth was Adam's mother, and was a maiden. Adam was Cain's father, who slew Abel ; and the blood fell on the pure earth ; its maidenhood was sped. Thence arose hate among men — and still endures. Nothing in the world is as pure as an innocent maid ; God was himself a maiden's child, and took the image of the first maid's fruit. With Adam's seed came sorrow and joy ; through him our lineage is from God, but through him, too, we carry sin, for which God took man's image, and so suffered, battling with troth against untroth. Turn to Him if you would not be lost. Plato, Sibyl the prophetess, foretold Him. With divine love His mighty hand plucked us from hell. The jojrful news they tell of Him the True Lover is this : He is radiant light, and wavers not in His love. Men may have either His love or hate. The unrepentant sinner flees the divine faithfulness ; he who does penance wins his clemency. God penetrates thought, which is hidden to the sun's rays and needs no castle's ward. Yet God's light passes its dark wall, comes stealing in, and noiselessly departs. No thought so quick but He discovers it before it leaves the heart. The pure in heart He chooses. Woe to the man who harbours evil. What help is there in human craft for him whose deeds put God to shame ? You are lost if you act in His despite, who is prepared for either love or hate. Now change your heart ; with goodness earn His thanks." " Sir/' says Parzival, " I am glad to be taught by you of Him who does not fail to reward both crime and virtue. With pain and struggle I have so borne my young life to this day that through keeping troth I have got sorrow." Parzival still feels his innocence ; perhaps the host is not so sure : " Prithee, be open with me. I would gladly hear your troubles and your sins. May be I can advise you." 22 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv " The Grail is my chief woe and then my wife — she is beyond compare. For both of these I yearn." " Sir, you say well. Your grief is righteous if its cause is yearning for your wife. If you were cast to hell for other sins, but loyal to your wife, God's hand would lift you out. As for the Grail, you foolish man, pursuit will never win it. Tis for him only who is named in heaven. I can say ; for I have seen it." " Sir, were you there ? " " I was." Parzival did not say that he had been there too ; but asked about the Grail. His host then told him of the valiant Templars who dwelt on Munsalvaesch, and rode thence on adventures as penance for their sins. " They are nourished by a Stone of marvellous virtue ; no sick man seeing it could die that week ; it gives youth and strength, and is called the Grail. To-day, as on every Good Friday, a dove flies from heaven and lays a wafer on the Grail, from which the Grail receives its share of every food and every good the earth or Paradise affords. The name of whosoever is chosen for the Grail, be it boy or girl, appears inscribed upon it, suddenly, and when read disappears. They come as children ; glad the mother whose child is named ; for taken to that company, it will be held from sin and shame, and be received in heaven when this life is past. Further, all those who took neither side in the war between Lucifer and the Trinity, were cast out of heaven to earth, and here must serve the Grail." Parzival spoke : "If knighthood might with shield and spear win earth's prize and Paradise for the soul — why I have fought wherever I found fight ; often my hand has touched the prize. If God is wise in conflicts, He should name me, that those people there may learn to know me. My hand never drew back." " First you must guard against pride, and practise modesty." The old man paused and then continued : " There was a Grail king named Anfortas. You and I should pity his sad lot which befell him through pride in youth and riches ; he loved in the world's light way — ^that also goes not with the Grail. There came once to the castle CHAP. XXV PARZlVAL 23 one unnamed, a simple man ; he went away, his sins upon his head ; he never asked the host what ailed him. Before that time a prince, Lahelein, approached and fought with a Grail knight, and slew him and took his horse. Sir, are you Lahelein ? you rode a Grail steed hither. I know his trappings well, and the dove's crest which Anfortas gave his knights. The old Titurel also wore that crest, and after him his son Frimutel, till he lost his life. Sir, you resemble him. Who are you ? " Each looked on the other. Parzival spoke : " My father was a knight. He lost his life in combat ; sir, include hiiTi in your prayers. His name was Gamuhret. I am not Lahelein ; yet in my folly once I too robbed the dead. My sinful hand slew Ither. I left him dead upon the sward — and took what was to take." " O world ! alas for thee ! heart's sorrow is thy pay ! " the hermit cried. " My nephew, it was your own flesh and blood you slew ; a deed which with God merits death. Ither, the pattern of all knights — ^how can you atone ? My sister too, your mother Herzeloide, you brought her to her death." " Oh no ! good sir, how say you that ? If I am your sister's child, oh tell me all." " Your mother died when you left her. My other sister was Sigune's mother ; our brother is Anfortas, who long has been the Grail's sad lord. We early lost our father, Frimutel ; from him Anfortas, his first-born, inherited the Grail crown, when still a child. As he grew a man, all too eagerly he followed the service set by love of woman, chose him a mistress and broke many a spear for her. He disobeyed the Grail, which forbids its lords love's service, save as it prescribes. One day, for his lady's favour, he ran a joust with a heathen knight. He slew him, but the heathen spear struck him, and broke, leaving a poisoned wound. In anguish he returned. No medicine or charm can heal that wound, and yet he cannot die ; that is the Grail's power. I renounced knighthood, flesh, and wine, in prayer that God would heal him. We knelt before the Grail, and on it read that when a knight should come, and, unadmonished, ask what ailed him, he should be sound 24 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv again. That knight should then be the Grail's king, in place of Anfortas. Since then a knight did come — I spoke of him to you. He might as well have stayed away for all the honour that he won or aid he brought us. He did not ask : My lord, what brought you to this pass ? Stupidity forbade him." The two made moan together. It was noon. The host said : " Let us take food now, and tend your horse." They went out ; Parzival broke up some branches for his horse, while the host gathered a repast of herbs. Then they returned to the cell. " Dear nephew," said the hermit, " do not despise this food. At least, you will not find another host who would more gladly give you better." " Sir, may God's favour pass me by, if ever a host's care was sweeter to me." When they had eaten, they saw to the horse again, whose hungry plight grieved the old man because of the saddle with Anfortas's crest. Then Parzival spoke : " Lord and uncle mine, if I dare speak for shame, I should tell you all my unhappiness. My troth takes refuge in you. My misdeeds are so sore, that if you cast me off I shall go all my days unloosed from my remorse. Take pity with good counsel on a fool. He who rode to Munsalvaesch, and saw that pain, and asked no question, that was I, mis- fortune's child. Thus have I, sir, misdone." " Nephew ! Alas ! We both may well lament — ^where were your five senses ? Yet I will not refuse thee counsel. You must not grieve overmuch, but, in lament and laying grief aside, follow right measure. Would that I might refresh and hearten you, so that you would push on, and not despair of God, You might still cure your sorrow. God will not forsake you. I counsel thee from Him." His host then told Parzival more about Anfortas's pains, and about the Grail people, then the story of his own life before he renounced knighthood, and also about Ither. " Ither was your kin. If your hand forgot this kinship, God will not. You must dapenance for this deadly sin, and also for your mother's death. Repent of your misdeeds and think of death, so that your labour here below may bring peace to your soul above." These two deadly sins of Parzival were done unwittingly. CHAP. XXV PARZI VAL 2 5 and unwitting was his neglect to ask the question. His guilt was thoughtlessness and stupid ignorance. It is im- possible not to think of Oedipus, and compare the Christian mediaeval treatment of unwitting crimes with the classical Greek consideration of the same dark subject. Oedipus sinned as unwittingly as Parzival, and as impulsively. His ruin was complete. Afterwards — ^in the Oedipus Coloneus — ^his character gathers greatness through submission to the necessary consequences of his acts ; this was his spiritual expiation. On the other hand, mercy, repentance, hope, the uplifting of the unwitting sinner, forgiveness and consolation, soften and glorify the Christian mediaeval story. Parzival stayed some days at the hermitage. At parting the hermit spoke words of comfort to him : " Leave me your sins. I will be your surety with God for your repentance. Perform what I have bidden you, and do not waver.*' The story here turns to Gawain. In the tale of his adventures there comes a glimpse of Parzival. A proud lady, for whose love Gawain is doing perilous deeds, teUs him she has never met a man she could not bend to her will and love, save only one. That one came and overthrew her knights. She offered him her land and her fair self ; his answer put her to shame : " The glorious Queen of Pelrapeire is my wife, and I am Parzival. I will have none of your love. The Grail gives me other care,'* Gawain won this lady, and conducted her to Arthur's Court, whither his rival the haughty King Gramoflanz was summoned to do battle with him. On the morning set for the combat Gawain rode out a little to the bank of a river, to prove his horse and armour. There at the river rode a knight ; Gawain deemed it was Gramoflanz. They rush together ; man and horse go down in the joust. The knights spring to their feet and fight on with their swords. Meanwhile Gramoflanz, with a splendid company, has arrived at Arthur's Court. The lists are ready ; Gramoflanz stands armed. But where is Gawain ? He was not wont to tarry. Squires hurry out in search, to find him just falling before the blows of the stranger. They call, Gawain ! and the unknown knight throws away his sword with a great cry : "Wretched and worthless ! Accursed is my dishonoured hand. 26 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv Be mine the shame. My luckless arms ever — and now again — strike down my happiness. That I should raise my hand against noble Gawain ! It is myself that I have overthrown." Gawain heard him : " Alas, sir, who are you that speak such love towards me ? Would you had spoken sooner, before my strength and praise had left me." " Cousin, I am your cousin, ready to serve you, Parzival." " Then you said true ! This fool's fight of two hearts that love ! Your hand has overthrown us both." Gawain could no longer stand. Fainting they laid him on the grass. Gramoflanz rides up, and is grieved to find his rival in no condition to fight. Parzival offers to take Gawain's place ; but Gramoflanz declines, and the combat is postponed till the morrow. Parzival is then escorted to Arthur's Court, where Gawain would have him meet fair ladies ; he holds back, thinking of the shame once put on him there by Cundrie. Gawain insists, and ladies greet the knight. Arthur again makes Parzival one of the Round Table. Early the next morning, Parzival, changing his arms, meets Gramoflanz in the lists, before Gawain has arrived ; and vanquishes him. Then comes Gawain and offers to postpone the combat as Gramoflanz had done. So the combat is again set for the next day. In the meanwhile, however, various matters come to light and explanations are had ; Arthur succeeds in reconciling the rival knights and adjusting their relations to the ladies. So the Court becomes gay with wedding festivals, and all is joy. Except with Parzival. His heart is torn with pain and yearning for his wife. He muses : " Since I could love, how has love dealt with me ! I was born from love ; why have I lost love ? I must seek the Grail ; yet how I yearn for the sweet arms of her from whom I parted — so long ago ! It is not fit that I should look on this joj^ul festival with anguish in my heart." There lay his armour : " Since I have no part in this joy, and God wills none for me ; and the love of Condwiramurs banishes all wish for other happiness — now God grant happiness to all this company. I will go forth." He put his armour on, saddled his horse, took spear and shield, and fled from the joyous Court, as the day was dawning. CHAP. XXV PARZI VAL 2 7 And now he meets a heathen knight, approaching with a splendid following. They rode a great joust ; and the heathen wondered to find a knight abide his lance. They fought with swords together, till their horses were blown ; they sprang on the ground, and there fought on. Then the heathen thought of his queen ; the love-thought brought him strength, and he struck Parzival a blow that brought him to his knee. Now rouse thee, Parzival ; why dost thou not think on thy wife ? Suddenly he thought of her, and how he won her love, vanquishing Clamide before Pelrapeire. Straight her aid came to him across four kingdoms, and he struck the heathen down ; but his sword — once Ither*s — broke. The foolish evil deed of Parzival in slaying Ither seems atoned for in the breaking of this sword. Had it not broken, 'great evil had been done. The great-hearted heathen sprang up. " Hero, you would have conquered had that sword not broken. Be peace between us while we rest." They sat together on the grass. " Tell me your name," said the heathen ; "I have never met as great a knight." " Is it through fear, that I should tell my name ? " " Nay, I will name myself — Feirefiz of Anjou." " How of Anjou ? that is my heritage. Yet I have heard I had a brother. Let me see your face. I will not attack you with your helmet off." " Attack me ? it is I that hold the sword ; but let neither have the vantage." He threw his sword far from them. With joy and tears the brothers recognized each other ; and long and loving was their speech. Then they rode back together to the Court. They entered Gawain's tent. Arthur came to greet them, and with him many knights. At Arthur's request each of the great brothers told the long list of his knightly victories. The next day Feirefiz was made a knight of the Round Table, and a grand tournament was held. Then the feast followed ; and again, as once before, to the great company seated at the table, Cundrie came riding. She greeted the king ; then turned to Parzival, and in tears threw herself at his feet and begged a greeting and forgiveness. Parzival forgives her. She rises up and cries : " Hail to thee, son of Gahmuret — Herzeloide's child. Humble thyself in gladness. The high lot is thine, thou 28 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv crown of human blessing. Thou shalt be the Grail's lord ; with thee thy wife Condwiramurs, and thy sons Lohengrin and Kardeiz, whom she bore to thee after thy going. Thy mouth shall question Anfortas — unto his joy. Now the planets favour thee ; thy grief is spent. The Grail and the Grairs power shall let thee have no part in evil. When young, thou didst get thee sorrow, which betrayed thy joy as it came ; — ^thou hast won thy soul's peace, and in sorrow thou hast endured unto thy life's joy." Tears of love sprang from Parzival's heart and fell from his eyes : " Lady, if this be true, that God's grace has granted me, sinful man, to have my children and my wife, God has been good to me. Loyally would you make good my losses. Before, had I not done amiss, you would not have been angry. At that time I was yet unblessed. Now tell me, when and how I shall go meet my joy. Oh ! let me not be stayed ! " There was no more delay. Parzival was permitted to take one comrade ; he chose Feirefiz. Cundrie guided them to the Grail castle. They entered to find Anfortas calling on death to free him of his pain. Weeping, and v^th prayer to God, Parzival asked what ailed him, and the king was healed. Then Parzival rode again to Trevrizent. The ' hermit breaks out in wonder at the power of God, which man cannot comprehend ; let Parzival obey Him and keep from evil ; that any one should win the Grail by striving was unheard of ; now this has come to Parzival, let him be humble. The hero yearns for his wife — ^where is she ? He is told ; there by the meadow where he once saw the drops of blood he finds her and his sons, asleep in their tent. They are united ; Parzival is made Grail king ; and the queen Repanse is given in marriage to Feirefiz, who is baptized and departs with her. Lohengrin is named as Parzival's successor, while Kardeiz receives the kingdoms which had been Gahmuret's and Herzeloide's. CHAPTER XXVI THE HEART OF HELOiSE The romantic growth and imaginative shaping of chivalric love having been followed in the fortunes of its great exemplars, Tristan, Iseult, Lancelot, Guinevere, Parzival, a different illustration of mediaeval passion may be had by turning from these creations of literature to an actual woman, whose love for a living man was thought out as keenly and as tragically felt as any heart-break of imagined lovers, and was impressed with as entire a self-surrender as ever ravished the soul of nun panting with love of the God-man. There has never been a passion between a man and woman more famous than that which brought happiness and sorrow to the lives of Abaelard and Heloise. Here fame is just. It was a great love, and its course was a perfect soul's tragedy. Abaelard was a celebrity, the intellectual glory of an active-minded epoch. His love- story has done as much for his posthumous fame as all his intellectual activities. Heloise became known in her time through her relations with Abaelard ; in his songs her name was wafted far. She has come down to us as one of the world's love-heroines. Yet few of those who have been touched by her story have known that Heloise was a great woman, possessed of an admirable mind, a character which proved its strength through years, and, above all, a capacity for loving — for loving out to the full conclusions of love's convictions, and for feeling in their full range and power whatever moods and emotions could arise from an unhappy situation and a passion as deeply felt as it was deeply thought upon. 29 30 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv Abaelard was not a great character — aside from his intellect. He was vain and inconsiderate, a man who delighted in confounding and supplanting his teachers, and in being a thorn in the flesh of all opponents. But he became chastened through his misfortunes and through Heloise's high and self-sacrificing love. In the end, perhaps, his love was worthy of the love of Heloise. Yet her love from the beginning was nobler and deeper than his love of her. Love was for him an incident in his experience, then an element in his life. Love made the life of Heloise ; it remained her all. Moreover, in the records of their passion, Heloise's love is unveiled as Abaelard's is not. For all these reasons, the heart of Heloise rather than the heart of Abaelard discloses the greatness of a love that wept itself out in the twelfth century, and it is her love rather than his that can teach us much regarding the mediaeval capacity for loving. Hers is a story of mediaeval womanhood, and sin, and repentance perhaps, with peace at last, or at least the lips shut close and further protest foregone. Abaelard's stormy intellectual career^ and the story of the love between him and the canon's niece are well known. Let us follow him in those parts of his narrative which disclose the depth and power of Heloise's love for him. We draw from his Historia calamitatum, written " to a friend," apparently an open letter intended to circulate. " There was," writes he, referring to the time of his sojourn in Paris, when he was about thirty-six years old, and at the height of his fame as a lecturer in the schools — " There was in Paris a young girl named. Heloise, the niece of a canon, Fulbert. It was his affectionate wish that she should have the best education in letters that could be procured. Her face was not unfair, and her knowledge was unequalled, v This attainment, so rare in women, had given her great reputation. " I had hitherto lived continently, but now was casting my eyes about, and I saw that she possessed- every attraction that lovers seek ; nor did I regard my success as doubtful, when I considered my fame and my goodly person, and also her love of letters. Inflamed with love, I thought how I could best become intimate with her. It occurred to me to obtain lodgings with her I See post, Chapter XXXVII., i. :hap. XXVI THE HEART OF HELOlSE 3 1 mcle, on the plea that household cares distracted me from study, mends quickly brought this about, the old man being miserly md yet desirous of instruction for his niece. He eagerly entrusted ler to my tutorship, and begged me to give her all the time I could :ake from my lectures, authorizing me to see her at any hour of ;he day or night, and punish her when necessary. I marvelled vith what simplicity he confided a tender lamb to a hungry wolf. \s he had given me authority to punish her, I saw that if caresses vould not win my object, I could bend her by threats and blows. Doubtless he was misled by love of his niece and my own good ■eputation. Well, what need to say more : we were united first Dy the one roof above us, and then by our hearts. Our hours of ;tudy were given to love. The books lay open, but our words A^ere of love rather than philosophy, there were more kisses than iphorisms ; and love was oftener reflected in our eyes than the ettered page. To avert suspicion, I struck her occasionally — /evy gentle blows of love. The joy of love, new to us both. Drought no satiety. The more I was taken up with this pleasure, :he less time I gave to philosophy and the schools — how tiresome lad all that become ! I became unproductive, merely repeating ny old lectures, and if I composed any verses, love was their subject, and not the secrets of philosophy ; you know how Dopular and widely sung these have become. But the students ! jvhat groans and laments arose from them at my distraction ! \ passion so plain was not to be concealed ; every one knew of t except Fulbert. A man is often the last to know of his own ihame. Yet what everybody knows cannot be hid forever, and JO after some months he learned all. Oh how bitter was that mcle's grief ! and what was the grief of the separated lovers ! How ashamed I was, and afflicted at the affliction of the girl ! \nd what a storm of sorrow came over her at my disgrace. Sfeither complained for himself, but each grieved at what the )ther must endure." Although Abaelard was moved at the plight of Heloise, h.e bitterly felt his own discomfiture in the eyes of the once admiring world. But the sentence touching Heloise is a firsf true note of her devoted love : what a storm of sorrow (moeroris aestus) came over her at my disgrace. Through this trouble and woe, Heloise never thought of her own pain 5ave as it pained her to be the source of grief to Abaelard. Abaelard continues : " The separation of our bodies joined our souls more closely md inflamed our love. Shame spent itself and made us un- ishamed, so small a thing it seemed compared with satisfjring 32 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv love. Not long afterwards the girl knew that she was to be a mother, and in the greatest exultation wrote and asked me to advise what she should do. One night, as we agreed on, when Fulbert was away I bore her off secretly and sent her to my own country, Brittany, where she stayed with my sister till she gave birth to a son, whom she named Astralabius. " The uncle, on his return to his empty house, was frantic. He did not know what to do to me. If he should kill or do me some bodily injury, he feared lest his niece, whom he loved, would suffer for it among my people in Brittany, He could not seize me, as I was prepared against all attempts. At length, pitying his anguish, and feeling remorse at having caused it, I went to him as a suppliant and promised whatever satisfaction he should demand. I assured him that nothing in my conduct would seem remarkable to any one who had felt the strength of love or would take the pains to recall how many of the greatest men had been thrown down by women, ever since the world began. Where- upon I offered him a satisfaction greater than he could have hoped, to wit, that I would marry her whom I had corrupted, if only the marriage might be kept secret so that it should not injure me in the minds of men. He agreed and pledged his faith, and the faith of his friends, and sealed with kisses the reconcihation which I had sought — so that he might more easily betray me ! " It will be remembered that Abaelard was a clerk, a clericus, in virtue of his profession of letters and theology. Never having taken orders, he could marry ; but while a clerk's slip could be forgotten, marriage might lead people to think he had slighted his vocation, and would certainly bar the ecclesiastical preferment which such a famous clericus might naturally look forward to. Nevertheless, he at once set out to fetch Heloise from Brittany, to make her his wife. The stand which she now took shows both her mind and heart : " She strongly disapproved, and urged two reasons against the marriage, to wit, the danger and the disgrace in which it would involve me. She swore — and so it proved — that no satis- faction would ever appease her uncle. She asked how she was*- to have any glory through me when she should have made me inglorious, and should have humihated both herself and me. What penalties would the world exact from her if she deprived it of such a luminary ; what curses, what damage to the Church, what lamentations of philosophers, would follow on this marriage. How indecent, how lamentable would it be for a man whom nature had made for all, to declare that he belonged to one woman, and HAP. XXVI THE HEART OF HELOlSE 33 abject himself to such shame. From her soul, she detested this larriage which would be so utterly ignominious for me, and a lurden to me. She expatiated on the disgrace and inconvenience f matrimony for me and quoted the Apostle Paul exhorting men shun it. If I would not take the apostle's advice or Hsten to i^hat the saints had said regarding the matrimonial yoke, I should ,t least pay attention to the philosophers — to Theophrastus's rords upon the intolerable evils of marriage, and to the refusal of yicero to take a wife after he had divorced Terentia, when he said hat he could not devote himself to a wife and philosophy at the ame time. ' Or,' she continued, ' la3dng aside the disaccord )etween study and a wife, consider what a married man's istabhshment would be to you. What sweet accord there would )e between the schools and domestics, between cop5dsts and :radles, between books and distaffs, between pen and spindle ! iVho, engaged in rehgious or philosophical meditations, could :ndure a baby's cr3dng and the nurse's ditties stilling it, and all he noise of servants ? Could you put up with the dirty ways of ihildren ? The rich can, you say, with their palaces and apart- nents of all kinds ; their wealth does not feel the expense or the laily care and annoyance. But I say, the state of the rich is not hat of philosophers ; nor have men entangled in riches and affairs my time for the study of Scripture or philosophy. The renowned Dhilosophers of old, despising the world, fleeing rather than ■elinquishing it, forbade themselves all pleasures, and reposed in ;he embraces of philosophy.' " Speaking thus, Heloise fortified her argument with quotations from Seneca, and the examples of Jewish and [jentile worthies and Christian saints, and continued : " It is not for me to point out— for I would not be thought to nstruct Minerva — how soberly and continently all these men lived vho, according to Augustine and others, were called philosophers is much for their way of life as for their knowledge. If laymen md Gentiles, bound by no profession of reHgion, hved thus, surely ^ou, a clerk and canon, should not prefer low pleasures to sacred iuties, nor let yourself be sucked down by this Charybdis and imothered in filth inextricably. If you do not value the privilege >f a clerk, at least defend the dignity of a philosopher. If •everence for God be despised, still let love of decency temper mmodesty. Remember, Socrates was tied to a wife, and through 1 nasty accident wiped out this blot upon philosophy, that others ■ ifterwards might be more cautious ; which Jerome relates in his )ook against Jovinianus, how once when enduring a storm of K^anthippe's clamours from the floor above", he was ducked with ilops, and simply said, ' I knew such thunder would bring rain.' VOL. II D 34 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv " Finally she said that it would be dangerous for me to take her back to Paris ; it was more becoming to me, and sweeter to her, to be called my mistress, so that affection alone might keep me hers and not the binding power of any matrimonial chain ; and if we should be separated for a time, our joys at meeting would be the dearer for their rarity. When at la,st with aU her persuasions and dissuasions she could not turn me from my folly, and could not bear to offend me, with a burst of tears she ended in these words : ' One thing is left : in the ruin of us both the grief which follows shall not be less than the love which went before.' Nor did she here lack the spirit of prophecy." Heloise's reasonings show love great and true and her absolute devotion to Abaelard's interests. None the less striking is her clear intelligence. She reasoned correctly ; she was right, the marriage would do great harm to Abaelard and little good to her. We see this too, if we lay aside our sense of the ennobling purity of marriage — a sentiment not commonly felt in the twelfth century. Marriage was holy in the mind of Christ. But it did not preserve its holiness through the centuries which saw the rise of monasticism and priestly celibacy. A way of life is not pure and holy when another way is holier and purer ; this is peculiarly true in Christianity, which demands the ideal best with such intensity as to cast reflection on whatever falls below the highest standard. From the time of the barbarian inroads, on through the Carolingian periods, and into the later Middle Ages, there was enough barbarism and brutality to prevent the preservation, or impede the development, of a high standard of marriage. Not monasticism, but his own half-barbarian, lustful heart led Charlemagne to marry and remarry at will, and have many mistresses besides. It was the same with the countless barons and mediaeval kings, rude and half civilized. This was barbarous lust, not due to the influence of monasticism. But, on the other hand, it was always the virgin or celibate state that the Church held before the eyes of all this semi-barbarous laity as the ideal for a Christian man or woman. The Church sanctioned marriage, but hardly lauded it or held it up as a condition in which lives of holiness and purity could be led. Such were the sentiments in which Heloise was born and bred. They were subconscious factors in her thoughts regarding :hap.xxvi the heart of HELOISE 35 lerself and her lover. Devoted and unselfish was her love ; indoubtedly Heloise would have sacrificed herself for ^baelard under any social conditions. Nevertheless, with tier, marriage added little to love ; it was a mere formal md binding authorization ; love was no purer for it. To tier mind, for a man in Abaelard's situation to be entangled in a temporary amour was better than to be chained to his passion, with his career irrevocably ruined, in marriage. In 50 far as her thoughts or Abaelard's were influenced by the environment of priestly thinking, marriage would seem a rendering permanent of a passionate and sinful state, which it were best to cast off altogether. For herself, as sh6 said truly, the marriage would bring obloquy rather than re- instatement. She had been mistress to a clerk ; marriage would make' her the partner of his abandonment of his vocation, the accomplice of broken purposes if not of broken vows. And finally, as there was then no line of disgrace as aow between bastard and lawful issue, Heloise had no thought that the interests of her son demanded that his mother should become his father's wife. " Leaving our son in my sister's care, we stole back to Paris, md shortly after, having in the night celebrated our vigils in a :ertain church, we were married at dawn in the presence of her ancle and some of his and our friends. We left at once separately md with secrecy, and afterwards saw each other only in privacy, ;o as to conceal what we had done. But her uncle and his house- lold began at once to announce the marriage and violate his word ; ffhile she, on the contrary, protested vehemently and swore that it ffas false. At that he became enraged and treated her vilely. When I discovered this I sent her to the convent of Argenteuil, lear Paris, where she had been educated. There I had her take :he garb of a nun, except the veil. Hearing this, the uncle and his •elations thought that I had duped them, ridding myself of Heloise Dy making her a nun. So having bribed my servant, they came ipon me by night, when I was sleeping, and took on me a vengeance as cruel and irretrievable as it was vile and shameful. Two of the perpetrators were pursued and vengeance taken. " In the morning the whole town was assembled, crjdng and amenting my plight, especially the clerks and students ; at which [ was afflicted with more shame than I suffered physical pain. I :hought of my ruined hopes and glory, and then saw that by God's ust judgment I was punished where I had most sinned, and that 36 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv Fulbert had justly avenged treachery with treachery. But what a figure I should cut in pubhc ! how the world would point its finger at me ! I was also confounded at the thought of the Levitical law, according to which I had become an abomination to the Church.^ In this misery the confusion of shame — ^I confess it — rather than the ardour of conversion drove me to the cover of the cloister, after she had wiUingly obeyed my command to take the veil. I became a monk in the abbey of St. Denis, and she a nun in the convent of Argenteuil. Many begged her not to set that yoke upon her youth ; at which, amid her tears, she broke out in ComeHa's lament : ' O great husband ! undeserving of my couch I Has fortune rights over a head so high ? Why did I, impious, marry thee to make thee wretched ? Accept these penalties, which I gladly pay.' ^ With these words, she went straight to the altar, received the veil blessed by the bishop, and took the vows before them all." Abaelard's Historia calamitatum now turns to troubles having no connection with Heloise : his difl&culties with the monks of St. Denis, with other monks, with every one, in fact, except his scholars ; his arraigimient before the Council of Soissons, the public burning of his book, De Unitate et Trinitate divina, and various other troubles, till, seeking a retreat, he constructed an oratory on the bank of the Ardisson. He named it the Paraclete, and there he taught and lectured. He was afterwards elected abbot of a monastery in Brittany, where he discovered that those under him were savage beasts rather than monks. Here the Historia calamitatum was written. The monks of St. Denis had never ceased to hate Abaelard for his assertion that their great Saint was not really Dionysius the Areopagite who heard Paul preach. Their abbot now brought forward and proved an ancient title to the land where stood the convent of Argenteuil, " in which," to resume Abaelard^s account, " she, once my wife, now my sister in Christ, had taken the veil, and was at this time prioress. The mms were rudely driven out. News of this came to me as a suggestion from the Lord to bethink me of the deserted Paraclete. Going thither, I invited Heloise and her nuns to come and take possession. They accepted, and I gave it to them. Afterward Pope Innocent II. confirmed this grant to them and their successors in perpetuity. There for a time they f J Lev, ?yir 30 ; Deut. xxiii. i. * Lucan, Pharsalia^ viii. 94. CHAP. XXVI THE HEART OF HELOlSE 37 lived in want ; but soon the Divine Pity showed itself the true Paraclete, and moved the people of the neighbourhood to take :ompassion on them, and they soon knew no lack. Indeed as women are the weaker sex, their need moves men more readily to pity, and their virtues are the more grateful to both God and man. ^nd on our sister the Lord bestowed such favour in the eyes of all, that the bishops loved her as a daughter, the abbots as a sister, the iaity as a mother ; and all wondered at her piety, her wisdom, and iier gentle patience in everything. She rarely let herself be seen, that she might devote herself more wholly to prayers and medita- tions in her cell ; but all the more persistently people sought her spiritual counsel.*' What were those meditations and those prayers uttered or unuttered in that cell ? They did not always refer to the kingdom of heaven, judging from the abbess's first letter to her former lover. After the installation of Heloise and her nuns, Abaelard rarely visited the Paraclete, although his advice and instruction was desired there. His visits gave rise to too much scandal. In the course of time, however, the Hisforia calamitatum came into the hands of Heloise, a,nd occasioned this letter, which seems to issue forth out of 1 long silence ; ten years had passed since she became a nun. The superscription is as follows : '' To her master, rather to a father, to her husband, rather to a brother, his maid or rather daughter, his wife or rather sister, to \baelard, Heloise. " Your letter, beloved, written to comfort a friend, chanced ■ecently to reach me. Seeing by its first hnes from whom it was, I )umed to read it for the love I bear the writer, hoping also from ts words to recreate an image of him whose life I have ruined. Those words dropped gall and absinthe as they brought back the mhappy story of our intercourse and thy ceaseless crosses, O my )nly one. Truly the letter must have convinced the friend that lis troubles were hght compared with yours, as you showed the reachery and persecutions which had followed you, the calumnies >f enemies and the burning of your glorious book, the machina- ions of false brothers, and the vile acts of those worthless monks vhom you call your sons. No one could read it with dry eyes. iTour perils have renewed my griefs ; here we all despair of your ife and each day with trembling hearts expect news of your death, n- the name of Christ, who so far has somehow preserved thee for limself, deign with frequent letters to let these weak servants of lim and thee know of the storms overwhelming the swimmer, so 38 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv that we who alone remain to thee may be participators of thy pain or joy. One who grieves may gain consolation from those grieving with him ; a burden borne by many is more hghtly borne. And if this tempest abates, how happy shall we be to know it. What- ever the letters may contain they will show at least that we are not forgotten. Has not Seneca said in Ms letter to Lucilius, that the letters of an absent friend are sweet ? When no malice can stop your giving us this much of you, do not let neglect prove a bar. " You have written that long letter to console a friend with the story of your own misfortunes, and have thereby roused our grief and added to our desolation. Heal these new wounds. You owe to us a deeper debt of friendship than to him, for we are not only friends, but friends the dearest, and your daughters. After God, you alone are the founder of this place, the builder of this oratory and of this congregation. This new plantation for a holy purpose is your own ; the delicate plants need frequent watering. He who gives so much to his enemies, should consider his daughters. Or, leaving out the others here, think how this is owing me from thee : what thou owest to all women under vows, thou shalt pay more devotedly to thine only one. How many books have the holy fathers written for holy women, for their exhortation and instruction ! I marvel at thy forgetfulness of these frail beginnings of our conversion. Neither respect of God nor love of us nor the example of the blessed fathers, has led thee by speech or letter to console me, cast about, and consumed with grief. TMs obhgation was the stronger, because the sacrament of marriage joined thee to me, and I — every one sees it — cling to thee with tmmeasured love. " Dearest, thou knowest — ^who knows not ? — how much I lost in thee, and that an infamous act of treachery robbed me of thee and of myself at once. The greater my grief, the greater need of consolation, not from another but from thee, that thou who art alone my cause of grief may be alone my consolation. It is thou alone that canst sadden me or gladden me or comfort me. And thou alone owest this to me, especially since I have done thy wiU so utterly that, unable to offend thee, I endured to wreck myself at thy command. Nay, more than this, love turned to madness and cut itself off from hope of that which alone it sought, when I obediently changed my garb and my heart too in order that I might prove thee sole owner of my body as well as of my spirit. God knows, I have ever sought in thee only thyself, desiring simply thee and not what was thine. I asked no matrimonial contract, I looked for no dowry ; not my pleasure, not my will, but thine have I striven to fulfil. And if the name of wife seemed hoher or more potent, the word mistress {arnica) was always sweeter to me, or even — be not angry ! — concubine or harlot ; for the more I CHAP. XXVI THE HEART OF HELOlSE 39 lowered myself before thee, the more I hoped to gain thy favour, md the less I should hurt the glory of thy renown. This thou lidst graciously remember, when condescending to point out in that letter to a friend some of the reasons (but not all !) why I preferred love to wedlock and hberty to a chain. I call God to witness that if Augustus, the master of the world, would honour me with marriage and invest me with equal rule, it would still seem to me dearer and more honourable to be called thy strumpet than his empress. He who is rich and powerful is not the better man : that is a matter of fortune, this of merit. And she is venal who marries a rich man sooner than a poor man, and yearns for a husband's riches rather than himself. Such a woman deserves pay and not affection. She is not seeking the man but his goods, and would wish, if possible, to prostitute herself to one still richer. Aspasia put this clearly when she was trying to effect a reconcihation between Xenophon and his wife : ' Until you come to think that there is nowhere else a better man or a woman more desirable, you will be continually looking for what you think to be the best, and will wish to be married to the man or woman who is the very best.' This is indeed a holy, rather than a philo- sophical sentiment, and wisdom, not philosophy, speaks. This is the holy error and blessed deception between man and wife, when affection perfect and unimpaired keeps marriage inviolate not so much by continency of body as by chastity of mind. But what with other women is an error, is, in my case, the manifest truth : since what they suppose in their husbands, I — and the whole world agrees — ^know to be in thee. My love for thee is truth, being free [rom all error. Who among kings or philosophers can vie with ^our fame ? What country, what city does not thirst to see you ? Who, I ask, did not hurry to, see you appearing in pubUc and crane bis neck to catch a last glimpse as you departed ? What wife, ivhat maid did not yearn for you absent, and bum when you were present ? What queeri did not envy me my joys and couch ? There were in you two quahties by which you could draw the soul )f any woman, the gift of poetry and the gift of singing, gifts which )ther philosophers have lacked. As a distraction from labour, yon composed love-songs both in metre and in rhyme, which for iheir sweet sentiment and music have been sung and resung and lave kept your name in every mouth. Your sweet melodies do lot permit even the ilHterate to forget you. Because of these jifts women sighed for your love. And, as these songs sung of our oves, they quickly spread my name in many lands, and made me :he envy of my sex. What excellence of mind or body did not idom your youth ? No woman, then envious, but now would )ity me bereft of such delights. What enemy eyen would not low be softened by the compassion due me ? 40 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv " I have brought thee evil, thou knowest how innocently. Not the result of the act but the disposition of the doer makes the crime ; justice does not consider what happens, but through what intent it happens. My intent towards thee thou only hast proved and alone canst judge. I commit everything to thy weighing and submit to thy decree. " Tell me one thing : why, after our conversion, commanded by thee, did I drop into oblivion, to be no more refreshed by speech of thine or letter ? Tell me, I say, if you can, or I wiU say what I feel and what every one suspects : desire rather than friendship drew you to me, lust rather than love. So when desire ceased, whatever you were manifesting for its sake hke- wise vanished. This, beloved, is not so much my opinion as the opinion of aU. Would it were only mine and that thy love might find defenders to argue away my pain. Would that I could invent some reason to excuse you and also cover my cheap- ness. Listen, I beg, to what I ask, and it will seem smaU and very easy to you. Since I am cheated of your presence, at least put vows in words, of which you have a store, and so keep before me the sweetness of thine image. I shall vainly expect you to be bountiful in acts if I find you a miser in words. Truly I thought that I merited much from you, when I had done aU for your sake and still continue in obedience. When little more than a girl I took the hard vows of a nun, not from piety but at your command. If I merit nothing from thee, how vain I deem my labour ! I can expect no reward from God, as I have done nothing from love of Him. Thee hurrying to God I followed, or rather went before. For, as you remembered how Lot's wife turned back, you first dehvered me to God bound with the vow, and then yourself. That single act of distrust, I confess, grieved me and made me blush. God knows, at your command I would have followed or preceded you to fiery places. For my heart is not with me, but with thee ; and now more .than ever, if not with thee it is nowhere, for it cannot exist without thee. That my heart may be well with thee, see to it, I beg ; and it will be well if it finds thee kind, rendering grace for grace — a Uttle for much. Beloved, would that thy love were less sure of me so that it might be more soHcitous ; I have made you so secure that you are neghgent. Remember all I have done and think what you owe. While I enjoyed carnal joy with you, many people were uncertain whether I acted from love or lust. Now the end makes clear the beginning ; I have cut myself off from pleasure to obey thy wiU. I have kept nothing, save to be more than ever thine. Think how wicked it were in thee where all the more is due to render less, nothing almost ; especially when Uttle is asked, and that so easy for you. In the name of God to n THE HEART OF HELOlSE 41 ou have vowed yourself, give me that of thee which is , the consolation of a letter. I promise, thus refreshed, God more readily. When of old you would call me to s, you sought me with frequent letters, and never failed r songs to keep thy Heloise on every tongue ; the streets, >es re-echoed me. How much fitter that you should now le to God than then to lust ? Bethink thee what thou heed what I ask ; and a long letter I will conclude with ending : farewell only one ! " narks upon this letter would seem to profane a shrine :he man profaned that shrine ? He had not always )ped there. Heloise knew this, for all her love. She ;oo, writing in phraseology which had been brutalized 1 the denouncing spirit of Latin monasticism. How he puts the situation and how clearly she thinks discerning as it were the beautiful and true in love rriage. The whole letter is well arranged, and written ^le showing the writer's training in Latin mediaeval :. It was not the less deeply felt because composed ire and skill. Evidently the writer is of the Middle her occasional prolixity was not of her sex but of le ; and she quotes the ancients so naturally ; what ly should be convincing. How the letter bares the 3 of her own conduct : not for God's sake, or the n of heaven's sake, but for Abaelard's sake she : a nun. She had no inclination thereto ; her letters ndicate that she ever became really and spontaneously i to her calling. Abaelard was her God, and as her e held him to the end ; though she applied herself consideration of religious topics, as we shall see. 'er, her position as nun and abbess could not fail to ich topics on her consideration. :here another such love-letter, setting forth a situation e-barred and hopeless ? And the love which fills the A^hich throbs and burns in it, which speaks and argues ow absolute is this love. It is love carried out to its Lclusions ; it includes the whole woman and the whole ife ; whatever lies beyond its ken and care is scorned ected. This love is extreme in its humility, and yet its own purity and worth ; it is grieved at the t of rousing a feeling baser than itself. Heloise had 42 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv been and still was Heloise, devoted and self-sacrificing in her love. But the situation has become torture ; her heart is filled with all manner of pain, old and new, till it is driven to assert its right at least to consolation. Thus Heloise's love becomes insistent and requiiing. Was it possibly burdensome to the man who now might wish to think no more of passion ? who might wish no longer to be loved in that way ? In his reply Abaelard does not unveil himself ; he seems to take an attitude which may have been the most faithful expression that he could devise of his changed self. " To Heloise his beloved sister in Christ, Abaelard her brother in the Same." This superscription was a gentle reminder of their present relationship — ^in Christ. The writer begins : his not having written since their conversion was to be ascribed not to his negligence, but to his confidence in her wisdom ; he did not think that she who, so full of grace, had consoled her sister nuns when prioress, could as abbess need teaching or exhortation for the guidance of her daughters ; but if, in her humility, she felt the need of his instruction in matters pertaining to God, she might write, and he would answer, as the Lord should grant. Thanks be to God who had filled their hearts — ^hers and her nuns — with sohcitude for his perils, and had made them participators in his afflictions ; through their prayers the divine pity had protected him. He had hastened to send the Psalter, requested by his sister, formerly dear to him in the world and now most dear in Christ, to assist their prayers. The potency of prayer, with God and the saints, and especially the prayer of women for those dear to them, is frequently declared in Scripture ; he cites a number of passages to prove it. May these move her to pray for him. He refers with affectionate gratitude to the prayers which the nuns had been offering for him, and encloses a short prayer for his safety, which he begs and implores may be used in their daily canonical hours. If the Lord, however, deHvers him into the hands of his enemies to kill him, or if he meet his death in any way, he begs that his body may be brought to the Paraclete for burial, so that the sight of his sepulchre may move his daughters and sisters in Christ to pray for him ; no place could be so safe :hap.xxvi the heart of HELOISE . 43 and salutary for the soul of one bitterly repenting of his sins, as that consecrated to the true "Paraclete — the Comforter ; nor could fitter Christian burial be found than among women devoted by their vows to Christ. He begs that the 'great solicitude which they now have for his bodily safety, they will then have for the salvation of his soul, and by the suffrage of their prayer for the dead man show how they had loved him when alive. The letter closes, not with a personal word to Heloise, but with this distich : "Vive, vale, vivantque tuae valeantque sorores, Vivite, sed Christo, quaeso, mei memores." Thus as against Heloise's beseeching love, Abaelard lifted his hands, palms out, repelling it. His letter ignored all that filled the soul and the letter of Heloise. His reply did not lack words of spiritual affection, and its tone was not as formal then as it now seems. When Abaelard asked for the prayers of Heloise and her nuns, he meant it ; he desired the efficacy of their prayers. Then he wished to be buried among them. We are touched by this ; but, again, A.baelard meant it, as he said, for his soul's welfare — it was no love sentiment. The letter stirred the heart of Heloise to a rebellious outcry against the cruelty of God, if not of Abaelard, a soul's cry against life and the calm attitude of one who no longer was — or at least meant to be no longer —what he had been to her. " To her only one, next to Christ, his only one in Christ. " I wonder, my only one, that contrary to epistolary custom md the natural order of things, in the salutation of your letter ^ou have placed me before you, a woman before a man, a wife before a husband, a servant before her lord, a nun before a monk ind priest, a deaconess before an abbot. The proper order is [or one writing to a superior to put his own name last, but when mting to an inferior, the writer's name should precede. We ilso marvelled, that where you should have afforded us consola- :ion, you added to our desolation, and excited the tears you should have quieted. How could we restrain our tears when 'eading what you wrote towards the end : ' If the Lord shall ieliver me into the hand of my enemies to slay me ' ! Dearest, low couldst thou think or say that ? May God never forget His landmaids, to leave them living when you are no more ! May ie never allot to us that life, which would be harder than any death ! 44 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv It is for you to perform our obsequies and commend our souls to God, and send before to God those whom you have gathered for Him — that you may have no further anxiety, and foUow us the more gladly because assured of our safety. Refrain, my lord, I beg, from making the miserable most miserable with such words ; destroy not our life before we die. ' Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof ' — and that day will come to all with bitterness enough. ' What need,' says Seneca, * to add to evil, and destroy life before death ? ' " Thou askest, only one, that, in the event of thy death when absent from us, we should have thy body brought to our cemetery, in order that, being always in our memory, thou shouldst obtain greater benefit from our prayers. Did you think that your memory could shp from us ? How could we pray, with distracted minds ? What use of tongue or reason would be left to us ? When the mind is crazed against God it wiU not placate Him with prayer so much as irritate Him with complaints. We could only weep, pressing to foUow rather than bury you. How could we hve after we had lost our hfe in you ? The thought of your death is death to us ; what would be the actuahty ? God grant we shall not have to pay those rites to one from whom we look for them ; may we go before and not follow ! A heart crushed with grief is not calm, nor is a mind tossed by troubles open to God. Do not, I beg, hinder the divine service to which we are dedicated. *' What remains of hope for me when thou art gone ? Or what reason to continue in this pilgrimage, where I have no solace save thee ? and of thee I have but the bare knowledge that thou dost live, since thy restoring presence is not granted me. Oh ! — ^if it is right to say it — ^how cruel has God been to me ! Inclement Clemency ! Fortime has emptied her quiver against me, so that others have nothing to fear ! If indeed a single dart were left, no place could be found in me for a new wound. Fortune fears only lest I escape her tortures by death. Wretched and unhappy ! in thee I was hfted above aU women ; in thee am I the more fatally thrown down. What glory did I have in thee ! what ruin have I now ! Fortime made me the happiest of women that she might make me the most miserable. The injury was the more outrageous in that all ways of right were broken. While we were abandoned to love's delights, the divine severity spared us. When we made the forbidden lawful and by marriage wiped out fornication's stains, the Lord's wrath broke on us, impatient of an unsuUied bed when it long had borne with one defiled. A man taken in adultery would have \ been amply punished by what came to you. What others , deserved for adultery, that you got from the marriage which you j :hap.xxvi the heart of HELOlSE 45 ;hought had made amends for everything. Adulteresses bring their paramours what your own wife brought you. Not when we Hved for pleasure, but when, separated, we lived in chastity, ^ou presiding at the Paris schools, I at thy command dwelling ivith the nuns at Argenteuil ; you devoted to study, I to prayer and holy reading ; it was then that you alone paid the penalty for what we had done together. Alone you bore the punishment, which you deserved less than I. When you had humiliated yourself and elevated me and all my kin, you little merited that punishment either from God or from those traitors. Miserable me, begotten to cause such a crime ! O womankind ever the ruin of the noblest men ! ^ " Well the Tempter knows how easy is man's overthrow through a wife. He cast his malice over us, and the man whom he could not throw down through fornication, he tried with marriage, using a good to bring about an evil where evil means had failed. I thank God at least for this, that the Tempter did not draw me to assent to that which became the cause of the evil deed. Yet, although in this my mind absolves me, too many sins had gone before to leave me guiltless of that crime. For long a servant of forbidden joys, I earned the punishment which I now suffer of past sins. Let the evil end be attributed to ill beginnings ! May my penitence be meet for what I have done, and may long remorse in some way compensate for the penalty you sufered ! What once you suffered in the body, may I through contrition bear to the end of life, that so I may make satisfaction to thee if not to God. To confess the infirmities of my most wretched soul, I can find no penitence to offer God, whom I never cease to accuse of utter cruelty towards you. Rebelhous to His rule, I offend Him with indignation more than I placate Him with penitence. For that cannot be called the sinner's penitence where, whatever be the body's suffering, the mind retains the will to sin and stiU burns with the same desires. It is easy in confession to accuse oneself of sins, and also to do penance with the body ; but hard indeed to turn the heart from the desire of its greatest joys ! ^ Love's pleasures, which we knew together, cannot be made displeasing to me nor driven from my memory. Wherever I turn, they press upon me, nor do they spare my dreams. Even in the solemn moments of the Mass, when prayer should be the purest, their phantoms catch my soul. When I should groan for what I have done, I sigh for what I have lost. Not only our acts, but times and places stick fast in my mind, and my body quivers. O truly wretched me, fit only to utter ^ Heloise here in mediaeval fashion cites a number of examples from Scripture showing the ills and troubles brought by women to men. ^ Again she quotes to prove this, from Job and St. Gregory and Ambrose. 46 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv this cry of the soxil : ' Wretched that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death ? ' Would I cotdd add with truth what follows : — ' I thank God through Jesus Christ oiir Lord.' Such thanksgiving, dearest, may be thine, by one bodily ill cured of many tortures of the soul, and God may have been merciful where He seemed against you ; hke a good physician who does not spare the pain needed to save life. But I am tortured with passion and the fires of memory. They call me chaste, who do not know me for a h5rpocrite. They look upon purity of the flesh as virtue — ^which is of the soul, not of the body. Having some praise from men, I merit none from God, who knows the heart. I am called rehgious at a time when most religion is hjrpocrisy, and when whoever keeps from offence against human law is praised. Perhaps it seems praiseworthy and acceptable to God, through decent conduct, — ^whatever the intent — to avoid scandalizing the Church or causing the Lord's name to be blasphemed or the rehgious Order discredited. Per- haps it may be of grace just to abstain from evil. But the Scriptmre says, ' Refrain from evil and do good ' ; and vainly he attempts either who does not act from love of God. God knows that I have always feared to offend thee more than I feared to offend Him ; and have desired to please thee rather than Him, Thy command, not the divine love,put on me this garb of reHgion, What a wretched Ufe I lead if I vainly endure aU this here and am to have no reward hereafter. My hypocrisy has long deceived you, as it has others, and therefore you desire my prayers. Have no such confidence ; I need your prayers ; do not withdraw their aid. Do not take away the medicine, thinking me whole. Do not cease to think me needy ; do not think me strong ; do not delay your help. Cease from praising me, I beg. No one versed in medicine wiU judge of inner disease from out- ward view. Thy praise is the more perilous because I love it, and desire to please thee always. Be fearful rather than confident regarding me, so that I may have the help of your care. Do not seek to spur me on, by quoting, ' For strength is made perfect in weakness,' or * He is not crowned unless he have contended lawfully.' I am not looking for the crown of victory ; enough for me to escape peril ; — safer to shun peril than to wage war ! In whatever little comer of heaven God puts me, that will satisfy me. Hear what Saint Jerome says : ' I confess my weakness ; I do not wish to fight for the hope of victory, lest I lose.' Why give up certainties to follow the uncertain ? " This letter gives a view of Heloise's mind, its strong grasp and its capacity for reasoning, though its reasoning is here distraught with passion. Scathingly, half-blinded by XXVI THE HEART OF HELOlSE 47 Dain, she declares the perversities of Providence, as they ;d upon her. Such a disclosure of the woman's mind ests how broadly based in thought and largely reared was great love into which her whole soul had been poured, mind as well as heart. Her love was great, unique, not from its force of feeling, but from the power and scope lought by which passion and feeling were carried out so md fully to the last conclusions of devotion. The letter shows a woman driven by stress of misery to utter cries clutch at remedies that her calmer self would have put It is not hypocrisy to conceal the desires or imaginings :h one would never act upon. To tell these is not true iosure of oneself, but slander. Torn by pain, Heloise :es herself more vile and needy than in other moments knew herself to be. Yet the letter also uncovers her ; in nakedness there is some truth. Doubtless her nun's ) did clothe a hypocrite. Whatever she felt — and here see the worst she felt — ^before the world she had to act nun. We shall soon see how she forced herself to act, le, the nun toward Abaelard. Abaelard replied in a letter filled with religious argument consolation. It was self-controlled, firm, authoritative, strong in those arguments regarding God's mercy which e stood the test of time. If they sometimes fail to satisfy embittered soul, at least they are the best tha:t man known. And withal, the letter is calmly and nobly ctionate — ^what place was there for love's protestations ? y would have increased the evil, adding fuel to Heloise's donate misery. The master-note is struck in the address: "To the ise of Christ, His servant." The letter seeks to turn oise's thoughts to her nun's calling and her soul's salva- L. It places her expressions of complaint under four ds. First, he had put her name first, because she had 3me his superior from the moment of her bridal with his ;ter Christ. Jerome writing to Eustochium called her [y, when she had become the spouse of Jerome's Lord, lelard shows, with citations from the Song of Songs, the y of the spouse, and how her prayers should be sought Dne who was the servant of her Husband. Second, as to 48 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv the terrors roused in her by his mention of his peril and possible death, he points out that in her first letter she had bidden him write of those" perils ; if they brought him death, she should deem that a kind release. She should not wish to see his miseries drawn out, even for her sake. Third, he shows that his praise of her was justified even by her dis- claimer of merit — as it is written, Who humbles himself shall be exalted. He warns her against false modesty which may be vanity. He turns at last to the old and ceaseless plaint which she makes against God for cruelty, when she should rather glorify Him ; he had thought that that bitterness had departed, so dangerous for her, so painful to him. If she wished to please him, let her lay it aside ; retaining it, she could not please him or advance with him to blessedness ; let her have this much religion, not to separate herself from him hastening to God ; let her take comfort in their joume57ing to the same goal. He then shows her that his punishment was just as well as merciful ; he had deserved it from God and also from Fxilbert. If she will consider, she will see in it God's justice and His mercy ; God had saved them from ship- wreck ; had raised a barrier against shame and lust. For himself the punishment was purification, not privation ; wiQ not she, as his inseparable comrade, participate in the work- ings of this grace, even as she shared the guilt and its pardon ? Once he had thought of binding her to him in wedlock ; but God found a means to turn them both to Him ; and the Lord was continuing His mercy towards her, causing her to bring forth spiritual daughters, when otherwise she would only have borne children in the flesh ; in her the curse of Eve is turned to the blessing of Mary. God had purified them both ; whom God loveth he correcteth. Oh ! let her thoughts dwell with the Son of God, seized, dragged, beaten, spit upon, crowned with thorns, hung on a vile cross. Let her think of Him as her spouse, and for Him let her make lament ; He bought her with himself, He loved her. In comparison with His love, his own (Abaelard's) was lust, seeking the pleasure it could get from her. If he, Abaelard, had suffered for her, it was not willingly nor for her sake, as Christ had suffered, and for her salvation. Let her weep for THE HEART OF HELOlSE (^ who made her whole, not for her corrupter ; for her lemer, not for her defiler ; for the Lord who died for her, or the hving servant, himself just freed from the death, lis sister accept with patience what came to her in mercy Him who wounded the body to save the soul. We are one in Christ, as through marriage we were one Whatever is thine is not alien to me. Christ is thine, ise thou art His spouse. And now thou hast me for a nt, who formerly was thy master — a servant united to thee )iritual love. I trust in thy pleading with Him for such ce as my own prayers may not obtain. That nothing may :r this petition I have composed this prayer, which I send ' O God, who formed woman from the side of man and sanction the sacrament of marriage ; who didst bestow my frailty a cure for its incontinence ; do not despise the ;rs of thy handmaid, and the prayers which I pour out for ins and those of my dear one. Pardon our great crimes, nay the enormity of our faults find the greatness of thy ble mercy. Punish the culprits in the present ; spare, in Liture. Thou hast joined us. Lord, and hast divided us, as ased thee. Now complete most mercifully what thou hast 1 in mercy ; and those whom thou hast divided in this world, eternally in heaven, thou who art our hope, our portion, xpectation, our consolation, Lord blessed forever. Amen.' Farewell in Christ, spouse of Christ ; in Christ farewell and rist Hve. Amen." n her next letter Heloise obeys, and turns her pen if her thoughts to the topics suggested by Abaelard's )nitions. The short scholastically phrased address Dt be rendered in any modem fashion : " Domino aliter sua singulariter.'* That you may have no further reason to call me disobedient, command shall bridle the words of unrestrained grief ; in ig I will moderate my language, which I might be unable in speech. Nothing is less in our power than our heart ; . compels us to obey more often than it obeys us. When Sections goad us, we cannot keep the sudden impulse from ing out in words ; as it is written, ' From the fulness of the the mouth speaketh.' So I will withhold my hand from g whenever I am unable to control my words. Would he sorrowing heart were as ready to obey as the hand that 1 You can afford some remedy to grief, even when unable pel it quite. As one nail driven in drives out another, a 3L. II E 50 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv new thought pushes away its predecessor, and the mind is freed for a time. A thought, moreover, takes the mind up and leads it from others more effectually, if the subject of the thought is excellent and of great importance." The rest of this long letter shows Heloise putting her principles in practice. She is forcing her mind to consider and her pen to discourse upon topics which might properly occupy an abbess's thoughts — topics, moreover, which would satisfy Abaelard and call forth long letters in reply. Whether she cared really for these matters or ever came to care for them ; or whether she turned to them to distract her mind and keep up some poor makeshift of intercourse with one who would and could no longer be her lover ; or whether all these motives mingled, and in what proportion, perhaps may best be left to Him who tries the heart. The abbess writes : " All of us here, servants of Christ and thy daughters, make two requests of thy fathership which we deem most needful. The one is, that you would instruct us concerning the origins of the order of nuns and the authority for our calling. The other is, that you would draw up a written regula, suitable for women, which shall prescribe and set the order and usages of our convent. We do not find any adequate regula for women among the works of the holy Fathers. It is a manifest defect in monastic institu- tions that the same rules should be imposed upon both monks and nuns, and that the weaker sex should bear the same monastic yoke as the stronger." ■^Heloise, having set this task for Abaelard, proceeds to show how the various monastic regulae, from Benedict's downward, failed to make suitable provision for the habits and requirements and weaknesses of women, the regulae hitherto having been concerned with the weaknesses of men. She enters upon matters of clothing and diet, and every- thing concerning the lives of nuns. She writes as one learned in Scripture and the writings of the Fathers, and sets the whole matter forth, in its details, with admirable understanding of its intricacies. She concludes, reminding Abaelard that it is for him in his lifetime to set a regula for them to follow forever ; after God, he is their founder. They might thereafter have some teacher who wotdd build in alien fashion ; such a one might have less care and :vi THE HEART OF HELOlSE 51 banding, and might not be as readily obeyed as : ; it is for him to speak, and they will listen. e first of Heloise's letters is a great expression of a Dve ; in the second, anguish drives the writer's hand ; third, she has gained self-control ; she suppresses her and writes a letter which is discursive and impersonal tie beginning to the little Vale at the end. laelard returned a long epistle upon the Scriptural of the order of nuns, and soon followed it with r, still longer, containing instruction, advice, and rules : nuns of the Paraclete. He also wrote them a letter the study of Scripture. From this time forth he [ his devotion to Heloise and her nuns by the large )f writings which he composed for their edification. 3 sent him a long list of questions upon obscure s and knotty points of Scripture, which he answered tly in detail.^ He then sent her a collection of written or " rearranged " by himself for the use of ms, accompanied by a prefatory letter : "At thy s, my sister Heloise, once dear to me in the world, lost dear in Christ, I have composed what in Greek led hymns, and in Hebrew tillim/' He then explains ^^ielding to the requests of the nuns, he had written , of which the Church had such a store. :xt he composed for them a large volume of sermons, he also sent with a letter to Heloise : " Having ited the book of hymns and sequences, revered in and loved sister Heloise, I have hastened to compose sermons for your congregation ; I have paid more ■on to the meaning than the language. But perhaps studied style is well suited to simple auditors. In sing and arranging these sermons I have followed the of Church festivals. Farewell in the Lord, servant , once dear to me in the world, now most dear in : in the flesh then my wife, now my sister in the md partner in our sacred calling." ,oise*s last problema did not relate to Scripture, and may have been i by her own life. '* We ask whether one can sin in doing what is per- r commanded by the Lord ? " Abaelard answers with a discussion of permissible between man and wife. 52 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv At a subsequent period, when his opinions were con- demned by the Council of Sens, he sent to Heloise a confession of faith. Shortly afterward his stormy hfe found a last refuge in the monastery of Cluny. His closing years (of peace ?) are described in a letter to Heloise from the good and revered abbot, Peter the Venerable. He writes that he had received with joy the letter which her affection had dictated,^ and now took the first opportunity to express his recognition of her affection and his reverence for herself. He refers to her keenly prosecuted studies (so rare for women) before taking the veil, and then to the glorious example of her sage and holy life in the nun's sacred calling — her victory over the proud Prince of this World. His admiration for her was deep ; his expression of it was extreme. A learned, wise, and holy woman could not be praised more ardently than Heloise is praised by this good man. He had spoken of the advantages his monastery would have derived from her presence, and then continued : " But although God's providence denied us this, it was granted us to enjoy the presence of him — ^who was yours — Master Peter Abaelard, a man always to be spoken of with honour as a true servant of Christ and a philosopher. The divine dispensation placed him in Cluny for his last years, and through him enriched our monastery with treasure richer than gold. No brief writing could do justice to his holy, humble, and devoted life among us. I have not seen his equal in humility of garb and manner. When in the crowd of our brethren I forced him to take a first place, in meanness of clothing he appeared as the last of all. Often I marvelled, as the monks walked past me, to see a man so great and famous thus despise and abase himself. He was abstemious in food and drink, refusing and condemning everything beyond the bare necessities. He was assiduous in study, frequent in prayer, always silent unless compelled to answer the question of some brother or expound sacred themes before us. He partook of the sacrament as often as possible. Truly his mind, his tongue, his act, taught and exemplified religion, philosophy, and learning. So he dwelt with us, a man simple and righteous, fearing God, turning from evil, consecrating to God the latter days of his life. At last, because of his bodily infirmities, I sent him to a quiet and salubrious retreat on the banks of the Saone. There he bent over his books, as long as his strength lasted, always praying, ^ This letter of Heloise is not extant. :;hap.xxvi the heart of HELOISE reading, writing, or dictating. In these sacred exercises, sleeping but watching, he was found by the heavenly Visit who summoned him to the eternal wedding-feast not as a ioo. but as a wise virgin, bearing his lamp filled with oil — the c 5ciousness of a holy life. When he came to pay humanity's ] debt, his illness was brief. With holy devotion he made c fession of the Catholic Faith, then of his sins. The broth who were with him can testify how devoutly he received viaticum of that last journey, and with what fervent faith commended his body and soul to his Redeemer. Thus i master, Peter, completed his days. He who was known throu out the world by the fame of his teaching, entered the school Him who said, * Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of hear and continuing meek and lowly he passed to Him, as we n beheve. '* Venerable and dearest sister in the Lord, the man who ^ once joined to thee in the flesh, and then by the stronger ch of divine love, him in thy stead, or as another thee, the L holds in His bosom ; and at the day of His coming. His gr will restore him to thee." The abbot afterwards visited the Paraclete, and returning to Cluny received this letter from the abbess : " God's mercy visiting us, we have been visited by the fav of your graciousness. We are glad, kindest father, and we gL that your greatness condescended to our insignificance. A v from you is an honour even to the great. The others may kr the great benefit they received from the presence of your hi, ness. I cannot tell in words, or even comprehend in thoug tiow beneficial and how sweet your coming was to me. Y 3ur abbot and our lord, celebrated mass with us the sixteentt :he Calends of last December ; you commended us to the H Spirit ; you nourished us with the Divine Word ; — you gave 'he body of the master, and confirmed that gift from Clu To me also, unworthy to be your servant, though by word 2 'etter you have called me sister, you gave as a pledge of sine ove the privilege of a Tricenarium, to be performed by brethren of Cluny, after my death, for the benefit of my sc Yon have promised to confirm this under your seal. May 3 fulfil this, my lord. Might it please you also to send to me t: )ther sealed roll, containing the absolution of the master, tha nay hang it on his tomb. Remember also, for the love of G )ur — and your — Astralabius, to obtain for him a prebend fr :he bishop of Paris or another. Farewell. May God prese j^ou, and grant to us sometime your presence." 54 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv The good abbot replied with a kind and affectionate letter, confirming his gift of the Tricenarium, promising to do all he could for Astralabius, and sending with his letter the record of Abaelard's absolution, as follows : " I, Peter, Abbot of Cluny, who received Peter Abaelard to be a monk in Cluny, and granted his body, secretly transported, to the Abbess Heloise and the nuns of the Paraclete, absolve him, in the performance of my office {pro officio) by the authority of the omnipotent God and all the saints, from all his sins." Abaelard died in the year 1142, aged sixty-three. Twenty-one years afterward Heloise died at the same age, and was buried in the same tomb with him at the Paraclete : " Hoc tumulo abbatissa jacet prudens Heloissa." CHAPTER XXVII GERMAN CONSIDERATIONS : WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE A CRITICISM of the world of feudalism, chivalry, and Ic may be had from the impressions and temperamental actions of a certain thinking atom revolving in the sar The atom referred to was Walther von der Vogelweide German, a knight, a Minnesinger, and a national poet wh< thoughts were moved by the instincts of his caste and ra In language, temperament, and character, the Germj east of the Rhine were Germans still in the thirteei century. They had accepted, and even vitally appropriat Latin Christianity ; those of them who were educated 1: received a Latin education. Yet their natures, thor somewhat tempered, showed largely and distinctly Germ: Moreover, through the centuries, they had acquired— rather they had never lost — a national antipathy tow£ those Roman papal well-springs of authority, which seen to suck back German gold and lands in return for spirit^ assurance and political betrayal. A different and already mediaevalized element had a become part of German culture, to wit, the matter of i French Arthurian romances and the lyric fashions Provence, which, working together, had captivated mod German circles from the Rhine to the Danube. Nevert] less the German character maintained itself in the Min-, lieder which followed Provencal poetry, and in the hbfi, (courtly) epics which were palpable translations from 1 French,^ The distinguished group of German poets wh< ^ The Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg and the Parzival of Wolfi i^on Eschenbach have been given. One may also refer to works of ol 55 56 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv lives fall around the year 1200, were as German as their language, although they borrowed from abroad the form and matter of their compositions. There could be no better Germans than the two most thoughtful of this group, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide. Most Germanically the former wrestled with that ancient theme, " from suffering, wisdom," which he pressed into the tale of ParzivaL His great poem, achieved with toil and sweat, was mighty in its cHmaxes, and fit to strengthen the hearts of those men who through sorrow and loneliness and despair's temptations were growing " slowly wise." The virtues which Wolfram praised and embodied in his hero were those praised in the verses, and even, one may think, strugglingly exemplified in the conduct, of Walther von der Vogelweide,^ most famous of Minnesingers, and a power in the German lands through his Sprilche, or verses personal and pohtical. Less is known of his life than of his whole and manly views, his poetic fancies, his musings, his hopes, and great depressions. Many places have claimed the honour of his birth, which took place somewhat before 1170. He was poor, and through his youth and manhood moved about from castle to castle, and from court to court, seeking to win some recompense for his excellent verses and good company. Thus he learned much of men, " climbing another's stairs," with his fellows, at the Landgraf Hermann's Wartburg, or at the Austrian ducal Court. Walther's Sprilche render his moods most surely, and reflect his outlook on the world. His charming Minnelieder bear more conventional evidence. The courtly German love- songs passing by this name were afiected by the conceits and conventions of the Proven9al poetry upon which they contemporaries, e.g. to the Aeneid of Heinrich von Veldeke, translated (1184) from a French rendering of Virgil ; and the two courtly narrative poems, the Erec and Ivain {Knight of the Lion) taken from Chretien of Troies by Hartmann von Aue, who flourished as the twelfth century was passing into the thirteenth. 1 On Walther von der Vogelweide, see Wilmann, Lehen und Dichtung Walthers, etc. (Bonn, 1882) ; Schonbach, Walther von der Vogelweide (and ed., Berlin, 1895). The citations from his poems in this chapter follow the Pfeiffer- Bartsch edition. cHAP.xxvii THE GERMAN VIEW were modelled. A strong nature might use such with pov or break with their influence. Walther made his own high convention of trouvere and troubadour, th^t love upl the lover's being. Besides this, and besides the ligh forms and phrases current in such poetry, his Lieder ca natural feeling, joy, and moral levity, according to the thei they also may express Walther's convictions. To take examples : Walther's Tagelied ^ imitates Provengal alba (dawn), in which knight and truant k bewail the coming of the light and the parting which brings. Far more joyous, and as immoral as one pleas is Unter der Linde, most famous of his songs. M vellously it gives the mood of love's joy remembered — £ anticipated too. The immorality is complete (if we will serious), and is rendered most alluring by the utter gladn of the girl's song — no repentance, no regret ; only joy a roguish laughter. Walther was young, he was a knight and a Minnesingi he had doubtless loved, in this way. His love-songs hi plenty to say of the red mouth, good for kissing — I care i who knows it either. But he also realizes, and greatly sin the height and breadth and worth of love the true a stable, the blessing and completion of two lives, which con to a false heart never. ^ He seems to feel it necessary defend love for itself, perhaps because marriage was tal more seriously in this imitative German literature than the French and Provengal originals : '* Who says that lov( sin, let him consider well. Many an honour dwells with h md troth and happiness. If one does ill to the other, k s grieved. I do not mean false love ; that were bet lamed un-love. No friend of that, am I." But : thoughts turn quickly to love as a lasting union : " '. lappy man, she happy woman, whose hearts are to ea )ther true ; both lives increased in price and worth ; bless :heir years and all their days." ^ Giving play to his caustic temper, Walther puts sec apon the light of love : " Fool he who cannot understa vhat joy and good, love brings. But the light man is e\ ^ No. 3 in the Pfeiffer-Bartsch edition. 2 184. 3 33. 58 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv pleased with light things, as is fit ! " ^ This Minnesinger applied most earnest standards to life ; lofty his praise of the qualities of wonaanhood, which are better than beauty or riches : " woman " is a higher word than " lady " ^ — ^it took a German to say this. " He who carries hidden sorrow in his heart, let him think upon a good woman — ^he is freed." ^ With a burst of patriotism, in one of his greatest poems Walther praises German women as the best in all the world.* But even in the Minnelieder, Walther has his despond- encies. One of the most definite, and possibly conventional, was regret for love's labour lost, and the days of youth spent in service of an ungracious fair. The poet wonders how it is that he who has helped other men is tongue-tied before his lady. Again, his reflections broaden from thoughts of unresponsive fair ones to a conviction of life's thanklessness. " I have well served the World {Frau Welt, Society), and gladly would serve her more, but for her evil thanks and her way of preferring fools to me. . . . Come, World, give me better greeting — the loss is not all mine." He knows his good unbending temper which will not endure to hear ill spoken of the upright. But he thinks, what is the use ? why speak so sweetly, why sing, when virtue and beauty are so lightly held, and every one does evil, fearing nought ? The verse which carries these reflections is tossing in the squally haven of Society ; soon the poet will encounter the wild sea without. Still from the windy harbour comes one grand lament over art's decline : " The worst songs please, frogs' voices ! Oh, I laugh from anger ! Lady World, no score of mine is on your devil's slate. Many a life of man and woman have I made glad — might I so have gladdened mine ! Here, I make my Will, and bequeath my goods — to the envious my ill-luck, my sorrows to the liars, my follies to false lovers, and to the ladies my heart's pain." ^ He makes a solemn offering of his poems : *' Good women, worthy men, a loving greeting is my due. Forty years have I sung fittingly of love ; and now, take my songs which gladden, as my gift to you. Your favour be my return. And with my staff I will fare on, still wooing worth with ^ 22. 2 14, 16, 69. 3 j8. 4 39. 6 See Lieder, 46, 51, 56, 59, 61, 62, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77. )HAP. XXVII THE GERMAN VIEW mdisheartened work, as from my childhood. So shall I 1 n lowly lot, one of the Noble — for me enough." To relish Walther's love -songs, one need not km /vhether she was dark or fair, kept forest-tryst or listened jome castle's hearth, or in what German land that cas itood. Likewise in his Spriiche, which have other bearii :he roll of his protesting voice carries the universal humi To comprehend them it were well to know that life was tt is now niggardly in rewarding virtue ; beyond this, c leads to have the type-idea of the Empire and the Papa* those two powers which were set, somewhat antagonistical dXi the decree of God ; both claiming the world's headshi the one, Roman in tradition, but in strength and tern] Serman, and of this world decidedly. The other, Rom in the genius of its organization, and Christian in its si Drdination of the life below to the life to come, if not in 1 methods of establishing this consummation ; Christian t' but more especially mediaeval, in its formal disdain ivhatever belonged to earth. In Germany these two pari ^pposites were further antagonized, since the native resour recoiled from the foreign drain upon them, and the struggli patriotism of a broken land resented the pressure of a st; mthin and above the state of duke and king and emperc In Walther's time Innocent III. swayed the nations fn Peter's throne. Just before Innocent's accession, German ible emperor, Henry VI., died suddenly in Sicily (Septe ber 1197), leaving an heir not four years old. The que< mother, d5dng the next year, bequeathed this child, Frederi to the paternal care of Innocent, his feudal as well as ghos lord, since the queen, for herself and child, had accepted 1 Pope as the feudal suzerain of their kingdom of Sicily. Germany (using that name loosely and broadly) Phi Hohenstauffen, Henry's brother and Duke of Suabia, clain the throne. His unequal opponent was Otto of Brunswi 3f the ever-rebellious house of Henry the Lion. The P( opposed the Hohenstauffen ; but was obliged to acknowlec him when the course of the ten years of wasting civil wai Germany decided in his favour — whereupon, alack ! Ph; was murdered (1207). Quickly the Pope turned back Otto ; but the latter, after he had been crowned king £ 6o THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv emperor, became intolerable to Innocent through the com- pulsion of his position as the head of an empire inherently hostile to the papacy. To thwart him Innocent set up his own ward, Frederick. Soon this precocious youth began to make head against pope-forsaken Otto ; and then the excommuni- cated emperor was overthrown in 1214 by Philip Augustus of France, who had intervened in Frederick's favour. So Otto passed away, and, some time after, Frederick was crowned German king at Aix-la-Chapelle.^ In the mean- while Innocent died (1216), and amity followed between Frederick and the gentle Honorius III., who crowned Frederick emperor at Rome in 1220. This peace ended quickly when the sterner Gregory IX. ascended the papal throne on the death of Honorius in 1227. Walther's life extended through these events. Though apparently changing sides under the stress of his necessities, he was patriotically German to the end. First he clave to the Hohenstauffen, Philip, as the true upholder of German interests against Otto and the Pope. On Philip's death, he turned to Otto ; but with all the world left him at last for Frederick. It is known that Walther, an easily angered man, felt himself ill-used by Otto and justified in turning to the open-handed Frederick, who finally gave him a small fief. To the last, Walther upheld him as Germany's sovereign. Probably the poet died in the year 1228, just as Gregory was succeeding Honorius, and the death-struggle of the Empire with the Papacy was opening. With no light heart, as well may be imagined, had Walther looked about him on the death of the emperor Henry in 1197. " I sat upon a rock, crossed knee on knee, and with elbow so supported, chin on hand I leaned. Anxiously I pondered. I could see no way to win gain without loss. Honour and riches do not go hand in hand, both of less value than God's favour. Would I have them all ? Alas ! riches and worldly honour and God's favour come not within the closure of one heart's wishes. The ways are barred ; perfidy lurks in secret, and might walks the highroads. Peace and law are wounded." ^ 1 A lucid account of this struggle is given by Luchaire, Innocent III., vol. iii. (" La Papaut6 et TEinpire"), Paris, 1906. 2 gi. CHAP. XXVII THE GERMAN VIEW 6i The personal dilemma of the poet with his fortune to make, but desirous of doing right, mirrors the desperate situation of the State : " Woe is thee, German tongue ; ill stand thy order and thy honour ! — I hear the lies of Rome betraying two kings ! " And in verses of wrath Walther inveighs against the Pope The sweeping nature of his denunciation raises the question whether he merely attacked the supposed treachery of the reigning pope, or was opposed to the papacy as an institution hostile to the German nation. The answer is not clear. Mediaeval denunciations of the Church range from indictments of particular abuses, on through more general invectives, to the clear protests of heretics impugning the ecclesiastical system. It is not always easy to ascertain the speaker's meaning. Usually the abuse and not the system is attacked. Hostility to the latter, however sweeping the language of satirist or preacher, is not lightly to be inferred. The invectives of St. Bernard and Damiani are very broad ; but where had the Church more devoted sons ? Even the satirists composing in Old French rarelyintended an assault upon herspiritual authority. It would seem as if, at least in the Romance countries, one must look for such hostihty to heretical circles, the Waldenses for example. And from the orthodox mediaeval standpoint, this was their most accursed heresy. It would have been hard for any German to use broader language than some of the French satirists and Latin castigators. If there was a difference, it must be sought in the specific matter of the German disapproval viewed in connection with the political situation. Was a position ever taken incompatible with the Church's absolute spiritual authority ? or one intrinsically irreconcilable with the secular power of the papacy ? At any time, in any country, papal claims might become irreconcilable with the royal pre- rogative — as William the Conqueror had held those of Gregory VIL in England, and as, two centuries afterwards, Philip the Fair was to hold those of Boniface VIII. in France. But in neither case was there such sheer and fundamental antagonism as men felt to exist between the Empire and the Papacy. Perhaps it was possible in the early thirteenth century for a German whose whole heart 62 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookiv was on the German side to dispute even the sacerdotal principle of papal authority. It is hard to judge otherwise of Freidank, the very German composer or collector of trenchant sayings in the early thirteenth century. Many of these sneer at Rome and the Pope, and some of them strike the gist of the matter : " Sunde nieman mac vergeben wan Got alein " ("God alone can forgive sins"). This is the direct statement ; he gives its scornful converse : " Could the Pope absolve me from my oaths and duties, I'd let other sureties go and fasten to him alone." ^ Such words mean denial of the Church's authority to forgive, and the Pope's to grant absolution from oaths of allegiance. Freidank is very near rejecting the principles of the ecclesiastical system. Walther, Freidank's contemporary, is more picturesque : '* King Constantine, he gave so much — as I will tell you — to the Chair of Rome : spear, cross, and crown. At once the angels cried : ' Alas ! Alas ! Alas ! Christendom before stood crowned with righteousness. Now is poison fallen on her, and her honey turned to gaU — ^sad for the world hence- forth ! ' To-day the princes all live in honour ; only their highest languishes — so works the priest's election. Be that denounced to thee, sweet God ! The priests would upset laymen's rights : true is the angels' prophecy." ^ On Constantine's apocryphal gift, symbolized by the emblems of Christ's passion, rested the secular authority of the popes, which Walther laments with the angels. " The Chair of Rome was first set up by Sorcerer Gerbert ! [Queer history this, but we see what he means.] He destroyed his own soul only ; but this one would bring down Christendom with him to perdition. When will aU tongues call Heaven to arms, and ask God how long He will sleep ? They bring to nought His work, distort His Word. His steward steals His treasure ; His judge robs here and murders there ; His shepherd has become a wolf among His sheep." ^ The clergy point their fingers heavenward while they travel fast to hell.* How laughs the Pope at us, when at home with his Italians, at the way he empties our German pockets into 1 From '* Freidank in Auswahl," in Hildebrand's Didaktih aus der Zeit der Kreuzziige, p. 336 (Deutsche Nat. Lit.). 2 85, Cf. 164. 3 IIO. 4 113, cf. Ill, 112. AP. XXVII THE GERMAN VIEW 6; 5 " poor boxes." ^ Walther's hatred of the foreign Pope i used at every point. And at last, in a Spruch full o iplied meaning, he declares that Christ's word as to th ibute money meant that the emperor should receive hi yal due.^ These utterances, considered in the light of the politica id racial situation, seem to deny, at least implicitly, th cular power of the papacy. Yet in matters of religioi 'alther apparently was entirely orthodox, and a piou iristian. He has left a sweet prayer to Christ, with ampL cognition of the angels and the saints, and a beautifu Tse of penitent contrition, in which he confesses his sins ti 3d very directly — how that he does the wrong, and leave e right, and fails in love of neighbour, " Father, Son, ma; y Spirit lighten mine ; how may I love him who does m ? Ever dear to me is he who treats me well ! " ^ Walther' lesting spirit alsp pondered over God's greatness an( comprehensibility.*. His open mind is shown by th mous line : '* Him (God) Christians, Jews, and heathe] rve," ^ a breadth of view shared by his friend Wolfram vo] schenbach, who speaks of the chaste virtue of a heathei dy as equal to baptism.® The personal lot of this proud heart was not an eas; le ; homelessness broke him down, and the bitterness o .ting others' bread. Too well had he learned of the worL id all its changing ways, and how poor becomes the sou .at follows them. Mortahty is a trite sorrow ; there ar Drse : " We all complain that the old die and pass away ther let us lament taints of another hue, that troth ani emliness and honour are dead." ^ At the last Walther' ^ 115, 116. * 133. My statement of the opposition to the papacy might be much moi alytical, and contain further apt distinctions. But this would remove it too U m the anti-papal feeling of the common man ; and the period, moreover, t yet that of Occam and Marsilius of Padua— as to whom see Gierke, Politid eories of the Middle Age, trans, by Maitland (Cambridge, 1900). ' 88, 137. * 158. Walther shared the crusading spirit. The inference that he was hin f a Crusader is unsafe ; but he wrote stirring crusading poems, one openir th a line that in sudden power may be compared with Milton's " Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints." " Rich, hSrre, dich und dine muoter, megede kint." 167. See also 78, 79. ^ 87. ' Parzival, i. 824. *? 186. 64 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND b grey memory of life and his vainly yearning hope took in a great elegy. After long years he seemed, with 1 steps, and leaning on his wanderer's staff, to be returni a home which was changed forever : " Alas ! whither are vanished, my many years ! Did I dream my life, or real ? what I once deemed it, was it that ? And n wake, and all the things and people once famiUar, stn My playmates, dull and old ! And the fields changed ; that the streams still flow as then they flowed, my would break with thinking on the glad days, vanished i sea. And the young people ! slow and mirthless ! ani knights go clad as peasants ! Ah ! Rome ! thy ban ! groans have stilled the song of birds. Fool I, to speal so despair, — and the earth looks fair ! Up knights aj your swords, your armour ! would to God I might fare your victor band, and gain my pay too — ^not in lam earth ! Oh ! might I win the eternal crown from that s voyage beyond the sea, then would I sing O joy ! and i more, alas — never more, alas." ^ 1 8i8. BOOK V SYMBOLISM VOL. II CHAPTER XXVIII SCRIPTURAL ALLEGORIES IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES ; HONORIUS OF AUTUN Words, pictures, and other vehicles of expression are symb of whatever they are intended to designate. A certain i avoidable symbolism also inheres in human mental process^ for the mind in knowing '' turns itself to images/' as Aquii says following Aristotle ; and every statement or formu tion is a casting together of data in some presentable a representative form. An example is the Apostles' Cre< called also by this very name of Symbol, being a casti together, an elementary formula, of the essentials of 1 Christian Faith. In the same sense the " law of gravitatioi or a moral precept is a deduction, induction, or gatheri together into a representative symbol, of otherwise i assembled and uncorrelated experience. In the present a following chapters, however, the term symbol wiU be us in its common acceptation to indicate a thing, an act, o] word invested with an adventitious representative significan All statements or expressions (through language or means of pictures) which are intended to carry, besides th palpable meaning, another which is veiled and more spiritu are symbolical or figurative, and more specifically are call allegories.^ ^ While an allegory is a statement having another consciously inten meaning, metaphor is the carrying over or deflection of a meaning from primary application. According to good usage, which has kept these te: distinct, allegory implies a definite and usually a sustained intention, and suggi the spiritual ; while metaphor suggests figures of speech and linguistic char often unconscious. Language develops through the metaphorical {not allegori extension or modification of the meanings of words. The original mear sometimes is obscured [e.g. in profane or depend, and sometimes continues 67 68 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND ^ These devices of the mind have a history as o humanity. From inscrutable beginnings, in time the come recognized as makeshifts ; yet they remain pro enter new stages of confusion. The mind seeking to es the transcendental, avails itself of symbols. All reli have teemed with them, in their primitive phases sc£ distinguishing between symbol and fact ; then a diffe becomes evident to clearer-minded men, while perhaps i same time other men are elaborately maintaining tha symbol magically is, or brings to pass, that which it repre; Such obscuring mysticism existed not merely in con Egypt and Brahminical India, but everywhere — in an Greece and Rome, and then afterwards through the tin the Christian Church Fathers and the entire Middle . Fact and symbol are seen constantly closing togethei becoming each other like the serpent-souls in the twenty canto of Dante's Inferno. Allegory properly speaking, which involves a cons and sustained effort to invest concrete or material stater with more general or spiritual meaning, played an intere role in epochs antecedent to the patristic and medi periods. Even before Plato's time the personal myt the gods shocked the Greek ethical intellect, which there proceeded to convert them into allegories. Greek alleg( interpretation of ancient myth was apologetic to botl critical mind and the moral sense. With Philo, the Hellenizing Jew of Alexandria, v philosophy revolted from the literal text of Genesis motive for allegorical interpretation was similar. Bu document before him was most unlike the Iliad and O^j Genesis contained no palpably immoral stories of Jeh to be explained away. Its account of divine creation human beginnings merely needed to be invested Math fu ethical meaning. So Philo made cardinal virtues of the rivers of Eden, and through like allegorical conceits t formed the Book of Genesis into a system of Helle] exist with the new one. In a vast number of languages, such words as si oblique, crooked, seem always to have had both a direct and a metaphorical xm Moral and intellectual conceptions necessarily are expressed in phrases pri applicable to physical phenomena. CHAP. XXVIII SCRIPTURAL ALLEGORIES 69 ethics. Not cosmogonic myths, but moral meanings, he had discovered in his document. Advancing along the path which Philo found, Christian allegorical interpretation undertook to substantiate the validity of the Gospel. To this end it fixed special symbolical meanings upon the Old Testament narratives, so as to make them into prefigurative testimonies to the truth of Christian teachings.^ Allegory was also called on to justify, as against educated pagans, certain acts of that heroic but peccant " type '' of Christ, David, the son of Jesse. Such special apologetic needs hardly affected the allegorical interpretation of the Gospel itself, which began at an early day, and from the first was spiritual and anagogic, constantly straining on to educe further salutary meaning from the text. The Greek and Latin Church Fathers created the mass of doctrine, including Scriptural interpretation,^ upon which mediaeval theologians were to expend their systematizing and reconstructive labours. Through the Middle Ages, the course of allegory and symbolism strikingly illustrates the mediaeval way of using the patristic heritage — first painfully learning it, then making it their own, and at last creating by means of that which they had organically appropriated. Allegory and symbolism were to impress the Middle Ages as perhaps no other element of their inheritance. The mediaeval man thought and felt in symbols, and the sequence of his thought moved as frequently from sjonbol to symbol as from fact to fact. The allegorical faculty with the Fathers was dogmatic and theological ; ingenious in devising useful interpretations, but oblivious to all reasonable propriety in the meaning which it twisted into the text : controversial necessities readily overrode the rational and moral requirements of the " historical " or " literal " meaning. For the deeply realized allegorical significance was a law unto itself. These characteristics of patristic allegory passed over to the Middle Ages, which in the course of time were to impress human qualities upon the patristic material. ^ Cf. Taylor, Classical Heritage,*-^. 97 sqq. 2 Ante, Chapters IV., V. 70 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv The Bathsheba and Uriah episode in the Hfe of David was of course taken allegorically, and affords a curious example of a patristic interpretation originating in the exigencies of controversy, and then becoming authoritative for later periods when the echoes of the old controversy had long been silent. Augustine was called upon to answer the book of the clever Manichaean, Faustus, the stress of whose attacks was directed against the Old Testament. Faustus declared that he did not blaspheme " the law and the prophets/' but rejected merely the special Hebrew customs and the vile calumnies of the Old Testament writers, imputing shameful acts to prophets and patriarchs. In his list of shocking narratives to be rejected, was the story " that David after having had such a number of wives, defiled the little woman of Uriah his soldier, and caused him to be slain in battle." ^ ' Augustine responds with a general exclamation at the Manichaean's failure to understand the sacramental sjmibols (sacramenta) of the Law and the deeds of the prophets. He then speaks of certain Old Testament statements regarding God and His demands, and proceeds to consider the nature of sin and the questionable deeds of the prophets. Some of the reprehended deeds he justifies, as, for instance, Abraham's intercourse with Hagar and his deceit in telling Abimelech that Sara was his sister when she was his wife. He also declares that Sara typifies the Church, which is the secret spouse of Christ, Proceeding further, he does not justify, but palliates, the conduct of Lot and his daughters, and then introduces its typological significance. At length he comes to David. First he gives a noble estimate of David's character, his righteousness, his liability to sin, and his quick penitence.^ Afterwards he considers, briefly as he says, what David's sin with Bathsheba signifies prophetically.^ The passage may be given to show what a mixture of banality and disregard of moral propriety in drawing analogies might emanate from the best mind among the ^ Contra Faustum, xxii. 1-5. ^ Contra Fatistum, xxii. 66-68. 3 Augustine's method in this twenty-second Book is first to consider the actual sinfulness or the justification of these deeds, and afterwards to take up in suc- cession their typological significance. So, for example, he discusses the blame- fulness of Judah's conduct with Tamar in par. 61-64 and its typology in 83-86. CHAP. XXVIII SCRIPTURAL ALLEGORIES 7\ Latin Fathers, and be repeated by later transitional and mediaeval commentators. " The names themselves when interpreted indicate what this deed prefigured, David is interpreted ' Strong of hand * or ' Desirable.' And what is stronger than that Lion of the tribe of Judah that overcame the world ? and what is more desirable than him of whom the prophet says : * The desired of aU nations shall come ' (Hag. ii. 7) ? Bathsheba means ' well of satiety/ or ' seventh well.' Whichever of these interpreta- tions we adopt will suit. For in Canticles the Bride who is the Church is called a well of living water (Cant. iv. 15) ; and to this well the name of the seventh number is joined in the sense of Holy Spirit ; and this because of Pentecost (the fiftieth), the day on which the Holy Spirit came. For that same festival is of the weeks [de septimanis constare) as the Book of Tobit testifies. Then to forty-nine, which is seven times seven, one is added, whereby unity is commended. By this spiritual, that is ' Seven-natured ' {septenario) gift, the Church is made a well of satiety ; because there is made in her a well of living water springing up unto everlasting life, which whoso has shall never thirst (John iv. 14). Uriah, indeed, who had been her husband, what but devil does his name signify ? In whose vilest wedlock all those were bound whom the grace of God sets free, that the Church without spot or wrinkle may be married to her own Saviour. For Uriah is interpreted, ' My light of God ' ; and Hittite means ' cut off,' or he who does not stand in truth, but by the guilt of pride is cut off" frorn the supernal hght which he had from God ; or it means, he who in falling away from his true strength which was lost, nevertheless fashioneth himself into an angel of hght (2 Cor. xi. 14), daring to say : ' My light is of God.' Therefore this David gravely and wickedly sinned ; and God rebuked his crime through the prophet with a threat ; and he himself washed it away by repenting. Yet likewise He, the desired of all nations, was enamoured of the Church bathing upon the roof, that is cleansing herself from the filth of the world, and in spiritual contemplation surmounting and trampling on her house of clay ; and knowledge of her having been had at their first meeting. He afterwards kiUed the devil, apart from her, and joined her to himself in perpetual marriage. Therefore we hate the sin but will not quench the prophecy. Let us love that {ilium) David, who is so greatly to be loved, who through mercy freed us from the devil ; and let us also love that {isfum) David who by the humiUty of penitence healed in himself so deep a wound of sin.''^ ^ Contra Faustum, xxii. 87. St. Ambrosej in his Apologia Prophetae David cap. iii. (Migne 14, col. 857), written some years before Augustine's treatise 72 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv Augustine's interpretation of the story of David and Bathsheba was embodied verbatim in a work upon the Old Testament by Isidore of Seville.^ The voluminous commen- tator Rabanus Maurus took the same, also verbatim, either from Isidore or Augustine.^ His pupil, Walafrid Strabo, in his famous Glossa ordinaria, cited, probably from Rabanus, the first part of the passage els far as the reference to the well of living water from John's Gospel. He abridged the matter somewhat, thus showing the smoothing compiler's art which was to bring his Glossa ordinaria into such general use. Walafrid omitted the lines declaring that Uriah signified the devil. He did cite, however, again probably from Rabanus, part of a long passage, taken by Rabanus from Gregory the Great, where Bathsheba is declared to be the letter of the Law, united to a carnal people, which David (Christ) joins to himself in a spiritual sense. Uriah is that carnal people, to wit, the Jews.^ Thus far as to the comments on the narrative from the eleventh chapter of the Second Book of Samuel, otherwise called the Second Book of Kings. When Rabanus came to explain the sixth verse of the first chapter of Matthew — " And David begat Solomon from her who was the wife of Uriah " — he said : " Uriah indeed, that is interpreted ' My light of God,' signifies the devil,- who fashions himself into an angel of light, daring to say to God : ' My light of God,' and ' I will be like unto the Most High ' (Isaiah xiv.)." * Here pupil Walafrid follows his master, but adds : " Whose be- wedded Church Christ became enamoured of from the terrace of His paternal majesty and joined her, made beautiful to himself in matrimony." ^ With Rabanus and Walafrid, as with Isidore and the Venerable Bede who were the links between these Carolingians against Faustus, finds Bathsheba to signify the " congregatio nationum quae non erat Christo legitimo quodam fidei copulata connubio." ^ Quaestiones in Vet. Testam. in Regum II. (Migne 83, col. 411). Isidore died A.D. 636 [ante, Chapter V.). 2 Comment, in Libros IV. Regum, in lib. ii. cap. xi. ; Migne, PeU. Lot. 109, col. 98 (written in 834). On Rabanus and Walafrid see ante. Chapter X. ^ Glossa ordinaria, Lib. Regum, ii. cap. xi. (Migne 113, col. 571, 572). * Comment, in Matthaenm (Migne 107, col. 734). ^ Mi;?ne 114, col. 67. cHAP.xxvm SCRIPTURAL ALLEGORIES 73 and the Fathers, the interest in Scripture relates to its allegorical significance. Unmindful of the obvious and literal meaning of the text, they were unabashed by the incongruity of their allegorical interpretations.^ Rabanus, for instance, had unbounded enthusiasm for Exodus, because of its rich symbolism : " Among the Scriptures embraced in the Pentateuch of the Law, the Book of Exodus excels in merit ; in it almost all the sacraments by which the present Church is founded, nourished, and ruled, are figuratively set forth. For there, through the corporeal exit of the children of Israel from the terrestrial Egypt, our exit from the spiritual Egypt is made clear. There again, through the crossing of the Red Sea and the submersion of Pharaoh and the Egyptians, the mystery of Baptism and the destruction of spiritual enemies are figured. There the immola- tion of the typifying lamb and the celebration of the Passover suggest the passion of the true Lamb and our redemption. There manna from heaven and drink from a rock are given in order to teach us to desire the heavenly bread and the drink of life. There precepts and judgments are delivered to the people of God upon a mountain in order that we may learn to be subject to supernal discipline. There the construction of the tabernacle and its vessels is ordered to take place with worship and sacrifices, that therein the adornment of the marvellous Church and the rites of spiritual sacrifices may be indicated. There the perfumes of incense and anointment are prepared, in order that the sancti- fication of the Holy Spirit and the mystery of sacred prayers may be commended to us." ^ The same commentator compiled a dictionary of allegories ^ It was the way of Bede in his commentaries to speak briefly of the literal or historic meaning of the text, and then give the usual symbolical interpretations, paying special attention to the significance of the Old Testament narratives as types of the career of Christ (see e.g. the beginning of the Commentary on Exodus, Migne 92, col. 285 sqq., and Prologue to the allegorical Commentary on Samuel, Migne 92, col. 501, 502). For example, in the opening of the First Book of Samuel, Elkanah is a type of Christ, and his two wives Peninnah and Hannah represent the Synagogue and the Church. When Samuel is born to Hannah he also is a type of Christ ; and Bede says it need not astonish one that Hannah's spouse and Hannah's son should both be types of Christ, since the Mediator between God and man is at once the spouse and son of Holy Church : He is her spouse as He aids her with His confidence and hope and love, and her son when by grace He enters the hearts of those who believe and hope and love. In Samuelam, cap. iii. (Migne 91, col. 508.) Bede's monastic mind balked at the literal statement that Elkanah had two wives (see the Prologue, Migne 91, col. 499). ^ Com. in Exodum, Praefatio (Migne 108, col. 9). 74 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv entitled Allegoriae in universam sacram scripturam,^ saying in his lumbering Preface : " Whoever desires to arrive at an understanding of Holy Scripture should consider when he should take the narrative historically, when aUegorically, when anagogically, and when tropologically. For these four ways of understanding, to wit, history, allegory, tropology, anagogy, we call the four daughters of wisdom, who cannot fully be searched out without a prior knowledge of these. Through them Mother Wisdom feeds her adopted children, giving to tender beginners drink in the milk of history ; to those advancing in faith, the food of allegory ; to the strenuous and sweating doers of good works, satiety in the savoury refection of tropology ; and finally, to those raised from the depths through contempt of the earthly and through heavenly desire progressing towards the summit, the sober intoxication of theoretical contemplation in the wine of anagogy. . . . History, through the ensample which it gives of perfect men, incites the reader to the imitation of hohness ; allegory, in the revelation of faith, leads to a knowledge of truth ; tropology, in the instruction of morals, to a love of virtue ; anagogy, in the display of ever- lasting joys, to a desire of eternal fehcity. In the house of our soul, history lays the foundation, allegory erects the walls, anagogy puts on the roof, while tropology provides ornament, within through the disposition, without through the effect, of the good work." 2 This work, alphabetically arranged, gave the allegorical significations of words used in the Vulgate, with examples ; for instance : " Ager (field) is the world, as in the Gospel : ' To the man who sowed good seed in his field,' that is to Christ, who sows preaching through the world. 1 Migne 112, col. 849-1088. A number of these dictionaries were compiled, the earliest being the De formulis spiritalis intellegentiae of Eucherius, Bishop of Lyons, who died in 450, ed. by Pauly 1884. In the later Middle Ages, Alanus de Insulis {post, Chapter XXX.) compiled one. 2 These distinctions, not commonly observed, are frequently reiterated. Says Hugo of St. Victor (see post. Chapter XXIX.) in the Prologue to his De sacrameiUis : " Divine Scripture, with threefold meaning, considers its matter historically, allegorically, and tropologically. History is the narrative of facts, and. follows the primary meaning of words ; we have allegory when the fact which is told signifies some other fact in the past, present, or future ; and tropology when the narrated fact signifies that something should be done." Of. Hugo's Didas- calicon, v. cap. 2, where Hugo illustrates his meaning, and points out that this threefold significance is not to be found in every passage of Scripture. In ibid. v. cap. 4, he gives seven curious rules of interpretation (Migne 176, col. 789-793). In his De Scripturis, etc., praenotatiunculae, cap. 3 (Migne 175, col. 11 sqq.), Hugo speaks of the anagogical significance in the place of the tropological. CHAP. XXVIII SCRIPTURAL ALLEGORIES 75 " Amicus (friend) is Christ, as in Canticles : ' He is my friend, daughters of Jerusalem/ for He loved His Church so much that He would die for her. . . . " Ancilla (handmaid) is the Church, as in the Psalms : ' Make safe the son of thine handmaid/ that is me, who am a member of the Church. Ancilla, corruptible flesh, as in Genesis : ' Cast out the handmaid and her son,' that is, despise the flesh and its carnal fruit. Ancilla, preachers of the Church, as in Job : * He win bind her with his handmaids,^ because the Lord through His preachers conquered the devil. Ancilla, the effeminate minds of the Jews, as in Job : ' Thy handmaids hold me as a stranger,' because the effeminate minds of the Jews knew me through faith. ^ Ancilla, the lowly, as in Genesis, ' and meal for his handmaids,' because Holy Church affords spiritual refection to the lowly. Aqua is the Holy Spirit, Christ, subtle wisdom, loquacity, temporal greed, baptism, the hidden speech of the prophets, the holy preaching of Christ, compunction, temporal prosperity, adversity, human knowledge, this world's wealth, the Hteral meaning, carnal pleasure, eternal reflection, holy angels, souls of the blessed, saints, humihty's lament, the devotions of the saints, sins of the elect which God condones, knowledge of the heretics, persecutions, unstable thoughts, the blandishments of tempta- tions, the pleasures of the wicked, the punishments of hell. Mons, mountain (in the singular) the Virgin Mary, monies (in the plural) angels, apostles, subhme precepts, the two Testa- ments, inner meditations, proud men, the Gentiles, evil spirits.^ Thus Rabanus dragged into his compilation every mean- ing that had ever been ascribed to the words defined. In him and his contemporaries, the allegorical material, apart 1 Raban's Latin is " Ligabit earn ancillis suis " — the verse in Job. xl. 24 reads " Ligabis earn ancillis tuis ? " In the English version the verse is Job xli. 5, " Wilt thou bind him for thy maidens ? " " " Per fidem me cognoverimt " ; I surmise a non is omitted. 3 I have omitted the Scriptural citations. Rabanus wrote an allegorical De laudibus sanctae cfucis {Migne 107, col. 133-294), composed in metre with prose explanations, which explain very little. The metrical portion is a puzzle con- sisting of twenty-eight " figures," or lineal delineations interwoven in hexameter verses ; the words and letters contained within each figure " make sense *' when read by themselves, and form verses in metres other than hexameters. The whole is as incomprehensible in meaning as it is indescribable in form. Angels, cherubim and seraphim, tetragons, the virtues, months, winds, elements, signs of the Zodiac, and other twelvefold mysteries, the days of the year, the number seven, the five books of Moses, the four evangelists, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the eight beatitudes, the mystery of the number forty, the sacrament shown by the number fifty, — all these and much besides contribute to the glory of the Cross, and are delineated and arranged in cruciform manner, so as to be included within the scope of the cross's symbolical significance. 76 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv from its utility for salvation, seems void of human interest or poetic quality, as yet unstirred by a breath of hfe. That was to enter when allegory and all manner of symbolism began to form the temper of mediaeval thought, and become a chosen vessel of the mediaeval spirit in poetry and art. The vital change had taken place before the twelfth century had turned its first quarter.^ There flourished at this time a worthy monk named Honorius of Autun, also called " the Solitary." It has been argued, and vehemently contradicted, that he was of German birth. At all events, monk he was and teacher at Autun. Those about him sought his instruction, and also requested him to put his discourses into writing for their use ; their request reads as if at that time Honorius had retired from among them.^ This is all that is known of the man who composed the most popular handbook of sermons in the Middle Ages. It was called the Speculum ecclesiae. Honorius may never have preached these sermons ; but still his book exists with sermons for Sundays, saints' days, and other Church festivals ; a sermon also to be preached at Church dedications, and one " sermo generalis," very useful, since it touched up aU orders of society in succession, and a preacher might take or omit according to his audience. Before begiiming, the preacher is directed to make the sign of the cross and invoke the Holy Spirit : he is admonished first to pronounce his text of Scripture in the Latin tongue, and then expound it in the vernacular ; ^ he is instructed as to what portions of certain sermons should be used under special circumstances, and what parts he may omit in winter when the church is cold, or when in summer it is too hot ; or this is left quite to his discretion : " Here make an end if you wish ; but if time permits, continue thus." ^ Since allegory and the spirit of symbolism pervaded all mediaeval thought, the present and two following chapters aim only at setting forth the elements (with pertinent examples) of this quite limitless subject. 2 See prefatory epistle to Speculum ecclesiae, Migne 172, col. 813. Com- pare the prefatory epistle to the Gemma animae, ibid. col. 541, and the Preface to the Elucidarium, ibid. col. 1109. Probably Honorius died about 1130. Cf. J. A. Endres, Honorius Augustodensis (Augsburg, 1906). ^ We have these sermons only in Latin. Presumably a preacher using them, gave them in that language or rendered them in the vernacular as he thought fit. cHAP.xxviii SCRIPTURAL ALLEGORIES yy Most of these sermons are short, and contain much excellent moral advice put simply and directly. They also make constant use of allegory, and evidently Honorius's chief care in their composition was to expound his text allegorically and point the allegory's application to the needs of his supposed audience. Neither he nor any man of his time devised many novel allegorical interpretations ; but the old ones had at length become part of the mediaeval spirit and the regular means of apprehending the force and meaning of Scripture. Consequently Honorius handles his allegories more easily, and makes a more natural human application of them, than Rabanus or Walafrid had done. Sometimes the allegory seems to ignore the moral lesson of the literal facts ; but while a smile may escape us in reading Honorius, the allegories in his sermons are rarely strained and shocking, likewise rarely dull. A general point from which he regards the narratives and institutions of the Old Testament is summed up in his statement, that for us Christ turned all provisions of the law into spiritual sacraments.^ The whole Old Testament has pre-figurative significance and spiritual meaning ; and likewise every narra- tive in the Gospels is spiritual. Two or three examples will illustrate Honorius's edifying way of using allegory. His sermon for the eleventh Sunday after Pentecost is typical of his manner. The text is from the thirty-first ^ Psalm : " Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin." Opening with an exhortation to penitence and tears and almsgiving, the preacher turns to the self-righteous " whose obstinacy the Lord curbs in the Gospel for the day, telling how two went up into the temple to pray, the one a Pharisee, to wit, one of the Jewish clergy, the other a Publican." After proceeding for a while with sound and obvious comment on the situation, Honorius says : " By the two men who went up into the temple to pray, two peoples, the Jewish and the Gentile, are meant. The Pharisee who went close to the altar is the Jewish people, who possessed the ^ " Ommia legalia Christus nobis convertit in sacramenta spiritualia " is Honorius's apt phrase (which may be borrowed !), Migne 172, col. 842. His special reference is to circumcision. * Ps. xxxi. Vulgate ; Ps. xxxii. 2, Authorized Version. 7^ THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv Sanctuary and the Ark. He teUs aloud his merits in the temple, because in the world he boasts of his observance of the law. " The Publican who stands afar off is the Gentile people, who were far off from the worship of God. He did not hft up his eyes to heaven, because the Gentile was agape at the things of earth. He beat his breast when he bewailed his error through penitence ; and because he humbled himself in confession, God exalted him through pardon. Let us also, beloved, thus stand afar off, deeming ourselves unworthy of the holy sacraments and the companionship of the saints. Let us not hft up our eyes to heaven, but deem ourselves unworthy of it. Let us beat our breasts and punish our misdeeds with tears. Let us fall prostrate before God ; and let us weep in the presence of the Lord who made us, so that He may turn our lament to joy, rend asunder our garb of mourning, and clothe us with happiness.'' Honorius lingers a moment with some further exhortations suggested by his parable, and then turns to the edification to be found in fables wisely composed by profane writers. Let not the congregation be scandalized ; for the children of Israel despoiled the Egyptians of gold and gems and precious vesture, which they afterwards devoted to completing the tabernacle. Pious Christians spoil the Egjrptians when they turn profane studies to spiritual account. The philosophers tell of a woman bound to a revolving wheel, her head now up, now down. The wheel is this world's glory, and the woman is that fortune which depends on it. Again, they tell of one who tries to roU a stone to the top of a mountain ; but, near the top, it hurls the wretch prostrate with its weight and crashes back to the bottom ; and again, of one whose liver is eaten by a vulture, and, when consumed, grows again. The man who pushes up the stone is he who toil- somely amasses dignities, to be plimged by them to heU ; and he of the liver is the man upon whose heart lust feeds. From that pest, they say. Medusa sprang, with noble form exciting many to lust, but with her look turning them to stone. She is wantonness, who turns to stone the hearts of the lewd through their lustful pleasure. Perseus slew her, covering himself with his crystalline shield ; for the strong man, gazing into virtue's mirror, averts his heart's coimte- nance {^.e. from wantonness). The sword with which he Jdlls her is the fear of everlasting fire. CHAP. XXVIII SCRIPTURAL ALLEGORIES 79 Then, continues Honorius, we read of a boy brought up by one of the Fathers in a hermitage ; but as he grew to youth he was tickled with lust. The Father commanded him to go alone into the desert and pass forty days in fasting and prayer. When some twenty days had passed, there appeared a naked woman foul and stinking, who thrust herself upon him, and he, unable to endure her stench, began to repel her. At which she asked : " Why do you shudder at the sight of me for whom you burned ? I am the image of lust, which appears sweet to men's hearts. If you had not obeyed the Father, you would have been overthrown by me as others have been." So he thanked God for snatching him from the spirit of fornication. Many other examples lead us to the path of life. Honorius closes with the story of the " Three Fools/' observed by a certain Father : the first an Ethiopian who was unable to move a faggot of wood, which he would continually unbind and make still heavier by adding further sticks ; the second, a man pouring water into a vase which had no bottom ; and, thirdly, the two men who came bearing before them crosswise a beam of wood ; as they neared the city gate neither would let the other precede him even a little, and so both remained without. The Ethiopian who adds to his in- supportable faggot is he who continually increases his weight of sin, adding new sins to old ones unrepented of ; he who pours water into the vase with no bottom is he who by his unclean- ness loses the merit of his good acts ; and the two who bear the beam crosswise are those bound by the yoke of Pride. ^ Such are good examples of the queer stories to which preachers resorted. One notices that whatever be the source from which Honorius draws, his interest is always in the allegory found in the narratives. Another very apt example of his manner is his treatment of the story of the Good Samaritan, so often depicted on Gothic church windows. For us this parable carries an exhaustless wealth of direct application in human life ; it was regarded very differently by Honorius and the glass painters, whose windows are a pictorial transcription of the first half of his sermon.^ ^ speculum ecclesiae, " Dominica XI." {Migne 172, col. 1053 sqq.). ^ Yet, curiously enough, near the time when I was making the following translation, I heard an elderly country clergyman preach substantially this sermon So THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv " Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly " — this is the text ; and Honorius proceeds : " Adam was the unhappy man who through the counsel of the wicked departed from his native land of Paradise and dragged all his descendants into this exile. He thus stood in the way of sinners, because he remained stable in sin. He sat ' in the seat of the scornful/ because by evil example he taught others to sin. But Christ arose, the blessed man who walketh in the coimsel of the Father from the hall of heaven into prison after the lost servant. He did not walk in the counsel of the ungodly when the devil showed Him all the kingdoms of the world ; He did not stand in the way of sinners, because he committed no sin ; He did not sit in the seat of the scornful, since neither by word nor deed did He teach evil. Thus as that unhappy man drew all his carnal children into death, this blessed man brought aU His sons to Hfe. As He himself sets forth in the Gospel : ' A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and robbers attacked and wounded him, stripped him and went away. And by chance there came that way a certain priest, who seeing him half-dead, crossed to the other side. Likewise a Levite passed by when he had seen him. But a Samaritan coming that same way, had compassion on the poor wretch, bound up his wounds and poured in oil and wine, and setting him on his own beast, brought him to an inn. The next day he gave the innkeeper two pence and asked that he care for him, and if more was needed He promised to repay the innkeeper on His return. " Surely man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho when our first parent from the joys of Paradise entered death's ecHpse. For Jericho, which means moon, designates the^cHpse of our mortaUty. Whereby man fell among thieves, since a swarm of demons at once surrounded the exile. Wherefore also they despoiled him, since they stripped him of the riches of Paradise and the garment of immortaKty. They gave him woimds, for sins flowed in upon him. They left him hah-dead, because dead in soul. The priest passed down the same way, as the Order of Patriarchs proceeded along the path of mortahty. The priest left him woimded, having no power to aid the human race while himself sore wounded with sins. The Levite went that way, inasmuch as the Order of Prophets also had to tread the path of death. He too passed by the wounded man, because he could bear no human aid to the lost while himself groaning imder the wounds of sin. The wretch half-dead was healed by the Samaritan, for the man set apart through Christ is made whole. of Honorius — wherever he may have culled it, perhaps from some useful " Homiletical " Commentary. cHAP.xxvm SCRIPTURAL ALLEGORIES 8i " Samaria was the chief city of the Israelitish kingdom whose chiefs were led away to idolatry in Nineveh, and Gentiles were placed in her. The Jews abhorred their fellowship, making them a byword of malediction. So when reviling the Lord, they called Him a Samaritan. The Lord was the true Samaritan, being called guardian (custos) since the human race is guarded by Him. He went down this way when from heaven He came into this world. He saw the wotmded traveller, inasmuch as He saw man held in misery and sin. He was moved with compassion for him, since for man He undergoes aU pains. Approaching, He bound his wounds when, proclaiming eternal Hfe, He taught man to cease from sin. He bound his wounds together with the two parts of the bandage when He quelled sins through two fears — the servile fear which forbids through penalties, and the filial fear which exhorts the holy to good works. He drew tight the lower part of the bandage when He struck men's hearts with fear of hell. Their worm, He said, does not die, and their fire is not quenched. He drew tight the upper part when He taught the fear which belongs to the study of good. ' The children of the kingdom,' said He, ' shall be cast into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.' He poured in wine and oil when He taught repentance and pardon. He poured in wine when He said, ' Repent ye ' ; He added oil when He said, * for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.' He set him upon His beast when He bore our sins in His body on the Cross. He led him to the inn when He joined him to the supernal Church. The inn, in which hving beings are assembled at night, is the present Church, where the just are harboured amid the darkness of this hfe until the Day of Eternity blows and the shadows of mortahty give way. " The next day He tendered the two pence. The first day was of death, the next of hfe. The day of death began with Adam, when all die. The day of life took its beginning from Christ, in whom all shall be made alive. Before Christ's resurrection all men were travelhng to death ; since His resurrec- tion aU the faithful have been rising to hfe. He tendered the two pence the next day- — when after His resurrection He taught that the two Testaments were fulfilled by the two precepts of love. He gave the pence to the innkeeper when He committed the doctrine of the law of hfe to the Order of Doctors. He directed him to tend the sick man when He commanded that the human race should be saved from sin. The stench drove the sick man from the inn, because this world's tribulation drives the righteous to seek the things celestial. Two pence are given to the innkeeper when the Doctors are raised on high by Scriptural knowledge and temporal honour. If they should require more, He repays them on His return ; for if they exemphfy good preach- VOL. II G 82 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv ing with good works, when the true Samaritan returns to judg- ment and leads him, aforetime wounded but now healed, from the inn to the celestial mansion. He will repay the zealous stewards with eternal rewards." ^ Here Honorius proceeds to expound the allegory con- tained in the healing of the dumb man and the ten lepers, and closes his sermon with two narratives, one of a poor idiot who sang the Gloria without ceasing, and was seen in glory after death ; the other of a lay nun {conversa) aroimd whose last hours were shed sweet odours and a miraculous light, while those present heard the chant of heavenly voices. The parables of Christ present types which we may apply in hfe according to circumstances. In the concrete instance of the parable we find the universal, and we deem Christ meant it so. Thus we also view the parables as symbols, which they were. Honorius, with the vast company of mediaeval and patristic expounders, ordinarily directs the symboHsm of the parables in a special mode, whereby — like the stories of the Old Testament — ^they become figurative of Christ and the needy soul of man, or figurative of the Christian dispensation with its historical antecedents and its Day of Judgment at the end. The like may be said of Honorius's allegorical interpreta- tion of Greek legends. These ancient stories have the perennial youth of human charm and meaning ever new. They had been good old stories to the Greeks, and then acquired further intendment as later men discerned a broader symbolism in them. Even in classic times. Homer's stories had been turned to allegories, philosophers and critics some- times finding in them a spiritual significance not unlike that which the same tales may bear for us. But with this difference : the later Greeks usually were trying to explain away the somewhat untrammelled ways of the Homeric pantheon, and therefore maintained that Homer's stories were composed as allegories, the wise and mystic poet choosing thus to veil his meaning. To-day we find the clarity of daybreak in Homer's tales, and if we make symbols of them we know the s5niibohsm is not his but ours. Honorius chooses to think that allegory had always lain in the old ^ speculum ecclesiae, " Dominica XIII." (Migne 172, col. 1059-1061). cHAP.xxvm SCRIPTURAL ALLEGORIES 83 story ; he will not deem it the invention of himself or other Christian writers. Here his attitude is not unlike that of the apologetic Greek critics. But his interpretations are apt to differ from theirs as well as from our own. For his symbohsm tends to abandon the broadly human, and to become, like the mediaeval Biblical interpretations, figurative of the tenets of the Christian Faith. There is an interesting example of this in the sermon for Septuagesima Sunday, which was written on a somewhat blind text from the twenty-eighth chapter of Job, Honorius proceeds expounding it through a number of strained allegories, which he doubtless drew from Gregory's Moralia ; for that great pope was the recognized expositor of Job, and the Book of Job was simply Gregory through all the Middle Ages. Perhaps Honorius felt that this sermon was rather soporific. At all events he stops in the middle to give a piece of advice to the supposed preacher : " Often put some- thing of this kind in your sermon ; for so you will relieve the tedium." And he continues thus : " Brethren, on this holy day there is much to say which I must pass over in silence, lest disgusted you should wish to leave the church before the end. For some of you have come far and must go a long way to reach your houses. Or perhaps, some have guests at home, or crying babies ; or others are not swift and have to go elsewhere, while to some a bodily infirmity brings uneasiness lest they expose themselves. So I omit much for everybody's sake, but still would say a few words. " Because to-day, beloved, we have laid aside the song of gladness and taken up the song of sadness, I would briefly tell you something from the books of the pagans, to show how you should reject the melody of this world's pleasures in order that hereafter with the angels you may make sweet harmonies in heaven. For one should pick up a gem found in dung and set it as a kingly ornament ; thus if we find anything useful in pagan books we should turn it to the building up of the Church, winch is Christ's spouse. The wise of this world write that there were three S5n:ens in an island of the sea, who used to chant the sweetest song in divers tones. One sang, another piped, the third played upon a lyre. They had the faces of women, the talons and wings of birds. They stopped all passing ships with the sweetness of their song ; they rent the sailors heavy with sleep ; they sank the ships in the brine. When a certain duke, Ulysses, had to sail by their island, he ordered his comrades to bind him to the mast 84 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv and stuff their ears with wax. Thus he escaped the peril un- harmed, and plunged the Syrens in the waves. These, beloved, are mysteries, although written by the enemies of Christ. By the sea is to be miderstood this age which rolls beneath the imceasing blasts of tribulations. The island is earth's jpy, which is intercepted by crowding pains, as the shore is beat upon by crowding waves. The three Syrens who with sweet caressing song overturn the navigators in sleep, are three deHghts which soften men's hearts for vice and lead them into the sleep of death. She who sings with human voice is Avarice, and to her hearers thus she tunes her song : * Thou shouldst get together much, so as to be able to spread wide thy fame, and also visit the Lord's sepulchre and other places, restore churches, aid the poor and thy relatives as well.' With such baneful song she charms the miser's heart, until the sleep of death oppresses him. Then she tears his flesh, the wave devours the ship, and the wretch by fierce pains is waked from his riches and plunged in eternal flame. She who plays upon the pipe is Vainglory (Jactanfia), and thus she pipes her lay for hers : ' Thou art in thy youth, and noble ; make thyself appear glorious. Spare no enemies, but Mil them aU when able. Then people will call thee a good knight.' Agaia wiU she chant : ' Thou shouldst win Jerusalem, and give great alms. Then thou wilt be famous, and wilt be called good by aU.' To the lay brethren (conversis) she sings : ' Thou must fast and pray always, singing with loud voice. Then wilt thou hear thyself lauded as a saint by aU.' Such song with vain heart she makes resound tiU the whirlpool of death devours the wretch emptied of worth. " She who sings to a lyre is Wantonness [Luxuria), and she chants melodies hke these to her parasites : ' Thou art in thy youth ; now is the time to sport with the girls — old age will do to reform in. Here is one with a fine figure ; this one is rich ; from this one you would gain much. There is plenty of time to save your soul/ In such way she melts the hearts of the wanton till Cocytus's waves engulf them suddenly tripped by death. " They have the faces of women, because nothing so estranges man from God as the love of women. They have wings of birds, because the desire of worldlings is always imstable, their appetites now craving one thing, and again their lust fl5dng to another object. They have also the talons of birds, because they tear their victims as they snatch them away to the torments of hell. Ulysses is called Wise. Unharmed he steers his course by the island, because the truly wise Christian swims over the sea of this world, in the ship of the Church. By the fear of God he binds himself to the mast of the ship, that is, to the cross of Christ ; with wax, that is with the incarnation of Christ, he seals the ears CHAP. XXVIII SCRIPTURAL ALLEGORIES of his comrades, that they may turn their hearts from lusts ; vices and yearn only for heavenly things. The Syrens are s merged, because he is protected from their lusts by the stren, of the Spirit. Unharmed the voyagers avoid the peril, inasmi as through victory they reach the joys of the saints." ^ 1 speculum ecclesiae, " Dominica in Septuagesima " (Migne 172, col. 855-8 Honorius may have forgotten the weariness of his supposed audience ; for sermon goes on with further admonition as to how the victory is to be won, The allegorical interpretation of Scripture is exemplified in the whole limit mass of mediaeval sermons. Illustrations from St. Bernard's sermons on Canti are given in Chapter XVIII., also post, in Chapter XXXVII., 11. CHAPTER XXIX THE RATIONALE OF THE VISIBLE WORLD : HUGO OF ST. VICTOR Just as the Middle Ages followed the allegorical interpreta- tion of Scripture elaborated by the Church Fathers, so they also accepted, and even made more precise, the patristic inculcation of the efficacy of such most potent symbols as the water of baptism and the bread and wine transubstantiated in the Eucharist.^ Passing onward from these mighty bases of conviction, the mediaeval genius made fertile use of allegory in the polemics of Church and State, and exalted the sjmibohcal principle into an ultimate explanation of the visible universe. Notable was the career of allegory in poUtics. TTirough- out the long struggle of the Papacy with the Empire and other secular monarchies, arguments drawn from allegory never ceased to carry weight. A very shibboleth was the witness of the " two swords " (Luke xxii. 38), both of which, the temporal as well as spiritual, the Church held to have been entrusted to her keeping for the ordering of earthly affairs, to the end that men's souls should be saved. Still more fluid was the argumentative nostrum of mankind con- ceived as an Organism, or animate body {unum corpus, corpus mysticum). This metaphor was found in more than one of the Latin classics ; but patristic and mediaeval writers took it from the works of Paul.^ The likeness of the human body to the body poUtic or ecclesiastic was carried out 1 For the Eucharist in the Carolingian period see ante. Chapter X. Berengar of Tours is spoken of in Chapter XII., iv. ^ Many members in one body, one body in Christ (Rom. xii. 4, 5). 86 CHAP. XXIX THE SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE 87 in every imaginable detail, and used acutely or absurdly by politicians and schoolmen from the eleventh century onward.^ We turn to the symbolical explanation of the universe. In the first half of the twelfth century, a profoundly medita- tive soul, Hugo of St. Victor by name, attempted a systematic exposition of the symbolical or sacramental plan inhering in God's scheme of creation. Of the man, as with so many monks and schoolmen whose names and works survive, little is known beyond the presentation of his personality afforded by his writings. He taught in the monastic school of St. Victor, a community that had a story, with which may be connected the scanty facts of the short and happy pilgrimage to God, which made Hugo's life on earth.^ When William of Champeaux, according to Abaelard's account, was routed from his logical positions in the cathedral school of Paris, ^ he withdrew from the school and from the city to the quiet of a secluded spot on the left bank of the Seine, not far distant from Notre-Dame. Here was an ancient chapel dedicated to Saint-Victor, and here William, with some companions, organized themselves into a monastic community according to the rule of the canons of St. Augustine. This was in 1108. If for a time William laid aside his studies and lecturing, he soon resumed them at the solicitations of his scholars, joined to those of his friend Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans.* And so the famous school of Saint- Victor began. William remained there only four years, being made Bishop of Chalons in 1112, and thereafter figuring prominently in Church councils, frequent in France at this epoch. 1 Of. post, Chapter XXXIV., v. ^ The works of Hugo of Saint- Victor are contained in Migne's Patrologia Latina, 175-177 (Paris, 1854 ; the reprint of 1883 is' full of misprints). The Prolegomena (in French) of Mgr. Hugonin are elaborate and valuable. Mignon, Les OHgines de la scholasfigue et Hugues de Saint-Victor (2 vols., Pads, 1895), follows Hugonin's writing and adds little of value. An exposition of Hugo's philosophy is to be found in Stockl, Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Band I, pp. 305-355 (Mainz, r864). On the authenticity of the writings ascribed to him see Haureau, Les CBuvres de Hugues de Saint-Victor (2nd ed., Paris, 1886). For Hugo's position in the history of scholasticism and mysticism see post, Chapter XXXVII., 11. 3 Post, Chapter XXXVII., i. '* Hildebert's letter is given post, Chapter XXXI., in. 88 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv Under William's disciple and successor, Gilduin, the community flourished and increased. King Louis VL, whose confessor was Gilduin himself, endowed it liberally, and other donors were not lacking. Saint- Victor became rich, and its fame for learning and holiness spread far and wide.^ Abbot Gilduin lived to see more than forty houses of monks or regular canons ^ flourishing as dependencies of Saint- Victor. He died in 1155, some years after the death of the young man whose scholarship and genius was the pride of the Victorine community. Notwithstanding a statement in an old manuscript, that Hugo was born near Ypres in Flanders, the ancient tradition of Saint- Victor, confirmed by the records of the cathedral of Halberstadt, shows him to have been a son of the Count of Blankemberg, and bom at Hartingam in Saxony.^ His uncle Reinhard was Bishop of Halberstadt, where his great- uncle, named Hugo like himself, was archdeacon. Reinhard had been a pupil of William of Champeaux at Saint- Victor, and after becoming bishop continued to cherish a profound esteem for him. The young Hugo renounced his inheritance and entered a monastery not far from Halberstadt ; but soon, in view of the disturbed affairs of Saxony, his uncle Reinhard urged him to go and pursue his studies at Saint- Victor. The young man persuaded his great-uncle Hugo to accompany him. By circuitous routes, visiting various places of pious interest on the way, the two reached Saint- Victor, where they were received with all honour by the abbot Gilduin. This was not far from the year 1115, and Hugo was about twenty at the time. He was already an accomplished scholar, and doubtless it is to his previous ^ On the neighbouring schools of Notre-Dame and St. Genevieve see post, Chapter XXXVIII. 2 At the opening of his Expositio in regulam becUi Augustiniy Migne 176, col. 881, Hugo explains that the precepts under which a monastic community lives are called the regula, and what we call a regula is called a canon by the Greeks ; and those are called canonici or regulates, who " juxta regularia praecepta sanctorum Patrum canonice atque apostolice vivunt." Thus the " regular canons " of St. Augustine were monks who lived according to the rule ascribed to that saint. In the case of the Victorines the rule was drawn up chiefly by Abbot Gilduin. See Prolegomena to the works of Hugo, Migne 175, col. xxiv. sqq. ^ See the Prolegomena to the works of Hugo de Saint-Victor, by Hugonin, Migne 175, col. xl. sqq. CHAP. XXIX THE SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE 89 studies that he refers when he speaks as follows in his book of elementary instruction, called the Didascalicon : " I dare say that I never despised anything pertaining to learning, and learned much that might strike others as light and vain, I practised memorizing the names of everything I saw or heard of, thinking that I could not properly study the nature of things unless I knew their names. Daily I examined my notes of topics, that I might hold in my memory every proposition, with the questions, objections, and solutions. I would inform myself as to controversies and consider the proper order of the argument on either side, carefully distinguishing what pertained to the office of rhetoric, oratory, and sophistry. I set problems of numbers ; I drew figures on the pavement with charcoal, and with the figure before me I demonstrated the different quahties of the obtuse, the acute and the right angle, and also of the square. Often I watched out the nocturnal horoscope through winter nights. Often I strung my harp {Saepe ad numerum protensum in ligno magadam ducere solebam) that I might perceive the different sounds and likewise delight my mind with the sweet notes. All these were bojdsh occupations (puerilia) but not useless. Nor does it burden my stomach to know them now." ^ Not long after Hugo's arrival at Saint- Victor he began to teach at the monastery school, and upon the death of its director, in 1133, succeeded to the office, which he held until his death in 1141.^ Colourless and grey are the outer facts of a monk's life, counting but little. The soul of a Hugo of Saint- Victor did not soil itself with any interest in the pleasures of the world : " He is not solitary with whom is God, nor is the power of joy extinguished because his appetite is kept from things abject and vile. He rather does himself an injustice who admits to the society of his joy what is disgraceful or unworthy of his love.'' ^ Hugo belonged to the aristocracy of contemplative piety, with its scorn of whatever lies without the pale of the soul's 1 Didascalicon, vi. 3 (Migne 176, col. 799). Other contents of this work are given, post, Chapter XXXVII., i. ^ His death is touchingly described in a letter of Osbert, the canon in charge of the infirmary. See Migne 175, col. xlvii. and clxi. ^ Hugo, De arrha animae, Migne 176, col. 954. Yet Hugo sometimes was stung with an irrelevant pang for the German fatherland, which he had left : "I have been an exile since my boyhood, and I know how the mind grieves to for- sake some poor hut's narrow hearth, and how easily it may then despise the marble hall and fretted roof " {Didascalicon, iii. 20 ; Migne 176, col. 778). Compare the single letter of Hugo that has a personal note, Ep. i. (Migne 176, col. loii). 90 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv companionship with God. In his independent way he followed Augustine, and Augustine's Platonism, which was so largely the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and Porphyry. He also followed the real Plato speaking in the Timaeus, with which he was acquainted. Plato would have nothing to do with allegorical interpretation as a defence of Homer's gods ; but he could himself make very pretty allegories, and his theory of ideas as at once types and creative intelligences lent itself to Christian systems of symbolism. In this way he was a spiritual ancestor of Hugo, who found in God the type-ideas of all things that He created. Moreover, if not Plato, at least his spiritual children — Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Plotinus — ^recognized that the highest truths must be known in modes transcending reason and its syllogisms, although these were the necessary avenues of approach. Hugo likewise regarded rational knowledge as but the path by which the soul ascends to the plateau of con- templation. The general aspects of his philosophy will be considered in a later chapter. Here he is to be viewed as a mediaeval symbolist, upon whom pressed a sense of the symbolism of all visible things. An examination of his great De sacramentis Christianae fidei will disclose that with Hugo the material creation in its deepest verity is a symbol ; that Scripture, besides its literal meaning, is allegory from Genesis to Revelation ; that the means of salvation provided by the Church are sacramental, and thus essentially symbolical, consisting of perfected and potent symbols which have been shadowed forth in the unperfected sacramental character of all God's works from the beginning.^ Hugo's little Preface (praefatiuncula) mentions certain requests made to him to write a book on the Sacraments. In undertaking it, he proposes to present in better form many things dictated from time to time rather negligently. Whatever he has taken from his previous writings he has revised as seemed best. Should there appear any in- consistency between what he may have said elsewhere and the language of the present work, he begs the reader to regard the present as the better form of statement. His 1 The De sacramentis Christianae fidei is printed in Migne 176, col. 174-618. It is thus a lengthy work. CHAP. XXIX THE SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE 91 method will be to treat his matter in the order of time ; and to this end his work is divided into two Books. The first discusses the subject from the Beginning of the World until the Incarnation of the Word ; the second continues it from the Incarnation to the final Consummation of all things. He explains that as he has elsewhere spoken at length upon the primary or historical meaning of Holy Writ,^ he will devote himself here rather to its secondary or allegorical significance. Hugo further explains the subject of his treatise in a Prologue : " The work of man's restoration is the subject-matter (materia) of all the Scriptures. There are two works, the work of founda- tion and the work of restoration, which include everything whatsoever. The former is the creation of the world with all its elements ; the latter is the incarnation of the Word with all its sacraments, those which went before from the beginning and those which follow even to the end of the world. For the incarnate Word is our King, who came into this world to fight the devil. And all the saints who were before His coming, were as soldiers going before His face ; and those who have come and will come after, until the end of the world, are as soldiers who follow their king. He is the King in the centre of His army, advancing girt by His troops. And although in such a multitude divers shapes of arms appear in the sacraments and observances of those who precede and come after, yet all are soldiers under one king and follow one banner ; they pursue one enemy and with one victory are crowned. In all of this may be observed the work of restoration. " Scripture gives first a brief account of the work of creation. For it could not aptly show how man war, restored unless it bad previously explained how he had fallen ; nor could it show how he had fallen, without first showing how God had made him, for which in turn it was necessary to set forth the creation of the whole world, because the world was made for man. The spirit was created for God's sake ; the body for the spirit's sake, and the world for the body's sake, so that the spirit might be subject to God, the body to the spirit, and the world to the body. In ^ Hugo evidently refers to his De Scripturis et scriptorihus sacris prae- notatiunculae, and his various Adnotationes elucidatonae, which will be found printed in vol. 175 of Migne's Patrologia Latina. In chap. v. of the work first mentioned (Migne 175, col. 13) he speaks sensibly of the folly of those who profess not to care for the literal historical meaning of the sacred text, but, in ignorance, spring at once to very inept allegorical interpretations. 92 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv this order, therefore. Holy Scripture describes first the creation of the world which was made for man ; then it teUs how man was made and set m the way of righteousness and discipline ; after that, how man fell ; and finally how he was restored [reparatus)," In these first little chapters of his Prologue, Hugo has grouped his topics suggestively. The world was made for man, and therefore the account of its creation is needed in order to understand man. Moreover, that man's body exists for his spirit's sake, at once suggests that a significance beyond the literal meaning is likely to dweU in that accoimt of the material creation which enables us to understand man. The soul needs instruction and guidance ; and God in creating the world for man surely had in view his most important interests, which were not those of his mortal body, but those of his soul. So the creation of the world subserves man's spiritual interests, and the divine account of it carries spiritual instruction. The allegorical significance of the world's creation, which answers to man's spiritual needs, is as veritable and real as the facts of the world's material foundation, which answers to the needs of his body. Thus symbohsm is rooted in the character and purpose of the material creation ; it Ues in the God-implanted nature of things ; therefore the allegorical interpretation . of the Scriptures corresponds to their deepest meaning and the revealed plan of God. These principles imderhe Hugo's exposition of the Christian sacraments, whose unperfected prototypes existed in the work of the Creation. No fact of sacred history, no single righteous pre-Christian observance, was unaffiliated with them. An adequate imderstanding of their nature involves a fuU knowledge not only of Christian doctrine, but of all other knowledge profitable to men — as Hugo clearly indicates in the remaining portion of his Prologue : " Whence it appears how much divine Scriptiu-e in subtle profundity surpasses all other writings, not only in its matter but in the way of treating it. In other writings the words alone carry meaning : in Scripture not only the words, but the things may mean something. Wherefore just as a knowledge of the words is needed in order to know what things are signified, so a knowledge of the things is needed in order to determine their CHAP. XXIX THE SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE 93 mystical signification of other things which have been or ought to be done. The knowledge of words falls under two heads : expression, and the substance of their meaning. Grammar relates only to expression, dialectic only to meaning, while rhetoric relates to both. A knowledge of things requires a knowledge of their form and of their nature. Form consists in external con- figuration, nature in internal quahty. Form is treated as number, to which arithmetic apphes ; or as proportion, to which music applies ; or as dimension, to which geometry applies ; or as motion, to which pertains astronomy. But physics (physica) looks to the inner nature of things. " It follows that all the natural arts serve Divine Science, and the lower knowledge rightly ordered leads to the higher. History, i.e. the historical meaning, is that in which words signify things, and its servants, as already said, are the three sciences, grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. When, however, things signify facts mystically, we have allegory ; and when things mystically signify what ought to be done, we have tropology. These two are served by arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy, and physics. Above and beyond all is that divine something to wluch divine Scripture leads, either in allegory or tropology. Of this the one part (which is in allegory) is right faith, and the other (which is in tropology) is good conduct : in these consist knowledge of truth and love of virtue, and this is the true restoration of man." ^ Hugo has now stated his position. The rationale of the world's creation lies in the nature of man. The ' Seven Liberal Arts, and incidentally all human knowledge, in hand- maidenly manner, promote an understanding of man as well as of the saving teaching contained in Scripture. This was the common mediaeval view ; but Hugo proves it through application of the principles of s3anbolism and allegorical interpretation. By these instruments he orders the arts and sciences according to their value in his Christian system, and makes all human knowledge subserve the intellectual economy of the soul's progress to God. An exposition of the Work of the Six Days opens the body of Hugo's treatise. God created all things from nothing, and at once. His creation was at first unformed ; not absolutely formless, but in the form of confusion, out of which in the six days He wrought the form of ordered dis- 1 De sacramentis, Prologus (Migne 176, col. 183-185). A more elementary statement may be foimd in De Scripturis, etc.j cap. xiii. (Migne 175, col. 20). 94 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv position. The first creation included the matter of corporeal things and (in the angelic nature) the essence of things invisible ; for the rational creature may be said to be un- formed until it take form through turning unto its Creator, whereby it gains beauty and blessedness from Him through the conversion which is of love. Thus the matter of every corporeal thing which God afterwards made, existed from the time of His first creation, and likewise the image of everything invisible. For although new souls are still created every day, their image existed previously in the angelic spirits. Then God made light, the unformed material of which He had created in the beginning. " And at the very moment when light was visibly and cor- poreally separated from darkness, the good angels were invisibly set apart from the wicked angels who were falling in the darkness of sin. The good were illumined and converted to the light of righteousness, that they might be light and not darkness. Thus we ought to perceive a consonance in the works of God, the visible work conforming to the issue of the invisible in such wise that the Wisdom which worked in both may in the former instruct by an example and in the latter execute judgment." The severance of light from darkness is the material example of how God executes judgment in dividing the good from the evil. In this visible work of God a " sacra- ment " is discernible, since every soul, so long as it is in sin, is in darkness and confusion. All the visible works of God offer spiritual lessons {spiritualia praeferunt documenta). They have sacramental qualities, and yet are not perfected and completed sacraments, as will hereafter appear from Hugo's definition. Following the order of creation, Hugo now speaks of the firmament which God set in the midst of the waters to divide them : " He who believes that this was made for his sake will not look for the reason of it outside of himself. For it all was made in the image of the world within him ; the earth which is below, is the sensual nature of man, and the heaven above is the purity of his intelligence quickening to immortal life." The rational and unseen are a world as well as the CHAP. XXIX THE SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE 95 material and visible. The sacramental quality of the material world lies in its correspondence to the unseen world. When Hugo speaks of the " sacramenta " in the creation of light and the waters divided by the firmament, he means that in addition to their material nature as light and water, they are essentially symbols. Their symbolism is as veritably part of their nature as the symbolical character of the Eucharist is part of the nature of the consecrated bread and wine. The sacraments are among the deepest verities of the Christian Faith. And the same representative verity that exists in them, exists, in less perfected mode, throughout God's entire creation. So the argument carries out the principles of the sacraments and the principles of sjmibolism to a full explanation of the world ; and Hugo's work upon the Sacraments presents his theory of theuniverse. " Many other mysteries/' says Hugo, closing the first " Part " of his first Book, " could be pointed out in the work of the creation. But we briefly speak of these matters as a suitable approach to the subject set before us. For our purpose is to treat of the sacra- ment of man's redemption. The work of creation was completed in six days, the work of restoration in six ages. The latter work we define as the Incarnation of the Word and what in and through the flesh the Word performed, with all His sacraments, both those which from the beginning prefigured the Incarnation and those wliich follow to declare and preach it till the end." It is unnecessary to follow Hugo through the discussion, upon which he now enters, of the wDl, knowledge, and power of the Trinity, or through his consideration of the knowledge which man may have of God. In Part V. of the first Book, he considers the creation of angels, their qualities and nature, and the reasons why a part of them fell. With Part VI. the creation of man is reached, which Hugo shows to have been causally prior, though later in time, to the creation of the world which God made for man. From love God created rational creatures, th§„.aiig£ls-purdy s piritual, aiid.jxa n r spiidt^-xlothed—with -ea^thJ^ Hugo ^ God is perfect and utterly good. His beatitude cannot be increased or diminished, but it can be imparted. Ttierefore the primal cause for creating rational creatures was God's wish that there should be partakers of His beatitude. This reasoning may be Christian ; but it is also close to the doctrine of Plato's Timaeus, which Hugo had read. gS THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv considers the corporeal as well as the spiritual nature and quaUties of man, and his condition before the Fall. The seventh Part is devoted to the Fall itself, and discusses its character and sinfulness. At length, in the eighth Part, Hugo reaches the true subject of his treatise, the restoration of man. Man's first sin of pride was followed by a triple punishment, consisting in a penalty and two entailed defects, the penalty being bodily mortality, the defects carnal concupiscence and mental ignorance. " Regarding his reparation three matters are to be considered, the time, the place, the remedy. The time is the present life, from the beginning to the end of the world. The place is this world.^ The remedy is threefold, and consists in faith, the sacraments, and good works. Long is the time, that man may not be taken unprepared. Hard is the place, that the trans- gressor may be castigated. Efficacious is the remedy, that the sick one may be healed." Hugo then sets forth the situation, the case in court as it were, to which God, the devil, and man, are the three parties. In this trial "... the devil is convicted of an injury to God in that he seduced God's servant by fraud and holds him by violence. Man also is convicted of an injury to God in that he despised His command and wickedly gave himself to evil servitude. Likewise the devil is convicted of an injury toward man, in first deceiving him and then bringing evil upon him. The devil holds man unjustly, though man is justly held." Since the devil's case against man was unjust, man might defeat his lordship ; but he needed an advocate (patronus), which could be only God. God, angry at man's sin, did not wish to undertake man's cause. He must be placated ; and man had no equivalent to offer for the injury he had done Him ; for he had deserted God when rational and innocent, and could deHver himself back to God, only as an irrational and sinful creature. Therefore, in order that 1 Hugo also takes a wider view of the " place " of mankind's restoration, and finds that it includes (i) heaven, where the good are confirmed and made perfect ; (2) hell, where the bad receive their deserts ; (3) the fire of purgatory, where there is correction and perfecting ; {4) paradise the place of good beginnings ; and (5) the world, the place of pilgrimage for those who need restoring. CHAP. XXIX THE SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE 97 man might have wherewithal to placate God, God through mercy gave man a man whom man might give in place of him who had sinned. God became man for man and as man gave himself for man. Thus He who had been man's Creator became also his Redeemer. God might have redeemed man in some other way, but took the way of human nature as best suited to man's weakness. After our first parent had been exiled from Paradise for his sin, the devil possessed him violently. But God's providence tempered justice with mercy, and from the penalty itself prepared a remedy. " He set for man as a sign the sacraments of his salvation, in order that whoever would apprehend them with right faith and firm hope, might, though under the yoke, have some fellowship with freedom. He set His edict informing and instructing man, so that whoever should elect to expect a saviour, should prove his vow of election in observance of the sacraments. The devil also set his sacraments, that he might know and possess his own more surely. The human race was at once divided into opposite parties, some accepting the devil's sacraments and some the sacraments of Christ. . . . Hence it is clear, that from the beginning there were Christians in fact, if not in name." Hugo proceeds to show that the time of the institution of the sacraments began when our first parent, expelled from Paradise, was subjected to the exile of this mortal life, with all his posterity until the end. " As soon as man had fallen from his first state of incorruption, he began to be sick, in body through his mortahty, in mind through his iniquity. Forthwith God prepared the medicine of his reparation through His sacraments. In divers times and places God presented these for man's heaHng, as reason and the cause demanded, some of them before the Law, some under the Law and some under grace. Though different in form they had the one effect and accomplished the one health. If any one inquires the period of their appointment he may know that as long as there is disease so long is the time of the medicine. The present life, from the beginning to the end of the world, is the time of sickness and the time of the remedy. When a sacrament has fulfilled its time it ceases, and others take its place, to bring about that same health. These in turn have been succeeded at last by others, which are not to be superseded." VOL. II H 98 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv Having followed Hugo's plan thus far, one sees why it is only at the commencement of the ninth Part of his first Book that he reaches the definition and discussion of those final and enduring sacraments which followed the Incarnation. He has hitherto been developing his theme, and now takes up its very essence. Lapng out the matter scholasticaUy, he says " there are four things to consider : first, what is a sacrament ; second, why they were instituted ; third, what may be the material of each sacrament, in which it is made and sanctified ; and fourth, how many sacraments there are. This is the definition, cause, material, and classification." Proceeding to the definition, he says that the doctors have briefly described a sacrament as the token of the sacred substance [sacrae rei signum), " For as there is body and soul in man, and in Scripture the letter and the sense, so in every sacrament there is the visible external which may be handled and the invisible within, which is believed and taught. The material external is the sacrament, and the invisible and spiritual is the sacrament's substance {res) or virtus. The external is handled and sanctified ; that is the signum of the spiritual grace, which is the sacrament's res and is invisibly apprehended." Having thus explained the old definition, Hugo objects to it on the ground that not every signum rei sacrae is a sacrament ; the letters of the sacred text and the pictures of holy things are signa rei sacrae, and yet are not sacraments. He therefore offers the following definition as adequate : " The sacrament is the corporeal or material element set out sensibly, representing from its simiHtude, signifying from its institution, and containing from its sanctification, some invisible and spiritual grace." ^ This, he maintains, is a perfect definition, since aU sacra- ments possess these three qualities, and whatever lacks them cannot properly be called a sacrament. As an example he instances the baptismal water : ^ " Sacramentum est corporale vel materiale elementum foris sensibiliter propositum ex similitudine repraesentans, et ex institutione significans, et ex sanctificatione coatinens aliquam invisibilem et spiritalem gratiam ** (pars ix. 2 ; Migne 176, col. 317). In spite of Hugo the old definition held its ground, being adopted by Peter Lombard and others after him. CHAP. XXIX THE SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE 99 " There is the visible element of water, which is the sacrament ; and these three are fonnd in one : representation from similitude, significance from appointment, virtue from sanctification. The simihtude is from creation, the appointment from dispensation, the sanctification from benediction. The first is imparted to it through the Creator, the second is added through the Saviour, the third is given through the administrator." ^ Passing to the second consideration, Hugo finds that the sacraments were instituted with threefold purpose, for man's humiliation, instruction, and discipline or exercise. The man contemning them cannot be saved. Yet God has saved many without them, as Jeremiah was sanctified in the womb, and John the Baptist, and those who were righteous under the natural law. " For those who under the natural law possessed the substance (res) of the sacrament in right faith and charity, did not to their damnation lack the sacrament." And Hugo warns whoever might take a narrower view, to beware lest in honouring God's sacraments. His power and goodness be made of no avail. " Dost thou tell me that he who has not the sacraments of God cannot be saved ? I tell thee that he who has the virtue of the sacraments of God cannot perish. Which is greater, the sacrament or the virtue of the sacrament — water or faith ? If thou wouldst speak truly, answer, ' faith.' " One notes that the twelfth century had its broad-mindedness, as well as the twentieth. While passing on discursively to consider the classifica- tion of the sacraments, Hugo considers many matters,^ and then opens his treatment of the sacraments of the natural law with a recapitulation : " The sacraments from the beginning were instituted for the restoration and heaHng of man, some under the natural law, ^ -^\ ^ Here we see clearly that the works of the Creation have the sacramental quality of similitude and, in a way, the quality of institution, since their similitude to spiritual things was intended by the Creator for the instruction of man. They lack, however, the third quality of sanctification, which enables the material signum to convey its spiritual res. ^ E.g. the material of the sacrament, which may consist in things, as in bread and wine, or in actions (as in making the sign of the cross), or in words, as in the invocation of the Trinity. He also shows how faith itself may be regarded as a sacrament, inasmuch as it is that whereby we now see in a glass darkly and behold but an image. But we shall hereafter see clearly through contemplation. Faith then is the image, i.e. the sacrament, of the future contemplation which is the sacrament's real verity, the res. loo THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv some under the written law, and others under grace. Those which are later in time will be found more worthy means of spiritual grace. For all those sacraments of the former time, under the natural or the written law, were signs and figures of those now appointed under grace. The spiritual effect of the former in their time was wrought through the virtue and sanctification drawn from the latter. If any one therefore would deny that those prior sacraments were effectual for sanctification, he does not seem to me to judge aright." ^ The sacraments of the natural law were as the umbra veritatis ; those of the written law as the imago vel figura veritatis ; but those under grace are the corpus veritatis? The written law, though given fully only through Moses, began with Abraham, upon whom circumcision was enjoined as a sacrament and sign of separation from the heathen peoples. In obedience to its precepts lies the merit, in its promises lies the reward, while its sacraments aid men to fulfil its precepts and obtain its reward. Hugo discusses the sacraments of circumcision and burnt-offerings which were necessary for the remission of sins ; then those which exercised the faithful people in devotion — the peace-offering is an example ; and again those which aided the people to cultivate piety, as the tabernacle and its utensils. Hugo's second Book, which makes the second half of his work, is devoted to the " time of grace " inaugurated by the Incarnation. It treats in detail the Christian sacraments and other topics of the Faith, down to the Last Judgment, when the wicked are cast into hell, and the blessed enter upon eternal life, where God will be seen eternally, praised without weariness, and loved without satiety. This blessed lot flows from the grace of the salvation brought by Christ, and is dependent on the sacraments, the enduring means of grace. On their part, the sacraments, whatever more they are, are symbols, in essence and function connected with the 1 De sacr. lib. i. pars xi. cap. i. The sacraments of the natural law included tithes, oblations, and sacrifices. Hugo also considers the good works which the natural law prescribed. This period ceases with the written law given implicitly through Abraham and explicitly through Moses. See De sacr. lib. i. pars xii. cap. i. Hugo appears to me to vary his point of view regarding the natural law and its time, for sometimes he regards it as the law prevailing till the time of Abraham or Moses, and again as the law under which pagan peoples lived, who did not know the Mosaic law. 2 De sacr. lib. i. pars xi. cap. 6 {Migne 176, col. 346). CHAP. XXIX THE SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE loi symbolical nature of God's creation, with the prefigurative significance of the fortunes of God's chosen people until the coming of Christ, with the import and symbolism of Christ's life and teachings, and with the symbolism inherent in the organization and building up of Christ's holy Church. Symbolism and allegory are made part of the constitution of the world and man ; they connect man's body and environment with his spirit, and link the life of this world with the life to come. Hugo has thus grounded and established symbolism in the purposes of God, in the universal scheme of things, and in the nature and destinies of man.^ ^ Whoever should wish for further illustration of Hugo's allegorical methods may examine his treatises entitled De area Noe morali and De area Noe mystiea (Migne 176, col. 618-702), where every detail of the Ark, which signifies the Church, is allegorically applied to the Christian scheme of life and salvation. With these treatises, Hugo's De vanitate mundi (Migne 176, col. 703-740) is con- nected. They will be referred to when considering Hugo's position in mediaeval philosophy, post, Chapter XXXVII., 11. CHAPTER XXX CATHEDRAL AND MASS \ HYMN AND IMAGINATIVE POEM I. GUILELMUS DURANDUS AND ViNCENT OF BEAUVAIS. II. The Hymns of Adam of St. Victor and the Anticlaudi- ANUS OF ALANUS OF LiLLE. Under sanction of Scriptural interpretation and the sacra- ments, allegory and symbolism became accepted principles of spiritual verity, sources of political argument, and modes of transcendental truth. They penetrated the Liturgy, charging every sentence and ceremonial act with saving ; significance and power ; and as plastic influences they imparted form and matter to religious art and poetry, where 'they had indeed been potent from the beginning. In the early Church the ofiice of the Mass, the ordination of priests, and the dedication of churches were not charged with the elaborate symbolism carried by these ceremonies in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,^ when the Liturgy, or speaking more specifically, the Mass, had become S5anbolical from the introit to the last benediction ; and Gothic sculpture and glass painting, which were the visible illustration of the Mass, had been impressed with corresponding allegory. Mediaeval liturgic lore is summed up by Guilelmus Durandus in his Rationale divinorum officiorum, which was composed in the latter part of the thirteenth century, and contains much that is mirrored in the art of the French cathedrals. It is ^ See Duchesne, Origines du culte chrltien. I02 CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN 103 impossible to review the elaborate symbolical significance of the Mass as set forth in the authoritative work of one who was a bishop, theologian, jurist, and papal regent.^ But a little of it may be given. The office of the Mass, says Durandus, is devised with great forethought, so as to contain the major part of what was accomplished by and in Christ from the time when He descended from heaven to the time when He ascended into heaven. In the sacrifice of the Mass all the sacrifices of the Ancient Law are represented and superseded. It may be celebrated at the third hour, because then, according to Mark, Christ ascended the cross, and at that hour also the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles in tongues of fire ; or at the sixth hour, when, according to Matthew, Christ was crucified ; or at the ninth hour, when on the cross He gave up His spirit. The first part of the Mass begins with the introii. Its antiphonal chanting signifies the aspirations and deeds, the prayers and praises of the patriarchs and prophets who were looking for the coming of the Son of God. The chorus of chanting clergy represents this yearning multitude of saints of the Ancient Law. The bishop, clad in his sacred vest- ments,^ at the end of the procession, emerging from the sacristy and advancing to the altar, represents Christ, the expected of the nations, emerging from the Virgin's womb and entering the world, even as the Spouse from His secret chamber. The seven lights borne before him on the chief festivals are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit descending upon the head of Christ. The two acolytes preceding him signify the Law and the Prophets, shown in Moses and Elias who appeared with Christ on Mount Tabor. The four who bear the canopy are the four evangelists, declaring the Gospel. The bishop takes his seat and lays aside his mitre. He is silent, as was Christ during His early ^ See the epitaph from his tomb in S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, given by Savigny, Geschichte des Romischen Rechts, v. 571 sqq., who also gives a sketch of his life. With the work of Durandus, the Gemma animae of Honorius of Autun (Books I. II. III. ; Migne 172, col. 541 sqq.) should be compared, as marking a somewhat earlier stage in the interpretation of the Litiurgy. It also gives the symbolism of the church and its parts, its ministers, and services. ^ Every article worn or borne by the bishop (or celebrating priest) has symbolic significance. I04 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv years. The Book of the Gospels lies closed before him. Around him in the company of clergy are represented the Magi and others. The services proceed, every word and act filled with symbolic import. The reading of the Epistle is reached — that is the preaching of John the Baptist, who preaches only to the Jews ; so the reader turns lo the north, the region of the Ancient Law. The reading ended, he bows before the bishop, as the Baptist humbled himself before Christ. After the Epistle comes the Gradual or responsorium, which relates to penitence and the works of the active life. The Baptist is still the main figure, until the solemn moment when the Gospel is read, which signifies the beginning of Christ's preaching. The Creed follows the Gospel, as faith follows the preaching of the truth. Its twelve parts refer to the calling of the twelve apostles. Then the bishop begins his sermon ; that is to say, after the calling of the Twelve, the Word of God is preached to the people, and it henceforth behoves the Church to hold fast to the Creed which has just been recited.^ The authoritative allegorizing of the twelfth andthirteenth centuries extended the symbolism of the Mass to the edifice in which it was celebrated ; as the Rationale sets forth in its opening chapter entitled " De ecclesia et eius partibus." There it is shown that the corporeal church is the edifice, while the Church, spiritually taken, signifies the faithful people drawn together from aU sorts of men as the edifice is constructed of aU sorts of stones. The various names ecclesia, synagogue, basilica, and tabernacle are explained ; and then why the Church is called the Body of Christ, and also Virgin, also Spouse, Mother, Daughter, Widow, and indeed Meretrix, as it shuts its bosom against no one seeking it. The form of the church conforms to that of Solomon's temple, in the anterior part of which the people heard and prayed, while the clergy prayed and preached, gave thanks and ministered, in the sanctuary or sacred place. Solomon's temple in turn was modelled on the Tabernacle of the 1 All this (which is taken from Book IV. of the Rationale) is but the first part of the Mass. The maze of symbolism increases in vastaess and intricacy as the office proceeds. CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN 105 Exodus, which, because it was constructed on a journey, is the type of the world which passes away and the lust thereof. It was made with the four colours of the arch of heaven, as the world consists of the four elements. Since God is in the world, He is in the tabernacle (which also means the Church miUtant) and in the midst of the faithful congregation. The anterior part of the tabernacle, where the people sacrificed, is also the Vita activa, in which the laity labour in neighbourly love ; and the portion where the Levites ministered is the Vita contemplativa. The church should be erected in the following manner : the place of its foundation should be made ready — well- founded is the house of the Lord upon a rock — and the bishop or licensed priest should sprinkle it with holy water to dispel the demons, and should lay the first stone, on which should be carved a cross. The head of the church, that is the chancel, should be set toward the rising sun at the time of the equinox. Now if the Jews were commanded to build walls for Jerusalem, how much more ought we to build the walls of our churches ? The material church signifies the Holy Church built of living stones in heaven, with Christ the corner-stone, upon which are set the foundations of Apostles and Prophets. The walls above are the Jews and Gentiles, who believing come to Christ from the four quarters of the world. The faithful people predestined to life are the stones thereof. The mortar in which the stones are set is made of lime, sand, and water. Lime is fervent love, which takes to itself the sand, that is, earthly toil ; then water, which is the Spirit, unites the lime and sand. As the stones of the wall would have no stability without the mortar, so men cannot be set in the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem without love, which the Holy Spirit brings. The stones of the wall are hewn and squared, which means sanctified and made clean. Some stones are borne, but do not themselves bear any burden, and these are the feeble in the Church. Other stones are borne, yet also bear ; while still others bear, but are not borne, save by Christ alone, the one foundation ; and the last are the perfect. The Jews were subject to hostile attack while building io6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv the walls of Jerusalem/ so that with one hand they set stones, while they fought with the other. Likewise are we surrounded by hostile vibes as we build the walls of the Church ; but we oppose them with the shield of faith and the breastplate of righteousness, and the sword of the Word of God in our hands. The church edifice is disposed like the human body. The chancel, where the altar is, represents the head, and the cross (transept) the arms and hands. The western portion (nave and aisles) is the rest of the body. But indeed Richard of St. Victor deems that the three parts of the edifice represent in order of sanctity, first the virgins, then the continent, and lastly married people. Again, the Church is built with four walls ; that is, by the teaching of the four evangelists it rises broad and high into the altitude of the virtues. Its length is the long- suffering with which, it endures adversity ; its breadth is love, with which it embraces its friends in God, and loves its enemies for His sake ; its height is the hope of future reward. Again, in God's temple the foundation is faith, which is as to what, is not seen ; the roof is charity, which covers a multitude of sins. The door is obedience — ^keep the com- mandments if thou wilt enter into life.^ The pavement is humility. The four walls are the four virtues, righteousness, (justitia), fortitude, prudence, and temperance. The windows are glad hospitality and free-handed pity. Some churches are cruciform, to teach us that we are crucified to the world, or should follow the Crucified. Some are circular, which signifies that the Church is spread through the circle of the world. The apse signifies the faithful laity ; the cr3rpts, the hermits. The nave signifies Christ, through whom lies the way to the heavenly Jerusalem ; the towers are the preachers and prelates, and the pinnacles represent the prelates' minds which soar on high. Also a weather-cock on top of the church signifies the preachers, who rouse the sleeping from the night of sin, and turning ever to the wind, resist the rebellious. The iron rod upholding the cock is the preacher's sermon ; and because this rod is placed above the cross on ^ ^ Neh. iv. 2 Matt. xix. 17. ! CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN 107 the church, it indicates the word of God finished and con- firmed, as Christ said in His passion, " It is finished." The lofty dome on which the cross is set, signifies how perfect and inviolate should be the preaching and observance of the Catholic Faith. The glass windows of the church are the divine Scriptures, which repel the wind and rain, but admit the light of the true sun, to wit God, into the church, that is, into the hearts of the faithful. The windows also signify the five senses of the body.^ The door of the church (again) is Christ — " I am the ' Door " ; the doors are also the Apostles. The pillars are the ; bishops and doctors ; their bases are the apostolic bishops ; their capitals are the minds of the doctors and bishops. The pavement is the foundation of faith, and also signifies the " poor in spirit," also the common crowd by whose labours the church is upheld. The rafters are the princes and preachers in the world, who defend the church by deed and word. The seats in a church are the contemplative in whom God rests without offence. The panels in the ceiling are also preachers who adorn and strengthen. The chancel, the head of the church, by being lower than the rest, indicates how great should be the humility of the clergy. The screens by which the altar is separated from the choir signify the separation of heavenly beings from things of earth. The choir stalls indicate the body's need of recreation. The pulpit is the life of the perfect. The horologe signifies the diligence with which the priests should say the canonical hours. The tiles of the roof are the knights who protect the church from pagans. The spiral stairways concealed within the walls are the secret knowledge had only by those who ascend to the heavenly places. The sacristy, where the holy utensils are kept and the priest puts on his vestments, signifies the womb of the most holy Virgin, in which Christ put on His sacred garb of flesh. From thence the priest emerges before the public, as Christ went forth from the Virgin's womb into the world. The lamp signifies Christ, who is the light of the world ; ^ Many parts of the church have more than one significance. The windows were said before to represent hospitality and pity. io8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv or the lamps signify the Apostles and other doctors, whose doctrine lights the church. Moses also made seven lights, which are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Durandus next devotes a whole chapter to the symbolism of the altar, and another to the significance and function of ornaments, pictures, and sculpture. The latter opens with the words : " The pictures and ornaments in a church are the texts and scriptures {lectiones et scnpturae) of the laity." This chapter is long ; it explains how Christ and the angels, also saints, Apostles and others, should be represented, and describes the proper kinds of church ornament and utensils. Much of the detail is symbolical. Thus Durandus devised or brought together meanings to fit each bit of the church edifice, its materials and furnish- ings. In the work of a contemporary are stored the alle- gorical meanings of the subjects of Gothic sculpture and painted glass. The thirteenth century had a weakness for the word " Speculum," and the idea it carried of a mirror or compendium of all human knowledge. The chief of mediaeval encyclopaedists was Vincent of Beauvais, a protege of the saintly King Louis IX. An analysis of his huge Speculum majus is given elsewhere.^ It was made up of the Mirror of Nature, the Mirror of human Knowledge and Ethics, and the Mirror of History, The compiler and his assistants laboured during the best period of Gothic art, and from their work, industry may draw an exhaustive commentary upon the series of topics presented by the sculpture and glass of a cathedral.^ The Mirror of Nature appears carved in the sculpture of Chartres or Bourges. In rendering the work of the Six Days, the Creator is shown (under the form of Christ) ^ con- 1 Post, Chapter XXXVI., i. ^ The application of Vincent's work to the sculpture and painting of a Gothic cathedral is due to Didron, Iconographie chrdtienne, histoire de Dieu, Introduction (1843). Other writers have followed him, like ^mile Male in his VArt religieux du XIII^ Slide en France (2nd ed., Paris, 1902), to which the present writer is much indebted. It goes without saying, that the sources from which Vincent drew [e.g. the works of Albertus Magnus) likewise form a commentary upon the subjects of Gothic glass and sculpture, and may even have suggested the manner of their presentation. ^ The opening verses of St. John's Gospel account for this. Christ, or God in the person of Christ, is shown in Old Testament scenes as early as the fourth century upon sarcophagi in the Lateran at Rome. CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN 109 templating His work, or resting from His toil ; here and there a Hon, sheep, or goat, suggests the animal creation, and a few trees the vegetable world. This is the necessary symbolism of the sculptor's art. But Gothic animals and plants sometimes have other definite symbolic meanings, as in the instance of the well-known signs of the four Evangelists, the man, the lion, the ox, the eagle. The allegorical interpretations of Scripture were an exhaustless source of symbolism for Gothic sculptors ; another was the Physiologus and its progeny of Bestiaries, with their symbolic explanations of the legendary attributes of animals. In- tentional symbolism, however, did not inhere in all this carving, much of which is sheer fancy and decoration. Such was the character of the splendid Gothic flora, of the birds and beasts that move in it, and of the grotesque monsters. They were not out of place, since the Gothic cathedral was itself a Speculum or Summa, and should include the whole of God's creation, not omitting even the devils who beset men's souls. Vincent may have drawn from Hugo of St. Victor the current doctrine that the arts have part in the work of man's restoration ; a doctrine abundantly justifying the presence of the sciences and crafts (composing the Mirror of Knowledge) in the sculpture and painting of the cathedral. There the Seven Liberal Arts are rendered, through allegorical figures ; and the months of the year are symboHzed in the Zodiac and the labours of the field which make up man's annual toil. Philosophy is shown and Fortune's wheel ; the Virtues and Vices are represented in personifications, and even their conflict, the Psychomachia, may be shown. At last the Mirror of History is. reached. This will teach in concrete examples what has been learned from the figures of the abstract Virtues and Vices. Its chief source is the Bible. Those Old Testament incidents were selected which for centuries had been interpreted as prefigurements of the life of Christ ; and each was presented as a pendant to the Gospel scene which it typified. These make the chief subjects of the coloured glass of Chartres and Bourges and other cathedrals where the windows are preserved. Here may be seen the Passion of Christ, surrounded by no THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv scenes from the Old Testament typifying it ; likewise His Resurrection and its ancient types ; and other significant incidents in the Ufa of the Saviour and His virgin mother.^ The latter is typified by the burning bush, by the fleece of Gideon, by the rod of Aaron, even as in the hynms of Adam of Saint- Victor.^ Besides these incidents, leading personages of the old Testament are presented as prefigurative of Christ, as in the great series of statues of Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, on the north portal of Chartres ; while the four greater and twelve minor prophets are shown as types of the four Evangelists and the twelve Apostles. Christ himself is depicted on a window at St. Denis, between the allegorical figures of the Ancient Law and the Gospel, — figures which are allied to those of the uncrowned and blinded Synagogue and the triumphant Church, so frequently seen together upon cathedrals. Every- where the tendency to symbolize is strong. Parts of the Crucifixion scene are rendered symbolically, and many of the parables. That of the Good Samaritan constantly appears upon the windows, and is always designed so as to convey the allegorical teaching drawn from it in Honorius's sermon.^ Obviously this Mirror of History was chiefly sacred history. Pagan antiquity was scantily suggested by the Sibyls, who stand for the dumb pagan prophecy of Christ. Scenes from - the history of Christian nations were more frequent ; but they always told of some victory for Christ, like the baptism of Clovis, or the crusading deeds of Charle- magne, Roland, or Godfrey of Bouillon. God's drama closed with the Last Judgment, the damnation of the damned and the beatitude of the elect. The Last Judgments, usually over -arching the tympanums above cathedral doors, are known to all — as at Rheims, at Chartres, at Bourges. They are full of symbohsm, and full of " historic '* reahty as well. The treatment becomes entirely allegorical when the sculptor enters Paradise with the redeemed, and portrays in lovely personifications the beatitudes of the blessed, as on the north portal of Chartres. * These subjects illustrated the series of events celebrated in the calendar of church services. = Fast, pp, ii-ji sqq. 3 Ante, Chapter XXVIII. CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN in Those bands of nameless men who carved the statues and designed the coloured glass which were to make Gothic cathedrals speak, faithfully presented the teachings of the Church. They rendered the sacred drama of mankind's creation, fall^ redemption, and final judgment unto hell or heaven : they rendered it in all its dogmatic symbolism, and with a plastic adequacy showing how completely they thought and felt in the allegorical medium in which they worked. They also created matchless ideals of symbolism in art. The statuary of the portals and facades of Rheims and Chartres are in their way comparable to the sculptures of the pediment of the Parthenon. But unlike those master- pieces of antique idealism, these Christian masterpieces do not seek to set forth mortal man in his natural strength and beauty and completeness. Rather they seek to show the working of the human spirit held within the power and grace of God. Theirs is not the strength and beauty of the flesh, or the excellence of the unconquerable mind of man ; but in them man's mind and spirit are palpably the devout creatures of God's omnipotence, obedient to His will, sustained and redeemed by His power and grace. Attitude, form, feature, alike designed to express the sacred beauty of the soul, are not invested with physical excellence for its own sake ; but every physical quality of these statues is a symbol of some holy and beautiful quality of spirit. These statues attain a symbolic, and not a natural, ideal in art. Yet many of them possess the physical beauty of form and feature, inasmuch as such may be the proper envelope for the chaste and eager soul.^ On the other hand, in the filling out of the illustrative detail of life on earth, of handicraft and art, the sculptor showed how he could carve these actualities, and present earth's beauty in the cathedral's wealth of vine and flower and leaf. The level commonplace of humanity is deftly rendered, the daily doings of the forge and field and market- place, the tugging labourer, the merchant with his stuffs, the ^ So the composition and the arrangement of topics in the cathedral sculpture and glass have scarcely the excellence of natural grouping. The arrangement is intended to illustrate the series of successive acts making up God's own artist- composition, itself symbolical of His purpose in the creation and redemption of man. 112 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv scholar with his scroUs. He knew Ufe weU, this artist, and had an eye for every catching scene, also for Nature's subtle beauties. Sometimes a certain passing show was represented because a window was given by some drapers' guild, desirous of seeing its craft shown in a place of honour ; and the artist loved his scenes from busy life, as he loved his ornament from Nature. Such scenes (which rarely held specific aUegory) were not imconnected with the rest of the drama of creation and redemption mirrored in the cathedral, nor was the exquisitely cut leaf and rose without its sugges- tion of the grace incarnate in the Virgin and her Son. Daily life and natural ornament had at least an illustrative pertinency to the whole, of which they were unobtrusive and lovely elements ; and since that whole was primarily a visible symbol of the unseen and divine power, these humble elements had part in its unutterable mystery, and were hkewise sjnnbols. Finally, have not these nameless artists — even as Dante and otu: EngUsh Bunyan — presented by their art a S5mthesis of hfe's reahties ? Their feet were on the earth ; with sympathy and knowledge their hands worked in the media of things seen and handled, and fashioned the httle human matters which are bounded by the cradle and the grave. Such were the materials from which Dante formed his Commedia, and Bunyan drew the Progress of his Pilgrim soul to God. Yet as with Bunyan and Dante, so with these artists in stone and colo\n-ed light, the mortal and the tangible were but the elements through which the poem or story, or the carved or painted picture, was made the realizing symbol of the imseen and eternal Spirit. II Beneath the Abbey Church of Saint- Victor there, was a crypt consecrated to the Mother of God. Here a certain monk was wont to retire and compose hymns in her honour. One day his lips uttered the lines : " Salve, mater pietatis, Et totius Trinitatis CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN 113 Nobile triclinium ; Verbi tamen incarnati Speciale majestati Praeparans hospitium ! " Whereupon a flood of light filled the crypt, and the Virgin, appearing to him, inclined her head. The monk*s name was Adam,^ and he is deemed the best of Latin hymn-writers. Breton bom, he entered Saint-Victor in his youth, about the year 1130. He was favoured with the instruction of Hugo till the master's death in 1141, Adam must have been of nearly the same age as Richard of Saint- Victor, that other pupil of Hugo who makes the third member of the great Victorine trio. Their works have been the monastery's fairest fame. Hugo was a Saxon ; Adam a Breton ; Richard was Scotch. So Saint- Victor drew her brilliant sons from many lands. Richard, whose writings worthily supplemented those of his master Hugo,^ died in ^^73 J his friend Adam outlived him, and died an old man as the twelfth century was closing. He was buried in the cloister, and over him was placed an elegiac epitaph upon human vanity and sin, in part his own composition. Adam's hymns were Sequences ® intended for church use. Their author was learned in Christian doctrine, skilled in the Liturgy, and saturated with the spirit of devotional symbolism. His symbolism, which his gift of verse made into imagery, was that of the mediaeval church and its understanding of the Liturgy ; he also shows the special influence of Hugo. Adam's hymns, with their powerful Latin rhymes, cannot be reproduced in English ; but a translation may give the contents of their symbolism. The hymn for Easter, beginning " Zyma vetus expurgetur," * is an epitome of the symbolic prefiguration of Christ in the Old Testament. Each familiar allegorical interpretation flashes in a phrase. Literally translated, or rather maltreated, it is as follows : ^ Adam's hymns are edited with notes and an introductory essay by L. Gautier, CEuvres poetiques d'Adam de S.-Victor {3rd ed., Paris, 1894). A number of his hymns will be found in Migne 196, col. 1422 sqq. ; and also in Clement's Carmina epoetis christianis excerpta. On Adam's verse see post, Chapter XXXIII,, iii. ^ Dante draws much from Richard of St. Victor. 3 See post, Chapter XXXIII., iii. * Gautier, o.c. p. 46 (Migne 196, col. 1437). VOL. II I tt4 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv " Let the old leaven be purged away that a new resurrection may be celebrated purely. This is the day of our hope ; wonder- ful is the power of this day by the testimony of the law. " This day despoiled Egypt, and hberated the Hebrews from the iron furnace ; for them in wretched straits the work of servi- tude was mud and brick and straw.^ " Now as praise of divine virtue, of triumph, of salvation, let the voice break free ! This is the day which the Lord made, the day ending our grief, the day bringing salvation. " The Law is the shadow of things to come, Christ the goal of promises, who completes all. Christ's blood blunts the sword, the watch removed.^ " The Boy, t5^e of our laughter, in whose stead the ram was slain, signifies Hfe's joys.^ Joseph issues from the pit ; * Christ returns above after death's punishment. " This serpent devours the serpents of Pharaoh secure from the serpent's spite.^ Whom the fiery one wounded, them the brazen serpent's presence frees. ^ " Christ, the hook and ring, pierces the dragon's jaw ; ' the weaned child puts his hand into the cockatrice's den, and the old tenant of the world flees affrighted.^ " The mockers of Ehsha while he ascends the house of God, feel the bald-head's wrath ; ® David, feigning madness, the goat cast forth, and the sparrow escape.^** " With a jaw-bone Samson slays a thousand and spurns the marriage of his tribe. Samson bursts the bars of Gaza, and, carr5dng its gates, scales the mountain's crest. ^^ ^ The Hebrews in bondage to the Egyptians are the symbol of all men in the bonds of sin. * As Christ expires the cherubim at the gate of Eden lower the flaming sword, so that the men bathed with His blood may pass in. ^ Isaac was always a type of Christ ; his name was interpreted laughter [risus) from Gen. xxi. 6 : " And Sarah said, God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me." * Joseph another type of Christ. ^ This serpent, i.e. Christ the rod of Aaron, safe from the devil's spite, consumes the false idols. * The Brazen Serpent, a tj^e of Christ. Of. John iii. 14. ' Cf. Job xli. I. The hook {hamus) is Christ's divinity, whereby He pierces the devil's jaw. ^ Cf. Isa. xi. 8. The gxiiltless child is Christ, and the cockatrice is the devil. ^ The children who mocked Elisha represent the Jews mocking Christ as He ascended Calvary ; the bear is Vespasian and Titus who destroy Jerusalem. ^^ These again are types of Christ : David feigning madness among the Philis- tines, I Sam. xxi. 12-15 ; the goat cast forth for the people's sins, Lev. xvi. 21, 22 ; and the sparrow in the rite of cleansing from leprosy, Lev. xiv. 2-7. ^^ Samson a type of Christ, will not wed a woman of his tribe (Judges xiv. T-3) as Christ chooses the Gentiles ; Samson bursts open Gaza's gates as Christ the gates of death and hell. CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN 115 " So the strong Lion of Judah, shattering the gates of dreadful death, rises the third day ; at His Father's roaring voice, He carried aloft so many spoils to the bosom of the supernal mother. ^ " After three days the whale gives back from his belly's narrow house Jonas the fugitive, type of the true Jonas. The grape of Cyprus ^ blooms again, opens and grows apace. The s5magogue's flower withers, while flourishes the Church.^ " Death and life fought together : truly Christ arose, and with Him many witnesses of glory. Let a new morn, a glad morn, wipe away the tears of evening : life has overcome destruction ; it is a time of joy. " Jesu victor, Jesu life, Jesu life's beaten way, thou whose death quelled death, bid us to the paschal board in trust. Live, Bread, living Wave, O true and fruitful Vine, do thou feed us, do thou cleanse us, that thy grace may save us from the second death. Amen." From the time of that old third-century hymn ascribed to Clement of Alexandria,* hymns to Christ had been filled with symbolism, the symbolism of loving personification of His attributes, as well as with the more formal symbolism of His Old Testament prefigurements. Adam's symbolism is of both kinds. It has feeling even when dogmatic,^ and throbs with devotion as its theme approaches the Gospel Christ. Prevailing modes of thought and feeling may prescribe topics for verse which a succeeding age will find curiously unpoetic. Yet if the later time have a sympathetic understanding for the past, it will recognize how fervid and how songful was that bygone verse— the verse of Adam's hymns, for instance. In one for Christmas Day, beginning : " Potestate, non natura. Fit Creator creatura," ^ ^ The allusion here is to the statement of mediaeval Bestiaries that the lion cub, when born, lies lifeless for three days, till awakened by his father's roar. The supernal mother is the Church triumphant. ^ The body of Christ, i.e. the Church. * A topic everywhere represented in church windows and cathedral sculpture. * Printed at the end of his Paedagogus ; see Taylor, Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, pp. 253-255, where it is translated. ^ Although the dogmas of Christianity were formulated by reason, they were cradled in love and hate. Nowadays, in a time when dogmas are apt to be thought useless clogs to the spirit, it is well for the historically-minded to remember the power of emotional devotion which they have inspired in other times. ® Gautier, CEuvres d*Adam (ist ed., vol. i. p. 11) ; Gautier (3rd ed., p. 269) doubts whether this hymn is Adam's. But for the purpose of illustrating the symbolism of the twelfth- century hymn, the question of authorship is not important. u6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv a stanza touches on the reason why the Creator thus became creature. It would be impossible to render its feeling in English, and much circumlocution would be needed to express even its literal meaning in any language but mediaeval Latin. This stanza has twelve lines : " Causam quaeris, modum rei : Causa prius omnes rei, Modus justum velle Dei, Sed conditum gratia." " Thou askest causa and modus of the fact : the causa was that first all were guilty, the modus was God's righteous willing, but seasoned with grace." These lines are scholastic. In the next four, the feeling begins to rise, yet the phrases repel rather than attract us : " O quam dulce condimentum Nobis mutans in pigmentura. Cum aceto fel cruentum Degustante Messya I " " Oh ! how sweet the condiment changing for us into juice, as the Messiah tastes the bloody gall and vinegar." The feeling touches its chmax with the four concluding lines — ^in which the parable of the Good Samaritan is in- vested with the special allegorical significance set forth in the sermon of Honorius : ^ " O salubre sacramentum. Quod nos ponit in jumentum Plagis nostris dans unguentum Ille de Samaria." " health-giving sacrament which sets us on a beast, giving ointment for our stripes, — ^he of Samaria." ^ Two stanzas from another of Adam's Christmas hymns 1 Ante, Chapter XXVIII. 2 In these closing lines the " salubre sacramentum " is in apposition to " Ille de Samaria " — i.e. the " sacramentum " is the Saviour, who is also typified by the Good Samaritan. In another hymn for Christmas, Adam speaks of the concurrence in one persona of Word, flesh, and spirit, and then uses the phrase " Tantae rei sacramentum " (Gautier, o.c. p. 5). Here the sacramentum designates the visible human person of Christ, which was the life-giving signum or symbol of so great a marvel (tarUae rei) as the Incarnation. Adam has Hugo's teaching in mind, and the full significance of his phrase will appear by taking it in con- nection with Hugo's definition of the Sacrament, ante, p. 98. CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN 117 will show how curiously intricate could be his symbolism. Having spoken of the ineffable wonder of the Incarnation, he proceeds : " Frondem, florem, nucem sicca Virga profert, et pudica Virgo Dei Filium. Fert coelestem vellus rorem, Creatura creatorem, Creaturae pretium, " Frondis, floris, nucis, roris Pietati Salvatoris Congruunt mysteria. Frons est Christus protegendo, Flos dulcore, nux pascendo, Ros coelesti gratia." ^ " A dry rod puts forth leafage, flower, nut,^ and a chaste Virgin brings forth the Son of God. A fleece bears heavenly dew,^ a creature the Creator, the creature's price. " The mysteries of leafage, flower, nut, dew are suited to the Saviour's tender love (pietas). Christ by His protecting is fohage, by His sweetness is a flower, is a nut by His 5delding food, and dew by His celestial grace." One observes that here the symbolism first touches Christ's birth, the dry rod and the fleece representing the Virgin. Then the leafage, flower, nut and dew typify His qualities. The remaining stanzas of this hymn carry out in further detail the symbolism of the nut. Besides the hymns devoted to the Saviour, the greater part of Adam's hymns are symbolical throughout. Those written for the dedication of churches are among the most interesting. One beginning " Quam dilecta taber- nacula " * sketches the Old Testament facts which prefigure Christ's holy Church. The keynote is in the lines : " Quam decora fundamenta Per concinna sacramenta Umbra praecurrentia ! " ^ Gautier, o.c. p. lo, ^ The reference is to Aaron's rod in Numbers xvii. ^ The reference is to Gideon's fleece, Judges vi. 37, which is a type of the Virgin Mary. * Gautier, o.c. ist ed., i. 155 (Migne 196, col. 1464). In his third edition, Gautier is doubtful of Adam's authorship of this hymn because of its irregular rhyme. ii8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv '' How seemly the foundations through the appropriate sacra- ments, forerunning by the shadow." The shadow is the Old Testament, and these three lines sum up the teaching of Hugo as to the sacramental nature of the Old Testament narratives. Throughout this hymn Adam follows Hugo closely.^ In another dedicatory hymn ^ Adam gives the prefigurative meaning of the parts of Solomon's temple. There is likewise much symbohsm in the grand hymns addressed to the Virgin. One for the festival of the Assumption ^ gives the figures of the Virgin in the Old Testament — ^the throne of Solomon, the fleece of Gideon, the burning bush. Then with more feeling the metaphorical epithets pour forth, voicing the heart's gratitude for the Virgin's saving aid to man. A still more splendid example of like symbolism and ardent metaphor is the great hymn beginning : " Salve mater Salvatoris, Vas electum, vas honoris/' which won the Virgin's greeting for the poet.* The lives of Honorius, of Hugo, of Adam, from whose works we have been drawing illustrations of mediaeval symbolism, vie with each other in obscurity ; and properly enough since they were monks, for whom self-effacement is becoming. This personal obscurity culminates with one last example to be drawn from monastic sources. The man him- self was an impressive figure in his time ; a sight of him was not to be forgotten : he was called magnus and doctor universalis. Nevertheless it has been questioned whether he lived in the twelfth or the thirteenth century, and whether one man or two bore the name of Alanus de Insulis. There was in fact but one, and he belongs to the twelfth century, dying almost a centenarian, in the year 1202. The cognomen de Insulis has also been an enigma. From it he has been dubbed a Sicilian, and then a Scot, bom on the island of Mona. But the name in reality refers to the chief town of Flanders, which is called Lisle ; and Alanus doubt- less was a Fleming. 1 Cf. Gautier's notes to this hymn, Gautier, o.c. ist ed., i. 159-167. 2 Gautier, o.c. i. 168. 3 Gautier, o.c. ii. 127. * Gautier, 3rd ed., p. 186. This is in Migne 196, col. 1502. CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN iig He became a learned man, and lectured at Paris. That he was possessed with no small opinion of his talents would appear from the legend told of him as well as of St. Augustine. He had announced that on a certain day in a single lecture he would set forth the complete doctrine of the mystery of the most Holy Trinity. The afternoon before the day appointed, he walked by the river, thinking how he should arrange his subject so as to include it all. He chanced upon a child who was dipping up the river water with a snail shell and dropping it into a little trench. Smiling, he asked what should be the object of this ; and the child told him that he was putting the whole river into his trench. As the great scholar was explaining that this could not be done, he suddenly felt himself chidden and taught — how much less might he perform what he had set for the next morning. He stood speechless at his pre- sumption, and burst into tears. The next day ascending the platform he said to the crowd of auditors, '' Let it suffice you to have seen Alanus " ;^ and with that he left them all astonished, and himself hastily set out for Citeaux. On arrival he asked to be admitted as a conversus, and was given charge of the monastery's sheep. Patient and unknown, he long plied this humble vocation. But at length it chanced that the abbot took him to a council at Rome, in the capacity of hostler. And there he beat down the arrogance of a heretic with such arguments that the latter cried out that he was disputing either with the devil or Alanus, and would say no more. Such is one story. By another he is made to seek the monastery of Clairvaux, and there become a monk under St. Bernard. It is also written that he became an abbot, and then a bishop, but afterwards resigned his bishopric. However all this may have been, he died and was buried, and was subjected to many epitaphs. On what purports to be an old copy of his tomb at Citeaux, he is shown with St. Bernard, and called Alanus Magnus. The title Doctor universalis has always clung to his memory, which will not altogether fade. For if Adam of Saint-Victor was the ^ A charlatan in Salimbene's Chronicle, ante, Chapter XXII., uses a like phrase. I20 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv greatest of Latin mediaeval hymn-writers, Alanus has good claim to be called the greatest of mediaeval Latin poets in the field of didactic and narrative poetry.^ The many works ascribed to Alanus include an allegorical Commentary on Canticles, a treatise on the art of preaching, a book of sententiae, another of theologicae regulae, sundry sermons, and a lengthy work " contra haereticos " ; also a large dictionary of Biblical allegorical interpretations, entitled Liber in distinctionibus dictionum theologicalium.^ All these are prose. He composed, besides, his Liber de planctu naturae ^ and his Anticlaudianus, a learned and profound, and likewise highly imaginative allegorical poem upon man.* Its Preface in prose casts a curious light upon the author's enigmatical personality, which combined the wonted or conventional humility of a monk with the towering self-consciousness of a man of genius. " The lightning scorns to spend its force on twigs, but breaks the proud tops of exalted trees. The wind's imperious rage passes over the reed and drives the assaults of its wild blasts against the highest summits. Wherefore let not envy's flame strike the pinched humility of my work, nor detraction's breath overwhelm the driven poverty of my Httle book, where misery's wreck demands a port of pity, far more than felicity provokes the sting of spite." More sentences of turgid deprecation follow, and the author begs the reader not to approach his book with disgust and irritation, but with pleasant anticipations of novelty (not all a monk speaks here !). " For although the book may not bloom with the purple vestment of flowering speech, nor shine with the constellated light of the flashing period, still in the tenuity of the fragile reed 1 For the data as to Alanus see the Prolegomena to Migne, Pat. Lot. 210, which volume contains his works. See also Haureau, MSm. de Vacad. des in- scriptions et des belles leitres, tome 32 (1886), p. i, etc. ; also Hist. lit. de France, tome 16, p. 396, etc. On Alanus and his place in scholastic philosophy, see post, Chapter XXXVII., in. ^ Migne 210, col. 686-1012. 3 Migne 210, col. 431-481. StQ post, Chapter XXXIII., i. * The significance of the title is not quite clear. The poem is written in hexametre, and is not far from 4700 lines in length. It is printed in Migne 210, col. 486-576 ; also edited by Thos. Wright, Master of the Rolls Series, vol. 59, ii. (1872). CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN 121 the honey's sweetness may be found, and parched thirst can be tempered with the scant water of a rill. In this book let nothing be made vulgar (plehescat) with ribaldry, nor let anything be open to biting reproof, as if it smacked of the coarseness of the moderns [to whom does he refer ?] ; but let the flower of my talent be presented, and the dignity of diligence ; for pigmy humihty, thus raised upon a height, may overtop the giant. Let not those dare to tire of this work, who are squalling in the cradles of elementary instruction, sucking milk from nurses' paps ; nor let those seek to cry it down, who are pledged to the service of the higher learning ; nor those presume to discredit it, who strike heaven with the exalted head of philosophy. For in this work, the sweetness of the literal meaning will tickle the puerile ear ; moral teaching will imbue the more proficient understanding ; and the finer subtilty of allegory wiU sharpen the finished intellect. Wherefore let aU those be kept from ingress who, abandoned to the mirrors of the senses, are not charioteered by reason, and, pursuing the sense-image, have no appetite for reason's truth, — ^lest indeed what is holy be defiled by dogs, and the pearl be trampled by the feet of swine. . . . But such as will not suffer the matter of their reason to rest among base images, and dare to lift their view to forms divine, may thread the narrow passes of my book, while they weigh with discretion's scales what is suited to the common ear, and what should be buried in silence." This Preface of strained sentence and laboured metaphor, of forced humility and overweening self-consciousness, hardly augurs well for the poem of which it is the prelude. But prefaces are authors' pitfalls, and, moreover, many writers have floundered in one medium of speech while in another they have moved with ease. From the ungainly prose of the Persones Tale, no one would expect the ease and force of Chaucer's verse. And the reader of Alanus's Preface need not be discouraged from entering upon his poem. Its subject is man ; its philosophic or religious purpose is to expound the functions of God, of Nature, of Fortune, of Virtue and Vice, in making man and shaping his career. The poem is an allegory, original in its general scheme of composition, but in many of its parts following earlier allegorical writings. The opening lines tell of Nature's solicitude to bestow her gifts so that the finished work may present a fair 122 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv harmony : as a patient workman she forges, trims and files, and fashions with reason's chisel. But when she seeks to invest her work with qualities beyond her giving, she is obliged to call on the Celestial Council of her Sisters, Responding, pilgrim-like the Crown of Heaven's soldiery comes from on high, brightens the earth with its light, and clothes the ground with blessed footprints. Leading this galaxy, Concord advances, foster-child of Peace ; then Plenty comes, and Favour, and Youth with favour anointed, and Laughter, banisher of mental mists ; then Shame and Modesty, and Reason the measure of good, and Honesty, Reason's happy comrade ; then Dignity {decus) and Prudence balancing her scales, and Piety and true Faith, and Virtue. Last of all Nobility {nobilitas), in grace not quite the others' equal.^ In the midst of a great wood blessed with fountains and multitudinous bird-song, a cloud-kissing mountain rose with level top. Nature's palace was erected here, gemmed and golden ; and within was a great hall hung upon bronze columns. Here the painter's art had rendered the ways of men, and inscriptions made plain the pictured story. *' new wonders of painting," exclaims the poet ; " what cannot be, comes into being ; and painting, the ape of truth, deluding with novel art, turns shadows to realities, and transforms particular falsehood into [general] truth." ^ There might be seen the power of logic pressing its arguments and conquering sophistry. There Aristotle was preparing his arms, and, more divinely, Plato mused on heaven's secrets. There Seneca moralized, and Ptolemy explained the stars in their times and courses. There spoke the word of TuUy, while Virgil's muse painted many lies, and put truth's garb on falsehood. There was also shown the might of Alcides and Ulysses' wisdom, Turnus's valour prodigal of life, and Hippo- ^ The poem is highly imaginative in the delineation of its allegorical figures. ^ These curious lines are as follows : " O nova picturae miracula, transit ad esse Quod nihil esse potest ! picturaque simia veri, Arte nova ludens, in res umbracula rerum Vertit, et in verum mendacia singula mutat.'* Anticlaudianus, i. cap. iv. (Migne 196, col. 491.) CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN 123 lytus's shame, undone by Venus's reins.^ Such and many other tropes of things and dreams of truth, this royal art set forth. Here, standing in the midst of her Council, Nature, with bowed head, spoke her solemn words : " Painfully I remake what my hand's solicitude has wrought. But the hand's penitence does not wipe out the flaws. The shortcomings of our works must be repaired by some perfect model, some man divine, not smelling of the earth and earthly, but whose mind shall hold to heaven while his body walks the earth. Let him be the mirror in which we may see what our faith, our potency, and virtue ought to be. As it is, our shame is over all the earth.'* When the Council had approved these words. Prudence arose in all her beauty.^ She discoursed upon man's dual nature, spirit and body. Nature and her helpers may be the artificers of his mortal body, but the soul demands its heavenly Artificer, and laughs at our rude arts. God's wisdom alone can create the soul, as Prudence shows by an exposition of its qualities. Now Reason raised his reverend form, holding his triple glass in which appear the causes and effects and qualities of things. He humbly disclaimed the power to instruct Minerva,^ and applauded the plan by which a new Lucifer should sojourn in the world. May he unite all the gifts which they can bestow, and be their champion against the Vices. Now let their suppliant vows be sped to Him who alone can create the divine mind. A legate should be despatched above, bearing their request. For this office none is so fit as Prudence, to whom the secrets of Heaven are known, and whose energy and wisdom will surmount the difficulties of the way. Prudence at first refuses ; but Concordia rises, the inspirer of chaste loves, she who knit the souls of David and Jonathan, Pirithous and Theseus, Nisus and Euryalus, ^ The allusion here is to the fate of Hippolytus, whose chariot-horses, maddened by the wiles of Venus, dashed the chariot to pieces and caused their lord's death. ^ i. cap. vi. Her garb and attributes are elaborately told. In the latter part of the poem she is usually called Phronesis. ^ A favourite commonplace ; Heloi'se uses it. 124 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv Orestes and Pylades. Persuasively she speaks, and points out all the ills the world had suffered by disobedience to her behests. Prudence is won over to the task, and now wills only as her sisters will. She thinks upon the naeans and way. Wisdom orders a chariot to be made, in which the sea, the stars, the heavens may be traversed. Its artificers are her seven daughters, wise and fair, who unite the skill and knowledge of all those wise ancients who had excelled in any Art. First Grammar (her functions and great writers being told) forms the pole which goes before the axle-tree {temo praeambulus axis) . Then Logic makes the axle-tree ; and Rhetoric adorns the pole with gems and the axle with flowers. Arithmetic constructs one wheel of the chariot, and Music the second. Geometry the third, and the fourth wheel is made by Astronomy.^ Now Reason, at Nature's nod, yokes to the chariot the five horses, to wit, the Senses disciplined and controlled, Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste, and Touch. He himself mounts as charioteer, and bids Prudence follow. Amid the farewells and plaudits of all, the chariot soars aloft. As it speeds along. Prudence investigates atmospheric phenomena, and then the spirits of evil who wander through the air. They passed on through the upper ether, reached the citadel and fount of light, where the Sun holds sway ; next was reached the region where Venus and the star of Mercury sing together and Lucifer exults, the herald of the day. Then to their rapid flight appeared Mars' flaming palace, seething with fire and wrath. Onward they passed to the glad light and unhurtful flames of Jupiter, and then to Saturn's sphere. At length they ascended the stellar region where the Pole stars contend in brightness, where are seen Hercules and Orion, Leda's twins, the fiery Crab, the Lion, and the rest of the Zodiac's constellations.^ Here at heaven's entrance the chariot halted. Those five horses of the Senses, charioteered by Reason, could ascend no farther. But a damsel was seen, seated upon the ^ The functions of these virgms, the Seven Liberal Arts, are poetically told. The Anticlaudianus is no text-book. But the poet apparently is following the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of Martianus Capella, ante, Chapter IV. ^ Compare the succession of Heavens in Dante's Paradiso. CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN 125 summit of the Pole. She scrutinizes the hidden Cause and End of all things, holding scales in her right hand and in her left a sceptre. On her vestments a subtile point traces God's secrets, and the formless is figured in form. Reverently Phronesis, that is Prudence, saluted this Queen of the Pole, and set forth the purpose of her journey, telling of Nature's desire and her limitations. In reply Theology, for it is she,^ offered herself as a companion, and bade Prudence leave her chariot, but keep the second courser (Hearing) to bear her on. Prudence now surmounted the starry citadels, and marvelled at heaven's nodes, where the four ways begin and the crystalline waters flow, shot with agreeing fires ; for here, in universal harmony transcending Nature's laws and Reason's power, Concord unites those elements which war below. Onward leads the way among those joys celestial which know no tears, where there is peace without hate, and light above all brightness. Here dwell the angel bands, the Thunderer's princes, regulators of the world ; here glow the seraphim, and cherubim drain draughts from the mind of God ; and here are the Thrones whereon God balances His weighed decrees, and with His band of Powers conquers the tyrants.^ Here also rest the saints, freed from earth's dross and passion, clothed in virgin white or martyr's purple, or wearing the Doctor's laurel. Joyful alike are they, yet diverse in merit, shining with unequal splendour.^ Here finally, in honour surpassing all, is the Virgin Mother, clad in the garb of our salvation — Star of the Sea, Way of Life, Port of Salvation, Limit of Piety, Mother of Pity, Garden closed, Sealed Font, Fruitful Olive, Sweet Paradise, Rose without Thorn, Guiltless Grace, Way of the Wanderer, Light of the Blind, Rest of the Tired — untold, unnumbered, and unspeakable are her praises.* Phronesis cannot bear the sight. Queen Theology calls to her sister Faith to aid the fainting one. Faith comes ^ One may recall Raphael's painting of Theology on the ceiling of the Stanza del Segnatura in the Vatican. It is impossible not to compare the r61es of Alan's Reason and Theology with those of Virgil and Beatrice in the Commedia. 2 Here we are back in the Celestial Hierafchy of Dionysius the Areopagite. ^ As in Dante's Paradiso. * Most of these epithets of the Virgin come from allegorical interpretations of the text of the Vulgate. 126 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv and holds her Mirror before the eyes of Phronesis ; and in this glass her eyes can endure the shaded glory of the overpowering vision. She staggers on, her trembling steps supported 'ty Faith and Theology. In the glass she sees the eternal and divine, the enduring, moveless, sure ; species unborn, celestial ideas, the forms of men and principles of things, causes of causes and the course of fate, the Thunderer's mind ; why God condemns some, predestines others, prepares that one for life and from this one withdraws His rewards ; why poverty presses upon some and want is filled only with tears ; why riches pour on others, why one is wise, another lacking, and why the worthies of the past have been endowed each with his several gifts.^ Marvelling at all these sights, Prudence, supported by the sisters, reached at last the palace of the King, and fell prostrate before God himself. He bade her rise, and speak. Humbly she set forth Nature's plight and the evil upon earth, and presented her petition. God accedes benignantly. He will not destroy the earth again, but will send a human spirit endowed with heavenly gifts, a pilgrim to the earth, a medicine for the world. Prudence worships. God summons Mind, and orders him to fashion the type-form, the idea of the human mind. Mind searches among existing beings for the traces of this new idea or type.^ His difficult search succeeds at last, and in the Mirror which he constructs, every grace takes its abode : Joseph's form, the intelligence of Judith, the patience of righteous Job, the modesty of Moses, Jacob's simplicity, Abraham's faith, Tobias's piety. He presents this pattern-type to God, who sets an accordant soul therein, and then entrusts the new-made being to Phronesis, while Mind anoints it with an unguent against the attacks of the Vices. Phronesis, with her prize, turned to the way by which she had ascended, regained her chariot and Reason her charioteer. Together they sped back to the congratulations of Nature and her Council. For this perfect soul Nature now forms a beautiful body. Concord unites the two, and a new man is formed, perfect and free from flaw. Chastity and guardian Modesty endow ^ Compare the final vision of Dante in Paradiso, xxxiii. ^ The reader will notice the Platonism and Neo-Platonism of all this. CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN 127 him with their gifts ; Reason adds his, and Honesty. These Logic follows, with her gift of skill in argument ; Rhetoric brings her stores, then Arithmetic, next Music, next Geometry, next Astronomy ; ^ while Theology and Piety are'not behind with theirs ; and to these Faith joins her gifts of fidelity and truth. Last of all comes Nobility, Fortune's daughter. But because she has nothing of her own to give, and must receive all from her mother, she betakes herself to Fortune's house of splendid mutability. What will Fortune give ? The two return to Nature's palace, and Fortune's magnificence is proffered by her daughter ; but Reason, standing by, will allow only a measured acceptance.^ The report of this richly endowed creature reached Alecto. Raging she summoned her pests, the chiefs of Tartarus, doers of ill, masters of every sin — Injury, Fraud, Perjury, Theft, Rapine, Fury and Anger, Hate, Discord, Strife, Disease and Melancholy, Lust, Wantonness and Need, Fear and Old Age. She roused them with a harangue : their rule is threatened by this upstart Creature, whom Parent Nature has prepared for war ; but what can his untried imbecility do against them in arms ? ALL clamour assent, and in a tumult of rage make ready for the strife. The hostile ranks approach. The first attack is made by Folly {StuUitia) and her comrades, Sloth, Gaming, Idle Jesting, Ease and Sleep. But faithful Virtues protect the constant youth against these foes. Next Discord leads its mutinous band, but only to defeat. Onslaughts follow from Poverty, next from Ill-Repute, from Old Age and Disease. Then Grieving advances, and is overthrown by Laughter. More deadly still are the attacks of Venus and Lust ; then Excess and Wantonness take up the fray ; and at the end Impiety and Fraud and Avarice. But still the man conquers with the aid of his Virtues ever true. The fight is over. The Virtues triumph and receive their Kingdoms ; Vice succumbs ; Love reigns instead of Discord ; the man is blessed ; and the earth, adorned with ^ Notice that the Arts are here equipping and perfecting the man for his fight against sin ; — which corresponds with the common mediaeval view of the function of education. * The poem gives a full description of Fortune and her house, and unstable splendid gifts. 128 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv flowers in a new spring of youth, brings forth abundance. The Poet sums up his poem's teaching : From God must everything begin and in Him end. But our genius may not stand inert ; ours is the strife as well, according to our strength and faculty. Let the mind attach itself to the things which are and do not pass, even as Plato sings, from things of sense reaching on ever to the grades Angelic and Olympus's steeps. Then it shall behold the universal praise of God and the true ascription of all good to Him. He in himself is perfect, Part and likewise Whole, and every- where uncircumscribed. Nothing has power in itself, but all would fall to nothing, did He close the flux of hidden power. Alanus, a good Christian Doctor, is also an eclectic in his thought. A consistent system is hardly to be drawn from his poem. It suggests Christ. But its hero is not the God- man of the Incarnation. Its figures are semi-pagan. The virtue Faith, for example, is the Fides, the Good Faith, of the antique Roman, though it is the Christian virtue Faith as well. In language the poem is antique ; its verse has vigorous flow ; its imagery lacks neither beauty nor sub- limity. It is in fact a poem, a creation, having a scheme and unity of its own, although the author borrows con- stantly. Martianus Capella is there and Dionysius the Areopagite ; there also is the Psychomachia of Prudentius and its progeny of symbolic battles between the Virtues and the Vices.^ Yet Alanus has achieved ; for he has woven his material into a real poem and has reared his own lofty allegory. His work is another grand example of mediaeval symbolism. Thus we see the ceaseless sweep of allegory through men's minds. They felt and thought and dreamed in allegories ; and also spent their dry ingenuity on allegorical ^ But the different names of Alanus*s Virtues and Vices, and their novel antagonisms, indicate an original view of morality with him. On the Psychomachia see Taylor, Classical Heritage, pp. 278 sqq. and 379. Allegorical combats and dSbats (both in Latin and in the vernacular tongues) are frequent in mediaeval literature. Cf. e.g. post, Chapter XXXI. Again, in certain parabolae ascribed to St. Bernard {Migne 183, col. 757 sqq.) the various virtues, Prudentia, Fortitude, Discretio, Temperantia, Spes, Timor, Sapientia, are so naturally made to act and speak, that one feels they had become personalities proper for poetry and art. Compare Hildegard's characterizations of the Vices, ante, Chapter XX. CHAP. XXX SYMBOLIC WORKS OF MEN 129 constructions. It was reserved for one supreme poet to create, out of this atmosphere, a supreme poem which is as complete an allegory as the Anticlaudianus. But the Divina Commedia has also the power of its human realities of actually experienced pain and joy, and hate and love. Compared with it, the Anticlaudianus betrays the vapourings of monk and doctor, imaginative indeed, but thin. The author's feet were not planted on the earth of human life. But the Middle Ages did not demand that allegory should have its feet planted on the earth, so long as- its head nodded high among the clouds — or its sentiments wandered sweetly in fancy's gardens. In one of these dwelt that lovely Rose, whose Roman once had vogue. In structure the Roman de la rose is an allegory from the beginning of the first part by De Lorris to the very end of that encyclo- paedic sequel added by De Meun. The story is well known. ^ One may recall the fact that in De Lorris's poem and De Meun's sequel every quality and circumstance of Love's sentiment and fortunes are figured in allegorical personifications — all the lover's hopes and fears and the wavering chances of his quest. In this respect the poem is the courtly and romantic counterpart of such a philosophical or religious allegory as the Anticlaudianus. Personifications of the arts and sciences, the vices and virtues, current since the time of Prudentius's Psychomachia and Capella's Nuptials of Philo- logy, were all in the Anticlaudianus, while in the Roman de la rose figure their secular and romantic kin : in De Lorris's part. Love, Fair-Welcome, Danger, Reason, Franchise, Pity, Courtesy, Shame, Fear, Idleness, Jealousy, Wicked-Tongue ; then, with De Meun, others besides : ^ The English reader will derive much pleasure from F. S. Ellis's admirable verse translation : The Romance of the Rose (Dent and Co., London, 1900). Each of the three little volumes of this translation has a convenient synopsis of the contents. Those who would know what is known of the tale and its authors should read Langlois's chapter on it, In Histoire de la langue et de la UtUrature frangaise, edited by Petit de Julleville. It may be said here, for those whose memories need refreshing, that William de Lorris wrote the first part, some forty- two hundred lines, about the year 1237* and died leaving it unfinished ; John de Meun took up the poem some thirty years afterwards, and added his sequel of more than eighteen thousand lines. VOL. II K I30 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv Richesse, False-Seeming, Hypocrisy, Nature, and Genius.^ The figures of the Roman de la rose have diverse antecedents scattered through the entire store of knowledge and classic literature possessed by the Middle Ages ; perhaps their immediate source of inspiration was the scheme of courtly love which the mediaeval imagination elaborated and revelled in.^ The poem of De Lorris was a veritable romantic allegory. De Meun, in his sequel, rather plays with the allegorical form, which he continues ; it has become a frame for his stores of learning, his knowledge of the world, his views of life, his wit and satire, and his great literary and poetic gifts. Yet it ends in a regular Psychomachia, in which Love's barons are hard beset by all the foes of Love's delight, though Love has its will at last. ^ The names are Englished after Ellis's translation. 2 See ante, Chapter XXIV. ; De Meun took much from the De planctu naturae of Alanus. BOOK VI LATINITY AND LAW 131 CHAPTER XXXI THE SPELL OF THE CLASSICS I. Classical Reading. IL Grammar. III. The Effect upon the Mediaeval Man ; Hildebert of Lavardin. During all the mediaeval centuries, men approached the Classics expecting to learn from them. The usual attitude toward the classical heritage was that of docile pupils looking for instruction. One may recall the antecedent reasons of this, which have already been stated at length. In Italy, letters survived as the most impressive legacy from an overshadowing past. In the north, save where they lingered on from the antique time, they came in the train of Latin Christianity, and were offered to men under the same imposing conditions of a higher civilization authori- tatively instructing ruder peoples. Moreover, between the ancient times which produced the classic hterature and the Carolingian period there intervened centuries of degeneracy and transition, when the Classics were used pedagogicaUy to teach grammar and rhetoric. Then grammars were com- posed or revised, and other handbooks of elementary instruction. The Classics still were loved ; but how shall men love beyond their own natures ? Gifted Jerome, great Augustine, loved them with an ardour bringing its own misgivings. Other lovers, like Ausonius and Apollinaris Sidonius, were pedantic imitators. Both north and south of the Alps another and obviously enduring cause fostered the habit of regarding the Classics 133 134 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi as storehouses of knowledge : the fact that they were such for all the mediaeval centuries. They included not only poetry and eloquence, but also history, philosophy, natural knowledge, law and polity. The knowledge contained in them exceeded what the men of western Europe otherwise possessed. As century after century passed, mediaeval men learned more for themselves, and also drew more largely on the classic store. Yet it remained unexhausted. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries constitute the great mediaeval epoch. Men were then opening their eyes a little to observe the natural world, and were thinking a little for themselves. Nevertheless the chief increase in knowledge issued from the gradual discovery and mastering of the works of Aristotle. These centuries, like their predecessors, make clear that men who inherit from a greater past a universal literature con- taining the best they can conceive and more knowledge than they can otherwise attain, will be likely to regard every part of this literature as in some way a source of knowledge, physical or metaphysical, historical or ethical. And the Classics merited such regard ; for where they did not instruct in science, they imparted knowledge of life, and norms and instances of conduct, from which men still may draw guidance. We have outlearned the physics, and perhaps the meta- physics of the Greeks ; their knowledge of nature, in com- parison with ours, was but as a genial beginning ; their polities and their formal ethics we have tried and tested ; but we have not risen above the power and inspiration of the story of Greece and Rome, and the exemplifications of life in the Greek and Latin Classics. It has not ceased to be true that he who best loves the Classics, and most deeply feels their unique excellence as literature, is he who still draws life from them, and discipline and knowledge. Their true lovers, like the true lovers of all noble hterature, are always in a state of pupilage to the poems and the histories they love. Obviously then no final word lies in the statement that through the Middle Ages men turned to the Classics for instruction. They did indeed turn to them for all kinds of knowledge, and for discipline. Often they looked for instruction from Ovid or Virgil in a way to make us smile. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 13S Often they were like schoolboys, dully conning words which they did not feel and so did not understand. But in the tenth century, and in the twelfth, some men admired and loved the Latin Classics, and drew from them, as we may, lessons which are learned only by those who love aright. It would be hard to say what the men of the Middle Ages did not thus gain. The pagan classical literature was one of humanity in its full range of interests. This was true of the Greek ; and from the Greek, the universal human passed to the Latin, which the Middle Ages were to know. In both literatures, man was a denizen of earth. The laws of mortality and fate were held before his eyes ; and the action of the higher powers bore upon mortal happiness, rather than upon any life to come. When reflecting upon the use and influence of the Classics through the Middle Ages, it is always to be kept in mind that the antique literature was the literature of this life and of this world ; that it was universal in its humanity, and still in the Middle Ages might touch every human love and human interest not directly connected with the hopes and terrors of the Judgment Day. So whenever educated mediaeval men were drawn by the ambitions or moved by the finer joys of human life, it lay in their path to seek instruction or satisfaction from some antique source. If a man wished the common education of a clerk, he drew it from antique text-books and their commentaries. Grammar and rhetoric meant Latin grammar and Latin rhetoric ; dialectic also was Latin and antique. Likewise the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, could be studied only in Latin. These ordinary branches of education having been mastered, if then the man's tastes or ambitions turned to the interests of earth (and who except the saintly recluse was not so drawn ?) he would still look to the antique. A civilian or an ecclesi- astic would need some knowledge of law, which for the most part was Roman, even when disguised as Canon law.^ Did a man incline toward philosophy, and the scrutiny of life's deeper problems, again the source was the antique ; and when he lifted his mind to theology, he would still find 1 Post, Chapter XXXIV. 136 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi himself reasoning in categories of antique dialectic. Finally, and this was a broad field of humane inclination, if a clerkly educated man loved poetry, eloquence, and history, for their own sakes, he also would turn to the antique. There is scarcely need to revert again to the use of the Classics in the earlier Middle Ages. We have seen that in Italy they never ceased to form the conscious background to all intellectual life ; and that in the north, letters came a handmaid in the train of Latin Christianity — a handmaid that was apt to assert her own value, and also charm the minds of men. From the first, it was the orthodox view that Latin letters should provide the education enabUng men to understand the Christian religion adequately. This is the object set forth in Charlemagne's Capitularies upon education.^ Three hundred years later Honorius of Autun says in his sermonizing way : " Not only, beloved, do the sacred writings lead us to eternal life, but profane letters also teach us ; for edifying matter may be drawn from them. In view of sacred examples no one should be scandalized at this. For the children of Israel spoiled the Egyptians ; they took gold and silver, gems and precious vest- ments, which they afterwards turned into God's treasury to build the tabernacle." ^ Honorius used Augustine's reference to the Egjrptians, and followed this Augustinian view, always recognized as orthodox in the Middle Ages. It was narrower than the practice among those who followed letters. Gerbert at the close of the tenth century loved to teach and read the pagan writers, and drew from them training and discipUne.^ In the next century, the German monk Froumund of Tegemsee, with Bernward and Godehard, bishops of Hildesheim, are instances of German love of antique letters.* Yet lofty souls might choose to limit their reading of the Classics, at least in theory, to the needs of their Latinity. Such a one was Hugo of St.-Victor, scholar, theologian, man of genius ; ^ he professed to care more for the Christian ardours of the soul than for learning even as a means of righteousness, 1 Ante, Vol. I. p. 213. ^ Migne, Pat. Lot. 172, col. 1056. 3 Ante, Chapter XII., t, * ^^^^^ Chapter XIII., i. ^ Ante, Chapter XXIX. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 137 and chose to take the side of those who would read the classic authors only so far as the" needs of education demanded : " There are two kinds of writings, first those which are termed the artes proper, secondly, those which are the supplements [appendentia) of the artes, Artes comprise the works grouped under {supponuntur) philosophy, those which contain some fixed and determined matter of philosophy, as grammar, dia- lectic and the hke. Appendentia artium are those [writings] which touch philosophy less nearly and are occupied with some subject apart from it ; and yet sometimes offer flotsam and jetsam from the artes, or simply as narratives smooth the road to philosophy. All the songs of poets are such — tragedies, comedies, satires, heroics, and lyrics too, and iambics, besides certain didactic works (didascalica) ; tales likewise, and histories ; also the writings of those nowadays called philosophers, who extend a brief matter with lengthy circumlocution, and thus darken a simple meaning. " Note then well the distinction I have drawn for thee : distinct and different {duo) are the artes and their appenditia, . . . and often from the latter the student will gain much labour and httle fruit. The artes, without their appenditia, may make the reader perfect ; but the latter, without the artes, can bring no whit of perfection. Wherefore one should first of all devote himself to the artes, which are so fundamental, and to the afore- said seven above all, which are the means and instruments [instrumenta) of all philosophy. Then let the rest be read, if one has leisure, since sometimes the playful mingled with the serious especially delights us, and we are apt to remember a moral found in a tale." ^ Temperament affected Hugo's view. He was of the spiritual aristocracy, who may be somewhat disdainful of the common means by which men get their education and round out their natures. The mechanical monotony of pedagogy grated on him and evoked the ironical sketch of a school-room, which he put in his dialogue on the Vanity of the World. The little Discipulus, directed by his Magister, is surveying human things. " Turn again, and look," says the latter, " and what do you see ? " " I see the schools of learners. There is a great crowd, and of all ages, boys and youths, men young and old. They study ^ Didascalicon, iii. 4 {Migne 176, col. 768-769). 138 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi various things. Some practise their rude tongue at the alphabet and at words new to them. Others hsten to the inflection of words, their composition and derivation ; then by reciting and repeating them they try to commit them to memory. Others furrow the waxen tablets with a stylus. Others, guiding the calamus with learned hand, draw figures of different shapes and colours on parchments. Still others with sharper zeal seem to dispute on graver matters and try to trip each other with twistings and impossibilities {gryphis ?). I see some also making calcxda- tions, and some producing various sounds upon a cord stretched on a frame. Others, again, explain and demonstrate geometric figures ; and yet others with various instruments show the positions and courses of the stars and tlSe movement of the heavens. Others, finally, consider the nature of planets, the con- stitution of men, and the properties and powers of things." The Disciple is captivated with this many-coloured show of learning ; but th*l Master declares it to be mostly foolish- ness, distracting the student from understanding his own nature, his Creator, and his future lot.^ These are examples, which might be multiplied indefinitely, of the pious mediaeval view that the artes, with a very little reading of the auctores, were proper for the educated Christian, whose need w^s to understand Scripture. Sometimes, stung, at least rhetorically, by fear of the lust and idolatry of the antique, mediaeval souls cry out against its lures, even as Jerome's Christianly protesting nature dreamed that famous dream of exclusion from heaven as a " Ciceronian." Alcuin, who led the educational movement under Charlemagne, gently chides one whose fondness for Virgil made him forget his friend — " would that the Gospels rather than the Aeneid fiUed thy breast." ^ Three^undred years later, St. Peter Damiani, himself a virtuoso xi letters and a sometime teacher of rhetoric, arraigns the monks for teaching grammar rather than things spiritual.® Damiani speaks with the harshness of one who fears what he loves. In France, about the same time, our worthy sermon- writer, Honorius of Autun, liked the profanities well enough, and drew from them apt moral tales, which preachers might introduce to rouse drowsy ^ De vanitate mundi, i. {Migne 176, col. 709, 710). 2 Ep. 169 (Migne, PcU. Lat. 100, col. 441). ^ Opusc, xiii. ; De perfectione monachi, cap. xi. (Migne 144, col. 306). See ante, Chapter XVII. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 139 congregations. Yet he directs his pulpit-thunder at the cives Babyloniae, the superhi, who after their several tastes finger profane literature to their peril : " Those dehghting in quibbhng learn Aristotle : the lovers of war have Maro, and the lustful idlers their Naso. Lucan and Statins incite discords, while Horace and Terence equip the pert and wanton (petulantes) — but since the names of these are blotted from the book of Ufe, I shall not commemorate them with my lips." ^ This with the excellent Honorius was pious rhetoric. Yet the love and fear of antique letters caused anxiety in many a mediaeval soul, deflected by them from its narrow path to the heavenly Jerusalem. Indeed the love of letters and of knowledge was to play its part, and might take one side or the other, according to the motive of their pursuit, iQ the great mediaeval psychomachia between the cravings of mortal hfe and the militant insistencies of the soul's salva- tion. This conflict, not confined to mediaeval monks, has its universal aspects. It echoes in the sigh of Michel- angelo over the "afEectuosa fantasia, ^ Che r arte si fece idolo e monarca/'*^^ — which had so long drawn his heart from Eternity.^ Commonly, however, this conflict did not greatly disturb scholars who felt in some degree the classic spell so manifold of delight in themes delightful, of pleasure somehow drawn from clear statement and convincing sequence of thought, of even deeper happiness springing from the stirring of those faculties through which, man rejoices in knowledge. To be sure, readers of the Cicelies, who drew joy from them or satisfaction, or humane instruction, were comparatively few in the mediaeval centuries, as they are to-day. And un- doubtedly in the Middle Ages the Classics usually were read in unenlightened schoolboy fashion. Yet making these reservations, we may be sure that letters yielded up their joys to the chosen few in every mediaeval century. " Amor litterarum ab ipso fere initio pueritiae mihi est in- natus," wrote Lupus in the ninth.® Gerbert might have said ^ speculum ecclesiae {Migne 172, col. 1085). 2 Sonnet 56. ^ Ep. i. (Migne 119, col. 433). I40 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND booi the same, and many of the men who taught at Chartres in 1 generations following. So likewise might have said John SaHsbury. In stud5dng the Classics he certainly looked them for instruction. But he also loved them, and fou companionship and solace in them, as he says, and as Cice before him had said of letters. We may ask ourselves what sort of pleasure do we j from reading the Classics ? not necessarily a Hght distra^ ing of the mind, but rather a deeper gratification : thoug is aroused and satisfied, and our nature is appeased by t admirable presentation of things admirable. At the sai time we may be conscious of discipline and benefit. Th( is good reason to suppose that a Uke pleasure, or satisf acti( with disciphne and ^struction, came to this exceeding clever John from reading Terence, Virgil and :Ovid, Hora Juvenal, Lucan, Persius and Statins, Cicejo, Seneca a QuintiUan — for he read them all.^ John is affected, i pressed, and trained by his classic reading ; he has absort his authors ; hie quotes from them as spontaneously a aptly as he quotes from Scripture. A quotation from the c or the other may give final point to an argument, and ha its own eloquent suggestions. Sometimes the tone of c of his own letters — ^which usually are excellent in form a language — ^may agree with that of the pithy antique quo tion garnishing it. A mediaeval writer was not likely say just what we should when expressing ourselves on 1 same matter. Yet John makes quite clear to us how cared for antique letters, in the Prologue to his Policratic his chief work on philosophy and life ; and we may take ' word as to the satisfaction which lie drew from them, su his own writings prove his assiduity in their cult. T prologue is somewhat cherche, and imbued with a precios of sentiment putting one in mind of Cicero's oration 1 Archia poeta. " Most delightful in many ways, but in this especially, is fruit of letters, that banishing the irksomeness of intervals place and time, they bring friends into each other's preser ^ John approved of reading the auctores, for educational purposes, and confining the pupil to the artes. See Metalogicus, i. 23, 24 (Migne, Pat. TQ9, col. 453)- On John, cf. post, Chapter XXXII. and XXXVII., in. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 141 and do not suffer noteworthy things to perish from mould. For the arts would have perished, laws would have vanished, the offices of faith and religion would have fallen away, and even the correct use of language would have failed, had not the divine pity, as a remedy for human infirmity, provided letters for the use of mortals. Ancient examples, which incite to virtue, would cheer and serve no one, had not the pious sohcitude of writers trans- mitted them to posterity. . . . Who would know the Alexanders and the Caesars, or admire Stoics and Peripatetics, had not the monuments of writers signalized them ? Triumphal arches promote the glory of illustrious men from the carved scroll of their deeds. The observer recognizes the Liberator of his Country, the Estabhsher of Peace, only when the inscription reveals Con- stantine the Victor whom Britain brought forth. The light of fame endures for no one save through his own or another's writing. How many and how great kings thinkest thou there have been, of whom there is neither speech nor thought ? Vainly are noble deeds performed if their fame does not shine in the hght of letters. Other favour or distinction is as when fabled Echo catches the plaudits of the Play, ceasing the moment it has begun. " Besides all this, solace in grief, recreation in labour, cheer- fulness in poverty, modesty among riches and delights, faithfully are bestowed by letters. For the soul is redeemed from its vices, and even in adversity refreshed with sweet and wondrous cheer, when the mind is intended upon reading or writing what is profit- able. Thou shalt find in human life no more pleasing or more i^ul emplo5mient ; unless perchance devotion divinely spurred by prayer attains divine colloquies, or with heart dilated through love conceives God, and as with the hand of meditation touches within itself the great things of God. Believe one who has tried it, that all the sweets of the world, compared with these exercises, are wormwood." ^ Hereupon, still addressing himself to his friend and patron, Thomas k Becket, John suggests that these recrea- tions are peculiarly beneficial to men in their circumstances, burdened with affairs ; and he puts his principles in practice, by launching forth upon his lengthy work of learned and philosophic disquisition. To supplement this outline of John's appreciation of the Classics, it will be interesting to look into the literary inter- pretation of a classical poem, from the pen of one of his contemporaries. So little is known of the author, Bernard ^ PoUcfoticus, Prologus (Migne, Pat. Lot. 199, col. 385) ; p. 12 in the (better) Oxford edition by Webb, Joannis Saresberiensis Policratici Ubri VIII. (1909). 142 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi Silvestris, that he usually has been confused with his more famous fellow, Bernard of Chartres, We may refer to both of them again.^ Here our business is solely with the Commentum Bernardi Silvestris super sex lihros Aeneidos Virgilii,^ The writer draws from the Saturnalia of the fifth- century grammarian, Macrobius ; but his allegorical inter- pretation of the Aeneid seems to be his own. He finds in the Aeneid a twofold consideration, in that its author meant to teach philosophic truth, and at the same time was not inattentive to the poetic plot. " Since then Virgil in this poem is both philosopher and poet, we shall first expound the purpose and method of the poet. . . . His aim is to unfold the calamities of Aeneas and other Trojans, and the labours of the exiles. Herein disregarding the truth of history as told by Dares the Phrygian,^ and seeking to win the favour of Augustus, he adorns the facts with figments. For Virgil, greatest of Latin poets, wrote in imitation of Homer, greatest of Greek poets. As Homer in the Iliad narrates the fall of Troy and in the Odyssey the exile of Ulysses ; so Virgil in the second Book briefly relates the overthrow of Troy, and in the rest the labours of Aeneas. Consider the twin order of narration, the natural and the artistic (artificialem). The natural is when the narrative proceeds according to the sequence of events, telling first what happened first. Lucan and Statius keep to this order. The artistic is when we begin in the middle of the story, and thence revert to the commencement. Terence writes thus, and Virgil in this work. It would have been the natural order to have described first the destruction of Troy, and then brought the Trojans to Crete, from Crete to Sicily, and from Sicily to Libya. But he first brings them to Dido, and introduces Aeneas relating the overthrow of Troy and the other things that he has suffered.^ " Up to this point we show how he proceeds : next let us observe why he does it so. With poets there is the reason of use- fulness, as with a satirist ; the reason of pleasure, as with a writer of comedies ; and again these two combined, as with the historical poet. As Horace says : ' Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae, Aut simul at iucunda et idonea dicere vitae. 1 Post, Chapter XXXVII., in. 2 I draw upon the extracts given in the thesis of M. Demimuid, De Bernardo Carnotensi grammatico professore et interprete Virgilii (Paris, 1873), who, as appears by his title, confuses the two Bernards. ^ The author of a bastard epitome on the Trojan War, see post. Chapter XXXIII., IV. * The above, in substance, is taken from Macrobius. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 143 " This kind of a historical poem is shown by its figurative and polished diction and in the various mischances and deeds narrated. If any one wiU study to imitate it he will gain skill in writing. The narrative also contains instances and arguments for following the right and avoiding what is evil. Hence a twofold profit to the reader : skill in writing, gained through imitation, and prudence in conduct, drawn from example and precept. For instance, in the labours of Aeneas we have an example of endurance ; and one of piety, in his affection for Anchises and Ascanius. From the reverence which he shows the gods, from the oracles which he supplicates, from the sacrifices which he offers, from the vows and prayers which he pours forth, we feel drawn to rehgion : while through Dido's unbridled love, we are recalled from desire for the forbidden." The above is excellent, but not particularly original. It shows, however, that Bernard could appreciate the Aeneid in this way. His allegorical interpretation is of a piece with current mediaeval methods. Yet to take a poem allegorically was not distinctively mediaeval ; for Homer and other poets had been thus expounded from the days of Plato, who did not himself approve. With Bernard, each Book of the Aeneid represents one of the ages of man, the first Book betokening infancy, the second boyhood, and so forth. Allegorical etymologies are applied to the names of the personages ; and in general the whole natural course and setting of the poem is taken allegorically. " The sea is the human body moved and tossed by drunkenness and lusts, which are represented by waves." Aeneas, to wit, the human soul joined to its body, comes to Carthage, the mundane city where Dido reigns, which is lust ; this allegory is unfolded in detail. So the interpretation ambles on, not more and not less jejune than such ingenuities usually are. fn Classical studies reached their zenith in the twelfth century. For in every way that century surpassed its pre- decessors ; and in classical studies it excelled the thirteenth, which devoted to them a smaller portion of its intellectual energies. The twelfth century, to be sure, was prodigiously interested in dialectic and theology. Yet these had not quite engulfed the humanities ; nor had any newly awakened interest in physical or experimental science distracted the 144 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi eyes of men from the charms of the ancient written page. The change took place in the thirteenth century. Its best intellectual efforts, north of the Alps at least, were directed to the study aAd theological appropriation of the Aristotelian encyclopaedia of metaphysics anduniversal knowledge.^ The effect of Aijstotle was totally unliterary. And the minds of men, absorbed in mastering this giant mass of knowledge and argument, ceased to regard literary form and the humane aspects of Latin literature. Until the thirteenth century, dialectic and theology were not completely severed from helles lettres. The Platonic- Augustinian theology of the twelfth century had been idealizing and imaginative, not to say poetical. Such an interesting exponent of it as Hugo of St. Victor appears as a hterary personage, despite his stinted advocacy of classical study. One notes that for his time the chief single source of physical knowledge was the Latin version of the Timaeus, certainly not a prosaic composition. Thus, for the twelfth century, an effective cause of the continuance of the study of letters lay herein : whatever branch of natural knowledge might allure the student, he could not draw it bodily from a serious but unUterary repository, like the Physics or De animalibus of Aristotle, which were not yet available ; he must follow his bent through the writings of various Latin poets as well as prose-writers. In fine, the sources of profane knowledge open to the twelfth century were hterary in their nature, and might form part of the hterature which would be read by a student of grammar or rhetoric. One sees this in John of SaUsbury. There may have been a few men who knew more than he did of some particular topic. But his range and readiness of knowledge were imique. And it is evident from his writings that his knowledge (except in logic) had no special or scientific source, but was derived from a promiscuous reading of Latin hterature. As a result, he is himself a hterary manj One may say much the same of his younger contemporary, Alanus de Insulis.^ He too has gathered knowledge from hterary sources, and he himself is one of the best Latin 1 Post, Chapter XXXVIII. * Ante, Chapter XXX., n., and post. Chapter XXXVII., in. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 145 poets of the Middle Ages. Another extremely poetic philosopher was Bernard Silvestris, the interpreter of Virgil. His De mundi unitate is a Pantheistic exposition of the Universe ; it is also a poem ; and incidentally it affords another illustration of the general fact, that before the works of Aristotle were made known and expounded in the thirteenth century, all kinds of natural and quasi-philosophic knowledge were drawn from a variety of writings, some of them poor enough from any point of view, but none of them distinctly scientific and unliterary, like the works of Aristotle. Formal logic or dialectic, as cultivated by Abaelard for example, appears as an exception. It had been specialized and more scientifically treated than any branch of sub- stantial knowledge ; for indeed it was based on the logical treatises of Aristotle, most of which were in use before Abaelard's death, and all of which were known to Thierry of Chartres and John of Salisbury.^ The contrast between the cathedral school of Chartres and the University of Paris illustrates the change from the twelfth to the thirteenth century. The former has been spoken of in a previous chapter, where its story was brought down to the times of its great teachers, Bernard and Thierry, of whom we shall have to speak in connection with the teaching of grammar and the reading of classical authors. The school flourished exceedingly until the middle of the twelfth century.^ By that time the schools of Paris had received an enormous impetus from the popularity of Abaelard, and scholars had begun to push thither from all quarters. But it was not till the latter part of the century that the University, with its organization of Masters and Faculties, began visibly to emerge out of the antecedent cathedral school.^ Chartres was a home of letters ; and 1 Post, Chapter XXXVII., i. ^ For a successor or friendly rival to Chartres, in the interest taken in grammar and classical literature, one should properly look to Orleans, where apparently those studies continued to flourish. Cf. L. Delisle, " Les 6coles d*0rl6ans au douzifeme sifecle," Annuaire-Bulletin de la SocUU de VHistoire de France, t. vii. (1869), p. 139 sqq. In a Bataille des sept arts, by Henri d*Andeli, of the first half of the thirteenth century. Logic, from its stronghold of Paris, vanquishes Grammar, whose stronghold is Orleans. In the conflict, with much symbolic truth, Aristotle overthrows Priscian, Histoire littiraire de la France, t. xxiii. p. 225. ^ Post, Chapter XXXVIII. VOL. II L 146 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi there Latin literature was read enthusiastically. But in Paris Abaelard was pre-eminently a dialectician ; and after he died, through those decades when the University was coming into existence, the tide of study set irresistibly toward theology and metaphysics. Students and masters of the Faculty of Arts outnumbered all the other Faculties ; nevertheless, counting not by tumultuous numbers, but by intellectual strength, the great matter was Theology, and the majority of the Masters in the Arts were students in the divine science. The Arts were regarded as a preparatory disciphne. So through its great period, which roughly coincides with the thirteenth century/ the University of Paris was for all Europe the supreme seat of Dialectic, Metaphysics, and Theology, and yet no kindly nurse of belles lettres. The tendencies of Oxford were not quite the same as those of Paris, yet Latin hterature as such does not seem to have been cultivated there for its own fair sake. This apparently was unaffected by the fact that at Oxford there took place a notable movement aiming at the acquisition of a substantial knowledge of Greek and Hebrew and even Arabic. The promoters were Robert Grosseteste and his pupil Roger Bacon. The former was Oxford's first great teacher and inspirer. He was bom in Suffolk about the year 1175 ; studied at Lincoln, then at Oxford, then at Paris, whence he returned to become chancellor of the University of Oxford. He was a devoted friend to the Franciscans, and lectured in their house at Oxford. Made bishop of Lincoln in 1236, he died seventeen years later.^ Bacon praises Grosseteste for his devotion to mathematics and physics, sa3dng : " No one knew the sciences save Lord Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, from his length of Ufe, experience, studiousness and industry, and because he knew mathe^ matics and optics, and was able to know all things ; and he knew enough of the languages to understand the saints and philosophers of antiquity ; but not enough to translate them, unless toward the end of his hfe, when he invited Greeks, and had books of Greek grammar gathered from 1 His works have at last been edited by L. Baur, Die philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste (Baeumker's Beitrage, 1912). J CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 147 Greece and elsewhere." ^ Bacon also says that Grosseteste " gave the Latins some part of the writings of St. Dionysius [the pseudo-Areopagite] and of Damascenus,^ and some other holy Doctors." There is other evidence of Grosseteste's work as a translator, or co-operator in translations, from the Greek and even Hebrew.^ Bacon was himself a better Greek scholar than the older man, and wrote a Greek grammar,* and endeavoured to incite men to a study of these tongues. But neither Grosseteste nor Bacon appears to have been moved by any literary interest in Greek literature ; both one and the other urged the importance of Greek, and of Hebrew too and Arabic, in order to reach a surer knowledge of Scripture and Aristotle.^ They sought to open the veritable founts of theology and natural know- ledge, an intelligent aim indeed, but quite unliterary. In spirit both these men belong to the thirteenth century, not to the twelfth. In Italy, one does not find that the passage from the twelfth to the thirteenth century displays the decline in classical studies which is apparent north of the Alps. The reasons seem obvious. The passion for metaphysical theology did not invade this land of practical ecclesiasticism and urban hving, where pagan antiquity, dumb, broken, and defaced, yet everywhere surviving, was the medium of life and thought and temperamental inclination in the thirteenth as well as in the twelfth century. Nor was Italy as yet becoming scientific, or greatly interested in physical hypothesis ; although medicine was cultivated in various centres, Salerno, for example, and Bologna. But for the twelfth, and for the thirteenth century as well, Italy's great intellectual achievement was in the two closely neighbouring sciences of canon and civil law. These made the University of Bologna as pre-eminent in law as Paris was in theology. There had been schools of grammar and rhetoric at Bologna ^ opus tertium, Chapter XXV., p. 91 (Brewer's text). ^ John of Damascus, an influential theologian of the Greek church, who wrote in the first half of the eighth century. Cf. post, p. 336, note. ^ See Grabmann, Ges. der schol. Methode^ ii. pp. 81 sqq. ; M. R. James, " The Christian Renaissance," Chapter XVII. of The Cambridge Modern History. Grosseteste translated apparently The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs and some parts of Eriugena. * Post, p. 155. ^ See post, Chapter XLII. 148 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi and Ravenna, before the lecturing of Imerius on the Pandects drew to the first-named town the concourse of mature and seemly students who were gradually to organize themselves into a university.^ Thus at Bologna law flourished and grew great, springing upward from an antecedent base of grammatical if not hterary studies. The study of the law never cut itself away from this foundation. For the exigencies of legal business demanded training in the scrivener's and notarial arts of inditing epistles and drawmg documents, for which the ars dictaminis, to wit, the art of composition was of primary utihty. This ars, teaching as it did both the general rules of composition and the more specific forms of legal or other formal documents, pertained to law as well as grammar. Of the latter study it was perhaps in Italy the main element or, rather, end. But even, without this hybrid hnk of the didamen, grammar was needed for the interpretation of the Pandects ; and indeed some of the glosses of Imerius and other early glossators are grammatical rather than legal explanations of the text. We should bear in mind that this august body of juris- prudential law existed not in the infiated statutory Latin of Justinian's time, but in the sonorous and correct language of the earher empire, when the great Jurists lived, as well as Quintilian. Accordingly a close study of the Pandects required, as weU as yielded, a knowledge of classical Latinity. Thus law tended to foster, rather than repress, grammar and rhetoric ; and had no unfavourable effect on classical studies. And even as such studies " flourished " in Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they did not cease to " flourish," there in the thirteenth, in the same general though rather duU and imcreative way. For it wiU hereafter appear that the productions of the Latin poets and rhetoricians of Italy were below the literary level of those composed north of the Loire in France, or in England. > II . • From the days of the Roman Empire, the study of grammar was, and never ceased to be, the basis of the ^ Cf. post. Chapter XXXIV. and XXXVIII. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 149 conscious and rational knowledge of the Latin tongue. The Roman boys studied it at Rome ; the Latin - speaking provincials studied it, and all people of education who remained in the lands of western Europe which once had formed part of the Empire ; its study was renewed under Charlemagne ; he and Alcuin and all the scholars of the ninth century were deeply interested in what to them represented tangible Latinity, and in fact was to be a chief means by which their mediaeval civilization should maintain its continuity with its source. For grammar was most instrumental in preserving mediaeval Latin from violent deflections, which would have left the ancient literature as the literature of a forgotten tongue. Had mediaeval Latin failed to keep itself veritable Latin ; had it instead suffered transmutation into local Romance dialects, the Latin classics, and all that hung from them, might have become as unknown to the Middle Ages as the Greek, and even have been lost forever. It was the study of Latin grammar, with classic texts to illustrate its rules, that kept Latin Latin, and preserved standards of universal usage throughout western Europe, by which one language was read and spoken everywhere by educated people. From century to century this language suffered modification, and varied according to the knowledge and training of those who used it ; yet its changes were never such as to destroy its identity as a language, or prevent the Latin writer of one age or country from understanding whatever in any land or century had been written in that perennial tongue. Therefore fortunately, as the Carolingian scholars studied Latin grammar, so likewise did those of aU succeeding mediaeval generations, thereby holding themselves to at least a homogeneity, though not an unvar3dng tmiformity, of usage. Evidently, however, the method of grammatical instruction had to vary with the needs of the learners and the teachers' skill. The Romans prattled Latin on their mothers' knees ; and so, with gradually widening deflections, did the Latinized provincials. Neither Roman nor Provincial prattled Ciceronian periods, or used quite the vocabulary of Virgil ; yet it was Latin that they talked. Thenceforward there was to be a difference between the people who lived in ISO THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi countries where Romance dialects had emerged from the spoken Latin and prevailed, and those people who spoke a Teuton speech. Although always drawing away, the natal speech of Romance peoples was so like Latin, that in learning it they seemed rather to correct their vulgar tongue than to acquire a new language. So it was in the Christian parts of Spain, in Gaul, and, above all, in Italy, where the vulgar dialects were tardiest in taking distinctive form. Never- theless, as the Romance dialects, for instance in the coimtry north of the Loire, developed into the various forms of what is called Old French, young people at school would have to learn Latin as a quasi-foreign tongue. Across the Rhine in Germany boys ordinarily had to learn it at school, as a strange language, just as they must to-day ; and every effort was devoted to this end.^ It was not likely that the grammars composed for Roman boys, or at least for boys who spoke Latin from their infancy, would altogether meet the needs of German, or even French, youth. Yet only gradually and slowly in the Middle Ages were grammars put together to make good the insufficiencies of Donatus and Priscian. The former was the teacher of St. Jerome. He composed a short work, in the form of questions and answers, explaining the eight parts of speech, but giving no rules of gender, or forms of declension and conjugation, needed for the instruction of those who, unlike the Roman youth, could not speak the language. This Uttle book went by the name of the Ars minor. The same grammarian composed a more extensive work, the third book of which was called the Barbarismus, after its opening chapter. It defined the figiu"es of speech {figurae, locutiones), and was much used through the mediaeval period. The Ars minor explained in simple fashion the elements of speech. But the Institutiones grammalicae of Priscian, a 1 Cf. Specht, Geschickte des Unterrichtswesens in Deutschland, etc. (Stutt- gard, 1885), p. 75 2Xi6. passim. Yet how soon and with what childish prattle youths might begin to speak and write Latin is touchingly shown by a bo/s letter, written from a monastic school, to his parents. It just asks for various little things, and its supersmption is: " Parentibus suis A. agnus ablactatus pium balatum " : which seems to mean : '* To his parents, A, a weaned lamb, sends a loving bah.** This and other curious little letters are ascribed to one Robertus Metensis [cir, a.d. goo) Migne 132, col. 533). CHAP XXXI. SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 151 contemporary of Cassiodorus, offered a mine of knowledge. Of its eighteen books the first sixteen were devoted to the parts of speech and their forms, considered under the variations of gender, declension, and conjugation. The remaining two treated of constructio or syntax. As early as the tenth century Priscian was separated into these two parts, which came to be known as Priscianus major and minor. The Priscian manuscripts, whose name is legion, usually present the former. Diffuse in language, confused in arrangement, and overladen perhaps with its thousands of examples, it was berated for its labyrinthine qualities even in the Middle Ages ; yet its sixteen books remained the chief source of et5anological knowledge. Priscianus minor was less widely used. The grammarians of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries followed Donatus and Priscian, making extracts from their works, or abridgements, and now and then introducing examples of deviation from the ancient usage. The last came usually from the Vulgate text of Scripture, which sometimes departed from the idioms or even word- forms approved by the old authorities.^ The Ars minor of Donatus became enveloped in commentaries ; but Priscian was so formidable that in these early centuries he was merely glossed, that is, annotated in brief marginal fashion. It would be tedious to dwell upon mediaeval grammatical studies. But the tendencies characterizing them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries may be in- dicated briefly. The substance of the Priscianus major was followed by mediaeval grammarians. That is to say, while admitting certain novelties,^ they adhered to its "ules and examples relating to the forms of words, their eclension and conjugation. But the Priscianus minor, Ithough used, was departed from. In the first place its ^ See Thurot, Hisioire des doctrines grammaticales au moyen age ; Notices et ■.traits des MSS. vol. 22, part 2, p. 85. For what is said in the preceding and illowing pages the writer's obligations are deep to this well-known work of hurot, and to Reichling's edition of the Doctnnale of Alexander de Villa-Dei tfo». Germ, paedagogica, XII., Berlin, 1893). Paetow's Arts Course at Medieval 'niversities (University of Illinois, 1910) treats learnedly of these matters. ^ See Thurot, o.c. p. 204 sqq. 1 52 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi treatment of its subject (syntax) was confused and inadequate. There was, however, a broader reason for seek- ing rules elsewhere. Mediaeval Latin, in its progress as a living or quasi-living language, departed from the classical norms far more in sjmtax and composition than in word- forms. The latter continued much the same as in antiquity. But the popular and so to speak Romance tendencies of mediaeval Latin brought radical changes of word-order £ind style, which worked back necessarily upon the rules of syntax. These had been but hazily stated by the old writers, and the task of constructing an adequate Latin syntax remained undone. It was a task of vital importance for the preservation of the Latin tongue. Word -forms alone will not preserve the continuity of a language ; it is essential that their use in speech and writing should be kept congruous through appropriate principles of S5mtax. Such were intelligently formulated by mediaeval grammarians. The result was not exactly what it would have been had the task been carried out in the fourth century : yet it has endured in spite of the attacks, pseudo-attacks indeed, of the cinquecento ; and the mediaeval treatment of Latin syntax is the basis of the modem treatment. One may add that syntax or constructio was taken broadly as embracing not only the agreements of number and gender, and the governing ^ of cases, but also the order of words in a sentence, which had changed so utterly between the time of Cicero and Thomas Aquinas. These general statements find illustration in the famous Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa-Dei, whose author was bom in Normandy in the latter half of the twelfth century. He studied at Paris, and in course of time was summoned by the Bishop of Dol to instruct his nepotes in grammar. While acting as their tutor, he appears to have helped their memory by setting his rules in rhyme ; and the bishop asked him to write a Summa of grammar in some such fashion. Compl5dng, he composed the Doctrinale in the year 1199, putting his work into leonine or rhyming hexameter, to make it easier to memorize. Rarely has a school-book met with such success. It soon came into use ^ Regere, a mediaeval term not used in this sense by Priscian. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 153 in Paris and elsewhere, and for some three hundred years was the common manual of grammatical teaching through- out western Europe. It was then attacked and apparently driven from the field by the so-called Humanists, who, however, failed to offer anything better in its place, and plagiarized from the work which they professed to execrate.^ The etymological portions of the Doctrinale follow the teachings of the Priscianus major ; the part devoted to syntax, or construction shows traces of the influence of the Priscianus minor. But Alexander's treatment of syntax is more systematic and elaborate than Priscian's ; and he did not hesitate to defer to the Vulgate and other Christian Latin writings. Thus he made his work conform to con- temporary usage, which its purpose was to set forth. He did the same in the section on Prosody, in which he says that the ancient metricians distinguished a number of feet no longer used, and he will confine himself to six— the dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapaest, iambus, and tribrach.^ In contradiction to classical usage he condemns elision ; ^ and in his chapter on accent he throws over the ancient rules : *' Accentus normas legitur posuisse vetustas ; Non tamen has credo servandas tempore nostro.* Alexander was not really an innovator. He followed previous grammarians in condemning elision, and in what he says of quantity and accent. In his sjmtax he endeavoured to set forth rules conforming to the best Latin usage of his time, like other mediaeval grammarians before him. He was indeed vehement in his advocacy of recent and Christian authors as standards of writing, and he in- veighed against the scholars of Orleans, who read the Classics, and would have us sacrifice to the gods and observe the indecent festivals of Faunus and Jove.^ But ^ See the Einleitung to Reichling*s edition of the Doctrinale already referred to; also Thurot, De Alexandri de VillorDei doctrinali {Paris, 1850). The chief mediaeval rival of the Doctrinale was the Graecismtis of Eberhard of Bethune, written a little later. SeePaetow, o.c. p. 38. * Doctrinale, line 1561 sqq. ^ Doctrinale, 1603 sqq, * Doctrinale, 2330-2331. ^ See passage in Reichling's Einleitung, p. xxvii. 1 54 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi others defended the Orleans school, and perhaps still regarded the Classics as the best arbiters of grammar and eloquence. There exist thirteenth-century grammars which follow Priscian more closely than Alexander does.^ Yet his work represents the dominant tendencies of his time. Twelfth and thirteenth century grammarians recom- mended to their pupils a variety of reading, in which mediaeval and early Christian compositions held as large a place as Virgil and Ovid. The Doctrinale advocates no work more emphatically than Petrus Riga' s A urora, a versified paraphrase of Scripture. Its author was a chorister in Rheims, and died in 1209.^ The works of scholastic philosophers were not cited as frequently as the com- positions of verse-writers ; yet mediaeval grammarians were influenced by the language of philosophy, and drew from its training principles which they applied to their own science. Grammar could not help becoming dialectical when the intellectual world was turning to logic and metaphysics. Commencing in the twelfth century, overmasteringly in the thirteenth, logic penetrated grammar and compelled an application of its principles. Often grammarians might better have looked to linguistic usage than to dialectic ; yet if grammar was to become a rational science, it had to systematize itself through principles of logic, and make use of dialectic in its endeavour to state a reason for its rules. Those who applied logic to grammar at least endeavoured to distinguish between the two, not always fruitfully. But a real difference could not fail to assert itself inasmuch as logic was in truth of universal application, while mediaeval grammar never ceased to be the grammar of the Latin language. Nevertheless its terminology was largely drawn from logic.® So dialectic brought both good and ill, proving itself helpful in the regulation of syntax, but banefuUy affecting grammarians with the conviction that language was the 1 See e.g. Une Grammaire latine inlditc du XIIP sUcle, par Ch. Fierville (Paris, 1886). 2 See Reichling, o.c. Einleitung, p. xix ; Thurot, Not, et extr. xxii. -a, p. 112 sqq. ^ See e.g. Thurot, o.c. p. 176 sqq. ; p. 216 sqq. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 155 creature of reason, and must conform to principles of logic. One likewise notes with curious interest, that, from their dialectic training, apparently, grammarians first foimd as many species of grammar as languages,^ and then forsook this idea for the view that, in order to be a science, grammar must be universal, or, as they phrased it, one, and must possess principles not applicable specially to Greek or Latin, but to congruous construction in the abstract ; " de constructione congrua secundum quod abstrahit ab omni lingua speciali," are the words of the English thirteenth-century philosopher and grammarian, Robert Kilwardby.^ A like idea affected Roger Bacon, who composed a Greek grammar,^ which appears to have been intended as the first part of a work upon the grammars of the learned languages other than Latin. It was adapted to afford a grounding in the elements of Greek : yet it touches matters in a way showing that the writer had thought deeply on the affinities of languages and the common principles of grammar. Of this the follow- ing passage is evidence : " Therefore, because I wish to treat of the properties of Greek grammar, it should be known that there are differences in the Greek language, to be hereafter noted in giving the names of these dialects (idiomata). And I call them idiomata and not linguas, because they are not different languages, but different properties which are peculiarities {idiomata) of the same language.* Wishing to set forth Greek grammar, for the use of the Latins, it is necessary to compare it with Latin grammar, because I commonly speak Latin myself, seeing that the crowd does not know Greek ; also because grammar is of one and the same substance in all languages, although varjdng in its non-essentials (accidentaliter) ; also because Latin grammar in a certain special way is derived from Greek, as Priscian says, and other grammarians." ^ ^ Thiirot, o.c. pp. 126-127. ^ Thurot,o.c. p. 127. ^ The Greek Grammar of Roger Bacon, ed. by Nolan and Hirsch (Cambridge, 1902). * Bacon defines idioma *' as the determined peculiarity [propnetas) of lan- guage, which one gens uses after its custom ; and another gens uses another idioma of the same language" {Greek Grammar, p. 26). Dialect is the modern term. * Greek Grammar, p. 27. Bacon appears to have followed Priscian chiefly. As to whether he used Byzantine models, or other sources, see the Introduction to Nolan and Hirsch's edition of the Greek Grammar. These thoughts inspiring Bacon's Grammar became a veritable metaphysics in the Grammatica speculativa ascribed to Duns Scotus, see post, Chapter XLIII. 1 56 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi The dialecticizing of grammar took place in the north, under influences radiating from Paris, the chief dialectic centre. These did not deeply affect grammatical studies in Italy, or in the Midi of Fance, which in some respects exhibited like intellectual tendencies. Grammar was zealously studied in Italy, but it did not there become either speculative or dialectical. To be sure, northern manuals were used, especially the Doctrinale ; but the study remained practical, an art rather than a science, and its chief element, or end, was the ars dictaminis or dictandi. The grammatical treatises of Italians were treatises upon this art of epistolary composition and the proper ways of drawing documents. These works were studied also in the North, where the ars dictaminis was by no means neglected.^ Latin grammar, although over - dialecticized in the North, and in Italy made very practical, remained of necessity the foundation of classical studies, and of mediaeval literary effort, in prose and verse. As the basis of hberal studies, it had no truer home than the cathedral school of Chartres.^ Contemporary writers picture the manner in which this study was there made to perform its most Hberal office, imder favourable mediaeval conditions, in the first half of the twelfth century. The time antedates the Doctrinale, and one notes at once that the Chartrian masters used the ancient grammatical authorities. This is shown by the Eptateuchon of Thierry, who was head- master (scholasticus) and then Chancellor there for a number of years between 1120 and 1150. As its name imphes, the work was a manual, or rather an encyclopaedia, of the Seven Arts. Thierry compiled it from the writings of the *' chief doctors on the arts." He transcribed the Ars minor of Donatus and then portions of his larger work. Having ^ Of. L. Rockinger, " Die Ars Dictandi in Italien," Sitzungsber. hayerisch. Akad.j 1861, pp. 98-151. For examples of these dictamina, see L. Delisle, " Dicta- mina Magistri Berardi de Neapoli " (a papal notary equally versed in law and rhetoric). Notices et extraits des MSS.^ etc., vol. 27, part 2, p. 87 sqq. ; Ch. V. Langlois, ** Formulaires de lettres," etc.. Not. et ext. vol. 32 (2), p. i sqq. ; ^d. vol. 34 (i), p. I sqq. and p. 305 sqq. and vol. 35 (2), p. 409 sqq. 2 For the history of this school in the eleventh century, see atUe^ Chapter XII. in. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 157 commended this author for his conciseness and subtilty, Thierry next copied out the whole of Priscian. As text- books for the second branch of the Trivium, he gives Cicero's De inventione rhetorica libri 2, Rhetoricorum ad Herennium libri ^, De partitione oratoria dialogus, and con- cludes with the rhetorical writings of Martianus Capella and J. Severianus.^ So much for the books. Now for the method of teach- ing as described by John of Salisbury. He gives the practice of Bernard of Chartres, Thierry's elder brother, who was scholasticus and Chancellor before him, in the first quarter of the twelfth century. John has been advocat- ing the study of grammar as the fundamentum atque radix of those exercises by which virtue and philosophy are reached ; and he is advising a generous reading of the Classics by the student, and their constant use by the professor, to illustrate his teaching. " This method was followed by Bernard of Chartre^, exundissi- \J' mus modernis temporihus fons litterarum in Gallia. fBy citations from the authors he showed what was simple and regular ; he brought into relief the grammatical figures, the rhetorical colours, the artifices of sophistry, and pointed out how the text in hand bore upon other studies ; not that he sought to teach everything in a single session, for he kept in mind the capacity of his audience. He inculcated correctness and propriety of diction, and a fitting use of congruous figures. Reahzing that practise strengthens memory and sharpens faculty, he urged his pupils to imitate what they had heard, inciting some by admonitions, others by whipping and penalties. Each pupil recited the next day some- thing from what he had heard on the preceding. The evening exercise, called the declinatio, was filled with such an abundance of grammar that any one, of fair intelHgence, by attending it for a year, would have at his fingers' ends the art of writing and speaking, and would know the meaning of all words in common use. But since no day and no school ought to be vacant of rehgion, Bernard would select for study a subject edifjdng to faith and morals. The closing part of this declinatio, or rather philo- sophical recitation, was stamped with piety: the souls of the ^ The Eptateuchon exists in manuscript. I have taken the above from Clerval, Les J^coles de Chartres au moyen age (Chartres, 1895), p. 221 sqq. Thierry appears to have written a commentary on Cicero's Rhetoric. See MManges Graux, pp. 41-46- 158 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi dead were commended, a penitential Psalm was recited, and the Lord's Prayer. " For those boys who had to write exercises in prose or verse, he selected the poets and orators, and showed how they should be imitated in the linking of words and the elegant ending of passages. If any one sewed another's cloth into his garment, he was reproved for the theft, but usually was not punished. Yet Bernard gently pointed out to awkward borrowers that whoever imitated the ancients (majores) should himself become worthy of imitation by posterity. He impressed upon his pupils the virtue of economy, and the values of things and words : he explained where a meagreness and tenuity of diction was fitting, and where copiousness or even excess shotild be allowed, and the advantage of due measure everywhere. He admonished them to go through the histories and poems with diligence, and daily to fix passages in their memory. He advised them, in reading, to avoid the superfluous, and confine themselves to the works of distinguished authors. For, he said (quoting from Quintihan) that to follow out what every contemptible person has said, is irksome and vainglorious, and destructive of the capacity which should remain free for better things. To the same effect he cited Augustine, and remarked that the ancients thought it a virtue in a grammarian to be ignorant of something. But since in school exercises nothing is more useful than to practise what should be accomphshed by the art, his scholars wrote daily in prose and verse, and proved themselves in discussions." M This passage indicates with what generous use of the atictores Bernard expounded grammar and explained the orators and poets ; how he assigned portions of their works for memorizing, and with what care he corrected his pupils' prose and metrical compositions, criticizing their know- ledge and their taste. He was a man mindful of his Christian piety toward the dead and living, but caring greatly for the Classics, and loving study. " The old man of Chartres {senex Carnotensis)/' says John of Salisbury, meaning Bernard, " named wisdom's keys in a few lines, and though I am not taken with the sweetness of the metre, I approve the sense : " 'Mens hmnilis, studium quaerendi, vita quieta, Scnitinium taciturn, paupertas, terra aliena, Haec reserare sclent multis obscura legendo.' " ^ 1 Metalogicus, i. cap. xxiv. (Migne, Pat. Lai. 199, col. 853-856). * PolicraticuSj vii. 13 (Webb i, p. 145 ; Migne 199, col. 666). CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 159 Bernard, Thierry, and other masters and scholars of their school, as the advocates of classical education, detested the men called by John of Salisbury Cornificiani, who were for shortening the academic course, as one would say to-day, so that the student might finish it up in two or three years, and proceed to the business of life. A good many in the twelfth century adopted this notion, and turned from the pagan classics, not as impious, but as a waste of time. Some of the good scholars of Chartres lost heart, among them William of Conches and a certain Richard, both teachers of John of Salisbury. They had followed Bernard's methods ; " but when the time came that so many men, to the great prejudice of truth, preferred to seem, rather than be, philosophers and professors of the arts, engaging to impart the whole of philosophy in less than three years, or even two, then my masters vanquished by the clamour of the ignorant crowd, stopped. Since then, less time has been given to grammar. So it has come about that those who profess to teach all the arts, both liberal and mechanical, are ignorant of the first of them, without which vainly will one try to get the rest." ^ Upon these people who seemed charlatans, and yet may have represented tendencies of the coming time, Thierry, Gilbert de la Porree,^ and John of Salisbury poured their sarcasms. The controversy may have clarified Bernard's consciousness of the value of classical studies and deepened his sense of obligation to the ancients, until it drew from him perhaps the finest of mediaeval utterances touching the matter : " Bernard of Chartres used to say that we were like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants. If we see more and further than they, it is not due to our own clear eyes or tall bodies, but because we are raised on high and upborne by their gigantic bigness." ^ Echoes of this same controversy — ^have they ever quite ^ Metalogicus, i. 24 (Migne 199, col. 856). The name seems to have been taken from Cornificius, a detractor of Virgil in Donatus, Vita Vergilii xvii. 65, xviii. 76, or possibly from Cornificius, a rhetorician cited by QuintUian and regarded by some as the author of the treatise Ad Herennium, which advocated a briefer course of study. * Cf. Clerval, o.c. p. 211 sqq. and p. 227 sqg. ^ Metalogicus, iii. 4 (Migne 199, col. 900). i6o THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi died away ? — are heard in letters of the scholarly Peter of Blois, who was educated at Paris in the middle of the twelfth century, became a secretary of Henry Plantagenet and spent the greater part of his life in England, dying about the year 1200. He writes to a friend : '" You greatly commend your nephew, saying that never have you found a man of subtler vein ; because, forsooth, skimming over grammar, and skipping the reading of the classical authors, he has flown to the trickeries of the logicians, where not in the books themselves but from abstracts and note-books, he has learned dialectic. Knowledge of letters caimot rest on such, and the subtilty you praise may be pernicious. For Seneca says, nothing is more odious than subtilty when it is only subtilty. Some people, without the elements of education, would discuss point and hne and superficies, fate, chance and free-will, physics and matter and the void, the causes of things and the secrets of nature and the soiuces of the Nile ! Om: tender years used to be spent in rules of grammar, analogies, barbarisms, solecisms, tropes, with Donatus, Priscian, and Bede, who would not have devoted pains to these matters had they supposed that a solid basis of knowledge could be got without them. Quintilian, Caesar, Cicero, urge youths to study grammar. Why condemn the writings of the ancients ? it is written that in antiquis est sctentia. You rise from the darkness of ignorance to the Ught of science only by their diMgent study. Jerome glories in having read Origen ; Horace bocists of reading Homer over and over. It was much to my profit, when as a httle chap I was studying how to make verses, that, as my master bade me, I took my matter not from fables but from truthful histories. And I profited from the letters of Hildebert of Le Mans, with their elegance of style and sweet urbanity ; for as a boy I was made to learn some of them by heart. Besides other books, well known in the schools, I gained from keeping company with Trogus Pompeius, Josephus, Suetonius, Hegesippus, Quintus Curtius, Tacitus, and Livy, all of whom throw into their histories much that makes for moral edification and the advance of hberal science. And I read other books, which had nothing to do with history — ^very many of them. From all of them we may pluck sweet flowers, and cultivate ourselves from their urbane suavity of speech." ^ In another letter Peter writes to his bishop of Bath, as touching the accusation of some " hidden detractor," that he, 1 Petrus Blesensis, Epist. loi (Migne 207, col. 312). CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS i6i Peter, is but a useless compiler, who fills letters and sermons with the plunder of the ancients and Holy Writ : " Let him cease, or he will hear what he does not like ; for I am fuU of cracks, and can hold in nothing, as Terence says. Let him try his hand at compiling, as he calls it. — But what of it ! Though dogs may bark and pigs may grunt, I shall always pattern on the writings of the ancients ; with them shall be my occu- pation ; nor ever, while I am able, shall the sun find me idle.'* ^ It is evident how broadly Peter of Blois, or John of Salisbury, or the Chartrians, were read in the Latin Classics. Peter mentions even Tacitus, a writer not thought to have been much read in the Middle Ages. We have been looking at the matter rather in regard to poetry and eloquence — belles lettres. But one may also note the same broad reading (among the few who read at all) on the part of those who sought for the ethical wisdom of the ancients. This is apparent (perhaps more apparent than real) with Abaelard, who is ready with a store of antique ethical citations.^ It is also borne witness to by the treatise Moralis philosophia de honesto et utili, placed among the works of Hildebert of Le Mans,^ but probably from the pen of William of Ccnches, grammaticus post Bemardum Camotensem opulentissimus, as John of Salisbury calls him.^ In some manuscripts it is entitled Summa moralium philosophorum, quite appropriately. One might hardly compare it for organic inclusiveness with the Christian Summa of Thomas Aquinas ; but it may very well be likened to the more compact Sentences of the Lombard ^ which were so solidly put together about the same time. The Lombard drew his Sentences from the writings of the Church Fathers ; William's work consists of moral extracts, mainly from Cicero, Seneca, Sallust, Terence, Horace, Lucan, and Boethius. The first part, De honesto, reviews Prudentia, Justitia, Fortitudo, and under these a number of particular virtues in correspondence with which the extracts are arranged. The De utili considers the adventitious goods of circumstance and fortune. ^ Epist. 92 {Migne 207, col. 289). These letters axe cited by Clerval. 2 See post, Chapter XXXVII., i. ^ Migne, Pat. Lot. lyi^ col. 1007-1056. * Metalogicus, i. 5. ^ See post, Chapter XXXVI., i. VOL. II M 1 62 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi The extracts forming the substance of this work were intelligently selected and smoothly joined ; and the treatise was much used by those who stucMed the antique philosophy of Hfe. It was drawn upon, for instance, by that truculent and well-bom Welshman, Giraldus Cambrensis, in his De instructione principum, which the author wrote partly to show how evilly Henry Plantagenet performed the functions of a king. This irrepressible claimant of St. David's See had been long a prickly thorn for Henry's side.^ But he was a scholar, and quotes from the whole range of the Latin Classics. Ill When a man is not a mere transcriber, but puts something of himself into the product of his pen, his work will reflect his personality, and may disclose the various factors of his spiritual constitution. To discover from the writings of mediaeval scholars the effect of their classical studies upon their characters is of greater interest than to trace from their citations the authors read by them. Such a compilation as the Summa moralium which has just been noticed, while plainly disclosing the latter information, teUs nothing of the personality of him who strung the extracts together. Yet he had read writings which could hardly have failed to influence him. Cicero and Seneca do not leave their reader unchanged, especially if he be seeking ethical instruction. And there was a work known to this particular compiler which moved men in the Middle Ages. Deep must have been the effect of that book so widely read and pondered on and loved, the De consolatione of Boethius with its intimate consolings, its ways of reasoning and looking upon hfe, its setting of the intellectual above the ph5^ical, its insistence that mind rather than body makes the man. Imagine it brought home to a vigorous struggling personality — ^imagine Alfred reading and translating it, and adding to it from the teachings of his own experience.^ The study of such a book might form the turning of a mediaeval hfe ; at least could 1 The works of Giraldus Cambrensis are published in Master of Rolls Series, 21, in eight volumes. The last contains the De instructione pHndpum, Giraldus lived from about 1147 to 1220. 2 ji^^g^ Chapter VIII. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 163 not fail to temper the convulsions of a soul storm-driven amid unreconcilable spiritual conflicts. One may look back even to the time of Alfred or Charlemagne and note suggestions coming from classical reading. For instance, the antique civilization being essentially urban, words denoting qualities of disciplined and polished men had sprung from city life, as contrasted with rustic rudeness. Thus the word urbanitas passed over into mediaeval use when the quality itself hardly existed outside of the transmitted Latin literature. For an Anglo-Saxon or a Frank to use and even partly comprehend its significance meant his introduction to a new idea. Alcuin writesjto Charlemagne that he knows how it rejoices the latter to meet with zeal for learning and church discipline, and how pleasing to him is anything which is seasoned with a touch of wit — urbanitatis sale conditum?- And again, in more curious phrase, he compliments a certain worthy upon his metrical exposition of the creed, " wherein I have found gold-spouting whirlpools {aurivomos gurgites) of spiritual meanings abounding with gems of scholastic wit {scholasticae urbanitatis)/' ^ Though doubtless this " scholastic wit " was flat enough, it was something for these men to get the notion of what was witty and entertaining through a word so vocalized with city life as urbanitas, a word that we have seen used quite knowingly by the more sophisticated scholar, Peter of Blois. Again, it is matter of common observation that a feeling for nature's loveliness depends somewhat on the growth of towns. But mediaeval men constantly had the idea suggested to them by the classic poetry of city-dwelling poets. Here are some lines by Alcuin or one of his friends, expressing sentiments which never came to them from the woods with which they were disagreeably familiar : " O mea cella, mihi habitatio, dulcis, amata, Semper in aeternum, o mea ceUa, vale. Undique te cingit ramis resonantibus arbos, Silvula florigeris semper onusta corais." ^ ^ Alcuin, Ep. 80 (Migne loo, col. 260). ^ Alcuin, Ep. 113, ad Paulinum patriarcham (Migne 100, col. 341). ^ Traube, Poetae Lot. Aevi CatoUni [Mon. Germ.), i, p. 243. Cf. " Versus iu laude Larii laci," by Paulus Diaconus, ibid. p. 42, 1 64 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi These are little hints of the effect of the antique literature upon men who still were somewhat rough-hewn. Advancing a century and a half, the influence of classic study is seen, as it were, " in the round " in Gerbert.^ It is likewise clear and full in John of Salisbury, of whom we have spoken, and shall speak again.^ For an admirable example, however, of the subtle working of the antique literature upon character and temperament, we may look to that scholar-prelate whose letters the youthful Peter of Blois studied with profit, Hildebert of Lavardin, Bishop of Le Mans, and Archbishop of Tours. He shows the effect of the antique not so strikingly in the knowledge which he possessed or the particular opinions which he entertained, as in the balance and temperance of his views, and incidentally in his fine facility of scholarship. Hildebert was bom at Lavardin, a village near the mouth of the Loire, about the year 1055. He belonged to an unimportant but gentle family. Dubious tradition has it that one of his teachers was Berengar of Tours, and that he passed some time in the monastery of Cluny, of whose great abbot, Hugh, he wrote a life. It is more probable that he studied at Le Mans. But whatever appears to have been the character of his early environment, Hildebert belongs essentially to the secular clergy, and never was a monk. While comparatively young, he was made head of the cathedral school of Le Mans, and then archdeacon. In the year 1096, the old bishop of Le Mans died, and Hildebert, then about forty years of age, was somewhat quickly chosen his successor, by the clergy and people of the town, in spite of the protests of certain of the canons of the cathedral. The none too happy scholar-bishop found himself at once a powerless but not negligible element of a violently com- plicated feudal situation. There was the noble Helias, Count of Maine, who was holding his domain against Robert de Bellesme, the latter slackly supported by William Rufus of England, who claimed the overlordship of the land. Helias reluctantly acquiesced in Hildebert's election. Not so Rufus, who never ceased to hate and persecute the man that had obtained the see which had been in the gift of his J Ante^ Chapter XII. 2 p^^t^ Chapter XXXVII., iii. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 165 father, William the Conqueror. It happened soon after that Count Helias was taken prisoner by his opponent, and was delivered over to Rufus at Rouen. But Fulk of Anjou now thrust himself into this feudal melee, appeared at Le Mans, entered, and was acknowledged as its lord. He left a garri- son, and departed before the Red King reached the town. The latter began its siege, but soon made terms with Fulk, by which Le Mans was to be given to Rufus, Helias was to be set free, and many other matters were left quite un- settled. Now Rufus entered the town (1098), where Hildebert nervously received him ; Helias, set free by the King, offered to become his feudal retainer ; Rufus would have none of him ; so Helias defied the King, and was permitted to go his way by that strange man, who held his knightly honour sacred, but otherwise might commit any atrocity prompted by rage or greed. It was well for Helias that trouble with the French King now drew Rufus to the north. The next year, 1099, Rufus in England heard that the Count had renewed the war, and captured Le Mans, except the citadel. He hurried across the channel, rushed through the land, entered Le Mans, and passed on through it, chasing Helias, But the war languished, and Rufus returned to Le Mans, or to what was left of it. Hildebert had cause to tremble. He had met the King on the latter's hurried arrival from England for the war. Rufus had spoken him fair. But now, at Le Mans, he was accused before the monarch of complicity in the revolt. Quickly flared the King's anger against the man whom he had never ceased to detest. He ordered him to pull down the towers of his cathedral, which rose threaten- ing and massive over the city's ruins and the citadel of the King. What could the defenceless bishop do to avert disgrace and the desolation of his beloved church ? Words were left him, but they did not prove effectual. Rufus commanded him to choose between immediate compliance and going to England, there to submit himself to the judg- ment of the English bishops. He accepted the latter alternative, and followed the King, leaving his diocese ruined and his people dispersed. In England, Rufus dangled him along between fear and hope, till at last the disheartened 1 66 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi prelate returned to the Continent, having ambiguously consented to pull down those towers. But instead, he set to work to repair the devastation of his diocese. The reiterated mandate of the King was not long in following him, and this time coupled with an accusation of treason. Hildebert's state was desperate. His clergy were forbidden to obey him, his palace was sacked, his own property destroyed. Such were William's methods of persuasion. Then the King proposed that the bishop should purge himself by the ordeal of hot iron. Hildebert, the bishop, the theologian, the scholar, was almost on the verge of taking up the challenge, when a letter from Yves, the saintly Bishop of Chartres, dissuaded him. At this moment, with ruin for his portion, and no escape, an arrow ended the Red King's life in the New Forest. It was the year of grace iioo. Now, what a change ! Henry Beauclerc was from the first his friend, as William Rufus to the last had been his enemy. Hitherto Hildebert has appeared weakly endeavour- ing to elude destruction, and perhaps with no unshaken loyalty in his bosom toward any cause except his dire necessities. Henceforth, sailing a calmer sea, he repays Henry's favour with adherence and admiration. He has no support to offer Anselm of Canterbury, still struggling with the English monarchy over investitures ; nor has he one word of censure for the clever cold-eyed scholar-King who kept his brother, Robert of Normandy, a prisoner for twenty-eight years till he died. Hildebert had still thirty years of life before him ; nor were they all to be untroubled. Shortly after the Red King's death, he made a voyage to Rome, to obtain the papal benediction. To judge from his poems, he was deeply impressed with the ruins of the ancient city. Returning, he devoted himself to the affairs of his diocese and to rebuilding the cathedral and other churches of Le Mans. In 1125, in spite of his tmwillingness, for he was seventy years old, he was enthroned Archbishop of Tours, where he was to be worried by disputes with Louis le Gros of France over investitures. But he acquitted himself with vigour, especially through his letters. A famous one relates to this struggle of his closing years : CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 167 " In adversity it is a comfort to hope for happier times. Long has this hope flattered me ; and as the corn in the blade cheers the countryman, the expectation of a fair season has comforted my soul. But now I no longer hope for the clearing of the cloudy weather, nor see where the storm-driven ship, on whose deck I sit, may gain the harbour of rest. " Friends are silent ; silent are the priests of Jesus Christ. And those also are silent through whose intercession I thought the king would be reconciled with me. I thought indeed, but in their silence the king has added to the pain of my wounds. Yet it was theirs through the canonical institutes to resist the injury to the Church. Theirs was it, if the matter had demanded it, to raise a wall before the house of Israel. Yet with the most serene king there is call for exhortation rather than threat, for advice rather than command, for instruction rather than the rod. By these he should have been met, by these reverently taught not to flesh his arrows in an aged priest, nor make void the canonical decrees, nor persecute the ashes of a church already buried, ashes in which I eat the bread of grief, in which I drink the cup of mourning, from which to be snatched away and escape is to pass from death to life. " Yet amid these straits, anger has never triumphed over me, that I should be willing to force the claim of the Lord, or wrest his peace with the strong hand and arm of the Church. Suspect is the peace to which high potentates are brought not by love, but by force. Easily is it broken, and sometimes the final state is worse than the first. There is another way by which, Christ leading, I can better reach it. I will cast my thought upon the Lord, and He will give me the desire of my heart. The Lord remembered Joseph, forgotten by Pharaoh's chief butler when prosperity had returned to him ; He remembered David abandoned by his own son. Perhaps he wiU remember even me, and bring the tossing ship to rest on the desired shore. He it is who looks upon the petition of the meek, and does not spurn their prayers. He it is in whose hand the hearts of kings are wax. If I shaU have found grace in his eyes, I shall easily obtain the grace of the king or advantageously lose it. For to offend man for the sake of God is to win God's grace." ^ Hildebert was a classical scholar, and in his time un- matched as a writer of Latin prose and verse. Many of his elegiac poems survive, some of them so antique in sentiment and so correct in metre as to have been taken for products 1 Ep. ii. 33 (Migne 171, col, 256). For the Latin text of this letter see post^ Chapter XXXII, p. 200, 1 68 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi of the pagan period. One of the best is an elegy on Rome obviously inspired by his visit to that city of ruins : " Par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina." Its closing lines are interesting : '' Hie superiim formas superi mirantur et ipsi, Et cupiunt fictis vultibus esse pares. Non potuit natura deos hoc ore creare Quo miranda deilm signa creavit homo. Vultus adest his numinibus, potiusque coluntur Artificum studio quam deitate sua. Urbs fehx, si vel dominis urbs ilia careret, Vel dominis esset turpe carere fide 1 " Such phrases, such frank admiration for the idols of pagan Rome, are startling from the pen of a contemporary of St. Bernard. The- spell of the antique lay on Hildebert, as on others of his time. " The gods themselves marvel at their own images, and desire to equal their sculptured forms. Nature was unable to make gods with such visages as man has created in these wondrous images of the gods. There is a look {vultus) about these deities, and they are worshipped for the skill of the sculptor rather than for their divinity." ^ Hildebert was not only a bishop, he was a Christian ; but the sense and feeling of ancient Rome had entered into him. Besides the poem just quoted, he wrote another, either in Rome or after his return, Christian in thought but most antique in sympathy and turn of phrase. " Dum simulacra mihi, dum numina vana placerent. Militia, populo, moenibus alta fui ; ruit alta senatus Gloria, procumbunt templa, theatra jacent." The antique feeling of these lines is hardly balanced by the expressed sentiment : " plus Caesare Petrus ! " ^ And again we hear the echo of the antique in " Nil artes, nil pura fides, nil gloria linguae, Ml fons ingenii, nil probitas sine re." ^ ^ For the entire poem, which is of interest throughout, see post. Chapter XXXIII., I. 2 For the poem see Haureau, Milanges poitiques d'Hildebert de Lavardin, p. 64 (Paris, 1882). 5 Haureau, o.c. p. 56. CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 169 Hildebert has also a poem " On his Exile/' perhaps written while in England with the Red King. Quite in antique style it sings the loss of friends and fields, gardens and granaries, which the writer possessed while prospera fata smiled. Then " J urates superos intra mea vota teneri I " — a very antique sentiment. But the Christian faith of the despoiled and exiled bishop reasserts itself as the poem closes.^ Did Hildebert also write the still more palpably *' antique " elegiacs on Hermaphrodite, and other question- able subjects ? ^ That is hard to say. If, on the other hand, he wrote the following squib against a woman who seems to have sent him verses, he shows himself a master of popular verse as well as classic metre : " Femina perfida, femina sordida, digna catenis. " O miserabilis, insatiabilis, insatiata, Desine scribere, desine mittere, carmina blandia, Carmina turpia, carmina mollia, vix memoranda. Nee tibi mittere, nee tibi scribere, disposui me. " Mens tua vitrea, plumbea, saxea, ferrea, nequam, Fingere, fallere, prodere, perdere, rem putat aequam." ^ With all his classical leanings, the maj or part of Hildebert was Christian. His theological writings which survive, his zeal against certain riotous heretics, and in general his letters, leave no doubt of this. It is from the Christian point of view that he gives his sincerest counsels ; it is from that that he balances the advantages of an active or contemplative life, the claims of the Christian vita activa and vita contemplativa. Yet his classic tastes gave temper- ance to his Christian views, and often drew him to sheer scholarly pleasures and to an antique consideration of the incidents of life. How sweetly the elements were mixed in him appears in a famous letter written to William of Champeaux, that Goliath of realism whom Abaelard discomfited in the Paris ^ Haureau, p. 82. ^ Ibid. p. 144. ^ Migne, Pat. Lot. 171, col. 1428. This volume of Migne also contains the poems criticized and (some of them) edited by Hamreau in the book already referred to. I70 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi schools. The unhappy William retreated a little way across the Seine, and laid the foundations of the abbey of St. Victor in the years between 1108 and 1113. He sought to abandon his studies and his lectures, and surrender himself to the austere salvation of his soul, and yet scarcely with such irrevocable purpose as would rebufi the temperate advice of Hildebert's letter proffered with tactful understanding. " Over thy change of life my soul is glad and exults, that at length it has come to thee to determine to philosophize. For thou hadst not the true odour of a philosopher so long as thou didst not cuU beauty of conduct from thy philosophic knowledge. Now, as honey from the honeycomb, thou hast drawn from that a worthy rule of Hving. This is to gather aU of thee within virtue's boundaries, no longer huckstering with nature for thy life, but attending less to what the flesh is able for, than to what the spirit wills. This is truly to philosophize ; to Hve thus is already to enter the fellowship of those above. Easily shalt thou come to them if thou dost advance disburdened. The mind is a burden to itself until it ceases to hope and fear. Because Diogenes looked for no favour, he feared the power of no one. What the cynic infidel abhorred, the Christian doctor far more amply must abhor, since his profession is so much more fruitful through faith. For such are stumbhng- blocks of conduct, impeding those who move toward virtue. " But the report comes that you have been persuaded to abstain from lecturing. Hear me as to this. It is virtue to furnish the material of virtue. Thy new way of hfe calls for no partial sacrifice, but a holocaust. Offer thyself altogether to the Lord, since so He sacrificed Himself for thee. Gold shines more when scattered than when locked up. Knowledge also when distributed takes increase, and unless given forth, scorning the miserly possessor, it sUps away. Therefore do not close the streams of thy learning." ^ Eventually William followed this, or other like advice. One sees Hildebert's sympathetic point of view ; he entirely approves of William's renunciation of the world — a good bishop of the twelfth century might also have wished to renounce its troublous honours ! Yes, William has at last turned to the true and most disburdened way of living. But this abandonment of worldly ends entails no abandonment of Christian knowledge or surrender of the cause of Christian ^ Hildebert, Epis. i. i (Migne 171, col. 141). CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 171 learning. Nay, let William resume, and herein give himself to God's will without reserve. So the letter presents a temperate and noble view of the matter, a view as sound in the twentieth century as in the twelfth. And a like broad consideration Hildebert brings to a more particular discussion of the two modes of Christian living, the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary. He amply distinguishes these two ways of serving God from any mode of life with selfish aims. It happened that a devout monk and friend of Hilde- bert was made abbot of the monastery of St. Vincent, in the neighbourhood of Le Mans. The administrative duties of an abbot might be as pressing as a 1;)ishop*s, and this good man deplored his withdrawal from a life of more complete contemplation. So Hildebert wrote him a long discursive letter, of which our extracts will give the thread of argument : " You bewail the peace of contemplation which is snatched away, and the imposed burden of active responsibilities. You were sitting with Mary at the feet of the Lord Jesus, when lo, you were ordered to serve with Martha. You confess that those dishes which Mary receives, sitting and Hstening, are more savoury than those which zealous Martha prepares. In these, indeed, is the bread of men, in those the bread of angels." And Hildebert descants upon the raptures of the vita contemplativa, of which his friend is now bereft. " The contemplative and the active life, ray dearest brother, you sometimes find in the same person, and sometimes apart. As the examples of Scripture show us. Jacob was joined to both Leah and Rachel ; Christ teaches in the fields, anon He prays on the mountains ; Moses is in the tents of the people, and again speaks with God upon the heights. So Peter, so Paul. Again, action alone is found, as in Leah and Martha, while contemplation gleams in Mary and Rachel. Martha, as I think, represents the clergy of our time, with whom the press of business closes the shrine of contemplation, and dries up the sacrifice of tears. " No one can speak with the Lord while he has to prattle with the whole world. Such a prattler am I, and such a priest, who when I spend the Kvelong day caring for the herds, have not a moment for the care of souls. Affairs, the enemies of my spirit, come upon me ; they claim me for their own, they thieve 172 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi the private hour of prayer, they defraud the services of the sanctuary, they irritate me with their stings by day and infest my sleep ; and what I can scarcely speak of without tears, the creeping furtive memory of disputes foUows me miserable to the altar's sacraments, — all such are even as the vultures which Abraham drove away from the carcases (Gen. xv. ii). " Nay more, what untold loss of virtue is entailed by these occupations of the captive mind ! While under their power we do not even serve with Martha. She ministered, but to Christ ; she bustled about, but for Christ. We truly, who like Martha bustle about, and, hke Martha, minister, neither bustle about for Christ nor minister to Him. For if in such busthng ministry thou seekest to win thine own desire, art taken with the gossip of the mob, or with pandering to carnal pleasures, thou art neither the Martha whom thou dost cotmterf eit nor the Mary for whom thou dost sigh. " In that case, dearest brother, you would have just cause for grief and tears. But if you do the part of Martha simply, you do well ; if, Hke Jacob, you hasten to and fro between Leah and Rachel, you do better ; if with Mary you sit and listen, you do best. For action is good, whose pressing instancy, though it kill contemplation, draws back the brother wandering from Christ. Yet it is better, sometimes seated, to lay aside administrative cares, and amid the irksome nights of Leah, draw fresh hfe from Rachel's loved embrace. From this intermixture the course to the celestials becomes more inclusive, for thereby the same soul now strives for the blessedness of men and anon participates in that of the angels. But of the zeal single for Mary, why should I speak ? Is not the Saviour's word enough, ' Mary hath chosen the best part, which shall not be taken from her.' " And in closing, Hildebert shows his friend the abbot that for him the true course is to follow Jacob interchanging Leah and Rachel ; and then in the watches of his pastoral duties the celestial vision shall be also his.^ Could any one adjust more fairly this contest, so insistent throughout the annals of mediaeval piety, between active duties and heavenly contemplation ? The only solution for abbot and bishop was to join Leah with Rachel. And how clearly Hildebert sees the pervasive peril of the active life, that the prelate be drawn to serve his pleasures and not Christ. Many souls of prelates had that cast into hell ! In theory Hildebert is clear as day, and altogether Christian, so far as we have followed the counsels of these ^ Hildebert, Ep. i. 22 (Migne 171, col. 197). CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 173 letters. But in fact the quiet life had for him a temptation, to which he yielded himself more generously than to any of the grosser lures of his high prelacy. This temptation, so alluring and insidious, so fairly masked under the proffer of learning leading to fuller Christian knowledge, was of course the all too beloved pagan literature, and the all too humanly convincing plausibilities of pagan philosophy. Hildebert's writings evince that kind of classical scholarship which springs only from great study and great love. His soul does not appear to have been riven by a consciousness of sin in this behoof. Sometimes he passes so gently from Chris- tian to pagan ethics, as to lead one to suspect that he did not deeply feel the inconsistency between them. Or again, he seems satisfied with the moral reasonings of paganism, and sets them forth without a qualm. For there was the antique pagan side of our good bishop ; and how pagan thoughts and views of life had become a part of Hildebert's nature, appears in a most interesting letter written to King Henry, consoling him upon the loss of his son and the noble company so gaily sailing from Normandy in that ill-starred White Ship in the year 1120. Hildebert begins reminding the King how much more it is for a monarch to rule himself than others. Hitherto he has triumphed over fortune, if fortune be anything ; now she has wounded him with her sharpest dart. Yet that cannot penetrate the well-guarded mind. It is wisdom not to vaunt oneself in prosperity, nor be overwhelmed with grief in adversity. Hildebert then reasons on the excellence of man's nature and will ; he speaks of the effect of Adam's sin in loss of grace and entailment of misery on the human race. He quotes from the Old Testament and from Virgil. Then he proceeds more specifically with his fortifying arguments. Their sum is, let the breast of man abound in weapons of defence and contemn the thrusts of fortune ; there is nothing over which the triumphant soul may not triumph. " Unhappy he who lacks this armament ; and most unhappy he who besides does not know it. Here Democritus found matter for laughter, Demosthenes {sic) matter for tears. Far be it from thee that the chance cast of things should affect thee so, and the loss of wisdom follow the loss of offspring. Thou hast suffered 174 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi on dry land more grievous shipwreck than thy son in the brine, if fortune's storm has wrested wisdom from the wise." After a while Hildebert passes on to consider what is man, and wherein consists his welfare : " To any one carefully considering what man is, nothing will seem more probable than that he is a divine animal, distinguished by a certain share of divinity (numinis). By bone and flesh he smacks of the earth. By reason his affinity to God is shown. Moses, inspired, certifies that by this prerogative man was created in the image of God. Whence it also follows for man, that he should through reason recognize and love his true good. Now reason teaches that what pertains to virtue is the true good, and that it is within us. The things we temporally possess are good only by opinion (opinione, i.e. not ratione), and these are about us. What is about us is not within our^ws but another's {alterius juris sunt). Chance directs them ; they neither come nor stand under our arbitrament. For us they are at the lender's will {precaria), like a slave belonging to another.^ Through such, true felicity is neither had nor lost. Indeed no one is happy, no one is wretched by reason of what is another's. It is his own that makes a man's good or ill, and whatever is not within him is not his own." Then Hildebert speaks of dignities, of wife and child, of the fruits of the earth and riches — bona vaga, bona sunt pennata haec omnia. Men quarrel and struggle about all these things — ecce vides quanta mundus laboret insania,^ No one need point out how much more natural this reasoning would have been from the lips of Seneca than from those of an archiepiscopal contemporary of St. Bernard. One may, however, comment on the patent fact that this reflection of the antique in Hildebert's ethical consolation reflects a manner of reasoning rather than an emotional ^ A technical illustration from Roman law. 2 Hildeberti, Ep. ii. 12 (Migne 171, col. 172-177). Compare Ep. i. 17, consoling a friend on loss of place and dignities. HUdebert's works are in vol. 171 of Migne*s Pat. Lot. A nimiber of his poems are more carefully edited by Haur6au in Notices et extraits des MSS., etc., vol. 28, ii. p. 289 sgq. ; and some of them in vol. 29, ii. p. 231 sqq. of the same series. The matter is more conveniently given by Haureau in his Milanges poitiques d^Hildebert de Lavardin. On the man and his writings see De servillers, Hildebert et son temps (Paris, 1B76) ; Hebert Duperron, De Venerabilis Hildeberti vita et scriptis {Bajocis, 1855) ; also vol. xi. of Hist. lit. de la France ; and (best of all) Dieudonn6, Hildebert de Lavardin, sa vie^ ses lettres, etc. (Paris, 1898). CHAP. XXXI SPELL OF THE CLASSICS 175 mood, and in this it is an instance of the general fact that mediaeval methods of reasoning consciously or unconsciously followed the antique ; while the emotion, the love and yearn- ing, of mediaeval religion was more largely the gift of Christianity, CHAPTER XXXII EVOLUTION OF MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE In this and the next chapter we are concerned with Hterature, properly speaking ; and with the effect of the Classics, the pure literary antique, upon mediaeval literary productions. The latter are to be viewed as literature ; not considering their substance, but their form, their composition, style, and temperamental shading, qualities which show the faculties and temper of their authors. We are to discover, if we can, wherein the qualities of mediaeval literature reflect the Latin Classics, or in any way betray their influence. It is an affair of dull diligence to learn what Classics were read by the various mediaeval writers ; and likewise is it a dull affair to note in mediaeval writings the direct borrowing from the Classics of fact, opinion, sentiment, or phrase. Such borrowing was incessant, resorted to as of course wherever opportunity offered and the knowledge was at hand. It would not commonly occur to a mediaeval writer to state in his own way what he could take^lroiqa an ancient author, save in so far as change of medium — ^from prose to verse, or from Latin to the vernacular — compelled^ him. So the church builders in Rome never thought of hewing new blocks of stone, or making new columns, when some ancient palace or temple afforded a quarry. The details of such spoliations offer little interest in comparison with the effect of antique architecture upon later styles. So we should like to discover the effect of the ancienV compositions upon the mediaeval, and observe how far the faculties and mental processes of classic authors, incorporate in their writings, were transmitted to mediaeval men, to become incorporate in theirs. 176 cHAP.xxxn. MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 177 Unless you are Virgil or Cicero, you cannot write like Virgil or Cicero. Writing, real writing, that is to say, creative self-expressive composition, is the personal product and closely mirrored reflex of the writer's temperament and mentality. It gives forth indirectly the influences which have blended in him, education and environment, his past and present. His personality makes his style, his untrans- mittable style. Yet a group of men affected by the same past, and living at the same time and place, or under like spiritual influences, may show a like faculty and taste. Having more in common with one another than with men of other time, their mental processes, and therefore their ways of writing, will present more common qualities. Around and above them, as well as through their natal and acquired faculties, sweeps the genius of the language, itself the age-long product of a hke-minded race. Each writer who will write that language must shape his more personal diction in harmony with its genius, and not in opposition and repugnancy. Obviously the personal elements in classic writings were no more capable of transmission than the personal qualities of the writers. Likewise, the genius of the Latin language, though one might think it fixed in approved compositions, changed with the spiritual fortune of the Roman people, and constantly transmitted an altered self and novel tenets of construction to control the linguistic usages of succeeding men. None but himself could have written Cicero's letters. No man of Juvenal's time could have written the Aeneid, nor any man of the time of Diocletian the histories of Tacitus. There were, however, common elements in these compositions, all of them possessing certain qualities which I are associated with classical writing. These may be difficult to formulate, but they become clear enough in contrast with the qualities of mediaeval Latin literature. The mediaeval man did not feel and reason like a contemporary of Virgil or Cicero ; he had not the same training in Greek literature ; he did not have the same definitude of conception, did not care so much that a composition should have limit and the unity springing from adherence to a single topic ; he did VOL. II N 178 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi not, in fine, stand on the same level of attainment and faculty and taste with men of the Augustan time. He had his own heights and depths, his own temperament and predilections, his own capacities. Reading the Classics had not transformed him into Cicero or Seneca, or set his feet in the Roman Forum. His feet wandered in the ways of the Middle Ages, and whatever he wrote in - prose or verse, in Latin or in his own vernacular, was himself and of himself, and but indirectly due to the antecedent influences which had been transmuted even in entering his nature and becoming part of his temper and faculty. Any consideration of the knowledge and appreciation of the Classics in the Middle Ages would be followed naturally by a consideration of their effect upon mediaeval com- position ; which in turn forms part of any discussion of the literary quahties of mediaeval Latin Uterature. But inas- much as mediaeval form and diction tend to remove further and further from classical standards, the whole discussion may seem a lucus a non lucendo for aU the light it throws upon the effect of the Classics on mediaeval literature. Our best plan will be to note the beginnings of mediaeval Latinity in that post -Augustan and largely patristic diction which had been enriched and reinvigorated with many phrases from daily speech ; and then to follow the living if sluggish river as it moves on, receiving increment along its course, its currents mottled with the sUt of mediaeval Italy, France, Germany. We shall suppose this flood to divide in rivers of Latin prose and verse ; and we may follow them, and see where they overflow their channels, canying antique flotsam into the ample marshes of vernacular poetry. There has always been a difference in diction between speech and literature. At Rome, Cicero and Caesar, and of course the poets, did not, in writing, use quite the language of the people. All the words of daily speech were not taken into the literary or classical vocabulary, which had often quite other words of its own. Moreover the writers, in forming their prose and verse and constructing their compositions, were affected deeply by their study of Greek cHAP.xxxn MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 179 literature.^ If Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, and their friends spoke differently from the Roman shopkeepers, there was a still greater difference between their writings and the parlance of the town. No one need be told that it was the spoken, and not the classical Latin, which in Italy, Spain, Provence, and Northern France developed into Italian, Spanish, Provengal, and French. On the other hand, the descent of written mediaeval Latin from the classical diction or the popular speech, or both, is not so clear, or at least not so simple. It cannot be said that mediaeval Latin came straight from the classical ; and manifestly it cannot have sprung from the popular spoken Latin, like the Romance tongues, without other influence or admixture ; because then, instead of remaining Latin, it would have become Romance ; which it did not. Evidently mediaeval Latin, the literary and to some extent the spoken medium of educated men in the Middle Ages, must have carried classic strains, or have kept itself Latin by the study of Latin grammar and a conscious adherence to a veritable, if not classical, Latin diction. The mediaeval reading of the Classics, and the earnest and constant study of Latin grammar spoken of in the previous chapter, were the chief means by which mediaeval Latin maintained its Latinity. Nevertheless, while it kept the word forms and inflections of classical Latin and most of the classical vocabulary, it also drew an indefinite supply of words from the spoken Latin of the late imperial or patristic period. In order to understand the genesis and qualities of mediaeval Latin, one must bear in mind (as with most things mediaeval) that its immediate antecedents lie in the transi- tional fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, and not in the classical period.^ Those centuries went far toward declassi- ^ It is well known that the great Latin prose, in spite of variances of stylistic intent and faculty among the individual writers, was an artistic creation, formed under the influence of Greek models. Cicero is the supreme example of this, and he is also the greatest of all Latin prose writers. After his time some great writers {e.g. Tacitus, Quintihan) preserved a Uke tradition ; others {e.g. Seneca) paid less attention to it. And likewise on through the patristic period, and the Middle Ages too, some men endeavoured to preserve a classic style, while others wrote more naturally. ^ Even as it is necessary, in order to appreciate some of the methods of the i8o THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi cizing Latin prose, by departing from the balanced structure of tlie classic sentences and introducing words from the spoken tongue. The style became less correct, freer, and better suited to the expression of the novel thoughts and interests coming with Christianity, The change is seen in the works of the men to whom it was largely due, Tertullian, Jerome, and other great patristic writers.^ Such men knew the Classics well, and regarded them as literary models, and yet wrote differently. For a new spirit was upon them and new necessities of expression, and they lived when, even outside of Christian circles, the classic forms of style were loosening with the falling away of the strenuous intellectual temper, the poise, the self-reliance and the self-control distinguishing the classical epoch. The stylistic genius of Augustine and Jerome was not the genius of the formative beginnings of the Romance tongues, with, for instance, its inability to rely on the close logic of the case ending, and its need to help the meaning by the more exphcit preposition. Yet the spirit of these two great men was turning that way. They were not classic writers, but students of the Classics, who assisted their own genius by the study of what no longer was themselves. So in the following centuries the most careful Latin writers are students of the Classics, and do not study Jerome and Augustine for style. Yet their writings carry out the tendencies beginning (or rather not beginning) with these two. It was not in diction alone that the Fathers were the forerunners of mediaeval writers. Classic Latin authors, both from themselves and through their study of Greek literature, had the sense and faculty of form. Their works maintain a clear sequence of thought, along with strict pertinency to the main topic, or adherence to the central current of the narrative, avoiding digression and refraining from excessive amplification. The classic writer did not lose himself in his subject, or wander with it wherever it might lead him. But Latin classical poetry, to realize that their immediate antecedents lay in Greek Alexandrian literature rather than in the older Greek Classics. 1 See Taylor, Classical Heritage, chapter viii. ; and generally L. Traube, Einleitung in die laieinische Pkilologie des Miftelalters (Munich, 1911). CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE i8i in patristic writings the subject is apt to dominate the man, draw him after its own necessities, or by its casual sugges- tions cause him to digress. The Fathers in their polemic or expository works became prolix and circumstantial, intent, like a lawyer with a brief, on proving every point and leaving no loophole to the adversary. In their works literary unity and strict sequence of argument may be cast to the winds. Above all, as it seems to us, and as it would have seemed to Caesar or Cicero or Tacitus, allegorical interpretation carries them at its own errant and fantastic will into footless mazes. Yet whoever will understand and appreciate the writings of the Fathers and of the mediaeval generations after them, should beware of inelastic notions. The question of unity hangs on what the writer deems the veritable topic of his work, and that may be the universal course of the providence of God, which was the subject of Augustine's Civitas Dei. Indeed, the infinite relationship of any Christian topic was likely to break through academic limits of literary unity. Similarly the proper sequence of thought depends on what constitutes the true connection between one matter and another ; it must follow what with the writer are the veritable relationships of his topics. If the visible facts of a man's environment and the narratives of history are to him primarily neither actual facts nor literal narratives, but symbols and allegories of spiritual things, then the true sequence of thought for him is from symbol to symbol and from allegory to allegory. He is justified in ignoring the apparent connection of visible facts and the logic of the literal story, and in sur- rendering himself to that sequence of thought which follows what is for him the veritable significance of the matter. Yet here we must apply another standard besides that of the writer's conception of his subject's significance. He should be wise, and not foolish. Other men and later ages will judge him according to their own best wisdom. And with respect to the writings of the Fathers viewed as literature, the modern critic cannot fail to see them entering upon that course of prolixity which in mediaeval writings will develop into the endless ; looking forward, he will see their errant habits resolving into the mediaeval lack of determined 1 82 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi topic, and their symbolically driven sequences of thought turning into the most ridiculous topical transitions, as the less cogent faculties of later men permit themselves to be suggested anywhither. The Fathers developed their distinguishing qualities of style and language under the demands of the topics absorbing them, and the influence of modes of feeling coming with Christianity. They were compelling an established language to express novel matter. In the centuries after them, further changes were to come through the linguistic tendencies moulding the evolution of the Romance tongues, through the counter influence of the study of grammar and rhetoric, and also through the ignorance and intellectual limitations of the writers. But as with the Latin of the Fathers, so with the Latin of the Middle Ages, the change of style and language was intimately and spiritually dependent upon the minds and temperaments of the writers and the qualities of the subjects for which they were seeking an expression. A profound influence in the evolution of mediaeval Latin was the continual endeavour of the mediaeval genius to express the thoughts and feelings through which it was becoming itself. With impressive adequacy and power the Christian writers of the Middle Ages moulded their inherited and acquired Latin tongue to utter the varied matters which moved their minds and lifted up their hearts. We marvel to see a language which once had told the stately tale of Rome, here lowered to fantastic incident and dull stupidity, then with almost gospel simplicity telling the moving story of some saintly life ; again sonorously uttering thoughts to lift men from the earth and denunciations crushing them to hell ; quivering with hope and fear and love, and chanting the last verities of the human soul. As to the evolution of various styles of written Latin from the close of the patristic period on through the following centuries, one may premise the remark that there would commonly be two opposite influences upon the writer ; that of the genius of his native tongue, and that of his education in Latinity. If he lived in a land where Teutonic speech had never given way to the spoken Latin of the Empire, his native tongue would be so different from the CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 183 Latin which he learned at school, that while it might impede, it could hardly draw to its own genius the learned language. But in Romance couritries there was no such absolute difference between the vernacular and the Latin, and the analytic genius of the growing Romance dialects did not fail to affect the latter. Accordingly in France, for example, the spoken Latin dialect, or one may say the genius that was forming the old French dialects to what they were to be, tends to break up the ancient periods, to introduce the auxiliary verb in the place of elaborate inflections, and rely on prepositions instead of case endings, which were dis- appearing and whose force was ceasing to be felt. One result was to simplify the order of words in a sentence ; for it was not possible to move a noun with its accompanying preposition wherever it had been feasible to place a noun whose relation to the rest of the sentence was felt from its case ending. Gregory of Tours is the famous example of these tendencies, with his Historia francorum, an ideal forerunner of Froissart. He became Bishop of Tours in the year 573. In his writings he followed the instincts of the inchoate Romance tongues. He acknowledges and perhaps overstates his ignorance of Latin grammar and the rules of composition. Such ignorance was destined to become still blanker ; and ignorance in itself was a disintegrating influence upon written Latin, and also gave freer play to the gathering tendencies of Romance speech. Evidently, had all these influences worked unchecked, they would have obliterated Latinity from mediaeval Latin. Grammatical and rhetorical education countered them effectively, and the mighty genius of the ancient language endured in the extant masterpieces. Nevertheless, the spirit of classical Latinity was never again to be a spontaneous creative power. The most that men thenceforth could do was to study and endeavour to imitate the forms in which it had embodied its living self. In brief, some of the chief influences upon the writing of Latin in the Middle Ages were : the classical genius dead, leaving only its works for imitation ; the school education in Latin grammar and rhetoric ; endeavour to 1 84 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi follow classic models and write correctly ; inability to do so from lack of capacity and knowledge ; conscious disregard of classicism ; the spirit of the Teutonic tongues clogging Latinity, and that of the Romance tongues deflect- ing it from classical constructions ; and finally, the plastic faculties of advancing Christian mediaeval civilization educing power from confusion, and creating modes of language suited to express the thoughts and feelings of mediaeval men. The life, that is to say the living development, of mediaeval Latin prose, was to lie in the capacity of suc- cessive generations of educated men to maintain a sufficient grammatical correctness, while at the same time writing Latin, not classically, but in accordance with the necessities and spirit of their times. There resulted an enormous literature which was not dead, nor altogether hving, and throughout was lacking in the spontaneity of writings in a mother tongue ; for Latin was not the speech of hearth and home, nor everywhere the tongue of the market-place and camp. But it was the language of mediaeval education and acquired culture ; it was also the language of the universal church, and, above all other tongues, expressed the thoughts by which men were saved or damned. More profoundly than any vernacular mediaeval literature, the Latin literature of the Middle Ages expressed the mediaeval mind. It thundered with the authority that held the keys of heaven ; it was resonant with feeling, and through long centuries gave voice to emotions, shattering, terror-stricken, convulsively loving. When, say with the close of the eleventh century, the mediaeval peoples had absorbed with power the teacldngs of patristic Christianity, and had undergone some centuries of Latin schooling, and when under these two chief influences certain distinctive and homogeneous ways of thinking, feeling, and looking upon life, had been reached ; when, in fine, the Middle Ages had become themselves and had evolved a genius that could create, — ^then and from that time appears the adaptability and power of mediaeval Latin to serve the ends of intellectual effort and the expression of emotion. To estimate the literary qualities of classical Latin is a CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 185 simpler task than to judge the Latinity and style of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages. Classic Latin prose has a common likeness. In general one feels that what Cicero and Caesar would have rejected, Tacitus and Quintilian would not have admitted. The syntax of these writers shows still greater uniformity. No such common likeness, or avoidance of stylistic aberration and gram- matical solecism, obtains in mediaeval prose or verse. The one and the other include many kinds of Latin, and vary from century to century, diversified in idiom and deflected from linguistic uniformity by influences of race and native speech, of ignorance and knowledge. He who would appreciate mediaeval Latin will be diffident of academic standards, and mistrust his classical predilections lest he see aberration and barbarism where he might discover the evolution of new constructions and novel styles ; lest he bestow encomium upon clever imitations of classical models, and withhold it from more living creations of the mediaeval spirit.^ The following pages do not offer themselves even as a slight sketch of mediaeval Latin literature. Their purpose is to indicate the stages of development of the prose and the phases of evolution of the verse ; and to illustrate the way in which antique themes and antique knowledge passed into vernacular poetry. Classical standards will supply us less with a point of view than with a point of departure. Nothing more need be said of the Latin of the Church Fathers and Gregory of Tours. But one must refer to the Carolingian period, in order to appreciate the Latin styles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. ^ A palpable difficulty in judging mediaeval Latin literature is its bulk. The extant Latin classics could be tucked away in a small comer of it. Every well- equipped student of the Classics has probably read them all. One mortal life would hardly suffice to read a moderate part of mediaeval Latin. And, finally, while there are histories of the classic literature in every modem tongue, there can scarcely be said to exist a geileral work upon mediaeval writings regarded as Hteratiure. Ebert*s Allgemeine Geschichte der Litteratur des Mittelalters ends with the tenth centtury. The author died. There has also appeared the first part (to the middle of the tenth century) of M. Manitius* Geschichte der lateinischen Literatuf des Mittelalters (Munich, 1911). It will be a work of value. Within the scope of its purpose, Sir J. E. Sandys* History of Classical Scholarship is very good. Grober's Ubersicht Uber die lateinische Litteratur von des 6. Jahrhunderts bis ^SSo may be referred to. 1 86 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi The revival of education and classical scholarship under the strong rule and fostering care of the greatest of mediaeval monarchs has not always been rightly judged. The vision of that prodigious personality ruling, christianizing, striving to civilize masses of barbarians and barbarized descendants of Romans and provincials ; at the same time with eager interest endeavouring to revive the culture of the past, and press it into the service of the Christian faith ; the striking success of his endeavours, men of learning coming from Ireland, England, Spain, and Italy, creating a peripatetic centre of knowledge at the imperial court, aQd establish- ing schools in many a monastery and episcopal residence — all this has never failed to arouse enthusiasm for the great achievement, and has veiled the creative deadness of it all, a deadness which in some provinces of intellectual endeavour was quite veritably moribund, while in others it betokened the necessary preparation for creative epochs to come.^ Carolingian scholarship was directed to the mastery of Latin. Grammar was taught, and the rules of composition. Then the scholars were bidden, or bade themselves, do likewise. So they wrote verse or prose according to their school lessons. They might write correctly ; but they had no style of their own. This was hopelessly true as to their metrical verses ; ^ it was only somewhat less tangibly true of their prose. The " classic " of the period, in the eyes of modem classical scholars and also in the opinion of the mediaeval centuries, is Einhard's Life of Charlemagne. Numberless encomiums have been passed on it, and justly too. It was an excellent imitation of Suetonius's Life of Augustus ; and the writer had made a careful study of Caesar and Livy.^ There is no need to quote from a writing so accessible and well known. Yet one remark may be added to what others have said : if Einhard's composition was an excellent copy of classical Latin, it was nothing else; it has no stylistic individuality.* 1 Ante, Chapter X. 2 Post, Chapter XXXIII., i. ^ See Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, i. 463-464. * There was no attempt at classicism in the narrative in which he recounted the Translation of the relics of the martjrs Marcellinus and Peter from Rome to his own new monastery at Seligenstadt (Migne 104, col. 537-594). It was an CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 187 Turning from this famous biography, we will illustrate our point by quoting from the letters of him who stands as the t57pe of the Carolingian revival, the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin. All praise to this noble educational coadjutor of Charlemagne; his learning was conscientious, his work was important, his character was lovable. His affectionate nature speaks in a letter to his former brethren at York, where his home had been before he entered Charlemagne's service. Here is a sentence : " O omnium dUectissimi patres et fratres, memores mei estote ; ego vester ero, sive in vita, sive in morte. Et forte miserebitur mei Deus, ut cujus infantiam aluistis, ejus senectutem sepeliatis." ^ It were invidious to find fault with this Latin, in which the homesick man expresses his hope of sepulture in his old home. Note also the balance of the following, written to a sick friend : " Gratias agamus Deo Jesu, vulneranti et medenti, flagellanti et consolanti. Dolor corporis salus est animae, et infirmitas temporalis, sanitas perpetua. Libenter accipiamus, patienter feramus voluntatem Salvatoris nostri." ^ This too is excellent, in language as in sentiment. So is another, and last, sentence from our author, in a letter congratulating Charlemagne on his final subjugation of the Huns, through which the survivors were brought to a knowledge of the truth : " Qualis erit tibi gloria, O beatissime rex, in die aetemae retributionis, quando hi omnes qui per tuam solKcitudinem ab adolatriae cultura ad cognoscendum verum Deum conversi sunt, te ante tribunal Domini nostri Jesu Christi in beata sorte stantem sequentur ! " ^ Again, the only trouble is stylelessness. In fine, this is the quality characterizing Carolingian prose, of which a last ex- ample may be taken from the Spaniard Theodulphus, Bishop entertaining story of a pious theft, and one may be sure that he wrote it more easily, and in a style more natural to himself than that shown in his consciously imitative masterpiece. ^ Ep. vi. (Migne loo, col. 146). ^ Ep. xxxii. (Migne 100, col. 187). * Ep. xxxiii. {Migne 100, col. 187). 1 88 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi of Orleans, " an accomplished Latin poet/* and an educator jdelding in importance to Alcuin alone. The sentence is from an official admonition to the clergy, warning them to attach more value to salvation than to lucre : " Admonendi sunt qui negotiis ac mercationibus rerum invigilant, ut non plus terrenam quam viam cupiant sempitemam. Nam qui plus de rebus terrenis quam de animae suae salute cogitat, valde a via veritatis aberrat." ^ Evidently there was a good knowledge of Latin among these Carolingians, who laboured for the revival of education and the preservation of the Classics. The nadir of classical learning falls in the succeeding period of break-up, confusion, and dawning re-adjustment. In the century or two following the year 850, the writers were too unskilled in Latin and often too cumbered by it, to manifest in their writings that unhampered and distinctive reflex of a personaHty which we term style, A rare exception would appear in such a potent scholar as Gerbert, who mastered whatever he learned, and made it part of his own faculties and temperament. His letters, consequently, have an individual style, however good or bad we may be disposed to deem it.^ Accordingly, until after the millennial year, Latin prose shows little beyond a clumsy heaviness resulting from the writer's insufficient mastery of his medium ; and there are many instances of barbarism and corruption of the tongue without any compensating positive qualities. A dreadful example is afforded by the Chronicon of Benedictus, a monk of St. Andrews in Monte Soracte, who lived in the latter part of the tenth century. He relates, as history, the fable of Charlemagne's journey to the Holy Land ; and his own eyes may have witnessed the atrocious times of John XIL, of whom he speaks as follows : " Inter haec non multum tempus Agapitus papa decessit (an. 956). Octabianus in sede sanctissima susceptus est, et vocatus est Johannes duodecimi pape. Factus est tarn lubricus sui corporis, et tarn audaces, quantum nunc in gentilis populo solebat fieri. Habebat consuetudinem sepius venandi non quasi apostolicus ^ Capitula ad Presbyteros {Migne 105, col. 202). ^ See antCj Chapter XII. CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 189 sed quasi homo ferus. Erat enim cogitio ejus vanum ; diligebat collectio feminarum, odibiles aecclesiarum, amabilis juvenis ferocitantes. Tanta denique libidine sui corporis exarsit, quanta nunc (non ?) possumus enarrare." ^ No need to draw further from this writing, which is characterized throughout by crass ignorance of grammar and all else pertaining to Latin. It has no individual qualities ; it has no style. Leaving this example of illiteracy, let us turn to a man of more knowledge, Odo, one of the greatest of the abbots of Cluny, who died in the year 943. He left lengthy writings, one of them a bulky epitome of the famous Moralia of Gregory the Great.^ More original were his three dull books of Collationes, or moral comments upon the Scriptures. They open with a heavy note which their author might have drawn from the dark temperament of that great pope whom he so deeply admired ; but the language has a leaden quality which is not Gregory's, but Odo's. " Auctor igitur et judex hominum Deus, Ucet ab ilia felicitate paradisi genus nostrum juste reptderit, suae tamen bonitatis memor, ne totus reus homo quod meretur incurrat, hujus pere- grinationis molestias multis beneficiis demulcet." And, again, a little further on : " Omnis vero ejusdem Scripturae intentio est, ut nos ab hujus vitae pravitatibus compescat. Nam idcirco terribilibus suis sententiis cor nostrum, quasi quibusdam stimulis pungit, ut homo terrore pulsatus expavescat, et divina judicia quae aut voluptate camis aut terrena sollicitudine discissus oblivisci facile solet, ad memoriam reducat."^ ^ Chroniconj cap. 35 (Migne 139, col. 46). The sense is easy to follow, but the impossible constructions render an exact translation quite impossible. It is doubtful whether this Benedictus was an Italian. The Italian writing of this period, like that of Liutprand, is easier than among more painful students north of the Alps. But otherwise its qualities are rarely more pronounced. Ease is shown, however, in the Chronicon Venetum of John the Deacon (d. cir. 1008). See ante, Chapter XIII., in. ^ Migne 133. This work fills four hundred columns in Migne. On Odo see ante. Chapter XII,, 11. ® Odo of Cluny, Collationes, lib. i. cap. i. (Migne 133, col. 519 and 520). "Therefore God, Creator and Judge of mankind, although He have justly driven our race from that felicity of Paradise, yet mindful of His goodness, lest man all gmlt should incur what he deserves, softens the sorrows of this pilgrimage with many benefits. . . . Indeed the whole purpose of that same Scripture is to keep us from the depravities of this life. For to that end with its dreadful utterances, as with so many goads, it pricks our heart, that man struck by fear may shudder. 190 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi One feels the dull heaviness of this. Odo, like many of his contemporaries, knew enough of Latin grammar, and had read some of the Classics. But he had not mastered what he knew, and his knowledge was not converted into power. The tenth century was still painfully learning the lessons of its Christian and classical heritage. A similar lack of personal facility may be observed in Ruotger's biography of Bruno, the worthy brother of the great emperor Otto I., and Archbishop of Cologne. Bruno died in 965, and Ruotger, who had been his companion, wrote his Life without delay. It has not the didactic ponderousness of Odo's writing, but its language is clumsy. The following passage is of interest as showing Bruno's education and the kind of learned man it made him. " Deinde ubi prima grammaticae artis rudimenta percepit, sicut ab ipso in Dei omnipotentis gloriam hoc saepius ruminante didicimus, Prudentium poetam tradente magistro legere coepit. Qui sicut est et fide intentioneque cathoUcus, et eloquentia veritateque praecipuus, et metrorum librorumque varietate elegantissimus, tanta mox dulcedine palate cordis ejus com- placuit, ut jam non tantum exteriorum verbonim scientiam, verum intimi meduUam sensus, et nectar ut ita dicam liquid- issimum, majori quam dici possit aviditate hauriret. Postea nullum penitus erat studiorum liberalium genus in omni Graeca vel Latina eloquentia, quod ingenii sui vivacitatem aufugeret. Nee vero, ut solet, aut divitiarum afSuentia, aut turbanim circumstrepentium assiduitas, aut ullum aliunde subrepens fastiditun ab hoc nobili otio animum ejus unquam avertit. . , . Saepe inter Graeconim et Latinorvim doctissimos de pMlosophiae subhmitate aut de cujuslibet in iUa florentis disciplinae subtilitate disputantes doctus interpres medius ipse consedit, et disputan- tibus ad plausum omnium, quo nihil minus amaverat, satisfecit," ^ The gradual improvement in the writing of Latin in the and may recall to memory the divine judgments whicli he is wont so easily to forget, distracted by lust of the flesh and the solicitudes of earth." ^ Ruotgerus, Vita Brunonis, cap. 4 and 6 ; Pertz, Mon. Germ. Script, iv. p. 254, and Migne 134, col. 944 and 946. A translation of this passage is given ante Vol. I., p. 311. See ibid., p. 315, for the scholarship and writings of Hermannus Contractus, an eleventh- century German. Ruotger*s clumsy Latin is outdone by the linguistic involutions of the Life of Wenceslatis, the martyr dxike of Bohemia, written toward the dose of the tenth century by Gumpoldus, Bishop of Mantua, who seems to have cultivated classical rhetoric most disastrously (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Script, iv. p. 211, and in Migne 135, col. 923 sqq.). CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 191 Middle Ages, and the evolution of distinctive mediaeval styles, did not result from a larger acquaintance with the Classics, or a better knowledge of grammar and school rhetoric. The range of classical reading might extend, or from time to time contract, and Donatus and Priscian were used in the ninth century as well as in the twelfth. It is true that the study ofl grammar became more intelligent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and its teachers deferred less absolutely to the old rules and illustrations. They recognized Christian standards of diction : first of all the Vulgate ; next, early Christian poets like Prudentius ; and then gradually the mediaeval versifiers who wrote and won approval in the twelfth century. Thus grammar sought to follow current usage.^ This endeavour culminated at the close of the twelfth century in the Doctrinale of Alexander of Villa Dei.^ Before this, much of the best mediaeval Latin prose and verse had been written, and the period most devoted to the Classics had come and was already waning. That period was this same twelfth century. During its earlier half, Latinity gained doubtless from such improvement in the courses of the Trivium as took place at Chartres, for example, an improvement connected with the intellectual growth of the time. But the increase in the knowledge of Latin was mainly such as a mature man may realize within himself, if he has kept up his Latin reading, however little he may seem to have added to his knowledge since leaving his Alma Mater. So the development of mediaeval Latin prose (and also verse) advanced with the maturing of mediaeval civilization. That which was at the same time a living factor in this growth and a result of it, was the more organic appropriation of the classical and Christian heritages of culture and religion. As intellectual faculties strengthened, and men drew power from the past, they gained facility in moulding their Latin ' From Thurot, Notices et extraits, etc., 22 (2), p. 87, and p. 341 sqq., one may see that the principles of construction stated by mediaeval grammarians followed the usage of mediaeval writers in adopting a simpler or more natural order than that of classical prose. An extract, for example, from an eleventh- century MSS. indicates the simple order which this grammarian author approved e.g. " Johannes hodie venit de civitate ; Petrus, quern Amulfus genuit et nutrivit, intellexit multa " {Thurot, p. 87). 2 Ante, Chapter XXXL, 11. 192 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi to their purposes. Writings begin to reflect the personalities of the writers ; the diction ceases ^o be that of clumsy or clever school compositions, and presents an evolution of tangible mediaeval styles. Henceforth, although a man be an eager student of the Classics, like John of Salisbury for example, and try to imitate ; their excellences, he will stiQ write mediaeval Latin, and with a personal style if he be a strong personality. The classical models no longer trammel, but assist him to be more effectively himself. If mediaeval civilization is to be regarded as that which the peoples of western Europe 8.ttained under the two universal influences of Christianity and antique culture, then nothing more mediaeval will be seen than mediaeval Latin. To make it, the antique Latin had been modified and reinspired and loosed by the Christian energies of the Fathers ; and had then passed on to peoples who never had been, or no longer were, antique. They barbarized the language down to the rudeness of their faculties. As they themselves advanced, they brought up Latin with them, as it were, from the depths of the ninth and tenth centuries, but a Latin which in the crude natures of these men had been stripped of classical quality ; a Latin barbarous and naked, and ready to be clothed upon with novel quahties which should make it a new creature. Throughout all this process, while Latin was sinking and re-emerging, it was worked upon. and inspired by the spirit of the uses to which it was predominantly applied, which were those of the Roman Cathohc Church and of the intimacies of the Christian soul, pressing to expression in the learned tongue which they were transforming. In considering the Latin writings of the Middle Ages one should bear in mind the differences between Italy and the North with respect to the ancient language. These were important through the earUer Middle Ages, when modes of diction sufficiently characteristic to be called styles, were forming. The men of Latin-sodden Italy might have a fluent Latin when those of the North still had theirs to learn. Thus there were Italians in the eleventh century who wrote quite a distinctive Latin CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 193 prose.^ Among them were St. Peter Damiani, and St. Anselm of Aosta, Bee, and Canterbury. The former died full of virtue in the year 1072. We have elsewhere observed his character and followed his career.^ He was, to his great anxiety, a classical scholar, who had earned large sums as a teacher of rhetoric before natural inclination and fears for his soul drove him to an ascetic life. He was a master of the Latin which he used. His style is intense, eloquent, personal to himself as well as suited to his matter, and reflects his ardent character and keen perceptions. The following is a rhetorical yet beautiful description of a " last leaf," taken from one of his compositions in praise of the hermit way of salvation. " Videamus in arbore folium sub ipsis pruinis hiemalibus lapsabundum, et consumpto autumnalis clementiae virore, jam- jam pane casurum, ita ut vix ramusculo, cui dependet, inhaereat, sed apertissima levis ruinae signa praetendat : inhorrescunt flabra, venti furentes hie inde eoncutiunt, brumalis horror crassi aeris rigore densatur : atque, ut magis stupeas, defluentibus reliquis undique foliis terra stemitur, et depositis comis arbor suo decore nudatur ; cum illud solum nullo manente permaneat, et velut cohaeredum superstes in fraternae possessionis jura succedat. Quid autem intelligendum in hujus rei consideratione relinquitur, nisi quia nee arboris folium potest eadere, nisi divinum praesumat imperium ? " ^ ^ So likewise in regard to verse, the perfected two-syllable rhyme came first in Italy, and more slowly in the North, although the North was to produce better Latin poetry. ^ Ante, Chapters XI., iv., and XVII. 8 Opusc. xiv., De ordine erimitarum (Migne 145, col. 329). " We may see upon a tree a leaf ready to succimib before the wintry frosts, and, with the sap of autumnal clemency consumed, even now about to fall, so that it barely cleaves to the twig it hangs from, but displays most evident signs of [its] Hght ruin. The blasts are quivering, wild winds strike it to and fro, the mid-winter horror of heavy air congeals with cold ; and that you may marvel the more, the ground is strewn with the rest of the leaves everjnvhere flowing down, and, with its locks laid low, the tree is stripped of its grace ; yet that alone, none other remaining, endures, and, as the survivor of co-heirs, succeeds to the rights of the brotherhood's possession. What then is left to be understood from consideration of this thing, save that not even a leaf of a tree can fall unless it receive beforehand the divine command ? " This description is rhetorically elaborated ; but Damiani commonly wrote more directly, as in this sentence from a letter to a nobleman, in which Damiani urges him not to fail in his duty to his mother through affection for his wife : " Sed forte dices : mater mea me frequenter exasperat, duris verbis meum et uxoris meae corda perturbat ; non possumus tot injuriarum probra perferre, non valemus austeritatis ejus et severae correptionis molestias tolerare " {Ep. vii. 3 ; Migne 144) col- 466). Translated antCj note 2, Vol. I. p. 269. VOL. II O 194 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi Anselm's diction, in spite of its frequent cloister rhetoric, has a simple and modem word-order. An account has already been given of his life and of his thoughts, so beautifully sky-blue, unpurpled with the crimson of human passion, which made the works of Augustine more veritably incandescent . ^ The great African was the strongest individual influence upon Anselm's thought and language. But the latter's style has departed further from the classical sentence, and of itself indicates that the writer belongs neither to the patristic period nor to the Carolingian time, busied with its rearrangement of patristic thought. The following is from his Proslogion upon the existence of God. Through this discourse. Deity and the Soul are addressed in the second person after the manner of Augustine's Confessions, " Excita nunc, anima mea, et erige totum intellectum tuum, et cogita quantum potes quale et quantum sit illud bonum [i.e. Deus]. Si enim singula bona delectabilia sunt, cogita intente quam delectabile sit illud bonum quod continet jucunditatem omnium bonorum ; et non qualem in rebus creatis sumus experti, sed tanto differentem quanto differt Creator a creatura. Si enim bona est vita creata, quam bona est vita creatrix ! Si jucunda est salus facta, quam jucunda est salus quae fecit omnem salutem ! Si amabihs est sapientia in cognitione rerum conditarum, quam amabilis est sapientia quae omnia condidit ex nihilo ! Denique, si multae et magnae delectationes sunt in rebus delectabilibus, qualis et quanta delectatio est in illo qui fecit ipsa delectabilia ! " ^ In a more emotional passage Anselm arouses in his soul the terror of the Judgment. It is from a " Meditatio " : 1 Ante, Chapter XI., iv. 2 Proslogion, cap. 24 (Migne 158, col. 239). *' Awaken now, my soul, and rouse all thy understanding, and consider, as thou art able, of what nature and how great is that Good [God]. For if single goods are objects of delight, consider intently how delightful is that good which contains the joy of all goods ; and not such as in things created we have tried, but differing as greatly as differs the Creator from the creature. For if life created is good, how good is the life creatrix ! If joyful is the salvation wrought, how joyful is the salvation which wrought all salvation ! If lovely is wisdom in the knowledge of things created, how lovely is the wisdom which created all from nothing. In fine, if there are many and great delectations in things delightful, of what quality and greatness is delectation [i.e. the delectation that we take] in Him who made the delights themselves ! " The reader may observe that the word-order of Anselm's Latin is preserved almost imchanged in the translation. cHAP.xxxii MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 195 " Taedet animam meam vitae meae ; vivere erubesco, mori pertimesco. Quid ergo restat tibi, o peccator, nisi ut in tota vita tua plores totam vitam tuam, ut ipsa tota se ploret totam ? Sed est in hoc quoque anima mea miserabiliter mirabilis et mirabiliter miserabilis, quia non tantum dolet quantum se noscit ; sed sic secura torpet, velut quid patiatur ignoret. O anima sterilis, quid agis ? quid torpes, anima peccatrix ? Dies judicii venit, juxta est dies Domini magnus, juxta et velox nimis, dies irae dies ilia, dies tribulationis et angustiae, dies calamitatis et miseriae, dies tenebrarum et caliginis, dies nebulae et turbinis, dies tubae et clangoris. vox diei Domini amara ! Quid dormitas, anima tepida et digna evomi ? " ^ Damiani wrote in the middle of the eleventh century, Anselm in the latter part. The northern lands could as yet show no such characteristic styles,^ although the classically educated German, Lambert of Hersfeld, wrote as correctly and perspicuously as either. His Annals have won admira- tion for their clear and correct Latinity, modelled upon the styles of Sallust and Livy. He died in 1077, the year of Canossa, his Annals covering the conflict between Henry IV. and Hildebrand up to that event. The narrative moves with spirit, as one may see by reading his description of King Henry and his consort struggling through Alpine ice and snow to reach that castle never to be forgotten, and gain absolution from the Pope before the ban should have completed Henry's ruin.^ ^ " Meditatio II." {Migne 158, col. 722). " My soul is ofEended with my life. I blush to live ; I fear to die. What then remains for thee, O sinner, save that all thy life thou weepest over all thy life, that it all may lament its whole self. But in this also is my soul miserably wonderful and wonderfully miserable, that it does not grieve as much as it knows itself [i.e. to the full extent of its self-knowledge] but secure, is listless as if it knew not what it is suffering. O barren soul, what art thou doing ? why art thou drowsing, sinner soul ? The Day of Judgment is coming, near is the great day of the Lord, near and too swift the day of wrath, {that day !) day of tribulation and distress, day of calamity and misery, day of shades and darkness, day of cloud and whirlwind, day of the trump and the roar ! O voice of the day of the Lord — harsh ! Why sleepest thou, soul lukewarm and fit to be spewed out ? " ^ Perhaps it may seem questionable to treat Anselm as an Italian, since he left Lombardy when a young man. Undoubtedly his theological interests were affected by his northern environment. But his temperament and language, his diction, his style, seem to me more closely connected with native temperament. * Annals for the year 1077 (Migne 146, col. 1234 sqq.) ; also in Mon. Germ. Script, iii. 196 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi For the North, the best period of mediaeval Latin, prose as well as verse, opens with the twelfth century. It was indeed the great literary period of the Middle Ages. For the vernacular literatures flourished as well as the Latin. Provengal literature began as the eleventh century closed, and was stifled in the thirteenth by the Albigensian Crusade. So the twelfth was its great period. Likewise with the Old French literature : except the Roland which is earlier, the chief chansons de geste belong to the twelfth century ; also the romances of antiquity, to be spoken of hereafter ; also the romances of the Round Table, and a great mass of chansons and fabliaux. The Old German — or rather, Mittel Hochdeutsch — Uterature touches its height as the century closes and the next begins, in the works of Heinrich von Veldeke, Gottfried von Strass- burg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide. The best Latin writers of the century lived, or sojourned, or were educated, for the most part in the France north of the Loire. Not that all of them were natives of that territory ; for some were German bom, some saw the light in England, and the birthplace of many is unknown. Yet they seem to belong to France. Nearly aU were ecclesiastics, secular or regular. Many of them were notables in theology, like Hugo of St. Victor, Abaelard, Alanus de Insulis (LiUe); many were poets as well, like Alanus and Hildebert and John of Salisbury too ; one was a thimderer on the earth, and a most deft politician, Bernard of Clairvaux. Some again are known only as poets, sacred or profane, like Adam of St. Victor, and Walter of Chatillon — ^but of these hereafter. The best Latin prose writing of this, or any other, mediaeval period, had its definite purpose, metaphysical, theological, or pietistic ; and the writers have been or will be spoken of in connection with their specific fields of intellectual achieve- ment or religious fervour. Here, without discussing the men or their works, some favourable examples of their writing will be given. In the last passage quoted from Anselm, the reader must have felt the working of cloister rhetoric, and have noticed the antitheses and rhymes, to which mediaeval Latin cHAP.xxxn MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 197 lent itself so readily.^ Yet it is a slight affair compared with the confounding sonorousness, the flaring pictures, and terrifying climaxes of St. Bernard when preaching upon the same topic — the Judgment Day. In one of his famous sermons on Canticles, the saint has been suggesting to his audience, the monks of Clara Vallis, that although the Father might ignore faults, not so the Dominus and Creator : " et qui parcit filio, non parcet figmento, non parcet servo nequam." Listen to the carrying out and pointing of this thought : " Pensa cujus sit formidinis et horroris tuum atque omnium contempsisse factorem, offendisse Dominum majestatis. Majes- tatis est timeri, Domini est timeri, et maxime hujus majestatis, hujusque Domini. Nam si reum regiae majestatis, quamvis humanae, humanis legibus plecti capite sancitum sit, quis finis contemnentium divinam omnipotentiam erit ? Tangit montes, et fumigant ; et tam tremendam majestatem audet irritare vilis pulvisculus, uno levi flatu mox dispergendus, et minime recoUi- gendus ? lUe, ille timendus est, qui postquam acciderit corpus, potestatem habet mittere et in gehennam. Paveo gehennam, paveo judicis vultum, ipsis quoque tremendum angelicis potestatibus. Contremisco ab ira potentis, a facie furoris ejus, a fragore mentis mundi, a conflagratione elementorum, a tempestate valida, a voce archangeli, et a verbo aspero. [Feel the climax of this sentence, which tells the end of the sinner.] Contremisco a dentibus bestiae infemaHs, a ventre inferi, a rugientibus praeparatis ad escam. Horreo vermem rodentem, et ignem torrentem, fumum, et vaporem, et sulphur, et spiritum ^ Also the accentual rhythms. Recent scholarship has done much to make clear the intentional use of metrical cadences in classic Greek prose. This principle of the cursus, as it is called {certi curstis conclusionesque verhorum, Cic. Orat. 178), was imitated and taken over into classic Latin prose, and was applied especially to the closing words of clauses and periods {clausulae). As the feeling for metrical quantity weakened, accent, always characteristic of " vulgar " Latin, tended to supplant the metrical cadence not only in verse but in the cadences of prose ; with the result that in the fourth and fifth centuries the cursus mixtus, sometimes metrical and sometimes accentual, presents itself. After the sixth century, generally speaking, these intended rhythms at the close of clauses and sentences fell away, to be revived, however, in the eleventh century at the Roman Curia. The cultivation of the cursus became part of the Ars DictanM (ante, pp, 148 and 156), and in some way its principles were usually followed in the better mediaeval prose. See A. C. Clark, The Cursus in Mediaeval and Vulgar Latin (Oxford, 1910), from which the substance of this note is drawn. See also Traube, Einleitung in die lot. Philol. des Mittelalters, pp. 115-121 (Munich, 1911), and J. Shelly, "Rhythmical Prose in Latin and English'* {Church Quarterly Rev.y April 1912), The substitution of accentual rhythms and rhymes for metre in mediaeval verse will be traced in the next chapter. 198 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi procellanim ; horreo tenebras exteriores. Quis dabit capiti meo aquam, et oculis meis fontem lacrymarum ut praeveniam fletibus fletum, et stridorem dentium, et manuum pedumque dura vincula, et pondus catenarum prementium, stringentium, uren- tium, nee consumentium ? Heu me, mater mea I utqmd me genuisti filium doloris, filium amaritudinis, indignationis et plorationis aetemae ? Ciir exceptus genibus, cur lactatus uberibus, natus in combustionem, et cibus ignis ? " ^ As one recovers from the sound and power of this high- wrought passage, he notices how readily it might be turned into the form of a Latin hymn ; and also how very modem is its sequence of words. Bemard*s Latin could whisper intimate love, as well as thunder terror. He says, preaching on the medicina, the healing power, of Jesu's name : " Hoc tibi electuarium habes, o anima mea, reconditum in vasculo vocabuH hujus quod est Jesus, salutiferum, certe, quodque nulli unquam pesti tuae inveniatur inefficax.'' ^ With the music of this prose one may compare the sweet personal plaint of the following : " Felices quos abscondit tabemaculo suo in umbra alarum suarum sperantes, donee transeat iniquitas. Caeterum ego infelix, pauper et nudus, homo natus ad laborem, implumis avicula pene omni tempore nidulo exsulans, vento exposita et turbini, turbatus sum et motus sum sicut ebrius, et onmis con- scientia mea devorata est." ^ Extracts can give no idea of Bernard's hterary powers, any more than a small volume could tell the story of that life which, so to speak, was magna pars of all contemporary history. But since he was one of the best of Latin letter- writers, one shoidd not omit an example of his varied epistolary style, which can be known in its compass only from a large reading of his letters. The following is a short letter, written to win back to the cloister a deUcately nurtured youth whose parents had lured him out into the world. * Sermo xvi, (Migne 183, col. 851). The power of this passage keeps it from being hysterical. But the monkish hysteria, without the power, may be found in the writings of St. Bernard's jackal, William of St. Thierry, printed in Migne, Pat. Lot. 180. Notice his MeditcUiones, for example ; also his De corUetnplando Deo, printed among St. Bernard's works (Migne 184, col. 365 sqq.). = Sermo xv. (Migne 183, col. 847). Translated ante, Vol. I., p. 427. ^ Ep. xii., ad Guigonem (Migne 182, col. 116). cHAP.xxxn MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 199 " Doleo super te, fill mi Gaufride, doleo super te. Et merito. Quis enim non doleat florem juventutis tuae, quern laetantibus angelis Deo illibatum obtuleras in odorem suavitatis, nunc a daemonibus conculcari, vitiorum spurcitiis, et saeculi sordibus inquinari? Quomodo qui vocatus eras a Deo, revocantem diabolum sequeris, et quern Christus trahere coeperat post se, repente pedem ab ipso introitu gloriae retraxisti ? In te experior nunc veritatem sermonis Domini, quern dixit : Inimici hominis, domestici ejus (Matt. x. 36). Amici tui et proximi tui adversum te appropinquaverunt, et steterunt. Revocaverunt te in fauces leonis, et in portis mortis iterum collocaverunt te. Collocaverunt te in obscuris, sicut mortuos saeculi : et jam parum est ut descendas in ventrem inferi ; jam te deglutire festinat, ac rugienti- bus praeparatis ad escam tradere devorandum. " Revertere, quaeso, revertere, priusquam te absorbeat profundum, et urgeat super te puteus os suum ; priusquam demergaris, unde ulterius non emergas ; priusquam ligatis manibus et pedibus projiciaris in tenebras exteriores, ubi est fletus et stridor dentium ; priusquam detrudaris in locum tene- brosum, et opertum mortis caligine. Erubescis forte redire, quia ad horam cessisti. Erubesce fugam, et non post fugam reverti in proelium, et rursum pugnare. Necdum finis pugnae, necdum ab invicem dimicantes acies discesserunt : adhuc victoria prae manibus est. Si vis, nolumus vincere sine te, nee tuam tibi invidemus gloriae portionem. Laeti occuremus tibi, laetis te recipiemus amplexibus, dicemusque : Epulari et gaudere oportet, quia Mc filius noster mortuus fuerat, et revixit ; perierat, et inventus est " (Luc. xv. 32).^ The argument of this letter is, from the standpoint of Bernard's time, as resistless as the style. Did it win back the Httle monk ? Many wonderful examples of loving expression could be drawn from Bernard's letters ; ^ but, instead, an instance may be given of his none too subtle way of uttering his hate : " Amaldus de Brixia, cujus conversatio mel et doctrina venenum, cui caput columbae, cauda scorpionis est, quern Brixia avomuit, Roma exhorruit, Francia repulit, Germania abominatur, Italia non vult recipere, fertur esse vobiscum." ^ And then he proceeds to ^ Bernard, Ep. 112, ad Gaufridum (Migne 182, col. 255). For translation see ante, Vol. I., p. 414. ^ E.g. Ep. i. and 144 (Migne 182, col. 70 and 300). ^ Ep. 196, ad Guidonem (Migne 182, col. 363). Translated ante, Vol. I., p. 417. See also the preceding letter, 195. 200 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi warn his correspondent of the danger of intercourse with this arch-enemy of the Church. Considering that Latin was a tongue which youths learned at school rather than at their mothers' knees, such writing as Bernard's is a triumphant recasting of an ancient language. One notices in him, as generally with mediaeval religious writers, the influence of the Vulgate, which was mainly in the language of St. Jerome — of Jerome when not writing as a literary virtuoso, but as a scholar occupied with rendering the meaning, and willing to accept such linguistic innovations as served his purpose.^ It is barely necessary to state that the pious Latin literature of the Middle Ages, besides constantly quoting from the Vulgate, is saturated with its words and phrases. But beyond this influence, one sees how masterful is Bernard's diction, quite freed from observance of classical principles, quite of the writer and his time, adapting itself -with ease and power to the topic and character of the composition, and always expressive of the personality of the mighty saint. Hildebert of Le Mans was a few years older than St. Bernard. As an example of his prose a letter may be cited, of which the translation has been given. It was written in 1128, when he was Archbishop of Tours, in protest against the encroachments of the royal power of the French king, Louis the Fat, upon the rights of the Archi- episcopacy of Tours in the matter of ecclesiastical appoint- ments within that diocese : " In adversis nonnullum solatium est,tempora sperare laetiora. Diutius spes haec mihi blandita est, et velut agricolam messis in herba, sic animum meum prosperitatis expectatio confortavit. Caeterum jam nihil est quo serenitatem nimbosi temporis ex- spectem, nihil est quo navis, in cujus puppi sedeo, crebris agitata turbinibus, portum quietis attingat. " Silent amici, silent sacerdotes Jesu Christi. Denique silent et iUi quorum suffragio credidi regem mecum ingratiam rediturum. Credidi quidem, sed super dolorem vulnerum meorum rex, iLlis silentibus, adjecit. Eorum tamen erat gravamini ecclesiae canonicis obviare institutis. Eorum erat, si res postulasset, opponere murum pro dome Israel. Verum apud serenissimum regem opus est exhortatione potius quam increpatione, consilio ^ As to Jerome's two styles see Goelzer, La LatiniU de St. Jerome^ Introduction. CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 201 quam praecepto, doctrina quam virga. His ille conveniendus fuit, his reverenter instruendus, ne sagittas suas in sene compleret sacerdote, ne sanctiones canonicas evacuaret, ne persequeretur cineres Ecclesiae jam sepultae, cineres in quibus ego panem doloris manduco, in quibus bibo calicem luctus, de quibus eripi et evadere, de morte ad vitam transire est. ' ' Inter has tamen angustias, nunquam de me sic ira triumphavit, ut aUquem super Christo Domini clamorem deponere vellem, seu pacem ipsius in manu forti et brachio Ecclesiae adipisci. Suspecta est pax ad quam, non amore sed vi, sublimes veniunt potestates. Ea facile rescindetur, et hunt aliquando novissima pejora prioribus. Alia est via qua compendiosius ad earn Christo perducente pertingam. Jactabo cogitatum meum in Domino, et ipse dabit mihi petitionem cordis mei. Recordatus est Dominus Joseph, cujus pincerna Pharaonis obhtus, dum prospera succederent, interveniendi pro eo curam abjecit. . . . Fortassis recordabitur et mei, atque in desiderate Httore navem sistet fluctuantem. Ipse enim est qui respicit in orationem humilium, et non spernit preces eorum. Ipse est in cujus manu corda regum cerea sunt. Si invenero gratiam in oculis ejus, gratiam regis vel facile consequar, vel utiliter amittam. Siquidem offendere hominem proper Deum lucrari est gratiam Dei." ^ John of Salisbury (1110-1180), much yoimger than Hildebert and a little younger than Bernard, seems to have been the best scholar of his time. With the classics he is as one in the company of friends ; he cites them as readily as Scripture ; their sententiae have become part of his views of life. John was an eager humanist, who followed his studies to whatever town and to the feet of whatsoever teacher they might lead him. So he listened to Abaelard and many others. His writing is always lively and often forcible, especially when vituperating the set who despised classic reading. His most vivacious work, the Metalogicus, was directed against their unnamed prophet, whom he dubs " Comificius." ^ Its opening passage is of interest as John's exordium, and because a somewhat consciously intending stylist like our John is likely to exhibit his utmost virtuosity in the opening sentences of an important work : " Adversus insigne donum naturae parentis et gratiae, cal- umniam veterem et majorum nostrorum judicio condemnatam 1 Ep. ii. 33 (Migne 171, col. 256). Translation ante, p. 167. 2 See ante, p. 159. 202 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi excitat improbus litigator, et conquirens undique imperitiae suae solatia, sibi proficere sperat ad gloriam, si multos similes sui, id est si eos viderit imperitos ; habet enim hoc proprium arro- gantiae tumor, ut se commetiatur aliis, bona sua, si qua sunt, efferens, deprimens aliena ; defectumque proximi, suum putet esse profectum. Omnibus autem recte sapientibus indubium est quod natura, clementissima parens omnium, et dispositissima moderatrix, inter caetera quae genuit animantia, hominem privilegio rationis extulit, et usu eloquii insignivit : id agens sedulitate officiosa, et lege dispositissima, ut homo qui gravedine faeculentioris naturae et molis corporeae tarditate premebatur et trahebatur ad ima, his quasi subvectus ahs, ad alta ascendat, et ad obtinendum verae beatitudinis bravium, omnia alia feUci compendio antecedat. Dum itaque naturam fecundat gratia, ratio rebus perspiciendis et examinandis invigilat ; naturae sinus excutit, metitur fnictus et efficaciam singulorum : et iimatus omnibus amor boni, naturali urgente se appetitu, hoc, aut solum, aut prae caeteris sequitur, quod percipiendae beatitudini maxime videtur esse accommodum." ^ One perceives the effect of classical studies ; yet the passage is good twelfth-century Latin, quite different from the compositions of the Carolingian epoch, those, for example, from the pen of Alcuin, who had studied the Classics like John, but unhke him had no personal style. One gains similar impressions from the diction of the PoUcraticus, a lengthy, discursive work in which John surprises us with ^ " Against that signal gift of parent nature and grace, a shameless wran^er has stirred up an old calumny, condemned by the judgment of our ancestors ; and, seeking everywhere comfort for his ignorance, he hopes to advance hin^elf toward glory, if he shall see many like himself, see them ignorant, that is to say. For the tumour of arrogance has this peculiarity, that it would measure itself with others, exalting its own goods (if they exist), and depreciating those of others. And he deems his neighbour's deficiency to be his own proficiency. *' Now it is indubitable to all truly wise, that Nature, kindest parent of all, and best-ordering directress, among the other living beings which she brought forth, distinguished man with the prerogative of reason and ennobled him with the exercise of eloquence (or ' with the use of speech ') : executing this with unremitting zeal and best-ordering decree, in order that man who was pressed and dragged to the lowest by the heaviness of a dodlike nature and the slowness of corporeal bulk, borne aloft as it were by these wings might ascend to the heights, and for obtaining the crown of true blessedness excel all others in happy economy. While Grace thus fecundates Nature, Reason watches over the matters to be inspected and considered ; Nature's bosom showers, metes out the fruits and faculty of individuals ; and the inborn love of good, stimulating itself by its natural appetite, follows this [i.e. the good] either solely or before all else, which seems best adapted to obtaining bUss " {MetcU. i. i ; Migne 199, col. 825). These translations are kept close to the original, in order to show the construction of the sentences. ^ CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 203 his classical equipment. Although containing many quoted passages, it is not made of extracts strung together ; but reflects the sentiments or tells the opinions of ancient philosophers in the Mriter's own way. The following shows John's knowledge of early Greek philosophers, and is a fair example of his ordinary style : " Alterum vero philosophorum genus est, quod lonicum dicitur et a Grecis ulterioribus traxit originem. Horum princeps fuit Tales Milesius, unus illorum septem, qui dicti sunt sapientes. Iste cum rerum naturam scrutatus inter ceteros emicuisset, maximeadmirabilisexstititquod astrologiae numeriscomprehensis solis et lunae defectus praedicebat. Huic successit Anaximander ejus auditor, qui Anaximenem discipulum reliquit et successorem. Diogenes quoque ejusdem auditor exstitit, et Anaxagoras qui omnium rerum quas videmus effectorem divinum animum docuit. Ei successit auditor ejus Archelaiis, cujus discipulus Socrates fuisse perhibetur, magister Platonis, qui teste Apuleio prius Aristoteles dictus est, sed deinde a latitudine pectoris Plato, et in tantam eminentiani philosophiae et vigore ingenii, et studii exercitio, et omni morum venustate eloquii quoque suavitate et copia subvectus est ut quasi in trono sapientiae residens, praecepta quadam auctoritate visus sit tam antecessoribus quam successoribus philosophis iniperare. Et primus quidem Socrates universam philosophiam ad corrigendos componendosque mores fiexisse memoratur, cum ante ilium omnes physicis, id est rebus naturalibus, perscrutandis maximam operam dederint." ^ These extracts from the writings of saints and scholars may be supplemented by two extracts from compositions of ^ " There is another class of philosophers called the Ionic, and it took its origin from the more remote Greeks. The first of these was Thales the Milesian, one of those seven who were called * wise.* He, when he had searched out the nature of things, shone among his fellows, and was especially admirable because, comprehending the laws of astrology, he predicted ecUpses of the sun and moon. To him succeeded his hearer, Anaximander, who (in turn) left Anaximenes as disciple and successor. Diogenes, likewise, was his hearer, and Anaxagoras who taught that the divine mind was the author of all things that we see. To him succeeded his hearer Archelaiis, whose disciple is said to have been Socrates, the master of Plato, who, according to Apuleius, was first called Aristotle, but then Plato from his breadth of chest, and was borne aloft to such height of philosophy, by vigour of genius, by assiduity of study, by every graciousness of character, and by sweetness and power of eloquence, that, as if seated on the throne of wisdom, he has seemed to command by a certain ordained authority the philosophers before and after him. And indeed Socrates is said to have been the first to have turned universal philosophy to the improvement and ordering of manners ; since before him all had devoted themselves chiefly to physics, that is to examining the things of nature " (PoUcraticus, vii. 5 ; Webb ii. 104, Migne 199, col. 643). 204 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi another class. The mediaeval chronicle has not a good reputation. Its credulity and uncritical spirit varied with the time and man. Little can be said in favour of its general form, which usually is stupidly chronological, or annalistic. The example of classical historical composition was lost on mediaeval annalists. Yet their work is not always dull ; and, by the twelfth century, their diction had become as mediaeval as that of the theologian rhetoricians, although it rarely crystaUizes to personal style by reason of the insignificance of the writers. A well-known work of this kind is the Gesta Dei per Francos, by Guibert of Nogent, who wrote his account of the First Crusade a few years after its turmoil had passed by. The following passage tells of proceedings upon the conclusion of Urban's great crusading oration at the Council of Clermont in 1099 : " Peroraverat vir excellentissimus, et omnes qui se ituros voverant, beati Petri potestate absolvit, eadem, ipsa apostolica auctoritate firmavit, et signum satis conveniens hujus tarn honestae professionis instituit, et veluti cingulum militiae, vel potius militaturis Deo passionis Dominicae stigma tradens, crucis figuram, ex cujushbet materiae panni, tunicis, bjmis et palliis iturorum, assui mandavit. Quod si quis, post hujus signi acceptionem, aut post evidentis voti poUicitationem ab ista benevolentia, prava poenitudine, aut ahquorum suorum affec- tione resileret, ut exlex perpetuo haberetur omnino praecepit, nisi resipisceret ; idemque quod omiserat foede repeteret. Prae- terea omnes illos atroci damnavit anathemate, qui eorum uxoribus, filiis, aut possessionibus, qui hoc Dei iter aggrederentur, per integrum triennii tempus, molestiam auderent inferre. Ad extremum, cuidam viro omnimodis laudibus efferendo, Podiensis urbis episcopo, cujus nomen doleo quia neque usquam reperi, nee audivi, curam super eadem expeditione regenda contulit, et vices suas ipsi, super Christiani populi quocunque venirent institutione, commisit. Unde et manus ei, more apostolorum, data pariter benedictione, imposuit. Quod ille quam sagaciter sit exsecutus, docet mirabilis opens tanti exitus.'* ^ ^ ** The most excellent man concluded his oration, and by the power of the blessed Peter absolved all who had taken the vow to go, and by apostolic authority confirmed the same ; and he instituted a suitable sign of this so honourable vow ; and as a badge of soldiering (or knighthood), or rather, of being about to soldier, for God, he took the mark of the Lord*s Passion, the figure of a cross, made from cloth of any kind, and ordered it to be sewed upon the tunics and cloaks of those about to go. But if any one, after receiving this sign, or after making open promise, should draw back from that good intent, by base repenting or through cHAP.xxxn MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 205 This Frenchman Guibeii is almost vivacious. A certain younger contemporary of his, of EngUsh birth, could con- struct his narrative quite as well. Ordericus Vitalis (d. 1 142) is said to have been bom at Wroxeter, though he spent most of his life as monk of St. Evroult in Normandy. There he wrote his Historia Ecclesiastica of Normandy and England. His account of the loss of the White Ship in 1120 tells the story : " Thomas, filius Stephani, regem adiit, eique marcum auri offerens, ait : ' Stephanus, Airardi filius, genitor mens fuit, et ipse in omni vita sua patri tuo in mari servivit. Nam ilium, in sua puppe vectum, in Angliam conduxit, quando contra Haraldum pugnaturus, in Angliam perrexit. Hujusmodi autem officio usque ad mortem famulando ei placuit, et ab eo multis honoratus exeniis, inter contribules suos magnifice floruit. Hoc feudum, domine rex, a te require, et vas quod Candida-Navis appellatur, merito ad regalem famulatum optime instructum habeo.' Cui rex ait : ' Gratum habeo quod petis. Mihi quidem aptam navim elegi, quam non mutabo ; sed filios meos, Guillelmum et Richardum, quos sicut me diligo, cum multa regni mei nobilitate, nunc tibi commendo.* " His auditis, nautae gavisi sunt, filioque regis adulantes, vinum ab eo ad bibendum postulavenmt. At ille tres vini modios ipsis dari praecepit. Quibus acceptis, biberunt, sociisque abund- anter propinaverunt, nimiumque potantes inebriati sunt. Jussu regis multi barones cum filiis suis puppim ascenderunt, et fere trecenti, ut opinor, in infausta nave fuerunt. Duo siquidem monachi Tironis, et Stephanus comes cum duobus miHtibus, Guillelmus quoque de Rolmara, et Rabellus Camerarius, Eduardus de Salesburia, et alii plures inde exierunt, quia nimiam multitudinem lascivae et pompaticae juventutis inesse conspicati sunt. Periti enim remiges quinquaginta ibi erant, et feroces epibatae, qui jam in navi sedes nacti turgebant, et suimet prae affection for his kin, he ordained that he should be held an outlaw utterly and perpetually, unless he turn and set himself again to the performance of what he had basely neglected. " Furthermore, with terrible anathema he damned all who within the term of three years should dare to do ill to the wives, children, or property of those setting forth on this journey of God. And finally he committed to a certain and praise- worthy man (bishop of Le Puy, whose name I am sorry never to have found or heard) the care and regulation of the expedition, and conferred his own authority upon him over the disposition (?) of Christian people wherever they should come. Whereupon giving his benediction, in the apostolic manner, he placed his hamds upon him. How sagaciously that one executed the behest, is shown by the marvellous outcome of so great an undertaking " (Guibert of Nogent, Gesta Dei per Francos J ii. 2 ; Migne 156, col. 702). 2o6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi ebrietate immemores, vix aliquem reverenter agnoscebant. Heu ! quamplures illorum mentes pia devotione erga Deum habebant vacuas ' Qui maxis immodicas moderatur et aeris iras/ Unde sacerdotes, qui ad benedicendos iUos illuc accesserant, aliosque ministros qui aquam benedictam deferebant, cum dedecore et cachinuis subsannantes abigerunt ; sed paulo post derisionis suae ultionem receperunt. " Soli homines, cum thesauro regis et vasis merum ferentibus, Thomae carinam implebant, ipsumque ut regiam classem, quae jam aequora sulcabat, summopere prosequeretur, commonebant. Ipse vero, quia ebrietate desipiebat, in virtute sua, satellitumque suorum confidebat, et audacter, quia omnes qui jam praecesserant praeiret, spondebat. Tandem navigandi signum dedit. Porro schippae remos baud segniter arripuerunt, et alia laeti, quia quid eis ante oculos penderet nesciebant, armamenta coaptaverunt, navemque cum impetu magno per pontum currere fecerunt. Cumque remiges ebrii totis navigarent conatibus, et infelix gubernio male intenderet cursui dirigendo per pelagus, ingenti saxo quod quotidie fluctu recedente detegitur et rursus accessu maris cooperitur, sinistrum latus Candidae-Navis vehementer illisum est, confractisque duabus tabulis, ex insperato, navis, proh dolor ! subversa est. Omnes igitur in tanto discrimine simul exclamaverunt ; sed aqua mox implente era, pariter perierunt. Duo soli virgae qua velum pendebat manus injecerunt, et magna noctis parte pendentes, auxilium quodlibet praestolati sunt. Unus erat Rothomagensis camifex, nomine Beroldus, et alter generosus puer, nomine Goisfredus, Gisleberti de Aquila filius. " Tunc luna in signo Tauri nona decima fuit, et fere ix hoiis radus suis mundum illustravit, et navigantibus mare lucidum reddidit. Thomas nauclerus post primam submersionem vires resumpsit, suique memor, super undas caput extulit, et videns capita eorum qui ligno utcunque inhaerebant, interrogavit : ' Filius regis quid devenit ? ' Cumque naufragi respondissent ilium cum omnibus coUegis suis deperisse : ' Miserum,' inquit, ' est amodo meum vivere.' Hoc dicto, male desperans, maluit illic occumbere, quam furore irati regis pro pemicie prolis oppetere, seu longas in vinculis poenas luere." ^ 1 Hist. ecclesiasHca, pars iii. lib. xii. cap. 25 (ed. Prevost, t. iv. p. 411 sqq, (Paris, 1852) ; Migne 188, col. 889-892). " Thomas, son of Stephen, approached the king, and offering him a mark of gold, said : ' Stephen, son of Airard, was my sire, and all his life he served thy father [William the Conqueror] on the sea. For him, borne on his ship, he conveyed to England, when he proceeded to England in order to make war on Harold. In this manner of service serving him until CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 207 Our examples thus far belong to the twelfth century. As touching its successor, it will be interesting to observe the qualities of two opposite kinds of writing, the one spring- ing from the intellectual activities, and the other from the death he gave him satisfaction, and honoured with many gifts from him, he prospered exceedingly among his people. This privilege, lord king, I claim of thee, and the vessel which is called White Ship I have ready, fitted out in the best manner for royal needs. To whom the king said : * I am pleased at your petition. For myself indeed I have selected a proper ship, which I shall not change ; but my sons, William and Richard, whom I cherish as myself, with much nobility of my realm, I commend now to thee.' '* Hearing these words the sailors were merry, and bowing down before the king's son, asked of him wine to drink. He ordered three measures of wine to be given them. Receiving these they drank and pledged their cormrades' health abundantly, and with deep potations became drunk. At the king's order many barons with their sons went aboard the ship, and there were about three hundred, as I believe, in that fatal bark. Then two monks of Tiron, and Count Stephen with two knights, also William of Rolmar, and Rabellus the chamberlain, and Edward of Salisbury, and a number of others, went out from it, because they saw such a crowd of wanton showy youth aboard. And fifty tried rowers were there and insolent marines, who having seized seats in the ship were brazening it, and forgetting themselves through drunkenness, showed respect for scarcely any one. Alas ! how many of them had minds void of pious devotion toward God ! — ' Who tempers the exceeding rages of the sea and air.* And so the priests, who had gone up there to bless them, and the other ministrants who bore the holy water, they drove away with derision and loud guffaws ; but soon after they paid the penalty of their mocking. " Only men, with the king's treasure and the vessels holding the wine, filled the keel of Thomas ; and they pressed him eagerly to follow the royal fleet which was already cutting the waves. And he himself, because he was silly from drink, trusted in his skill and that of his crew, and rashly promised to outstrip all who were now ahead of him. Then he gave the word to put to sea. At once the rowers snatched their oars, and because they did not know what hung before their eyes, they gladly adjusted their tackle, and made the ship start over the sea with a great bound. Now while the drunken rowers were putting forth all their strength, and the wretched pilot was paying slack attention to steering his course over the gulf, upon a great rock which daily is uncovered by the ebbing wave and again is covered when the sea is at flood, the port side of White Ship struck violently, and with two planks smashed, all unexpectedly the ship, alas ! was capsized. All cried out together in such a catastrophe ; but the water quickly filling their mouths, they perished alike. Two only cast their hands upon the boom from which hung the sail, and clinging to it a great part of the night, waited for some aid. One was a butcher of Rouen named Berold, and the other a well-born lad named Geoffrey, son of Gilbert of Aquila. " The moon was then at its nineteenth in the sign of the Bull, and lighted the earth for nearly nine hours with its beams, making the sea bright for navigators. Captain Thomas after his first submersion regained his strength, and bethinking himself, pushed his head above the waves, and seeing the heads of those clinging to some piece of wood, asked, ' What has become of the king's son ? ' When the shipwrecked answered that he had perished with all his companions, * Miserable ' said he, ' is my life henceforth,' Saying this, and utterly despairing, he chose to die there, rather than meet the fury of the king enraged for the destruction of his children, or undergo long punishment in chains.'* 2o8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi religious awakening, of the time. In the thirteenth century, scientific and scholastic writing was of representative import- ance, and deeply affected the development of Latin prose. Very different in style were the Latin stories and vitae of the blessed Francis of Assisi and other saints, composed in Italy. Roger Bacon, of whom there will be much to say, com- posed most of his extant works about the year 1267.^ His language is often rough and involved, from his impetuosity and eagerness to utter what was in him. But it is always vigorous. He took pains to say just what he meant, and what was worth saying; and frequentlyrewrote his sentences. His writings show little rhetoric ; yet they are stamped with a Baconian style, which has a cumulative force. The word- order is modem with scarcely a trace of the antique. Per- haps we may say that he wrote Latin like an Englishman of vehement temper and great intellect. He is powerful in continuous exposition ; yet instances of his general, and very striking statements, will illustrate his diction at its best. In the following sentence he recognizes the progressiveness of knowledge, a rare idea in the Middle Ages : " Nam semper posteriores addidenint ad opera priorum, et multa correxerunt, et plura mutaverunt, sicut maxime per Aris- totelem patet, qui omnes sententias praecedentium discussit." ^ Again, he animadverts upon the duty of thirteenth- century Christians to supply the defects of the old philosophers : " Quapropter antiquorum defectus deberemus nos posteriores supplere, quia introivimus in labores eorum, per quos, nisi simus asini, possumus ad meliora excitari ; quia miserrimum est semper uti inventis et nunquam inveniendis." ^ Speaking of language, he says : " Impossibile est quod proprietcis unius linguae servetur in alia/' * ( " The idioms of a language cannot be preserved in a translation.") And again : " Omnes philosophi fuenint post patriarchas et prophetas . . . et legerunt libros prophetarum et 1 Post, Chapter XLII. » Opus majus, pars i. cap. 6, 3 Op. maj. ii. cap. 14. * Op. maj. iii. i. CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 209 patriarcharum qui sunt in sacro textu." ^ (" The philosophers of Greece came after the prophets of the Old Testament and read their works contained in the sacred text/') In the first of these sentences Bacon shows his linguistic insight ; in the second he reflects an uncritical view enter- tained since the time of the Church Fathers ; in both, he writes with an order of words requiring no change in an English translation. In his time, Bacon had but a sorry fame, and his works little influence. The writings of his younger contemporary Thomas Aquinas exerted greater influence than those of any man after Augustine. They represent the culmination of scholasticism. He was Italian bom, and his language, however difficult the matter, is lucidity itself. It is never rhetorical ; but measured, temperate, and balanced ; properly proceeding from the mind which weighed every proposition in the scales of universal consideration. Sometimes it gains a certain fervour from the clarity and import of the state- ment which it so lucidly conveys. In article eighth, of the first Quaestio, of Pars Prima of the Summa theologiae, Thomas thus decides that Theology is a rational {argumen- tativa) science : " Respondeo dicendum quod, sicut aliae scientiae non argu- mentantur ad sua principia probanda, sed ex principiis argumen- tantur ad ostendendum alia in ipsis scientiis ; ita haec doctrina non argumentatur ad sua principia probanda, quae sunt articuli fidei ; sed ex eis procedit ad aliquid aliud ostendendum ; sicut Apostolus I ad Cor. xv., ex resurrectione Christi argumentatur ad resurrectionem communem probandam. " Sed tamen considerandum est in scientiis philosophicis, quod inferiores scientiae nee probant sua principia, nee contra negantem principia disputant, sed hoc relinquunt superiori scientiae : suprema vero inter eas, scilicet metaphysica, disputat contra negantem sua principia, si adversarius aliquid concedit : si autem nihil concedit, non potest cum eo disputare, potest tamen solvere rationes ipsius. Unde sacra scriptura [i.e. Theology], cum non habeat superiorem, disputat cum negante sua principia : argumentando quidem, si adversarius aliquid concedat eorum quae per divinam revelationem habentur ; sicut per auctoritates sacrae doctrinae disputamus contra heriticos, et per unum articulum ^ op. maj. ii. 14. VOL. II P 210 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi contra negantes alium. Si vero adversarius nihil credat eorum quae divinitus revelantur, non remanet amplius via ad pro- bandum articulos fidei per rationes, sed ad solvendum rationes, si quas inducit, contra fidem. Cum enim fides infallibili veritati innitatur, impossibile autem sit de vero demonstrari contrarium, manifestum est probationes quae contra fidem inducuntur, non esse demonstrationes, sed solubilia argumenta." ^ Of a different intellectual temperament was John of Fidanza, known as St. Bonaventura.^ He also was bom and passed his youth in Italy. This sainted General of the Franciscan Order was a few years older than the great Dominican, who was his friend. Both doctors died in the year 1274. Bonaventura's powers of constructive reasoning were excellent. His diction is clear and beautiful, and elo- quent with a spiritual fervour whenever the matter is such as .to evoke it. His account of how he came to write his famous little Itinerarium mentis in Deum is full of temperament. " Cum igitur exemplo beatissimi patris Francisci hanc pacem anhelo spiritu quaererem, ego peccator, qui loco ipsius patris beatissimi post eius transitum septimus in generali fratrum minis- terio per omnia indignus succedo ; contigit, ut nutu divino circa Beati ipsius transitum, anno trigesimo tertio ad montem Alvemae tanquam ad locum quietum amore quaerendi pacem spiritus declinarem,ibique existens, dum mente tractarem aliquasmentales ascensiones in Deum, inter alia occurrit iUud miraculum, quod in praedicto loco contigit ipsi beato Francisco, de visione scilicet Seraph alati ad instar Crucifixi. In cuius consideratione statim visum est mihi, quod visio ilia praetenderet ipsius patris suspen- sionem in contemplando et viam, per quam pervenitur ad earn." ^ And Bonaventura at the end of his Itinerarium speaks of the perfect passing of Francis into God through the very mystic climax of contemplation, concluding thus : " Si autem quaeras, quomodo haec fiant, interroga gratiam, non doctrinam ; desiderium, non intellectum ; gemitum orationis, non studium lectionis ; sponsum, non magistrum ; Deum, non hominem ; caliginem, non claritatem ; non lucem, sed ignem totaliter inflammantem et in Deum excessivis unctionibus et ardentissimis affectionibus transferentem/' * ^ For translation see post, Chapter XXXV. 2 Post, Chapter XXXIX. ® Itinerarium mentis in Deum, Prologus, 2. * Ibid. cap. vii. 6. For translations see post, Chapter XXXIX. CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 211 Bonaventura's fervent diction will serve to carry us over from the more unmitigated intellectuality of Bacon and Thomas to the simpler matter of those personal and pious narratives from which may be drawn concluding illustrations of mediaeval Latin prose. Some of the authors will show the skill which comes from training ; others are quite innocent of grammar, and their Latin has made a happy surrender to the genius of their vernacular speech, which was the lingua vulgaris of northern Italy. One of the earliest biographers of St. Francis of Assisi was Thomas of Celano, a skilled Latinist, who was enraptured with the loveliness of Francis's life. His diction is limpid and rhythmical. A well-known passage in his Vita prima (for he wrote two Lives) tells of Francis's joyous assurance of the great work which God would accomplish through the simple band who formed the beginnings of the Order. This assurance crystallized in a vision of multitudes hurrying to join. Francis speaks to the brethren : " Confortamini, charissimi, et gaudete in Domino, nee, quia pauci videmini, efficiamini tristes. Ne vos deterreat mea, vel vestra simplicitas, quoniam sicut mihi a Domino in veritate ostensum est, in maximam multitudinem faciet vos crescere Deus, et usque ad fines orbis multipliciter dilatabit. Vidi multitudinem magnam hominum ad nos venientium, et in habitu sanctae conversationis beataeque religionis regula nobiscum volentium conversari ; et ecce adhuc sonitus eorum est in auribus meis, euntium,et redeuntium secundum obedientiae sanctae mandatum: vidique vias ipsorum multitudine plenas ex omni fere natione in his partibus convenire. Veniunt Francigenae, festinant Hispani, Teuthonici, et Anglici currunt, et aliarum diversarum linguanim accelerat maxima multitudo. " Quod cum audissent fratres, repleti sunt gaudio Salvatoris sive propter gratiam, quam dominus Deus contulerat sancto suo, sive quia proximorum lucrum sitiebant ardenter, quos desider- abant ut salvi essent, in idipsum quotidie augmentari." ^ We feel the flow and rhythm, and note the agreeable balancing of clauses. Francis died in 1226. The Vita prima by Celano was approved by Gregory IX. in 1229. Already other matter touching the saint was gathering in ^ Vita prima, cap. xi. Translated arUe, Vol. I., p. 444, 212 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi anecdote and narrative. Much of it was brought together in the so-called Speculum perfecHonis, which has been con- fidently but very questionably ascribed to Francis's personal disciple, Brother Leo. Brother Leo, or whoever may have been the narrator or compiler, was no scholar ; his Latin is naively incorrect, and has also the simplicity of Gospel narrative. An interesting passage tells with what loving wisdom Francis interpreted a text of Scripture : " Manente ipso apud Senas venit ad eum quidam doctor sacrae theologiae de ordine Praedicatorum, vir utique humilis et spiritu- alis valde. Quum ipse cum beato Francisco de verbis Domini simul aliquamdiu contulissent interrogavit eum magister de illo verbo Ezechielis : Si non annuntiaveris impio impietatem suam animam ejus de manu tua requiram. Dixit enim : ' Multos, bone pater, ego cognosce in peccato mortali quibus non annuntio impietatem eorum, numquid de manu mea ipsorum animae requirentur ? ' " Cui beatus Franciscus humiliter dixit se esse idiotam et ideo magis expedire sibi doceri ab eo quam super scripturae sententiam respondere. Tunc ille humilis magister adjecit : ' Frater, licet ab aliquibus sapientibus hujus verbi expositionem audiverim, tamen libenter super hoc vestrum perciperem intellectum.' Dixit ergo beatus Franciscus : ' Si verbum debeat generaliter inteUigi, ego taliter accipio ipsum quod servus Dei sic debet vita et sanc- titate in seipso ardere vel fulgere ut luce exempli et lingua sanctae conversationis omnes impios reprehendat. Sic, inquam, splendor ejus et odor famae ipsius annuntiabit omnibus iniquitates eorum.' " Plurimum itaque doctor iUe aedificatus recedens dixit sociis beati Francisci : ' Fratres mei, theologia hujus viri puritate et contemplatione subnixa est aquila volans, nostra vero scientia ventre graditur super terram.' '* ^ Another passage has Francis breaking out in song from the joy of his love of Christ : " Ebrius amore et compassione Christi beatus Franciscus quandoque talia faciebat, nam dulcissima melodia spiritus intra se ipsum ebulliens frequenter exterius gallice dabat sonum et vena divini susurrii quam auris ejus suscipiebat furtive gallicum erumpebat in jubilum. " Lignum quandoque coUigebat de terra ipsumque sinistro brachio superponens aliud lignum per modum arcus in manu ^ spec. perfecHonis, ed. Sabatier, cap. 53. Translated ante. Vol. I., p. 443. CHAP. XXXII MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE 213 dextera trahebat super illud, quasi super viellam vel aliud instrumentum atque gestus ad hoc idoneos faciens gallice cantabat de Domino Jesu Christo. Terminabatur denique tota haec tripudiatio in lacrymas et in compassionem passionis Christi hie jubilus solvebatur. " In his trahebat continue suspiria et ingeminatis gemitibus eorum quae tenebat in manibus oblitus suspendebatur ad caelum." ^ This Latin is as childlike as the Old Italian of the Fioretti of St. Francis ; it has a Uke word-order, and one might almost add, a like vocabtdary. The simple, ignorant writer seems as if held by a direct and personal inspiration from the familiar life of the sweet saint. His language reflects that inspiration, and mirrors his own childlike character. Hence he has a style, direct, effective, moving to tears and joy, like his impression of the blessed Francis. A not dissimilar kind of childlike Latin could attain to a remarkable symmetry and balance. The Legenda aurea is before us, written by the Dominican Jacobus a Voragine, by race a Genoese, and living toward the close of the thirteenth century. This book was the most popular compend of saints' lives in use in the later Middle Ages. Its stories are told with fascinating naivete. We cite the opening sentences from its chapter on the Annunciation, just to show the harmony and balance of its periods. The passage is exceptional and almost formal in these qualities : " Annunciatio dominica dicitur, quia in tali die ab angelo adventus filii Dei in camem fuit annuntiatus, congruum enim fuit, ut incarnationem praecederet angelica annuntiatio, triplici ratione. Primo ratione ordinis connotandi, ut scilicet ordo reparationis responderet ordini praevaricationis. Unde sicut dyabolus tentavit mulierem,uteam pertraheret ad dubitationem et perdubitationem ad consensum et per consensum ad lapsum, sic angelus nuntiavit virgini, ut nuntiando excitaret ad fidem et per fidem ad consensum et per consensum ad concipiendum Dei filium. Secundo ratione ministerii angelici, quia enim angelus est Dei minister et servus et beata virgo electa erat, ut esset Dei mater, et congruum est ministrum dominae famulari, conveniens fuit, ut beatae virgini annuntiatio per angelum fieret. Tertio ratione lapsus angelici 1 spec. perfecHonis, ed. Sabatier, cap. 93. Translated ante, Vol. I., p. 448. 2 14 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi reparandi. Quia enim incarnatio non tantum faciebat ad repara- tionem humani lapsus, sed etiam ad reparationem ruinae angelicae, ideo angeli non debuerunt excludi. Unde sicut sexus mulieris non excluditur a cognitione mysterii incarnationis et resurrec- tionis, sic etiam nee angelicus nuntius. Imo Deus utrumque angelo mediante nuntiat mulieri, scilicet incarnationem virgini Mariae et resurrectionem Magdelenae." ^ These extracts bring us far into the thirteenth century. Two hundred years later, mediaeval Latin prose, if one may say so, sang its swan song in that little book which is a last, sweet, and. composite echo of all mellifluous mediaeval piety. Yet perhaps this De imitatione Christi of Thomas a Kempis can scarcely be classed as prose, so full is it of assonances and rhythms fit for chanting. ^ Cap. li., ed. Graesse. ** The Annunciation of our Lord is so called, because on that day by an angel the advent of the Son of God in the flesh was announced, for it was fitting that the angelical annunciation should precede the incarnation, for a threefold reason. First, by reason of betokening the order, that to wit the order of reparation should answer to the order of transgression. Accordingly as the devil tempted the woman, that he should draw her to doubt and through doubt to consent and through consent to fall, so the angel announced to the Virgin, that by announcing he should arouse her to faith and through faith to consent and through consent to conceiving God*s son. Secondly, by reason of the angelic ministry, because since the angel is God's minister and servant, and the blessed Virgin was chosen in order that she might be God's mother, and it is fitting that the minister should serve the mistress, so it was proper that the annunciation to the blessed Virgin should take place through an angel. Thirdly, by reason of repairing the angelical fall. Because since the incarnation worked not only for the reparation of the human fall, but also for the reparation of the angelical catastrophe, therefore the angels ought not to be excluded. Accordingly as the female sex is not excluded from knowledge of the mystery of the incarnation and resurrection, so also neither the angelical messenger. Behold, God twice announces to a woman by a mediating angel, both the incarnation to the Virgin Mary and the resurrection to the Magda- lene." The order of the Latin words is scarcely changed in the translation. CHAPTER XXXIII EVOLUTION OF MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE I. Metrical Verse. II. Substitution of Accent for Quantity. III. Sequence-Hymn and Student-Song. IV. Passage of Themes into the Vernacular. In mediaeval Latin poetry the endeavour to preserve a classical style and the irresistible tendency to evolve new forms are more palpably distinguishable than in the prose. For there is a visible parting of the ways between the reten- tion of the antique metres and their fruitful abandonment in verses built of accentual rhyme. Moreover, this formal divergence corresponds to a substantial difference, inasmuch as there was usually a larger survival of antique feeling and allusion in the mediaeval metrical attempts than in the rhyming poems. As in the prose, so in the poetry, the lines of development may be followed from the Carolingian time. But a difference will be found between Italy and the North ; for in Italy the course was quicker, while a less organic evolution resulted in verse less excellent and less distinctly mediaeval. By the end of the eleventh century, Latin poetry in Italy, rhjmiing or metrical, seems to have drawn itself along as far as it was destined to progress ; but in the North a richer growth culminates a century later. Indeed the most originative line of evolution of mediaeval Latin verse would seem to have been confined to the North in the main if not exclusively. The following pages offer no history of mediaeval Latin poetry, even as the previous chapter made no attempt to sketch the history of the prose. Their object is to point 215 2i6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi out the general lines along which the verse-forms were developed, or were perhaps retarded. Three may be dis- tinguished. The first is marked by the retention of quantity and the endeavour to preserve the ancient measures. In the second, accent and rh5ane gradually take the place of metre within the old verse-forms. The third is that of the Sequence, wherein the accentual rhyming hjnnn springs from the chanted prose, which had superseded the chanting of the final a of the Alleluia.^ The lover of classical Greek and Latin poetry knows the beautiful fitness of the ancient measures for the thought and feeling which they enframed. If his eyes chance to fall on some twelfth-century Latin hymn, he will be struck by its different quality. He will quickly perceive that classic forms would have been unsuited to the Christian and romantic sentiment of the mediaeval period,^ and will realize that some vehicle besides metrical verse would have been needed for this thoroughly declassicized feeling, even had metrical quantity remained a vital element of language, instead of passing away some centuries before. Metre was but con- vention in the time of Charlemagne. Yet it kept its sway with scholars, and could not lack votaries so long as classical poetry made part of the Ars grammatica or was read for delectation. Metrical composition did not cease throughout the Middle Ages. But it was not the true mediaeval style, and became obviously academic as accentual verse was perfected and made fit to carry spiritual emotion. Never- ^ In order that no reader may be surprised at the absence of discussion of the antique antecedents of the more particular genres of mediaeval poetry (Latin and Vernacular), I would emphasize the impossibility of entering upon such exhaust- less topics. Probably the very general assumption will be correct in most cases, that genres of mediaeval poetry {e.g. the Conflicts or DibcUs in Latin and Old French) revert to antecedents sufficiently marked for identification, in the antique Latin (or Greek) poetry, or in the (extant or lost) productions of the " low " Latin period from the third century downward. An idea of the difficulty and range of such matters may be gained from Jeanroy, Les Origines de la poisie lyrique en France au moyen Hge (Paris, 1889), and the admirable review of this work by Gaston Paris in the Journal des savants for 1891 and 1892 (four articles). Cf. also Batiouchkof in Romania, xx. (1891), pages i sqq. and 513 sqq. 2 Cf. Taylor, Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, chap. ix. CHAP. XXXIII MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 217 theless, the simpler metres were cultivated successfully by the best scholars of the twelfth century. Most of the Latin poetry of the Carolingian period was metrical, if we are to judge from the mass that remains. Reminiscence of the antique enveloped educated men, with whom the mediaeval spirit had not reached distinctness of thought and feeling. So the poetry resembled the contem- porary sculpture and painting, in which the antique was still unsuperseded by any new style. Following the antique metres, using antique phrase and commonplace, often copy- ing antique sentiment, this poetry was as dull as might be expected from men who were amused by calling each other Homer, Virgil, Horace, or David. Usually the poets were ecclesiastics, and interested in theology ; ^ but many of the pieces are conventionally profane in topic, and as humanistic as the Latin poetry of Petrarch.^ Moreover, just as Petrarch's Latin poetry was still-bom, while his Italian sonnets live, so the Carolingian poetry, when it forgets itself and falls away from metre to accentual verse, gains some degree of life. At this early period the Romance tongues were not a fit poetic vehicle, and consequently living thoughts, which with Dante and Petrarch found voice in Italian, in the ninth century began to stammer in Latin verses that were freed from the dead rules of quantity, and were already vibrant with a vital feeling for accent and rhyme. ^ Through the tenth century metrical composition became rougher, yet sometimes drew a certain force from its rudeness. A good example is the famous Waltarius, or Waltharilied, of Ekkehart of St. Gall, composed in the year 960 as a school exercise.* The therpe was a German story found in ver- nacular poetry. Ekkljiart's hexameters have a strong Teuton flavour, and doubtless some of the vigour of his paraphrase was due to the German original. ^ There is much verse from noted men, Alcuin, Paulus Diaconus, Walafrid Strabo, Rabanus Maurus, Theodulphus. It is all to be found in the collection of Diimmler and Traube, Poetae Latini aevi Carolini {Mon. Germ. 1880-1896). ^ It is amusing to find a poem by Walafrid Strabo ^turning up as a favourite among sixteenth- century hmnanists. The poem referred to, " De cultura hortorum " {Poet. Lot. aev. Car. ii. 335-350), is a poetic treatment of gardening, reminiscent of the Georgics, but not imitating their structure. It has many allusions to pagan mythology. ^ Post^ p. 223 sqq. * Antet Vol. I., p. 147. 2i8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi The metrical poems of the eleventh century have been spoken of already, especially the more interesting ones written in Italy.^ Most of the Latin poetry emanating from that classic land was metrical, or so intended. Frequently it tells the story of wars, or gives the Gesta of notable lives, making a kind of versified biography. One feels as if verse was employed as a refuge from the dead annalistic form. This poetry was a semi-barbarizing of the antique, without new formal or substantial elements. Italy, one may say, J hardly became essentially and creatively mediaeval : the pressure of antique survival seems to have barred original development ; Italians took little part in the great mediaeval military religious movements, the Crusades ; no strikingly new architecture arose with them ; their first vernacular poetry was an imitation or a borrowing from Provence and France ; and by far the greater part of their Latin poetry presents an uncreative barbarizing of the antique metres. These remarks find illustration in the principal Latin poems composed in Italy in the twelfth century. Among them one observes differences in skill, knowledge, and tendency. Some of the writers made use of leonine hexameters, others avoided the rhyme. But they were all akin in lack of excellence and originality both in composition and verse-form. There was the monk Donizo of Canossa, who wrote the Vita of the great Countess Matilda ; ^ there was William of Apulia, Norman in spirit if not in blood, who wrote of the Norman conquests in Apulia and Sicily ; ^ also the anonymous and barbarous De hello et excidio urbis ^ Ante, Chapter XI., iii. ^ The following leonine hexameters are attributed to Donizo : " Chrysopolis dudum Graecormn dicitur usu, Aurea sub lingua sonat haec Urbs esse Latina, Scilicet Urbs Parma, qxiia grammatica manet alta, Artes ac septem studiose sunt ibi lectae." Muratori, Afiiiquitates, iii. p. 912. ^ WUliara was a few years older than Donizo, and died about the year iioo. His hero is Robert Guiscard, and his poem closes with this bid for the favour of his son, Roger : " Nostra, Rogere, tibi cognoscis carmina scribi, Mente tibi laeta studuit parere Poeta : Semper et auctores hilares meruere datores ; Tu duce Romano Dux dignior Octaviano, Sis mihi, quaeso, boni spes, ut fuit ille Maroui.** Muratori, Scriptores, v. 247-248, cHAP.xxxm MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 219 Comensis, in which is told the destruction of Como by Milan between 1118 and 1127 ; ^ then the metrically jingling Pisan chronicle narrating the conquest of the island of Majorca, and beginning (like the Aeneid !) with " Anna, rates, populum vindictam coelitus octam Scribimus, ac duros terrae pelagique labores/' ^ We also note Peter of Ebulo, with his narrative in laudation of the emperor Henry VL, written about 1194 ; Henry of Septimella and his elegies upon the checkered fortunes of divers great men ; ^ and lastly the more famous Godfrey of Viterbo, of probable German blood, and notary or scribe to three successive emperors, with his cantafable Pantheon or Memoria saecularum^ Godfrey's poetry is rhymed after a manner of his own. In the North, or more specifically speaking in the land of France north of the Loire, the twelfth century brought better metrical poetry than in Italy. Yet it had something of the deadness of imitation, since the vis vivida of song had passed over into rhyming verse. Still from the academic point of view, metre was the proper vehicle of poetry ; as one sees, for instance, in the Ars versificatoria of Matthew of Vendome,^ written toward the close of the twelfth century. " Versus est metrica descriptio," says he, and then elaborates his, for the most part borrowed, definition : "Verse is metrical description proceeding concisely and line by line through the comely marriage of words to flowers of thought, and containing nothing trivial or irrelevant.*' A neat conception this of poetry ; and the same writer denoimces leonine rhyming as unseemly, but praises the favourite metre of the Middle Ages, the elegiac ; for he regards the hexameter and pentameter as together forming the perfect verse. It was in this metre that Hildebert wrote his almost classic ^ Muratori, Script, v. 407-457. 2 Muratori, Script, vi. 110-161 ; also in Migne. ^ Written at the close of the twelfth century. On these people see Ronca, Cultura medioevale e poesia Latina d' Italia (Rome, 1892). * Muratori, vii. pp. 349-482 ; Waitz, Mon. Germ. xxii. 1-338. Godfrey lived from about 1120 to the close of the century. The Pantheon was completed in 1185. Cf. L. Delisle, Instructions du comiiS des travaux historiques, etc. ; Litt^rature latine, p. 41 (Paris, 1890). ^ Matthaei Vindocinensis ars versificatoriay L. Bomrgain (Paris, 1879). 2 20 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi elegy over the ruins of Rome. A few lines have been quoted from it ; ^ but the whole poem, which is not long, is of interest as one of the very best examples of a mediaeval Latin elegy : " Par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina ; Quam magni fueris Integra fracta doces. Longa tuos fastus aetas destruxit, et arces Caesaris et superum templa palude jacent. Ille labor, labor ille ruit quern dims Araxes Et stantem tremuit et cecidisse dolet ; Quem gladii regum, quem provida cura senatus, Quern superi rerum constituere caput ; Quem magis optavit cum crimine solus habere Caesar, quam socius et pius esse socer, Qui, crescens studiis tribus, hostes, crimen, amicos Vi domuit, secuit legibus, emit ope ; In quem, dum fieret, vigilavit cura priorum : Juvit opus pietas hospitis, unda, locus. Mafceriem, fabros, expensas axis uterque Misit, se muris obtulit ipse locus. Expendere duces thesauros, fata favorem. Artifices studium, totus et orbis opes. Urbs cecidit de qua si quicquam dicere dignum Moliar, hoc potero dicere : Roma fuit. Non tamen annorum series, non fiamma, nee ensis Ad plenum potuit hoc abolere decus. Cura hominum potuit tantam componere Romam Quantam non potuit solvere cura deum. Confer opes marmorque novum superumque favorem, Artificum vigilent in nova facta manus, Non tamen aut fieri par stanti machina muro, Aut restaurari sola ruina potest. Tantum restat adhuc, tantum ruit, ut neque pars stans Aequari possit, diruta nee refici. Hie superum formas superi mirantur et ipsi, Et cupiunt fictis vultibus esse pares. Non potuit natura deos hoc ore creare Quo miranda deum signa creavit homo. Vultus adest his numinibus, potiusque coluntur Artificum studio quam deitate sua. Urbs felix, si vel dominis urbs ilia careret, Vel dominis esset turpe carere fide." ^ The elegiac metre was used by Abaelard in his didactic 1 Ante, Chapter XXXI., in. 2 Text from Haur6au, Les MSlanges poetiques tVHildebert de Lavardin, p. 60 ; also in Notices des manuscrits de la bib. nat. t. 28, 2nd part (1878), p. 331. cHAP.xxxiii MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 221 poem to his son Astralabius,^ and by John of SaUsbury in his Entheticus. The hexameter also was a favourite measure, used, for instance, by Alanus of Lille in the Anticlaudianus, perhaps the noblest of mediaeval narrative or allegorical poems in Latin. ^ Another excellent composition in hexa- meter was the Alexandreis of Walter, born, like Alanus, apparently at Lille, but commonly called of Chatillon. As poets and as classical scholars, these two men were worthy contemporaries. Walter's poem follows, or rather enlarges upon the Life of Alexander by Quintus Curtius.^ He is said to have written it on the challenge of Matthew of Vendome, him of the Ars versificatoria. The Ligurinus of a certain Cistercian Gunther is still another good example of a long narrative poem in hexameters. It sets forth the career of Frederick Barbarossa, and was written shortly after the opening of the thirteenth century. Its author, like Walter and Alanus, shows himself widely read in the Classics.^ The sapphic was a third not infrequently attempted metre, of which the De planctu naturae of Alanus contains examples. This work was composed in the form of the De consolatione philosophiae of Boethius, where Ijrics alternate with prose. The general topic was Nature's complaint over man's disobedience to her laws. The author apostrophizes her in the following sapphics : " O Dei proles, genitrixque rerum. Vinculum mundi, stabilisque nexus. Gemma terrenis, speculum caducis, Lucifer orbis. Pax, amor, virtus, regimen, potestas, Ordo, lex, finis, via, dux, origo. Vita, lux, splendor, species, figura Regula mundi. ^ Haureau gives a critical text of the Carmen ad Astralabium filium in Notices el extraits, etc., 34, part ii., p. 153 sgq. Other not unpleasing instances of elegiac verse are afEorded by the poems of Baudri, Abbot of Bourgueil (d. 1130). They are occasional and fugitive pieces — nugae, if we will. See L. Delisle, Romania, i. 32-50. ^ The substance of this poem has been given ante, Chapter XXX. On Alanus see also post, Chapter XXXVII., iii. ^ It is printed in Migne 209. Cf. post, p. 259, note i. * The Ligitrinus is printed in tome 212 of Migne's Patrol. Lot. On its author see Pannenborg, Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, Band ii. pp. 161-301, and Band xiii. pp. 225-331 (Gottingen, 1871 and 1873). 222 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi Quae tuis mundum moderas habenis, Cuncta concordi stabilita nodo Nectis et pacis glutino maritas Coelica terris. Quae noys (vovs) plures recolens ideas Singulas rerum species monetans. Res togas fonnis, chlamidemque formae PoUice formas. Cui favet coelum, famulatur aer, Quam colit Tellus, veneratur unda, Cui velut mundi dominae tributum Singula solvunt. Quae diem nocti vicibus catenans Cereum solis tribuis diei, Lucido lunae speculo soporans Nubila noctis. Quae polum stellis variis inauras, Aetheris nostri solium serenans Siderum gemmis, varioque coelum Milite complens. Quae novis coeli faciem figuris Protheans mutas aridumque vulgus Aeris nostri regione donans, Legeque stringis. Cujus ad nutum juvenescit orbis, Silva crispatur folii capillo, Et tua florum tunicata veste, Terra superbit. Quae minas ponti sepelis, et auges, Syncopans cursum pelagi furori Ne soli tractum tumulare possit Aequoris aestus." ^ Practically all of our examples have been taken from works composed in the twelfth century, and in the land comprised under the name of France. The pre-excellence of this period will likewise appear in accentual rhyming Latin poetry, which was more spontaneous and living than its loftily descended relative. II The academic vogue of metre in the early Middle Ages did not prevent the growth of more natural poetry. The * Alanus de Insulis, De planctu naturae (Migne 210, col. 447). A translation of the work has been made by D. M. Moffat (New York, 1908). For other examples of Sapphic and Alcaic verses see Haur6au in Notices et extraits^ etc., 31 (2), p. 165 sqq. CHAP. XXXIII MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 223 Irish had their Gaehc poems ; people of Teutonic speech had their rough verse based on aUiteration and the count of the strong syllables. The Romance tongues emerging from the common Latin were as yet poetically untried. But in the proper Latin, which had become as unquantitative and accentual as any of its vulgar forms, there was a tonic poetry that was no longer unequipped with rhyme. Three rhythmic elements made up this natural mode of Latin versification : the succession of accented and un- accented syllables ; the number of syllables in a line ; and that regularly recurring sameness of soimd which is called rhyme. The source of the first of these seems obvious. Accent having driven quantity from speech, came to super- sede it in verse, with the accented syllable taking the place of the long syllable and the tmaccented the place of the short. In the Carolingian period accentual verse followed the old metrical forms, with this exception : the metrical principle that one long is equivalent to two shorts was not adopted. Consequently the number of syllables in the successive lines of an accentual strophe would remain the same, where in the metrical antecedent they might have varied. This is also sufficient to account for the second element, the observance of regularity in the number of syllables. For this regularity seems to follow upon the acceptance of the principle that in rhythmic verse an accented syllable is not equal to two unaccented ones. The query might perhaps be made why this Latin accentual verse did not take up the principle of regularity in the number of strong syllables in a line, like Old High German poetry for example, where the niunber of unaccented syllables, within reasonable limits, is indifferent. A ready answer is that these Latin verses were made by people of Latin speech who had been acquainted with metrical forms of poetry, in which the number of syllables might vary, but was never indifferent ; for the metrical rule was rigid that one long was equivalent to two short ; and to no more and no less. Hence the short syllables were as fixed in number as the long.^ ^ Wilhelm Meyer, a leading authority upon mediaeval Latin verse- structure, derives the principle of a like number of syllables in every line from eastern Semitic influence upon the early Christians. See Fragmenta Burana (Berlin, 224 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND \ bookvi The origin of the third element, rhyme, is in (iispute. In some instances it may have passed into Greek and Latin verses from Syrian hymns.^ But on the other hand it had long been an occasional element in Greek and Latin rhetorical prose. Probably Thyme in Latin accentual verse had no specific origin. It gradually became the sharpening, defining element of such verse. Accentual Latin lent itself so naturally to rhyme, that had not rhyme become a fixed part of this verse, there indeed would have been a fact to explain. These, then, were the elements : accent, number of syllables, and rhyme. Most interesting is the development of verse-forms. Rhythmic Latin poetry came through the substitution of accent for quantity, and probably had many prototypes in the old jingles of Roman soldiers and provincials, which so far as known were accentual, rather than metrical. Christian accentual poetry retained those simple forms of iambic and trochaic verse which most readily submitted to the change from metre to accent, or perhaps one should say, had for centuries offered themselves as natural forms of accentual verse. Apparently the change from metre to accent within the old forms gradually took place between the sixth and the tenth centuries. During this period there was slight advance in the evolution of new verses ; nor was the period creative in other respects, as we have seen. But thereafter, as the mediaeval centuries advanced from the basis of a mastered patristic and antique heritage, and began to create, there followed an admirable evolution of verse-forms, which in some instances apparently issued from the old metrico-accentual forms, and in others developed independently by virtue of the faculty of song meeting the need of singing. This factor wrought with power — ^the human need and cognate faculty of song, a need and faculty stimulated in the Middle Ages by religious sentiment and emotion. In the igoi), pp. 151, 166. That may have had its effect ; but I do not see the need of any cause from afar to account for the syllabic regularity of Latin accentual verse. ^ Again Wilhelm Meyer's view : see I.e. and the same author's " Anfange der latein. und griech. rhythmischen Dichtung," Abhand. der Batrish. Ahad. Philos., philol. Klasse, 1886. cHAP.xxxni MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 225 fusing of melody and words into an utterance of song — at last into a strophe — music worked potently, shaping the com- position of the lines, moulding them to rhythm, insisting upon sonorousness in the words, promoting their assonance, and at last compelling them to rhyme so as to meet the stress, or mark the ending, of the musical periods. Thus the exigencies of melody helped to evoke the finished verse, while the words reciprocating through their vocal capabilities and through the inspiration of their meaning, aided the evolution of the melodies. In fine, words and melody, each quickened by the other, and each moulding the other to itself, attamed a perfected strophic unison ; and mediaeval musician-poets achieved at last the finished verses of hymns or Sequences and student-songs. There were two distinct lines of evolution of accentual Latin verse in the Middle Ages ; and although the faculty of song was a moving energy in both, it worked in one of them more palpably than in the other. Along the one line, accentual verse developed pursuant to the ancient forms, displacing quantity with accent, and evolving rhyme. The other line of evolution had no connection with the antique. It began with phrases of sonorous prose, replacing inarticulate chant. These, under the influence of music, through the creative power of song, were by degrees transformed to verse. The evolution of the Sequence-h5min will be the chief illustration. With the finished accentual Latin poetry of the twelfth century it may become impossible to tell which line of rh5d:hmic evolution holds the antecedent of a given poem. In truth, this final and perfected verse may often have a double ancestry, descending from the rh5^hms which had superseded metre, and being also the child of mediaeval melody. Yet there is no difficulty in tracing by examples the two lines of evolution. To illustrate the strain of verse which took its origin in the displacement of metre by accent and rhyme, we must look back as far as Fortunatus. He was bom about the year 530 in northern Italy, but he passed his eventful life among^, Franks and Thuringians. A scholar and also a peet, he had a fair mastery of metre ; yet some of his poems -^ince the spirit of the coming mediaeval time both in sentiment VOL. II Q 226 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi and form. He wrote two famous hjmins, one of them in the popular trochaic tetrameter, the other in the equally simple iambic dimeter. The first, a h5min to the Cross, begins with the never-to-be-forgotten " Pange, lingua, gloriosi proelium certaminis '* ; and has such lines as *' Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis Dulce lignum, dulce clavo dulce pondus sustinens ! " In these the mediaeval feeling for the Cross shows itself, and while the metre is correct, it is so facile that one may read or sing the lines accentually. In the other h57mn, also to the Cross, assonance and rhyme foretell the coming transformation of metre to accentual verse. Here are the first two stanzas : " Vexilla regis prodeunt, Fulget crucis mysterium. Quo came camis conditor Suspensus est patibulo. Confixa clavis viscera Tendens manus, vestigia ' Redemtionis gratia Hie immolata est hostia." Passing to the Carolingian epoch, some lines from a poem celebrating the victory of Charlemagne's son Pippin over the Avars in 796, will illustrate the popular trochaic tetrameter which had become accentual, and already tended to rhjrme : " Multa mala iam fecerunt ab antico tempore, Fana dei destruxerunt atque monasteria, Vasa aurea sacrata, argentea, fictilia." ^ Next we turn to a piece by the persecuted and interesting Gottschalk, written in the latter part of the ninth century. A young lad has asked for a poem. But how can he sing, the exiled and imprisoned monk who might rather weep as the Jews by the waters of Babylon ? ^ yet he will sing a hymn 1 Poet. Lat. aev. Car. i. ir6. Cf. Ebert, Gesch. etc. ii. 86. For similar verses see those on the battle at Fontanetum (a.d. 841), Poet. Lat. aev. Car. ii. 138, and the carmen against the town of Aquilegia, ibid. p. 150. 2 Cf. antej Vol. I., pp. 224 sqq. CHAP. XXXIII MEDIAEVAL TZ:ATIN VERSE 227 to the Trinity, and bewail his piteous lot before the highest pitying Godhead. The veri!^ses have a lyric unity of mood, and are touching with the^ir sad refrain. Their rhyme, if not quite pure, is abundar^t and catching, and their nearest metrical affinity would be a trochaic dimeter. " I. Ut quid iubes, pusiole, qviare mandas, filiole, c:'arnieii dulce me cantare, ■cum sim longe exul valde intra mare ? o cur iubes canere ? 2. Magis mihi, miserule, flere libet, puerule, plus plorare quam cantare carmen tale, iubes quale, amor care. o cur iubes canere ? 3. Mallem scias, pusillule, ut velles tu, fratercule, pio corde condolere mihi atque prona mente conlugere. o cur iubes canere ? 4. Scis, divine tyruncule, scis, superne clientule, hie diu me exulare, multa die sive nocte tolerare. o cur iubes canere ? 5. Scis captive plebicule Israheli cognomine praeceptum in Babilone decantare extra longe fines lude. o cur iubes canere ? 6. Non potuerunt utique, nee debuerunt itaque carmen dulce coram gente ali^ne nostri terre resonare. o cur iubes canere ? 7. Sed quia vis omnimode, consodalis egregie, 228 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi canam patri Inlioque simul atque procedente ex utroque. hoc cano ultronee. 8. Benedictus es, domrne, pater, nate, paraclitt?, deus trine, deus une, deus summe, deus pie, deus iuste. hoc cano spontanee. 9. Exul ego diuscule hoc in mare sum, domine ;• annos nempe duos fere nosti fore, sed iam iamque miserere, hoc rogo humiliime. 10. Interim cum pusione psallam ore, psallam mente, psallam voce (psallam corde) psallam die, psallam ijocte carmen dulce tibi, rex piissime." ^ Gottschalk (and for this it is hard to love hiin) was one of the initiators of the leonine hexameter, in which a syllable in the middle of the line rhymes with the last syllable. '* Septeno Augustas decimo praeeunte Kalendas " is the opening hexameter in his Epistle to hisi friend Ratramnus.^ To what horrid jingle such verses coulvi attain may be seen from some leonine hexameter-pentameters of two or three hundred years later, on the Fall of Troy, beginning : " Viribus, arte, minis, Danaum clara Troja minis, Annis bis quinis fit rogus atque cinis." ^ ^ Traube, Poetae Lai. aevi Car. iii. p. 731. Cf. Ebert, Gesch. etc, ii. 169 and 325. 2 Poet. Lot. aev. Car. iii. 733. ^ Du Meril, Po&sies populaires latines, i. 400. Perhaps the most successful attempt to write hexameters containing rh3n:ae5 or assonances is the twelfth-century poem of Bernard Morlanensis, a monk of Cluny, beginning with the famous lines : " Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus. Ecce minaciter imminet arbiter iUe supremus." Bernardi Morlanensis, De contemptu mundi, ed. by Thos. Wright, Master of the Rolls Series, vol. 59 (ii.), 1872. Bernard says in his Preface, as to his measflres : *' Id genus metri, turn dactylum continuum exceptis hnalibus, turn etiam sonori- tatem leonicam servans. . . " cHAP.xxxiii MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 229 Hector and Troy, and the dire wiles of the Greeks never left the mediaeval imagination. A poem of the early tenth century, which bade the watchers on Modena's walls be vigilant, draws its inspiration from that unfading memory, and for us illustrates what iambics might become when accent had replaced quantity. The lines throughout end in a final rhyming a, " O tu, qui servas annis ista moenia, Noli dormire, moneo, sed vigila, Dum Hector vigil extitit in Troia, Non earn cepit fraudulenta Graecia." ^ And from a scarcely later time, for it also is of the tenth century, rise those verses to Roma, that old " Roma aurea et etema,'' and forever "caput mundi,*' sung bypilgrim bands as their eyes caught the first gleam of tower, church, and ruin : *' O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina, Cunctarum urbiiim excellentissima, Roseo martyrum sanguine rubea, Albis et virginum liliis Candida : Salutem dicimus tibi per omnia, Te benedicimus : salve per secula."^ This verse, which still lifts the heart of whosoever hears or reads it, may close our examples of mediaeval verses descended from metrical forms. It will be noticed that all of them are from the early mediaeval centuries ; a circumstance which may be taken as a suggestion of the fact that by far the greater part of the eariier accentual Latin poetry was composed in forms in which accent simply had displaced the antique quantity. Ill We turn to that other genesis of mediaeval Latin verse, arising not out of antique forms, but rather from the mediaeval need and faculty of song. In the chief instance selected for illustration, this line of evolution took its * " Carmina Mutinensia," Poet. Lat. aev. Car. iii. 703. The poem has forty- two lines, of which the above are the first four. The usual date assigned is 924, but Traube in Poet. aev. Car. has put it back to 892. * See further text and discussion in Traube, " O Roma nobilis," Abhand. Bairish. Akad. Philos., pkilol. Klasse^ 1891. 230 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookv inception in the exigencies and inspiration of the Alleluia chant or jubilation. During the celebration of the Mass, as the Gradual ended in its last Alleluia, the choir continued chanting the final syllable of that word in cadences of musical exultings. The melody or cadence to which this final a of the Alleluia was chanted, was called the sequentia. The words which came to be substituted for its cadenced reitera- tion were called the prosa. By the twelfth century the two terms seem to have been used interchangeably. Thus arose the prose Sequence, so plastic in its capability of being moulded by melody to verse. Its songful qualities lay in the sonorousness of the words and in their syllabic corre- spondence with the notes of the melody to which they were sung.^ In the year 860, Norsemen sacked the cloister of Jumieges in Normandy, and a fleeing brother carried his precious Antiphonary far away to the safe retreat of St. Gall. There a young monk named Notker,^ poring over its contents, perceived that words had been written in the place of the repetitions of the final a of the Alleluia. Taking the cue, he set to work to compose more fitting words to correspond with the notes to which this final a was sung. So these lines of euphonious and fitting words appear to have had their beginning in Notker's scanning of that fugitive Antiphonary, and his devising labour. Their primary purpose was a musical one ; for they were a device — mnemotechnic, if one will — to facilitate the chanting of cadences previously vocalized with difficulty through the singing of one simple vowel sound. Notker showed his work to his master, Iso, who rejoiced at what his gifted pupil had accomplished, and spurred him on by pointing out that in his composition one syllable was still sometimes repeated or drawn out through several successive notes. One syllable to each note was the principle which Notker now set himself to realize ; and he succeeded. ^ The verbal Sequence or prosa was thus a species of trope. Tropes were interpolations or additions to the older text of the Liturgy. The Sequences were the tropes appended to the last Alleluia of the Gradual, the psalm chanted in the celebration of the Mass, between the reading of the Epistle and the Gospel. Cf. Leon Gautier, Po^sie Uturgique au moyen age, chap. iii. (Paris, 1886) ; ibU. (Euvres poHiques d'Adam de Saint Victor, p. 281 sqq. (3rd ed., Paris, 1894). 2 On Notker see Manitius, Ges. der lot. Lit. des MiUelalters, i. pp. 354-367. cHAP.xxxiii MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 231 He composed some fifty Sequences. In his work, as well as in that of others after him, the device of words began to modify and develop the melodies themselves. Sometimes Notker adapted his verbal compositions to those cadences or melodies to which the Alleluia had long been sung ; sometimes he composed both melody and words ; or, again, he took a current melody, sacred or secular, to which the Alleluia never had been sung, and composed words for it, to be chanted as a Sequence. In these borrowed melodies, as well as in those composed by Notker, the musical periods were more developed than in the Alleluia cadences. Thus the musical growth of the Sequences was promoted by the use of sonorous words, while the improved melodies in turn drew the words on to a more perfect rhythmic ordering. Notker died in 912. His Sequences were prose, yet with a certain parallelism in their construction ; and, even with Notker in his later years, the words began to take on assonances, chiefly in the vowel sound of a. Thereafter the melodies, seizing upon the words, as it were, by the principle of their syllabic correspondence to the notation, moulded them to rh5^hm of movement and regularity of line ; while conversely with the better ordering of the words for singing, the melodies in turn made gain and progress, and then again reacted on the words, until after two centuries there emerged the finished verses of an Adam of St. Victor. Thus these Sequences have become verse before our eyes, and we realize that it is the very central current of the evolution of mediaeval Latin poetry that we have been following. How free and how spontaneous was this evolution of the Sequence. It was the child of the Christian Middle Ages, seeing the light in the closing years of the ninth century, but requiring a long period of growth before it reached the glory of its climacteric. It was born of musical chanting, and it grew as song, never unsung or conceived of as severable from its melody. Only as it attained its perfected strophic forms, it necessarily made use of trochaic and other rhythms which long before had changed from quantity to accent and so had passed on into the verse- 2 32 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi making habitudes of the Middle Ages.^ If there be any Latin composition in virtue of origin and growth absolutely un-antique, it is the mediaeval Sequence, which in its final forms is so glorious a representative of the mediaeval Hymn. And we shall also see that much popular Latin poetry, " Carmina Burana " and student-songs, were composed in verses and often sung to tunes taken — or parodied — from the Sequence-hjmins of the Liturgy. There were many ways of chanting Sequences. The musical phrases of the melodies usually were repeated once, except at the beginning and the close ; and the Sequence would be rendered by a double choir singing antiphonally. Ordinarily the words responded to the repetition of the musical phrases with a paraUeUsm of their own. The lines (after the first) varied in length by pairs, the second and third lines having the same number of syllables, the fourth and fifth likewise equal to each other, but differing in length from the second and third ; and so on through the Sequence, imtil the last Une, which commonly stood alone and differed in length from the preceding pairs. The Sequence called " Nostra tuba "is a good example. Probably it was composed by Notker, and in his later years ; for it is filled with assonances, and exhibits a regidar parallelism of structure. " Nostra tuba Regatur fortissime Dei dextra et preces audiat Aura placatissima et serena ; ita enim nostra Laus erit accepta, voce si quod canimus, canat pariter et pura con- scientia. Et, ut haec possimus, omnes divina nobis semper flagitemus adesse auxUia. ^ On the Sequence see Leon Gautier, Poisie liiurgique au moyen ^ge (Paris, 1886), passim, and especially the comprehensive summary in the notes from p. 154 to p. 159. Also see Schubiger, Die Sdngerschule SL Gallus {1858), in which many of Notker* s Sequences are given with the music ; also v. Winterfeld, *' Die Dichter- schule St. Gallus mid Reichenau," Neue Jdhrhucher f. d. klassisch. AUertum, Bd. V. (1900), p. 341 sqq. The present writer has found Wilhelm Meyer*s Fragmenta Burana {Berlin, 1901) most suggestive ; and in all matters pertaining to mediaeval Latin verse- forms, use has been made of the same writer's exhaustive study : ** Ludus de Antichrist© und iiber lat. Rythmen," Sitzungsber. Bairisch. Akad. Philos., philol. Klasse, 1882. See also Ch. Thurot, " Notices, etc., de divers MSS. latins pour servir i I'histoire des doctrines grammaticales au moyen age," in vol. sxii. (2) of Notices et extraits des MSS. pp. 417-457. CHAP. XXXIII MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 233 O bone Rex, pie, juste, misericors, qui as via et janua, Portas regni, quaesumus, nobis reseres, dimittasque facinora Ut laudemus nomen nunc tuum atque per cuncta saecula." ^ Here, after the opening, the first pair has seventeen syllables, and the next pair twenty-six. The last pair quoted has twenty ; and the final line of seventeen syllables has no feUow. A further rh5d;hmical advance seems reached by the following Sequence from the abbey of St. Martial at Limoges. It may have been written in the eleventh century. It is^.given here with the first and second line of the couplets opposite to each other, as strophe and antistrophe ; and the lines themselves are divided to show the assonances (or rhymes) which appear to have corresponded with pauses in the melody : *' (i) Canat omnis turba (2fl) Fonte renata (26) Laude jucunda Spiritusque gratia et mente perspicua (3a) Jam restituta (3&) Sicque jactura pars est decima coelestis ilia fuerat quae culpa completur in laude perdita. divina. (4a) Ecce praeclara (46) Enitet ampla dies dominica per orbis spatia, (5a) Exsultat in qua (56) Quia destructa plebs omnis redempta, mors est perpetua." ^ A Sequence of the eleventh century will afford a final illustration of approach to a regular strophic structure, and of the use of the final one-syllable rhyme in a, throughout the Sequence : ^ " May our trumpet be guided mightily by God's right hand, and may the calm and tranquil air hear our prayers ! for our praise will be accepted if what we sing with the voice a pure conscience sings likewise. And that we may be able, let us all beseech divine aid to be always present with us. ... O good King, kind, just, and pitying, who art the way and the door, unlock the gates of the kingdom for us, we beg, and pardon our offences, that we may praise thy name now and through all the ages." * G. M. Dreves, " Die Prosen der Abtei St. Martial zu Limoges," p. 59 (vol. vii. of Dreves's Analecta hymnica medii aevi ; Leipzig, 1889). " Let every band sing with fount renewed and the Spirit's grace with joyful praise and clear mind. Now is made good the tenth part {i.e. the fallen angels], undone by fault ; and thus that celestial fall is made good in divine praise. Lo ! the bright day of the Lord gleams through the broad spaces of the world : in which all the redeemed people exult because everlasting death is destroyed." 234 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi " AUeluia, Turma, proclama leta ; Laude canora. Facta prome divina. Jam instituta Superna disciplina. Christi sacra Per magnalia Es quia de morte liberata Ut destructa Inferni claustra Januaque celi patefacta I Jam nunc omnia Celestia Terrestria Virtute gubemat eterna. In quibus sua Judicia Semper equa Dat auctoritate paterna." 1 As the eleventh century closed and the great twelfth century dawned, the forces of mediaeval growth quickened to a mightier vitality, and distinctively mediaeval creations appeared. Our eyes, of course, are fixed upon the northern lands, where the Sequence grew from prose to verse, and where derivative or analogous forms of popular poetry developed also. Up to this time, throughout mediaeval life and thought, progress had been somewhat uncrowned with palpable achievement. Yet the first briQiant creations of a master-workman are the fruit of his apprentice years, during which his progress has been as real as when his works begin to make it visible. So it was no sudden birth ^ Published by Boucherie, " Melanges Latins, etc.," Revue des langues romanes, t. vii. (1875), P- 35- ** Alleluia ! O flock, proclaim joy ; with melodious praise utter deeds divine now fixed by heavenly teaching. Because thou art freed from death through the holy works of Christ, how are the gates of hell destroyed and heaven's doors opened. Now He rules all things celestial and terrestrial by eternal power; wherein by the Father's authority He gives judgments always just." cHAP.xxxm MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 235 of power, but rather faculties ripening through apprentice centuries, that illumined the period opening about the year iioo. This period would carry no human teaching if its accomplishment in institutions, in philosophy, in art and poetry, had been a heaven-blown accident, and not the fruit of antecedent discipline. The poetic advance represented by the Sequences of Adam of St. Victor may rouse our admiration for the poet's genius, but should not blind our eyes to the continuity of development leading to it. Adam is the final artist and his work a veritable creation ; yet his antecedents made part of his creative faculty. The elements of his verses and the general idea and form of the sequence were given him ; — all honour to the man's holy genius which made these into poems. The elements referred to consisted in accentual measures and in the two -syllabled Latin rhyme which appears to have been finally achieved by the close of the eleventh century.^ In using them Adam was no borrower, but an artist who perforce worked in the medium of his art. Trochaic and iambic rhythms then constituted the chief measures for accentual verse, as they had for centuries, and do still. For, although accentual rh5d:hms admit dactyls and anapaests, these have not proved generally serviceable. Likewise the inevitable progress of Latin verse had developed assonances into rhymes ; and indeed into rhymes of two syllables, for Latin words lend themselves as readily to rhymes of two syllables as English words to rhymes of one. There existed also the idea and form of the Sequence, consisting of pairs of lines which had reached assonance and some degree of rhythm, and varied in length, pair by pair, following the music of the melodies to which they were sung. For the Sequence-melody did not keep to the same recurring tune throughout, but varied from couplet to couplet. In consequence, a Sequence by Adam of St. Victor may contain a variety of verse-forms. Moreover, a number of the Sequences of which he may have been the author show survivals of the old rhythmical irregularities, and of assonance as yet unsuperseded by pure rhyme. ^ See Gautier, Poisie liturgique, p. 147 sgq. It came somewhat earlier in Italy. See Ronca, Cultura medioevale, etc., p. 348 sqq. (Rome, 1892). 536 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi Before giving examples of Adam's poems, a tribute should be paid to his great forerunner in the art of Latin verse. Adam doubtless was familiar with the hjnnns ^ of the most brilhant intellectual luminary of the departing generation, one Peter Abaelard, whom he may have seen in the flesh. Those once famous love-songs written for Heloise, perished (so far as we know) with the love they sang. Another fate — and perhaps Abaelard wished it so — was in store for the many hjnmns which he wrote for his sisters in Christ, the abbess and her nuns. They still exist,^ and display a richness of verse-forms scarcely equalled even by the Sequences of Adam. In the development of Latin verse, Abaelard is Adam's immediate predecessor ; his verses being, as it were, just one stage inferior to Adam's in sonorousness of line, in certainty of rhythm, and in purity of rhyme. The " prose " Sequences were not the direct antecedents of Abaelard's hjmins. Yet both sprang from the freely devising spirit of melody and song ; and therefore those h5mins are of this free-bom lineage more truly than they are descendants of antique forms. To be sure, every possible accentual rhythm, built as it must be of trochees, iambics, anapaests, or dactyls, has unavoidably some antique quantitative antecedent ; because the antique measures exhausted the possibilities of syllabic combination. Yet antecedence is not source, and most of Abaelard's verses by their form and spirit proclaim their genesis in the creative exigencies of song as loudly as they disavow any antique parentage. For example, there may be some far echo of metrical dactyls in the following accentual and rhyme-harnessed twelve-syllable verse : " Advenit Veritas, umbra praeteriit, Post noctem claritas diei subiit, -f. y^While Sequences may be called hymns, all hynms are not Sequences. For tire hymn is the general term designating a verbal composition sung in praise of God . kind of writing corresponding to that which was to progress to clearer form in the Sequence. Without discussing to what extent the Latin of these plays may be called rhythmical, one or two things are clear. It is filled with assonances and rude rhymes, usually of one syllable. It has no clear verse- structure, and the utterances of the dramatis personae apparently observe no regularity in the number of syllables, such as lines of verse require. Of. her Opera ed. Winterfeld, Scriptores Rerum Germanicorum (Berlin, 1902) ; also Manitius, Ges. der lat. Lit. des Mittelaliers, i. pp. 619-632. CHAP. XXXIII MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 245 is from the Modus Ottinc, a popular song composed about the year 1000 in honour of a victory of Otto III. over the Hungarians : " His incensi bella fremunt, anna poscunt, hostes vocant, signa secuntur, tubis canunt. Clamor passim oritur et milibus centum Theutones inmiscentur. Pauci cedunt, plures cadunt, Francus instat, Parthus fugit ; vulgus exangue undis obstat ; Licus rubens sanguine Danubio cladem Parthicam ostendebat." Another example is the Modus florum of approximately the same period, a song about a king who promised his daughter to whoever could tell such a lie as to force the king to call him a liar. It opens as follows : *' Mendosam quam cantilenam ago, puerulis commendatam dabo, quo modules per mendaces risum auditoribus ingentem ferant. Liberalis et decora cuidam regi erat nata quam sub lege hujusmodi procis opponit quaerendam." Here the rhyme still is rude and the rhythm irregular. The following dirge, written thirty or forty years later on the death of the German emperor, Henry IL, shows improvement : " Lamentemur nostra, Socii, peccata, lamentemur et ploremus I Quare tacemus ? Pro iniquitate corruimus late ; scimus coeH hinc offensum regem immensum. Heinrico requiem, rex Christe, dona perennem." ^ We may pass on into the twelfth century, still following the traces of that development of popular verse which paralleled the evolution of the Sequence. We first note ^ For these and other songs, written after the manner of Sequences, see Du Meril, Ponies pop. lot. i. p. 273 sg?. They are also printed by Piper in Nacktrdge zur dUeren deutschen Lit. (Deutsche Nat. Lit,) p. 206 sqq. and p. 234 sqq. See also W, Meyer, Fragmenta Burana, p. 174 sqq. and Ebert, AUgemeine Gesch. etc. ii. 343 sqq. ^ Du Meril, ibid. i. p. 285. 246 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi I some catchy rhymes of a German student setting out for Paris in quest of learning and intellectual novelty : " Hospita in Gallia nunc me vocant studia. Vadam ergo ; flens a tergo socios relinquo. Plangite discipuli, lugubris discidii tempore propinquo. Vale, dulcis patria, suavis Suevorum Suevia ! Salve dilecta Francia, philosoplionim curia ! Suscipe discipulum in te peregrinum, Quem post dierum circulum remittes Socratinum."i This Suabian, singing his uncouth Latin rh5mies, and footing his way to Paris, suggests the common, delocalized influences which were developing a mass of student-songs, " Carmina Burana/' or " GoUardic " poetry. The authors belonged to that large and broad class of clerks made up of any and all persons who knew Latin. The songs circulated through western Europe, and their home was everywhere, if not their origin. Some of them betray, as more of them do not, the author's land and race. Frequently of diabolic cleverness, gibing, amorous, convivial, they show the virtuosity in rh3mie of their many makers. Like the hymns and later Sequences, they employed of necessity those accentual measures which once had their quantitative proto- types in antique metres. But, again like the hymns and Sequences, they neither imitate nor borrow, but make use of trochaic, iambic, or other rh5rthms as the natural and tm- avoidable material of verse. Their strophes are new strophes, and not imitations of anj^thing in quantitative poetry. So these songs were free-bom, and their develop- ment was as independent of antique influence as the melodies which ever moulded them to more perfect music. Many and divers were their measures. But as that great strophe of Adam's Heri mundus exultavit (the strophe of the Stahat Mater) was of mightiest dominance among the h5mMis, so for these student-songs there was also one measure that was chief. This was the thirteen-syllable trochaic line, with its lilting change of stress after the seventh syllable, and its pure two-syUable rh57me. It is the line of the Confessio poetae, or Confessio Goliae, where nests that one mediaeval Latin verse which everybody still knows by heart : ^ Wil. Meyer, FragmetUa Burana, p. i8o. CHAP. XXXIII MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 247 " Meum est propositum in taberna mori, Vinum sit appositum morientis ori. Tunc cantabunt laetius angelorum chori, * Sit Deus propitius huic potatori.' " It is also the line of the quite charming Phyllis and Flora of the Carmina Burana : " Erant ambae virgines et ambae reginae, Phyllis coma libera. Flora compto crine : Non sunt formae virginum, sed formae divinae, Et respondent facie luci matutinae.'* ^ Another common measure is the twelve-syllable dactylic line of the famous Apocalypsis Goliae Episcopi : " Ipsam Pytliagorae formam aspicio, Inscriptam artium schemate vario. An extra corpus sit haec revelatio, Utrum in corpora, Deus scit, nescio. In fronte micuit ars astrologica ; Dentium seriem regit grammatica ; In lingua pulcrius vernat rhetorica, Concussis aestuat in labiis logica." An example of the not infrequent eight-syllable line is afforded by that tremendous satire against papal Rome, beginning : " Propter Sion non tacebo, Sed ruinam Romae flebo, Quousque justitia Rursus nobis oriatur, Et ut lampas accendatur Justus in ecclesia." Here the last line of the verse has but seven syllables* as is the case in the following verse of four lines : *' Vinum bonum et suave. Bonis bonum, pravis prave, Cunctis dulcis sapor, ave, Mundana laetitia I " But the eight-syllable lines may be kept throughout, as in the following lament over life's lovely, pernicious charm, so touching in its expression of the mortal heartbreak of mediaeval monasticism : 1 The best text of the ** Phillidis et Florae altercatio " is Haureau's in Notices et extraits, 32 (i), p. 259 sqq. The same article has some other disputes or causae, e.g. catisa pauperis scholaris cum presbytero, p. 289. 248 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi " Heu 1 Heu I mundi vita, Quare me delectas ita ? Cum non possis mecum stare. Quid me cogis te amare ? Vita mundi, res morbosa, Magis fragilis quam rosa. Cum sis tota lacrymosa. Cur es mihi graciosa ? " ^ IV Our consideration of the different styles of mediaeval Latin prose and the many novel forms of mediaeval Latin verse has shown how radical was the departure of the one and the other from Cicero and Virgil. Through such changes Latin continued to prove itself a Uving language. Yet its vitality was doomed to wane before the rivalry of the vernacular tongues. The vivida vis, the capability of growth, had weU-nigh passed from Latin when Petrarch was bom. In endeavouring to maintain its supremacy as a literary vehicle he was to hold a losing brief, nor did he strengthen his cause by attempting to resuscitate a classic style of prose and metre. The victory of the vernacular was announced in Dante's De vulgari eloquentia and demonstrated beyond dispute in his Divina Commedia. A long and for the most part peaceful and unconscious conflict had led up to the victory of what might have been deemed the baser side. For Latin was the sole mediaeval literature that was bom in the purple, with its stately lineage of the patristic and the classical back of it. Latin was the language of the Roman world and the vehicle of Latin Christianity. It was the language of the Chiurch and its clergy, and the language of all educated people. Naturally ^ Du Meril, Poisies pop. lot. ii. p. io8 sqq. The piece is a cento, and its tone changes and becomes brutal further on. The poems, from which are taken the preceding citations, are to be found in Wright's Latin Poems commonly attributed to Walter Mapes (London, 1841, Camden Society) ; Carmina Burana, ed. J. A. Schmeller ; " Gedichte auf K. Friedrich I. (archipoeta)," in vol. iii. of Grimm's Kleinere Schrijten. Cf. also Hubatsch, Die lateiniscken Vagantenlieder (GorUtz, 1870). The best texts of many of these and other " Carmina Burana," and such like poems, are to be foimd in the contributions of Haur6au to the Notices et extraits, etc. ; especially in tome 29 (2), pp. 231-368 ; tome 31 (i), p. 51 sqq. CHAP. XXXIII MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 249 the entire contents of existing and progressive Christian and antique culture were contained in the mediaeval Latin literature, the literature of religion and of law and govern- ment, of education and of all serious knowledge. It was to be the primary literature of mediaeval thought ; from which passed over the chief part of whatever thought and knowledge the vernacular literatures were to receive. For scholars who follow, as we have tried to, the intellectual arid the deeper emotional life of the Middle Ages, the Latin literature yields the incomparably greater part of the material of our study. It has been our home country, from which we have made casual excursions into the vernacular literatures. These existed, however, from the earliest mediaeval periods, beginning, if one may say so, in oral rather than written documents. We read that Charlemagne caused a book to be made of Germanic poems, which till then presumably had been carried in men's memories. The Hildebrandslied is supposed to have been one of them.^ In the Norse lands, the Eddas and the matter of the Sagas were repeated from generation to generation, long before they were written down. The habit, if not the art, of writing came with Christianity and the Latin education accompanying it. Gradually a written literature in the Teutonic languages was accumulated. Of this there was the heathen side, well represented in Anglo-Saxon and the Norse ; while in Old High German the Hildebrandslied remains, heathen and savage. Thereafter, a popular and even national or rather racial poetry continued, developed, and grew large, notwithstanding the spread of Latin Christianity through Teutonic lands. Of this the Niebelungenlied and the Gudrun are great examples. But individual and still famous poets, who felt and thought as Germans, were also composing sturdily in their vernacular — a lack of education possibly causing them to dictate (didieren, dichten) rather than to write. Of these the greatest were Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide. With them and after them, or following upon the Niebelungenlied, came a mass of secular poetry, 1 Ante, Vol. I., p. 145. 2 50 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi some of which was popular and national, reflecting Germanic story, while some of it was courtly, transcribing the courtly poetry which by the twelfth century flourished in Old French. Thus bourgeoned the secular branches of German literature. On the other hand, from the time of Christianity's introduction, the Germans felt the need to have the new religion presented to them in their own tongues. The labour of translation begins with Ulfilas, and is continued with conscientious renderings of Scripture and Latin educational treatises, and also with such epic paraphrase as the Heliand and the more elegiac poems of the Anglo- Saxon CjTiewulf.^ Also, at least in Germany, there comes into existence a full religious literature, not stoled or mitred, but popular, non-academic, and non-liturgical ; of which quantities remain in the Middle High German of the thirteenth and fotuleenth centuries.^ Obviously the Romance vernacular literatures had a different commencement. The languages were Latin, simply Latin, in their inception, and never ceased to be legitimate continuations and developments of the popular or Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. But as the speech of children, women, and unlettered people, they were not thought of as literary media. AU who could write under- stood perfectly the better Latin from which these popular dialects were slowly differentiating themselves. And as they progressed to languages, still their hfe and progress lay among peoples whose ancestral tongue was the proper Latin, which all educated men and women still imderstood, and used in the serious business of life. But, sooner or later, men wiU talk and sing and think and compose in the speech which is closest to them. The Romance tongues became literary through this human need of natiu^al expression. There always had been songs in the old Vulgar Latin ; and such did not cease as it gradually became what one may call Romance. Moreover, the clergy might be impelled to use the popular speech in preaching to ^ Ante, Chapter IX., ii. and iii. * For generous samples of it, see GeistHche Lit. des Mittelalters, ed. P. Piper (Deutsche National Literatur). cHAP.xxxm MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 251 the laity, or some unlearned person might compose religious verses. Almost the oldest monument of Old French is the hymn in honour of Ste. Eulalie. Then as civilization advanced from the tenth to the twelfth century, in southern and northern France for example, and the langue d'oc and the langue d'oil became independent and developed languages, unlearned men, or men with unlearned audiences, would unavoidably set themselves to composing poetry in these tongues. In the North the chansons de geste came into existence ; in the South the knightly Troubadours made love-ljnics. Somehow, these poems were written down, and there was literature for men's eyes as well as for men's ears. In the twelfth century and the thirteenth, the audiences for Romance poetry, especially through the regions of southern and northern France, increased and became diversified. They were made up of all classes, save the brute serf, and of both sexes. The chansons de geste met the taste of the feudal barons ; the Arthurian Cycle charmed the feudal dames; the coSiTse fabliqux pleased the bourgeoisie; and chansons of all kinds might be found diverting by various people. If the religious side was less strongly represented, it was because the closeness of the language to the clerkly and liturgical Latin left no such need of translations as was felt from the beginning among peoples of Germanic speech. Still the Gospels, especially the apocryphal, were put into Old French, and miracles de Notre Dame without number ; also legends of the saints, and devout tales of many kinds. The accentual verses of the Romance tongues had their source in the popular accentual Latin verse of the later Roman period. Their development was not unrelated to the Latin accentual verse which was superseding metrical composition in the centuries extending, one may say, from the fifth to the eleventh. Divergences between the Latin and Romance verse would be caused by the linguistic evolution through which the Romance tongues were becoming independent languages. Norwas this divergence uninfluenced by the fact that Romance poetry was popular and usually concerned with topics of this life, while Latin poetry in the most striking lines of its evolution was liturgical ; and even when secular in topic tended to become learned, since it was 252 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi the product of the academically educated classes. Much of the vernacular (Romance as well as Germanic) poetry in the Middle Ages was composed by imleamed men who had at most but a speaking acquaintance with Latin, and knew little of the antique literature. This was true, generally, of the Troubadours of Provence, of the authors of the Old French chansons de geste, and of such a courtly poet as Chretien de Troies ; true likewise of the great German Minnesingers, epic poets rather, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide. On the other hand, vernacular poetry might be written by highly learned men, of whom the towering though late example would be Dante AJighieri. An instance somewhat nearer to us at present is Jean Clopinel or de Meun, the author of the second part of the Roman de la rose. His extraordinary Voltairean production embodies aU the learning of the time ; and its scholar-author was a man of genius, who incorporated his learning and the fruit thereof very organically in his poem. But here, at the close of our consideration of the mediaeval appreciation of the Classics, and the relations between the Classics and mediaeval Latin literature, we are not occupied with the very loose and general question of the amount of classical learning to be found in the vernacular literatures of western Europe. That was a casual matter depending on the education and learning, or lack thereof, of the author of the given piece. But it may be profitable to glance at the passing over of antique themes of story into mediaeval vernacular literature, and the manner of their refashioning. This is a huge subject, but we shall not go into it deeply, or pursue the various antique themes through their endless propagations. Antique stories aroused and pointed the mediaeval imagination ; they made part of the never-absent antique influence which helped to bring the mediaeval peoples on and evoke in them an articulate power to fashion and create all kinds of mediaeval things. But with antique story as with other antique material, the Middle Ages had to turn it over and absorb it, and also had to become themselves with power, before they could refashion the antique theme or CHAP. XXXIII MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 253 create along its lines. All this had taken place by the middle of the twelfth century. As to choice of matter, twelfth-century refashioners would either select an antique theme suited to their handling, or extract what appealed to them from some classic story. In the one case as in the other they might recast, enlarge, or invent as their faculties permitted. Mediaeval taste took naturally to the degenerate pro- ductions of the late antique or transition centuries. The Greek novels seem to have been unknown, except the ApoUonius of Tyre.^ But the congenially preposterous story of Alexander by the Pseudo-Callisthenes was available in a sixth-century Latin version, and was made much of. Equally popular was the debasement and intentional distortion of the Tale of Troy in the work of " Dares " and " Dictys " ; other tales were aptly presented in Ovid's Metamorphoses ; and the stories of Hero and Leander, of Pjnramus and Thisbe, of Narcissus, Orpheus, Cadmus, Daedalus, were widely known and often told in the Middle Ages. The mediaeval writers made as if they believed these tales. At least they accepted them as they would have their own audiences accept their recasting, with little reflec- tion as to whether truth or fable. But was the work of the refashioners conscious fiction ? Scarcely, when it simply recast the old story in mediaevalizing paraphrase ; but when the poet went on and wove out of ten lines a thousand, he must have known himself devising. The mediaeval treatment of classic themes of history and epic poetry shows how the Middle Ages refashioned and reinspired after their own image whatever they took from the antique. If it was partly their fault, it was also their unavoidable misfortune that they received these great themes in the literary distortions of the transition centuries. Doubt- less they preferred encyclopaedic dulness to epic unity ; ^ For this novel, a Greek original is usually assumed ; but the Middle Ages had it only in a sixth-century Latin version. It was copied in Jourdain de Blaie, a chanson de geste. See Hagen, Der Roman von Konig ApoUonius in seinen ver~ schiedenen BearheiUingen (Berlin, 1878). The other Greek novels doubtless would have been as popular had the Middle Ages known them. In fact, the Ethiopica of Heliodorus, and others of these novels, did become popular enough through translations in the sixteenth century. 2 54 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi they loved fantasy rather than history, and of course de- Hghted in the preposterous, as they found it in the Latin version of the Life and Deeds of Alexander. As for the Tale of Troy, the real Homer never reached them : and perhaps mediaeval peoples who were pleased, hke Virgil's Romans, to draw their origins from Trojan heroes, would have rejected Homer's story just as " Dares " and " Dictys," whoever they were, did.^ The true mediaeval rifacimenti, to wit, the retellings of these tales in the vernacular, mirror the mediaeval mind, the mediaeval character, and the whole panorama of mediaeval life and fantasy. The chief epic themes drawn from the antique were the Tales of Troy and Thebes and the story of Aeneas. In verse and prose they were retold in the vernacular Uteratures and also in mediaeval Latin.^ We shall, however, limit our view to the primary Old French versions, which formed the basis of compositions in German, Italian, EngUsh, as well as French. They were composed between 1150 and 1170 by Norman-French trouveres. The names of the authors of the Roman de Thebes and the Eneas are unknown ; the Roman de Troie was written by Benoit de St. More. These poems present auniversal substitution of mediaeval manners and sentiment. For instance, one observes that the epic participation of the pagan gods is minimized, and in the Roman de Troie even discarded ; necromancy, on the ^ Hugo of St. Victor says in the twelfth century : ** Apud gentiles primus Darhes Phrygius Trojanam historiam edidit, quam in foliis palmarum ab eo scriptam esse ferunt " {Erud. didas. iii. cap. 3 ; Migne 176, col. 767). On the Trojan origin of the Franks, Britons, and other peoples, see Joly in his " Benoit de St. More et le Roman de Troie," pp. 606-635 [Mem. de la Soc. des Antiquaires de Normandie, vol. vii. 3^^ ser., 1869) ; also Graf., Roma nella memoria, etc., del medio aevo. The Trojan origin of the Franks was a commonplace in the early Middle Ages, see e.g. Aimoinus of Fleury in beginning of his Historia Fran- corum, Migne 139, col. 637. On Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan see " Dares and Dictys," N. E. Grif&n {Johns Hopkins Studies, Baltimore, 1907) ; Taylor, Classical HerUage, pp. 40 and 360 (authorities) ; also, generally, L. Constans, " L*£pop6e antique,** in Petit de Julleville's Histoire de la langue et de la littSrature frangaise, vol. i. (Paris, 1896). ^ Joseph of Exeter or de Iscano, as he is called, at the close of the twelfth century composed a Latin poem in six books of hexameters entitled De hello Trojano. It is one of the best mediaeval productions in that metre. The author followed Dares, but his diction shows a study of Virgil, Ovid, Statins, and Claudian. See J. J. Jusserand, De Josepho Exoniensi vel Iscano (Paris, 1877) ; A. Sarradin, De Josepho Iscano, Belli Trojani, etc. (Versailles, 1878). CHAP. XXXIII MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 255 other hand, abounds. A more interesting change is the transformation of the love episode. That had become an epic adjimct in Alexandrian Greek literature as early as the third century before Christ. It existed in the antique sources of all these mediaeval poems. Nevertheless, the romantic narratives of courtly love in the latter are mediaeval creations. The Eneas relates the love of Lavinia forfthe hero, most correctly reciprocated by him. The account of it fills four- teen hundred lines, and has no precedent in Virgil's poem, which in other respects is followed closely. Lavinia sees Aeneas from her tower, and at once understands a previous discourse of her mother on the subject of love. She utters love's plaints, and then faints because Aeneas does not seem to notice her. After which she passes a sleepless night. The next morning she tells her mother, who is furious, since she favours Tumus as a suitor. The girl falls senseless, but coming to herself when alone, she recalls love's stratagems, and attaches a letter to an arrow which is shot so as to fall at Aeneas's feet. Aeneas reads the letter, and turns and salutes the fair one furtively, that his followers may not see. Then he enters his tent and falls so sick with love that he takes to his bed. The next day Lavinia watches for him, and thinks him false, till at last, pale and feeble, he appears, and her heart acquits him ; amorous glances now fly back and forth between them.^ To have this jaded jilt grow sick with love is a little too much for us, and Aeneas is absurd ; but the universal human touches us quite otherwise in the sweet changing heart of Briseida in the Roman de Troie. There is no ground for den5dng to Benoit of St. More his meed of fame for creating this charming person and starting her upon her career. Following " Dares," Benoit calls her Briseida ; but she becomes the Griseis of Boccaccio's Filostrato ; and what good man does not sigh and love her under the name of Cressid in Chaucer's poem, though he may deplore her somewhat brazen heartlessness in Shakespeare's play. It is not given to all men, or women, in presence or absence, in life and death, to love once and forever. One has 1 Eneas, ed. by Salverda de Grave {Halle, 1891), lines 785^-9362. 256 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi the stable heart, another's fancy is quickly turned. Some- times, of course, our moral sledge-hammers should be brought to bear ; but a little hopeless smile may be juster, as we sigh " she (it is more often " he ") couldn't help it." Such was Briseida, the sweet, loving, helpless — coquette ? jilt ? flirt ? these words are all too belittling to tell her truly. Benoit knew better. He took her dry-as-dust characterization from " Dares " ; he gave it life, and then let his fair creature do just the things she might, without ceasing to be she. The abject " Dares " (Benoit may have had a better story under that name) in his catalogue of characters has this : " Briseidam formosam, alta statura, candidam, capillo flavo et molU, superciliis junctis, oculis venustis, corpore aequali, blandam, affabilem, verecimdam, animo simplici [0 ye gods !], piam/' He makes no other mention of this tall, graceful girl, with her lovely eyes and eyebrows meeting above, her modest, pleasant mien, and simple soul ; for simple she was, and therein lies the direst bit of truth about her. For it is simple and uncomplex to take the colour of new scenes and faces, and of new proffered love when the old is far away. Now see what Benoit does with this dust : Briseida is the daughter of Calchas, a Trojan seer who had passed over to the Greeks, warned by Apollo. He is in the Grecian host, but his daughter is in Troy. Benoit says, she was engaging, lovelier and fairer than the fleur de lis — ^though her eyebrows grew rather too close together. " Beaux yeux " shehad, "degrandemaniere," and charming was her talk, and faultless her breeding as her dress. Much was she loved and much she loved, although her heart changed ; and she was very loving, simple, and kind : " Molt fu am6e et molt amei-f; Mes sis corages li changeit ; Et si esteit molt am.orose. Simple et almosniere et pitose." ^ Calchas wants his daughter, and Priam decides to send 1 Roman de Troiey 5257-^270^ ed. Joly ; " Benoit de St. More et le Roman de Troie, etc.," Mem. de la Soc. des Antiquaires de Nortnandie^ vol. vii. 3™® ser., 1869. On its sources see also L. Constans, in Petit de Julleville's Hist, de la langue et de la Utt. fran'gaise, vol. i. pp. 188-220. CHAP. XXXIII MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 257 her. There is truce between the armies. Troilus, Troy's glorious young knight, matchless in beauty, in arms second only to his brother Hector, is beside himself. He loves Briseida, and she him. What tears and protestations, and what vows ! But the girl must go to her father. On the morrow the young dame has other cares — to see to the packing of her lovely dresses and put on the loveliest of them ; over all she threw a mantle inwoven with the flowers of Paradise. The Trojan ladies add their tears to the damsel's ; for she is ready to die of grief at leaving her lover. Benoit assures us that she will not weep long ; it is not woman's way, he continues somewhat mediaevally. The brilliant cortege is met by one still more distinguished from the Grecian host. Troilus must turn back, and the lady passes to the escort of Diomede. She was young ; he was impetuous ; he looks once, and then greets her with a torrential declaration of love. He never loved before ! ! He is hers, body and soul and high emprize. Briseida speaks him fair : " At this time it would be wrong for me to say a word of love. You would deem me light indeed ! Why, I hardly know you ! and girls so often are deceived by men. What you have said cannot move a heart grieving, Hke mine, to lose my — friend, and others whom I may never see again. For one of my station to speak to you of love ! I have no mind for that. Yet you seem of such rank and prowess that no girl under heaven ought to refuse you. It is only that I have no heart to give. If I had, surely I could hold none dearer than you. But I have neither the thought nor power, and may God never give it to me ! " ^ One need not tell the flash of joy that then was Diomede's, nor the many troubles that were to be his before at last Briseida finds that her heart has indeed turned to this new lover, always at hand, courting danger for her sake, and at last wounded almost to death by Troilus's spear. The end of the story is assured in her first discreetly halting words. Enough has been said to show how far Benoit was from Omers qui fu clers merveillos, and what a story in some thirty thousand lines he has made of the dry data of " Dares " and " Dictys." His Briseida, with her changing heart, was to 1 Roman de Troie, 13235 sqq, VOL. II S 258 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi rival steadier - minded but not more lovable women of mediaeval fiction — Iseult or Guinevere. And although the far-off echo of Briseid's name comes from the ancient cen- turies, none the less she is as entirely a mediaeval creation as Lancelot's or Tristram's queen. Thus the Middle Ages took the antique narrative, and created for themselves within the altered lines of the old tale.^ The transformation of themes of epic story in vernacular mediaeval versions is paralleled by mediaeval refashionings of historical subjects which had been fictionized before the antique period closed. A chief example is the romance of Alexander the Great. The antique source was the con- queror's Life and Deeds, written by one who took the name of Alexander's physician, Callisthenes. The author was some Egyptian Greek of the first century after Christ. His work is preposterous from the beginning to the end, and presents a succession of impossible marvels performed by the somewhat indistinguishable heroes of the story. Its qualities were reflected in the Latin versions, which in turn were drawn upon by the Old French rh5nning romancers. ^ The Roman de Thebes^ the third of these large poems, is temperate in the adaptation and extension of its theme. Its ten thousand or more lines of eight- syllable rhyming verse are no longer than the Thebaid of Statins, and as a narrative make quite as interesting reading. Statins, who lived imder Domitlan, was a poet of considerable skill, but with no genius for the construction of an epic. His work reads well in patches, but does not move. Several books are taken up with getting the Argive army in motion, and when the reader and Jove himself are wearied, it moves on — to the next halt. And so forth through the whole twelve books. See Nisard, £tudes sur les poetes latins de la decadence, vol. i. p. 261 sqq, (2nd ed., Paris, r849) ; Pichon, Hist, de la lift. lot. p. 606 {2nd ed., Paris, 1898). The Roman de Thebes was not drawn directly from the work of Statins, but through the channels, apparently, of intervening prose compendia. It also evidently drew from other works, as it contains matters not found in Statius's Thebaid. It is easy, if not inspiring, reading. The style is clear, and the narrative moves. Of course it presents a general mediaevalizing of the manners of Statius's somewhat fustian antique heroes ; it introduces courtly love [e.g. the love between Parthonopeus and Antigone, lines 3793 sqq.), mediaeval conmionplaces, and feudal customs. It drops the antique conception of accursed fate as a fundamental motive of the plot, substituting in its place the varied play of romantic and chivalric sentiment. Leopold Constans has made the Roman de Thebes his own. Having followed the story of Oedipus through the Middle Ages in his L&gende d^CEdipe, etc. (Paris, 1881), he has corrected some of his views in his critical edition of the poem, '* Le Roman de Thebes," 2 vols., 1890 {Sac. des anciens textes frangais), and has treated the same matters more popularly in Petit de Julleville's Hist, de la langue et de la litt. fran^aise, vol. i. pp. 170-188. These works fully discuss the sources, date, and language of the poem, and the later redactions in prose and verse through Europe. CHAP. XXXIII MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE 259 The latter mediaevalized and feudalized the tale. Nor were they halted by any absurdity, or conscious of the character- lessness of the puppets of the tale.^ Further to pursue the fortunes of antique themes in mediaeval Uterature would lead us beyond bounds. Yet mention should be made of the handling of minor narratives, as the Metamorphoses of Ovid. They were very popular, and from the twelfth century on, paraphrases or refashionings were made of many of them. These added to the old tale the interesting mediaeval element of the moral or didactic allegory. The most prodigious instance of this moralizing of Ovid was the work of Chretien Legouais, a French Franciscan who wrote at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In some seventy thousand lines he presented the stories of the Metamorphoses, the allegories which he discovered in them, and the moral teaching of the same.^ Equally interesting was the application of allegory to Ovid's Ars amatoria. The first translators treated this frivolous production as an authoritative treatise upon the art of winning love. So it was, perhaps, only Ovid was amusing himself by making a parable of his youthful diversions. Mediaeval imitators changed the habits of the gilded youth of Rome to suit the society of their time. But they did more, being votaries of courtly love. Such love in the Middle Ages had its laws which were prone to deduce their lineage from Ovid's verses. But its uplifted spirit revelled in s3mibolism ; and tended to change to spiritual aUegory whatever authority it imagined itself based upon, even though the authority were a book as dissolute, when seriously considered, as the Ars amatoria. It is strange to think of this poem as the very far off street-walking protot3rpe of De Lorris's Roman de la rose. ^ On Pseudo-Callisthenes see Paul Meyer, Alexandre le Grand dans la litUrature frangaise du moyen dge {Paris, 1886) ; Taylor, Classical Heritage, etc., pp. 38 and 360. In the last quarter of the twelfth century Walter of Lille, called also Walter of Chatillon, wrote his Alexandreis in ten books of easy-flowing hexameters. It is printed in Migne, Pai. Lot. 209, col. 463-572. Cf. ante, page 221. His work shows that a mediaeval scholar-poet could reproduce a historical theme quite soberly. His poem was read by other bookmen ; but the Alexander of the Middle Ages remained the Alexander of the fabulous vernacular versions, ^ See Gaston Paris, *' Chretien Legouais et autres imitateurs d'Ovide," Hist, Utt. de la France, t. xxix., pp. 455-525- CHAPTER XXXIV MEDIAEVAL APPROPRIATION OF THE ROMAN LAW I. The Fontes Juris Civilis. II. Roman and Barbarian Codification. III. The Mediaeval Appropriation. IV. Church Law. V. Political Theorizing. Of all examples of mediaeval intellectual growth through the appropriation of the antique, none is more completely illuminating than the mediaeval use of Roman law. As with patristic theology and antique philosophy, the Roman law was crudely taken and then painfully learned, till in the end, vitally and broadly mastered, it became even a means and mode of mediaeval thinking. Its mediaeval appropria- tion illustrates the legal capacity of the Middle Ages and their concern with law both as a practical business and an intellectual interest. Primitive law is practical ; it develops through the adjustment of social exigencies. Gradually, however, in an intelligent community which is progressing under favouring influences, some definite consciousness of legal propriety, utility, or justice, makes itself articulate in statements of general principles of legal right and in a steady endeavour to adjust legal relationships and adjudicate actual con- troversies in accordance. This endeavour to formulate just and useful principles, and decide novel questions in accordance with them, and enunciate new rules in harmony with the 260 CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 261 body of the existing law, is jurisprudence, which thus works always for concord, co-ordination, and system. There was a jurisprudential element in the early law of Rome. The Twelve Tables are trenchant announcements of rules of procedure and substantial law. They have the form of the general imperative : " Thus let it be ; If one summons [another] to court, let him go ; As a man shall have appointed by his Will, so let it be ; When one makes a bond or purchase,^ as the tongue shall have pronounced it, so let it be." These statements of legal rules are far from primitive ; they are elastic, inclusive, and suited to form the foundation of a large and free legal development. And the consistency with which the law of debt was carried out to its furthest cruel conclusion, the permitted division of the body of the defaulting debtor among several creditors,^ gave earnest of the logic which was to shape the Roman law in its humaner periods. Moreover, there is jurisprudence in the arrangement of the Laws of the Twelve Tables. Never- theless, the jurisprudential element is still but inchoate. The Romans were endowed with a genius for law. Under the later Republic and the Empire, the minds of their jurists were trained and broadened by Greek philosophy and the study of the laws of Mediterranean peoples ; Rome was becoming the commercial as well as social and political centre of the world. From this happy combination of causes resulted the most comprehensive body of law and the noblest jurisprudence ever evolved by a people. The great juris- consults of the Empire, working upon the prior labours of long lines of older praetors and jurists, perfected a body of law of well-nigh universal applicability, which through- out was logically consistent with general principles of law and equity, recognized as fundamental. The latter were in part suggested by Greek philosophy, especially by Stoicism as adapted to the Roman temperament. They represented the best ethics, the best justice of the time. As principles of law, however, they would have hung in the air, had not the practical as well as theorizing genius of the jurisconsults ^ The words " nexum mancipiumque " are more formal and special than the English given above. * The early law had as yet devised no execution against the debtor's property. 262 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi been equal to the task of embodsdng them in legal proposi- tions, and applying the latter to the decision of cases. Thus was evolved a body of practical rules of law, controlled, co- ordinated, and, as one may say, imiversalized through the constant logical employment of sound principles of legal justice.^ The Roman law, broadly taken, was heterogeneous in origin, and complex in its modes of growth. The great jurisconsults of the Empire recognized its diversity of source, and distinguished its various characteristics accordingly. They assumed (and this was a pure assumption) that every civilized people lived under two kinds of law, the one its own, springing from some recognized law-making source within the community ; the other the jus gentium, or the law inculcated among all peoples by natural reason or common needs. The supposed origin of the jus gentium was not simple. Back in the time of the Republic it had become necessary to recognize a law for the many strangers in Rome, who were not entitled to the protection of Rome's jus civile. The edict of the praetor Peregrinus covered their substantial rights, and sanctioned simple modes of sale and lease which did not observe the forms prescribed by the jus civile. So this edict became the chief source of the jus gentium so-called, to wit, of those liberal rules of law which ignored the peculiar formahties of the stricter law of Rome. Probably foreign laws, that is to say, the commercial customs of the Mediterranean world, were in fact recognized ; and their study led to a perception of elements common to the laws of many peoples. At all events, in course of time the jus gentium came to be regarded as consisting of universal rules of law which all peoples might naturally follow. The recognition of these simple modes of contracting obligations, and perhaps the knowledge that certain rules of ^ The jurisconsults whose opinions were authoritative flourished in the second and third centuries. The great five were Gains, Julian, Papinian, Ulpian, Paulus. Inasmuch as these jurisconsults of the Empire were members of the Imperial {or, later, Praetorian) Auditory, they were judges in a court of last resort, and their " responsa " were decisions of actual cases. They subsequently "digested" them in their books. See Munroe Smith, " Problems of Roman Legal History," Columbia Law Review, 1904, p. 538. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 263 law obtained among many peoples, fostered the concep- tion of common or natural justice, which human reason was supposed to inculcate everywhere. Such a concep- tion could not fail to spring up in the minds of Roman jurists who were educated in Stoical philosophy, the ethics of which had much to say of a common human nature. Indeed the idea naturalis ratio was in the air, and . the thought of common elements of law and justice which naturalis ratio inter omnes homines constituit, lay so close at hand that it were perhaps a mistake to try to trace it to any single source. Practically the jus gentium became identical with jus naturale, which Ulpian imagined as taught by nature to all animals ; iYiejus gentium, however, belonged to men alone. ^ Thus rules which were conceived as those of the jus gentium came to represent the principles of rational law, and impressed themselves upon the development of ih.e jus civile. They informed the whole growth and application of Roman law with a breadth of legal reason. And conceptions of a jus naturale and a jus gentium became cognate legal fictions, by the aid of which praetor and jurisconsult might justify the validity of informal modes of contract. In their appli- cation, judge and jurist learned how and when to disregard the formal requirements of the older and stricter Roman law, and found a way to the recognition of what was just and convenient. These fictions agreed with the supposed nature and demands of aequitas, which is the principle of progressive and discriminating legal justice. Law itself {jus) was iden- tical with aequitas conceived (after Celsus's famous phrase) as the ars boni et aequi. ^ Dig. i. I (" De Just, et jure ") i. See Savigny, System des heutigen romischen Rechts, i. p. 109 sqq. Apparently some of the jurists {e.g. Gaius, /ns. i. i) draw no substantial distinctions between the j-us naturale and the jus gentium. Others seem to distinguish. With the latter, jus naturale might represent natural or instinctive principles of justice common to all men, and jus gentium, the laws and customs which experience had led men to adopt. For instance, libertas is jure naturali, while dominatio or servitus is introduced ex gentium jure {Dig. i. 5, 4 ; Dig. xii, 6, 64). Jus gentium represented common expediency, but its institutions (e.g. servitus) might or might not accord with natural justice. For manumissio as well as servitus was ex jure gentium {Dig. i. i, 4), and so were common modes and principles of contract. Ulpian*s notion of the jus naturale as pertaining to all animals, and jus gentium as belonging to men alone, was but a catching classifica- tion, and did not represent any commonly followed distinction. 264 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi The Roman law proper, the jus civile, had multifarious sources. First the leges, enacted by the people ; then the plebiscita, sanctioned by the Plebs ; the senatus consulta, passed by the Senate ; the constitutiones and rescripta ^ principum, ordained by the Emperor. Excepting the rescripta, these (to cover them with a modem expression) were statutory. They were laws annoimced at a specific time to meet some defijiite exigency. Under the Empire, the constitutiones principum became the most important, and then practically the only kind of legal enactment. Two or three other sources of Roman law remain for mention : first, the edicta of those judicial magistrates, especially the praetors, who had the authority to issue them. In his edict the praetor announced what he held to be the law and how he would apply it. The edict of each successive praetor was a renewal and expansion or modification of that of his predecessor. Papinian calls this source of law the "jus praetorium, which the praetors have introduced to aid, supplement, or correct the jus civile for the sake of public utility." Next, the responsa or auctoritas jurisprudentium, by which were intended the judicial decisions and the authority of the legal writings of the famous jurisconsults. Imperial rescripts recognized these responsa as authoritative for the Roman courts ; and some of the emperors embodied portions of them in formally promulgated collections, thereby giving them the force of law. Justinian's Digest is the great example of this method of codification.^ One need scarcely add that the authoritative writings and responsa of the jurisconsults extended and applied the jus gentium, that is to say, the rules and principles of the best- considered jurisprudence, freed so far as might be from the formal peculiarities of the jus civile strictly speaking. And the same was true of the praetorian edict. The ^ Constitutio is the more general term, embracing whatever the emperor annomices in writing as a law. The term rescript properly applies to the emperor's written answers to questions addressed to him by magistrates, and to the decisions of his Auditory rendered in his name. 2 For this whole matter, see vol. i. of Savigny's System des heutigen romischen Rechts ; Gains, Institutes, the opening paragraphs ; and the first two chapters of the first Book of Justinian's Digest. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 265 Roman law also gave legal effect to inveterata consuetudo, the law which is sanctioned by custom : "for since the laws bind us because established by the decision of the people, those unwritten customs which the people have approved are binding." ^ Simply naming the sources of Roman law indicates the ways in which it grew, and the part taken by the juris- consults in its development as a universal and elastic system. It was due to their labours that legal principles were logically carrie'd out through the mass of enactments and decisions ; that is, it was due to their large considera- tion of the body of existing law, that each novel decision- — each case of first impression^ — should be a true legal deduction, and not a solecism ; and that even the new enactments should not create discordant law. And it was due to their labours that as rules of law were called forth, they were stated clearly and in terms of well-nigh universal applicability. The Laws of the Twelve Tables showed the action of legal intelligence and the result of much experience. They sanctioned a large contractual freedom, if within strict forms ; they stated broadly the right of testamentary disposition. Many of their provisions, which commonly were but authoritative recognitions, were expressions of basic legal principles, the application of which might be extended to meet the needs of advancing civic life. And through the enlargement of this fundamental collection of law, or deviating from it in accordance with principles which it implicitly embodied, the jurists of the Republic and the first centuries of the Empire formed and developed a body of private and public law from which the jurisprudence of Europe and America has never even sought to free itself. Roman jurisprudence was finally incorporated in Justinian's Digest, which opens with a statement of the most general principles, even those which would have hung in the air but for the Roman genius of logical and practical application to the concrete instance. " Jus est ars boni et aequi " — ^it is better to leave these words imtranslated, such is the wealth of significance and connotation which 1 Dig. i. 3, 32. 266 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi they have acquired. " Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum cuique tribuendi. Juris praecepta sunt haec : honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suiun cuique tribuere. Jurisprudentia est divinarum atque humanarum rerum notitia, justi atque injusti scientia/* The first pregnant phrase is from the older jurist Celsus ; the longer passage is by the later Ulpian, and may be taken as an expansion of the first. Both the one and the other expressed the most advanced and philosophic ethics of the ancient world. They are both in the first chapter of the Digest, wherein they become enactments. An extract from Paulus follows : " Jus has different mean- ings ; that which is always aequum ac honum is called jus, to wit, the jus naturale : jus also means the jus civile, that which is expedient {utile) for aU or most in any state. And in our state we have also the praetorian jusJ' This passage indicates the course of the development of the Roman law : the fundamental and ceaselessly growing core of specifically Roman law, the jus civile ; its continual equitable application and enlargement, which was the praetor's contribution ; and the constant application of the aequum ac bonum, observed perhaps in legal rules common to many peoples, but more surely existing in the high reasoning of j urists instructed in the best ethics and philosophy of the ancient world, and learned and practised in the law. Now notice some of the still general, but distinctly legal, rather than ethical, rules collected in the Digest : The laws cannot provide specifically for every case that may arise ; but when their intent is plain, he who is adjudicating a cause should proceed ad similia, and thus declare the law in the case.^ Here is stated the general and important formative principle, that new cases should be decided consistently and eleganter, which means logically and in accordance with established rules. Yet legal solecisms will exist, perhaps in a statute or in some rule of law evoked by a special exigency. Their application is not to be extended. For them the rule is : " What has been accepted contra rationem juris, is not to be drawn out ^ Dig. i. 3, lo and 12. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 267 (producendum) to its consequences/' ^ or again : " What was introduced not by principle, but at first through error, does not obtain in like cases." ^ These are true principles making for the consistent development of a body of law. Observe the scope and penetration of some other general rules : " Nuptias non concubitus, sed consensus facit." ^ This goes to the legal root of the whole conception of matrimony, and is still the recognized starting-point of all law upon that subject. Again : " An agreement to perform what is impossible will not sustain a suit." ^ This is still everywhere a fundamental principle of the law of contracts. Again : "No one can transfer to another a greater right than he would have himself/' ^ another principle of fundamental validity, but, of course, like all rules of law subject in its application to the qualif3dng operation of other legal rules. Roman jurisprudence recognized the danger of definition : " Omnis definitio in jure civili periculosa est." ® Yet it.could formulate admirable ones ; for example : " Inheritance is succession to the sum total [universum jus) of the rights of the deceased." ^ This definition excels in the completeness of its legal view of the matter, and is not injured by the obvious omission to exclude those personal privileges and rights of the deceased which terminate upon his death. Thus we note the sources and constructive principles of the Roman law. We observe that while certain of the former might be called "statutory," the chief means and method of development was the declarative edict of the praetor and the trained labour of the jurisconsults. In these appears the consummate genius of Roman juris- prudence, a jurisprudence matchless in its rational conception of principles of justice which were rooted in a philosophic consideration of human life ; matchless also in its carr3dng through of such principles into the body of the law and the decision of every case. 1 Dig. i. 3, 14. 2 7^^-^ 2g 3 7)jg 1 j^^ 2Q^ * Dig. 1. 17, 31. ^ Ibid. 54. ^ Ibid. 202. ' Dig. 1. 16, 24 ; Ibid. 17, 62. 268 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi II The Roman law was the creation of the genius of Rome and also the product of the complex civilization of which Rome was the kinetic centre. As the Roman power crumbled, Teutonic invaders established kingdoms within territories formerly subject to Rome and to her law — a law, however, which commonly had been modified to suit the peoples of the provinces. Those territories retained their population of provincials. The invaders, Burgimdians, Visigoths, and Franks, planting themselves in the different parts of Gaul, brought their own law, imder which they continued to live, but which they did not force upon the provincial population. On the contrary, Burgundian and Visigothic kings promulgated codes of Roman law for the latter. And these represent the forms in which the Roman law first passed over into modes of acceptance and applica- tion no longer fully Roman, but partly Teutonic and incipiently mediaeval. They exemplify, moreover, the fact, so many aspects of which have been already noticed, of transitional and partly barbarized commimities drawing from a greater past according to their simpler needs. One may say that these codes carried on processes of decline from the full creative genius of Roman jurisprudence, which had irrevocably set in under the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. The decline lay in a weakening of the intellectual power devoted to the law and its development. The living growth of the praetorian edict had long since come to an end ; and now a waning juris- prudential intelligence first ceased to advance the develop- ment of law, and then failed to save from desuetude the achieved jurisprudence of the past. So the jurisprudential and juridical elements {jus) fell away from the law, and the imperial constitutions {leges) remained the sole legal vehicle and means of amendment. The need of codification was felt, and that preserving and eliminating process was entered upon. Roman codification never became a reformulation. The Roman Codex was a collection of existing constitutions. A CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 269 certain jurist (" Gregorianus ") made an orderiy and compre- hensive collection of such as early as the close of Diocletian's reign ; it was supplemented by the work of another jurist {" Hermogenianus ") in the time of Constantine. Each com- pilation was the work of a private person, who, without authority to restate, could but compile the imperial con- stitutions. The same method was adopted by the later codifications, which were made and promulgated under imperial decree. There were two which were to be of supreme importance for the legal future of western Europe, the Theodosian Code and the legislation of Justiniar The former was promulgated in 438 by Theodosius II. and Valentinianus. The emperors formally announce that " in imitation {ad similittidinem) of the Code of Gregorianus and Hermogenianus we have decreed that all the Constitutions should be collected " which have been promulgated by Constantine and his successors, including ourselves.^ So the Theodosian Code contains many laws of the emperors who decreed it.^ It was thus a compilation of imperial constitutions already in existence, or decreed from year to year while the codification was in process (429-438) . Every constitution is given in the words of its original announcement, and with the name of the emperor. Evidently this code was not a revision of the law. The codification of Justinian began with the promulga- tion of the Codex in 529. That was intended to be a com- pilation of the constitutions contained in the previous codes and still in force, as well as those which had been decreed since the time of Theodosius. The compilers received authority to omit, abbreviate, and supplement. The Codex was revised and promulgated anew in 534. The constitu- tions which were decreed during the remainder of Justinian's long reign were collected after his death and pubhshed as Novellae, So far there was nothing radically novel. But under Justinian, life and art seemed to have revived in the East ; and Tribonian, with the others who assisted in these labours, had larger views of legal reform and jurisprudential ^ Cod. Theod, {ed. by Mommsen and Meyer) i. i, 5. ^ With the Theodosian Code the word lex, leges, begins to be used for the constitutiones or other decrees of a sovereign. 270 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi conservation than the men who worked for Theodosius. Justinian and his coadjutors had also serious plans for improving the teaching of the law, in the furtherance of which the famous little book of Institutes was composed after the model, and to some extent in the words, of the Institutes of Gains. It was pubUshed in 533. The great labour, however, which Justinian and his lawyers were as by Providence inspired to achieve was the encyclopaedic codification of the jurisprudential law. Part of the emperor's high-soimding command runs thus : '* We therefore command you to read and sift out from the books pertaining to the jus Romanum composed by the ancient learned jurists (antiqui prudentes), to whom the most sacred emperors granted authority to indite and interpret the laws, so that the material may all be taken from these writers, and incon- gruity avoided — for others have written books which have been neither used nor recognized. When by the favour of the Deity this material shaU have been collected, it should be reared with toil most beautiful, and consecrated as the own and most holy temple of justice, and the whole law (totumjus) should be arranged in fifty books under specific titles." ^ The language of the ancient jurists was to be preserved even critically, that is to say, the compilers were directed to emend apparent errors and restore what seemed " verum et optimum et quasi ab initio scriptum/' It was not the least of the providential mercies connected with the compila- tion of this great body of jurisprudential law, that Justinian and his commission did not abandon the phrasing of the old jurisconsults, and restate their opinions in such language as we have a sample of in the constitution from which the above extract is taken. This jurisprudential part of Justinian's Codification was named the Digest or Pandects.^ Inasmuch as Justinian's brief reconquest of western portions of the Roman Empire did not extend north of the Alps, his codification was not promulgated in Gaul or 1 From the constitution directing the compilation of the Digest, usually cited as Deo auctore. * The original plan of Theodosius embraced the project of a Codex of the jurisprudential law. See his constitution of the year 429 in Theod. C. i. i, 5. Had this been carried out, as it was not, Justinian's Digest woulcl h^ye hacj ^ forerunner. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 271 Germany. Even in Italy his legislation did not maintain itself in general dominance, especially in the north where the Lombard law narrowed its application. Moreover, throughout the peninsula, the Pandects quickly became as if they were not, and fell into desuetude, if that can be said of a work which had not come into use. This body of juris- prudential law was beyond the legal sense of those monarchi- cally-minded and barbarizing centuries, which knew law only as the command of a royal lawgiver. The Cod.ex and the Novellae were of this nature. They, and not the Digest, represent the influence upon Italy of Justinian's legislation until the renewed interest in jurisprudence brought the Pandects to the front at the close of the eleventh century. But Codex and Novellae were too bulky for a period that needed to have its intellectual labours made easy. From the first, the Novellae were chiefly known and used in the condensed form given them in the excellent Epitome of /z^Z^'awws, apparently a Byzantine of the last part of Justinian's reign.^ The cutting down and epitomizing of the Codex is more obscure ; probably it began at once ; the incomplete or condensed forms were those in common use.^ It is, however, with the Theodosian Code and certain survivals of the works of the great jurists that we have immediately to do. For these were the sources of the codes enacted by Gothic and Burgundian kings for their Roman or Gallo-Roman subjects. Apparently the earliest of them was prepared soon after the year 502, at the com- mand of Gondebaud, King of the Burgundians. This, which later was dubbed the Papianus,^ was the work of a skilled Roman lawyer, and seems quite as much a text-book as a code. It set forth the law of the topics important for the Roman provincials living in the Burgundian kingdom, not merely making extracts from its sources, but stating their contents and referring to them as authorities. These sources ^ Juliani epitome Latina Novellarum Justiniani, ed. by G. Haenel (Leipzig, 1873)- 2 Conxat, Ges. der Quellen und Lit. des rbm. Rechts, pp. 48-59, and 161 sqq. ; Mommsen, Zeitschrift fUr Rechtsges. 21 {1900), Roman. Abteilung, pp. 150-155. ' 3 Ed. by Bluhme, Mon. Germ, leges, iii. 579-630. Cf. Tardif, Sources du droit frangais, 124-128. A code of Burgundian law had already been made. 272 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi were substantially the same as those used by the Visigothic Breviarium, which was soon to supersede the Papianus even in Burgundy. Breviarium was the popular name of the code enacted by the Visigothic king Alaric II. about the year 506 for his provinciates in the south of Gaul.^ It preserved the integrity of its sources, giving the texts in the same order, and with the same rubrics, as in the original. The principal source was the Theodosian Code ; next in importance the collections of Novellae of Theodosius and succeeding emperors ; a few texts were taken from the Codes of " Gregorianus " and " Hermogenianus." These parts of the Breviarium consisted of leges, that is, of constitutions of the emperors. Two sources of quite a different character were also drawn upon. One was the Institutes of Gains, or rather an old epitome which had been made from it. The other was the Sententiae of Paulus, the famous " Five Books of Sentences adfilium** This work of elementary jurisprudence deserved its great repute ; yet its use in the Breviarium may have been due to the special sanction which had been given it in one of the constitutions of the Theodosian Code, also taken over into the Breviarium : " Pauli quoque sententias semper valere praecipimus." ^ The same constitution confirmed the Insti- tutes of Gains, among other great jurisconsults. Presum- ably these two works were the most commonly known as well as the clearest and best of elementary jurisprudential compositions. An interesting feature of the Breviarium, and destined to be of great importance, was the Interpretatio accompany- ing all its texts, except those drawn from the epitome of Gaius. This was not the work of Alaric's compilers, but probably represents the approved exposition of the leges, with the exposition of the already archaic Sentences of Paulus, current in the law schools of southern Gaul in the fifth century. The Interpretatio thus taken into the Breviarium had, like the texts, the force of royal law, and soon was to surpass them in practice by reason of its ^ Edited by Haenel, with the epitomes of it in parallel columns, under the name of Lex Romana Visigothorum (Leipzig, 1849). See Tardif, o.c. 129-143. 2 Cod. Theod. i. 4, 3 ; Brev. i. 4, i. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW .273 perspicuity and modernity. Many manuscripts contain only the Interpretatio and omit the texts. The Breviarium became the source of Roman law, indeed the Roman law par excellence, for the Merovingian and then the Carolingian realm, outside of Italy. It was soon subjected to the epitomizing process, and its epitomes exist, dating from the eighth to the tenth century : they reduced it in bulk, and did away with the practical incon- venience of lex and interpretatio. Further, the Breviarium , and even the epitomes, were glossed with numerous marginal or interlinear notes made by transcribers or students. These range from definitions of words, sometimes taken from Isidore's Etymologiae, to brief explanations of difficulties in the text.^ In like manner in Italy, the Codex and Novellae of Justinian were, as has been said, reduced to epitomes, and also equipped with glosses. These barbaric codes of Roman law mark the passage of Roman law into incipiently mediaeval stages. On the other hand, certain Latin codes of barbarian law present the laws of the Teutons touched with Roman conceptions, and likewise becoming inchoately mediaeval. Freedom, the efficient freedom of the individual, belongs to civilization rather than to barbarism. The actual as well as imaginary perils surrounding the lives of men who do not dwell in a safe society, entail a state of close mutual dependence rather than of liberty. Law in a civilized community has the twofold purpose of preserving the freedom of the individual and of maintaining peace. With each advance in human progress, the latter purpose, at least in the field of private civil law, recedes a little farther, while ^ On these epitomes and glosses see Conrat, Ges. der Quellen, etc., pp. 222-252. Mention should be made of the Edict of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, a piece of legisla- tion contemporary with the Breviarium and the Papianus. In pursuance of Theodoric*s policy of amalgamating Goths and Romans, the Edict was made for both [Barbari Romanique). Its sources were substantially the same as those of the Breviarium, except that G'aius was not used. The sources are not given verbatim, but their contents are restated, often quite bunglingly. Naturally a Teutonic influence runs through this short and incomplete code, which contains more criminal than private lawj No further reference need be made to it because its influence practically ceased with the reconquest of Italy by Justinian. It is edited by Bluhme, in Mon, Ger. leges, v. 145-169. See as to it, Savigny, Geschichte des rom, Rechts, ii. 172-181 ; Salvioli, Storia del diritto 'italiano^ 3rd ed., pp. 45-47- VOL. II T 274 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi the importance of private law, as compared with penal law, constantly increases. The law of uncivilized peoples lacks the first of these purposes. Its sole conscious object is to maintain, or at least provide a method of maintaining, peace ; it is scarcely aware that in maintaining peace it is enhancing the freedom of every individual. The distinct and conscious purpose of early Teutonic law was to promote peace within the tribe, or among the members of a warband. Thus was law regarded by the people — as a means of peace. Its communication or ordainment might be ascribed to a God or a divine King. But in reality its chief source lay in slowly growing regula- tive custom.^ The force of law, or more technically speaking the legal sanction, lay in the power of the tribe to uphold its realized purpose as a tribe ; for the power to maintain its solidarity and organization was the final test of its law- upholding strength. Primarily the old Teutonic law looked to the tribe and its sub-imits, and scarcely regarded the special claims of an individual, or noticed mitigating or aggravating elements in his culpability — answerabihty rather. It prescribed for his peace and protection as a member of a family, or as one included within the bands of Sippe (blood relationship) ; or as one of a warband or a chief's close follower, one of his comitatus. On the other hand, the law was stiff, narrow, and ungeneralized in its recognized rules. The first Latin codifications of Teutonic law are not to be compared for breadth and elasticity of statement to the Law of the Twelve Tables. And their substance was more primitive.^ The earliest of these first codifications was the Lex Salica, codified under Clovis near the year 500. Unquestion- ably, contact with Roman institutions suggested the idea, even as the Latin language was the vehicle, of this code. Otherwise the Lex Salica is un-Christian and im-Roman, although probably it was put together after Clovis's baptism. It was not a comprehensive codification, and omitted much ^ Cf. Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, i. p. 109 sqq. 2 For the characteristics and elements of early Teutonic law, see Brunner. Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte^ Bd. i. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 275 that was common knowledge at the time ; which now makes it somewhat enigmatical. One finds in it lists of thefts of every sort of object that might be stolen, and of the various injuries to the person that might be done, and the sum of money to be paid in each case as atonement or compensation. Such schedules did not set light store on life and property. On the contrary, they were earnestly intended as the most available protection of elemental human rights, and as the best method of peaceful redress. The sums awarded as Wergeld were large, and were reckoned t according to the slain man*s rank. By committing a homicide, a man might ruin himself and even his blood relatives {Sippe), and of course on failure to atone might incur servitude or death or outlawry. The Salic law is scarcely touched by the law of Rome. From this piece^of intact Teutonism, the codes of other Teuton peoples shade off into bodies of law partially Romanized, that is, affected by the provincialized Roman law current in the locality where the Teutonic tribe found a home. The codes of the Burgimdians and the Visigoths in southern France are examples of this Teutonic-Romanesque commingling. On the other hand, the Lombard codes, though later in time, held themselves even harshly Teutonic, as opposed to any influence from the law of the conquered Italian population, for whom the Lombards had less regard than Burgundians and Visigoths had for their subject pro- vincials. Moreover, as the Frankish realm extended its power over other Gallo-Teuton states, the various Teuton laws modified each other and tended toward imiformity. Naturally the law of the Franks, first the Salic and then the partly derivative Ribuarian code, exerted a dominating influence.^ These Teuton peoples regarded law as pertaining to the tribe. There was little conscious intention on their part of forcing their laws on the conquered. When the Visigoths established their kingdom in southern France they had no idea of changing the law of the Gallo-Roman provincials living within the Visigothic rule ; and shortly afterwards, when the Franks extended their power over the still Roman * See Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschickte, i. p. 254 sqq., and 338-340. 276 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi parts of Gaul, and then over Alemanni, Burgundians, and Visigoths, they Ukewise had no thought of forcing their laws either upon Gallo-Romans or upon the Teuton people previously dominant within a given territory. This remained true even of the later Prankish period, when the Carolingians conquered the Lombard kingdom in upper Italy. Indeed, to all these Teutons and to the Roman pro- vincials as well, it seemed as a matter of course that tribal or local laws should be permitted to endure among the peoples they belonged to. These assumptions and the conditions of the growing Prankish Empire evoked, as it were, a more acute mobilization of the principle that to each people belonged its law. Por provincials and Teuton peoples were mingling throughout the Prankish realm, and the first obvious solution of the legal problems arising was to hold that provincials and Teutons evers^where should remain amenable and entitled to their own law, which was assumed to attend them as a personal appurtenance. Of course this solution became intolerable as tribal blood and delimitations became obscure, and men moved about through the territories of one great realm. Archbishop Agobard of Lyons remarks that one might see five men sitting together, each amenable to a different law.^ The escape from this legal confusion was to revert to the idea of law and custom as applying to every one within a given territory. The personal principle gradually gave way to this conception in the course of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries.^ In the meanwhile during the Merovingian, and more potently in the Carolingian period, king's law, as distinguished from people's law, had been an influence making for legal uni- formity throughout that wide conglomerate empire which acknowledged the authority of the Prankish king or emperor. The king's law might emanate from the delegated authority, and arise from the practices, of royal functionaries ; ^ " Adversus Gundobadi legem," c. 4 {Mon, Germ, leges, hi. 504). As to Agobard see ante, Vol. I. p. 232. ^ The matter is suggested here only in its general aspects. The details present every kind of complication {for some purposes to-day a court will apply the law of the litigant's domicile). The professio (professus sum or professa sum), by which a man or woman formally declares by what law he or she lives, remained common in Italy for five centuries after Pippin's conquest, and indicates the legal situation there, especially of the Teutonic newcomers. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 277 it was most formally promulgated in Capitularies, which with Charlemagne reach such volume and importance. Some of these royal ordinances related to a town or district only. Others were for the realm, and the latter not only were instances of law applying universally, but also tended to promote, or suggest, the harmonizing of laws which they did not modify directly. Ill The Roman law always existed in the Middle Ages. Pro\Tncialized and changed, it was interwoven in the law and custom of the land of the langtte d'oc and even in the customary law of the lands where the langue d'oil was spoken. Through the same territory it existed also in the Breviarium and its epitomes. There was ver}- little of it in England, and scarcely a trace in the Germany east of the Rhine. In Italy it was apphed when not superseded by the Lombard codes, and was drawn from works based on the Codex and Xovds of Justinian. But the jurisprudential law contained in Justinian's Digest was as well forgotten in Italy as in any land north of the Alps, where the Codifica- tion of Justinian had never been promulgated. The extent to which the classic forms of Roman law were known or unknown, unforgotten or forgotten, was no accident as of codices or other writings lost accidentally. It himg upon larger conditions — ^whether society had reached that stage of civilized exigency demanding the appUcation of an advanced commercial law, and whether there were men capable of understanding and applying it. This need and the capacity to understand would be closely joined.^ The history of the knowledge and vmderstanding of Roman law in the Middle Ages might be resolved iato a consideration of the sources drawn upon, and the extent and manner of their use, from century' to century. In the fifth century, when the Theodosian Code was promulgated, law was thought of chiefly as the mandate of a ruler. The * One sees an analogy in the fortunes of the Boethian translations of the mcffe advanced treatises of Aristotle's Organon, They fell into disuse (or never came into use) and so were '* lost *' until they came to light, i.e. into use, in the last part of the twelfth century. But see anU, Vol. I. p. g2, note j. 278 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi Theodosian Code was composed of constitutiones principmn. Likewise the Breviarium, based upon it, and other barbarian codes of Roman law, were ordained by kings ; and so were the codes of Teutonic law. For law, men looked directly to the visible ruler. The jus, reasoned out by the wisdom of trained jurists, had lost authority and interest. To be sure, a hundred years later Justinian's Commission put together in the Digest the body of jurisprudential law ; but even in Italy where his codification was promulgated, the Digest fell still-bom. Never was an official compilation of less effect upon its own time, or of such mighty import for times to come. The Breviarium became par excellence the code of Roman law for the countries included in the present France. With its accompan5dng Interpretatio it was a work indicating intelligence on the part of its compilers, whose chief care was as to arrangement and explanation. But the time was not progressive, and a gathering mental decadence was shown by the manner in which the Breviarium was treated and used, to wit, epitomized in many epitomes, and practi- cally superseded by them. Here was double evidence of decay ; for the supersession of such a work by such epitomes indicates a diminishing legal knowledge in the epitomizers, and also a narrowing of social and commercial needs in the conununity, for which the original work contained much that was no longer useful. There were, of course, epitomes and epitomes. Such a work as the Epitome Juliani, in which a good Byzantine lawyer of Justinian's time presented the substance of the Novellae, was an excellent compendium, and deserved the fame it won. Of a lower order were the later manipulations of Justinian's Codex, by which apparently the Codex was superseded in Italy. One of these was the Summa Perusina of the ninth or tenth century, a wretched work, and one of the blindest.^ Justinian's Codex and Julian's Epitome were equipped with glosses, some of which are as early as Justinian's time ; but the greater part are later. The glosses to Justinian's legislation resemble those of the Breviarium before referred ^ See Conrat, Ges. der Quellen, pp. 182-187. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 279 to. That is to say, as the centuries pass downward toward the tenth, the glosses answer to cruder needs : they become largely translations of words, often taken from Isidore's Etymologiae?- Indeed many of them appear to have had merely a grammatical interest, as if the text was used as an aid in the study of the Latin language. The last remark indicates a way in which a very super- ficial acquaintance with the Roman law was kept up through the centuries prior to the twelfth : it was commonly taught in the schools devoted to elementary instruction, that is to say, to the Seven Liberal Arts. In many instances the instructors had only such knowledge as they derived from Isidore, that friend of every man. That is, they had no special knowledge of law, but imparted various definitions to their pupils, just as they might teach them the names of diseases and remedies, a list of which (and nothing more) they would also find in Isidore. It was all just as one might have expected. Elementary mediaeval education was encyclopaedic in its childish way ; and, in accordance with the methods and traditions of the transition centuries, all branches of instruction were apt to be turned to grammar and rhetoric, and made linguistic, so to speak — ^mere subjects for curious definition. Thus it happened to law as well as medicine. Yet some of the teachers may have had a prac- tical acquaintance with legal matters, with an understanding for legal documents and skill to draw them up. The assertion also is warranted that at certain centres of learning substantial legal instruction was given ; one may even speak of schools of law. Scattered information touching all the early mediaeval periods shows that there was no time when instruction in Roman law could not be obtained some- where in western Europe. To refer to France, the Roman law was very early taught at Narbonne ; at Orleans it was taught from the time of Bishop Theodulphus, Charlemagne's contemporary, and probably the teaching of it long continued. One may speak in the same way of Lyons ; and in the eleventh century Angers was famed for the study of law. Our information is less broken as to an Italy, where through the early Middle Ages more general opportunities * See Conrat, Ges. der Quellen, etc., pp. 1^3-166, 168-182, 192-202, 240-253. 28o THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi offered for elementary education, and where the Roman law, with Justinian's Codification as a base, made in general the law of the land. There is no reason to suppose that it was not taught. Contemporary allusions bear witness to the existence of a school of law in Rome in the time of Cassio- dorus and afterwards, which is confirmed by a statement of the jurist Odofredus in the thirteenth century. At Pa via there was a school of law in the time of Rothari, the legislat- ing Lombard king ; this reached the zenith of its repute in the eleventh century. Legal studies also flourished at Ravenna, and succumbed before the rising star of the Bologna school at the beginning of the twelfth century.^ In these and doubtless many other cities,^ students were instructed in legal practices and formulae, and some substance of the Roman law was taught. Extant legal documents of various kinds afford, especially for Italy, ample evidence of the continuous application of the Roman law.^ .' >'As for the merits and deficiencies of legal instruction in Italy and in France, an idea may be gained from the various manuals that were prepared either for use in the schools of law or for the practitioner. Because of the uncertainty, however, of their age and provenance, it is difficult to connect them with a definite /oy^?' of instruction. Until the opening of the twelfth century, or at all events until the last quarter of the eleventh, the legal litei-ature evinces scarcely any originality or critical capacity. There are glosses, epitomes, and collections of extracts, more or less condensed or confused from whatever text the compiler had before him. Little jurisprudential intelligence appears in any writings which are known to precede the close of the eleventh century ; none, for instance, in the epitomes of the Breviarium and the glosses relating to that code ; none in ^ See Salvioli, Storia di diritto italiano^ 3rd ed,, 1899, pp. 84-90; ibid. VIstruzione puhblica in Italia nei secoli VIII, IX. X. ; Tardif, HisL des sources du droit frangais, p. 281 sgq. ; Savigny, Geschichte, etc., iv. pp. 1-9 ; Fitting, " Zur Geschichte der Rechtswissenschaft im Mittelalter," Zeitschrift fUr Rges. Sav. Stift.f Roman. AbteiL, Bd. vi., 1885, pp. 94-186; ibid. Juristische Schriften des frUheren Mittelalters, 108 sqq. (Halle, 1876). ^ A contemporary notice speaks of the enormous number of judges, lawyers, and notaries in Milan about the year 1000. Salvioli, VIstruzione pubblica, etc., p. 78. It is hard to imagine that no legal instruction could be had there. ^ The evidence is gathered in different parts of Savigny's Geschichte. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 281 those works of Italian origin the material for which was drawn directly or indirectly from the Codex or Novels of Justinian, for instance the Summa Perusina and the Lex Romana canonice compta, both of which probably belong to the ninth century. Such compilations were put together for practical use, or perhaps as aids to teaching. Thus, so far as inference may be drawn from the extant writings, the legal teaching in any school during this long period hardly rose above an uncritical and tmenlightened explanation of Roman law somewhat mediaevalized and deflected from its classic form and substance. There was also practical instruction in current legal forms and customs. Interest in the law had not risen above practical needs, nor was capacity shown for anything above a mechanical handling of the matter. Legal study was on a level with the other intellectual phenomena of the period. In an opusculum ^ written shortly after the middle of the eleventh century, Peter Damiani bears unequivocal, if some- what hostile, witness to the study of law at Ravenna ; and it is clear that in his time legal studies were progressing in both France and Italy. It is unsafe to speak more definitely, because of the difficulty in fixing the time and place of certain rather famous pieces of legal literature, which show a marked advance upon the productions to be ascribed with certainty to an earlier time. The reference is to the Petri exceptiones and the Brachylogus. The critical questions relat- ing to the former are too complex even to outline here. Both its time and place are in dispute. The ascribed dates range from the third quarter of the eleventh century to the first quarter of the twelfth, a matter of importance, since the opening of the twelfth century is marked by the rise of the Bologna school. As for the place, some scholars still adhere to the south of France, while others look to Pavia or Ravenna. On the whole, the weight of argument seems to favour Italy and a date not far from 1075. ^ The Petrus, as it is familiarly caUed, is drawn from ^ De parentelae gradibus, see Savigny, GescMchte, Bd. iv. p. i sqq. ^ See Savigny, GescMchte, Bd. ii. pp. 134-163 (the text is published in an Appendix to that volume, pp. 321-428) ; Conrat, Ges. der Quellen, etc., pp. 420- 549 I Tardif, Hist, des sources du droit frani^ais, pp. 213-246. 282 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi immediately prior and still extant compilations. The compiler wished to give a compendious if not systematic presentation of law as accepted and approved in his time, that is to say, of Roman law somewhat mediaevalized in tone, and with certain extraneous elements from the Lombard codes. The ultimate Roman sources were the Codification of Justinian, and indeed all of it, Digest, Codex, and Novels, the last in the form to which they had been brought in Julian's Epitome. The purpose of the compilation is given in the Prologue,^ which in substance is as follows : *' Since for many divers reasons, on account of the great and manifold difficulties in the laws, even the Doctors of the laws cannot without pains reach a certain opinion, we, taking account of both laws, to wit, the jus civile and the jus naturale, unfold the solution of controversies under plain and patent heads. What- ever is found in the laws that is useless, void, or contrary to equity, we trample under our feet. Whatever has been added and surely held to, we set forth in its integral meaning so that nothing may appear unjust or provocative of appeal from thy judgments, Odilo ; ^ but all may make for the vigour of justice and the praise of God." The arrangement of topics in the Petrus hardly evinces any clear design. The substance, however, is weU presented. If there be a question to be solved, it is plainly stated, and the solution arrived at may be interesting. For example, a case seems to have arisen where the son of one who died intestate had seized the whole property to the exclusion of the children of two deceased daughters. The sons of one daughter acquiesced. The sons of the other per placitum et guerram forced their uncle to give up their share. Thereupon the supine cousins demanded to share in what had so been won. The former contestants resisted on the plea that the latter had borne no aid in the contest and that they had obtained only their own portion. The decision was that the supine cousins might claim their heritage from whoever held it, and should receive their share in what the 1 This follows the so-called Tubingen MSS., the largest immediate source of the Petrus. As well-nigh the entire substance of the Petrus is drawn from the immediately prior compilations (which are still unpublished) its characteristics are really theirs. 2 Apparently the chief magistrate of Valence : " Valentinae civitatis magistro magnifico." CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 283 successful contestants had won ; but that the latter could by counter-actions compel them to pay their share of the necessary expenses of the prior contest.^ Sometimes the Petrus ^seems to draw a general rule of law from the apparent instances of its application in Justinian^s Codification. Therein certain formalities were prescribed in making a testament, in adopting a son, or emancipating a slave. The Petrus draws from them the general principle that where the law prescribes formalities, the transaction is not vahd if they are omitted.^ In fine, unsystematized as is its arrangement of topics, the work presents an advance in legal intelligence over mediaeval law- writings earher than the middle of the eleventh century. If the Petrus was adapted for use in practice, the Brachylogus, on the other hand, was plainly a book of elementary instruction, formed on the model of Justinian's Institutes. But it made use of his entire codification, the Novels, however, only as condensed in Juhan's Epitome. The influence of the Breviarium is also noticeable ; which might lead one to think that the treatise was written in Orleans or the neighbourhood, since the Breviarium was not in use in Italy, while the Codification of Justinian was known in France by the end of the eleventh century. The beginning of the twelfth is the date usually given to the Brachylogus. It does not belong to the Bologna school of glossators, but rather immediately precedes them, wherever it was composed.^ The Brachylogus, as a book of Institutes, compares favourably with its model, from the language of which it departed at will. Both works are divided into four libri ; but the libri of the Brachylogus correspond better to the logical divisions of the law. Again, frequently the author of the Brachylogus breaks up the chapters of Justinian's Institutes and gives the subject-matter imder more pertinent headings. Sometimes the statements of the older work are improved by rearrangement. The definitions of the ^ Petri exceptiones, iii. 69. ^ Petrus, i. 66. ^ See Conrat, Ges. der Quellen, etc., 550-582; Tardif, Hist, des sources, etc., pp. 207-213 ; Fitting, Zeitschrift fiir Rges. Bd. vi. p. 141. It Is edited by Bocking (Berlin, 1829) under the title of Corpus legum sive Brachylogus juris civilis. 284 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND dookvi Brachylogus are pithy and concise, even to a fault. Often the exposition is well adapted to the purposes of an elementary text-book,^ which was meant to be supplemented by oral instruction. On the whole, the work shows that the author is no longer encumbered by the mass or by the advanced character of his sources. He restates their substance intelligently, and thinks for himself. He is no compiler, and his work has reached the rank of a treatise. The merits of the Brachylogus as an elementary text- book are surpassed by those of the so-called Summa Codicis Irnerii, a book which may mark the beginning of the Bologna school of law, and may even be the composition of its founder. Many arguments are adduced for this author- ship.2 The book has otherwise been deemed a production of the last days of the school of law at Rome just before the school was broken up by some catastrophe as to which there is httle information. In that case the work would belong to the closing years of the eleventh century, whereas the authorship of Imerius would bring it to the beginning of the twelfth. At all events, its lucid jurisprudential reasoning precludes the likelihood of an earlier origin. This Summa is an exposition of Roman law, following the arrangement and titles of Justinian's Codex, but making extensive use of the Digest. It thus contains Roman juris- prudential law, and may be regarded as a compendious text- book for law students, forming apparently the basis of a course of lectures which treated the topics more at length.^ The author's command of his material is admirable, and his presentation masterly. Whether he was Imerius or some one else, he was a great teacher. His work may be also called academic, in that his standpoint is always that of the Justinianean law, although he limits his exposition to those topics which had living interest for the twelfth century. Private substantial law forms the chief matter, but procedure is set forth and penal law touched upon. The author ^ For instance, Brack, ii. 12, " De juris et facti ignorantia," is short and clear. It follows mainly Digest xxii. 6. ^ Summa Codicis des Imerius, cd. by Fitting {Berlin, 1894). See Introduction, and also T'itting in Zeitschfift fUr Rechtsgeschichie^ Bd. xvii. (1896), Romamsche Abteilung, pp. 1-96. ^ Cf. Summa Codicis Irnerii, vii. 23, and vii. 31. i. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 285 appreciates the historical development of the Roman law and the character of its various sources — ^praetorian law, constitidiones principu7n, and responsa prudentium. He also show^ independence, and a regard for legal reasoning and the demands of justice. WTiile he sets forth the jus civile, his exposition and approval follow the dictates of the jus ludurale. " The estabhshed laws are to be understood benignly, so as to preserve their spirit, and prevent their departure from equity ; for the Judge recognizes ordairunents as legitimate when they conform to the principles of justice {ratio equitatis), , . . Inter- pretation is sometimes general and imperative, as when the law- giver declares it : then it must be applied not only to the matter for which it is announced, but in all like cases. Sometimes an interpretation is imperative, but only for the special case, like the interpretation which is declared by those adjudicating a cause. It is then to be accepted in that cause, but not in hke instances ; for not by precedents, but by the laws are matters to be adjusted. There is another kind of interpretation which binds no one, that made by teachers explaining an ambiguous law, for although it may be admissible because sound, stiU it compels no one. For every interpretation should so be made as not to depart from justice, and that all absurdity may be avoided and no door opened to fraud." ^ One must suppose that such concise statements were explained and qualified in the author's lectures. But even as they stand, they afford an exposition of Roman principles of interpretation. Not only under the Roman Empire, but subsequently in mediaeval times, the Roman lawyer or the canonist did not pay the deference to adjudicated precedent which is felt by the English or American judge. The passage in the Codex which " Imerius " was expounding commands that the judge, in deciding a case, shall follow the laws and the reasoning of the great jurists, rather than the decision of a like controversy. Since the author of this Summa weighs the justice, the reason, and the convenience of the laws, and compares them with each other, his book is a work of jurisprudence. Its quahties may be observed in its discussion of possession and the rights arising therefrom. The writer has just been ^ Summa Codicis Irnerii, i. 14. The corresponding passages in Justinian's Codification are Dig. i. 3, lex 12 and 38, and Codex vii. 45, lex 13. 286 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi expounding the usucapio, an institution of the jus civile strictly speaking, whereby the law of Rome in certain instances protected and, after three years, perfected, the title to property which one had in good faith acquired from a vendor who was not the owner : " Now we must discuss the ratio possessionis, Usucapio in the jus civile hinges on possession, and ownership by the jus naturale may take its origin in possession. There are many differences in the ways of acquiring possession, which must be considered. And since in the constitutiones and responsa prudentium divers reasons are adduced regarding possession, my associates have begged that I would expound this important and obscure subject in which is mingled the ratio both of the civil and the natural law. So I will do my best. First one must consider what possession is, how it is acquired, maintained, or lost. Possession (here the author follows Paulus and Labeo in the Digest) is as when one's feet are set upon a thing, when body naturally rests on body. To acquire possession is to begin to possess. Herein one considers both the fact and the right. The fact arises through ourselves or our representative. It is understood differently as to movables and as to land ; for the movable we take in our hand, but we take possession of a farm by going upon it with this intent and lajdng hold of a sod. The intent to possess is crucial. Thus a ring put in the hand of a sleeper is not possessed for lack of intent on his part. You possess naturally when with mind and body (yours or another's who represents you) you hold or sit upon with intent to possess. Corporeal things you properly possess, and acquire possession of, by your own or your agent's hand. In the same manner you retain. Incorporeal things cannot be possessed properly speaking, but the civil law accords a quasi possession of them." Then follows a discussion of the persons through whom another may have possession, and of the various modes of possessing longa manu without actual touch : ''It is one thing when the possession begins with you, and another when it is transferred to you by a prior possessor : for possession begins in three ways, by occupation, accession, and transfer. You occupy the thing that belongs to no one. By accession you acquire possession in two ways. Thus the incre- ment may be possessed, as the fruit of thy handmaid ; or the accession consists in the union with a larger thing which is yours, as when aUuvium is deposited on your land. Again possession is transferred to you," CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CAKOX LAW 287 voluntarily or otherwise. He now discusses the %-aiioTis modes in which possession is ax^qnired by transfer, then the nature of the justa or injusta causa with which possession may begin, and the effect on the rights of the possessor, and then some matters more peculiar to the time of Justinian. After which he passes to the loss of possession, and concludes with saying that he has endeavoured to go over the whole subject, and whatever is omitted or insufficientl}' treated, he b^s that it be laid to the fault of hunianae imbeciUitaiis. The discussion reads like a carefully drawn outline which his lecture should expand.^ The knowledge and understanding of the Roman law in the mediaeval centuries should be viewed in conjunction with the general progress of intellectual aptitude during the same periods. The growth of legal knowledge will then show itself as a part of mediaeval development, as one phase of the flowering of the mediaeval intellect. For the treat- ment of Roman law presents stages essentially analogous to those by which the Middle Ages reached their understand- ing and appropriation of other portions of their great inheritance from classical antiquity and the Christianit\- of the Fathers. Let us recapitulate : the Roman law, adapted, or corrupted if one will, epitomized and known chiefly in its later enacted forms, was never unapplied nor the stud^' of it quite abandoned. It constituted a great part of the law of Italy and southern France ; in these two regions likewise was its study least neglected. We have observed the super- ficial and mainly linguistic nature of the glosses which this early mediaeval period interlined or wrote on the margins of the source-books drawn upon, also the rude and barbarous nature of the earHer summaries and compilations. They were helps to a crude practical knowledge of the law. Gradually the treatment seems to become more intelligent, a littie nearer the level of the matter excerpted or made use of. Through the eleventh century it is evident that social conditions were demanding and also facilitating an increase in l^al knowledge ; and at that century's dose a by no means stupid compilation appears, the Petri exceptiones, and * Summa Codicis Irn^rii, vii. 22 and 23. The chief Jnstiuianean sources are Dig. xlL 2, and Cod, xiL 32. 288 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi perhaps such a fairly intelligent manual for elementary instruction as the Brachylogus. These works indicate that the instruction in the law was improving. We have also the sparse references to schools of law, at Rome, at Ravenna, at Orleans. Then we come upon the Summa Codicis called of Imerius, of uncertain provenance, like the Petrus and Brachylogus. But there is no need to be informed specifically of its place and date in order to recognize its advance in legal inteUigence, in veritable jurisprudence. The writer was a master of the law, an adept in its exposition, and his oral teaching must have been of a high order. With this book we have unquestionably touched the level of the strong be- ginnings of the greatest of mediaeval schools of Roman law. Its seat was Bologna, one of the chief centres of the civic and commercial hfe of Lombardy. The Lombards themselves had shown a persistent legal genius : their own Teutonic codes, enacted in Italy, had maintained themselves in that land of Roman law and custom. Lombard codifica- tion had almost reached a jurisprudence of its own, at Pavia, the juridical centre of Lombardy. The provisions of various codes had been compared and put together in a sort of Concordia, as early as the ninth century.^ Possibly the rivalry of Lombard law might stimulate those learned in the law of Rome to sharper efforts to expoimd it and prove its superiority. Moreover, all sides of civic Hfe and culture were flourishing in that region where novel commercial relations were calling for a corresponding progress in the law, and especially for a better knowledge of the Roman law which alone afforded provision for their regulation. As some long course of human development approaches its climax, the advance apparently becomes so rapid as to give the impression of something suddenly happening, a sudden leap upward of the human spirit. The velocity of the movement seems to quicken as the simimit is neared. One easily finds examples, for instance, the fifth century before Christ in Greek art, or the fourth century in Greek philosophy, or again the excellence so quickly reached apparently by the Middle High German poetry just about ^ See Salvioli, Manuale, etc., pp. 65-68 ; ibid. L* Istruzione puhblica in Italia, pp. 72-75 ; Brunner, Deutsche Recktsgesckichte, i. p. 387 sqq. CHAP, XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 289 the year 1200. But may not the seeming suddenness of the phenomenon be due to lack of information as to antecedents ? and the flare of the final achievement even darken what went before ? Yet, in fact, as a movement nears its climax, it may become more rapid. For, as the promoting energies and favouring conditions meet in con- junction, their joint action becomes more effective. Forces free themselves from cumbrances and draw aid from one another. Thus when the gradual growth of intellectual faculty effects a conjunction with circumstances which offer a fair field, and the prizes of life as a reward, a rapid increase of power may evince itself in novel and timely productivity. This may suggest the manner of the apparently sudden rise of the Bologna school of Roman law, which, be it noted, took place but a little before the time of Gratian*s achieve- ment in the Canon law, itself contemporaneous with the appearance of Peter Lombard's novel Books of Sentences?- The preparation, although obscure, existed ; and the school after its commencement passed onward through stages of development, to its best accomplishment, and then into a condition of stasis, if not decline. Imerius apparently was its first master ; and of his life little is known. He was a native of Bologna. His name as causidicus is attached to a State paper of the year 1113. Thereafter he appears in the service of the German emperor, Henry V. We have no sure trace of him after 1118, though there is no reason to suppose that he did not live and labour for some further years. He had taught the Arts at Ravenna and Bologna before teaching, or perhaps seriously stud5ang, the law. But his career as a teacher of the law doubtless began before the year 1113, when he is first met with as a man of affairs. Accounts agree in ascribing to him the foundation of the school. Unless the Summa Codicis already mentioned, and a book of Quaestiones, be really his, his glosses upon Justinian's Digest, Codex, and Novels, are all we have of him ; ^ of the 1 Post, Chapter XXXVI., i. ^ The Bologna school is commonly called the school of the glossators. Their work was to expound the law of Justinian ; and their glosses, or explanatory notes, were the part of their writings which had the most permanent influence, VOL. II U 290 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi rest we know by report. The glosses themselves indicate that this jurist had been a grammarian, and used the learning of his former profession in his exposition of the law. His interlinear glosses are explanations of words, and would seem to represent his earlier, more tentative, work when he was himself learning the meaning of the law. But the marginal glosses are short expositions of the passages to which they are attached, and perhaps belong to the time of his fuller command over the legal material. They indicate, besides, a critical consideration of the text, and even of the original connection which the passage in the Digest held in the work of the jurisconsult from which it had been taken. Some of them show an understanding of the chronological sequence of the sources of the Roman law, e.g. that the law- making power had existed in the people and then passed to the emperors. These glosses of Imerius represent a clear advance in jurisprudence over any previous legal comment subsequent to the Inferpretatio attached to the Breviarium. It was also part of his plan to equip his manuscripts of the Codex with extracts taken from the text of the Novels, and not from the Epitome of Julian. He appears also as a lawyer versed in the practice of the law. For he wrote a book of forms for notaries and a treatise on procedure, neither of which is extant.^ The accomplishment of the Bologna school may be judged more fully from the works, still extant, of some of its chief representatives in the generations following Imerius. A worthy one was Placentinus, a native of Piacenza. The year of his birth is unknown, but he died in 1192, after a presumably full span of life, passed chiefly as a student and teacher of the law. He taught in Mantua and Montpellier, as well as in Bologna. He was an accomplished jurist and a lover of the classic literature. His work entitled De varietate actionum was apparently the first attempt to set The glosses were originally written between the lines or on the margins of the codices of the Digest^ Codex, Novels, and Institutes. * Savigny gives examples of Irnerius's glosses in an appendix 'to the fourth volume of his Geschichte. Pescatore {Die Glossen des Imerius, Greifswald, 1888) maintains that Savigny overstates the difference between the interlinear and the marginal glosses of Irnerius. cHAF.xsxiv ROMAN AND C-\XOX LAW 291 forth the Roman law in an arrangem^it and fonn that did not fdlow the sources.^ He opens his treatise with an alkgray of a " c^ble dame, named Jniisprudeitia, within the drde of whose sweet and honied utterances i:^3^y ea^er yonths were thrMiging. Plaooitinns drew near, and recdved from her the book which he now gives to oihers.- This Kttle allegory savours of the De amsoUdione of Boethins, or, if one wiH, of CapeDa's De nurtiis Philologist. The most admirable snrviviiig work of Hacentinns is his Smnma of the Codex of Justinian. Hs antobiogiaphical ^rc'fffyiwr, shows him not laddru? in. sdi-esieem. and leHs J. •- why he undertook the work. He had tho^ht at fusi to comjdete the Summa of Rogeiins. an cider glossator, but then decided to put that book to sleep, and compose a full Summa of the Codex himsdf , from the beginning to the end. Tim by the fevour oi God he has done ; it is the work 0: Ms own hands, from head to he^, and all the matter is his own — not borrowed. Next he wnote for beginners a Snnmia (rf the InsMiuies. After which he retnmed to hfc otptti town, and shortly proceeded thesioe to Bdiogna, whitha: he had been called- "There in the citadel ,:"^ c-jst-ci^-:^ for two vears I expcnnded the laws to srudenis ; I bronght me other teachers to the threshold oi envy ; I emptied their bsiches of students. The hiddei places of rhe law I laid apesi. I reccHiciled the conflicts of siactments. I unlocked the secrets most potently." His snocess was great, and he ^ras brought to cominne his course of lecmres. He oomjdied, and rsnained two y^iis more, and then remmed to Moffitpdher, in order to ocnnpoee a Summa of the Di^s-s::.^ If indeed PlacaitiniB q>eaks bombastically cf his wmt its excdlence excuses him. His wdt-eamed leputation as a jni^ and schdar long oidured. QMae^ones,Disliridi:ri^s, Li':n disT'.Uaiicmim,Summ4i£ of the Codex vs: the InsHtuHons, and od^r legal writings, are extant in goodly bnlk and number from the Bdc>gna school. The nances of the men are ahncKt legion, and many were of * Ob 7^_5cs=.ir!irs see SviT^ny. GiSifticiSc. iv. ro. zj^-zS^-, * J^p©f!wcia«B to Dtf" TUE^- McUcmi^f^ ^vim tj S^vLpiT. iv. r-. ~j.r^ * Hhs is ircESi the prDajmswK stta^ed tc aae did f-diQcc- sud is r^f^ ~ S.i.v. G«s. IT, p, iif. In in ir-psn£i- p. 5^-^ S^"^^s:iy ^^^ S3t eT-ea njore iond inTTfnmm to the SttmmB Ca^as ircc a xnEXTScriT'i- 292 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi great repute in their day both as jurists and as men of affairs. We may mention Azo and Accursius, of a little later time. Azo's name appears in public documents from the year 1190 to 1220 — and he may have survived the latter date by some years. His works were of such compass and excellence as to supersede those of his predecessors. His glosses still survive, and his Lectura on the Codex, his Summae of the Codex and the Institutes, and his Quaestiones, and Brocarda, the last a sort of work stating general legal propositions and those contradicting them. Azo's glosses were so complete as to constitute a continuous exposition of the entire legislation of Justinian. His Summae of the Codex and Institutes drove those of Placentinus out of use, which we note with a smile.^ None of the glossators is better known than Accursius. He comes before us as a Florentine, and apparently a peasant's son. He died an old man rich and famous, about the year 1260. Azo was his teacher. In 1252 he was Podesta of Bologna, which indicates the respect in which men held him. Villani, the Florentine historian, describes him as of martial form, grave, thoughtful, even melancholy in aspect, as if always meditating ; a man of briUiant talents and extraordinary memory, sober and chaste in life, but delighting in noble vesture. His hearers drank in the laws of living from his mien and manners no less than from the dissertations of his mouth.^ Late in life he retired to his villa, and there in quiet worked on his great Glossa tiU he died. This famous, perhaps all too famous, Glossa ordinaria was a digest and, as it proved, a final one, of the glosses of his predecessors and contemporaries. He drew not only from their glosses, but also on their Summae and other writings. He added a good deal of his own. Great as was the feat, the somewhat deadened talent of a compiler shows in the result, which flattened out the individual labours of so many jurists. It came at once into general use in the courts and outside of them ; for it was a complete commentary on the Justinianean law, so compendious and ^ On Azo see Savigny, Ges. v. pp. 1-44. =* Quoted by Savigny. On Accursius see Sav. Ges. v. pp. 262-305. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 293 convenient that there was no further need of the glosses of earlier men. This book marked the turning-point of the Bologna school, after which its productivity lessened. Its work was done : Codex, Novels, and above all the Pandects were rescued from obhvion, and fully expounded, so far as the matter in them was still of interest. When the labours of the school had been conveniently heaped together in one huge Glossa, there was no vital inducement to do this work again. The school of the glossators was functus officio. Naturally with the lessening of the call, productivity diminished. Little was left to do save to gloss the glosses, an epigonic labour which would not attract men of talent. Moreover, treating the older glosses, instead of the original text, as the matter to be interpreted was unfavourable to progress in the understanding of the latter. Yet, for a little, the breath of hfe was still to stir in the school of the glossators. There was a man of fame, a humanist indeed, named Cino, whose beautiful tomb still draws the lover of things lovely to Pistoia. Cino was also a jurist, and it came to him to be the teacher of one whose name is second to none among the legists of the Middle Ages. This was Bartolus, bom probably in the year 13 14 at Sassoferrato in the duchy of Urbino. He was a scholar, learned in geometry and Hebrew, also a man of affairs. He taught the law at Pisa and Perugia, and in the last- named toAvn he died in 1357, not yet forty-four years old. Bartolus wrote and compiled full commentaries on the entire Corpus juris civilis ; and yet he produced no work differing in kind from works of his predecessors. Moreover, between him and the body of the law rose the great mass of gloss and comment already in existence, through which he did not always penetrate to the veritable Corpus. Yet his labours were inspired with the energy of a vigorous nature, and he put fresh thoughts into his commentaries.^ The school of glossators presented the full Roman law to Europe. The careful and critical interpretation of the text of Justinian's Codification, of the Digest above all, was their great service. In performing it, these jurists also had educated themselves and developed their own intelligence. * On Bartolus see Savigny, Ges. etc. vi. pp. 137-184. 294 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi They had also put together in Summae the results of their own education in the law. These works facilitated legal study and sharpened the faculties of students and professors. Books of Quaestiones, legal disputations, works upon legal process and formulae, served the same ends.^ These men were deficient in historical knowledge. Yet they compared Digest, Codex, and Novels ; they tried to re-establish the purity of the text ; they weighed and they expounded. Theirs was an intellectual effort to master the jurisprudence of Rome : their labours constituted a renaissance of juris- prudence ; and the fact that they were often men of affairs as well as professors, kept them from ignoring the practical bearings of the matters which they taught. The work of the glossators may be compared with that of the theologian philosophers of the thirteenth century — Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas — who were winning for the world a new and comprehensive knowledge of Aristotle. Both jurists and philosophers, in their different spheres, carried through a more profound study, and reached a more comprehensive knowledge, of a great store of antique thought, than previous mediaeval centuries conceived of. Moreover, the interpretation of the Corpus juris was quite as successful as the interpreta- tion of Aristotle. It was in fact surer, because freer from the deflections of religious motive. No consideration of agreement or disagreement with Scripture troubled the glossators' interpretation of the Digest, though indeed they may have been interested in finding support for whatever political views they held upon the claims of emperor and pope. But this did not disturb them as much as Aristotle's opinion that the universe was eternal, worried Albertus and Aquinas. IV The Church, from the time of its first recognition by the Roman Empire, lived under the Roman law ; ^ and the ^ Cf. Savigny, Ges, v. pp. 222-261. Prof. Vinogradoff's admirable Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe (Harpers, 1909), is packed with illuminating information. 2 " Ecdesia vivit lege Romana," Lex Ribuaria, 58. This was universally recognized, although the individual clericus might remain amenable to the law of his birth. cHAP.xxxiv ROMAN AND CANON LAW 295 constitutions safeguarding its authority were large and ample before the Empire fell. Constantine, to be sure, never dreamed of the famous " Donation of Constantine " forged by a later time, yet his enactments fairly laimched the great mediaeval Catholic Church upon the career which was to bring it more domination than was granted in this pseudo-charter of its power. A number of Constantine's enactments were preserved by the Theodosian Code, in which the powers and privileges of Church and clergy were portentously set forth. The Theodosian Code freed the property of the Church from most fiscal burdens, and the clergy from taxes, from public and military service, and from many other obligations which sometimes the Code groups under the head of sordida munera. The Church might receive all manner of bequests, and it inherited the property of such of its clergy as did not leave near relatives surviving them. Its property generally was inalienable ; and the clergy were accorded many special safeguards. Slaves might be manumitted in a church. The church edifices were declared asylums of refuge from pursuers, a privilege which had passed to the churches from the heathen fanes and the statues of the emperors. Constitution after constitution was hurled against the Church's enemies. The Theodosian Code has one chapter containing sixty-six constitutions directed against heretics, the combined result of which was to deprive them, if not of life and property, at least of protected legal existence. Of enormous import was the sweeping recognition on the Empire's part of the validity of episcopal jurisdiction. No bishop might be summoned before a secular court as a defendant, or compelled to give testimony. Falsely to accuse one of the clergy rendered the accuser infamous. All matters pertaining to religion and church discipline might be brought only before the bishop's court, which likewise had plenary jurisdiction over controversies among the clergy. It was also open to the laity for the settlement of civil disputes. The command not to go to law before the heathen came down from Paul (i Cor. vi.), and together with the severed and persecuted condition of the early 296 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi Christian communities, may be regarded as the far source of the episcopal jurisdiction, which thus divinely sanctioned tended to extend its arbitrament to aU manner of legal controversies.^ To be sure, under the Christian Roman Empire the authority of the Church as well as its privileges rested upon imperial law. Yet the emperors recognized, rather than actually created, the ecclesiastical authority. And when the Empire was shattered, there stood the Church erect amid the downfall of the imperial government, and capable of supporting itself in the new Teutonic kingdoms. The constitutions of Christian emperors did not from their own force and validity become Ecclesiastical or Canon law — ^the law relating to Christians as such, and especially to the Church and its fimctions. The source of that law was God ; the Church was its declarative organ. Accept- ance on the Church's part was requisite before any secular law could become a law of the Church. Canon law may be taken to include theology, or may be limited to the law of the organization and functions of the Church taken in a large sense as inclusive of the laity in their relations to the religion of Christ.^ Obviously part comes from Christ directly, through the Old Testament as well as New. The other part, and in bulk far greater, emanates from His foundation, the Church, under the guid- ance of His Spirit, and may be added to and modified by the Church from age to age. It is expressed in custom, imiversal and estabhshed, and it is foimd in written form in the works of the Fathers, in the decrees of Councils, in the decretals of the popes, and in the concordats and conven- tions with secular sovereignties. From the beginning, canon law tacitly or expressly adopted the constitutions of the Christian emperors relating to the Church, as well as the Roman law generally, under which the Church lived in its civil relations. The Church arose within the Roman Empire, and who ^ For these matters see primarily the sixteenth book of the Theodosian Code, and book i. chap. 27. Also the suspected ConstittUiones Sirniondianae attached to that Code. Justinian's Codex and Novellae add much. Zom, in his Kirchen- recht, p. 29 sqq.j gives a convenient S3mopsis of the matter. ^ One observes that the opening chapter of Justinian's Digest speaks of juriS' prudentia as knowledge of divine as well as human matters. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 297 shall say that its wonderfully efficient and complete organiza- tion at the close of the patristic period was not the final creation of the legal and constructive genius of Rome, newly inspired by the spirit of Christianity ? But the centre of interest had been transferred from earth to heaven, and human aims had been recast by the Gospel and the understanding of it reached by Christian doctors. Evidently since the ideals of the Church were to be other than those of the Roman Empire, the law which it accepted or evolved would have ideals different from those of the Roman law. If the great Roman jurists created a legal formulation and rendering of justice adequate for the highly developed social and commercial needs of Roman citizens, the law of the Church, while it might borrow phrases, rules, and even general principles, from that system, could not fail to put new meaning in them. For example, the constant will to render each his due, which was justitia in the Roman law, might involve different considerations where the soul's salvation, and not the just allotment of the goods of this world, was the law's chief aim. Again, what new meaning might attach to the honeste vivere and the alterum non laedere of pagan legal ethics. Honeste vivere might mean to do no sin imperilling the soul ; alterum non laedere would acquire the meaning of doing nothing to another which might impede his progress toward salvation. Injuries to a man in his temporalities were less important. Further, Christianity although conceived as a religion for all mankind, was founded on a definite code and revela- tion. The primary statement was contained in the canoni- cal books of the Old and New Testaments. These were for all men, imiversal in apphcation and of irrefragable validity and truth. Here was some correspondence to the conception of the jus gentium as representative of universal principles of justice and expediency, and therefore as equiva- lent to the jus naturale. There was something of logical necessity in the transference of this conception to the law of Christ. Says Gratian at the beginning of his Decretum : '* It is jus naturae which is contained in the Law and the Gospel, by which every one is commanded to do to another as he would be done by, and forbidden to inflict on him 298 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi what he does not wish to happen to himself." Since the Law and the Gospel represent the final law of life for all men, they are par excellence the jus naturae, as well as lex divina. Gratian quotes from Augustine : " Divinum jus in scripturis divinis habemus, humanum in legibus regmn." ^ And then adds : "By its authority the jus naturaie prevails over custom and constitution. Whatever in customs or writings is contrary to the jus naturaie is to be held vain and invalid." Again he says more exphcitly : " Since therefore nothing is commanded by natural law other than what God wills to be, and nothing is forbidden except what God prohibits, and since nothing may be foxmd in the canonical Scripture except what is in the divine laws, the laws will rest divinely in nature {divine leges natura con- sistent). It is evident, that whatever is proved to be contrary to the divine will or canonical Scripture, is Uke- wise opposed to natural law. Wherefore whatever should give way before divine will or Scripture or the divine laws, over that ought the jus naturaie to prevail. Therefore whatever ecclesiastical or secular constitutions are contrary to natural law are to be shut out." ^ The canon law is a vast sea. Its growth, its age-long agglomerate accretion, the systematization of its huge contents, have long been subjects for controversiahsts and scholars. Its sources were as multifarious as those of the Roman law. First the Scriptures and the early quasi- apostohc and pseudo-apostohc writings ; then the traditions of primitive Christianity and also the writings of the Fathers ; hkewise ecclesiastical customs, long accepted and legitimate, and finally the two great written sources, the decretals or decisions of the popes and the decrees of coimcils. From patristic times, collections were made of the last. These collections from a chronological gradually acquired a topical and more systemic arrangement, which the compilers followed more completely after the opening of the tenth century. The decisions of the popes also had been collected, and then were joined to conciliar compilations and arranged after the same topical plan. ^ Decretum, i. dist. viii. c. i. ^ Decretum, i. dist. iz. c. xi. ; see ibid. dist. xiii., opening. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 299 In all of them there was unauthentic matter, accepted as if its pseudo-authorship or pseudo-source were genuine. But in the stormy times of the ninth century following the death of Charlemagne, the method of argument through forged authority was exceptionally creative. It produced two masterpieces which won universal acceptance. The first was a collection of false Capitularies ascribed to Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, and ostensibly the work of a certain Benedictus Levita, deacon of the Church of Mainz, who worked in the middle of the century. Far more famous and important was the book of False Decretals, put together and largely written, that is forged, about the same time, probably in the diocese of Rheims, and appear- ing as the work of Saint Isidore of Seville. This contained many forged letters of the early popes and other forged matter, including the Epistle or " Donation *' of Constantine ; also genuine papal letters and conciliar decrees. These false collections were accepted by councils and popes, and formed part of subsequent compilations. From the tenth century onward many such compilations were made, all of them uncritical as to the genuineness of the matter taken, and frequently ill-arranged and discordant. They were destined to be superseded by the great work in which appears the better methods and more highly trained inteUigence developing at the Bologna school in the first part of the twelfth century. Its author was Gratianus, a monk of the monastery of St. Felix at Bologna. He was a younger contemporary of Imerius and of Peter Lombard. Legend made him the latter's brother, with some pro- priety ; for the compiler of those epoch-making Sentences represents the same stage in the appropriation of the patristic theological heritage of the Middle Ages, that Gratian represents in the handling of the canon law. The Lombard's Sentences made a systematic and even harmoniz- ing presentation of the theology of the Fathers in their own language ; and the equally immortal Decretum of Gratian accomplished a like work for the canon law. This is the name by which his work is known, but not the name he gave it. That appears to have been Concordia discordantium canonum, which indicates his methodical 300 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi presentation of his matter and his endeavour to reconcile conflicting propositions. The first part of the Decretwm was entitled " De jure naturae et constitutionis/' It presents the sources of the law, the Church's organization and administration, the ordination and ranking of the clergy, the election and consecration of bishops, the authority of legates and primates. The second part treats of the procedure of ecclesiastical courts, also the law regulating the property of the Church, the law of monks and the contract of marriage. The third part is devoted to the Sacraments and the Liturgy. Gratian's usual method is as foUows : He will open with an authoritative proposition. If he finds it universally accepted, it stands as valid. But if there are opposing statements, he tries to reconcile them, either pointing out the difference in date (for the law of the Church may be progressive), or showing that one of the discordant rules had but local or otherwise limited appHcation, or that the first proposition is the rule, while the others make the exceptions. If he still fails to estabhsh concord, he searches to find which rule had been followed in the Roman Church, and accepts that as authoritative. A rule being thus made certain, he proceeds with subdivisions and distinctions, treating them as deductions from the main rule and adjusting the supporting texts. Or he wiU suppose a controversy (causa) and discuss its main and secondary issues. Throughout he accompanies his authoritative matter with his own commentary — commonly cited as the Dicta Gratiani} The Decretum was characterized by sagacity of interpretation and reconcilement, by vast learning, and clear ordering of the matter. Only it was uncritical as to the genuineness of its materials ; and a number of Gratian's own statements were subsequently disapproved in papal decretals. The Dicta Gratiani never received such formal sanction by pope or council as the writings of Roman jurists received by being taken into Justinian's Digest. The papal decretals had become the great source of ^ Tardif, Sources du droit canonique, p. 175 sqq., has been chiefly followed here. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 301 canonical law. Gratian's work was soon supplemented by various compilations known as Appendices ad Decretum or Decretales extravagantes, to wit, those which the Decretum did not contain. These, however, were superseded by the collection, or rather codification, made at the command of the great canonist Gregory IX. and completed in the year 1234. This authoritative work preserved Gratian's Decretum intact, but suppressed, or abridged and reordered, the decretals contained in subsequent collections. Arranged in five books, it forms the second part of the Corpus juris canonici. In 1298 Boniface VIII. promulgated a supple- mentary book known as the Sextus of Boniface. This with a new collection promulgated under the authority of Clement V. in 1313, called the Clementinae, and the Extravagantes of his successor John XXII. and certain other popes, constitute the last portions of the Corpus juris canonici.^ According to the law of the Empire the emperor's authority extended over the Church, its doctrine, its dis- cipline, and its property. Such authority was exercised by the emperors from Constantine to Justinian. But the Church had always stood upon the principle that it was better to obey God rather than man. This had been maintained against the power of the pagan Empire, and was not to be sunned out of existence by imperial favour. It was stiU better to obey God rather than the emperor. The Church still should say who were its members and entitled to participate in the salvation which it mediated. Ecclesiastical authorities could excommunicate ; that was their engine of coercion. These principles were incarnate in Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, withstanding and prohibiting Theodosius from Christian fellowship until he had done penance for the massacre at Thessalonica. Of necessity they inhered in the Church ; they were of the essence of ^ On the above matters see (with the authorities and bibliographies therein given) Maasen, Geschichte der Quellen, etc., der canonischen Reckts (Bd. i., to the middle of the ninth century) ; Tardif, Soirees du droit canonique (Paris, 1887) ; Zom, Lehrhuch des Kirchenrechts (Stuttgart, 1888) ; Gerlach, Lehrbuch des catho- lischen Kirchenrechts (5 th edition, Paderborn, 1 890) . Hinschius, Decretales pseudo-Isidorianae (Leipzig, 1863) ; Corpus juris canonici, ed. by Friedberg (Leipzig, 1879-1881). 302 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi its strength to fulfil its purpose ; they stood for the duly constituted power of Christian resolution to uphold and advance the peremptory truth of Christ. So such principles persisted through the time of the hostile and then the favouring Roman Empire. And when the Empire in fact crumbled and fell, what de facto and de jure authority was best fitted to take the place of the imperial supremacy ? The Empire represented a imiversal secular dominion ; the Church was also imiversal, and with a universality now reaching out beyond the Empire's shrinking boundaries. In the midst of political fragments otherwise disjoined, the Church endured as the imiversal unity. The power of each Teutonic king was great in fact and law within his realm. Yet he was but a local potency, while the Church existed through his and other realms. And when the power of one Teutonic line (the Carolingian) reached something Uke universal sway, the Church was also there within and without. It held the learning of the time, and the culture which large-minded seculars respected ; and quite as much as the empire of Charlemagne, it held the prestige of Rome. Witness the attitude of Charles Martel and Pippin toward Boniface the great apostle, and the attitude of Boniface toward the Gregories whose legate he proclaimed himself, and upon whose central authority he based his claims to be obeyed. Through the reforms of the Prankish Church, carried out by him with the support of Charles Martel and Pippin, the ecclesiastical supremacy of Rome was estabhshed. Charlemagne, indeed, from the nature and necessities of his own transcendent power, possessed in fact the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman emperors, whom men deemed his predecessors. But after him the secular power fell again into fragments scarcely locally efficient, while the Church's universality of authority endured. In the unstable fragmentation of secular rule in the ninth century, the Isidorean Decretals presented the truth of the situation as it was to be, although not as it had been in the times of the Church dignitaries whose names were forged for that collection. And thereafter, as the Church recovered from its tenth-century disintegration, it advanced to the pragmatic demonstration of the vaUdity of those false CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 303 Decretals, on through the tempests of the age of Hildebrand to the final triumph of Innocent III. at the opening of the thirteenth century. Evidently the canon law, whatever might be its immediate or remote source, drew its authority from the sanction of the Roman Catholic Church, which enimciated it and made it into a body corresponding to the Church's functions. It was what the Church promulgated as the law of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the kingdom of God on earth. It should be the temporal and legal counterpart of the Church's spiritual purposes. Its general tendency and purpose was the promotion of the Church's saving aim, which regarded all things in the light of their relationship to life eternal. Therefore the Church's law could not but define and consider all worldly interests, all personal and property rights and secular authority, with constant regard to men's need of salvation. The advance- ment of that must be the final appellate standard of legal right. Such was the event. The entire canon law might be lodged within those propositions which Hildebrand enunciated and Innocent III. realized. For the salvation of souls, all authority on earth had been entrusted by Christ to Peter and his successors. Theirs was the spiritual sword ; secular power, the material sword, was to be exercised under the pope's mandate and permission. No king or emperor, no layman whatsoever, was exempt from the supreme authority of the pope, who also was the absolute head of the Church, which had become a monarchy. " The Lord entrusted to Peter not only the universal Church, but the government of the whole world," writes Innocent III., whose pontificate almost made this principle a fact. In private matters no member of the clergy could be brought before a secular court ; and the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts over the laity threatened to reduce the secular jurisdiction to narrow functions.^ The property of the Church might not ^ Jiirisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts embraced marriage and divorce, wills and inheritance, and, by virtue of their surveillance of usury and vows and oaths, practically the whole relationship between debtor and creditor. Prevalent mediaeval principles, at once economic, legal and theological, as to the rights of buyers and sellers [justum pretium, etc.), and as to usury, made part of the canon law and could be properly presented in connection with it and the theologies of 304 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi be taxed or levied on by any temporal ruler or government ; nor could the Church's functions and authority be controlled or limited by any secular decree. Universally throughout every kingdom the Church was a sovereignty, not only in matters spiritual, but with respect to all the personal and material relationships that might be connected in an5r^ay with the welfare of souls.^ V The exposition of the Corpus juris civilis in the school of the glossators was of great moment in the evolution of mediaeval political theory, which in its turn 5delds one more example of the mediaeval application of thoughts derived from antique and patristic sources. Political thinking in the Middle Ages sought its surest foundation in theology ; then it built itself up with concepts drawn from the philosophy and social theory of the antique world ; and lastly it laid hold on jurisprudence, using the substance and reasoning of the Roman and the Canon law. Mediaeval ideas upon government and the relations between the individual and his earthly sovereign, started from theological premises, of patristic origin : e.g, that the universe and man were made by God, a miraculous creation, springing from no other cause, and subject to no other fundamental law, than God's unsearchable will, which never ceases to direct the whole creation to the Creator's ends. A further premise was the Scripttural revelation of God's purpose as to man, with all the contents of that revelation touching the overweening importance of man's deathless soul. Unity — the unity of the creation — springs from these premises, or is one of them. The principle of this unity is God's will. Within the universal whole, mankind also constitutes a unit, a community, specially ordained and the Scholastics. Thomas Aquinas discusses such matters ia Summa Theol. II. ii., Quaestio 77. Cf. generally W. J. Ashley, English Economic History ; Troeltsch, Die Sociallehren der christlichen Kirchen (Tubingen, 1912). ^ Volume ii. of R. W. and A. J. Carlyle's History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West {1909) maintains that the statements of papal pretensions which were incorporated in the recognized collections of Decretals were less extreme than those emanating from the papacy imder stress of controversy. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 305 ordered. The Middle Ages, delivered over to allegory and to an unbridled recognition of the deductions of allegorical reasoning, argued thus : Mankind is a community ; mankind is also an organism, the mystical body whereof the head is Christ. Here was an allegory potent for foolishness or wisdom. It was used to symbolize the mystery of the oneness of all mankind in God, and the organic co-ordination of all sorts and conditions of men with one another in the divine commonwealth on earth ; it was also drawn out into every detail of banal anthropomorphic comparison. From John of SaUsbury to Dante and Occam and Nicholas Cusanus, no point of fancied analogy between the parts and members of the body and the various functions of Church and State was left unexploited.^ Mankind then is one community ; also an organism. But within the human organism abides the duaUty of soul and body ; and the Community of Mankind on earth is constituted of two orders, the spiritual and temporal. Church and State.^ There must be either co-ordination between State and Church, body and soul, or subordination of the temporal and material to the eternal and spiritual. To evoke an adjustment of what was felt to be an actually universal opposition, was the chief problem of mediaeval polity, and forms the warp and woof of conflicting theories. The Church asserted a full spiritual supremacy even in things temporal, and, to support the claim brought sound arguments as well as foolish allegory — allegory pretending to be horror-stricken at the vision of an animal with two heads, a bicephalic monstrosity. Thus : does not the Church comprise all man- kind ? Did not God found it ? Is not Christ its head, and under Him his vicegerent Peter and all the popes ? Then shall not the pope who commands the greater, which ^ See Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans, by Maitland (Cam- bridge, 1900), p. 22 sqq* and notes. I would express my indebtedness to this book for these pages on mediaeval political theories. Dunning's History of Political Theories is an excellent outline ; Carlyle*s History of Mediaeval Political Theory gives the sources carefully. ^ Occasionally studium {knowledge, study, or science) is introduced as a third part or element of the human community or of human life. Thus in the famous statement of Jordanes of Osnabriick — the Romans received the Sacerdotium, the Germans the Imperium, the French the Studium. See Gierke, Political Theories^ p. 104, note 8. VOL. II X 3o6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi is the spiritual, much more command the less, the temporal ? And all the argumentation of the two swords, delivered to Peter, comes into play. That there are two swords is but a propriety of administration. Secular rulers wield the secular sword at the pope's command. They are instruments of the Church. Fimdamentally the State is an ecclesiastical institution, and the boimds of secular law are set by the law spiritual : the canon law overrides the laws of every State. True, in this division, the State also is ordained of God, but only as subordinate. And divinely ordained though it be, the origin of the State Ues in sin ; for sin alone made government and law needful for man.^ On the other hand, the partisans of the State upheld co-ordination as the true principle.^ The two swords represent distinct powers, Sacerdotiimi and Imperium. The latter as well as the former is from God ; and the two are co-ordinates, although of course the Church which wields the spiritual sword is the higher. This theory creates no bicephalic monster. God is the universal head. And even as man is body as weU as soul, the human community is State as well as Church ; and the State needs the emperor for its head, as the Church has the pope. The Roman Dominion, imperium mundij was legitimate, and by divine appointment has passed over to the Roman-German emperor. Other views sustaining the scheme of co-ordina- tion upheld a plurality of states, rather than one universal Imperium. Of course these opposing views of subordination or co-ordination of State and Church took on every shade of diversity. As to both Church and State, mediaeval political theory was predominantly monarchical. Ideally this flowed from the thought of God as the true monarch of the universe. Practically it comported with mediaevsd social conditions. Under Innocent III., if not imder Gregory VIL, the Church had become a monarchy well-nigh absolute.^ The pope's ^ Cf. Gierke, o.c. p. 109, note 16. But compare Carlyle, o.c. vol. ii. part ii. chaps. vii.-xL ^ Even toward the dose of the Middle Ages, Marsilius of Padua was almost alone in positing the absolute supremacy of the State, says Gierke. ' See Gierke, o.c. p. 144, note i3r, and compare notes 132, 133, and 183 fOT attacks upon the plenary power of the pope. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 307 power continued plenary until the great schism and the age of councils evoked by it. For the secular state, the common voice likewise favoured monarchy. The unity of the social organism is best effected by the singleness of its head. Thomas Aquinas authoritatively reasons thus, and Dante maintains that as the unifjnng principle is Will, the will of one man is the best means to realize it.^ But monarchy is no absolute right existing for the ruler's benefit, rather it is an office to be righteously exercised for the good of the community. The monarch's power is limited, and if his command outrages law or right, it is a nullity ; his subjects need not obey, and the principle applies, that it is better to obey God than man. Even when, as in the days of the Hohenstaufen, the civil jurists claimed for the emperor the plenitudo potestatis of a Roman Caesar, the opposite doctrine held strong, which gave him only a limited power, in its nature conditioned on its rightful exercise. Moreover, rights of the community were not im- recognized, and indeed were supported by elaborate theories as the Middle Ages advanced to their climacteric. The thought of a contract between ruler and people frequently appears, and reference to the contract made at Hebron between David and the people of Israel (2 Sam. v. 3). The civil jurist also looked back to the principle of the jus gentium giving to every free people the right to choose a ruler ; also to that famous text of the Digest, where, through the lex regia, the people were said to have conferred their powers upon the princeps.^ With such thoughts of the people's rights came theories of representation and of the monarch as the people's representative ; and Roman corporation law supplied the rules for mediaeval representa- tive assemblies, lay and clerical.* The old Germanic state was a conglomerate of positive law and specific custom, having no existence beyond the laws, which were its formative constituents. Such a con- ^ Gierke, o.c, pp. 31-32, and p. 139, notes 107 and 108. * Dig. i. 4, I ; Gierke, o.c. p. 39 and pp. 146, 147. ^ Gierke, o.c, p. 64. Cf. E. Barker, The Dominican Order and Convocation (O.^ford, 1913). 3o8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvi ception did not satisfy mediaeval publicists, imbued with antique views of the State's further aims and potency. Nor were all men satisfied with the State's divinely ordered origin in human sinfulness. An ultimate ground for its existence was sought, commensurate with its broadest aims. Such was found, not in positive, but in natural law — again an antique conception. That a veritable natural law existed, all men agreed ; also that its source lay back of human conventions, somehow in the nature of God. All admitted its absolute supremacy, binding ahke upon popes and secular monarchs, and rendering void all acts and positive laws contravening it. It must be the State's ultimate constituent groimd. God was the source of natural law. Some argued that it proceeded from His will, as a command, others that its source was eternal Reason announcing her necessary and unalterable dictates ; again its source was held to lie more definitely in the Reason that was identical with God the summa ratio in Deo existens, as Aquinas puts it. From that springs the Lex naturalis, ordained to rest on the participation of man, as a rational creature, in the moral order which he perceives by the light of natural reason. This lex naturalis (or jus naturale) is a true promulgated law, since God implants it for recognition in the minds of men.^ Absolute unconditional supremacy was ascribed to it, and also to the jus divinum, which God revealed super- naturally for a supramimdane end. A cognate supremacy was ascribed to the jus commune gentium, which was composed of rules of the jus naturale adapted to the conditions of fallen human nature. Such law was above the State, to which, on the other hand, positive law was subject. Whenever the ruler was conceived as sovereign or absolute, he likewise was deemed above positive law, but bound by these higher laws. They were the source and sanction of the innate and indestructible rights of the individual, to property and liberty and life as they were formulated at a later period. It is evident how the recognition of such rights fell in with the Christian revelation of the absolute value of every individual in and ^ Gierke, o.c. p. 172, note 256. Cf. ante, p. 297. CHAP. XXXIV ROMAN AND CANON LAW 309 for himself and his immortal hfe. On the other hand, certain rights of the State, or the community, were also indestructible and inalienable by virtue of the nature of their source in natural law,^ This abstract of political theory has been stated in terms generalized to vagueness, and with no attempt to follow the details or trace the historical development. The purpose has been to give the general flavour of mediaeval thought concerning Church and State, and the Individual as a member of them both. One observes how the patristic and mediaeval Christian thought mingles with the antique ; and one may assume the intellectual acumen applied by legist, canonist, and scholastic theologian to the discussion and formulation of these high arguments. The mediaeval genius for abstractions is evident, and the mediaeval faculty of linking them to the affairs of life ; clear also is the baneful effect of mediaeval allegory. Even as men nowadays are disposed to rest in the apparent reality of the tangible phenomenon, so the mediaeval man just as commonly sought for his reality in what the phenomenon might be conceived to symbolize. Therefore in the higher political controversies, even as in other interests of the human spirit, argument through allegory was accepted as legitimate, if not convincing ; and a proper sequence of thought was deemed to lie from one symbolical meaning to another, with even a deeper validity than from one palpable fact to that which followed from it. ^ See Gierke, o.c, pp. 73-86, and corresponding notes. BOOK VII ULTIMATE INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS OF THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES 3" CHAPTER XXXV SCHOLASTICISM : SPIRIT, SCOPE, AND METHOD The religious philosophy or theology of the Middle Ages is commonly called scholasticism, and its exponents are called the scholastics. The name applies most properly to the respectable acadeinic thinkers. These, in the early Middle Ages, usually were monks living in monasteries, like St. Anselm, for instance, who was Abbot of Bee in Normandy before, to his sorrow, he was made Archbishop of Canterbury. In the thirteenth century, however, while these respected thinkers still were monks, or rather mendicant friars, they were also imiversity professors. Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominicans, and their friend St. Bonaventura, who became the head of the Franciscan Order, all lectured at the University of Paris, the chief university of the Middle Ages in the domain of philosophy and theology. Moreover, as the scholastics were respectable and acadeinic, so they were usually orthodox^ Qiurchmen, good Roman Catholics. The conduct or opinions^^^'some of them, Abaelard for example, became suspect to the Church authorities ; yet Abaelard, although his book had been condemned, kept within the Church's pale, and died a monk of Cluny. There were plenty of obdurate heretics in the Middle Ages ; but their bizarre ideas, sometimes coming down from Manichaean sources, were scarcely germane to the central lines of mediaeval thought.^ ^ Little will be said in these pages of palpable crass heretics like the Cathari; for example. The philosophic ideas of such seem gathered from the flotsam and jetsam of the later antique world ; their stock was not of the best, and bore little interesting fruit for later times. Such mediaeval heresies present no continuous evolution like that of the proper scholasticism. Progress in philosophy and 313 314 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii One hears of scholastic philosophy and scholastic theology ; and assuredly these mediaeval theologian-philo- sophers endeavoured to distinguish between the one and the other phase of the matters which occupied their minds. The distinction was intelligibly drawn and, in many treatises, doubtless affected the choice and ordering of topics. Whether it was consistently observed in the handling of those topics, is another question, which perhaps should be answered in the negative. At all events, to attempt to observe this distinction in considering the ultimate intel- lectual interests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, might sap the matter of the human interest attaching to it, to wit, that interest and validity possessed by aU serious effort to know — and to be saved. These were the motives of the scholastics, whether they used their reason, or clung to revelation, or did both, as they always did. Mediaeval methods of thinking and topics of thought are no longer in vogue. For the time, men have turned from the discussion of tiniversals and the common imity or separate individuality of mind, and are as little concerned with transubstantiation as with the old dispute over investitures. But the scholastics were men and so are we. theology came through academic personages, who at all events laid claim to orthodoxy. All lines of advance leading on to later phases of philosophic, scientific, and religious thought, lay within the labours of such, some of whom, however, were suspected or even condemned by the Church, like Eriugena, Abaelard, or Roger Bacon. But these men did not stand apart from orthodox academic circles, and were never cast out by the Church. Thought and learning in the Middle Ages were domiciled in monastic, episcopal, or university circles ; and these were at least conventionally orthodox. It has been said, to be siure, that the heresy of one generation becomes the orthodoxy of another ; but this is true only of tendencies like those of Abaelard, which represent the gradual expansion and clearing up of scholastic processes. For the time they may be condemned, perhaps because of the vain and contentious character of the suspected thinker ; but in the end they are recognized as admissible. The Averroists constitute an apparent exception. Yet they were a philosophic and academic sect, whose heresy consisted in an implicit following of Aristotle as interpreted by Averroes. Moreover, they sought to save theu: orthodoxy by their doctrine of J^ie two kinds of truth, philosophic and theological or dog- matic. It is not clear that much fruitful thought came from their school. The positions of Siger de Brabant, a prominent Averroist and contemporary of Aquinas, are referred to post, Chapter XXXVIII. The best account of Averroism is Mandonnet*s Siger de Brabant et Vaverroisme latin au XIII* sUcle (second edition, Louvain, 1911). See also De Wulf, Hist, of Medieval Philosophy (3rd ed., Long- mans, 1909), p. 379 sqq. with authorities cited. CHAP. XXXV METHODS OF SCHOLASTICISM 315 Our humanity is one with theirs. Men are still under the necessity of reflecting upon their own existence and the world without, and still feel the need to reach conclusions and the impulse to formulate consistently what seem to them vital propositions. Herein we are blood kin to Gerbert and Anselm, to Abaelard and Hugo of St. Victor, to Thomas Aquinas as well as Roger Bacon : and our highest nature is one with theirs in the intellectual fellowship of human endeavour to think out and present that which shall appease the mind. Because of this kinship with the scholastics, and the sympathy we feel for the struggle which is the same in us and them, their intellectual endeavours, their achieved conclusions, although now appearing as but apt or neces- sitated phrases, may have for us the immortal interest of the eternal human. Let us then approach mediaeval thought as man meets man, and seek in it for what may still be valid, or at least real to us, because agreeing with what we find within our- selves. Being men as well as scholars, we would win from its parchment-covered tomes those elements which if they do not represent everlasting verities, are at least S5niibols of the permanent necessities of the human mind. Whatever else there is in mediaeval thought, as touching us less nearly; may be considered by way of historical setting and explanation. In different men the impulse to know bears different relationships to the rest of life. It sometimes seems self- impelled, and again palpably inspired by a motive beyond itself. In some form, however, it winds itself into every action of our mental faculties, and no province of life appears untouched by this craving of the mind. Nevertheless, to know is not the whole matter ; for with knowledge comes appetition or aversion, admiration or contempt, love or abhorrence ; and other impulses — emotional, desiderative, loving — ^impel the human creature to realize its nature in states of heightened consciousness that are not palpable modes of knowing, though they may be replete with all the knowledge that the man has gained. These ultimate cravings which we recognize in ourselves, inspired mediaeval thought. Its course, its progress, its 3i6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii various phases, its contents and completed systems, all represent the operation of human faculty pressing to expres- sion and realization under the accidental or " historical " conditions of the mediaeval period. We may be sure that many kinds of human craving and corresponding faculty realized themselves in mediaeval philosophy, theology, piety and mysticism — ^the last a word used provisionally, until we succeed in resolving it into terms of clearer significance. And we also note that in these provinces, realization is expression. Every faculty, every energy, in man seeks to function, to realize its power in act. The sheer body — ^if there be sheer body — acts bodily, operates, and so makes actual its powers. But those human energies which are informed with mind, reahze themselves in ardent or rational thought, or in uttered words, or in products of the artfully devising hand. All this clearly is expression, and corre- sponds, if it is not one and the same, with the passing of energy from potency to the actuality which is its end and consummation. Thus love, seeking its end, thereby seeks expression, through which it is enhanced, and in which it is realized. Likewise, impelled by the desire to know, the faculties of cognition and reason realize themselves in expres- sion ; and in expression each part of rational knowledge is clarified, completed, rendered accordant with the data of observation and the laws or necessities of the mind. Human faculties form a correlated whole ; and this composite human nature seeks to act, to function. Thus the whole man strives to realize the fullest actuality of his being, to satisfy or express the whole of him, and not alone his reason, nor yet his emotions, or his appetites. This utter- most realization of human being — ^man's summum honum or summa necessitas — cannot unite the incompatible within its sjnithesis. It must be kept a consistent ideal, a possible whole. Here the demiurge is the discriminating and con- structive intelligence, which builds together the permanent and valuable elements of being, and excludes whatever cannot coexist in concord with them. Yet the inteUigence does not always set its own rational activities as man's furthest goal of realization. It may place love above reason. And, of course, its discriminating judgment will CHAP. XXXV METHODS OF SCHOLASTICISM 317 be affected by current knowledge and by dominant beliefs as to man and his destiny, the universe and God. Manifestly whatever the thoughtful idealizing man in any period (and our attention may at once focus itself upon the Middle Ages) adjudges to belong to the final reahzation of his nature, will become an object of intellectual interest for him ; and he will deem it a proper subject for study and meditation. The rational, spiritual, or even physical elements, which may enter and compose this, his summum bonum, represent those intellectual interests which may be termed ultimate, for the very reason, that they relate to what the thinker deems his beatitude. These ultimate intellectual interests possess an absolute sanction, for the lack of which whatever lies outside of them tends to adjudge itself vain. The philosophy, theology, and the profoundly felt and reasoned piety, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made up that period's ultimate intellectual interests. We are not concerned with other matters occupying its attention, save as they bore on man's supreme beatitude, which was held to consist in his everlasting salvation and all that might con- stitute his bliss in that unending state. The elements of this blessedness were not deemed to lie altogether in rational cognition and its processes ; for the conception of the soul's beatitude was catholic ; and while with some men the intellectual elements were dominant, with others salva- tion's summit was attained along the paths of spiritual emotion. Obviously, from the side of the emotions, there could come no large and lasting happiness, unless emotional desire and devotion were directed to that which might also satisfy the mind, or at all events, would not conflict with its judg- ment. Hence the emotional side of the ultimate mediaeval ideal was pietistic ; because the mediaeval dogmatic faith regarded the emotional impulses between one human being and another as distracting, if not wicked. Such mortal impulses were so very difficult to harmonize with the eternal beatitude which consisted in the cognition and love of God. This principle was proclaimed by monks and theologians, or philosophers ; it was even recognized (although not followed) 3i8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND eookvh in the literature which glorified the love of man and woman, but in which the lover-knight so often ends a hermit, and the convent at last receives his sinfiil mistress. On the other hand, reason, with its practical and speculative know- ledge, is sterile when immixed with piety and love. This is the sum of Bonaventura's fervid arguments, and is as clearly, if more quietly, recognized by Aquinas, with whom fides without caritas is informis, formless, very far indeed from its true actuality or realization. Thus, for the full reahzation of man's highest good in everlasting salvation, the two complementary phases of the human spirit had to act and function in concord. Together they must realize themselves in such cathoUc expression as should exclude only the froward or evil elements, non- elements rather, of man's nature. Both represent ultimate mediaeval interests and desires ; and perhaps deep down and very intimately, even inscrutably, they may be one, even as they clearly are complementary phases of the human soul. Yet with certain natures who perhaps fail to hold the balance between them, the two phases seem to draw apart, or at least to evince themselves in distinct expression, and indeed in aU men they are usually distinguishable. Generally speaking, the conception of man's divinely mediated salvation, and of the elements of human being which might be carried on, and realized in a state of ever- lasting beatitude, prescribed the range of ultimate intellec- tual interests for the Middle Ages. The same had been despotically true of the patristic period. Augustine would know God and the soul ; Ambrose expressed equally em- phatic views upon the vanity of all knowledge that did not contribute to an understanding of the Christian Faith. This view was held with temperamental and barbarizing narrow- ness by Gregory the Great. It was admitted, as of course, throughout the Carolingian period, although humanistically- minded men played with the pagan literature. Nor was it seriously disputed in the eleventh or twelfth century, when men began to delight in dialectic, and some cared for pagan literature ; nor yet in the thirteenth when an increasing number were asking many things from philosophy and natural knowledge, which had but distant bearing on the CHAP. XXXV METHODS OF SCHOLASTICISM 319 soul's salvation. One of these men was Roger Bacon, whose scientific studies were pursued with ceaseless energy. But he could also state emphatically the principle of the worth- lessness of whatever does not help men to understand the divine truths by which they are saved. In Bacon's time, the love of knowledge was enlarging its compass, while, really or nominally as the individual case might be, the criterion of relevancy to the Faith still obtained, and set the topics with which men should occupy themselves. All matters of philosophy or natural science had to relate themselves to the summum honum of salvation in order to possess ultimate human interest. Therefore, if philosophy was to preserve the strongest reason for its existence, it had to remain the handmaid of theology. Still, to be sure, the conception of man's beatitude would become more comprehensive with the expansion and variegation of the desire for knowledge. As the summum bonum of salvation prescribed the topics of ultimate intellectual interest for the Middle Ages, so the stress which it laid upon one topic rather than another tended to direct their ordering or classification, as well as the proportion of attention devoted to each one. Likewise the form or method of presentation was controlled by the authority of the Scriptural statement of the way and means of salvation, and the well-nigh equally authoritative inter- pretation of the same by the beatified Fathers. Thus the nature of the summum bonum and the character of its Scriptural statement and patristic exposition suggested the arrangement of topics, and set the method of their treatment in those works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which afford the most important presentations of the ultimate intellectual interests of that time. Obvious examples will be Abaelard's Sic et non and his Theologia, Hugo of St. Victor's De sacramentis, the Lombard's Books of Sentences, and the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. It will be seen in the next chapter that the arrangement of topics in these comprehensive treatises differed from what would have been evolved through the requirements of a systematic presentation of human knowledge. Aquinas sets forth the reasons why one mode of treatment is suitable to philosophy and another to sacred science, and why the 320 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii latter may omit matters proper for the former, or treat them from another point of view. The supremacy of sacred science is incidentally shown by the argimient. In his Contra Gentiles,^ chapter four, book second, bears the title : " Quod aliter considerat de creaturis Philosophus et ahter Theologus " {*' That the philosopher views the creation in one way and the theologian in another "). In the text he says : " The science {doctrina) of Christian faith considers creatures so far as there may be in them some likeness of God, and so far as error regarding them might lead to error in things divine. . . . Human philosophy considers them after their own kind, and its parts are so devised as to correspond with the different classes (genera) of things ; but the faith of Christ considers them, not after their own kind, as for example, fire as fire, but as representing the divine altitude. . . . The philosopher considers what belongs to them according to their own nature ; the believer (fidelis) regards in creatures only what pertains to them in their relation- ship to God, as that they are created by Him and subject to Him. Wherefore the science of the Faith is not to be deemed incomplete, [if it passes over many properties of things, as the shape of the ftieaven or the quaUty of motion. ... It also follows that the two 'sciences do not proceed in the same order. With philosophy, which regards creatures in themselves, and from them draws on into a knowledge of God, the first consideration is in regard to the creatures and the last is as to God. But in the science of faith, which views creatures only in their relationship to God (in [ or dine ad Deum), the first consideration is of God, and next of the ^creatures." Obviously sacra doctrina, which is to say, theologia, proceeds differently from philosophia humana, and evidently it has to do with matters of ultimate importance, and therefore of ultimate intellectual interest. The passage quoted from the Contra Gentiles may be taken as intro- ductory to the more elaborate statement at the beginning of his Summa theologiae, where Thomas sets forth the principles by which sacra doctrina is distinguished from the philosophicae disciplinae, to wit, the various sciences of human philosophy : *' It was necessary to human salvation that there should be a science (doctrina) according with divine revelation, besides the ^ Called also his Summa philosophica, to distinguish it from his Summa theo- logiae. CHAP. XXXV METHODS OF SCHOLASTICISM 321 philosophical disciplines which are pursued by human reason. Because man was formed (ordinatur) toward God as toward an end exceeding reason's comprehension. That end should be known to men, who ought to regulate their intentions and actions toward an end. Wherefore it was necessary for salvation that man should know certain matters through revelation, which surpass human reason." Thomas now points out that, on account of many errors, it also was necessary for man to be instructed through divine revelation as to those saving truths concerning God which human reason was capable of investigating. He next proceeds to show that sacra doctrina is science. " But there are two kinds of sciences. There are those which proceed from the principles known by the natural light of the mind, as arithmetic and geometry. There are others which pro- ceed from principles known by the light of a superior science : as perspective proceeds from principles made known through geometry, and music from principles known through arithmetic. And sacra doctrina is science in this way, because it proceeds from principles known by the hght of a superior science or knowledge which is the knowledge belonging to God and the beatified. Thus as music beheves the principles delivered to it by arithmetic, so sacred doctrine beheves the principles revealed to it from God." The question then is raised whether sacra doctrina is one science, or many. And Thomas answers, that it is one, by reason of the unity of its formal object. For it views every- thing discussed by it as divinely revealed ; and all things which are subjects of revelation {revelabilia) have part in the formal conception of this science ; and so are comprehended under sacra doctrina, as under one science. Nevertheless it extends to subjects belonging to various departments of knowledge so far as they are knowable through divine illumination. As some of these may be practical and some speculative, it follows that sacred science includes both the practical and the speculative, even as God with the same knowledge knows himself and also the things He makes. " Yet this science is more speculative than practical, because on principle it treats of divine things rather than human actions, which it treats in so far as man by means of them is directed (ordinatur) to perfect cognition of God, wherein eternal beatitude consists. . . . This science in its speculative as well as practical VOL. II Y 322 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh functions transcends other sciences, speculative and practical. One speculative science is said to be worthier than another, by reason of its certitude, or the dignity of its matter. In both respects this science surpasses other speculative sciences, because the others have certitude from the natural light of human reason, which may err ; but this has certitude from the light of the divine knowledge, which cannot be deceived ; likewise by reason of the dignity of its matter, because primarily it relates to matters too high for reason, while other sciences consider only those which are subjected to reason. It is worthier than the practical sciences, which are ordained for an'ulterior end ; for so far as this science is practical, its end is eternal beatitude, ;mto which as an ulterior end all other ends of the practical sciences are ordained (ordinantur). " Moreover although this science may accept something from the philosophical sciences, it requires them merely for the larger manifestation of the matters which it teaches. For it takes its principles, not from other sciences, but immediately from God through revelation. So it does not receive from other sciences as from superiors, but uses them as servants. Even so, it uses them not because of any defect of its own, but because of the defectiveness of our intellect which is more easily conducted {manudncitur) by natural reason to the things above reason which this science teaches." Thomas now shows, with scholastic formalism, that God is the subjectum of this science ; since all things in it are treated with reference to God {sub ratione Dei), either because they are God himself, or because they bear relation- ship {habent ordinem) to God as toward their cause and end (principium et finem). The final question is whether this science be argumentativa, using arguments and proofs ; and Thomas thus sets forth his masterly solution : " I reply, it should be said that as other sciences do not argue to prove their first principles, but argue from them in order to prove other matters in those sciences, so this science does not argue to prove its principles, which are articles of Faith, but proceeds from them to prove something else, as the Apostle, in I Corinthians xv., argues from the resurrection of Christ to prove the resurrection of us all. One should bear in mind that in the philosophic sciences the lower science neither proves its own first principles nor disputes with him who denies them, but leaves that to a higher science. But the science which is the highest among them, that is metaphysics) does dispute with him who denies its principles, if the adversary CHAP. XXXV METHODS OF SCHOLASTICISM 323 will concede anything ; if he concede nothing it cannot thus argue with him, but can only overthrow his arguments. Likewise sacra doctrina or theology, since it owns no higher science, disputes with him who denies its principles, by argument indeed, if the adversary will concede any of the matters which it accepts through revelation. Thus through Scriptural authorities we dispute against heretics, and adduce one article against those who deny another. But if the adversary will give credence to nothing which is divinely revealed, sacred science has no arguments by which to prove to him the articles of faith, but has only argu- ments to refute his reasonings against the Faith, should he adduce any. For since faith rests on infallible truth, its contrary cannot be demonstrated : manifestly the proofs which are brought against it are not proofs, but controvertible arguments. " To argue from authority is most appropriate to this science ; ^ for its principles rest on revelation, and it is proper to credit the authority of those to whom the revelation was made. Nor does this derogate from the dignity of this science ; for although proof from authority based on human reason may be weak, yet proof froxn^authontyj)ased- on- divine revelation is most effective, ~" Yef~SLcred science also makes use of human reason ; not indeed to prove the Faith, because this would take away the merit of believing ; but to make manifest other things which may be treated in this science. For since grace does not annul nature, but perfects it, natural reason should serve faith, even as the natural inclination conforms itself to love {caritas). Hence sacred science uses the philosophers also as authority, where they were able to know the truth through natural reason. It uses authorities of this kind as extraneous arguments having probabihty. But it uses the authorities of the canonical Scrip- tures arguing from its own premises and with certainty. And it uses the authorities of other doctors of the Church, as arguing upon its own ground, yet only with probabihty. For our faith rests upon the revelation made to the Apostles and Prophets, who wrote the canonical books; and not upon the revelation, if there was any, made to other doctors." ^ Mediaeval thought was beset behind and before by the compulsion of its conditions. Antique philosophy and the dogmatic Christian Faith, very dual and yet joined, antagon- istic and again united, constituted the form-giving principles of mediaeval thinking. They were, speaking in scholastic phrase, the substantial as well as accidental forms of ^ Summa theologiaej i. i., quaestio i. art. i-S. 324 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh mediaeval theology, philosophy, and knowledge. Which means that they set the lines of mediaeval theology or philo- sophy, and caused the one and the other to be what it became, rather than something else ; and also that they supplied the knowledge which mediaeval men laboured to acquire, and attempted to adjust their thinking to. Thus, through the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the fourteenth centuries, they remained the inworking formal causes of mediaeval thought ; while, on the other hand, the moving and efficient causes (still speaking in scholastic-Aristotelian phrase) were the human impulses which those formal causes moulded, or indeed suggested, and the faculties which they trained. The patristic system of dogma with the antique philo- sophy, set the forms of mediaeval expression, fixed the distinctive qualities of mediaeval thought, furnished its topics, and even necessitated its problems — in .two ways : First, through the specific substance which passed over and filled the mediaeval productions ; and secondly, simply by reason of the existence of such a vast authoritative body of antique and patristic opinion, knowledge, dogma, which the Middle Ages had to accept and master, and beyond which the substance of mediaeval thinking was hardly ^destined to advance. The first way is obvious enough. The second is less obvious, but equally important. This mass of dogma, know- ledge, and opinion, existed finished and complete. Men imperfectly equipped to comprehend it were brought to it by the conviction that it was necessary to their salvation, and then gradually by the persuasion also that it offered the only means of intellectual progress. The struggle to master such a volume of knowledge issuing from a more creative past, gave rise to novel problems, or promoted old ones to a novel prominence. The problem of universals was taken directly from the antique dialectic. It played a monstrous role in the twelfth century because it was in very essence a funda- mental problem of cognition, of knowing, and so pressed upon men who were driven by the need to master con- tinually imfolding continents of thought.^ This is an instance of a problem transmitted from the past, but blown 1 Post, Chapter XXXVII., i. CHAP. XXXV METHODS OF SCHOLASTICISM 325 up to extraordinary importance by mediaeval intellectual conditions. So throughout the whole scholastic range, attitude and method alike are fixed by the fact thati scholasticism was primarily an appropriation of transmitted' propositions. In considering the characteristics of mediaeval thought, is well to bear in mind these diverse ways in which its antecedents made it what it was : through their substance transmitted to it ; through the receptive attitude forced upon men by existing accumulations of authoritative doctrine, and the method entailed upon mediaeval thought by its scholastic rather than originative character. ^ Also one will not omit to notice which elements came from the action of the patristic body of antecedents, rather than from the antique group, and vice versa. Since the antique and patristic constituted well-nigh the whole substance of philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages, a separate consideration of what was thus transmitted would amount to a history of mediaeval thought from a somewhat unilluminating point of view. On the other hand, one may learn much as to the qualities of mediaeval thought from observing the attitudes of various men in successive centuries toward Greek philosophy and patristic theology. The Fathers had used the concepts of the former in the construction of their systems of acceptance of the Christian Faith. But the spirit of inquiry from which Greek philo- sophy had sprung, was very different from the spirit in which the Fathers used its concepts and arguments, in order to substantiate what they accepted on the authority of Scripture and tradition. It is true that Greek philosophy in the Neo- Flatonism of Porphyry and lamblicus was not far from the patristic attitude toward knowledge. But the spirit of these declining moods of Neo-Platonism was not the spirit which had carried the philosophy of the Greeks to its intellectual culmination in Plato and Aristotle, and to its attainment of the ethically rational in Stoicism and the system of Epicurus. Thus patristic thinking was essentially different in purpose and method from the philosophy which it forced to serve its uses ; and the two differed by every difference of method, spirit, and intent which were destined to appear 326 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh among the various kinds of mediaeval thinkers. But the difference between Greek philosopher and Church Father was deeper than any that ever could exist among mediaeval men. Some of the last might be conventionally orthodox and passionately pious, while others cared more distinctly for the fruits of knowledge. But even these could not be as Greek philosophers, because they were accustomed to rely on authority, and because they who drew their knowledge from an existing store would not have the independence and originality distinguishing the Greeks, who had created so much of that store from which they drew.^ Moreover, while neither Plato's inquiry for truth, nor Aristotle's cathoHc search for knowledge, was isolated from its bearing on either the conduct or the event of life, nevertheless with them rational inquiry was a final motive representing in itself that which was most divinely human, and so the best for man.^ But with the philosophers of the Middle Ages, it never was quite so. For the need of salvation had worked in men's blood for generations. And salvation, man's highest good, did not consist in humanly-attained knowledge or in virtue won by human strength ; but was divinely mediated and had to be accepted upon authority. Hence, even in the great twelfth and thirteenth centuries, intellectual inquiry was never unHmbered from bands of deference, nor ever quite dispassionately rational or unaffected by the mortal need to attain a salvation which was bestowed or withheld by God according to His plan authoritatively declared. Accordingly all mediaeval variances of thought show common similitudes ; to wit, some consciousness of need of super-rational and superhuman salvation ; deference to some authority ; and finally a pervasive scholasticism, since mediaeval thought was of necessity diligent, acceptant, reflective, rather than original. One will be impressed with the formal character of mediaeval thought. For being thus ^ Even the Averroists were more mediaeval than Greek, inasmuch as they professed to follow Aristotle implicitly. Ct post, Chapter XXXVIII., at the end. * A touch of " salvation," or salvation's need, is on Plato when his " philo- sophy " becomes a consideration of death (fie\4-nj Bapdrov) and a process of growing as like to God {ofioiwffis detfi) as man can. Phaedo, 80 e, and Theaetetus, 176 A. CHAP. XXXV METHODS OF SCHOLASTICISM 327 scholastic, it was occupied with devising forms through which 1 to express, or re-express, the mass of knowledge proffered to it. Besides, formal logic was a prominent part of the* transmitted contents of antique philosophy, and became! a chief discipline for mediaeval students ; because they accepted it along with all the rest, and found its training helpful for men burdened with such intellectual tasks as theirs. Within the lines of these universal qualities wind the divergencies of mediaeval thought ; and one will notice how they consist in leanings toward the ways of Greek philosophy, or a reliance more or less complete upon the contents and method of patristic theology. One common quality, of which we note the variations, is that of deference to the /authority of the past. The mediaeval scholar could hardly read a classic poet without finding authoritative statements upon every topic brushed by the poet's fancy, and of course the matter of more serious writings, history, logic, natural science, was implicitly accepted. If the pagan learning was thus regarded, how much more absolute was the deference to sacred doctrine. Here all was authority. Scripture was the primary source ; next came the creed, and the dogmas established by councils ; and then the expositions of the Fathers. Thus-tftelneaning of the authoritative Scripture was pressed into authoritative dogma, and then authorita- tively systematized. The process had been intellectual and rational, yet with the driven rationality of Church Fathers struggling to formulate and express the accepted import of the Faith delivered to the saints. Authority, faith, held the primacy, and in two senses, for not only was it supreme and final, but it was also prior in initiative efficiency. Tertullian's cerium est, quia impossibile est, was an extreme paradox. But Augustine's credimus ut cognoscamus was fundamental, and remained unshaken. Anselm lays it at the basis of his arguments ; with Bernard and many others it is credo first of all, let the intelUgere come as it may, and as it will accord- ing to the fulness of our faith. The same principle of faith's efficient primacy is temperamentally as well as logically fundamental with Bonaventura. Here then was a first general quality of mediaeval 328 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii \ thought : deference to authority. Now for the variances. Scarcely diverging, save in emphasis, from Augustine and Bonaventura, are the greatest of the schoolmen, Albert and Thomas. They defer to authority and recognize the primacy of faith, and yet they will, with abundant use of reason, deliminate the respective provinces of grace and human knowledge, and distinguish the absolute authority of Scrip- ture from the statements even of the saints, which may be weighed and criticized. In secular philosophy, these two will, when their faith admits, accept the views of the philosophers — ^Aristotle above all — yet using their own reason. They are profoundly interested in knowledge and metaphysical dialectic, but follow it with deferential tempers and believing Christian souls. Outside the company! of such, are men of more inde- pendent temper, whose attitude tends to weaken the principle of acceptance of authority in sacred doctrine. The first of these was Eriugena with his exphcit statement that reason is greater than authority ; yet we may assume that he was not intending to impugn Scripture. Centuries later another chief example is Abaelard, whose dialectic temper leads him to wish to prove everything by reason. Not that he stated, or would have admitted this ; yet the extreme rationalizing tendency of the man is projected through such a passage as the following from his Historia calamitatum, where he alludes to the circumstances of the composition of his work upon the Trinity. He had become a monk in the monastery of St. Denis, but students were still thronging to hear him, to the wrath of some of his superiors. " Then it came about that I was brought to expound the very foundation of our faith by applying the analogies of human reason, and was led to compose for my pupils a theological treatise on the divine Unity and Trinity. They were calling for human and philosophical arguments, and insisting upon something intelli- gible, rather than mere words, saying that there had been more than enough of talk which the mind could not foUow ; that it was impossible to believe what was not understood in the first place ; and that it was ridiculous for any one to set forth to others what neither he nor they could rationally conceive (intellectu caper e)." CHAP. XXXV METHODS OF SCHOLASTICISM 329 And Abaelard cites the verse from Matthew about the blind leaders of the blind, and goes on to tell of the success of his treatise, which pleased everybody, yet provoked the greater envy because of the difficulty of the questions which it elucidated ; and at last envy blew up the condemnation of his book, at the Council of Soissons, in the year of grace 1121.^ / Here one has the plain reversal. We must first under- Cstand in order to believe. Doubtless the demands of Abaelard's students to have the principles of the Christian Faith explained, that they might be understood and accepted rationally, echoed the master's imperative intellectual need. Not that Abaelard would breathe the faintest doubt of these verities ; they were absolute and unquestionabler He accepted them upon authority just as implicitly (he might think) as St. Bernard. Herein he shows the mediaeval quality of deference. But he will understand with his mind the profoundest truths enunciated by authority ; he will explain them rationally, that the mind may rationally comprehend them. Men of an opposite cast of mind foresaw the outcome of this rationalization of dogma more surely than the subtle dialectician for whom this process was both peremptory and proper. And the Church acted with a true instinct in condemning Abaelard in spite of his protestations of belief, just as with a like true instinct Friar Bacon's own Franciscan Order looked askance on one whose mind was suspiciously set upon observation and experiment — and cavilling at others. Ceci tuera cela ! The ultra-scientific spirit is dangerous to faith — and Bacon's asseverations that no knowledge was of value save as it helped the soul's salvation, was doubtless regarded as a conventional insincerity. Yet Roger Bacon had his mediaeval deferences, as will appear.^ Neither one extreme view nor the other was to represent the attitude of thoughtful and beheving Christendom ; not William of St. Thierry and St. Bernard, nor yet (on these points) Abaelard and Friar Bacon should prevail ; but the aU-balancing and all-considering Aquinas. He will draw the ^ Historia calamitatum, cap. 9 and 10. Of. post, p. 333. 2 Post, Chapter XLII. 330 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh lines between faith and reason, and bulwark them with arguments which shall seem to render unto reason the-things of reason, and imto faith its due. Yet it is actually Roger Bacon who accuses Thomas of making his Theology out of dialectic and very human reasonings. It was true ; and we are again reminded how variant views shaded into each other in the Middle Ages, and all within certain lines of similarity. Practically all mediaeval thinkers defer to authority — ^more or less ; and all hold to some principle of faith, to the neces- sity of believing something, for the soul's salvation. There is - likewise some similarity in their attitudes toward intellectual I interests. For all recognized their propriety, and gave credit j to the human desire to know. Likewise aU saw that salva- tion, the summum bonum for man, included more than intellection ; and felt that it held some consummation of other human impulses ; that it held love — ^the love of God along with the intellectual ardour of contemplation ; and well-nigh all recognized also that the faith held mystery, not to be solved by reason. Thus aU were rational — some more, some less ; and all were devotional and beUeving, pietistic, ardent — some more, some less ; according as the intellectual nature dominated the emotional, or the emotions, quelled the conscious exercise of reason, yet reached out and upward from what knowledge and reason had given as a base to spring from. Thus the mediaeval spirit, variant within its lines of like- ness ; and of a piece with it was the field it worked in, which made its range and scope. Here as well, a saving know- ledge of God and the soul was central and chief among , all intellectual interests. None denied this. Augustine, the ! universal protot5rpe of the mediaeval mind, had cried, " God ^ and the soul, these will I know, and these are all." But wide had been the scope of his knowledge of God and the soul ; and in the centuries which hung upon his words, wide also was the range of knowledge subsumed under those capitals. How would one know God and the soul ? Might one not know God in aU His universe, in the height and breadth thereof, and backwards and forwards through the reach of time ? Might not one also know the soul in all its operations, all its queries and desires ; would not it and they, and their CHAP. XXXV METHQDS OF SCHOLASTICISM 331 activities, make up the complementary side of knowledge- complementary to the primal object, God, known in His eternity, in His temporal creation, in His everlasting govern- ance ? Wide or narrow might be the intellectual interests included within a knowledge of God and the soul. And while many men kept close to the centre and saving nexus of these potentially universal themes, others might become absorbed with data of the creature-world, or with the manifold actions of the mind of man, so as to forget to keep all duly ordered and connected with the central thought. So the search for knowledge might roam afield. Like- wise as to its motive ; practically with many men it was, in itself, a joy and end; although they might continue to connect this end formally with the salvation of the soul. Roger Bacon of a surety was such a one. Another was Albertus Magnus. The laborious culling of twenty tomes of universal knowledge surely had the joy of knowing as the active motive. And Aquinas too ; no one could be such an acquisitive and reasoning genius, without the love of know- ledge in his soul. Yet Thomas never let this love point untrue to its goal of research and devotion, to wit, sacred doctrine, theology, the Christian Faith in its very widest compass, yet in its unity of saving purpose. In Thomas Aquinas the certitude of faith, the sense of grace, the ardour of love, never quenched the conscious action of the reasoning and knowing mind ; nor did reason- ing quench devotion. A balance too, though perhaps with one scale higher than the other, was kept by Bonaventura, whose mind had reason's faculty, but whose heart burned perpetually toward God. Another rationally ardent soul was Bonaventura's intellectual forerunner, Hugo of St. Victor. In these men intellect did not outstrip the fervours of contemplation. But such catholic balance did not hold with Abaelard and Bacon, who lacked the pietistic temperament. With others, conversely, the strength of the pietistic and emotional nature overbore the intellect ; the mind was less exacting ; and devotional ardour used reason solely for its purposes. The mightiest of these were Bernard and Francis. To the same key might chime the woman, St. Hildegard of Bingen. We narrow down from these to 332 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh hectic souls content with a, few thoughts which serve as a basis for the heart's fervours. The varying attitudes of mediaeval thinkers toward reason and authority, and even their different views upon the limits of the field of salutary knowledge, are exemplified in their methods, or rather in the variations of their common method. Here the factors were again authority and the intellect which considers the authority, and in terms of its own rational processes reacts upon the pro- position under view. The intellect might simply accept authority ; or, on the other hand, it might, through dialectic, seek a conclusion of its own. But midway between a mere acceptance of authority and the endeavour of dialectic for its own conclusion, there is the reasoning process which perceives divergence among authorities, compares, dis- criminates, interprets, and at last acts as umpire. This was the combined and catholic scholastic method. It contained the two factors of its necessary duality ; and its variations (besides the gradual perfecting of its form from one generation to another) consisted in the predominant employment of one factor or the other. The beginning was in the Carolingian time, when Rabanus compiled his authorities from source|^.sacred and profane, scarcely discriminating except to riiaintain the pre-eminence of the sacred matter. His younger con- temporary, Eriugena, was a translator of his own chief source, Pseudo-Dionysius, him of the Hierarchies, Celestial and Ecclesiastical. Yet he composed also a veritable book, De divisione naturae, in which he put his matter together organically and with argument. And while professing to hold to the authority of Scripture and the Fathers, he not only took upon himself to select from their statements, but propounded the proposition that the authority which is not confirmed by reason appears weak. Eriugena made his authorities yield him what his reason required. His argumentative method became an independent rehandling of matter drawn from them. It was very different from the plodding excerpt-gathering of Rabanus. We pass down the centuries to Anselm. Contemplative and religious, his reverence for authority was unimpaired by CHAP. XXXV METHODS OF SCHOLASTICISM 333 any conscious need to refashion its meaning. Though he possessed creative intellectual powers, they were incited and controlled by his deep piety. Hence his works were con- structed of original and lofty arguments, but such as did not infringe upon either the efficient or the final priority of faith. With Abaelard of many-sided fame the duaUty of method becomes explicit, and is, if one may say so, set by the ears. On the one hand, he advances in his constructive theological treatises toward a portentous application of reason to explain the contents of the Christian Faith ; on the other, somewhat sardonically, he devises a scheme for the employment and presentation of authorities upon these sacred matters, a scheme so obviously apt that, once made known, it could not but be followed and perfected. The divers works of a man are likely to bear some relation and resemblance to each other. Abaelard was a reasoner, more specifically speaking, a dialectician according to the ways of Aristotelian logic. And in categories of formal logic he sought to rationalize every matter appre- hended by his mind. Swayed by the master-interest of the time, he turned to theology ; and his own nature impelled him to apply a constructive dialectic to its systematic formulation. The result is exemplified in the extant portion of his Theologia {rms-called Introductio ad Theologiam), which was condemned by the Council of Sens in 1141, the year before the master's death. The spirit of this work appears in the passage already quoted from the Historia calamitatum, referring to what was substantially an earlier form of the Theologia.^ The Theologia argues for a free use of dialectic in expounding dogma, especially in order, to refute those heretics who will not listen to authority, but demand reasons. Like Abaelard's previous theological treatises, it is filled with citations of authority, principally Augustine ; and the reader feels the author's hesitancy to reveal that dialectic is the architect. Nor, in fact, is the work an exclusively dialectic structure ; yet it illustrates (if it does not always inculcate) ^ Ante, p. 329. I cannot avoid referring to Abaelard several times before considering the mein and his work more specifically, and in the proper place • post, Chapter XXXVII., i. Cf. Grabmann, Ges. der schol. Methode, ii. pp. 168 sgq. 334 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh 'jthe application of the arguments of human reason to the ^exposition and substantiation of the fundamental and most ideeply hidden contents of the Christian Faith. Obviously 'Abaelard was not an initiator here. Augustine had devoted his life to fortif5dng theFaithwith argument and explanation ; Eriugena, with a far weaker realization of its contents, had employed a more distorting metaphysics in its presentatii ; and saintly Anselm had flown his veritable eagle flights E reason. But Abaelard's more systematic work represeni l purther stage in the application of independent dialectic to aogma, and an innovating freedom in the citation of pagan philosophers to demonstrate its philosophic reasonableness, | Nevertheless, his statement that he had gathered these citations from writings of the Fathers, and not from the books of the philosophers {quorum pauca novi)} shows that he was only using what the Fathers had made use of before him, and also indicates the slightness of his independent knowledge of Greek philosophy. On the other hand, Abaelard's way of presenting authorities for and against a theological proposition was more distinctly original. He seems to have been the first purposefully to systematize the method of stating the problem, and then giving in order the authorities on one side and the other — sic et non ; as he entitled his famous work. But the trail of his nature lay through this apparently innocent composition, the evident intent of which was to emphasize, if not exaggerate, the opposition among the patristic authorities, and without a counterbalancing attempt to show any substantial accord among them. This, of course, is not stated in the Prologue, which, however, like everything that Abaelard wrote, discloses his fatal faciUty of putting his hand on the raw spot in the matter ; which unfortunately is likely to be the vulnerable point also. In it he remarks on the difficulty of interpreting Scripture, upon the corruption of the text (a perilous subject), and the introduction of apocr3^hal writings. There are discrepancies even in the sacred texts, and contradictions in the writings of the Fathers. With a profuse backing of authority he shows that the latter are not to be read cum credendi neces- ^ IfUroductio ad theologiam, lib. ii. (Migne 178, col. 1039), CHAP. XXXV METHODS OF SCHOLASTICISM 335 sitate, but cum judicandi lihertate. Assuredly, as to any- thing in the canonical Scriptures, "it is not permitted to say : ' The Author of this book did not hold the truth ' ; but rather ' the codex is false or the interpreter errs, or thou \ dost not understand/ But in the works of the later ones {posteriorum, Abaelard's inclusive designation of the Fathers), which are contained in books without number, if passages are deemed to depart from the truth, the reader is at liberty 1 to approve or disapprove/* ' This view was supported by Abaelard's citations from the Fathers themselves ; and yet, so abruptly made, it was not a pleasant statement for the ears of those to whom the writings of the holy Fathers were sacred. Nothing was sacred to the man who wrote this prologue — ^so it seemed to his pious contemporaries. And who among them could approve of the Prologue's final utterance upon the method and purpose of the book ? " Wherefore we decided to collect the diverse statements of the holy Fathers, as they might occur to our memory, thus raising an issue from their apparent repugnancy, which might incite the teneros lectores to search out the truth of the matter, and render them the sharper for the investigation. For the first key tOf wisdom is called interrogation, diligent and unceasing. . . . By doubting we are led to inquiry ; and from inquiry we perceiv^ the truth." I To use the discordant statements of the Fathers to sharpen the wits of the young ! Was not that to uncover their shame ? And the character of the work did not salve the Prologue's sting. Abaelard selected and arranged his extracts from pagan as well as Christian writers, and prepared sardonic titles for the questions under which he ordered his material. Time and again these titles flaunt an opposition which the citations scarcely bear out. For example, title iv. : " Quod sit credendum in Deum solum, et contra " — certainly a flaming point ; yet the excerpts display merely the verb credere, used in the palpably different senses borne by the word " believe." There is no real repugnancy among the citations. And again, in title Iviii. : " Quod Adam salvatus sit, et contra- " — ^there is no citation contra. And the longest chapter in the book (cxvii.) has this 336 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh bristling title : " De sacramento altaris, quod sit essentialiter ipsa Veritas camis Christi et sanguinis, et contra." Because of such prickly traits the Sic et non did not itself come into common use. But the suggestions of its method once made, were of too obvious utility to be abandoned. First, among Abaelard's own pupils the result appears in Books of Sentences, which, in the arrangement of their matter, followed the topical division not of the Sic et non, but of Abaelard's Theologia, with its threefold division of Theology into Fides, Caritas, and Sacramentum.^ But the arrangement of the Theologia was not made use of in the best and most famous of these compositions, Peter Lom- bard's Sententiarum libri quatuor. This work employed the method (not the arrangement) of the Sic et non, and expounded the contents of Faith methodically, " Distinctio " after " Distinctio," stating the proposition, citing the authorities bearing upon it, and ending with some con- ciliating or distinguishing statement of the true result.^ In canon law the same method was appUed in Gratian's Decretum, of which the proper name was Concordia discordantium canonum. These Books of Sentences have sometimes been called Summae, inasmuch as their scope embraced the entire contents of the Faith. But the term Summa may properly be confined to those larger and still more encyclopaedic compositions in which this scholastic method reached its final development. The chief makers of these, the veritable Summae theologiae, were, in order of time, Alexander of 1 Hales, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas. The Books of Sentences were books of sentences. The Summa pro- ceeded by the same method, or rather issued from it, as its consummation and perfect logical form ; thus the ^ See Denifle, " Die Sentenzen Abaelard*s und die Bearbeitimgen seiner Theologia," ArchivfUr LitereUur und Kirchengeschichte, i. p. 402 sqq. and p. 584 sgq. Also Picavet, *' Abelard et Alexander de Hales, createurs de la methode schol- astique," Bib. de VScole des hatUes itudes, sciences religiettses, t. vii. p. 221 sqg* ^ For certain other precursors of the Lombard see ante. Vol. I. p. 106, note i. He also used the ni/TTj yvtbtrctas of John of Damascus (eighth century). This " Spring of Knowledge " was made up from the writings of the Greek Fathers, and is still an authoritative handbook of dogma for the Eastern church. In a Latin translation it afforded a model for the Lombard to follow or depart from, and also influenced Aquinas. Cf. Grabmann, Ges. der schol. Methode^ i. p. 108 sqq. ; ii. p. 128 sqq. CHAP. XXXV METHODS OF SCHOLASTICISM 337 scholastic method arrived at its highest constructive energy. In the Sentences one excerpted opinion was given and another possibly divergent, and at the end an adjustment was presented. This comparative formlessness attains in the Summa a serried syllogistic structure. Thomas, who finally perfects it, presents his connected and successive topics divided into quaestiones, which are subdivided into articuli, whose titles give the point to be discussed. He states first, and frequently in his own syllogistic terms, the successive negative arguments ; and then the counter-proposition, which usually is a citation from Scripture or from Augustine. Then with clear logic he constructs the true positive conclusion in accordance with the authority which he has last adduced. He then refutes each of the adverse arguments in turn. Thus the method of the Sentences is' rendered dialectic- ally organic ; and with the perfecting of the form of quaestio and articulus, and the logical linking of successive topics, the whole composition, from a congeries, becomes a structure, organic likewise, a veritable Summa, and a Summa of a science which has unity and consistency. This science is sacra doctrina, theologia. Moreover, as compared with the Sentences, the contents of the Summa are enormously en- larged. For between the time of the Lombard and that of i Thomas, there has come the whole of Aristotle, and what is '; more, the mastery of the whole of Aristotle, which Thomas j incorporate^ in a complete and organic statement of the \ Christian scheme of salvation.^ ^ Two extracts, one from the Sentences and one from the Summa, touching the same matter, will illustrate the stage in the scholastic process reached by Peter Lombard, about the year 1150, and that attained by Thomas Aquinas a hundred years later. The Lombard's Four Books of Sentences are divided into Distinctiones, with sub-titles to the latter. Distinctio xlvi, of the first Book bears the general title : " The opinion {sententia) declaring that the will of God which is himself, cannot be frustrated, seems to be opposed by some opinions." The first subdivision of the text begins : '* Here the question rises. For it is said by the authorities above adduced [the preceding Distinctio had discussed " The will of God which is His essence, one and eternal "] that the will of God, which is himself, and is called His good pleasure {beneplacitum) cannot be frustrated, because by that will fecit quaecumque voluit in caelo et in terra, which — witness the Apostle — mui resistit, [I leave the Scriptural quotations in Latin, so as to mark them.] It is queried, therefore, how one should understand what the Apostle says con- cerning the Lord, i Tim. 2 : Qui vult omnes homines salvos fieri. For since all are not saved, but many are damned, that which God wills to take place, seems VOL. II Z 338 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh not to take place (become, fieri), the human will obstructing the will of God The Lord also in the Gospel reproaching the wicked city, Matt, xxiii., says : Quoties volui congregate filios tuos, sicut gallina congregai pullos suos sub tdis, et noluisti. Thus it might seem from these, that the will of God may be overcome by the wUl of men, and, resisted by the unwillingness of the weakest, the Most Strong may prove unable to do what He willed. Where then is that omnipotence by which in coelo et terra, according to the Prophet, omnia quaecumque voluit fecit ? And how does nothing withstand His will, if He wished to gather the children of Jerusalem, and did not ? For these sayings seem indeed to oppose what has been stated." The second paragraph proceeds : " But let us see the solution , and first hear how what the Lord said should be understood. For it was not intended to mean (as Augustine says, Enchiridion, c. 97, solving this question) that the Lord wished to gather the children of Jerusalem, and did not do what He willed because she would not ; but rather she did not wish her children to be gathered by Him, yet in spite of her unwillingness {qua tamen nolente) He gathered all He willed of her children. . . . And the sense is : As many as I have gathered by my will, always effective, I have gathered, thou being unwilling. Hence it is evident that these words of the Lord are not opposed to the authorities referred to." (Paragraph 3) ** Now it remains to see how the aforesaid words do not con- tradict what the Apostle said of the Lord : VuU omnes homines salvos fieri. Because of these words many have wandered from the truth, saying that God willed many things which did not come to pass. But the saying is not thus to be under- stood, as if God willed any to be saved, and they were not. For who can be so impiously foolish as to say that God cannot change the evil wills of men to good when and where He will ? Surely what is said in Psalm 113, Quaecumque voluit fecit, is not true, if He willed anything and did not accomplish it. Or, — (and this is still more shameful) for that reason He did not do it, because what the Omnipotent willed to come to pass, the will of man obstructed. Hence when we read in Holy Scripture velit omnes homines salvos fieri, we should not detract from the will of oimiipotent God, but imderstand the text to mean that no man is saved except whom He wiUs to be saved : not that there is no man whom He does not will to be saved, but that no man may be saved except whom He wills should be saved. . . . Thus also is to be understood the text from John i. ; Illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum ; not as if th«:e is no man who is not lighted, but that none is lighted save from Him. . . ." The next and fourth paragraph takes up the problem whether evil, that is sin, takes place by the will of God, or He unwilling {eo nolente). " As to this, divers men thinking diversely have been found in contradiction. For some say that God wills evils to be or become {esse vel fieri) yet does not will evils. But others say that He neither wills evUs to be nor to become. Yet these and those agree in declaring that God does not will evils. Yet each with arguments as well as authorities strives to make good his assertion." We will not follow the Lombard through this thorny problem. He cuts his way with passages from his chief patristic authority, Augustine, and in the end concludes : " Leaving this and other like foolish opinions, and favouring the sounder view, which is more fully sanctioned by the testimonies of the Saints, we may say that God neither wills evils to become, nor wills that they should not become, nor yet is He unwilling {nolle) that they should become. All that He wills to become, becomes, and all that He wills not to become does not become. Yet many things become which He does not will to become, as every evil." Thus the Lombard. Now let us see how Thomas, in his Summa theologiae, Pars Prima, Quaestio xix. Articulus ix. expoimds the point : utrum voluntas Dei sit malorum. " As to the ninth articulus thus one proceeds, (i) It seems [Videtur, formula for stating the initial argument which will not be approved] that the will of God CHAP. XXXV METHODS OF SCHOLASTICISM 339 is [the cause] of evils. For God wills every good that becomes (i,e. comes into existence). But it is good that evils should come ; for Augustine says in the Enchiridion : ' Although those things which are evils, in so far as they are evils, are not goods ; yet it is good [honum) that there should be not only goods [bona) but evils.* Therefore God wills evils." " (2) Moreover [Praeterea, Thomas's regular formula for introducing the succeeding arguments, which he will not approve] Dionysius says, iv. cap. de divinis nominibtis : * There will be evil making for the perfection of the whole/ And Augustine says in the Enchiridion : ' Out of all (things) the admirable beauty of the universe arises ; wherein even that which is called evil, well ordered and set in its place, commends the good more highly ; since the good pleases more, and is the more praiseworthy, when compared with evil.' But God wills every- thing that pertains to the perfection and grace of the universe ; since this is what God chiefly wills in His creation. Therefore God wills evils." " (3) Moreover, the occurrence and non- occurrence of evils {mala fieri, et nan fieri) are contradictory opposites. But God does not will evils not to occur ; because since some evils do occur, the will of God would not be fulfilled. Therefore God wills evils to occur." '* Sed contra est [Thomas's formula for stating the opinion which he will approve] what Augustine says in his book of Eighty-three Questions : ' No wise man is the author of man's deterioration ; yet God is more excellent than any wise man ; much less then, is God the author of any one's deterioration. But He is said to be the author when He is spoken of as wilUng anything. There- fore man becomes worse, God not willing it. But with every evil, some one becomes worse. Therefore God does not will evils.' " " Respondeo dicendum quod [Thomas's formula for commencing his elucidation] since the reason (or ground or cause, ratio) of the good is Ukewise the reason of the desirable (as discussed previously), evil is opposed to good : it is impossible that any evil, as evil, should be desired, either by the natural appetite or the animal, or the intellectual, which is will. But some evil may be desired per accidens, in so far as it conduces to some good. And this is apparent in any appetite. For the natural impulse {agens naturale) does not aim at privation or destruction [corruptio) ; but at form, to which the privation of another form may be joined ; and at the generation of one, which is the destruction of another. Thus a lion, killing a stag, aims at food, to which is joined the killing of an animal. Likewise the fornicator aims at enjoyment, to which is joined the deformity of guilt. " Thus evil which is joined to some good, is privation of another good. Never, therefore, is evil desired, not even per accidens, unless the good to which the evil is joined appears greater than the good which is annulled through the evil. But God wills no good more than His goodness ; yet He wills some one good more than some other good. Hence the evil of guilt, which destroys relationship to divine good {quod privat ordinem ad honum divinum), God in no way wills. But the evil of natural defect, or the evil of penalty. He wills in willing some good to which such evil is joined ; as, in willing righteousness, He wills penalty ; and in willing that the order of nature be preserved, He wills certain natural corruptions. " Ad primum ergo dicendum [Thomas's formula for commencing his reply to the first false argument] that certain ones have said that although God does not will evils. He wills evils to be or become : because, although evils are not goods, yet it is good that evils should be or become. They said this for the reason that those things which are evil in themselves, are ordained for some good ; and they deemed this ordainment involved in saying honum est mala esse vel fieri. Bm that is not said rightly. Because evil is not ordained for good per se but per accidens. For it is beyond the sinner's intent that good should come of it ; just as it was beyond the intent of the tyrants that from their persecutions the patience of the martyrs should shine forth. And therefore it cannot be said that such 340 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii ordainment for good is involved in saying that it is good for evil to be or become : because nothing is adjudged according to what pertains to it pef accidens but according to what pertains to it per se" " Ad secundum dicendum that evil is not wrought for the perfection or beauty of the whole except per acctdensj as has been shown. Hence this which Dionysius says, that evil makes for the perfection of the whole, may lead to an illogical con- clusion." " Ad tertium dicendum that although the occurrence and non- occurrence of evUs are opposed as contradictories ; yet to will the occurrence and to will the non-occurrence of evils, are not opposed as contradictories, since both one and the other are affirmative. God therefore neither wills the occurrence nor the non-occurrence of evils ; but wills to permit their occurrence. And this is good." As to matters discussed in this Chapter and in Chapter XXXVI., see generally the important work of M. Grabmann, Geschichte der scholastischen Methode (Freiburg i. B., vols. i. and ii., 1909, 1911 ; vol. iii., on the fully developed scholasticism of the thirteenth century, has not appeared). As to the Lombard especially, see Grabmann, o.c, ii. p. 359 sqq. CHAPTER XXXVI CLASSIFICATION OF TOPICS ; STAGES OF EVOLUTION I. Philosophic Classification of the Sciences ; the Arrange- ment OF Vincent's Encyclopaedia, of the Lombard's Sentences^ of Aquinas's Summa theologiae. II. The Stages of Development : Grammar, Logic, Meta- LOGICS. The problem of classification presented itself to Gerbert as one involved in the rational study of the ancient material.^ As scholasticism culminated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the problem became one of arrangement and presentation of the mass of knowledge and argument which the Middle Ages had at length made their own, and were prepared to re-express. This ordering was influenced by a twofold principle of classification ; for, as abundantly shown by Aquinas,^ theology in which all is ordered with reference to God, will properly follow an arrangement of topics quite unsuitable to the natural or human sciences, which treat of things with respect to themselves. But the mediaeval practice was more confused than the theory ; , because the interest in human knowledge was apt to bei touched by motives sounding in the need of divine salvation ■ . and speculation could not free itself from the moving principles of Christian theology. On the other hand, an enormous quantity of human dialectic, and a prodigious mass of what strikes us as profane information, or mis- information, was carried into the mediaeval Summa, and still more into those encyclopaedias which attempted to include ^ Ante, Chapter XII. ^ Ante, pp. 319 sqq. 341 342 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh all knowledge, and still were influenced in their aim by a religious purpose.^ As the human sciences came from the pagan antique, the accepted classifications of them naturally were taken from Greek philosophy. They followed either the so-called Platonic division, into Physics, Ethics, and Logic,^ or the Aristotelian division of philosophy into theoretical and practical. The former scheme, of which it is not certain that Plato was the author, passed on through the Stoic and Epicurean systems of philosophy, was recognized by the Church Fathers, and received Augustine's approval. It was made known to the Middle Ages through Cassiodorus, Isidore, Alcuin, Rabanus, Eriugena, and others. Nevertheless the Aristotelian division of philosophy into theoretical and practical was destined to prevail. It was introduced to the western Middle Ages through Boethius's Commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge,^ and adopted by Gerbert ; later it passed over through translations of Arabic writings. It was accepted by Hugo of St. Victor, by Albertus Magnus and by Thomas, to mention only the greatest names ; and was set forth in detail with explanation and comment in a number of treatises, such as Gundissalinus's De divisione philosophiae, and Hugo of St. Victor's Eruditio didascalica,^ which were formal and schematic introductions to the study of philosophy and its various branches. The usual subdivisions of these two general parts of philosophy were as follows. Theoretica (or Theorica) was divided into (i) Physics, or scientia naturalis, (2) Mathematics, and (3) Metaphysics or Theology, or divina scientia, as it might be called. Physics and Mathematics were again divided into more special sciences. Practica was divided commonly into Ethics, Economics, Pohtics, or into Ethics and Artes mechanicae. There was a difference of opinion as ^ The Speculum majus of Vincent of Beauvais will afford the principal example of the resulting hybrid arrangement. ^ Ludwig Baur, Dominicus Gundissalinus, De divisione philosophiae (Baeiimker's Beitrdge, Munster, 1903), p. 193 sqg., to which I am indebted for what I have to say in the next few pages. Cf. Grabmann, o.c, ii. p. 28 sqq. 3 Migne, PcU. Lot. 64, col. 10 sqq. ■* These works were written near the middle of the twelfth century, Gundis- salinus was Archdeacon of Segovia and drew upon Arab writings. CHAP. XXXVI CLASSIFICATION OF TOPICS 343 to what to do with Logic. It had, to be sure, its position in the current Trivium, along with grammar and rhetoric. But this was merely current, and might not approve itself on deeper reflection. Gundissalinus speaks of three propae- deutic sciences, the scientiae eloquentiae, grammar, poetics, andrhetoric,and then puts Logic after them as a scientia media between theae primary educational matters and philosophy, i.e. the whole range of knowledge, theoretical and practical. Again, over against philosophia realis, which contains both the theoretica (or speculativa) and the pradica, Thomas Aquinas sets the philosophia rationalis, or logic ; and Richard Kilwardby opposes logica, the scientia rationalis, to practica, in his division.^ This last-named philosopher was the pupil and then the hostile critic of Aquinas, and also became Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the author of a careful and elaborate classification of the parts of philosophy, entitled De ortu et divisione philosophiae.^ In it, following the broad distinction between res divinae and res humanae, Kilwardby divides philosophy into speculativa and practica. Speculativa is divided into naturalis (physics), mathematica, and divina (metaphysics). He does not divide the first and third of these ; but he divides mathematica into those sciences which treat of quantity in continuity and separation respectively {quantitas continua and quantitas discreta). The former embrace geometry, astronomy and astrology, and perspec- tive ; the latter, music and arithmetic. Practica, which is concerned with res humanae, is divided into activa and sermocinalis : because res humanae consist either of opera- tiones or locutiones. The activa embraces Ethics and mechanics ; the scientia sermocinalis embraces grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Such are Kilwardby's bare captions ; his treatise lengthily treats of the interrelations of these various branches of knowledge. A.n idea of the scholastic discussion of the classification of sciences may be had by following Albertus Magnus's ponderous approach to a consideration of logic : whether it ^ See L. Baur, Gundissalinus, etc., p. 376 sqq. ^ The treatise is not printed. Its captions are given by L. Baur in his Gundis- salinusj pp. 368-375, from which I have borrowed what I give of them. 344 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh be a science, and, if so, what place should be allotted it. We draw from the opening of his liber on the Predicables} that is to say, his exposition of Porphyry's Introduction. x\lbert will consider " what kind of a science (qualis scientia) logic may be, and whether it is any part of philosophy ; what need there is of it, and what may be its use ; then of what it treats, and what are its divisions." The ancients seem to have disagreed, some sapng that logic is no science, since it is rather a modus (mode, manner or method) of every science or branch of knowledge. But these, continues Albertus, have not reflected that although there are many sciences, and each has its special modus, yet there is one modus common to all sciences, pertaining to that which is common to them all : the principle, to wit, that through reason's inquiry, from what is known one arrives at know- ledge of the unknown. This mode or method, common to every science, may be considered in itself, and so may be the subject of a special science. After further balancing of the reasons and authorities pro and con, Albertus concludes : " It is therefore clear that logic is a special science just as in ironworking there is the special art of making a hammer, yet its use pertains to everything made by the ironworker's craft. So this process of discovering the unknown through the known, is something special, and may be studied as a special art and science; yet the use of it pertains to all sciences." He next considers whether logic is a part of philosophy. Some say no, since there are (as they say) only three divisions of philosophy, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics ; others say that logic is a modus of philosophy and not one of its divisions. But, on the contrary, it is shown by others that this view of philosophy omits the practical side, for philosophy's scope comprehends the truth of everything which man may understand, including the truth of that which is in ourselves, and strives to comprehend both truth and the process of advancing from the known to a knowledge of the unknown. These point out that ^ Liber de praedicabilibus (tome i. of Albertus's works), which in scholastic logic means the five " universals," genus, species, difference, property, accident (also called the quinque voces), discussed in Porphyry's Introduction to the Cate- gories. The Caiegories themselves are called praedicamenta. CHAP. XXXVI CLASSIFICATION OF TOPICS 345 "... the Peripatetics divided philosophy first into three parts, to wit, into physicam generaliter dictam, and ethicam generaliter dictanty and rationalem likewise taken broadly. I call physica generaliter dicta that which embraces scientia naturalis, discip- linalis, and divina {i.e. physics in a narrower sense, mathematics which is called scientia disciplinalis, and metaphysics which is scientia divina). And I call ethica, that which, broadly taken, contains the scientia monastica, oeconomica and civilis. And I call that the scientia rationalis, broadly taken, which includes every mode of proceeding from the known to the unknown. From which it is evident that logic is a part of philosophy." And finally it may be shown that " if anything is within the scope of philosophy it must be that without which philosophy cannot reach any knowledge. He who is ignorant of logic can acquire no perfect cognition of the un- known, because he is ignorant of the way in which he shoidd proceed from the known to the unknown." From these latter arguments, approved by him and in part stated as his own, Albertus advances to a classification of the parts of logic, which he makes to include rhetoric, poetics, and dialectic, and to be demonstrative, sophistical or disputatious, according to the use to which logic (broadly taken) is applied and the manner in which it may in each case proceed, in advancing from the known to some farther ascertainment or demonstration.^ Soon after this, in dis- cussing the subject of this science, Albertus points out how logic differs from rhetoric and poetics, although with them it may treat of sermo, or speech, and be called a scientia sermonalis ; for, unlike them, it treats of sermo merely as a means of drawing conclusions, and not in and for itself. From the purely philosophical division of the sciences we pass to the hybrid arrangement adopted by Vincent of Beauvais, who died in 1264. This man was a prodigious devourer of books, and for a sufficient pabulum, St. Louis set before him his collection of twelve hundred volumes. Thereupon Vincent compiled the most famous of mediaeval encyclopaedias, employing in that labour enormous diligence and a number of assistants. His ponderous Speculum majus ^ The above gives the arguments of chapters i. and ii. of the work. One notices that Albertus in this exposition of the subject of Porphyry*s treatise, is using the method which Thomas brings to syllogistic perfection in his Summa. 346 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh is drawn from the most serviceable sources, including the works of Albertus, his contemporary, and great scholastics like Hugo of St. Victor, who were no more. It consisted of the Speculum naturale, doctrinale, and historiale ; and a fourth, the Speculum morale, was added by a later hand.^ Turning its leaves, and reading snatches here and there, especially from its Prologues, we shall gain a sufficient illustration of the arrangement of topics followed by this writer, whose faculties seem to drown in his shoreless undertaking.^ In his turgid generalis prologus to the Speculum naturaUy Vincent presents his motives for collecting in one volume. "... certain flowers according to my modicum of faculty, gathered from every one I have been able to read, whether of our Catholic Doctors or the Gentile philosophers and poets. Especially have I drawn from them what seemed to pertain either to the building up of our dogma, or to moral instruction, or to the incitement of charity's devotion, or to the mystic exposition of divine Scripture, or to the manifest or symbolical explanation of its truth. Thus by one grand opus I would appease my studiousness, and perchance, by my labours, profit those who, hke me, try to read as many books as possible, and cull their flowers. Indeed of making many books there is no end, and neither is the eye of the curious reader satisfied, nor the ear of the auditor," He then refers to the evils of false copying and the ascription of extracts to the wrong author. And it seems to him that Church History has been rather neglected, while men have been intent on expounding knotty problems. And now considering how to proceed and group his various matters, Vincent could find no better method than the one he has chosen, "to wit, that after the order of Holy Scripture, ^ It was printed, more than once, in the late fifteenth century ; the most readable edition is that printed at Douai in 1624, in four huge folios. • ^ Boundless as the work appears, neither in mental powers, nor learning, nor in massiveness of achievement, is its author to be compared with Albertus Magnus. The De universo of Rabanus Maurus, Migne in, col. 9-612, is in its arrangement and method a forerunner of Vincent's Speculum. Later predecessors were the English Franciscan Bartolomaeus, whose encyclopaedic De proprietcUibus reruin was written a little before the middle of the twelfth century (see Felder, Studien in Francis canerorder, etc., pp. 251-253), and Lambertus Audomarensis (St. Omer) with his Liber floridus, a general digest of knowledge, historical, ecclesiastical, and natural, taken from many writers, an account of which is given in Migne 163, col. 1004 sqq. CHAP. XXXVI CLASSIFICATION OF TOPICS 347 I should treat first of the Creator, next of the creation, then of man's fall and reparation, and then of events {rebus gestis) chronologically." He proposes to give a summary of titles at the end of the work. Sometimes he may state as his own, things he has had from his teachers or from very well-known books ; and he admits that he did not have time to collate the gesta martyrum, and so some of the abstracts which he gives of these are not by his own hand, but by the hand of scribes (notariorum) . Vincent proposes to call the whole work Speculum majus, a Speculum indeed, or an Imago mundi, " containing in brief whatever, from unnumbered books, I have been able to gather, worthy of consideration, admiration, or imitation as to things which have been made or done or said in the visible or invisible world from the beginning until the end, and even of things to come." He briefly adverts to the utility of his work, and then gives his motive for including history. This he thinks will help us to understand the story of Christ ; and from a perusal of the wars which took place "before the advent of our pacific King, the reader will perceive with what zeal we should fight against our spiritual foes, for our salvation and the eternal glory promised us." From the great slaughter of men in many wars, may be realized also the severity of God against the wicked, who are slain like sheep, and perish body and soul.^ As to nature, Vincent says : " Moreover I have diligently described the nature of things, which, I think, no one will deem useless, who, in the Hght of grace, has read of the power, wisdom and goodness of God, creator, ruler and preserver, in that same book of the Creation appointed for us to read." Moreover, to know about things is useful for preachers and theologians, as Augustine says. But Vincent is conscious of another motive also : " Verily how great is even the humblest beauty of this world, and how pleasing to the eye of reason diligently considering not only the modes and numbers and orders of things, so decorously 1 Here, of course, we have the hands of Esau, but the voice of Augustine and Orosius ! 348 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii appointed throughout the universe, but also the revolving ages which are ceaselessly uncoiled through abatements and succes- sions, and are marked by the death of what is bom. I confess, sinner as I am, with mind befouled in flesh, that I am moved with spiritual sweetness toward the creator and ruler of this world, and honour Him with greater veneration, when I. behold at once the magnitude, and beauty and permanence of His creation. For the mind, lifting itself from the dunghill of its affections, and rising, as it is able, into the Hght of speculation, sees as from a height the greatness of the universe containing in itself infinite places filled with the divers orders of creatures." Here Vincent feels it well to apologize for the limitless- ness of his matter, being only an excerptor, and not really knowing even a single science ; and he refers to the example of Isidore's Etymologiae. He proceeds to enumerate the various sources upon which he relies, and then to summarize the headings of his work ; which in brief are as follows : The Creator. The emp5n:ean heaven and the nature of angels ; the state of the good, and the ruin of the proud, angels. The formless material and the making of the world, and the natture and properties of each created being, according to the order of the Works of the Six Days. The state of the first man. The nature and energies of the soul, and the senses and parts of the human body. God's rest and way of working. The state of the fkst man and the felicity of Paradise. Man's fall and punishment. Sin. The reparation of the Fall. The properties of faith and other virtues in order, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the beatitudes. The number and matter of all the sciences. Chronological history of events in the world, and memorable sayings, from the beginning to our time, with a consideration of the state of souls separated from their bodies, of the times to come, of Antichrist, the end of the World, the resurrection of the dead, the glorification of the saints and the punishments of the wicked. One may stand aghast at the programme. Yet practi- cally all of it would go into a Summa theologiae, excepting the human history, and the matter of what we should call the arts and sciences ! A programme like this might be CHAP. XXXVI CLASSIFICATION OF TOPICS 349 handled summarily, according to the broad captions under which it is stated ; or it might be carried out in such detail as to include all available information, or opinion, touching every part of every topic included under these universal heads. The latter is Vincent's way. Practically he tries to include all knowledge upon everything. The first of his tomes (the Speculum naturale) is to be devoted to a full de- scription of the forms and species of created beings, which make up the visible world. Yet it includes much relating to beings commonly invisible ; for Vincent begins with a treat- ment of the angels. He then passes to a consideration of the seven heavens ; and then to the physical phenomena of nature ; then on to every known species of plant, the cultiva- tion of trees and vines, and the making of wine ; then to the celestial bodies, and after this to living things, birds, fishes, savage beasts, reptiles, the anatomy of animals, — and at last comes to man. He discusses him body and soul, his psycho- logy, and the phenomena of sleep and waking ; then human anatomy — ^nor can he keep from considerations touching the whole creation ; then human generation, and a description of the countries and regions of the earth, with a brief com- pendium of history until the time of Antichrist and the Last Judgment. Of course he is utterly uncritical, even the pseudo-Turpin's fictions as to Charlemagne serving him for authority. Vincent's Prologue to his second tome, the Speculum doctrinalCj briefly mentions the topics of the tota naturalis historia, contained in his first giant tome. In that he had brought his matter down to God's creation of humana natura, omnium rerum finis ac summa — and its spoliation [destitutio) through sin. Humana natura as constituted by God, was a universitas of all nature or created being, corporeal and spiritual. Now " in this second part, in like fashion we propose to treat of the plenary restitution of that destitute nature. . . . And since that restitution, or restoration, is effected and perfected by doctrina (imparted knowledge, science), this part not improperly is called the Speculum doctrinale. For of a surety everything pertaining to recovering or defending man's spiritual or temporal welfare {salutem) is embraced under doctrina. In this book, the sciences 350 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii (doctrinae) and arts are treated thus : First concerning all of them in general, to wit, concerning their invention, origin and species ; and concerning the method of acquiring them. Then concerning the singular arts and sciences in particular. And here first con- cerning those of the Trivium, which are devoted to language (grammar, rhetoric, logic) ; for without these, the others cannot be learned or communicated. Next concerning the practical ones {practica), because through them, the eyes of the mind being clarified, one ascends to the speculative {theorica). Then also concerning the mechanical ones ; since, as they consist in making [operatio), they are joined by affinity to the practica. Finally concerning the speculative sciences {theorica), because the end and aim {finis) of all the rest is placed by the wise in them. And since (as Jerome says) one cannot know the power (vis) of the antidote imless the power of the poison first is understood, there- fore to the reparatio doctrinalis of the human race, the subject of the book, something is prefixed as a brief epilogue from the former book, concerning the faU and misery of man, in which he still labours, as the penalty for his sin, in lamentable exile." So Vincent begins with the fall and misery of man ; the peccatum and the supplicium. Then he proceeds to discuss the goods (6owa) which God bestows, like the mental powers by which man may learn wisdom, and how to strive against error and vice, and be overcome solely by the desire of the highest and immutable good. He speaks also of the corporeal goods bestowed on man, and the beauty and utility of visible things ; and then of the principal evils ; — ignorance which corrupts the divine image in man, concupis- cence which destroys the divine similitude, sickness which destroyshis original bodily immortality. "And the remedies are three by which these three evils may be repelled, and the three goods restored, to wit, Wisdom, Virtue, and Need." Here we touch the gist of the ordering of jtopics in the Speculum doctrinale, which treats of all the arts and sciences : " For the obtaining of these three remedies every art and every* disciplina was invented. In order to gain Wisdom, Theorica was devised ; and Practica for the sake of virtue ; and for Need's sake, Mechanica, Theorica driving out ignorance, illuminates Wisdom ; Practica shutting out vice, strengthens Virtue ; Mechanica pro- viding against pemuy, tempers the infirmities of the present Ufe. Theorica, in all that is and that is not, chooses to investigate the CHAP. XXXVI CLASSIFICATION OF TOPICS 351 true. Practica determines the correct way of living and the form of discipline, according to the institution of the virtues. Mechanica, occupied with fleeting things, strives to provide for the needs of the body. For the end and aim of all human actions and studies, which reason regulates, ought to look either to the reparation of the integrity of our nature or to alleviating the needs to which life is subjected. The integrity of our nature is repaired by Wisdom, to which Theorica relates, and by Virtue, which Practica cultivates. Need is alleviated by the administra-. tion of temporalities, to which Mechanica attends. Last found of all is Logic, source of eloquence, through which the wise who understand the aforesaid principal sciences and disciplines, may discourse upon them more correctly, truly and elegantly ; more correctly, through Grammar ; more truly, through Dialectic ; more elegantly, through Rhetoric." ^ Thus the entire round of arts and sciences is connected with man's corporeal and spiritual welfare, and is made to bear directly or indirectly on his salvation. All constitutes doctrina, and by doctrina man is saved. This is the reason for including the arts and sciences in one tome, rightly called the Speculum doctrinale. We need not follow the detail, but may view as from afar the long course ploughed by Vincent through his matter. He first sketches the history of antique philosophy, and then turns to books and language, and presents a glossary of Latin synonyms. Book II. treats of Grammar, Book HI. of Logic, Book IV. of Practica scientia or Ethica, first giving pagan ethics and then passing on to the virtues of the monastic life. Book V. is a continuation of this subject. Book VL concerns the Scientia oeconomica, treating of domestic economy, then of agriculture. Books VIL and VIII. take up Politica, and, having discussed political institutions, proceed to a treatment of law — the law of persons, things, and actions, according to the canon and the civil law. Books IX. and X. consider Crimes — simony, heresy, perjury, sacrilege, homicide, rape, adultery, robbery, usury. Book XL is more cheerful, De arte mechanica, and tells of building, the military art, navigation, alchemy, and metals. Book XII. is Medicine, and Books XIII. and XIV. discuss Physics, in connection with the healing art. Book XV. is Natural Philosophy — animals and plants. Book ^ The above is from cap. 9 of liber i. of the Speculum doctrinale. 352 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND .bookvh XVL, De mathematica, treats of arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy, and metaphysics cursorily. Book XVII. like- wise thins out in a somewhat slight discussion of Theology, which was to form the topic of the tome that Vincent did not write. But Vincent did complete another tome, the Speculum historiale. It is a loosely chronological compilation of tradition, myth, and history, with discursions upon the literary works of the characters coming under review. It would be tedious to follow its excerpted presentation of the profane and sacred matter. We may leave Vincent, with the obvious reflection that his work is a conglomerate, both in arrangement and con- tents. It has the pious aim of contributing to man's salva- tion, and yet is an attempted universal encyclopaedia of human knowledge, much of which is plainly secular and mundane. The monstrous scope and dual purpose of the work prevented any unity in method and arrangement. More single in aim, and better arranged in consequence, are the Sentences of Peter Lombard and the Summa theologiae of Aquinas. For although their scope, at least the scope of the Summa, is wide, all is ordered with respect to the true aim of sacra doctrina, just as Thomas explained in the passage which we have already given. The alleged principle of the Lombard's division strikes one as curious ; yet he got it from Augustine : Signum and res — ^the symbol and the thing : verily an age-long play of spiritual tendency lay behind these contrasted concepts. Christian doctrina related, perhaps chiefly, to the significance of signa, signs, sjnnbols, allegories, mysteries, sacraments. It was not so strange that the Lombard made this antithesis the ground of his arrangement. Quite as of course he begins by saying it is clear to any one who considers, with God's grace, that the " contents of the Old and New Law are occupied either with res or signa. For as the eminent doctor Augustine says in his Doctrina Christiana, all teaching is of things or signs ; but things are also learned through signs. Properly those are called res which are not employed in order to signify something ; while signa are those whose use is to signify." Then the Lombard separates the CHAP. XXXVI CLASSIFICATION OF TOPICS 353 sacraments from other signa^ because they not only signify, but also confer saving aid ; and he points out that evidently a signum is also some sort of a thing ; but not everything is a signum. He will treat first of res and then of signa. As to res, one must bear in mind, as Augustine says, that some things are to be enjoyed (Jruendum), as from love we cleave to them for their own sake ; and others are to be used {utendum) as a means ; and still others to be both enjoyed and used. " Those which are to be enjoyed make us blessed {beatos) ; those which are to be used, aid us striving for blessedness. . . . We ourselves are the things which are both to be enjoyed and used, and also the angels and the saints. . . . The things which are to be enjoyed are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ; and so the Trinity is summa res." So the Lombard's first two Books .consider res in the descending order of their excellence ; the third considers the Incarnation, which, if not itself a sacrament, and the chief and sum of all sacraments, is the source of those of the New Law, considered in the fourth Book. The scheme is single and orderly; the difficulty will be in actually arranging the various topics within it. Endeavouring to do so, the Lombard in Book I. puts together the doctrine of the Trinity, of the three Persons composing it, and their attributes and qualities. Book II. considers in order, the Angels and, very briefly, the work of the Six Days down to the creation of man ; then the Christian doctrina as to man is presented : his creation and its reasons ; the creation of his anima ; the creation of woman ; the condition of man and woman before the Fall ; their sin ; next, free-will and grace. Book III. treats of the Incarnation, in all the aspects in which it may be known, and of the nature of Christ, His saving merit, and the grace which was in Him ; also of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the seven gifts of the Spirit, and the existence of them all in Christ, Book IV. considers the Sacraments of the New Law : Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, ordination to holy orders, marriage. It concludes with setting forth the Resurrection and the Last Judgment. VOL. 11 2 A 354 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii The first chapters of Genesis were the ultimate source of the Lombard's actual arrangement. And the Summa will follow the same order of treatment. One may perceive how naturally the adoption of this order came to Christian theologians by glancing over Augustine's De Genesi ad KUeram?- This Commentary was partially constructive, and not simply exegetical ; and afforded a cadre, or frame, of topical ordering, which coUld readily be filled out with the contents of the Sentences or even of the Summa : God, in His unity and trinity, the Creation, man especially, his fall, the Incarnation as the saving means of his restoration, and then the Sacraments, and the final Judgment unto heaven and hell. One may say that this was the natural and proper order of presenting the contents of the Christian sacra doctrina. So the great Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas adopts the same order which the Lombard had followed. The Pars prima begins with defining sacra doctrina,^ It then proceeds to consider God — ^whether he exists ; then treats of His simplicitas and perfectio \ next of His attributes ; His bonitas, infinitas, immulabilitas, aeternUas, unitas ; then of our knowledge of Him ; then of His knowledge, and therein of truth and falsity ; thereupon are considered the divine will, love, justice, and pity ; the divine providence and predestination ; the divine power and beatitude. AU this pertains to the unitas of the divine essence; and now Thomas passes on to the Trinitas personarum, or the more distinctive portions of Christian theology. He . treats of the processio and relationes of the divinae Personae, and then of themselves — Father, Son, Holy Spirit — ^and then of their essential relationship and properties. Next he discusses the missio of the divine Persons, and the relations between God and His Creation. First comes the consideration of the principle of creation, the processio creaturarum a Deo, and of the nature of created things, with some discussion of evil, whether it be a thing. Among created beings, Thomas treats first of angels, and at great length ; then of the physical creation, in its order — the work of the six days, but with no great detail. Then 1 Migne, Pai. LaU 34, col. 246-485. ^ AtUe^ p. 320 sqq. CHAP. XXXVI CLASSIFICATION OF TOPICS 355 man, created of spiritual and corporeal substance — his complex nature is to be analysed and fathomed to its depths. Thomas discusses the union of the anima ad corpus ; then the powers of the anima, in generali and in speciali — the intellectual faculties, the appetites, the wiU and its freedom of choice ; how the anima knows — the full Aristotelian theory of cognition is given. Next, more specifically as to the creation of the soul and body of the first man, and the nature of the image and similitude of God within him ; then as to man's condition and faculties while in a state of innocence ; also as to Paradise. This closes the treatment of the creatio et distinctio rerum ; and Thomas passes to their gubernatio, and the problem of how God conserves and moves the corporeal and spiritual ; then concerning the action of one creature on another, and how the angels are ranged in hierarchies, and although purely spiritual beings, minister to men and guard them ; then concerning the action of corporeal things, concerning fate, and the action of men upon men. Here ends Pars prima. The first section of the second part [Prima secundae) begins. In a short Prologue Thomas says that having considered God the Exemplar and His creations, it remains to consider man the Image, in so far as he is the source of his own acts. He then takes up in order : the ultimate end of man ; the nature of man's beatitude, and wherein it consists, and how it may be attained ; then voluntary and involuntary acts, and the nature and action of will ; then fruition, intention, election, deliberation, consent, and actions good and bad, flowing from the will ; then the passions, — concupiscence and pleasure, sadness, hope and despair, fear, anger ; next habits (habitus) and the virtues, intellectual, cardinal, theological ; the gifts of the Spirit, and the beatitudes ; the vices, and sin, and penalty. Thereupon it becomes proper to consider the external causes (principia) of acts : " The external cause iprincipium) moving toward good is God ; who instructs us through law, and aids us through grace. Therefore we must speak, first of law, then of grace." So Thomas discusses : the essentia of law, and the different kinds of law — lex aeterna, lex naturalis, lex humana — their effect and validity ; then 356 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii the precepts of the Old Law (of the Old Testament) ; then as to the law of the Gospel and the need of grace ; and lastly, concerning grace and human merit. The Secunda secundae (the second division of the second part) opens with a Prologue, in which the author says that, having considered generally the virtues and vices, and other things pertaining to the matter of ethics, it is needful to consider these same matters more particularly, each in turn ; " for general moral statements {sermones morales universales) are less useful, inasmuch as actions are always in particu- laribus." A more special statement of moral rules may proceed in two ways : the one from the side of the moral material, discussing this or that virtue or vice ; the other considers what .applies to special orders {speciales status) of men, for instance prelates and the lower clergy, or men devoted to the active or contemplative religious life. " We shall, therefore, consider specially, first what applies to all conditions of men, and then what applies to certain orders (determinatos status)/' Thomas adds that it will be best to consider in each case the virtue and corresponding gift, and the opposing vice, together ; also that " virtues are reducible to seven, the three theological,^ and the four cardinal virtues. Of the intellectual virtues, one is Prudence, which is nmnbered with the cardinal virtues ; but ars does not pertain to morals, which relate to what is to be done, while ars is the correct faculty of making things {recta ratio factibilium).^ The other three intellectual virtues, sapientia, intellectus, et scientia, bear the names of certain gifts of the Holy Spirit, and are considered with them. Moral virtues are all reducible to the cardinal virtues ; and therefore in considering each cardinal virtue all the virtues related to it are considered, and the opposite vices." This classification of the virtues seems anything but clear. And perhaps the weakest feature of the Summa is ^ The three theological virtues are fides, spes, and caritas. They are called thus because Deum habent pro objecto ; and because they are poured {infundun- tur) into us by God alone. They are distinguished from the moral and intellectual virtues because their object surpasses our reason, while the object of the moral and intellectual virtues can be comprehended by human reason [Summay Pars prima secundae, Quaestio Ixii., Art.^1-4). ^ ^^is (lerh. X670U 6.\q$ov$ iroiijriK'^, Arist. Nick. Ethics, vi. 4. CHAP. XXXVI CLASSIFICATION OF TOPICS 357 this scarcely successful ordering, or combination, of the Aristotelian virtues with those more germane to the Chris- tian scheme. However this may be, the author of the Summa proceeds to consider in order : fides, and the gifts [dona) of intellectus and scientia which correspond to the virtue faith ; next the opposing vices : infidelitas, haeresis, apostasia,bhsphemia, and caecitas mentis (spiritual blindness). Next in order come the virtue spes, and the corresponding gift of the Spirit, timor, and the opposing vices of desperatio and praesumptio?- Next, caritas, with its dilectio, its gaudimriy its pax, its misericordia, its heneficentia and eleemosyna, and its correctio fraterna ; then the opposite vices, odium, acedia, invidia, discordia, contentio, schisma, helium, rixa, seditio, scandalum. Next the donum sapientiae, and its opposite, stuUitia ; next, prudentia, and its correspondent gift, con- silium ; and its connected vices, imprudentia, negligentia, and its evil semblances, dolus and fraus. Says Thomas : Consequenter post prudentiam consideran- dum est de Justitia. Whereupon foUows a juristic treat- ment oi jus, justitia, judicium, restitutio, acceptio personarum ; then homicide and other crimes recognized by law. Then come the virtues connected with justitia, to wit, religio, and its acts, devotio, oratio, adoratio, sacrificium, ohlatio, decimae, votum, juramentum ; then the vices opposed to religio : superstitio, idolatria, tentatio Dei, perjurium, sacrilegium, simonia. Next is considered the virtue of pietas ; then ohservantia, with its parts, i.e. dulia (service), obedientia, and its opposite, inohedientia. Next, gratia (thanks) or gratitude, and its opposite, ingratitudo ; next, vindicatio (punishment) ; next, Veritas, with its opposites, hypocrisis, jactantia (boast- ing), and ironia ; next, amicitia, with the vices of adulatio and litigium. Next, the virtue of liheralitas, and its vices, avaritia d.nd prodigalitas ; next, epieikeia {aequitas). Finally, closing this discussion of all that is connected with Justitia, Thomas speaks of its corresponding gift of the Spirit, pietas. Now comes the third cardinal virtue, Fortitudo — under which martyrium is the type of virtuous act ; intimiditas and audacia are the two vices. Then the parts of Fortitudo, ^ One notes that these two, like many other of the vices enumerated, are vices in that they are extremes, in the Aristotelian sense. 358 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii to wit, magnanimitaSy magnificentia, patientia, perseverantia, and the obvious opposing vices. Next, the fourth cardinal virtue, Temperantia, its obvious opposing vices, and its parts, to wit, verecundiuj honestas, abstinentia, sobrietas, castitas, dementia, modestia, humilitas, and the various appropriate acts and opposing vices related to these special virtues. So f ar,^ Thomas has been considering the virtues proper for all men ; and now he comes to those specially pertaining to certain kinds of men, according to their gifts of grace, their modes of life, or the diversity of their offices, or stations. Of the special virtues related to gifts of grace, the first is prophetiay next raptus (vision), then gratia linguarum, and gratia miraculorum. After this, the vita activa and con- templativa, with their appropriate virtues, are considered. And then Thomas proceeds to speak De officiis et statibus hominum, and their respective virtues. Here ends the Secunda secundae, and Pars tertia opens with this Prologue : " Inasmuch as our Saviour Jesus Christ (as witnesseth the Angel, populum suum salvum faciens a peccatis eorum) has shown in himself the way of truth, through which we are able to come to the beatitude of immortal fife by rising again, it is necessary, for the consummation of the whole theological matter, after the consideration of the final end of human life, and of the virtues and vices, that our attention should be fixed upon the Saviour of all and His benefactions to the human race. "As to which, first one must consider the Saviour himself ; secondly, His sacraments, by which we obtain salvation ; thirdly, concerning the end [finis) , immortal life, to which we come by rising again through Him. "As to the first, one has to consider the mystery of the In- carnation, in which God was made man for our salvation, and then those things that were done and suffered by our Saviour, that is, God incarnate." This Prologue indicates sufficiently the order of topics in the Pars tertia of the Summa, through Quaestio xc, at which point the hand of the Angelic Doctor was folded to eternal rest. He was then considering penance, the fourth in his order of Sacraments. All that he had to say as to the person, and attributes, and acts and passion of Christ ^ We are at Quaestio clxxi. of Secunda secundae. CHAP. XXXVI STAGES OF EVOLUTION 359 had been written ; and he had considered the Sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and the eucharist ; he was occupied with poenitentia ; and still other sacraments remained, as well as his final treatment of the matters which lie beyond the grave. So he left his work unfinished, and, in spite of many efforts, unfinishable by any of his pupils or successors.^ II Inasmuch as the matter of their thoughts was trans- mitted to the men of the Middle Ages, and was not drawn from their own observation or constructive reasoning, the fundamental intellectual endeavour for mediaeval men was to apprehend and make their own, and re-express. Their intellectual progress followed this process of appropriation, and falls into three stages — ^learning, organically appro- priating, and re-expressing with added elements of thought. Logically, and generally in time, these three stages were successive. Yet, of course, they overlapped, and may be observed progressing simultaneously. Thus, for example, what was known of Aristotle at the beginning of the twelfth century was slight compared with the knowledge of his philosophy that was opened to western Europe in the latter part of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth. And while, by the middle of the twelfth century, the elements of Aristotle's logic had been thoroughly appropriated, the substantial Aristotelian philosophy had still to be learned and mastered, before it could be reformulated and re-expressed as part of mediaeval thought. Looking solely to the outer form, the three stages of mediaeval thought are exemplified in the Scriptural Com- mentary of the later Carolingian time, in the twelfth-century Books of Sentences, and at last in the more organic Summa theologiae. With this significant evolution and change of outer form, proceeded the more substantial evolution ^ The order which Thomas would have followed in the unfinished conclusion of his Summa theologiae, may be inferred from the order of the last half of Book IV. of his Contra Gentiles, or indeed from the last part of the fourth Book of the Lombard's Sentences. 36o THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii consisting in learning, appropriating, and re-expressing the inherited material. In both cases, these three stages were necessitated by the greatness of the transmitted matter ; for the intellectual energies of the mediaeval period were fuUy occupied with mastering the data proffered so pressingly, with presenting and re-presenting this superabundant material, and recasting it in new forms of statement, which were also expressions, or realizations, of the mediaeval genius. So the mediaeval product may be regarded as given by the past, and by the same token necessitated and controlled. But, on the other hand, each stage of intellectual progress rendered possible the next one. The first stage of learning is represented by the Carolingian period, which we have considered. It was then that the patristic material was extracted from the writings of the Fathers, and rearranged and reapplied, to meet the needs of the time. The mastery of this material had scarcely made such vital progress as to enable the men of the ninth and tenth and eleventh centuries to re-express it largely in terms of their own thinking. In the ninth century, Eriugena affords an extraordinary exception with his drastic restatement of what he had drawn from Pseudo-Dionysius and others ; and at the end comes Anselm, whose genius is metaphysically constructive. But Anselm touches the coming time ; and the springs of Eriugena's genius are hidden from us. As for the antique thought during these Carolingian centuries, Eriugena dealt in his masterful way with what he knew of it through patristic and semi-patristic channels. But let us rather seek it in the curriculum of the Trivium and Quadrivium. What progress Gerbert made in the Quadrivium, that is, in the various branches of mathematics which he taught, has been noted, and to what extent his example was followed by his pupil Fulbert, at the cathedral school of Chartres.^ The courses of the Trivium — ^grammar, rhetoric, logic — demand our closer attention ; for they were the key of the situation. We must keep in mind that we are approaching mediaeval thought from the side of the innate human need of intellectual expression — the impulse 1 Ante, Chapter XIL, iii. CHAP. XXXVI STAGES OF EVOLUTION 361 to know and the need to formulate one's conceptions and express them consistently. For mediaeval men the first indispensable means to this end was grammar, including rhetoric, and the next was logic or dialectic. The Latin language contained the sum of knowledge transmitted to the Middle Ages. And it had to be learned. This was true even in Italy and Spain and France, where each year the current ways of Romance speech were departing more definitely from the parent stock ; it was more patently true in the countries of Teutonic speech. Centuries before, the Roman youth had studied grammar that they might speak and write correctly. Now it was necessary to study Latin grammar, to wit, the true forms and literary usages of the Latin tongue, in order to acquire any branch of knowledge whatsoever, and express one's corresponding thoughts. And men would not at first distinguish sharply between the mediating value of the learned tongue and the learning which it held.i Thus grammar, the study of the Latin language, repre- sented the first stage of knowledge for mediaeval men. This was to remain true through aU the mediaeval centuries ; since aU youths who became scholars had to learn the language before they could study what was contained in it alone. One may also say, and yet not speak fantastically, that grammar, the study of the correct use of the language itself, corresponded spiritually with the main intellectual labour of the Carolingian period. Alcuin's attention is commonly fixed upon the significance of language, Latin of course. And the labours of his pupil Rabanus, and the ^ There were, of course, attempts at translation, notably those of Notker the German (see ante, Vol. I., p. 309) and Alfred's translation of Boethius's De con- solatione. But such were made only of the popular parts of Scripture {e.g. the Psalms) or of very elementary profane treatises. To what extent Notker's translations were used, is hard to say. But at all events any one really seeking learning, studied and worked and thought in the medium of Latin ; for the bulk of the patristic writings never were translated ; and when the works of Aristotle had at last reached the Middle Ages in the Latin tongue, they were studied in that tongue. Because of the crudeness of the vernacular tongues, the Latin classics were even more untranslatable in the tenth or eleventh century than now. One may add, that it was fortunate for the progress of mediaeval learning that Latin was the one language used by all scholars in all cotmtries. This facili- tated the diffusion of knowledge. How slow and painful would have been that diffusion if the difierent vernacular tongues had been used in their respective countries for serious writing. 362 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii latter's pupil Walaf rid, are, as it were, devoted to the grammar of learning. That is to say, they read and endeavour to understand the works of the Fathers ; they compare and collate, and make volumes of extracts, which they arrange for the most part as Scripture commentaries ; commentaries, that is, upon the significance of the canonical writings which were the substance of aU wisdom, but needed much explica- tion. Such works were the very grammar of knowledge, being devoted to the exposition of the meaning of the Scriptures and the vast burden of patristic thought. A like purpose was evinced in the efforts of the great emperor himself to re-establish schools of grammar, in order that the Scriptures might be more correctly understood, and the expositions of the holy Fathers. In fine, just' as know- ledge of the Latin tongue was the end and aim of grammar, so a correct understanding of what was contained in Latin books was the aim of the intellectual labours of this period. It all represented the first stage in the mediaeval acquisition of knowledge, or in the presentation or expression of the same ; and thus the first stage in the mediaeval endeavour to realize the human impulse to know. The next course of the Trivium was logic ; and likewise its study wiU represent truly the second stage in the mediaeval realization of the human impulse to know, to wit, the second stage in the appropriation and expression of the knowledge transmitted from the past. We have spoken at some length of the logical studies of Gerbert, and his endeavours to adjust his thinking and classify the branches of knowledge by means of formal logic.^ Those discussions of his which seem somewhat puerile to us, were essential to his endeavours to formulate what he had learned, and present it as rational and ordered knowledge. Logic is properly the stage succeeding grammar in the formulation of rational knowledge. At least it was for men of Gerbert*s time, and the following centuries. Rightly enough they looked on logic as a scientia sermotionalis, which on one side touched sheer linguistics, and on the other, had for its field the further processes of reason. Thus Hugo of St. Victor, Abaelard's very great contemporary, says : 1 Ante, Chapter XII., i. CHAP. XXXVI STAGES OF EVOLUTION 363 " Logic is named from the Greek word logos, which has a two- fold interpretation. For logos means either sermo or ratio ; and therefore logic may be termed either a scientia sermotionalis or a scientia rationalis. Logica raiionalis embraces dialectic and rhetoric, and is called discretiva (argumentative and exercising judgment) ; logica sermotionalis is the genus which includes grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, to wit, discursive science (dis- ertiva)." ^ The close connection between grammar and logic is evident. Logic treats of language used in rational expres- sion, as well as of the reasoning processes carried on in language. Its elementary chapters teach a rational use of language, whereby men may reach a more deeply consistent expression of their thoughts than is gained from grammar. Yet grammar also is logic, and based on logical principles. All this is exemplified in the logical treatises composing the Aristotelian Organon, which the Middle Ages used. First comes Porphyry's Isagoge, which clearly is bound up in language. Likewise Aristotle's Categories treat of the rational and consistent use of language, or of what may be stated in language. Next it is obvious that the De inferpretatione treats of language used to express thought, its generic function. The more advanced treatises of the Organon, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and Sophistical Elenchi, treat directly and elaborately of the reasoning processes themselves. So one perceives the grammatical affinities of the simpler treatises in the Organon. The more advanced ones seem to stand to them as oratorical rhetoric stands to elementary grammar. For the Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Elenchi are a kind of eristic, training the student to use the processes of thought and their expression in order to attain an end, commonly argumentative. The prior treatises have taught the elements, as it were the orthography and etymology of the rational expression of thought in language ; the latter (even as syntax and rhetoric) , train the student in the use of these elements. And one observes a nice historical fitness in the fact that only the simpler treatises of the Organon were in common use in the early Middle Ages, since they alone were necessary to the ^ Eruditio didascalica, i. cap. 12 {Migne, Pat. Lot. 176, col. 750). 364 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh first staige in the appropriation of the substance of patristic and antique thought. The full Organon was rediscovered, and retaken into use in the middle or latter part of the twelfth century, when men had progressed to a more organic appropriation of the patristic material and what they knew of the antique philosophy.^ Thus in mediaeval education, and in the successive order of appropriating the patristic and the antique, logic stood on grammar's shoulders. It was grammar's rationalized stage, and treated language as the means of expressing thought consistently and validly ; that is, so as not to contravene the necessities of that whereof it was the vehicle. And since language thus treated was in accord with rational thought, it would accord with the realities to which thought corresponds, and might be taken as expressing them. This last reflection introduces metaphysics. And properly. For the three stages in the mediaeval appropriation and expression of knowledge were grammar, logic, metaphysics. Logic has to do with the processes of thought ; with the positing of premises and the drawing of the conclusion. It does not necessarily consider whether the contents of its premises represent realities. This is matter for ontology, metaphysics. Now mediaeval meta- physics, which were those of Greek philosophy, were extremely pre-Kantian, in assuming a correspondence between the necessities or conclusions of thought and the supreme realities, God and the Universe. Nor did mediaeval logic doubt that its processes could elucidate and express the veritable natures of things. So mediaeval logic readily wandered into the province of metaphysics, and ignored the line between the two. Yet there is little metaphysics in the Organon ; none in its simpler treatises. So there was none in the elementary logical instruction of the schools before the twelfth century at least.2 One may always distinguish between logic and ^ Cf. Mandoimet, Siger de Brabant, etc., p. 6 {2nd ed., Louvain, 1911). Grabmann, o.c, ii. p. 68 sqq., says that Otto of Freising (d. 1158) was the first to show a thorough knowledge of the entke Ofganon. See also Hofmeister, " Studien iiber Otto von Freising,'* Neues Archiv fur deutsche Geschichtskunde, Bd. xxxvii., p. 99 sqq., and p. 635 sqq. (Hannover, 1911, 1912). ^ Cf. Abelson, The Seven Liberal Arts (New York, 1906). CHAP. XXXVI STAGES OF EVOLUTION 365 metaphysics ; and it is to our purpose to do so here. For as we have taken logic to represent the second stage in the mediaeval appropriation of knowledge, so metaphysics, poised in turn on logic's shoulders, is very representative of the third stage, to wit, the stage of systematic and organic re-expression of the ancient matter, with elements added by the great schoolmen. Metaphysics was very properly the final stage. The grammatical represented an elementary learning of what the past had transmitted ; the logical a further retrying of the matter, an attempt to understand and express it, formulate parts of it anew with deeper consistency of expression. Then follows the attempt for final and universal consistency : final, inasmuch as thought penetrates to the nature of things and expresses realities and the relationships of realities ; and universal, in that it seeks to order and systematize all its concepts, and bring them to unity in a Summa — a perfected scheme of rational presentation of God and His creation. This will be, largely speaking, the final endeavour of the mediaeval man to ease his mind, and realize his impulse to know and express himself with uttermost consistency. So for mediaeval men, metaphysics stood on logic's shoulders and represented the final completion of their thought, in a universal system and scheme of God and man and things.^ But the first part of this proposition had not been true with Greek philosophy. Metaphysics is properly occupied with being, in its ultimate essence and relation- ships ; with the consistent putting together of things, to wit, the presentation or expression of them so as not to disagree with any of the data recognized as pertinent. The thinker considers profoundly, seeking to penetrate the ultimate reality and relationships of things, through which a universal whole is constituted. This makes ontology, metaphysics— the science of being, of causes, and so the science of the first Cause, God. Aristotle called this the *' first *' philosophy, because lying at the base of all branches of knowledge, and ^ I am speaking generally, that is to say, omitting for the present the aberrant or special or intrusive tendencies found in a man like Roger Bacon, for example. They were of importance for what was to come thereafter ; but are not broadly representative of the Middle Ages. 366 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh depending on nothing beyond itself. Some time after his death, the Peripatetics and then the Neo-Platonists called this first science by the name of Metaphysics, " after " or " beyond " physics, if one will, perhaps because of the actual order of treatment in the schools. The term Metaphysics is vague enough ; either " first *' philosophy or " ontology " is preferable. Yet as to Greek philosophy the term has apt historical suggestiveness. For it did come after physics in time, and was in fact evoked by the imperfect method and consequent contradictions of the earlier philosophies. From the beginning, Greek philosophy drove straight at the cause or origin of things — surely the central problem of metaphysics. Thales and the other lonians began with rational, though crude, hypotheses as to the sources of the universe. These were first attempts to reach a consistent expression of its origin and nature. Each succeeding philosopher considered further, from the vantage-ground of the recognized inconsistencies or inade- quacies in the theories of his predecessors. He was thus led on to consider more profoundly the essential relationships of things, the very truth of their relationships, and on and on into the problem of their being. For the verity of rela- tions must be according to the verity of being of the things related. The world about us consists in relationships, of antecedents and sequences, of cause and effect ; and our thought of it is made up of consistencies or contradictions, which last we struggle to eliminate, or to transform to consistencies. These early philosophers looked only to the Aristotelian material cause for the origin and cause of things ; yet reflection plunged them deeper into a consideration of the nature of being and relationships. The other causes were evoked by Anaxagoras and then by Plato, and by them were led into the arena of debate ; and philosophers dis- cussed the efficient and final cause as well as the material. Such discussions are recognized by Plato, and finally by Aristotle as relating to the first principles of cognition and being, and so as constituting metaphysics. The constant search for a deeper consistency of explanation had led on and on through a manifold consideration of those palpable CHAP. XXXVI STAGES OF EVOLUTION 367 relationships which make up the visible world ; it had dis- closed the series of necessary assumptions required by those visible relationships ; and thus the search for causality and origins, and essential relationships, became one and the same — metaphysics . Metaphysics was not ineptly called so, since it had in time come after the cruder physical hypotheses. But such was not the order of mediaeval intellectual progress. The Middle Ages passed through no preliminary course of physical hypotheses, explanatory of the universe. Not physics, but logic (introduced by grammar) led up to the final construction — or rather adoption and reconstruction — of ultimate hypotheses as to God and man, led up to the all- ordering and all-compassing Theologia. Metalogics, rather than Metaphysics, would be the proper name for these final expressions or actualizations of the mediaeval impulse to know. CHAPTER XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICISM I, The Problem of Universals : Abaelard. II. The Mystic Strain : Hugo and Bernard. III. The Later Decades: Bernard Silvestris ; Gilbert de LA Porree ; William of Conches ; John of Salisbury, and Alanus of Lille. From the somewhat elaborate general considerations which have occupied the last two chapters, we turn to the repre- sentative manifestations of mediaeval thought in the twelfth century. These belong in part to the second or " logical/' and in part to the third or " meta-logical," stage of the mediaeval mind. The first or " grammatical " stage was represented by the Carolingian period ; and in reviewing the mental aspects of the eleventh century, we entered upon the second stage, that of logic, or dialectic, to use the more specific mediaeval term. Toward the close of the tenth century, Gerbert was found strenuously occupying himself with logic, and using it as a means of ordering the branches of knowledge. At the end of the eleventh, Anselm has not only considered certain logical problems, but has vaulted over into constructive metaphysical theology. Looking back over Anselm 's work, from the vantage-ground of the twelfth century's further reflections, one may be conscious of a certain genial youthfulness in his reliance upon single arguments, noble and beautiful soarings of the spirit, which however pay little regard to the firmness of the premises from which they spring, and still less to a number of cognate 368 CH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 369 and pertinent considerations, which the twelfth century was to analyze. Anselm's thought perhaps overleaped logic. At all events he appears only occasionally absorbed with its formal problems. Yet he lived in a time of dawning logical con- troversy. Roscellin was even then blowing up the problem of universals, a problem occasioned by the entering of mediaeval thought upon the " logical " stage of its appropria- tion of tfee patristic and antique. The problem of universals, or general ideas, from the standpoint of logic, lies at the basis of consistent thinking. It reverts to the time when Aristotle's assertion of the pre- eminently real existence of individuals broke away from the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. For the early mediaeval philosophers, it took its rise in a famous passage in Porphjry's Introduction to the Categories, the concluding sentence of which, as translated into Latin by Boethius, puts the question thus : " Mox de generibus et speciebus illud quidem sive subsistant sive in nudis intellectibus posita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia sint an incorporalia, et utrum separata a sensibilibus an in sensibilibus posita et circa haec consistentia, dicere recusabo." " Next as to genera and species, do they actually exist or are they merely in thought ; are they corporeal or incorporeal existences ; are they separate from sensible things or only in and of them ? — I refuse to answer/' says Porphyry ; " it is a very lofty business, unsuited to an elementary work." Thus, in three pairs of crude alternatives, the question came over to the early Middle Ages. The men of the Carolingian period took one position or another, without sensing its difficulties, or observing how it lay athwart the path of kno'vC^ledge. Students were not as yet attempting such a dynamic appropriation of the ancient material as would evoke this veritable problem of cognition. Even Gerbert at the close of the tenth century was still so busy with the outer forms and figments of logic that he had no time to enter on those ulterior problems where logic links itself to metaphysics. One Roscellin, living and teaching apparently at Besan9on in the latter part of the eleventh century, seems to have been the first to attack the VOL. II , 2 B 370 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh currently accepted " realism " with some sense of the matter's thorny intricacies. With his own " nominalistic " position we are acquainted only through his adversaries, who imputed to him views which a thoughtful person could hardly have entertained — ^that universals were merely words and breath {flatus vocis). Roscellin seems at all events to have been a man strongly held by the reality of individuals, and one who found it difficult to ascribe a sufficient in- tellectual actuality to the general idea as distinguished from the perception of things and the demands of the concepts of their individual existences. His logical diffi- culties impelled him to theological heresy. The unity in the Trinity became an impossibility ; he could only con- ceive of three beings, just as he might think of three angels ; and he would have spoken of three Gods had usage not forbidden it, says St. Anselm.^ As it was, he said enough to draw on him the condemnation of a Council held at Soissons in 1092, before which he quailed and recanted. For the remainder of his life he so constrained the expression of his thoughts as to ensure his safety. One may say that Plato's theory of ideas was a meta- physical presentation of the universe, sounding in conceptions of reality. But for the Middle Ages, the problem whether genera and species exist when abstracted from their par- ticulars, sprang from logical controversy. It was a problem of cognition, cognizance, understanding ; how should one understand and analyze the contents of a statement, e.g. Socrates is a man. Moreover, it was a fundamental and universal problem of cognition ; for it was not merely occupied, like all mental processes, with bringing data to consistent formulation, but pertained to those processes them- selves by which any and all data are stated or formulated. It touched every formulation of truth, asking, in fine, how are we to think our statements ? The philosophers of the 1 St. Anselm, Epist. lib. iii. 41, ad Fulconem (Migne, Pat. Lot. 158, col. 1192). So Roscellin showed in his own case how problems primarily logical could pass over to metaphysics or theology. Likewise, although on the other side of the controversy, one, Odo of Tournai, a good contemporary realist, found reahsm an ef&cient aid in explaining the transmission of original sin ; ' since for him all men formed but one substance, which was infected once for all by the sin of the first parents. Cf. Haur6au, HisU de la philosophic scholastique, i. pp. 297-308 ; Du Wulf, Hist, of Medieval Philosophy, p. 156, 3rd ed. cH.xxxvn TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 371 eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, did not view this problem as one pertaining to the mind's processes, and as having to do solely with the miderstanding of the contents of a statement. Rather, even as Plato had done, they approached it as if it were a problem of modes of existence ; and for this very reason it had pushed Roscellin into theological error. The discussion was to pass through various stages ; and each stage may seem to us to represent the point reached by the thinker in his analysis of his conscious meaning in stating a proposition. Moreover, each solution may be valid for him who gives it, because of its correspondence to the meaning of his utterances so far as he has analyzed them. But mediaeval men could not take it in this way. Their intellectual task lay in appropriating, and in their own way re-expressing, all that had come to them from an authoritative past. The problem of universals had been stated by a great authority, who put it as pertaining to the objective reality of genera and species. How then might mediaeval men take it otherwise, especially when at all events it pertained in all verity to their endeavour to grasp and re-express the contents of transmitted truth ? It became for a while the crucial problem, the answer to which might indicate the thinker's general intellectual attitude. Far from keeping to logic, to the organon or instrumental part of the mediaeval endeavour to know, it wound itself through metaphysics and theology. Obviously the thinker's answer to the problem would bear relation to his thoughts upon the transcendent reality of spiritual essences. The men who first became impressed with the importance of this problem, gave extreme answers to it, sometimes crassly denying the real existence of universals, but more often hailing them as antecedent and all-permeating realities. If Roscellinus took the former position, a pupil of his, William of Champeaux, held the extreme opposite view, when both he and the twelfth century were still young. One may, however, bear in mind that as the views of the older nominalist are reported only by his enemies, so our knowledge of William's lucubrations comes mainly from the exacerbated pen of Peter Abaelard. 372 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh William held apparently " that the same thing, in its totality and at the same time, existed in its single individuals, among which there was no essential difference, but merely a variety of accidents." ^ Abaelard appears to have per- formed a reductio ad absurdum upon this view that the total genus exists in each individual. He pointed out that in such case the total genus homo would at the same time exist in Socrates and also in Plato, when one of them might be in Rome and the other in Athens. " At this William changed his opinion/' continues Abaelard, " and taught that the genus existed in each individual not essentialiter but indifferenter or [as some texts read] individualiter/' Which seems to mean that William no longer held that the total genus existed in each individual actually, but " indistinguishably," or *' individually." And the students flocked away with Abaelard, he also says ; and William fled the lecture chair. William and Peter ; shall we say of them arcades ambo ? This would be but a harmless depreciation of Abaelard, in the face of the universal and correct tradition as to his epoch-making intellectual progressiveness. Indeed it might be well to let the phrase sound in our ears, just for the reminder's sake, that Abaelard was, like William, a man of logic, although far more expert both in manipulating the dialectic processes and in applying them to theology. Before endeavouring briefly to reconstruct the intellectual qualities of Abaelard from his writings, let us see how the famous open letter to a friend, in giving an apologetic story of the writer's life, discloses the fatalities of his character. This Historia calamitatum suarum makes it plain enough why the crises of his life were all of them catastrophes — even leaving out of view his liaison with Heloise and its penalty. A fatal impulse to annoy seems to drive him from fate to fate ; the old word of Heraclitus ^0o<; avOpmirw Saifiav (character is a man's genius) was so patently true of him. Much that he said was to receive orthodox approval after his time. Quite true. But if, as often remarked, the heresy of one age becomes the accepted doctrine of the next, one still may doubt whether the heretic would have been persona * Abaelard, Hist, calamitatum, chap. 2. CH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 373 grata to the later time. Abaelard at all events would have led others and himself a life of thorns in the thirteenth century or the fourteenth, had he been born again when some of his methods and opinions had become accepted commonplace. Did he have an eye for logical and human truth more piercing than his twelfth-century fellows ? Apparently. Was his need to speak out his truth so much the more imperative than theirs ? Possibly. At all events, he was certainly possessed with an inordinate impulsion to undo his rivals. He sits down before their fortress walls by night, and when they see him there, they know not whether they look on friend or foe — in this auditor. They will find out soon enough. He studied dialectic under William of Champeaux at Paris, as all men were to know. He got what William had to teach, and moved on, to lecture in Melun and elsewhere. Then he returned and sat at William's feet awhile to learn rhetoric, as he announced. But quickly he rose up, and assailed his master's doctrine of universals, and overthrew him, as we have seen. The victim's friends made Abaelard's eristically-won lecturer's seat a prickly one. He left Paris for a while, and then returned and taught on Mount St. Genevieve, outside the city. Up to this time he had not been known to study theology. But in 1113, at the age of thirty-four, he went to Laon to listen to a famous theologian named Anselm, who himself had studied at Bee under a greater Anselm. Says Abaelard in his Historia calamitatum : " So I came to this old man, whose repute was a tradition, rather than merited by talent or learning. Any one who brought his uncertainties to him went away more uncertain still ! He was a marvel in the eyes of his hearers, but a nobody before a questioner. He had a wonderful wordflow, but the sense was contemptible and the reasoning abject." Well, I didn't listen to him long, Abaelard intimates ; but began to absent myself from his lectures, and was brought to task by his auditors, to whom jokingly I said, I, too, could lecture on Scripture ; and I was taken up. Nothing loath, the next day I lectured to them on the passage they had chosen from Ezekiel's obscure prophecies. So, all unprepared, and trusting in my genius, I began to lecture, at first to sparse 374 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii audiences, but they quickly grew. Such is the substance of Abaelard's own account, and he goes on to tell how " the old man aforesaid was violently moved with envy," and shortly Abaelard had to take his lecturings elsewhere. He returned to Paris, and we have the episode of Heloise, for whom, as his life went on, he evinced a devoted affection.^ Now he is monk in the abbey of St. Denis ; and there again he lectures, and takes up certain themes against Roscellinus, whom he seems to resurrect from the quiet of old age to make a target of. This old man, too, hits back, and other vicious people blow up a cloud of envy, until the gifted lecturer finds himself an accused before the Council of Soissons, and his book condemned. Untaught by the burning of his book, Abaelard returns to his convent, and proceeds to unearth statements of the Venerable Bede show- ing that Dionysius the Areopagite who heard Paul preach, was not the St. Denis who became patron saint of France, and founder of the great abbey which even now was sheltering a certain Abaelard, and drawing power and revenue from the fame of its reputed almost apostolic founder. Its abbot and monks did not care to have the abbey walls undermined by truth, and Abaelard was hunted forth from among them. It was after this that he made for himself a lonely refuge, which he named the Paraclete, not far from Troyes, and thither again his pupils followed him in swarms, and built their huts around him in the wilderness. But still mightier foes — or their phantoms — rise against this hunted head. The Historia seems to allude to St. Norbert and to St. Bernard. Whatever the storm was, it was escaped by flight to a remote Breton convent which — stiU for his sins ! — had chosen Abaelard its abbot. There in due course they tried to murder him, and again he fled, this time back to his congenial sphere, the schools of Paris, where he lectured, now at the summit of fame, to enthusiastic multitudes of students. Some years pass, and then the pious jackal, William of St. Thierry, rouses his lion Bernard to contend with Abaelard and crush him, not with dialectic, at the Council of Sens in 1141. In a year he died, a broken man, 1 Ante, Chapter XXVI. cH.xxxvn TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 375 in Cluny's shelter. The conflict had not been of his seeking. Perhaps, had he been less vain, he might have avoided it. When it was upon him, the unhappy athlete of the schools found himself a pigmy matched against the giant of Clairvaux — the Thor and Loki of the Church ! Whether or not the unequal battle raises Abaelard in our esteem, its outcome commends him to our pity ; and all our sympathy stays with him to the last days of a life that was, as if physically, crushed. This accumulation of sad fortune bears witness enough to the character of the man on whose neck it did not fall by accident. Now let us try to reconstruct him intellectually. We have heretofore observed the genius and noted the somewhat swaddling dialectic categories of a certain eager intellect bearing the iname of Gerbert.^ Abaelard's mental processes have advanced beyond such logical stammerings. He and his time are in the fulness of youth, and feel the strength and joyful assurance of an intellectual progress, to be brought about by a new-found proficiency in dialectic. In the first half of the twelfth century, the intellectual genius of the time — and Abaelard was its quintessence — knew itself advancing by this means in truth. A like intellectual consciousness had rejoiced the disputants in Plato's academy, under the inspiration of that beautiful reasoner's exquisite dialectic. The one time, like the other, was justified in its confidence. For in such epochs, language, reasoning, and knowledge advance with equal step ; thought clears up with linguistic and logical analysis ; it becomes clear and illuminated because more distinctly conscious of the char- acter of its processes, and the nature of statement. There is thus a veritable progress, at least in the methodology of truth. In Abaelard's time men had already studied grammar, the grammar of the Latin tongue, and the quasi-grammar of rearrangement and first painful learning of the knowledge which it held. They had studied logic too, its simpler elements, those which consist mainly in a further clearing up of the meanings of language. Some men — Anselm of Canterbury — had already made sudden flights beyond ^ Ante, Chapter XII., i. 376 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh grammar, and out of logic's pale. And the labour of logical and organic appropriation, with some reconstruction of the ancient material, was to go on in this first half of the twelfth century, when Hugo of St. Victor lived as well as Abaelard. Progress by means of dialectic controversy, and first attempts at systematic construction, mark this period intellectually. Abaelard lived and moved and had his being in dialectic. The further interest of Theology was lent him by the spirit of his time. Through the medium of the one he reasoned analytically ; and in the province of the other he applied his reasoning constructively, using patristic materials and the fragments of Greek philosophy scattered through them. Thus Abaelard, a true man of the twelfth century, passes on through logic to theology or metaphysics. For the completeness of his logical knowledge he lived and worked twenty or thirty years too soon. He was unacquainted with the more elaborate logical treatises of Aristotle, to wit, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and Sophistical Elenchi. The sources of his own treatises upon Dialectic are Porphyry's Introduction, Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione, and certain treatises of Boethius.^ A first result of the elementary and quasi-grammatical character of the sources of logic upon which he drew, is that the connection between logic and grammar is very plain with him. Note, for example, this paragraph of his, the substance of which is drawn from Aristotle's Categories : " But neither can substances be compared,^ since comparison relates to attribute, and not to substance ; so it is shown that comparison lies not as to nouns, but as to their attributes. Thus we say whiter but not whitenesser. Much more are substances which have no attribute (adjacentiam) immune from comparison. More or less cannot be preheated of nouns (nomina suhstantiva). For one cannot say more man or less man, as more or less white." ^ ^ Abaelard's Dialectica was published by Cousin, Ouvrages inHits d*AbMafd (Paris, 1836). For a thorough exposition of Abaelard*s logic see Prantl, Ges. der Logik, ii. p. 160 sqq. 2 I.e. as positive, comparative, and superlative. ^ Cousin, Ouvr. in&dits, p. 175. Cf. Aristotle's Categories^ ii. v. 20. The opening of Pars tertia of Abaelard's Dialectica (in Cousin's edition, p. 324 sqq.) affords an interesting example of this logical analysis and reconstruction of state- ment, which seems to originate in sheer grammar, and then advance beyond it. cH.xxxvn TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 377 Evidently this elementary sort of logic, whether with Aristotle or Abaelard, represents a clearing up of the mind on current modes of expression. And sometimes from such studies men make discoveries like that of Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who discovered that he had always been talking prose. Some of the points on which the minds of Abaelard's contemporaries required clarification, would be foolish word-play to ourselves, as, for instance, whether the significance of the sentence homo est animal is contained in the subject, copula, or predicate, or only in all three ; and whether when a word is spoken, the very same word and the whole of it comes to the ears of all the hearers at the same time : " utrum ipsa vox ad aures diversorum simul et tota aequaliter veniat." ^ Such questions, as was observed regarding the problems of logical arrangement in Gerbert's mind, may be pertinent and reasonable enough, if viewed in connection with the intellectual conditions of a period ; just as other questions now make demand on us for solution, being links in the chain of our knowledge, or manner of reasoning. But future men may pass them by as not lying in their path to progressive knowledge of the universe and man. So the problem of universals was still cardinal with Abaelard and his fellow-logicians, who through logic were advancing, as they believed, along the path of objective truth. Its solution would determine the nature of the categories into which logic was fitting whatever might be enunciated or expressed. The inquiry represented an ultimate analysis of statement, — of the general nature of propositions ; and also related to their assumed corre- spondence with realities. What William of Champeaux had unqualifiedly alleged, Abaelard tried to determine more analytically, to wit, the value of the proposition " si aliquid sit ea res quae est species, id est vel homo vel equus et caetera, sit quaelibet res quae eorum genus est, veluti animal aut corpus aut substantia,'' — if species be something, as man, horse, and so forth, then that which is the genus of these may be something, as animal, body, or substance.^ Abaelard's discussion of this matter is a discussion of the true content of propositions. His conclusion is not so ^ Cousiiij o.c. pp. 190, 192. ^ Ibid. p. 331. 378 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh clear as to have occasioned no dispute. One must not think of him as an AristoteUan — ^for he knew little of the sub- stantial philosophy of Aristotle, Our dialectician had absorbed more of Plato, through turbid patristic channels and the current translation of the Timaeus. So his solution of the question of genus and species may prove an analytic bit of eclecticism, an imagined reconcilement of the two great masters. VThe universal or general is, says he, " quod natum est de pluribus praedicari," that which is by its nature adapted to be predicated of a number of things. The universal consists neither in things as such nor in words as such ; it consists rather in general predicability ; it is sermo, sermo praedicabiliSy that which may be stated, as a predicate, of many. As such it is not a mere word : sermo is not merely vox ; that is not the true general predicable. On the other hand, one thing cannot be the predicate of another ; res de re non praedicatur : therefore sermo is not res. Yet Abaelard does not limit the existence of the universal to the concept of him who thinks it. It surely exists in the individuals, since substantia specierum is not different from the essentia individuorum. But does not the general con- cept exist as an objective unity ? Apparently Abaelard would answer : Yes, it does thus exist as a common same- ness (consimilitudo). All this is anything but clear. And the various twelfth- century opinions on universals no longer possess human interest. It is hard for us to distinguish between them, or understand them clearly, or state them intelligibly. They are bound up in a phraseology untranslatable into modem language, because the discussion no longer corresponds to modern ways of thought. But one is interested in the human need which drove Abaelard and his fellows upon the horns of this problem, and in the nature of their endeavours to formulate their thought so as to escape those opposing horns — of an extreme realism which might issue in pantheism, and an extreme nominalism which seemed to deprive predication of substance and validity.^ ^ Prantl's Geschichte der Logik, vol. ii., contains an exhaustive discussion of the various phases of this controversy : its language is little less difl&cult than that of the twelfth- century word- twisters. CH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 379 So much for Abaelard as sheer logician, formal adjuster of the instrumental processes of thinking. Dialectic was for him a first stage in the actualization of the impulse to know, and bring knowledge to consistent expression. It was also his way of approach to the further systematic presentation of his thoughts upon God and man, human society and justice, divine and human. " A new calumny against me, have my rivals lately devised, because I write upon the dialectic art ; affirming that it is not lawful for a Christian to treat of things which do not pertain to the Faith. Not only they say that this science does not prepare us for the Faith, but that it destroys faith by the implications of its arguments. But it is wonderful if I must not discuss what is permitted them to read. If they aUow that the art militates against faith, surely they deem it not to be science (scientia). -¥oT the science of truth is the comprehension of things, whose -^speeies is the wisdom in which faith consists. Truth is not opposed to truth. For not' as falsehood may be opposed to falsity, or evil to evil, can the true be opposed to the true, or the good to the good ; but rather all good things are in accord. All knowledge is good, even that which relates to evil, because a righteous man must have it. Since he may guard against evil, it is necessary that he should know it beforehand : otherwise he could not shun it. Though an act be evil, knowledge regard- ing it is good ; though it be evil to sin, it is good to know the sin, which otherwise we could not shun. Nor is the science mathe- matica to be deemed evil, whose practice (astrology) is evil. Nor is it a crime to know with what services and immolations the demons may be compelled to do our will, but to use such knowledge. For if it were evil to know this, how could God be absolved, who knows the desires and cogitations of aU His creatures, and how the concurrence of demons may be obtained ? If therefore it is not wrong to know, but to do, the evil is to be referred to the act and not to the knowledge. Hence we are convinced that all knowledge, which indeed comes from God alone and from His bounty, is good. Wherefore the study of every science should be conceded to be good, because that which is good comes from it ; and especially one must insist upon the study of that doctrina by which the greater truth is known. This is dialectic, whose function is to distinguish between every truth and falsity : as leader in aU knowledge, it holds the primacy and rule of aU philosophy. The same also is shown to be needful to the Catholic Faith, which cannot without its aid resist the sophistries of schismatics." ^ 1 Cousin, o.c. pp. 434, 435. 38o THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii In this passage the man himself is speaking, and dis- closing his innermost convictions. For Abaelard's nature was set upon understanding all things through reason, even the mysteries of the Faith. He does not say, or quite think, that he will disbelieve whatever he cannot understand ; but his reasoning and temper point to the conclusion. This was obviously true of Abaelard's ethical opinions ; his enemies said it was true of his theology. Such a man would naturally plead for freedom of discussion, even for freedom of conclusion ; but within certain bounds ; for who in the twelfth century could maintain that heretics or infidels did rightly in rejecting the Christian Faith ? Yet Abaelard says heretics should be compelled {coercendi) by reason rather than force.^ And he could at least conceive of the rejection of the Faith upon, say, imperfect rational grounds. In his dialogue between Philosopher, Jew, and Christian, the Christian says to the Philosopher : One cannot argue against you from the authority of Scripture, which you do not recognize ; for no one can be refuted save with arguments drawn from what he admits : Nemo quippe argui nisi ex concessis potest.^ However this sounded in Abaelard's time, the same was enunciated by Thomas Aquinas after him, in a passage already given.^ But it is doubtful whether Thomas would have cared to follow Abaelard in some of the arguments of his Ethics or Book called. Know Thyself, in which he maintains that no act is a sin unless the actor was conscious of its sinfulness ; and therefore that killing the martyrs could not be imputed as sin to those persecutors who deemed themselves thereby to be doing a service acceptable to God.* The titles given by Abaelard to his various treatises are indicative of the critical insistency of his nature. He gave his Ethica the title of Scito te ipsum, Know Thyself : under- stand thy good and ill intentions, and what may be vice or virtue in thee. Through the book, the discussion of right and wrong directs itself as pertinaciously to considerations of ^ Theologia Christiana, iv. (Migne 178, col. 1284). 2 Migne, Pat. Lat. 178, col. 1641. ^ Ante, p. 322. * Sciio te ipsum, cap. 13 {Migne 178, col, 653). CH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 381 human nature as was possible in an age when theological dogma held the final criteria of human conduct. And Abaelard is capable of a lofty insight touching the relation- ship between God and man. " Penitence," says he, " is truly fruitful when grief and contrition proceed from love of God, regarded as benignant, rather than from fear of penalties. Sin cannot endure with this groaning and contrition of heart : for sin is contempt of God, or consent to evil, and the love of God in inspiring our groaning, suffers no ill." ^ Possibly when reading the Scito te ipsum oneis con- scious of a dialectician drawing distinctions, rather than of a moralist searching the heart of the matter. Everything is set forth so reasonably. Yet Abaelard's impartial delight in a rational view of belief and conduct shows nowhere quite as obviously as in his Dialogue between Philosopher and Jew and Christian. Each in turn is made to set forth the best arguments his position admits of. The author does his best for each, and perhaps seems temperamentally drawn to the position of the Philosopher, whom he permits to call the Jews stuUos and the Christians insanos. This philosopher naturally is no Greek of Plato's or Aristotle's time, but a good Roman, who regards moralis philosophia as the finis omnium' disciplinarum, and hangs all intellectual considerations upon a discussion of the summum bonum. His well-worn arguments are put with earnestness. He deprecates the blind acceptance of beliefs by children from their fathers, and the narrowness of mind which keeps men from perceiving the possible truth in others' opinions : " so that whomsoever they see differing from themselves in belief, they deem alien from the mercy of God. Thus condemn- ing all others, they vaunt themselves alone as blessed. Long reflecting on this blindness and pride of the human race, I have unceasingly besought the Divine Pity that He would deign to draw me forth from this miserable Charibdian whirlpool of error, and guide me to a port of safety. So you [addressing both Jew and Christian] behold me solicitous and attentive as a disciple, to the documents of your arguments." ^ ^ Scito te ipsum, cap. 19 {Migne 178, col. 664). ^ Migne 178, col. i6ig. 382 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh The qualities cultivated by dialectic, and the impartial rational temper, here displayed, reappear in the works of Abaelard devoted to sacred doctrine. Enough has been said of the method and somewhat captious qualities of the Sic et non} Unquestionably its manner of presenting the contradictory opinions of the Fathers, without any attempt to reconcile them, tended to bring into view the difficulties inhering in the formulation of Christian belief. And indeed the book made prominent all the diabolic insoluble problems of the Faith or rather of life itself and any view of God and man : predestination, for example ; whether God causes evil ; whether He is omnipotent ; whether He is free. The Lombard's Sentences and Thomas's Summa considered all these questions ; but they strove to solve them ; and Thomas did solve every one, leaving no loose ends to his theology. More potently than Abaelard did the Angelic Doctor employ dialectic in his finished scheme. With him, this propaedeutic discipline, this tool of truth, perfectly performs its task of construction. So also Abaelard intended to work with it ; but his somewhat unconsidered use of the tool did not meet the approval of his con- temporaries. Accordingly, in his more constructive theo- logical treatises his impulse to know and state appears finally actualized in^lthe systematic formulation of convic- tions upon topics of^ultimate interest, to wit, theology, the contents of the Christian Faith, the full relationship of God and man. Did he sever theology from philosophy ? Nay, rather, with him theology was ultimate philosophy. Several times Abaelard rewrote what was substantially the same general work upon Theology, In one of its earliest forms it was burnt by the Council of Soissons in 1121.^ In another form it exists under the title Theologia Christiana ; ^ and the first part of its apparently final revision is now improperly entitled, Introductio ad theologiam.^ 1 Ante, pp. 334 sqq. ^ This has been published by Stolzle : Abaelards isii zu Soissons verurteiUef Tradatus de Unitate et Trinitate divina (1891). 3 Migne 178, col. 1123-1330; Cousin and Jourdain, P. Abaelardi opera^ ii. pp. 357-566 (1859). * Ibid. col. 979-1114 ; Cousin and Jourdain, o.c. pp. 1-149. CH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 383 The first Book of the Theologia Christiana is an exposition of the Trinity, not clinched in syllogisms, but consisting mainly of an orderly presentation of the patristic authorities supporting the author's view of the matter. The testimonies of profane writers are also given. Liber 11. opens by saying that in the former part of the work *' we have collected the testimonia of prophets and philosophers, in support of the faith of the Holy Trinity." Hereupon, by the same method of adducing authorities, Abaelard proceeds to refute those who had blamed him for citing the pagan philosophers. He marshals his supporting excerpts from the Fathers, and remarks : " That nothing is more needful for the defence of our faith than that as against the importunities of all the infidels we should have witness from themselves wherewith to refute them." Then he points to the moral worth of some of the philosophers, to their true teaching of the soul's immortality, and quotes Horace's " Oderunt peccare boni virtutis amore." He continues at some length setting forth their well- nigh evangelical virtue, and speaks of the Gospel as refor- matio legis naturalis. At the beginning of Liber III. comes the statement : " We set the faith of the blessed Trinity as the foundation of all good;" Whereupon Abaelard breaks out in a de- nunciation of those who misuse dialectic ; but again he passes to a defence of the art as an art and branch of know- ledge, and shows its need as a weapon against those wranglers who will be quieted neither by the authority of the saints nor the philosophers : against whom, he, Abaelard, trusting in the divine aid, will turn this weapon as David did the sword of Goliath. He now states the true object of his work : " First then is to be set forth the theme of our whole labour, and the sum of faith ; the unity of the divine substance and the Trinity of persons, which are in God, and are one God. Next we state the objections to our theses, and then the solutions of those objections." And he gives the substance of the Athanasian Creed, From this point, his work becomes more dialectical and constructive, although of course continuing to quote authorities. He is 384 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii emboldened to discuss the deepest mysteries, the very penetralia of the Trinity, and in a way which might well alarm men like Bernard, who desired acceptance of the Faith, with rhetoric, but without discussion. To be sure Abaelard pauses to justify himself by reverting to his apologetic purpose : " Heretics must be coerced with reason rather than by force." However this may be, the wor|/ henceforth shows the passing on of logic to the exercise of its architectonic functions in constructing a systematic theological metaphysics. The miscalled Introductio ad theologiam, as might be expected of a last revision of the author's Theology, is a more organic work. In the Prologue, Abaelard speaks of it as a Summa sacrae eruditionis or an Introductio to Divine Scripture. And again he states the justifjdng purpose of his labour, or rather puts it into the mouths of his disciples who have asked for such a work from him : " Since our , faith, the Christian Faith, seems entangled in such difficult questions, and to stand apart from human reason {d ah humana ratione longius ahsistere), it should be fortified by so much the stronger arguments, especially against the attacks of those who call themselves philosophers." Con- tinuing, Abaelard protests that if in any way, for his sins, he should deviate from the Catholic understanding and statement, he will on seeing his error revise the same, like the blessed Augustine. The work itself opens with a statement of its intended divisions : "In three matters, as I judge, rests the sum of human salvation : Fides, caritas, and sacramentum " ; and he gives his definition of faith, which was so obnoxious to Bernard and others, as the existimaUo rerum nan apparentium. The three extant Books do not conclude the treatment even of the first of these three topics. But one readily sees that were the work complete, its arrangement might correspond with that of Thomas's Summa} One may reiterate that it was more constructively argumentative than the Theologia Christiana, even in the manner of using the cited authorities. For instance, Abaelard's mind is fixed on the analogy between the Neo-Platonic Trinity of Deus, nous, and anima ^ Ante, Chapter XXXVI., i. CH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 385 mundi, and that of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The nous fitly represents Christ, who is the Sapientia Dei — which Abaelard sets forth ; but then with even greater insistency he identifies the Holy Spirit with the world-soul. Nothing gave a stronger warrant to the accusations of heresy brought against him than this last doctrine, with which he was obsessed. Yet what roused St. Bernard and his jackals was not so much any particular opinion of Abaelard, as his dialectic and critical spirit, which insisted upon under- standing and explaining, before believing. " The faith of the righteous believes ; it does not dispute. But that man, suspicious of God [Deum habens suspedum), has no mind to believe what his reason has not previously argued." ^ Still, when Bernard says that faith does not discuss, but believes, he states a conviction of his mind, a conviction corresponding with an inner need of his own to formulate and express his thought. With Abaelard the need to con- sider and analyse was more consciously imperative. He could not avoid the constant query : How shall I think this thing — this thing, for example, which is declared by revelation ? Just as other questioning spirits in other times might be driven upon the query : How shall we think these things which are disclosed by the variegated walls of our physical environment ? Those yield data, or refuse them, and force the mind to put many queries, and come to some adjustment. So experience presents data for adjustment, just as dogma and Scripture and revelation present that which reason must bring within the action of its processes, and endeavour to find rational expression for. II The greatest dialectician of the early twelfth century felt no problems put him by the physical world. That did not attract his inquiry ; it did not touch the reasonings evolved by his self -consciousness, any more than it impressed the fervid mind of his great adversary, St. Bernard. The natural world, however, stirred the mind of Abaelard's con- ^ Bernard, Ep. 338 {Migne 182, col. 542). VOL. II 2 C 386 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvu temporary, Hugo of St. Victor.^ Its colours waved before his reveries, and its visible sublimities drew his mind aloft to the contemplation of God : for him its things were all the things of God — opus condiUonis or opus restaurationis ; ^ the work of foundation, whereby God created the physical world for the support and edification of its crowning creature man ; and the work of restoration, to wit, the incarnation of the Word, and all its sacraments. Hugo was a Platonic and very Christian theologian. He would reason and expound, and yet was well aware that reason could not fathom the nature of God, or bring man to salvation. " Logic, mathematics, physics teach some truth, yet do not reach that truth wherein is the soul's safety, without which whatever is is vain." ^ So Hugo was not primarily a logician, like Abaelard ; nor did he care chiefly for the kind of truth which might be had through logic. Nevertheless the productions of his short life prove the ex- cellence of his mind and his large enthusiasm for knowledge. As Hugo was the head of the school of St. Victor for some years before his death, certain of his works cover topics of ordinary mediaeval education, secular and religious ; while others advance to a more profound expression of the intellectual, or spiritual, interests of their author. For elementary religious instruction, he composed a veritable book of Sentences,^ which preceded the Lombard's in time, but was later than Abaelard's Sic et non. Without striking features, it lucidly and amiably carried out its general purpose of setting forth the authoritative explanations of the elements of the Christian Faith. The writer did not hesitate to quote opposing views, which were not heralded, however, by such danger-signals of contradiction as flare from the chapter headings of the Sic et non. The corresponding treatise upon profane learning — the ^ Whose sacramental theory of the Creation has ahready been given at length, ante, Chapter XXIX. For the incidents of Hugo's life see the same chapter. Bibliography, note to page 87. See also Ostler, '* Die Psychologic des Hugo von St. Viktor" (Baeumker's Bdtrage, Miinster, 1906). 2 De script, cap. 2 (Migne 175, col. 11). ® De script, cap. 2 (Migne 175, col. 10). * Summa sententiarum (Migne 176, col. 42-174) ; also under title of Tractalus theologicus, wrongly ascribed to Hildebert of Lavardin, in Migne 171, col. 1067- 1150- cH.xxxvn TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 387 Eruditio didascalica — ^is of greater interest.^ It commences in elementary fashion, as a manual of study : *' There are two things by which we gain knowledge, to wit, reading and meditation ; reading comes first." The book is to be a guide to the student in the study both of secular and divine writings ; it teaches how to study the artes, and then how to study the Scriptures.^ Even in this manual, Hugo shows himself a meditative soul, and one who seeks to base his most elementary expositions upon the nature and needs of man. The mind, says he, is distracted by things of sense, and does not know itself. It is renewed through study, so that it learns again not to look without for what itself affords. Learning is life's solace, which he who finds is happy, and he who makes his own is blessed.^ For Hugo, philosophy is that which investigates the rationes of things human and divine, seeking ever the final wisdom, which is knowledge of the primaeva ratio : this distinguishes philosophy from the practical sciences, like agriculture : it follows the ratio, and they administer the matter. Again and again, Hugo returns to the thought that the object of all human actiones and studia is to restore the integrity of our nature or mitigate its weaknesses, restore the image of the divine similitude in us, or minister to the needs of life. This likeness is renewed by speculatio veritatis, or exercitium virtutis.^ Such is a pretty broad basis of theory for a high school manual. Hugo proceeds to set forth the scheme, rather than the substance, of the arts and sciences, pausing occasionally to admonish the reader to hold no science vile, since knowledge always is good ; and he points out that all knowledge hangs together in a common coher- ency. He sketches ^ the true student's life : Whoever seeks learning, must not neglect discipline ! He must be humble, and not ashamed to learn from any one ; he must observe decent manners, and not play the fool and make faces at ^ Migne 176, col. 740-838. ^ I think of no previous work so closely resembling the Erud. didas. as the Instituiiones divinarum et saecularum lectionum of Cassiodorus. ^ Erud. did. i. 2. * Here one sees the source of much that we quoted from Vincent de Beauvais, ante, Chapter XXXVI., i. ^ Lib. iii. cap. 13 sqq. 388 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii lecturers on divinity, for thereby he insults God. Yea, and let him mind the example of the ancient sages, who for learning's sake spurned honours, rejected riches, rejoiced in insults, deserted the companionship of men, and gave themselves up to philosophy in desert solitudes, that they might be more free for meditation. Diligent search for wisdom in quietude becomes a scholar ; and likewise poverty, and likewise exile : he is very delicate who clings to his fatherland ; " He is brave to whom every land is home (patria) ; and he is perfect to whom the whole world is an exile ! '' ^ Hugo has much to say of the pulchritudo and the decor of the creature-world. But with him the world and its beauty point to God. One should observe it because of its suggestiveness, the visible suggesting the invisible. Hugo has already been followed in his argument that the world, in its veriest reality, is a symbol.^ Here we follow him along his path of knowledge, which leads on and upward from cogitatio, through meditatio, to contemplatio. The steps in Hugo's scheme are rational, though the summit lies beyond. This path to truth, leading on from the visible symbol to the unseen power, is for him the reason and justification of study ; drawing to God, it makes for man's salvation. Hugo has put perhaps his most lucid exposition of the three grades of knowledge into the first of his Nineteen Sermons on Ecclesiastes,^ He is fond of certain numbers, and here his thought revolves in categories of the number three. Solomon composed three works, the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Canticles. In the first, he addresses his son paternally, admonishing him to pursue virtue and shun vice ; in the second, he shows the grown man that nothing in the world is stable ; finally, in Canticles, he brings the consummate one, who has spurned the world, to the Bridegroom's arms. " Three are the modes of cognition (visiones) belonging to the rational soul : cogitation, meditation, contemplation. It is 1 Erud, did, in. cap. 20. Of. ante, p. 89. 2 Ante, Chapter XXIX, ^ Migne, Pat. Lai. 175, col. 115 sqq. cH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 389 cogitation when the mind is touched with the ideas of things, and the thing itself is by its image presented suddenly, either entering the mind through sense or rising from memory. Meditation is the assiduous and sagacious revision of cogitation, and strives to explain the involved, and penetrate the hidden. Contemplation is the mind's perspicacious and free attention, diffused everywhere throughout the range of whatever may be explored. There is this difference between meditation and contemplation : meditation relates always to things hidden from our intelligence ; contemplation relates to things made manifest, either according to their nature or our capacity. Meditation always is occupied with some one matter to be investigated ; contemplation spreads abroad for the comprehend- ing of riiany things, even the universe. Thus meditation is a certain inquisitive power of the mind, sagaciously striving to look into the obscure and unravel the perplexed. Contemplation is that acumen of intelligence which, keeping all things open to view, comprehends all with clear vision. Thus contemplation has what meditation seeks. " There are two kinds of contemplation : the first is for beginners, and considers creatures ; the kind which comes later, belongs to the perfect, and contemplates the Creator. In the Proverbs, Solomon proceeds as through meditation. In Ecclesi- astes, he ascends to the first grade of contemplation. In the Song of Songs, he transports himself to the final grade. In meditation there is a wresthng of ignorance with knowledge ; and the Ught of truth gleams as in a fog of error. So fire is kindled with difficulty in a heap of green wood ; but then fanned with stronger breath, the flame burns higher, and we see volumes of smoke rolling up, with flame flashing through. Little by little the damp is exhausted, and the leaping fire dispels the smoke. Then victrix flamma darting through the heap of crack- ling wood, springs from branch to branch, and with lambent grasp catches upon every twig ; nor does it rest until it penetrates ever3nvhere and draws into itself all that it finds which is not flame. At length the whole combustible material is purged of its own nature and passes into the simiHtude and property of fire ; then the din is hushed, and the voracious fire having subdued aU, and brought all into its own likeness, composes itself to a high peace and silence, finding nothing more that is alien or opposed to itself. First there was fire with flame and smoke ; then fire with flame, without smoke ; and at last pure fire with neither flame nor smoke." So the victrix flamma achieves the three stages of spiritual insight, fighting its way through the smoke of 390 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh cogitation, through the smoke and flame of meditation and at last through the flame of creature contemplation, to the high peace of God, where all is love's ardent vision, without flame or smoke. It is thus through the grades of knowledge that the soul reaches at last that fulness of intelligence which may be made perfect and inflamed with love, in the contemplation of God. All knowledge is good according to its grade ; only let it always lead on to God, and with humility. Hugo makes his principles clear at the opening of his commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius.^ " The Jews seek a sign, and the Greeks wisdom. There was a certain wisdom which seemed such to them who knew not the true wisdom. The world found it, and began to be puffed up, thinking itself great in this. Confiding in its wisdom, it presumed, and boasted that it would attain the highest wisdom. . . . And it made itself a ladder of the face of the creation, shining toward the invisible things of the Creator. . . . Then those things which were seen were known, and there were other things which were not known ; and through those which were manifest they expected to reach those which were hidden ; and they stumbled and feU into the falsehoods of their own imaginings. ... So God made fooUsh the wisdom of this world ; and He pointed out another wisdom, which seemed fooUshness, and was not. For it preached Christ crucified, in order that truth might be sought in humility. But the world despised it, wishing to contemplate the works of God, which He had made to be marvelled at, and it did not wish to venerate what He had set for imitation. Neither did it look to its own disease, and seek a medicine with piety ; but presuming on a false health, it gave itself over with vain curiosity to the study of alien matters.*' This study made the wisdom of the world, whereby it devised the arts and sciences which we stiU learn. But the world in its pride did not read aright the great book of nature. It had not the knowledge of the true Exemplar, for the sanitation of its inner vision, to wit, the flesh of the eternal Word in the humanity of Jesus. " There were two images {simulacra) set for man, in which he might perceive the unseen : one consisting of nature, the other of grace. The former image was the face of this world ; the latter ^ Migne, Pat. Lai. 175, col. 923 sqq. cH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 391 was the humanity of the Word, And God is shown in both, but He is not understood in both ; since the appearance of nature discloses the artificer, but cannot illuminate the eyes of him who contemplates it." Hugo then classifies the sciences in the usual Aristotelian way, and shows that Christian theology is the end of all philosophy. The first part of philosophia theorica is mathematics, which speculates as to the visible forms of visible things. The second is physics, which scrutinizes the invisible causes of visible things. The third, theology, alone contemplates invisible substances and their invisible natures. Herein is a certain progression ; and the mind mounts to knowledge of the true. Through the visible forms of visible things, it comes to invisible causes of visible things ; and through the invisible causes of visible things, it ascends to invisible substances, and to knowing their natures. This is the summit of philosophy and the perfection of truth. In this, as already said, the wise of this world were made foolish ; because proceeding by the natural document alone, making account only of the elements and appearance of the world, they missed the instructive instances of Grace : which in spite of humble guise afford the clearer insight into truth. This is Hugo's scheme of knowledge ; it begins with cogitatio, then proceeds through meditatio to contemplatio of the creature world, and finally of the Creator. The arts and sciences, as well as the face of nature, afford a simu- lacrum of the unseen Power ; but all this knowledge by itself will not bring man to the perfect knowledge of God. For this he needs the exemplaria of Grace, shown through the incarnation of the Word. Only by virtue of this added means, may man attain to perfect contemplation of the truth of God. That end and final summit is beyond reason's reach ; but the attainment of rational knowledge makes part of the path thither. Keen as was Hugo's intellectual nature, his interest in reason was coupled with a deeper interest in that which reason might neither include nor understand. The intellect does not include the emotional and immediately desiderative elements of human nature ; neither can it comprehend the infinite which is God ; and 392 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii Hugo drew toward God not only through his intellect, but likewise through his desiderative nature, with its yearnings of religious love. That love with him was rational, since its object satisfied his mind as far as his mind could comprehend it. So Hugo's intellectual interests were connected with the emotional side of human nature, and also led up to what transcended reason. Thus they led to what was a mystery because too great for human reason, and they included that which also was somewhat of a mystery to reason because lying partly outside its sphere. Hugo is an instance of the intellectual nature which will not rest in reason's pro- vince, but feels equally impelled to find expression for matters that either exceed the mind, or do not altogether belong to it. Such an intellect is impelled to formulate its convictions in regard to these ; its negative conviction that it cannot comprehend them, and why it cannot ; and its more positive conviction of their value — of the absolute worth of God, and of man's need of Him, and of the love and fear by which men may come close to Him, or avoid His wrath. What Hugo has had to say as to cogitation, meditation, and contemplation, represents his analysis of the stages by which a sufficing sense may be reached of the Creator and His world of creature-kind. In this final wisdom and ardour of contemplation, both human reason and human love have part. The intellect advances along its lines, considering the world, and drawing inferences as to the unseen Being who created and sustains it. Mind's unaided power will not reach. But by the grace of God, supremely manifested in the Incarnation, the man is humbled, and his heart is touched and drawn to love the power of the divine pity and humility. The lesson of the Incarnation and its guiding grace, emboldens the heart and enlightens the mind ; and the man's faculties are strengthened and uplifted to the contemplation of God, wherein the mind is satisfied and the heart at rest. We have here the elements of piety, intellectual and devotional. Hugo is an example of their union ; they also preserve their equal weight in Aquinas. But because Hugo emphasizes the limitations of the intellect, and so ardently cH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 393 recognizes the heart's yearning and immediacy of appercep- tion, he is what is styled a mystic ; a term which we are now in a position to consider, and, to some extent, exchange for other phrases of more definite significance.^ Quite to avoid the term is not possible, inasmuch as the conception certainly includes what is mysterious because unknowable through reason. For it includes a sense of the supreme, a sense of God, who is too great for human reason to comprehend, and therefore a mystery. And it includes a yearning toward God, the desire of Him, and the feeling of love. The last is also mysterious, in that it has not exclusive part with reason, but springs as well from feeling. Yet the essence or nature of this spirit of piety which we would analyse, consists in consciousness of the reality of the object of its yearning or devotion. Not altogether through induction or deduction, but with an irrational immediacy of conviction, it feels and knows its object. In place of the knowledge which is mediated through rational processes, is substituted a conviction upheld by yearning, love's conviction indeed, of the reality and presence of that which is all the greater and more worthy because it baffles reason. And the final goal attainable by this mystic love is, even as the goal of other love, union with the Beloved. The mystic spirit is an essential part of all piety or religion, which relates always and forever to the rationally unknown and therefore mysterious. Without a conscious- ness of mystery, there can be neither piety nor religion. Nor can there be piety without some devotion to God, nor the deepest and most ardent forms of piety, without fervent love of God. This devotion and this love supply strength of conviction, creating a realness of communion with the divine, and an assurance of the soul's rest and peace therein. But that the intellect has part, Hugo abundantly demonstrates. One must have perceptions, and thought's severest wrestlings — cogitatio and meditatio — before reaching the first stage of wide and sure intelligence, which relates ^ The following consideration of the mysticism of Christian theologians is not intended to include other forms of " mysticism " (Pantheistic, poetical, patho- logical, neurotic, Intellectual, and sensuous) within or without the Christian pale. 394 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh to the creature world, and affords a broad basis of assurance, whence at last the soul shall spring to God. Intellectual perceptions and rational knowledge, and all the mind's puttings together of its data in inductions and deductions and constructions, form a basis for contemplation, and yield material upon which the emotional side of human nature may exercise itself in yearning and devotion. Herein the constructive imagination works ; which is intellectual faculty illuminated and impelled by the emotions. This spirit actualizes itself in the power and scope of its resultant conviction, by which it makes real to itself the qualities, attributes, and actions of its object, God, and the nature of man's relationship or union with the divine. In its final energy, when only partly conscious of its intellectual inductions, it discards syllogisms, quite dissatisfied with their devious and hesitating approach. Instead, by the power of love, it springs directly to its God. Nevertheless, the soul which feels the inadequacy of reason even to voice the soul's desires, will seek means of expression wherein reason still will play a submerged part. The soul is seeking to express what is not altogether expressible in direct and rational statement. It seeks adumbrations, partial unveilings of its sentiments, which shall perhaps make up in warmth of colour what they lack in definiteness of line. In fine, it seeks s37mbols. Such symbolism must be large and elastic, in order to shadow forth the soul's relations with the Infinite ; it must also be capable of carrying passion, that it may satisfy the soul's craving to give voice to its great love. In Greek thought as weU as in the Hellenizing Judaism of a Philo, symbolism, or more specifically speaking, alle- gorical interpretation, was obviously apologetic, seeking to cloud in naturalistic interpretations the doings of the rather over-human gods of Greece.^ But it sprang also from the unresting need of man to find expression for that sense of things which will not fit definite statement. This was the need which became creative, and of necessity fancifully creative, with Plato. Though he would have nothing to do with falsif3dng apologetics, all the more he felt the need of allegories, to suggest what his dialectic could not formulate. ^ Ante, p. 68 sgq. CH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 395 In the early times of the Church mihtant of Christ, alle- gorical interpretation was exploited to defend the Faith ; in the later patristic period, the Faith had so far triumphed, that allegory as a sword of defence and attack might be sheathed, or just allowed to glitter now and then half-drawn. But piety's other need, with increasing energy, compelled the use of symbols and articulate allegory to express the directly inexpressible. Thereafter through the Middle Ages, while the use of allegory as a defence against the Gentiles slumbered, so much more the other need of it, and the sense of the universal symbolism of material things, filled the minds of men ; and in age-long answer to this need, alle- gory, symbolism, became part of the very spirit of the mediaeval time. Thus it became the universal vehicle of pious expression : it may be said almost to have co-extended with all mediaeval piety. It was ardently loving, as with St. Bernard ; it might be filled with scarlet passion, as with Mechthild of Magdeburg ; or it might be used in the self-conscious, and yet inspired vision-pictures of Hildegard of Bingen. And indeed with almost any mediaeval man or woman, it might keep talking, as a way of speech, obtrusively, conventionally, ad nauseam. For indeed in treatise after treatise even of the better men, allegory seems on the one hand to become very foolish and perverse, banal, intolerably talking on and on beyond the point ; pr again we sense its mechanism, hear the creaking of its jaws, while no living voice emerges, — and we suspect that the mystery of life, if it may not be compassed by direct statement, also lies deeper than alle- gorical conventions. Hugo's great De sacramentis showed the equipoise of intellectual and pietistic interests in him, and the Platonic quality of his mind's sure sense of the reality of the super- sensual.^ Other treatises of his show his yearning piety, and the Augustinian quality of his soul, " made toward thee, and unquiet till it rests in thee." The De area Noe morali,^ that is to say, the Ark of Noah viewed in its moral significance, is charming in its spiritual refinement, and interesting in its 1 Ante, Chapter XXIX. 2 Migne, Pat. Lat. 176, col. 617-680. 39^ THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh catholic intellectual reflections. The Prologue presents a situation : " As I was sitting once among the brethren, and they were asking questions, and I replying, and many matters had been cited and adduced, it came about that all of us at once began to marvel vehemently at the unstableness and disquiet of the human heart ; and we began to sigh. Then they pleaded with me that I would show them the cause of such whirlings of thought in the hmnan heart ; and they besought me to set forth by what art or exercise of discipline this evil might be removed. I indeed wished to satisfy my brethren, so far as God might aid me, and untie the knot of their questions, both by authority and by argument. I knew it would please them most if I should compose my matter to read to them at table. " It was my plan to show first whence arise such violent changes in man's heart, and then how the mind may be led to keep itself in stable peace. And although I had no doubt that this is the proper work of grace, rather than of human labour, nevertheless I know that God wishes us to co-operate. Besides, it is well to know the magnitude of our weakness and the mode of its repairing, since so much the deeper wiU be our gratitude. " The first man was so created, that if he had not sinned, he would always have beheld in present contemplation his Creator's face, and by always seeing Him, would have loved Him always, and, by loving, would always have clung close to Him, and by clinging to Him who was eternal, would have possessed life without end. Evidently the one true good of man was perfect knowledge of his Creator. But he was driven from the face of the Lord, since for his sin he was struck with the blindness of ignorance, and passedf rom that intimate Hght of contemplation ; and he inclined his mind to earthly desires, as he began to forget the sweetness of the divine. Thus he was made a wanderer and fugitive over the earth. A wanderer indeed, because of dis- ordered concupiscence ; and a fugitive, through guilty conscience, which feels every man's hand against it. For every temptation will overcome the man who has lost God's aid. " So man's heart which had been kept secure by divine love, and one by loving one, afterwards began to flow here and there through earthly desires. For the mind which knows not to love its true good, is never stable and never rests. Hence restlessness, and ceaseless labour, and disquiet, until the man turns and adheres to Him. The sick heart wavers and quivers ; the cause of its disease is love of the world ; the remedy, the love of God." Hugo's object is to give rest to the restless heart, by cH.xxxvn TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 397 directing its love to God. One still bears in mind his three plains of knowledge, forming perhaps the three stages of ascent, at the top of which is found the knowledge that turns to divine contemplation and love. There may be a direct and simple love of God for simple souls ; but for the man of mind, knowledge precedes love. " In two ways God dwells in the human heart, to wit, through knowledge and through love ; yet the dwelling is one, since every one who knows Him, loves, and no one can love without knowing. Knowledge through cognition of the Faith erects the structure ; love through virtue, paints the edifice with colour." ^ Then make a habitation for God in thy heart. This is the great matter, and indeed all : for this. Scripture exists, and the world was made, and God became flesh, through His humility making man sublime. The Ark of Noah is the type of this spiritual edifice, as it is also the type of the Church. The piety and allegory of this work rise as from a basis of knowledge. The allegory indeed is drawn out and out, until it seems to become sheer circumlocution. This was the mediaeval way, and Hugo's too, alas ! We will not follow further in this treatise, nor take up his De area Noe mystica,^ which carries out into still further detail the symbolism of the Ark, and applies it to the Church and the people of God. Hugo has also left a colloquy between man and his soul on the true love, which lies in spiritual meditation.^ But it is clear that the reaches of Hugo's yearning are still grounded in intellectual considerations, though these may be no longer present in the mind of him whose consciousness is transformed to love. One may discern the same progression, from painful thought to surer contemplation, and thence to the heart's devoted communion, in him whom we have called the Thor and Loki of the Church. No twelfth-century soul loved God more zealously than St. Bernard. He was not strong ^ De area Noe morali, i. cap. 2 (Migne 176, col. 621). ^ Migne 176, col. 681-703. With Hugo's pupil, Richard of St. Victor, this constant allegory, especially the constant allegorical use of Scripture names, becomes pedantic, precieux, impossible. See e.g. his Benjamin major in Migne 196, col. 64-202. ^ De arrha animae, Migne 176, col. 951-970. 398 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh in abstract reasoning. His mind needed the compulsion of the passions to move it to sublime conclusions. Commonly he is dubbed a mystic. But his piety and love of God poise themselves on a basis of consideration before springing to soar on other wings. In his De consider atione} Bernard explains that word in the sense given by Hugo to meditatio, while he uses contemplatio very much as Hugo does. It applies to things that have become certain to the mind, while " consideratio is busy investigating. In this sense contemplatio may be defined as the true and certain intuition of the mind {intuitus animi) regarding anything, or the sure apprehension of the true : while consideratio is thought intently searching, or the mind's endeavour to track out the true/' 2 Contemplatio, even though it forget itself in ecstasy, must be based on prior consideration ; then it may take wings of its own, or rather (with orthodox Hugo and Bernard) wings of grace, and fly to the bosom of its God. This flight is the immediacy of conviction and the ecstasy which follows. One may even perceive the thinking going on during the soul's outpour of love. For the mind still supports the soul's ardour with reasonings, original or borrowed, as appears in the second sermon of that long series preached by Bernard on Canticles to his own spiritual elite of Clairvaux.^ The saintly orator is yearning, yearning for Christ Himself ; he will have naught of Moses or Isaiah ; nor does he desire dreams, or care for angels' visits : ipse, ipse me osculetur,' cries his soul in the words of Canticles — ^let Him kiss me. The phrasing seems symbolical ; but the yearning is direct, and at least rhetorically overmastering. The emotion is justified by its reasons. They lie in the personality of Christ and Bernard's love of Him, rising from all his knowledge of Him, even from his experience of Jesus' whisperings to the soul. He knows how vastly Jesus sur- passes the human prophets who prefigured or foretold Him : ipsos longe superat Jesus meus — the word meus is love's very ^ Migne 182, col. 727-808. Translated by George Lewis in the Oxford Library of Translations. * De consid. lib. ii. cap. 2. ^ Migne 183, col. 789 sgq. Chapter XVIIL, ante, is devoted to Bernard, and his letters and sermons. CH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 399 articulation. The orator cries : " Listen ! Let the kissing mouth be the Word assuming flesh ; and the mouth kissed be the flesh which is assumed ; then the kiss which is consummated between them is the persona compacted of the two, to wit, the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus." This identical allegory goes back to Origen's Commentary on Canticles. Bernard has kindled it with an intimate love of Jesus, which is not Origen's. But the thought explains and justifies Bernard's desire to be kissed by the kiss of His mouth, and so to be infolded in the divine love which " gave His only-begotten Son/' and also became flesh. Os osculans signifies the Incarnation : one realizes the emotional power which that saving thought would take through such a metaphor. At the end of his sermon, Bernard sums up the conclusion, so that his hearers may carry it away : "It is plain that this holy kiss was a grace needed by the world, to give faith to the weak, and satisfy the desire of the perfect. The kiss itself is none other than the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns God, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen." Ill There is small propriety in speaking of these men of the first half of the twelfth century as Platonists or Aristo- telians ; nor is there great interest in trying to find in Plato or Aristotle or Plotinus the specific origin of any of their thoughts. They were apt to draw on the source nearest and most convenient ; and one must remember that their immediate philosophic antecedents were not the distinct systems of Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus, but rather the late pagan eras of eclecticism, followed by that strongly motived syntheticism of the Church Fathers which selected whatever might accord with their Christian scheme. So Abaelard must not be called an Aristotelian. Neither he nor his contemporaries knew what an Aristotelian was, and when they called Abaelard Peripateticus, they meant one skilled in the logic which was derived from the simpler treatises of Aristotle's Organon. Nor will we call Hugo a 400 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh Platonist, in spite of his fine affinities with Plato ; for many of Hugo's thoughts, his classification of the sciences for example, pointed back to Aristotle. Abaelard, Hugo, St. Bernard suggest the triangulation of the epoch's intellectual interests. Peter Lombard, some- what their junior, presents its compend of accepted and partly digested theology. He took his method from Abaelard, and drew whole chapters of his work from Hugo ; but his great source, which was also theirs, was Augustine. The Lombard was, and was to be, a representative man ; for his Sentences brought together the ultimate problems which exercised the minds of the men of his time and after. The early and central decades of the twelfth century offer other persons who may serve to round out our general notion of the character of the intellectual interests which occupied the period before the rediscovery of Aristotle, that is, of the substantial Aristotelian encyclopaedia of knowledge. Among such Adelard of Bath (England) was somewhat older than Abaelard. His keen pursuit of knowledge made him one of its early pilgrims to Spain and Greece. He compiled a book of Quaestiones naturales, and another called De eodem et diver so ^ in which he struggled with the problem of imi- versals, and with palpable problems of psychology. His cosmology shows a genial culling from the Timaeus fragment of Plato, and such other bits of Greek philosophy as he had access to. Adelard was influenced by the views of men who taught or studied at Chartres. Bernard of Chartres, the first of the great Chartrian teachers of the early twelfth century,^ wrote on Porphyry, and after his death was called by John of Salis- bury perfectissimus inter Platonicos saeculi nostri. He was one of those extreme realists whose teachings might bear pantheistic fruit in his disciples ; he had also a Platonistic imagination, leading him to see in Nature a living organism. Bernard's younger brother, Thierry, also called of Chartres, extended his range of studies, and compiled numerous works * on natural knowledge, indicating his wide reading and receptive nature. His realism brought him very close to ^ Ed. by Willner (Baeumker's Bettrdge^ Munster, 1903). ^ See ante^ Chapter XXXI., i. cH.xxxvn TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 401 pantheism, which indeed flowered poetically in his admirer or pupil, Bernard Silvestris of Tours. If we should analyze the contents of the latter's De mundi universitate, it might be necessary to afhrm that the author was a dualistic thinker, in that he recognized two first principles, God and matter ; and also that he was a pantheist, because of the way in which he sees in God the source of Nature : " This mind (nous) of the supreme God is soul (intellectus) , and from its divinity Nature is born/'^ One should not, however, drive the heterogeneous thoughts of these twelfth-century people to their opposite conclusions. A moderate degree of historical insight should prevent our interpreting their gleanings from the past by formulas of our own greater knowledge. Doubtless their books — Hugo's as well as Thierry's and Bernard Silvester's — have enough of contradiction if we will probe for it with a spirit not their own. But if we will see with their eyes and perceive with their feelings, we shall find ourselves resting with each of them in some unity of personal temperament ; and that, rather than any half-borrowed thought, is Hugo or Thierry or Bernard Silvestris. Silvester's book, De mundi universi- tate, sive Megacosmus et microcosmus, is a half poem, like Boethius's De consolatione and a number of mediaeval pro- ductions to which there has been occasion to allude. It is fruitless to dissect such a composite of prose and verse. In it Natura speaks to Nous, and then Nous to Natura ; the four elements come into play, and nine hierarchies of angels ; the stars in their firmaments, and the genesis of things on earth ; Physics and her daughters, Theorica and Practica, and all the figures of Greek mythology. An analysis of such a book will turn it to nonsense, and destroy the breath of that twelfth-century temperament which loved to gather driftwood from the wreckage of the ancient world of thought. Thus perhaps they expected to draw to themselves, even from the pagan flotsam, some congenial explanation of the universe and man. ^ Bernardus Silvestris, De mundi universitate^ i. 2 (ed. by Barach and Wrobel ; lunsbriick, 1876). As to Bernard Silvestris, see Clerval, ^coles de Chartres an- moyen age, p. 259 sqq. and passim ; also Haur^au (who confuses him with Bernard of Chartres), Hist, de la phil. scholastique, ii. 407 sqq. VOL. II 2D 402 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh A far more acute thinker was Gilbert de la Porree/ who taught at Chartres for a number of years, before advancing upon Paris in 1141. He next became Bishop of Poictiers, and died in 1154. Like Abaelard, he was primarily a logician, and occupied himself with the problem of universals, taking, a position not so different from Abaelard's. Like Abaelard also, Gilbert was brought to task before a council, in which St. Bernard sought to be the guiding, scilicet, condemning spirit. But the condemnation was confined to certain sen- tences, which when cut from their context and presented in distorting isolation, the author willingly sacrificed to the flames. He refused, some time afterwards, to discuss his views privately with the Abbot of Clairvaux, saying that the latter was too inexpert a theologian to understand them. Gilbert's most famous work, De sex principiis, attempted to complete the last six of Aristotle's ten Categories, which the philosopher had treated cursorily ; it was almost to rival the work of the Stagirite in authority, for instance, with Albertus Magnus, who wrote a Commentary upon it in the same spirit with which he commented on the logical treatises of the Organon. In the same year with Gilbert (1154) died a man of different mental tendencies, William of Conches,^ who like- wise had been a pupil of Bernard of Chartres. He was for a time the tutor of Henry Plantagenet. William was in- terested in natural knowledge, and something of a humanist. He made a Commentary on the Timaeus, and wrote various works on the philosophy of Nature, in which he wavered around an atomistic explanation of the world, yet held fast to the Biblical Creation, to save his orthodoxy. He also pursued the study of medicine, which was a specialty at Chartres ; through the treatises of Constantinus Africanus ^ he had some knowledge of the pathological theories of Galen and Hippocrates. For his interest in physical knowledge, ^ See Grabmann, Ges. der schol. Methode, ii. p. 408 sqq, ; Haur6au, Hist. etc. ii. 447-472 ; R. L. Poole, Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought, chap. vi. His Liber de sex principiis is printed in Migne 188, col. 1257-1270. * Werner, " Die Kosmologie und Naturlehre des scholastischen Mittelalters, mit specialler Beziehung auf Wilhelm von Conches,*' Sitzungsb. K. Akad., philos. Klasse, 1873, Bd. Ixxv. ; Haiir6au, Hist, etc, i. 431-446 ; ibid. SingularitSs lit- ieraires, etc. ^ Ante, Vol. I., p. 252. CH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 403 he may be regarded as a precursor of Roger Bacon. On the other hand, he was a humanist in his strife against those " Cornificiani " who would know no more Latin than was needful ; ^ and he compiled from the pagan moralists a sort of Summa. It is called, in fact, a Summa moralium philoso- phorum (an interesting title, connecting it with the Christian Summae sententiarum) .^ It treats the virtues under the head of de honesto ; and under that of de utile, reviews the other good things of mind, body, and estate. It also dis- cusses whether there may be a conflict between the honestum and the utile. These men of the first half of the twelfth century lived before the new revealing of the Aristotelian philosophy and natural knowledge coming at the century's close. Their muster is finally completed by two younger men, the one an Englishman and the other a Lowlander. The youthful years of both synchronize with the old age of the men of whom we have been speaking. For John of Salisbury was born riot far from the year 1115, and died in 1180 ; and Alanus de Insulis (Lille) was probably born in 1128, and lived to the beginning of the next century. They are spiritually connected with the older men because they were taught by them, and because they had small share in the coming encyclopaedic knowledge. But they close the group : John of Salisbury closing it by virtue of his critical estimate of its achievement ; Alanus by virtue of his final rehandling of the body of intellectual data at its disposal, to which he may have made some slight addition. Abaelard knew and used the simpler treatises of the Aristotelian Organon of logic. He had not studied the Analytics and the Topics, and of course was unacquainted with the body of Aristotle's philo- sophy outside of logic. John of Salisbury and Alanus know the entire Organon ; but neither one nor the other knows the rest of Aristotle, which Alexander of Hales was the first to make large use of. John of Salisbury, Little John, Johannes Parvus, as he was called, was a most excellent classical scholar.^ His ^ Ante, Chapter XXXI., i. ^ Under another title, Moralis philosophia de honesto et utile, it has been ascribed to Hildebert of Lavardin, Migne 171, col. 1007-1056. ' For examples of John's Latin, see ante, p. 201. 404 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh was an acute and active intellect, which never tired of hearing and weighing the views of other men. He was, moreover, a man of large experience, travelling much, and listening to all the teachers prominent in his youth. Also he was active in affairs, being at one time secretary to Thibaut, Archbishop of Canterbury, and then the intimate of Becket, of Henry II., and Pope Adrian IV. ! A finished scholar, who knew not one thing, but whatever might be known, and was enlightened by the training of the world. Little John critically estimates the learning and philosophy of the men he learns from. Having always an independent point of view, he makes acute remarks upon it all, and admirable contributions to the sum of current thought. But chiefly he seems to us as one who looks with even eye upon whatsoever comes within his vision. He knows the weaknesses of men and the limitations of branches of discipline ; knows, for instance, that dialectic is sterile by itself, but ef&cient as an aid to other disciplines. So, as to logic, John keeps his own point of view, and is always reasonable and practical,^ Likewise, with open mind, he considers what there may be in the alleged science of the Mathematicians, i.e. diviners and astrologers. He uses such phrases as " prohahilia quidem sunt haec . . . sed tamen the venom Ues under the honey ! " For this science sets a fatal necessity on things, and would even intrude into the knowledge of the future reserved for God's majesty. And as John considers the order of events to come, and the diviner's art, cornua succrescunt — ^the horns of more than one dilemma grow.^ John knew more than any man of the ancient philo- sophies.^ For himself, of course he loved knowledge ; yet he would not dissever it from its value in the art of living. " Wisdom indeed is a fountain, from which pour forth the streams which water the whole earth ; they fill not alone the garden of delights of the divine page, but flow on to the Gentiles, and do not altogether fail even the Ethiopians. ... It is certain that the faithful and wise reader, who ^ See e.g. his treatment of logic in Lib. III. and IV. of the Metalogicus (Migne 199). * Policraticus, ii. 19-21 sqq. ^ Policraticus, lib. vii., is devoted to a history of antique philosophy. cH.xxxvii TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 405 from love keeps learning*s watch, escapes vice and draws near to life/' ^ Philosophy is the moderatrix omnium (a favourite phrase with John) ; the true philosopher, as Plato says, is a lover of God : and so philosophia is amor divinitatis. Its precept is to love God with all our strength, and our neigh- bour as ourselves : '* He who by philosophizing has reached charitas, has attained philosophy's true end/' ^ John goes on to show how deeply they err who think philosophy is but a thing of words and arguments : many of those who multiply words, by so doing burden the mind. Virtue in- separably accompanies wisdom ; this is John's sum of the matter. Clearly he is not always, or commonly, wrestling with ultimate metaphysical problems ; he busies himself, acutely but not metaphysically, with the wisdom of life. He too can use the language of piety and contemplation. In the sixth chapter of his De septem septenis (The seven Sevens) he gives the seven grades of contemplation — meditatio, soliloquium, circumspectio, ascensio, revelatio, emissio, inspiratio.^ He presents the matter succinctly, thus perhaps giving clarity to current pietistic phraseology. Alanus de Insulis was a man of renown in his life-time, and after his death won the title of Doctor Universalis. Although the fame of scholar, philosopher, theologian, poet, may have uplifted him during his years of strength, he died a monk at Citeaux, in the year 1202. Fame came justly to him, for he was learned in the antique literature, and a gifted Latin poet, while as thinker and theologian he made skilful and catholic use of his thorough knowledge of whatever the first half of the twelfth century had achieved in thought and system. Elsewhere he has been considered as a poet ; * here we merely observe his position and accomplishment in matters of salvation and philosophy.^ Alanus possessed imagination, language, and a faculty of acute exposition. His sentences, especially his definitions, are pithy, suggestive, and vivid. He projected much thought ^ PoUcraiicus, vii. cap. lo. ^ PoUcrat. vii. cap. ii. ^ Migne 199, col. 955- * Ante, Chapter XXX., 11. and XXXIII., i. ^ The works of Alanus are collected in Migne, Pat. Lat. 210. What follows in the text is much indebted to M. Baumgartner, " Die Philosophic des Alanus de Insulis " {Baeumker*s Beitrage, Miinster, 1896), 4o6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh as well as fantasy into his poem, Anticlaudianus, and his cantafable, De planctu naturae. He showed himself a man of might, and insight too, in his Contra haereticos. His suggestive pithiness of diction lends interest to his encyclo- paedia of definitions, Distinctiones dictionum theologicalium ; and his keen power of reasoning succinctly from axiomatic premises is evinced in his De artefidei catholicae. The intellectual activities of Alanus fell in the latter decades of the twelfth century, when mediaeval thought seemed for the moment to be mending its nets, and preparing for a further cast in the new waters of Aristotelianism. Alanus is busy with what has already been won ; he is unconscious of the new greater knowledge, which was preparing its revelations. He is not even a man of the transition from the lesser to the greater intellectual estate ; but is rather a final compendium of the lesser. Himself no epoch-making reasoner, he uses the achievements of Abaelard and Hugo, of Gilbert de la Porree and William of Conches, and others. Neither do his works unify and systematize the results of his studies. He is rather a re-phraser. Yet his refashioning is not a mere thing of words ; it proceeds with the vitalizing power of the man's plastic and creative temperament. One may speak of him as keen and acquisi- tive intellectually, and creative through his temperament. Alanus shows a catholic receptivity for all the mingled strains of thought, Platonic, Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic and Pythagorean, which fed the labours of his predecessors. He has studied the older sources, the Timaeus fragment, also Apuleius and Boethius of course. His chief blunder is his misconception of Aristotle as a logician and confuser of words {verborum turbator) — a phrase, perhgips, consciously used with poetic licence. For he has made use of much that came originally from the Stagirite. ' Within his range of opportunity, Alanus was a universal reader, and his writings discover traces of the men of importance Jrom Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena dd^yn to John of Salisbury and Gundissalinus. ' ' " These remarks may take the place of any specific pre- sentation of Alanus's work in logic, of his view of universals, of his notions of physics, of nature, of piatter and form, of cH. XXXVII TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICS 407 man's mind and body, and of the Triune Godhead.^ In his cosmology, however, we may note his imaginatively original employment of the conception or personification of Nature. God is the Creator, and Nature is His creature, and His vice- regent or vicarious maker, working the generation and decay of things material and changeable.^ This thought, imagi- natively treated, makes a good part of the poetry of the De planctu and the Anticlaudianus. The conception with him is full of charming fantasy, and we look back through Bernardus Silvestris and other writers to Plato's divine fooling in the Timaeus, not as the specific, but generic, origin of such imaginative views of the contents and generation of the world. Such imaginings were as fantasy to science, when compared with the solid and comprehensive con- sideration of the material world which was to come a few years after Alanus's deaths through the encyclopaedic Aristotelian knowledge presented in the works of Alexander of Hales and Albertus Magnus. ^ All this is thoroughly done by Baumgartner, o.c. ^ See Baumgartner, p. ';& sqq. and citations. CHAPTER XXXVIII THE UNIVERSITIES, ARISTOTLE, AND THE MENDICANTS Intellectually, the thirteenth century in western Europe is marked by three closely connected phenomena ; the growth of Universities, the discovery and appropriation of Aristotle, and the activities of Dominicans and Franciscans; These movements were universal, in that the range of none of them was limited by racial or provincial boundaries. Yet a line may still be drawn between Italy, where law and ^^medicine were cultivated, and the North, where theology with , logic and metaphysics were supreme. Absorption in these subjects produced a common likeness in the intellectual processes of men in France, England, and Germany, whose writings were to be no longer markedly affected by racial idiosyncrasies. This was true of the logical controversy regarding universals, so prominent in the first part of the twelfth century. It was very true of the great intellectual movement of the later twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, to wit, the coming of Aristotle to dominance, in spite of the counter-currents of Platonic Augustinianism. The men who followed the new knowledge had slight regard for ties of home, and travelled eagerly in search of learning. So, even as from far and wide those who could ^study Roman law came to Bologna, the study of theology and all that philosophy included drew men to Paris. Thither came the keen-minded from Italy and from England ; from the Low Countries and from Germany ; and from the many very different regions now covered by the name of France. Wherever born and of whatever race, the devotees of philosophy and theology at some period of their career reached 408 CHAP. XXXVIII THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 409 Paris, learned and taught there, and were affected by the universaUzing influence of an international aggregate of scholarship. So had it been with Breton Abaelard, with German Hugo, and with Lombard Peter ; so with English John, hight of Salisbury. And in the following times of culmination, Albertus Magnus comes in his maturity from Germany ; and his marvellous pupil Thomas, born of noble Norman stock in southern Italy, follows his master, eventually to Paris. So Bonaventura of lowly mid-Italian birth likewise learns and teaches there ; and that unique Englishman, Roger Bacon, and after him Duns Scotus. These few greatest names symbolize the centralizing of thought in the crowded and huddled lecture-rooms of the City on the Seine. The origins of the great mediaeval Universities can scarcely be accommodated to simple statement. Their history is frequently obscure, and always intricate ; and the selection of a specific date or factor as determining the inception, or distinctive development, of these mediaeval creations is likely to be but arbitrary. They had no antique prototype : nothing either in Athens or Rome ever resembled these corporations of masters and students, with their authoritative privileges, their fixed curriculum, and their grades of formally certified attainment. Even the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, with all the pedantry of its learned littera- teurs and their minute study of the past, has nothing to offer like the scholastic obsequiousness of the mediaeval University, which sought to set upon one throne the antique philosophy and the Christian revelation, that it might with one and the same genuflection bow down before them both. It behoves us to advert to the conditions influencing the growth of Universities, and give a little space to those which were chief among them. The energetic human advance distinguishing the twelfth century in western Europe exhibits among its most obvious phenomena an increased mobility in all classes of society, and a tendency to gather into larger communities and form strong corporate associations for profit or protection.^ No kind of men were more quickly touched by the new mobility than 1 Ante, Chapter XIV. •4IO THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh the thousands of youthful learners who desired to extend their knowledge, or, in some definite field, perfect their education. In the eleventh century, such would commonly have sought a monastery, near or far. In the twelfth and then in the thirteenth, they followed the human currents to the cities, where knowledge flourished as well as trade, and tolerable accommodation might be had for teachers and students. Certain towns, some for more, some for less, obvious reasons, became homes of study. Bologna, Paris, Oxford are the chief examples. Irnerius, famed as the founder of the systematic study of the Roman law, and Gratian, the equally famous orderer of the Canon law, taught or wrote at Bologi;ia when the twelfth century was young. Their fame drew crowds of laymen and ecclesiastics, who desired to equip themselves for advancement through the business of the law, civil or ecclesiastical. At the same time, hundreds, which grew to thousands, were attracted to the Paris schools — ^the school of Notre Dame, where William of Champeaux held forth ; the school of St. Victor, where he afterwards established himself, and where Hugo taught ; and the school of St. Genevieve, where Abaelard lectured on dialectic and theology. These were palpable gatherings together of material for a University. What first brought masters and students to Oxford a few decades later is not so clear. But Oxford had been an important town long before a University lodged itself there. In the twelfth century, citizenship scarcely protected one beyond the city walls. A man carried but little safety with him. Only an insignificant fraction of the students at Bologna, and of both masters and students at Paris and Oxford, were citizens of those towns. The rest had come from everywhere. Paris and Bologna held an utterly cosmopolitan, international, concourse of scholar-folk. And these scholars, turbulent enough themselves, and dwelling in a turbulent foreign city, needed affiliation there, and protection and support. Organization was an obvious necessity, and if possible the erection of a civitas within a civitaSy a University within a none too friendly town. This was the primal situation, and the primal need. Through somewhat different processes, and under different circum- cHAP.xxxvm THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 411 stances, these exigencies evoked a University in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford.^ In Italy, where the instincts of ancient Rome never were extinguished, where some urban life maintained itself through the early helpless mediaeval centuries, where during the same period an infantile humanism did not cease to stammer ; where " grammar " was studied and taught by laymen, and the " ars dictaminis *' practised men in the forms of legal instruments, it was but natural that the new intellectual energies of the twelfth century should address themselves to the study of the Roman law, which, although debased and barbarized, had never passed into desuetude. And inasmuch as abstract theology did not attract the Italian temperament or meet the conditions of papal politics in Italy, it was likewise natural that ecclesiastical energies should be directed to the equally useful and closely related canon law. Such studies with their practical ends could best be prosecuted at some civic centre. In the first part of the twelfth century, Imerius lectured at Bologna upon the civil law ; a generation later, Gratian published his Decretum there. The specific reasons inducing the former to open his lectures in that city are not known ; but a large and thrifty town set at the meeting of the great roads from central Italy to the north and east, was an admirable place for a civil doctor and his audience, as the event proved. Gratian was a monk in a Bologna convent, and may have listened to Irnerius. The publication of his Decretum from Bologna, by that time (cir. 1142) famous for jurisprudence, lent authority to this work, whose universal recognition was to enhance in turn Bologna's reputation. From the time of this inception of juristic studies, the talents of the doctors, and the city's fame, drew a prodigious ^ What I have felt obliged to say upon the organization of mediaeval Univer- sities, I have largely drawn from Rashdall's Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1895). The subject is too large and complex for independent investigation, except of the most lengthy and thorough character. Extracts from illustrative mediaeval documents, with considerable information touching mediaeval Universities, are brought together by Arthur O. Norton in his Mediaeval Universities (Readings in the History of Education, Harvard University, 1909). For the Paris University, the most important source is the Chartularium Univer- sitatis Parisiensis, ed. by Denifle and Chatelain (1889-1891). See also Ch, Thurot, V Organisation de V enseignement dans f University de Paris (Paris, 1850), and Denifle, Die Universitdten des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1885). 412 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh concourse of students from all the lands of western Europe. The Doctors of the Civil and Canon Laws organized themselves into one, and subsequently into two, Colleges. Apparently they had become an efficient association by the third quarter of the twelfth century. But the University of Bologna was to be constituted par excellence, not of one or more colleges of doctors, but of societies of students. The persons who came for legal instruction were not boys getting their first education in the Arts. They were men studying a profession, and among them were many individuals of wealth and consequence, holding perhaps civil or ecclesiastic office in the places whence they came. The vast majority had this in common, that they were foreigners, with no civil rights in Bologna. It behoved them to organize for their protection and mutual support, and for the furtherance of the purposes for which they had come. That a body of men in a foreign city should live under the law of their own home, or the law of their own making, did not appear extraordinary in the twelfth century. It was not so long since the principle that men carried the law of their home with them, had been widely recognized, and in all countries the clergy still lived under the law of the Church. The gains accruing from the presence of a great number of foreign students might induce the authorities of Bologna to permit them to organize as student guilds, and regulate their affairs by rules of their own, even as was done by other guilds in most Italian cities. At Bologna the power of Guelf and Ghibeline clubs, and of craftsmen's guilds, rivalled that o{ the city magistrates. There is some indirect evidence that these students first divided themselves into four Nationes. If so, the arrange- ment did not last. For by the middle of the thirteenth century they are found organized in two Universitates, or corporations, a Universitas Citramontanorum and a Uni- versitas Ultramontanorum ; each under its own Rector. These two corporations of foreign students constituted the University. The Professors did not belong to them, and therefore were not members of the University. Indeed they fought against the recognition of this University of students, asserting that the students were but their pupils. But the students prevailed, strong in their numbers, and in the CHAP. XXXVIII THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 413 weapon which they did not hesitate to use, that of migration to another city, which cut off the incomes of the Professors and diminished the repute and revenue of Bologna. So great became the power of the student body, that it brought the Professors to complete subjection, paying them their salaries, regulating the time and mode of lecturing, and compelling them to swear obedience to the Rectors. The Professors protested, but submitted. To make good its domination over them, and its independence as against the city, the student University migrated to Arezzo in 1215 and to Padua in 1222.^ In origin as well as organization, the University of Paris differed from Bologna. It was the direct successor of the cathedral school of Notre Dame. This had risen to prominence under William of Champeaux. But Abaelard drew to Paris thousands of students for William's hundreds (or at least hundreds for William's tens) ; and Abaelard at the height of his popularity taught at the school of St. Genevieve, across the Seine. Therefore this school also, although fading out after Abaelard's time, should be regarded as a causal predecessor of the Paris University. So, for that matter, should the neighbouring school of St. Victor, founded by the discomfited William ; for its reputation under Hugo and Richard drew devout students from near and far, and augmented the scholastic fame of Paris. It was both the privilege and duty of the Chancellor of Notre Dame to license competent Masters to open schools near the cathedral. In the course of time, these Masters formed an Association, and assumed the right to admit to their Society the licentiates of the Chancellor, to wit, the new Masters who were about to begin to teach. In the decades following Abaelard's death, the Masters who lectured in the vicinity of Notre Dame increased in number. They spread with their schools beyond the island, and taught in houses on the bridges. They were Masters, that is, teachers, in the Arts. As the twelfth century gave way to the thirteenth, ^ What has been said appUes to the Bologna Law University. That had been preceded by a ■ school of Arts, and later there grew up a flourishing school of Medicine, where siurgery was also taught. These schools became affiUated Universities, but never equalled the Law University in importance. 414 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii interest in the Arts waned before the absorbing passion for - metaphysical theology. This was a higher branch of study, for which the Arts had come to be looked on as a preparation. So the scholars of the schools of Arts became impatient to graduate, that is, to reach the grade of Master, in order to pass on to the higher study of theology. A result was that the course of study in the Arts was shortened, while Masters multiplied in number. Their Society seems to have become a definite and formal corporate body or guild, not later than the year 1175. Herein was the beginning of the Paris University. It had become a studium generate, like Bologna, because there were many Masters, and students from every- where were admitted to study in their schools. Gradually the University came to full corporate existence. From about 1210, written statutes exist, passed by the Society of Masters ; at the same date a BuU of Innocent III. recognizes the Society as a Corporation. Then began / a long struggle for supremacy, between the Masters and the Chancellor : it was the Chancellor's function to grant the licence to become a Master ; but it was the privilege of the Society to admit the licentiate to membership. The action of both being thus requisite, time alone could tell with whom the control eventually should rest. Was the self- governing University to prevail, or the Chancellor of the Cathedral ? The former won the victory. The Masters in Arts constituted par excellence the University, because they far outnumbered the Masters in the upper Faculties of Theology, Law, and Medicine. They were the dominant body ; what they decided on, the other Faculties acquiesced in. These Masters in Arts, besides being numerous, were young, not older than the law students at Bologna. With their stiU younger students,^ they made the bulk of the entire University, and were the persons who most needed protection in their lawful or unlawful conduct. ■^ At some indeterminate period they divided themselves into the four Nationes, French, Normans, Picards, and English. They voted by Nationes in their meetings ; but from a period apparently as early as their organization, a Rector was elected for all four Nationes, and not one Rector for each. * The Masters who taught were called Regentes. cHAP.xxxvm THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 415 There were, however, occasional schisms or failures to agree. It was to be the fortune of the Rector thus elected to sup- plant the Chancellor of the Cathedral as the real head of the University. The vastly greater number of the Masters in Arts were actually students in the higher Faculties of Theology, Law,^ or Medicine, for which graduation in the Arts was the ordinary prerequisite. The Masters or Doctors of these three higher Faculties, at least from the year 1213, determined the qualifications of candidates in their depart- ments. Nevertheless the Rector of the Faculty of Arts continued his advance toward the headship of the whole University. The oath taken by the Bachelors in the Arts, of obedience to that Faculty and its Rector, was strengthened in 1256, so as to bind the oath-taker so long as he should continue a member of the University. The University had not obtained its privileges without insistence, nor without the protest of action as well as word. Its first charter of privileges from the king was granted in 1200, upon its protests against the conduct of the Provost of Paris in attacking riotous students. Next, in combating the jurisdiction of the Chancellor, it obtained privileges from the Pope ; and in 1229, upon failure to obtain redress for an attack from the Provost's soldiers, ordered by the queen, Blanche of Castile, the University dispersed. Thus it re- sorted to the weapon by which the University of Bologna had won the confirmation of its rights. In the year 1231 the great Papal Bull, Parens scientiarum, finally confirmed the Paris University in its contentions and demands : the right to suspend lectures was sanctioned, whenever satisfac- tion for outrage had been refused for fifteen days ; likewise the authority of the University to make statutes, and expel members for a breach of them. The Chancellor of Notre Dame and the Bishop of Paris were both constrained by the same Bull. A different struggle still awaited the University, in which it was its good fortune not to be altogether success- ful ; for it was contending against instruments of intellectual ^ Both civil and canon law were studied till 1219, when a Bull of Honorius III, forbade the study of the former at Paris. 4i6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh and spiritual renovation, to wit, the Mendicant Orders. The details are difficult to unravel at this distance of time. But the Dominicans and Franciscans, in the lifetime of their founders, established themselves in Paris, and opened schools of theology. Their Professors were licensed by the Chancellor, and yet seem to have been unwilling to fall in with the customs of the University, and, for example, cease from teaching and disperse, when it saw fit to do so. The doctors of the theological Faculty became suspicious, and opposed the admission of Mendicants to the theological Faculty. The struggle lasted thirty years, until the Dominicans obtained two chairs in that Faculty, and the Franciscans perhaps the same number, on terms which looked like a victory for the Orders, but in fact represented a compromise ; for the Mendicant doctors in the end apparently submitted to the statutes of the University.^ ^ The origin of Oxford University was different, and one may say more adventitious than that of Paris or Bologna. For Oxford was not the capital of a kingdom, nor is it known to have been an ancient seat of learning. The city was not even a bishop's seat, a fact which had a marked effect upon the constitution of the University. The old town lay at the edge of Essex and Mercia, and its position early gave it importance politically, or rather strategically, and as a place of trade. How or whence came the nucleus of Masters and students that should grow into a University is unknown. One hypothesis ^ is that it was a colony from Paris, shaken off by some academic or political disturbance. This surmise has been connected with the year 1167. There is more direct evidence of lectures in divinity delivered at Oxford thirty years before, and even of lectures upon Civil Law.® There is at all events a circumstantial statement of the formal reading of a book before the Masters and scholars in the year 1185.* After this date the references multiply. In 1209, one has a veritable " dispersion," in protest against the hanging of some scholars. A charter from the papal legate in 1214 accords certain privileges, among others that 1 See post, p. 428. 2 Dr. RashdalVs. ^ A. F. Leach, Educational Charters^ etc., pp. xxiii. and loo sgg. (Cambridge, 191 1). * Rashdall, o.c. ii. p. 341. CHAP. XXXVIII THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 417 a clerk arrested by the town should be surrendered on demand of the Bishop of Lincoln ^ or the Archdeacon, or the Chan- cellor, whom the Bishop shall set over the scholars. This document points to the beginning of the chancellorship. The title probably was copied from Paris ; but in Oxford the office was to be totally different. The Paris Chancellor was primarily a functionary of a great cathedral, who naturally maintained its prerogatives against the encroach- ments of university privilege. But at Oxford there was no cathedral ; the Chancellor was the head of the University, chosen from its Masters if not by them, and had chiefly its interests at heart. Making allowance for this important difference in the Chancellor's office, the development of the University closely resembled that of Paris. Its first extant statute, of the year 1252, prescribes that no one shall be licensed in Theology who has not previously graduated in the Arts. To the same year belongs a settlement of disputes between the Irish and northern scholars. The former were included in the Australes or southerners, one of the two Nationes com- posing the Faculty of Arts. The Australes included the natives of Ireland, Wales, and England south of the Trent ; the other Natio, the Boreales, embraced the English and Scotch coming from north of that river. But the division into Nationes was less important than in the cosmopolitan University of Paris, and soon ceased to exist. The Faculty of Arts, however, continued even more dominant than at Paris. There was no serious quarrel with the Mendicant Orders, who established themselves at Oxford — ^the Domini- cans in 1221, and the Franciscans three years later. The curriculum of studies appears much the same at both Universities, and, as followed in the middle of the thirteenth century, may be thus summarized. For the lower degree of Bachelor of Arts, four or five years were required; and three or four years more for the Master's privileges. The course of study embraced grammar (Priscian), also rhetoric, and in logic the entire Organon of Aristotle, preceded by Porphyry's Isagoge, and with the Sex principia of Gilbert de la Porree added to the course. ^ Oxford lay in the diocese of Lincoln. VOL. II * 2 E 41 8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh ^ The mathematical branches of the Quadrivium also were (required : arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. ; And finally a goodly part of the substantial philosophy of Aristotle was studied, with considerable choice permitted to the student in his selection from the works of the Philosopher. At Oxford he might choose between the Physics or the De coelo et mundo, or the De anima or the De animalibus. The Metaphysics and Ethics or Politics were also required before the Bachelor could be licensed as a Master. ^ In Theology the course of study was extremely lengthy, especially at Paris, where eight years made the minimum, and the degree of Doctor was not given before the candi- date had reached the a^ of thirty-five. The chief sub- jects were Scripture and the Sentences of Peter Lombard. ^Besides which, the candidate had to approve himself ^in sermons and disputations. The latter might amount to a trial of nerve and endurance, as well as proficiency in learn- ing, since the candidate was expected to militare in scholis, against a succession of opponents from six in the morning till six in the evening, with but an hour's refreshment at noon.^ In spite of the many resemblances of Oxford to Paris in organization and curriculum, the intellectual tendencies of the two Universities were not altogether similar. At Paris, speculative theology, with metaphysics and other branches of " philosophy," regarded as its adjuncts, were of absorbing interest. At Oxford, while the same matters were perhaps supreme, a closer scholarship in language or philology was cultivated by Grosseteste, and his pupils, Adam of Marsh and Roger Bacon. The genius of observa- tion was stirring there ; and a natural science was coming into being, which was not to repose solely upon the authority of ancient books, but was to proceed by the way of observation and experiment. Yet Roger Bacon imposed ^ For the course of medicine and the list of books studied or lectured on, especially at Montpellier, from which we have the most complete list, see Rashdall, ii. p. ii8 sqg, and ibid. p. 780. In Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. xx., 1909, C. H. Haskins publishes An unpublished List of Text-books, belonging to the close of the twelfth century, when classical studies had not as yet been over- shadowed by Dialectic. See also, generally, Paetow, The Arts Course at Medieval Universities {Univ. of Illinois, 1910). cHAP.xxxviii THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 419 upon both his philology and his natural science a certain ultimate purpose : that they should subserve the surer ascertainment of divine and saving truth, and thus still remain handmaids of theology, at least in theory. The year 1200 may be taken to symbolize the middle of a period notable for the enlargement of knowledge. If one should take the time of this increase to extend fifty years on either side of the central point, one might say that the student of the year 1250 stood to his intellectual ancestor of the year 1150, as a man in the full possession and use of the Encyclopaedia Britannica would stand toward his father who had saved up the Durchase money for the same. The most obvious cause of this was an increasing acquaintance with the productions of the so-called Arabian philosophy, and more especially with the works of Aristotle, first through translations from the Arabic, and then through translations from the Greek, which were made in order to obviate the insufficiency of the former. It woidd need a long excursus to review the far from simple course af so-called Arabian thought, philosophic and religious. It begins in the East, and follows the setting sun. Even before the Hegira (622) the Arabs had rubbed up against the inhabitants of Syria, Christian in name, eastern or Hellenic in culture and proclivity. Then in a century or two, when the first impulsion of Mohammedan conquest was spent, the works of Aristotle and his later Greek commentators were translated into Arabic from Syrian versions, under the encouragement of the rulers of Bagdad. The S5ndan versions, as we may imagine, were somewhat eclecticized and, more especially, Neo-Platonized. So it was not the pure Aristotle that passed on into Arabic philosophy, but the Aristotelian substance interpreted through later phases of Greek and Oriental thought. Still, Aristotle was the great jiame, and his system furnished the nucleus of doctrine rferesented in the Peripatetic eclecticism which was to constitiwe, par excellence, Arabic philosophy. Also Greek mathematical and medical treatises were translated into Arabic from Sjnrian versions. El-Farabi (d. 950) and Avicenna (980-1036) were the chief glories of the Arabic 420 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii philosophy of Bagdad. These two gifted men were com- mentators upon the works of the Stagirite, and authors of many interesting lucubrations of their own.^ Arabian philosophy declined in the East with Avicenna's death ; but only to revive in Mussulman Spain. There its great repre- sentative was Averroes, whose life filled the last three quarters of the twelfth century. So great became his authority as an Aristotelian, with the Scholastics, that he received the name of Commentator, par excellence, even as Aristotle was par excellence, Philosophus. We need not consider the ideas of these men which were their own rather than the Stagirite's ; nor discuss the pietistic and fanatical sects among the Mussulmans, who either sought to harmonize Aristotle with the Koran, or disapproved of Greek philosophy. One readily perceives that in its task of acquisition and interpretation, with some independent thinking, and still more temperamental feeling, Arabic philosophy was the analogue of Christian scholasticism, of which it was, s6 to speak, the collateral ancestor.^ And in this wise. The Commentaries of Averroes, for example, were translated into Latin ; and, throughout all the mediaeval centuries, the Commentary tended to supplant the work commented on, whether that work was Holy Scripture or a treatise of Aristotle. By the middle of the thirteenth century all the important works of Averroes had been translated into Latin, and he had many followers at Paris ; and before then, from the College of Toledo, had come translations of the principal works of the other chief Arabian philosophers. Of still greater importance for the Christian West was the work of Jews and Christians in Spain and Provence, in translating the Arabic versions of Aristotle into Latin, sometimes directly, and sometimes first into Hebrew and then into Latin. They attempted a literal translation, which, however, frequently failed to give the ^ See generally, Carra de Vaux, Avicenne (Paris, 1900) ; also Gazali, by the same author. ^ Whoever will read the two monographs of the Baron Carra de Vaux, Avicemte and Gazali, will be struck by the closely analogous courses of Moslem and Christian thought ; each showing the parallel phases of scholastic rationalism {reliant upon reason and rational authority) and scholastic theological piety, or mysticism {reliant upon the authority of Revelation and sceptical as to the validity of human reason). cHAP.xxxvm THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 421 significance even of the Arabic version. These Arabic-Latin translations were of primary importance for the first intro- duction of Aristotle to the theologian philosophers of Christian Europe. They were not to remain the only ones. In the twelfth century, a number of Western scholars made excursions into the East ; and the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 enlarged their opportunities of studying the Greek language and philosophy. Attempts at direct translation into Latin began. One of the first translators was the sturdy Englishman, Robert Grosseteste.^ But the most adequate translations were the work of a Dominican, the Fleming, William of Moerbeke, who appears to have trans- lated a number of the works of Aristotle at the instance of Thomas Aquinas, possibly working with him at Rome and elsewhere in 1263 and the years following. Aquinas re- cognized the inadequacy of the older translations, and based his own Aristotelian Commentaries upon these made by his collaborators, learned in the Greek tongue. The joint labour of translation and commentary seems to have been undertaken at the command of Pope Urban IV., who had renewed the former prohibitions put upon the use of Aristotle at the Paris University, in the older, shall we say, Averroistic versions. If these prohibitions, which did not touch the logical treatises, were meant to be taken absolutely, such had been far from their effect. In 1210 and again in 1215, an inter- dict was put upon the naturalis philosophia and the metha- fisica of the Stagirite. It was not revoked, but rather provisionally renewed, in 1231, until those works should be properly expurgated. A Commission was appointed which accomplished nothing ; and the old interdict still hung in the air, unrescinded, yet ignored in practice. So Pope Urban referred to it as still effective — which it was not — in 1263. For Aristotle had been more and more thoroughly exploited in the Paris University, and by 1255 the Faculty of Arts formally placed his works upon the list of books to be studied and lectured upon.^ ^ Ante, p. 146. ^ See Mandonnet, O. P., Aristote et la mouvement intellectuel du moyen age, 42 2 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh So the founding of Universities and the enlarged and surer knowledge brought by a study of the works of Aristotle were factors of power in the enormous intellectual advance which took place in the last half of the twelfth and the first half of the thirteenth century. Yet these factors could not have operated as they did, but for the antecedent intellectual development. Before the first half of the twelfth century had passed, the patristic material had been mastered, along with the current notions of antique philosophy, for the most part contained in it. Strengthened by this discipline, men were prepared for an extension and solidifying of their knowledge of the universe and man. Not only had they appropriated what the available sources had to offer, but, when we think of Abaelard and Hugo of St. Victor, we see that organic restatements had been made of what had been acquired. Still, men really knew too little. It is very well to exploit logic, and construct soul-satisfying schemes of cosmogonic symbolism, in order to represent the deepest truth of the material world. But the evident sense-realities of things are importunate. The minds even of spiritual men may, in time, crave explanation of this side of their consciousness. Abaelard seems to have been oblivious to natural phenomena ; Hugo recognizes them in order to elicit their spiritual meaning ; and Alanus de Insulis, a generation and more afterwards, takes a poet's view of Nature. Other men had a more hard-headed interest in these phenomena ; but they knew too little to attempt seriously to put them together in some sense -rational scheme. The natural knowledge presented by the writings of the Church Fathers was little more than foolishness ; the early schoolmen were their heirs. They observed a little for themselves ; but very little. There is an abysmal difference in the amount of natural knowledge exhibited by any writing of the twelfth century, and the works of Albertus Magnus belonging say to the middle of the thirteenth. The obvious reason of this is, that the latter had drawn upon the great volume of natural contained in his Siger de Brabant (2nd ed.), and printed separately ; De Wulf, Hist, of Medieval Phil., 3rd ed., pp. 243-253 ; C. Marchesi, V Etica Nicomachea nella tradizione medievale (Messina, 1904) ; Grabmann, o.c. ii., p. 64 sqq. CHAP. XXXVIII THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 423 observation and hypothesis which for the preceding five hundred years had been actually closed to western Europe, and for five hundred years before that had been spiritually closed, because of the ineptitude of men to read therein. That volume was of course the encyclopaedic Natural Philosophy of Aristotle, completed, and treated in its ultimate causal relationships, by his Metaphysics. The Metaphysics, the First Philosophy, gave completeness and unity to the various provinces of natural knowledge ex- pounded in his special treatises. For this reason, one finds in the works of Albertus a fund of natural knowledge solid with the solidity of the earth upon which one may plant his feet, and totally unlike the beautiful dreaming which drew its prototypal origins from the skyey mind of Plato. The utilization of Aristotle's philosophy by the English- man, Alexander of Hales, who became a Franciscan near the year 1230, when he had already lectured for some thirty years at Paris ; its far more elaborate and complete exposition by the very Teutonic Dominican, Albertus Magnus ; and its even closer exposition and final incorpora- tion within the sum of Christian doctrine, by Thomas, — this three-staged achievement is the great mediaeval instance of return to a genuine and chief source of Greek philosophy. These three schoolmen went back of the accounts and views of Greek philosophy contained in the writings of the Fathers. And in so doing they also went back of what was transniiitted to the Middle Ages by Boethius and other " transmitters.'' ^ But the achievement of these schoolmen had other import- Their work represents the culmination of the third stage of mediaeval thought : that of systematic and organic restatement of the substance of the patristic and antique, with added elements ; for there can be no organic restatement which does not hold and present something from him who achieves it. The result, attained at least by Thomas, was even more than this. Based upon the data and assumptions of scholasticism, it was a complete and final statement of the nature of God so far as that ^ Ante, Chapter V.' 424 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh might be known, of the creature world, corporeal and incorporeal, and especially of man, his nature, his qualities, his relationship to God and final destiny. And herein, in its completeness, it was satisfying. The human mind in seeking explanation of the phenomena of its consciousness — ■ presumably a reflex of the universe without — ^tends to seek a unity of explanation. A unity of explanation requires a completeness in the mental scheme of what is to be explained. Thoughtful men in the Middle Ages craved a scheme of life complete even in detail, which should educe life's currents from a primal Godhead, and project them compacted, with none left straying or pointing nowhither, on toward universal fulfilment of His will. Mediaeval thought had been preceded by whole views, entire schemes of life. Greek philosophy had held only such from the time when Thales said that water was the cause of all things. Plato's view or scheme also was beautiful in its ideally pyramided structure, with the Idea of tne Good at the apex. For Aristotle, knowledge was to be a syllogistic, or at least rational and jointed, encyclopaedia, rounded, unified, complete. After the pagan times, another whole scheme was that of Augustine, or again, that of Gregory the Great, though barbarized and hardened. Thus as patterns for their own thinking, mediaeval men knew only of entire schemes of thought. Their creed was, in every sense, a symbol of a completed scheme. And no mediaeval philosopher or theologian suspected himself of fragmentariness. Yet, in fact, at first they did but select and compile. After a century and more of this, they began to make organic statements of parts of Christian doctrine. So we have Anselm's Proslogium and Cur Deus Homo. Abaelard's Theologia is far more complete ; and so is Hugo's De sacramentis, which offers an entire scheme, s5nnbolical, sacramental, Christian, of God and the world and man. Hugo's scheme might be ideally satisfying ; but little concrete knowledge was represented in it. And when in the generations follow- ing 'Jiis death, the co-ordinated Aristotelian encyclopaedia was 'brought to light and studied, then and thereafter any whole view of the world must take account of this new CHAP. XXXVIII THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 425 volume of argument and concrete knowledge. Alexander of Hales begins the labour of using it in a Christian Summa ; Albertus makes prodigious advance, at least in the massing and preparation of the full Aristotelian material. Both try for whole views and comprehensive results. Then Thomas, most highly favoured in his master Albert, and gifted with a genius for acquisition and synthetic exposition, incorporates Aristotle, and Aristotle's whole views, into the whole view presented by the Catholic Faith. Thomas's view, to be satisfying, had to be complete. It was knowledge united and amalgamated into a scheme of salvation. But a scheme of salvation is a chain, which can hold only in virtue of its completeness ; break one link, and it snaps ; leave one rivet loose, and it may also snap. A scheme of salvation must answer every problem put to it ; a single unanswered problem may imperil it. The problem, for example, of God's foreknowledge and pre- destination — ^that were indeed an open link, which Thomas will by no means leave unwelded. Hence for us modern men also, whose views of the universe are so shamelessly partial, leaving so much unanswered and so much unknown, the philosophy of Thomas may be restful, and charm by its completeness. It is of great interest to observe the apparently unlikely agencies by which this new volume of knowledge was made generally available. In fact, it was the new know- ledge and the demand for it that forced these agencies to fulfil the mission of exploiting it. For they had been created for other purposes, which they also fulfilled. Verily it happened that the chief means through which the new knowledge was gained and published were the two new unmonastic Orders of monks, friars rather we may call them. Francis of Assisi was born in 1182 and died in 1226 ; Dominic was born in 1177 and died in 1221. The Orders of Minorites and Preachers were founded by them respectively in 1209 and 1215. Neither Order was founded to promote secular knowledge. Francis organized his Minorites that they might imitate the lives of Christ and His apostles, and preach repentance to the world. Dominic founded his Order to save souls through preaching : " For 426 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh our Order is known from the beginning to have been insti- tuted especially for preaching and the saving of souls, and our study {studium nostrum) should have as the chief object of its labour to enable us to be useful to our neighbours' souls {ut proximorum animabus possimus utiles esse)." ^ Within an apparent similarity of aim, each Order from the first reflected the temper of its founder ; and the temper of Francis was not that of Dominic. For our purpose here, the difference may perhaps be symbolized by the Dominican maxim to preach the Gospel throughout the world equally by word and example {verbo pariter et exemplo) ; and the Franciscan maxim, to exhort aU plus exemplo quant verbo.^ A generation later St. Bonaventura puts it thus : " Alii (scilicet, Praedicatores) principaliter intendunt specu- lationi . . . et postea unctioni. Alii (scilicet, Minores) principaliter unctioni et postea speculation^" ^ It is safe to say that St. Francis had not thought of secular studies ; and as for the Order of Preachers, the Constitutions of 1228 forbade the Dominicans to study libros gentilium and seculares scientias. They are to study libros theologicosJ^ Francis, also, recognized the necessity of Scriptural study for those Minorites who were allowed to preach. In these views the early Franciscans and Dominicans were not peculiar ; but rather represented the attitude of the older monastic Orders and of the stricter secular clergy. The Gospel teaching of Christ had nothing to do with secular knowledge — explicitly. But the first centuries of the Church perceived that its defenders should be equipped with the Gentile learning, into which indeed they had been born. And while Francis was little of a theologian, and Dominic's personality and career remain curiously obscure, one can safely say that both founders saw the need of sacred studies, and left no authoritative expression prohibiting their Orders from pursuing them to the best advantage for the cause of Christ. Yet we are not called on to suppose that either founder, in founding his Order ^ Constitutiones des Prediger-Ordens vom Jahre 1228, Prologus ; H. Denifle, Archiv fUr Litt. und Kirchenges, des Miitelalters, Bd- i. (1885), p. 194. ^ See Felder, Wissenschaftliche Studien im Frandskanerorden, p. 24 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1904) ; a valuable work. ^ See Felder, o.c. p. 29. * Constitutiones, etc., cap. 28-31. cHAP.xxxviii THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 427 for a definite purpose, foresaw all the means which after his death might be employed to attain that purpose — or some other ! The new Order cometh, the old rusteth. So has it commonly been with Monasticism. Undoubtedly these uncloistered Orders embodied novel principles of efficiency for the upholding of the Faith : their soldiers marched abroad evangelizing, and did not keep within their fastnesses of holiness. The Mendicant Orders were still young, and fresh from the inspiration of their founders. In those years they moved men's hearts and drew them to the ideal which had been set for themselves. The result was, that in the first half of the thirteenth century the greater part of Christian religious energy girded its loins with the cords of Francis and Dominic. At the commencement of that century, when the Orders of Minorites and Preachers were founded, the world of Western thought was prepared to make its own the new Aristotelian volume of knowledge and applied reason. Once that was opened and its contents perceived, the old Augustinian-Neo-Platonic ways of thinking could no longer proceed with their idealizing constructions, ignoring the pertinence of the new data and their possible application to such presentations of Christian doctrine as Hugo's De sacramentis or the Lombard's Sentences. The new know- ledge, with its methods, was of such insistent import, that it had at once to be considered, and either invalidated by argument, or accepted, and perhaps corrected, and then accommodated within an enlarged Christian Philosophy. The spiritual force animating a new religious movement attracts the intellectual energies of the period, and furnishes them a new reality of purpose. This was true of early Christianity, and likewise true of the fresh religious impulse which proceeded from Francis's energy of love and the organizing zeal of Dominic. From the very years of their foundation, 1209 and 1215, the rapid increase of the two Orders realized their founders' visions of multitudes hurry- ing from among all nations to become Minorites or Preachers. And more and more their numbers were recruited from among the clergy. The lay members, 428 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh important in the first years of Francis's labours, were soon wellnigh submerged by the clericals ; and the educated or learned element became predominant in the Franciscan Order as it was from the first in the Dominican. J Consider for an instant the spread of the former. In 1216, Cardinal Jacques of Vitry finds the Minorites in Lombardy, Tuscany, Apulia, and Sicily. The next year five thousand are reported to have assembled at the general meeting of the Order. Two years later Francis proceeds to carry out his plan of world-conquest by apportion- ing the Christian countries, and sending the brethren into France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and throughout Italy.^ It was a period when in the midst of general ignorance on the part of the clergy as well as laity, Universities {generalia studio) were rising in Italy, France, and England. The popes, Innocent III. (died 1216), Honorius III. (died 1221), and Gregory IX. (died 1241), were seeking to raise the education and even the learning of the Church. Their efforts found in the zeal of the Mendicants a ready response which was not forthcoming from the secular clergy. The Mendicants were zealous for the Faith, and loyal liegemen of the popes, who were their sustainers and the guarantors of their freedom from local ecclesiastical interference. What more fitting instruments could be found to advance the cause of sacred learning at the Universities, and enlarge it with the new knowledge which must either serve the Faith or be its enemy. If all this was not evident in the first decades of the century, it had become so by the middle of it, when the Franciscan Bonaventura and the Dominicans Albertus and Thomas were the intellectual glories of the time. And thus, while the ardour of the new Orders drew to their ranks the learning and spiritual energy of the Church, the intellectual currents of the time caught up those same Brotherhoods, which had so entrusted their own salvation to the mission of saving other souls abroad in the world, where those currents flowed. The Universities, above all the University par excellence, i were in the hands of the secular clergy ; and long and in- i tricate is the story of their jealous endeavours to exclude ^ Of. Felder, o.c. p. 107 sqq. CHAP. XXXVIII THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 429 the Mendicants from Professors' chairs. The Dominicans estabUshed themselves at Paris in 1217, the Franciscans two years later. The former succeeded in obtaining one chair of theology at the University in 1229, and a second in 1231 ; and about the same time the Franciscans obtained their first chair, and filled it with Alexander of Hales. When he died an old man, fifteen years later, they wrote upon his tomb : " Gloria Doctorum, decus et flos Philosophorum, Auctor scriptorum vir Alexander variorum/' closing the epitaph with the words : "primus Doctor eorum," to wit, of the Minorites. He was the author of the first Summa theologiae, in the sense in which that term fits the work of Albert and Thomas. And there is no harm in repeating that this Summa of Alexander's was the first work of a mediaeval schoolman in which use was made of the physics, metaphysics, and natural history, of Aristotle.^ He died in 1245, when the Franciscans appear to have possessed two chairs at the University. One of them was filled in 1248 by Bonaventura, who nine years later was taken from his professorship, to become Minister-General of his Order. It was indeed only in this year 1257 ^^^^ the University itself had been brought by papal injunctions formally to recognize as magister this most eloquent of the Franciscans, and the greatest of the Dominicans, Thomas Aquinas. The latter's master, Albert, had been recognized as magister by the University in 1245. Before the intellectual achievements of these two men, the Franciscan fame for learning paled. But that Order went on winning fame across the Channel, which the Dominicans had crossed before them. In 1224 they came to Oxford, and were received as guests by an establishment of Dominicans : this was but nine years after the foundation of the preaching Order ! Perhaps the Franciscan glories overshone the Dominican at Oxford, where Grosseteste almost belongs to them and Adam of Marsh and Roger Bacon. But whichever Order led, there can be no doubt that together they included the greater part of the intellectual productivity 1 Of. Felder, o.c. p. 177 sgq. 430 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii of the maturing thirteenth century. Nevertheless, in spite of the vast work of the Orders in the field of secular know- ledge, it will be borne in mind that the advancement of sacra doctrina, theology, the saving understanding of Scripture, was the end and purpose of all study with Dominicans and Franciscans, as it was universally with all orthodox mediaeval schoolmen ; although for many the nominal purpose seems a mere convention. Few men of the twelfth or thirteenth century cared to dispute the principle that the Carmina poetarum and the Dicta philosophorum " should be read not for their own sake, but in order that we may learn holy Scripture to the best advantage : I say they are to be offered as first-fruits, for we should not grow old in them, but spring from their thresholds to the sacred page, for whose sake we were studying them for a while." ^ Within the two Orders, especially the Franciscan, men differed sharply as to the desirability of learning. So did their contemporaries among the secular clergy, and their mediaeval and patristic predecessors as far back as Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian. On this matter a large variance of opinion might exist within the compass of orthodoxy ; for Catholicism did not forbid men to value secular knowledge, provided they did not cleave to opinions contradicting Christian verity. This was heresy, and indeed was the sum of what was called Averroism, the chief intellectual heresy of the thirteenth century. It consisted in a sheer following of Aristotle and his infidel commentator, wheresoever the opinions of the Philosopher, so interpreted, might lead. They were not to be corrected in the interest of Christian truth. A representative Averroist, and one so important as to draw the fire of Aquinas, as well as the censures of the Church, was Siger de Brabant. He followed Aristotle and his commentator in maintaining: The universal oneness of the (human) intelligence, the anima infellectiva, an opinion which involved the denial of an individual immortality, with its rewards and punishments ; the eternity of the visible world, — ^uncreated and everlasting ; a rational necessitarianism which precluded freedom of human action and moral responsibility. ^ From Denifle, Universitdten des Mittelalters^ i. 99, note 192. cHAP.xxxvm THE NEW KNOWLEDGE 431 It would be hard to find theses more fundamentally opposed to the Christian Faith. Yet Siger may have deemed himself a Christian. With other Averroists, he sought to preserve his religious standing by maintaining that these opinions were true according to philosophy, but not according to the Catholic Faith : '* Dicunt enim ea esse vera secundum philosophiam, sed non secundum fidem catholicam. ' ' ^ With what sincerity Siger held this untenable position is hard to say. ^ See generally, Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et Vaverroisme latin au moyen age (2nd ed.j Louvain, 1911) ; Baeumker [Beitrdge, 1898), Die Impossihilia des Siger von Brabant ; De Wulf, Hist, of Medieval Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 379 sqq. (Longmans, 1909). CHAPTER XXXIX BONAVENTURA The range and character of the ultimate intellectual interests of the thirteenth century may be studied in the works of four men : St. Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas, and lastly Roger Bacon. The first and last were as different as might be : and both were Franciscans. Albertus and Thomas represent the successive stages of one achievement, the greatest in the course of mediaeval thought. In some respects, their position is intermediate betweenBona- ventura and Bacon. Bonaventura reflects many twelfth- century ways of thinking ; Albert and Thomas embody par excellence the intellectual movement of the thirteenth century in which they all lived ; and Roger Bacon stands for much, the exceeding import of which was not to be recognized until long after he was forgotten. The four were contem- poraries, and, with the possible exception of Bacon, knew each other well. Thomas was Albert's pupil ; Thomas and Bonaventura taught at the same time in the Faculty of Theology at Paris, and stood together in the academic con- flict between their Orders and the Seculars. Albertus and Bonaventura also must have known each other, teaching at the same time in the theological faculty. As for Bacon, he was likewise at Paris studying and teaching, when the others were there, and may have known them.^ Albert and Thomas came of princely stock, and sacrificed their fortune in the world for theology's sake. Bacon's family was well- to-do ; Bonaventura was lowly born. ^ Albert was bom probably in 1193, and died in 1280; Bacon was born some twenty years later, and died about 1292. Bonaventura was bom in 1221, and Thomas in 1225 or 1227 ; they both died in 1274. 432 CHAP. XXXIX BONAVENTURA 433 John of Fidanza, who under the name of Bonaventura was to become Minister-General of his Order, Cardinal, Saint, and Doctor Seraphicus, saw the light in the Tuscan village of Bagnorea. That he was of Italian, half Latin-speaking, stock is apparent from his own fluent Latin. Probably in the year 1238, when seventeen years old, he joined the Franciscan Order ; and four years later was sent to Paris, where he studied under Alexander of Hales. In 1248 he was licensed to lecture publicly, and thenceforth devoted himself at Paris to teaching and writing, and defending his Order against the Seculars, until 1257, when, just as the University conferred on him the title of Magister, he was chosen Minister-General of his Order, in the thirty-seventh year of his age. The greater part of his writings were com- posed before the burdens of this primacy drew him from his studies. He was still to become Prince of the Church, for he was made Cardinal of Albano in 1273, the year before his death. For all the Middle Ages the master in theology was Augustine. Either he was studied directly in his own writ- ings, or his views descended through the more turbid channels •of the works of men he influenced. Mediaeval theology was overwhelmingly Augustinian until the middle of the thirteenth century ; and since theology was philosophy's queen, mediaeval philosophy conformed to that system which Augustine employed in his theology. This, if traced back- ward to its source, should be called Platonism, or Neo- Platonism if we turn our mind to the modes in which Augustine made use of it. His Neo-Platonism was not unaffected by Peripatetic and later systems of Greek philo- sophy ; yet it was far more Platonic than Stoical or Aristotelian. Those first teachers, who in the maturity of their powers became Brothers Minorites, were Augustinians in theology, and consequently Platonists, in so far as Platonism made part of Augustine's doctrines. Thus it was with the first great teacher at the Minorites school in Oxford, Robert Grosseteste, and with the first great Minorite teacher at Paris, Alexander of Hales. Both of these men were pro- moters of the study of Aristotle ; yet neither became so VOL. II 2 F 434 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh imbued with Aristotelianism as to revise either his theological system or the Platonic doctrines which seemed germane to it. Moreover, in so far as we may imagine St. Francis to have had a theology, we must feel that Augustine, with his hand on Plato's shoulder, would have been more congenial to him than Aristotle. And so in fact it was to be with his Order. Augustine's fervent piety, his imagination and religious temperament, held the Franciscans fast. Surely he was very close to the soul of that eloquent Franciscan teacher, who called Alexander of Hales '' master and father," sat at his feet, and never thought of himself as delivering new teachings. It would have been strange indeed if Bona- ventura had broken from the influences which had formed his soul, this Bonaventura whose most congenial precursor lived and wrote and followed Augustine far back in the twelfth century, and bore the name of Hugo of St. Victor. Bonaventura's writings did much to fix Augustinianism upon his Order ; rivalry with the Dominicans doubtless helped to make it fast ; for the latter were following another system under the dominance of their two Titan leaders, who had themselves come to maturity with the new Aristotelian influences, whereof they were magna pars. But just aslGrosseteste and Alexander made use of what they knew of Aristotle, so Bonaventura had no thought of misprizing him who was becoming in western Europe '' the master of those who know." In specific points this wise Augustinian might prefer Aristotle to Plato. For example, he chose to stand, with the former, upon the terra firma of sense perception, rather than keep ever on the wing in the upper region of ideal concepts. " Although the anima, according to Augustine, is linked to eternal principles (legibus aeternis), since somehow it does reach the light of the higher reason, still it is unquestionable, as the Philo- sopher says, that cognition originates in us by the way of the senses, of memory, and of experience, out of which the universal is deduced, which is the beginning of art and knowledge (artis et scientiae). Hence, since Plato referred all certain cognition to the intelligible or ideal world, he was rightly criticized by Aristotle. Not because he spoke ill in sajdng that there are ideas and eternal rationes ; but because, despising the world of sense, he wished to refer all certain cognition to those Ideas. And thus, although CHAP. XXXIX BON A VENTURA 43 5 Plato seems to make firm the path of wisdom {sapientiae) which proceeds according to the eternal rationes, he destroys the way of knowledge, which proceeds according to the rationes of created things {rationes creatas). So it appears that, among philosophers, the word of wisdom {sermo sapientiae) was given to Plato, and the word of knowledge (scientiae) to Aristotle. For that one chiefly looked to the things above, and this one considered things below. ^ But both the word of wisdom and of knowledge, through the Holy Spirit, was given to Augustine, as the pre-eminent declarer of the entire Scripture." ^ So there is Aristotelian ballast in Bonaventura's Platonic- Augustinian theology. His chief divergence from Albert and Thomas (who, of course, likewise held Augustine in honour, and drew on Plato when they chose) is to be found in his temperamental attitude, toward life, toward God, or toward theology and learning. His Augustinian soul held to the pre-eminence of the good above the true, and tended to shape the second to the first. So he maintained the primacy of willing over knowing. Man attains God through goodness of will and through love. The way of knowledge is less prominent with Bonaventura than with Aquinas. Surely the latter, and his master Albert, saw the main sanction of secular knowledge in its ministry to sacra doctrina; but their hearts may seem to tarry with the handmaid. Bonaventura's position is the same ; but his heart never tarries with the handmaid ; for with him heart and mind are ever constant to the queen, Theology. Yet he recognizes the queen's need of the handmaid. Holy Writ is not for babes ; the fulness of knowledge is needed for its understanding : " Non potest intelligi sacra Scriptura sine aliarum scientiarum peritia." ^ And without philosophy many matters of the Faith cannot be intelligently discussed. There is no knowledge which may not be sanctified to the purpose of understanding Scripture ; only let this purpose really guide the mind's pursuits. ^ So Raphael represents them in his " School of Athens.*' ^ Bonaventura, Sermo IV., Quaracchi edition, tome v. p. 572 (cited by De Wulf, Hist. etc. p. 304, note). With all their Augustinian- Platonism, the Fran- ciscans made a good second to the Dominicans in the study of Aristotle, as is proved by the great number of commentaries upon his works by members of the former Order. See Felder, o.c. p. 479. ^ Epist. de tribus quaestionihus, § 12. 436 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii Bonaventura wrote a short treatise to emphasize these universally admitted principles, and to show how every form of human knowledge conformed to the supreme illumination afforded by Scripture, and might be reduced to the terms and methods of Theology, which is Scripture rightly understood. He named the tract De reductione artium ad theologiam ^ (The leading back of the Arts to Theology). " ' Everygood and perfect gift is from above, coming downfrom the Father of lights,' says James. This indicates the source of all illumination, and the streaming of all enlightenment from that fontal Ught. While every illumination is inner knowledge (omnis illuminatio cognitio interna sit) we may distinguish the external hght {lumen exterius), to wit, the light of mechanical art ; the lower Hght, to wit, the Hght of sense perception ; the interior Hght, to wit, the Hght of philosophical cognition ; the superior Hght, to wit, the Hght of grace and Holy Scripture. The first iUuminates as to the arts and crafts ; the second as to natural form ; the third as to inteUectual truth ; the fourth as to saving truth." He enumerates the mechanical arts, drawing from Hugo of St. Victor ; then he follows with Augustine's explanation of the second lumen, as that which discerns corporeal things. He next speaks of the third lumen which lightens us to the investigation of truths intelligible, scrutinizing the truth of words (Logic), or the truth of things (Physics), or the truth of morals (Ethics). The fourth lumen, of Holy Scripture, comes not by seeking, but descends through inspiration from the Father of lights. It includes the literal, the spiritual, moral and anagogic signification of Scripture, teaching the eternal generation and incarnation of Christ, the way to hve, and the union of God and the soul. The first of these branches pertains to faith, the second to morals, and the third to the aim and end of both. " Let us see,'' continues Bonaventura, " how the other illuminations have to be reduced to the light of Holy Scripture. And first as to the illumination from sense cognition, as to which we consider its means, its exercise, and its deUght {oblectamentum)," Its means is the Word eternally generated, and incarnated in time ; its exercise is in the sense perception of an ordered way of living, following ^ Tome V. (Quaracchi ed.) pp. 319-325. CHAP. XXXIX BONAVENTURA 437 the suitable and avoiding the nocuous ; and as for its object of dehght, as every sense pursues that which dehghts it, so the sense of our heart should seek the beautiful, harmonious, and sweet-smelling. In this way divine wisdom dwells hidden in sense cognition. Next, as to the illumination of mechanical art, which is concerned with the production of the works of craft. Herein likewise niay be observed analogies with the light from Holy Scripture, which reveals the Word, the order of living, and the union of God and the soul. No creature proceeds from the great Artificer, save through the Word ; and the human artificer works to produce a beautiful, useful, and enduring work ; which corresponds to the Scriptural order of living. Each human artificer makes his work that it may bring him praise or use or deligh^' ; as God made the rational soul, to praise and serve and take delight in Him, through love. By similar methods of reasoning Bonaventura next "reduces,*' or leads back. Logic, and Natural and Moral Philosophy to the ways and purposes of Theology, and shows how '* the multiform wisdom of God, which is set forth lucidly by Scripture, lies hidden in every cognition, and in every nature. It is also evident that all kinds of knowledge minister to Theology ; and that Theology takes illustrations, and uses phrases, pertaining to every kind of knowledge {cognitionis). It is also plain how ample is the illuminating path, and how in every thing that is sensed or perceived, God himself lies concealed." ^ Ways of reasoning change, while conclusions sometimes endure. Bonaventura's reasoning in the above treatise is for us abstruse and fanciful ; yet many will agree with the conclusion, that all kinds of knowledge may minister to our thought of God, and of man's relationship to Him. And with Bonaventura, all his knowledge, his study of secular philosophy, his logic and powers of presentation, had theology unfailingly in view, and ministered to the satisfaction, the ^ This is from § 26, the last in the work. Bonaventura has already said (§ 7) : " Omnes istae cognitiones ad cognitionem Sacrae Scripturae ordinantur, in ea clauduntur et in ilia perficiuntur, et mediante ilia ad aetemam illuminationem ordinantur." {" All kinds of knowledge are ordained for the knowledge of Holy- Scripture, in this are enclosed and in that are perfected ; and through that as a mediator are ordered for eternal illumination.") 43B THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii actualization (to use our old word) of his religious nature. He belongs among those intellectually gifted men — Augustine, Anselm, Hugo of St. Victor — whose mental and emotional powers draw always to God, and minister to the conception of the soul's union with the living spring of its being. The life, the labours of Bonaventura were as the title of the little book we have just been worrying with, a reductio artium ad theologiam, a constant adapting of all knowledge and ways of meditation, to the sense of God and the soul's inclusion in the love divine. No one should expect to find among his compositions any independent treatment of secular knowledge for its own sake. Rather throughout his writings the reasonings of philosophy are found always ministering to the sovereign theme. The most elaborate of Bonaventura's doctrinal works was his Commentary upon the Lombard's Sentences. In form and substance it was a Summa theologiae^ He also made a brief and salutary theological compend, which he called the Breviloquium.^ The note of devotional piety is struck by the opening sentence, taken from the Epistle to the Ephesians, and is held throughout the work : " ' I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole fatherhood in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you according to the riches of His glory to be strengthened by His Spirit in the inner man ; that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith ; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth ; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled in aU the fulness of God.' The great doctor of the Gentiles discloses in these words the source, progress, and state {ortus, progressus, status) of Holy Scripture, which is called Theology ; indicating that the source is to be thought upon according to the grace {influentiam) of the most blessed Trinity ; the progress with reference to the needs of hinnan capacity ; and the state or fruit with respect to the superabundance of a superplenary feUcity. " For the Source hes not in human investigation, but in divine revelation, which flows from the Father of lights, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and earth is named, from whom, through ^ It is contained in tomes i.-iv. of the Quaracchi edition. ^ T. V. pp. 201-291. CHAP. XXXIX BONAVENTURA 439 His Son Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit flows in us ; and through the Holy Spirit bestowing, as He wills, gifts on each, faith is given, and through faith Christ dwells in our hearts. This is the knowledge of Jesus Christ, from which, as from a source, comes the certitude and understanding of the whole Scripture. Where- fore it is impossible that any one should advance in its know- ledge, unless he first has Christ infused in him. . . . " The Progress of Holy Scripture is not boimd to the laws of reasonings and definitions, like the other sciences ; but, conform- ably to supernatural light, proceeds to give to man the wayfarer {homini viatori) a knowledge of things sufficing for his salvation, by plain words in part, and in part mystically : it presents the contents of the universe as in a Summa, in which is observed the breadth ; it describes the descent (from above) in which is con- sidered the length ; it describes the goodness of the saved, in which is considered the height ; it describes the misery of the damned, in which consists the depth not only of the imiverse itself but of the divine judgment. . . . " The State or fruit of Holy Scripture is the plenitude of eternal felicity. For the Book containing words of eternal life was written not only that we might believe, but that we might have eternal life, in which we shall see, we shall love, and all our desires shall be fiUed, whereupon we shaU know the love which passeth knowledge, and be filled in all the fulness of God. . . . " As to the progress of Scripture, first is to be considered the breadth, which consists in the multitude of parts. . . . Rightly is Holy Scripture divided into the Old and New Testament, and not in theorica and practica, hke philosophy ; because since Scripture is founded on the knowledge of faith, which is a virtue and the basis of morals, it is not possible to separate in Scripture the knowledge of things, or of what is to be believed, from the knowledge of morals. It is otherwise with philosophy, which handles not only the truth of morals, but the true, speculatively considered. Then as Holy Scripture is knowledge {notitia) moving to good and recalling from evil, through fear and love, so it is divided into two Testaments, whose difference, briefly, is fear and love. . . . " Holy Scripture has also length, which consists in the descrip- tion of times and ages from the beginning to the day of Judg- ment. . . . The progress of the whole world is described by Scripture, as in a beautiful poem, wherein one may follow the descent of time, and contemplate the variety, manifoldness, equity, order, righteousness, and beauty of the multitude of divine judgments proceeding from the wisdom of God ruling the world : and as with a poem, so with this ordering of the world, one cannot see its beauty save by considering the whole. . . . " No less has Sacred Scripture height {suhlimitatem) , consisting 440 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh in description of the ranged hierarchies, the ecclesiastical, angehc, and divine. . . . Even as things have^being in matter or nature, they have also being in the anima through its acquired knowledge ; they have also being in the anima through grace, also through glory ; and they have also being in the way of the eternal — ^in arte aeterna. Philosophy treats of things as they are in nature, or in the anima according to the knowledge which is naturally implanted or acquired. But theology as a science (scientia) founded upon faith and revealed by the Holy Spirit, treats of those matters which belong to grace and glory and to the eternal wisdom. Whence placing philosophic cognition beneath itself, and drawing from nature {de naturis rerum) as much as it may need to make a mirror 3rielding a reflection of things divine, it constructs a ladder which presses the earth at the base, and touches heaven at the top : and all this through that one hierarch Jesus Christ, who through his assumption of human nature, is hierarch not in the ecclesiastical hierarchy alone, but also in the angelic ; and is the medial person in the divine hierarchy of the most blessed Trinity." ^ The depth (profunditas) of Scripture consists in its manifold mystic meanings. It reveals these meanings of the creature world for the edification of man journeying to his fatherland. Scripture throughout its breadth, length, height, and depth uses narrative, threat, exhortation, and promise all for one end. " For this doctrina exists in order that we may become good and be saved, which comes not through naked consideration, but rather through inclina- tion of the will. . . . Here examples have more effect than arguments, promises are more moving than ratiocinations, and devotion is better than definition." Hence Scripture does not follow the method and divisions of other sciences, but uses its own diverse means for its saving end. The Prologue closes vnth rules of Scriptural interpretation.^ In our plan of following what is of human interest in mediaeval philosophy or theology, prologues and introduc- tions are sometimes of more importance than the works which they preface ; for they disclose the writer's intent ^ Breviloquium, Prologus. ^ One feels the reality of Bonaventura*s distinctions here between theology and philosophy. They are enunciations of his religious sense, and possess a stronger validity than any elaborate attempt to distinguish by argument between the two. Thomas distinguishes them with excellent reasoning. It lacks con- vincingness, perhaps, from the fact that Thomas's theology is so largely philosophy, as Roger Bacon said. CHAP. XXXIX BONAVENTURA 44 ^ and purpose, and the endeavour within him, which may be more intimately himself, than his performance. So more space has been given to Bonaventura's Prologue than the body of the treatise will require. The order of topics is that of the Lombard's Sentences or Aquinas's Summa. Seven successive partes consider the Trinity, the creation, the corruption from sin, the Incarnation, the grace of the Holy Spirit, the sacramental medicine, and the Last Judgment. Each pars is divided into chapters setting forth some special topic. Bonaventura's method, pursued in every chapter, is to state first the scriptural or dogmatic propositions, and then give their reason, which he introduces with such words as : Ratio autem ad praedictorum intelligentiam haec est. The work is a complete systematic compend of Christian theology ; its conciseness and lucidity of statement are admirable. For an example of its method and quality, the first chapter of the sixth part may be given, upon the origin of Sacraments. " Having treated of the Trinity of God, of the creation of the world, the corruption of sin, the incarnation of the Word, and the grace of the Holy Spirit, it is time to treat of the sacramental medicine, regarding which there are seven matters to consider : the origin of the sacraments, their variation, distinction, appoint- ment, dispensation, repetition, and the integrity of each. " Concerning ^ the origin of the Sacraments this is to be held, that sacraments are sensible signs divinely appointed as medica- ments, in which under cover of things sensible, divine virtue secretly operates ; also that from likeness they represent, from appointment they signify, from sanctification they confer, some spiritual grace, through which the soul is healed from the in- firmities of vice ; and for this as their final end they are ordained ; yet they avail for humility, instruction, and exercise as for a subsidiary end. " The reason and explanation of the aforesaid is this : The reparative principle {principium), is Christ crucified, to wit, the Word incarnate, that directs all things most compassionately because divine, and most compassionately heals because divinely incarnate. It must repair, heal, and save the sick human race, in a way suited to the sick one, the sickness and the occasion of it, ^ As this chapter opens a pars, it begins with a recapitxilation of what has preceded and a summary of what is to come. The specific topic of the chapter commences here. 442 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii and the cure of the sickness. The physician is the incarnate Word, to wit, God invisible in a visible nature. The sick man is not simply spirit, nor simply flesh, but spirit in mortal flesh. The disease is original sin, which through ignorance infects the mind, and through concupiscence infects the flesh. While the origin of this fault primarily lay in reason's consent, yet its occasion came from the senses of the body. Consequently, in order that the medicine should correspond to these conditions, it should be not simply spiritual, but should have somewhat of sensible signs ; for as things sensible were the occasion of the soul's falhng, they should be the occasion of its rising again. Yet since visible signs of themselves have no efficiency ordained for grace, although representative of its nature, it was necessary that they should by the author of grace be appointed to signify and should be blessed in order to sanctify ; so that there should be a representation from natural hkeness, a signification from appointment, and a sanctification and preparedness for grace from the added benediction, through which our soul may be cured and made whole. " Again, since curative grace is not given to the puffed up, the unbelieving, and disdainful, so these sensible signs divinely given, ought to be such as not only would sanctify and confer grace, and heal, but also would instruct by their signification, humble by their acceptance, and exercise through their diversity ; that thus through exercise despondency {acedia) should be shut out from the desiderative [nature], through instruction ignorance be shut out from the rational [nature], through humiliation pride be shut out from the irascible [nature], and the whole soul become curable by the grace of the Holy Spirit, which remakes us according to these three capacities {potentias) ^ into the image of the Trinity and Christ. Finally, whereas the grace of the Holy Spirit is received through these sensible signs divinely appointed, it is found in them as an accident. Hence sacraments of this kind are called the vessels and cause of grace : not that grace is of their substance or produced by them as by a cause ; for its place is in the soul, and it is infused by God alone ; but because it is ordained by divine decree, that in them and through them we shall draw the grace of cure from the supreme physician, Christ ; although God has not fettered His grace to the sacraments.^ '* From the premises, therefore, appears not only what may be the origin of the sacraments, but also the use and fruit. For their origin is Christ the Lord ; their use is the act which exercises, teaches, and humbles ; their fruit is the cure and salvation of men. ^ I.e. the desiderative, rational, and irascible elements in man. ^ Bonaventura closely follows Hugo of St. Victor's De sacramentis, see atUCy Chap. XXIX., especially p. 98, CHAP. XXXIX BONAVENTURA 443 It is also evident that the efi&cient cause of the sacraments is the divine appointment ; their material cause is the figurement of the sensible sign ; their formal cause the sanctification by grace ; their final cause the medicinal healing of men. And because they are named from their form and end they are called sacraments, as it were medicamenta sanctificantia. Through them the soul is led back from the filth of vice to perfect sanctification. And so, although corporeal and sensible, they are medicinal, and to be venerated as holy because they signify holy mysteries, and make ready for the holy gifts {charismata) given by most holy God ; and they are divinely consecrated by holy institution and benedic- tion for the holiest worship of God appointed in holy church, so that rightly they should be called sacraments/' The Breviloquium was Bonaventura's rational com- pendium of Christian theology. It offered in brief compass as complete a system as the bulkiest Summa could carry out to doctrinal elaboration. Quite different in method and intent was his equally famous Itinerarium mentis in Deum,'^ the praise of which, according to the great Chancellor Gerson, could not fitly be uttered by mortal mouth. We have seen how in the Reductio artium ad theologiam Bona- ventura conformed all modes of perception and knowledge to the uses and modes of theology ; the final end of which is man's salvation, consisting in the union of the soul with God, through every form of enlightenment and all the power of love. The Breviloquium has given the sum of Christian doctrine, an intelligent and heart-felt understand- ing of which leads to salvation. And now the Itinerarium — well, it is best to let Bonaventura tell how he came to compose it, and of its purpose and character. " When, after the example of our most blessed father Francis, with panting spirit I was seeking the peace which he preached in the manner of our Lord Jesus Christ, I a sinner who am the seventh, all unworthy, Minister-General of the Brethren, — ^it happened that by God's will in the thirty-third year after our blessed father's death, I turned aside to the mountain of Alvema, as to a quiet place, seeking the spirit's peace. While I lingered there, my mind dwelt on the ascensions of the spirit, and, among others, on the miracle which in that very spot came to blessed Francis, when he saw the winged Seraph in the Ukeness of the Crucified. And it seemed to me his vision represented the 1 opera, t. v. pp. 295-313- 444 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh suspension of our father in contemplation, and the way by which one comes to it. For by those six wings may be understood the suspensions of the six illuminations, by which the soul, as by steps and journeys, through ecstatic outpourings of Christian wisdom, is prepared to pass beyond to peace. For the way hes only through love of the Crucified, which so transformed Paul carried to the third heaven, that he could say : ' I am crucified with Christ : nevertheless I live ; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' So the image of the six seraph's wings represents the six rungs of illumination, which begin with the creatures and lead on to God, to whom no one can come save through the Crucified. . . . " For one is not prepared for the divine contemplations, which lead to the rapt visions of the mind, unless he be with Daniel, a man of desires.^ Desires are stirred within us by the cry of prayer and the bright light of speculation. I shall invite the reader first to the sighings of prayer through Christ crucified, lest perchance he believe that study might sufiice without unction, or dihgence without piety, knowledge without charity, zeal without divine grace, or the mirror {speculum) without the wisdom divinely inspired. Then to those humble and devout ones, to whom grace first has come, to those lovers of the divine wisdom, who burn with desire of it, and are wilhng to be still, for the magnifjdng of God, I shaU propose pertinent speculations, showing how little or nothing is it to turn the mirror outward unless the mirror of our mind be rubbed and polished." Thus Bonaventura writes his prologue to this devotional tract, which will also hold " pertinent speculations." One is sensible of the intellectuality and compacted thought which he fuses in emotional expression. He will write seven chapters, on the seven steps, or degrees, in the ascent to God, which is the mind's true itinerarium. Since we cannot by ourselves lift ourselves above ourselves, prayer is the very mother and source of our upward struggle. Prayer opens our eyes to the steps in the ascent. Placed in the universe of things, we find in it the corporeal and temporal footprint {vestigium) leading into the way of God. Then we enter our mind, which is the everlasting and spiritual image of God ; and this is to enter the truth of God. Whereupon we should rise above us to the eternal most spiritual first cause ; and this is to rejoice in the knowledge of God's majesty. This is the threefold illumination, by ^ Vir desideriomm, Dan. ix. 23 (Vulgate). CHAP. XXXIX BONAVENTURA 445 which we recognise the triple existence of things, in matter, in the intelligence, and in the divine way — in arte divina. And likewise our mind has three outlooks, one upon the corporeal world without, which is called sense, another into and within itself, which is called spiritus, and a third above itself, which is called mens. By means of all three, man should set himself to rising toward God, and love Him with the whole mind, and heart, and soul. Then Bonaventura makes further analysis of his triple illumination into " six degrees or powers of the soul, to wit, sense, imagination, reason, intellect, intelligence, and apex mentis seu synteresis scintilla. These degrees are planted within us by nature, de- formed through fault, reformed through grace, purged through righteousness, exercised through knowledge, perfected through wisdom. . . . Whoever wishes to ascend to God should shim the sins which deform nature, and stretch forth his natural powers, in prayer, toward reforming grace, in mode of Ufe, toward purify- ing righteousness, in meditation, toward illuminating knowledge, in contemplation, toward the wisdom which makes perfect. For as no one reaches wisdom except through grace, righteousness, and knowledge, so no one reaches contemplation, except through meditation, a holy Hfe, and devout prayer." Chapter one closes with little that is novel ; for we seem to be retracing the thoughts of Hugo of St. Victor. The second chapter is on the " Contemplation of God in His Footprints in the Sensible World." This is the next grade of speculation, because we shall now contemplate God not only through His footprints, but in them also, so far as He is in them through essence, power, or presence. The sensible world, the macrocosmus, enters the microcosmus, which is the anima, through the gates of the five senses. The author sketches the processes of sense-perception, through which outer facts are apprehended according to their species, and delighted in if pleasing, and then adjudged according to the ratio of their delightfulness, to wit, their beauty, sweetness, salubrity, and proportion. Such are the footprints in which we may contemplate our God. All things knowable possess the quality of generating their species in our minds, through the medium of our perceptions ; and thus we are led to contemplate the eternal generation 446 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii of the Word — image and Son — from the Father. Like- wise sweetness and beauty point on to their fontal source. And from speculation on the local, the temporal, and mutable, our reason carries us to the thought of the immut- able, the uncircumscribed and eternal. Then from the beauty and delightfulness of things, we pass to the thought of number and proportion, and judge of their irrefragable laws, wherein are God's wisdom and power. '' The creatures of this sensible world signify the invisible things of God ; in part because God is the source and exemplar and end of every creature ; in part through their proper likeness ; in part from their prophetic prefiguring ; in part from angelic operations ; and in part through superadded ordainment. For every creature by nature is an effigy of the eternal wisdom ; especially whatever creature in Scripture is taken by the spirit of prophecy as a type of the spiritual ; but more especially those creatures in the Hkeness of which God willed to appear by an angehc minister ; and most especially that creature which he chose to mark as a sacrament." From these first grades of speculation, which contemplate the footprints of God in the world, we are led to contemplate the divine image in the natural powers of our minds. We find the image of the most blessed Trinity in our memory, our rational intelligence, and our will ; the joint action of which leads on to the desire of the summum bonum. Next we contemplate the divine image in our minds remade by the gifts of grace upon which we must enter by the door of the faith, hope, and love of the Mediator of God and men, Jesus Christ. As philosophy helped us to see the image of God in the natural qualities of our mind, so Scripture now is needed to bring us to these three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love), which enable the mind of fallen man to be repaired and made anew through grace. From this fourth grade, in which God is still con- templated in his image, we rise to consider God as pure being, wherein there is neither privation, nor bound, nor particularity ; and next in his goodness, the highest com- municability {summam communicahilitatem) of which may be contemplated, but not comprehended, in the mystery of the most blessed Trinity. ** In whom [the persons of the Trinity] it is necessary because of the summa honitas that CHAP. XXXIX BONAVENTURA 447 there should be the summa communicahilitaSy and because of the latter, the summa consubstantialitas, and because of this the summa configurabilitas, and from these the summa coaequalitas, and through this the summa coaeternitas, and from all the preceding the summa cointimitas, by which each is in the other, and one works with the other through every conceivable indivisibility [indivisionem) of the substance, virtue, and operation of the same most blessed Trinity. . . ." " And when thou contemplatest this," adds Bonaventura, " do not think to comprehend the incomprehensible." From age to age the religious soul finds traces of its God in nature and in its inmost self. Its ways of finding change, varying with the prevailing currents of knowledge ; yet still it ever finds these vestigia, which represent the widest deductions of its reasoning, the ultimate resultants of its thought, and its own brooding peace. Therefore may we not follow sympathetically the Itinerarium of Bona- ventura's mind as it traces the footprints of its God ? Thus far the way has advanced by reason, uplifted by grace, and yet still reason. This reason has comprehended what it might comprehend of the traces and evidences of God in the visible creation and the soul of man ; it has sought to apprehend the being of God, but has humbly recognized its inability to penetrate the marvels of his goodness in the mystery of the most blessed Trinity. There it stops at the sixth grade of contemplation ; yet not baffled, or rendered vain, for it has performed its function and brought the soul on to where she may fling forth from reason's steeps, and find herself again, buoyant and blissful, in a medium of super-rational contemplation. This makes the last chapter of the mind's Itinerarium ; it is the apex mentis, the summit of all contemplations in which the mind has rest. Hence- forth " Christ is the way and door, the ladder and the vehicle, as the propitiation placed on the Ark of God, and the sacrament hidden from the world. He who looks on this propitiation, with his look full fixed on him who hangs upon the cross, through faith, hope, and charity, and all devotion, he makes his Passover, and through the rod of the cross shall pass through the Red Sea, out of Egypt entering the desert, and there taste the hidden manna, and rest 448 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh with Christ in the tomb, dead to all without ; and shall realize, though as one still on the way, the word of Christ to the beHeving thief : ' To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.' Which was also revealed to the blessed Francis when in ecstasy of contempla- tion on the high mountain, the Seraph with six wings, nailed on a cross, appeared to him.i There, as we have heard from his com- panion, he passed into God through ecstasy of contemplation, and was set as an exemplar of perfect contemplation, whereby God should invite all truly spiritual men to this transit and ecstasy, by example rather than by word. In this passing over, if it be perfect, all the ways of reason are relinquished, and the apex affectus is transferred and transformed into God. This is the mystic secret known by no one who does not receive it, and received by none who does not desire it, and desired only by him whose heart's core is aflame from the fire of the Holy Spirit, whom Christ sent on earth. . . . Since then nature avails nothing here, and dihgence but Httle, we should give ourselves less to investiga- tion and more to unction ; httle should be given to speech, and most to inner gladness ; Httle to the written word, and all to God's gift, the Holy Spirit ; Httle or nothing is to be ascribed to the creature, and all to the creative essence. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." Here Bonaventura loses himself yi an untranslatable extract from Eriugena's version of the Areopagite, and then proceeds : " If thou askest how may these things be, interrogate grace and not doctrine, desire and not knowledge, the groaning of prayer rather than study, the Spouse rather than the teacher, God and not man, mist rather than clarity, not Hght but fire aU aflame and bearing on to God by devotion and glowing affection. Which fire is God, and the man Christ kindles it in the fervour of his passion, as only he perceives who says : ' My soul chooseth strangHng and my bones, death.' He who loves this death shall see God. Then let us die and pass into darkness, and silence our soHcitudes, our desires, and phantasies ; let us pass over with Christ crucified from this world to the Father ; that, the Father shown us, we may say with PhiHp : ' it sufficeth us.' Let us hear with Paul : ' My grace is sufficient for thee.' Let us exult with David, sa5nng : ' Defecit caro mea et cor meum, Deus cordis mei et pars mea Deus in aetemum.' " ^ It is best to leave the saint and doctor here, and not ^ The Breviloquium and Itinerarium are conveniently edited by Hefele in a little volume (Tubingen, 1861) ; but his text is not always the same as the Quaracchi edition. CHAP. XXXIX BONA VENTURA 449 follow in other treatises the current of his yearning thought till it divides in streamlets which press on their tortuous ways through allegory and the adumbration of what the mind disclaims the power to express directly. Those more elaborate treatises of his, which are called mystic, are difficult for us to read. As with Hugo of St. Victor, from whom he drew so largely, Bonaventura's expression of his religious yearnings may interest and move us ; but one needs perhaps the cloister's quiet to follow on through the allegorical elaboration of this pietism. Bonaventura's Soliloquium might weary us after the Itinerarium, and we should read his De septem itineribus aeternitatis with no more pleasure than Hugo's Mystic Ark of Noah. It is enough to witness the spiritual attitude of these men without tracking them through the " selva oscura " to their lairs of meditation. VOL. IT 2 G CHAPTER XL ALBERTUS MAGNUS Albert the Great was prodigious in the mass of his accomplishment. Therein lay his importance for the age he lived in ; therein lies his interest for us. For him -^substantial philosophy, as distinguished from the instru- mental role of logic, has three parts, set by nature rather than devised by man ; they are physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. " It is our intention," says Albert at the beginning of his exposition of Aristotle's Physics, " to make all the said parts intelligible to the Latins." And he did. Perhaps the world has had no greater purveyor of a knowledge not his own. He is comparable with Boethius, who gave the Latin world the Aristotelian Organon, a gift but half availed of for many centuries. Albert gave his Latin world the rest of Aristotle, the philosophia recdis. His world was as ready to receive this great donation, as the time of Boethius was unready to profit by any intel- lectual gift demanding mental energies for its assimilation. Boethius stood alone in his undertakiag ; if his hand failed there was none to take up his task. Fate stayed his hand ; and the purpose that was his, to render the whole of Plato and Aristotle intelligible to the Latin world, perished with him, the Latin world being by no means eager for the whole of Aristotle and Plato, and unfit to receive it had it been proffered. But Albert's time was eager ; it was importunate for the very enlargement of knowledge which Albert, more than any other man, was bringing it. An age obtains what it demands. Albert had fellow-labourers, some preceding, some assisting, and others following him, to perfect the 450 CHAP. XL ALBERTUS MAGNUS 451 knowledge in which he worked, and build it into the scholastic Christian scheme. But in this labour of purveyor- ship he overtopped the rest, the giant of them all. He was bom Count of Bollstadt, in Suabia, probably in the year 1193. Whether his youth was passed in the profession of arms, or in study, is not quite clear. But while still young he began his years of studious travel, and at Padua in 1223 he joined .the Dominican Order. He became a miracle of learning, reputed also as one who could explain the phenomena of nature. From 1228 to 1245 he taught in German cities, chiefly at Cologne. Then the scene changed to Paris, where he lectured and won fame from 1245 to 1248. With this period begins the publica- tion of his philosophical encyclopaedia. Perhaps it was first completed in 1256. But Albert kept supplementing and revising it until his death. In 1248 he was remanded to Cologne to establish a school there. His life continued devoted to study and teaching, yet with interruptions. For he filled the office of Provincial of his Order for Germany from 1254 to 1257, ^^d w^s compelled to be Bishop of Regensburg from 1260 to 1262. Then he insisted on resigning, and retired to a cloister at Cologne. Naturally he was engaged in a number of learned controversies, and was burdened with numerous ecclesiastical affairs. In 1277 for the last time he set his face toward Paris, to defend the doctrines and memory of his great pupil, who had died three years before. His own illustrious life closed at Cologne on the fifteenth of November, 1280. Albert was a man of piety, conforming strictly to the rules of his Order. It is said that he refused to own even the manu- scripts which he indited ; and as Dominican Provincial of Germany he walked barefoot on his journeys through the vast territory set under his supervision. Tradition has him exceeding small of stature. Albert's labours finally put within reach of his con- temporaries the sum of philosophy and science contained in the works of Aristotle, and his ancient, as well as Arabian, commentators. The undertaking was grandly conceived ; it was carried out with tireless energy and massive learning. Let us observe the principles which 452 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh informed the mind of this mighty Teuton scholar. He transcribed approvingly the opinion expressed by Aristotle at the opening of the Metaphysics, that the love of know- ledge is natural to man ; and he recognized the pleasure arising from knowledge of the sensible world, apart from considerations of utihty.^ He took this thought from Aristotle ; but the proof that he made it his own with power lay in those fifty years of intellectual toil which produced the greatest of all mediaeval storehouses of knowledge. In his reliance on his sources, Albert is mediaeval ; his tendency is to accept the opinion which he is reproducing, especially when it is the opinion of Aristotle. .Yet he protested against regarding even him as infallible. , " He who believes that Aristotle was God, ought to believe that he never erred. If one regards him as a man, then surely he may err as well as we." ^ Albert was no Averroist to adhere to all the views of the Philosopher ; he pointedly differed from him where orthodoxy demanded it, maintain- ing, for instance, the creation of the world in time, contrary to the opinion of the Peripatetics. Albert, and with him Aquinas, had not accepted merely the task of expounding Aristotle, but also that of correcting him where Truth (with a large Christian capital) required it. Albert held that Aristotle might err, and that he did not know everything. The development of science was not closed by his death : " Dicendum quod scientiae demonstrativae non omnes factae sunt, sed plures restant adhuc inveniendae." ^ This is not Roger Bacon speaking, but Albertus ; and stiQ more might one think to hear the voice of the recalcitrant Franciscan in the words : " Oportet experimentum non in uno modo, sed secundum omnes circmnstantias probare." * Yet these words too are Albert's, and he is speaking of the observation of nature's phenomena ; regarding which one shall not simply transcribe the ancient statement ; but observe with his own eyes and mind. ^ AlbertuSj Metaphysicorum lihri XIII., lib. i. tract, x, cap. 4. 2 Physic, lib. viii. tract, i, cap. 14. ^ Poster. Analyt. lib. i. tract, i, cap. 1. This and the previous citation are from Mandonnet's Siger de BrabatU, * Ethic* lib. vi. tract. 2, cap. 25. CHAP. XL ALBERTUS MAGNUS 453 This was in the spirit of Aristotle ; Albert recognizes and approves. But did he make the experimental principle his own with power, as he did the thought that the desire to know is inborn ? This is a fundamental question as to Albert. No one denies his learning, his enormous book- diligence. But was he also an observer of natural pheno- mena ? One who sought to test from his own observation the statements of the books he read ? It is best here to avoid either a categorical affirmation or denial. The standard by which one shapes one's answer is important. Are we to compare Albert with a St. Bernard, whose meditations shut his eyes to mountains, lakes, and woods ? Or are we to apply the standards of a natural science which looks always to the tested results of observation ? There is sufficient evidence in Albert's writings to show that he kept his eyes open, and took notice of interesting phenomena, seen, for instance, on his journeys. But, on the other hand, it is absurd to imagine that he dreamed of testing the written matter which he paraphrased, or of materially adding to it, by systematic observation of nature. Accounts of his observations do not always raise our opinion of his science. He transcribes the description of certain worms, and says that they may come from horse-hairs, for he has seen horse-hairs, in still water, turning into worms. ^ The trouble was that Albert had no general understanding of the processes of nature. Consequently, in his De animalibus for instance, he gives the fabulous as readily as the more reasonable. Nevertheless, let no one think that natural knowledge did not really interest and delight him. His study of plants has led the chief historian of botany to assert that Albert was the first real botanist, after the ancient Theophrastus, inasmuch as he studied for the sake of learning the nature of plants, irrespective of their medical or agricultural uses.^ The writings of Albertus Magnus represent, perhaps more fully than those of any other man, the round of know- ledge and intellectual interest attracting the attention of western Europe in the thirteenth century. At first glance ^ Carus, Ges, def Zoologie, p. 231. ^ Ernst Meyer, Ges. der Botanik, Bd. iv. p. 77. 454 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh they seem to separate into those which in form and sub- stance are paraphrases of Aristotelian treatises, or borrowed expositions of AristoteUan topics ; and those which are more independent compositions. Yet the latter, like the Summa de creaturis, for example, will be found to consist largely of borrowed material ; the matter is rearranged, and presented in some new connection, or with a purpose other than that of its source. In his Aristotelian paraphrases, which were thickly sown with digressive expositions, Albert's method, as he states at the beginning of the Physica, is " to foUow the order and opinions of Aristotle, and to give in addition whatever is needed in the way of explanation and support ; yet without reproducing Aristotle's text {tamen quod textus eius nulla fiat mentio). And we shall also compose digressiones to expound whatever is obscure." The titles of the chapters will indicate whether their substance is from Aristotle. Thus instead of giving the Aristotelian text, with an attached commentary, Albert combines paraphrase and supple- mentary exposition. Evidently the former method would have presented Aristotle's meaning more surely, and would have thus subserved a closer scholarship. But for this the Aristotelian commentaries of Aquinas must be awaited. The compass of Albert's achievement as a purveyor of ancient knowledge may be seen from a cursory survey of his writings ; which will likewise afford an idea of the quaUty of his work, and how much there was of Albert in it.^ To begin with, he sets forth with volmninous exposition the entire Aristotelian Organon. The preliminary questions as to the nature of logic were treated in the De praedicabilibus,^ which expanded the substance of Porphyry's Isagoge, In this treatise Albert expounds his conclusions as to universals, the universal being that which is in one yet is fit {aptum) to be in many, and is predicable of many. " Et hoc modo prout ratio est praedicabilitatis, ad logicam pertinet de uni- versalitractare; quamvis secundum quod est natura quaedam ^ The works of Albertus were edited by the Dominican Jammy in twenty-one volumes (Lyons, 1651) ; they are reprinted by Borgnet (Paris, 1890 et seq.). My references to volumes follow Jammy*s edition. ^ See ante, pp. 343 sqq. CHAP. XL ALBERTUS MAGNUS 45 5 et differentia entis, tractate de ipso pertineat ad meta- physicam." That is to say, It pertains to logic to treat of the universal in respect to its predicability ; but in so far as the question relates to the nature and differences of essential being, it pertains to metaphysics. This sentence is an example of Albert's awkward Latin ; but it shows how firmly he distinguishes between the logical and the meta- physical material. His treatment of logic is exhaustive, rather than acutely discriminating. He works constantly with the material of others, and the result is more inclusive than organic.^ In his ponderous treatment of logical themes, no possible consideration is omitted. The De praedicahilibus is followed by the De praedica- mentis, Albert's treatise on the Categories, Next comes his Liber de sex principiis, which is a paraphrasing exposition of the work of Gilbert de la Porree. Then comes his Perihermenias, which keeps the Greek title of the De inter- pretatione. These writings are succeeded by elaborate expositions of the more advanced logical treatises of Aristotle, all of them, of course, Analytics (Prior and Posterior), Topics, and Elenchi. The total production is detailed, exhaustive, awful ; it is ingens truly, only not quite informis ; and Teutonically painstaking and conscientious. Thus logic makes Tome I. of the twenty-one tomes of Albert's Opera, Tome II. contains his expository para- phrases of Aristotle's Physics and lesser treatises upon physical topics, celestial and terrestrial. From the opening chapter we have already taken the programme of his large intention to make known all Aristotle to the Latins. In this chapter, likewise, he proceeds to lay out the divisions of philosophia realis into Aristotelian conceptions of meta- physica, mathematica, and physica. With chapter two he faUs into the first of his interminable digressions, taking up what were called ** the objections of Heracleitus " to any science of physics. Another digressive chapter considers the proper subject of physical science, to wit, corpus mobile, and another considers its divisions. After a while he takes up the opinions of the ancients upon the beginnings (principia) ^ Prantl, Ges. der Logik, iii. 89 sqq,, calls him an " unklarer Kopf," incapable of consistent thinking. 4S6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh of things, and then reasons out the true opinion in the matter. Liber 11. of his Physica is devoted to Natura, considered in many ways, but chiefly as the principium intrinsecum omnium eorum quae naturalia sunt. It is the principle of motion in the mobile substance. Next he passes to a discussion of causes ; and in the succeeding books he considers movement, place, time, and eternity. Albert's paraphrase is replete with logical forms of thinking ; it seems like formal logic applied in physical science. The world about us still furnishes, or is, data for our thoughts ; and we try to conceive it consistently, so as to satisfy our thinking ; so did Aristotle and Albertus. But they avowedly worked out their conceptions of the external world according to the laws determining the consistency of their own mental processes ; and deemed this a proper way of approach to natural science. Yet the work of Aristotle represents a real consideration of the universe, and a tremendous mass , of natural knowledge. The achievement of Albertus in I rendering it available to the scholar-world of the thirteenth : century was an extension of knowledge which seems the : more prodigious as we note its enormous range. This con- ' tinues to impress us as we turn over Albert's next treatises, paraphrasing those of Aristotle, as their names indicate : De coelo et mundo ; De generatione et corruptione ; Libri IV. mefeorum ; De mineralibus, which ends Tome 11. and the physical treatises proper. Tome HI. introduces us to another region, opening with Albert's exhaustive paraphrase, De anima. It is placed here because the scientia de anima is a part of naturalis scienfia, and comes after minerals and other topics of physics, but precedes the science of animate bodies — corporum animatorum ; for the last cannot be known except through knowing their animae. In this, as well as in other works of Albert, psychological material is gathered from many sources. One may hardly speak of the psychology of Albertus Magnus, since his matter has no organic unity. It is largely Aristotelian, with the thoughts of Arab commentators taken into it, as in Albert's Aristotelian paraphrases generally. But it is also Augustinian, and Platonic and Neo-Platonic. Albert is capable of defending opposite views in the same CHAP. XL ALBERTUS MAGNUS 457 treatise ; and in spite of best intentions, he does not succeed in harmonizing what he draws from Aristotle, with what he takes from Augustine. Hence his works nowhere present a system of psychology which might be called Albert's, either through creation or consistent selection. But at least he has gathered, and bestowed somewhere, all the accessible material.^ Tome III. of Albert's Opera contains also his Aristotelian paraphrase, Metaphysicorum libri XIII. In this vera sapientia philosophiae, he follows Aristotle closely, save where orthodoxy compels deviation.^ Tome IV. contains his paraphrasing expositions, Ethica and In octo libros poUticorum Aristotelis commentarii. Tome V. contains paraphrases of Aristotle's minor natural treatises, — parva naturalia ; to wit, the Liber de sensu et sensato, treating problems of sense-perception ; next the Liber de memoria et reminiscentia, in which the two are thus distinguished : '* Memoria motus continuus est in rem, et uniformis. Re- miniscibilitas autem est motus quasi interceptus et abscissus per oblivionem." Treatises follow : De somno et vigilia ; De motibus animalium ; De aetate, sive dejuventute et senectute; De spiritu et respiratione ; De morte et vita ; De nutrimento et nutribile ; De natura et origine animae ; De unitate intellectus contra Averroem (a controversial tract) ; De intellectu et intelligibile (an important psychological writing) ; De natura locorum ; De causis proprietatum elementorum ; De passionibus aeris, sive de vaporum impressionibus ; and next and last, saving some minor tracts, Albert's chief botanical work, De vegetabilibus. Aristotle's Botany was lost, and Albert's work was based on the De plantis of Nicolas of Damascus, a short compend vulgarly ascribed to Aristotle, but really made in the first century, and passing through numerous translations from one language to another, before Albert accepted it as the com- position of the Stagirite. It consisted of two short books ; ^ This is the view of A. Schneider, Die Psychologie Alberts des Grossen {Baeum- ker's Beitrdge, Miinster, 1903). The author presents analytically the disparate elements — Aristotelian, Neo- Platonic, and theological- Augustinian, which are found in Albert's writings. ^ See Endriss, Albertus Magnus als Interpret der Aristotelischen Metaphysik (Munich, 1886). 458 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh Albert's work contained seven long ones, and made the most important work on botany since the times of Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus. In opening, Albert says that generalities applicable to all animate things have been already presented, and now it is time to consider more especially and in turn, vegetabilia, sensibilia, rationabilia. In the first eight chapters of his first book, Albert foUows his supposed Aristotelian source, and then remarks that the translation of the Philosopher's treatise is so ignorantly made that he will himself take up in order the six problems thus far incompetently discussed. So he considers whether plants have souls ; whether plant-souls feel and desire ; whether plants sleep ; as to sex in plants ; whether without sex they can propagate their species ; and as to their hidden life. In the second book, having again bewailed the in- sufficiency of his source, Albert takes up the classification of plants, and proceeds with a description of their various parts, then passes on to the shape of leaves, the generation and nature of flowers, their colour, odour, and shape. Liber III., still as an independent digressio, discusses seeds and fruit. In Liber IV. Albert returns to his unhappy source, and his matter declines in interest ; but again, in Liber V., he frees himself in a digressio on the properties and effects of plants, gathered from many sources, some of which are foolish enough. His sixth book is a description of trees and other plants in alphabetical order. The last and seventh is devoted to agriculture.^ In the De vegetabilibus, Albert, as an expounder of natural knowledge, is at his best. A less independent and intelli- gent production is his enormous treatise De animalibus libri XXVI,, which fills the whole of Tome IV. of Albert's Opera, A certain Thomas of Cantimpre, an admiring pupil of Albert, may have anticipated the above-named work of his teacher by his own compilation, De naturis reruniy which appears to have been composed shortly before the middle of the thirteenth century. Its descriptions of animals, although borrowed and uncritical, were at least intended to describe them ^ The above is mainly drawn from E. Meyer's Ges. der Botanik, Bd. iv. pp. 38-78. CHAP. XL ALBERTUS MAGNUS 459 actually, and were not merely fashioned for the moral's sake, after the manner of the Physiologus,^ and many a compilation of the early Middle Ages. Yet the work contains moralities enough, and plenty of the fabulous. But Thomas diligently gathered information as he might, and from Aristotle more than any other. Thus, in his lesser way, he, as well as Albert, represents the tendency of the period to interest itself in the realities, as well as in the symbolisms, of the natural world. Albert's work is not such an inorganic compilation as Thomas's. He has paraphrased the ten books of Aristotle's natural histories, his four books on the parts of animals, and his five books on their generation. To these nineteen, he has added seven books on the nature of animal bodies and on their grades of perfection ; and then on quadrupeds, birds, aquatic animals, snakes, and small bloodless creatures. Besides Aristotle, he draws on Avicenna, Galen, Ambrose (!), and others, including Thomas of Cantimpre. Thus, his work is made up mainly of the ancient written material. Moreover, Albert is kept from a natural view of his subject through the needs he feels to measure animals by the standards of human capacity, and learn to know them through knowing man. His digressiones usually discuss abstract problems, as, for instance, whether beyond the four elements, any fifth principle enters the composition of animal bodies. As for his anatomy, he describes the muscles, and calls the veins nerves, having no real knowledge of the latter. He corrects few ancient errors, either anatomical or physiological ; and his own observations, occasionally referred to in his work, scarcely win our respect. Nor does he exclude fabulous stories, or the current superstitions as to the medicinal or magical effect of parts of certain animals. On the whole, Albert's merit in the province of Zoology lies in his intro- duction of the Aristotelian data and conceptions to the mediaeval Latin West.^ After Tome IV, of Albert's Opera, follow many portly tomes, the contents of which need not detain us. There are enormous commentaries on the Psalms and Prophets, and the ^ Antej Volume I. p. 76. ^ See Carus, Gesckichte der Zoologie, pp. 211-239. 46o THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh Gospels (Tomes VII.-XI.) ; then a tome of sermons, then a tome of commentaries on the Hierarchies of Pseudo-Diony- sius ; and three tomes of commentaries on the Lombard's Sentences, — commentaries, that is to say, upon works which stood close to Scripture in authority. With these we reach the end of Albert's labours in paraphrase and commentary, and pass to his more constructive work. Of course, the first and chief is his Summa theologiae, contained in Tomes XVII. and XVIII. of the Opera. With Albert, theology is a science, a branch of systematic knowledge, the highest indeed, and yet one among others. This science, says he in the Prologue to his Summa, ". . . is of aU sciences the most entitled to credence — certissimae credulitatis etfidei. Other sciences, concerning creatures, possess rationes immohiles, yet those rationes are mobiles because they are in created things. But this science, founded in rationihus aeternis, is immutable both secundum esse and secundum rationem. And since it is not constituted of the sensible and imaginable, which are not quite cleared of the hangings of matter, plainly it, alone or supremely, is science : for the divine intellect is altogether intellectual, being the hght and cause of everything intelligible ; and from it to us is the divine science." Albert's dialectic is turgid enough, and lacks the lucidity of his pupil. Yet his reasoning may be weighty and even convincing. Intellect, Reason and its realm of that which is known through Reason, is higher than sense perceptions and imaginations springing from them : it affords the surest knowledge ; the science that treats of pure reason, which is in God, is the surest and noblest of sciences. Albert clearly defines the province and nature of theology. " It is scientia secundum pietatem ; it is not concerned with the knowable {scihile) simply as such, nor with the knowable imivers- ally ; but only as it incUnes us to Piety. Piety, as Augustine says, is the worship of God, perfected by faith, hope, charity, prayer, and sacrifices. Thus theology is the science of what pertains to salvation ; for piety conduces to salvation.'* ^ The Summa theologiae treats of the encyclopaedic matter of the sacred science, in the order and arrangement ^ Sum. theol. pars prima, tract, i, quaest. ii. CHAP. XL ALBERTUS MAGNUS 461 with which we are familiar.^ It is followed (Tome XIX.) by Albert's Sumnta de creaturis, a presentation of God's creation, omitting the special topics set forth in the De vegetabilibus and De animalibus. It treats of creation, of matter, of time and eternity, of the heavens and celestial bodies, of angels, their qualities and functions, and the hierarchies of them ; of the state of the wicked angels, of the works of the six days, briefly ; and then of man, soul and body, very fully ; of man's habitation and the order and perfection of the universe. Thus the Summa de creaturis treats of the world and man as God's creation ; but it is not directly concerned with man's salvation, which is the distinguishing purpose of a Summa theologiae, however encyclopaedic such a work may be. Two tomes remain of Albert's opera, containing much that is very different from anything already considered. Tome XX. is devoted to the Virgin Mary, and is chiefly made up of two prodigious tracts : De laudibus heatae Mariae Virginis lihri XII, , and the Mariale, sive quaestiones super evangelium, Missus est angelus Gabriel. These works — ^it is disputed whether Albert was their author — are a glorifica- tion, indeed a deification, of Mary. They are prodigious ; they are astounding. The worship of Mary is gathered up in them, of Mary the chief and best beloved religious creation of the Middle Ages ; only not a creation, strictly speaking, for the Divine Virgin, equipped with attribute and quality, sprang from the fecimd matrix of the early Church. The works before us represent a simpler piety than Albert's Summa theologiae. They contain satisfying, consoling state- ments, not woven of dialectic. And the end is all that the Mary-loving soul could wish. " Christ protects the servants of His genetrix : — and so does Mary, as may be read in her miracles, protect us from our bodily enemies, and from the seducers of souls." ^ The praises of Mary will seem mar- vellous indeed to any one turning over the tituli of books and chapters. There is here a whole mythology, and a universal symbolism. Symbolically, Mary is everything imaginable ; she has every virtue and a mass of power 1 Ante, Chapter XXXVI., i. ^ Tome XX. p. 4.1a, 462 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii and privileges. She is the adorable and chief efficient Goddess mediating between the Trinity and the creature man. Tome XXL, last tome of all, has a variety of writings, some of which may not be Albert's. Among them is a work of sweet and simple piety, a work of turning to God as a little child ; and one would be loath to take it away from this man of learning. De adhaerendo Deo is its title, which tells the story. Albert wished at last to write something presenting man's ultimate perfection, so far as that might be realized in this life. So he writes this little tract of chamber-piety, as to how one should cling to Christ alone. Yet he cannot disencumber himself of his lifelong methods of composition. He might conceive and desire ; but it was not for him to write a tract to move the heart. The best he can say is that the end of all our study and discipline is intendere et quiescere in Domino Deo intra te per purissimum intellectum, et devotissimum affectum sine phantasmatibus et implicationibus. The great scholar would come home at last, like a little chUd, if he only could. CHAPTER XLI THOMAS AQUINAS I. Thomas's Conception of Human Beatitude. II, Man*s Capacity to know God. III. How God knows. IV. How the Angels know. V. How Men know. VI. Knowledge through Faith perfected in Love. I With Albert it seemed most illuminating to outline the masses of his work of Aristotelian purveyorship and in- choate reconstruction of the Christian encyclopaedia in conformity with the new philosophy. Such a treatment will not avail for Thomas. His achievement, even measured by its bulk, was as great as Albert's. But its size and encyclopaedic inclusiveness do not represent its integral excellences. The intellectual qualities of Thomas evinced in his work are of a higher order than those included in intelligent diligence, however exceptional. They must be disengaged from out of the vast product of their energies, in order that they may be brought together, and made to appear in the organic correlation which they held in the mind of the most potent genius of scholasticism. We are pleased to find some clue to a man's genius in the race and place from which he draws his origin. So for whatever may be its explanatory value as to Thomas, one may note that he came of Teutonic stocks, which for some generations had been domiciled in the form-giving Italian land. The mingled blood of princely Suabian and Norman lines flowed in him ; the nobility of his father's house, the 463 464 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh Counts of Aquinum, was equalled by his mother's lineage. Probably in 1225 he was born, in Southern Italy, not far from Monte Cassino. Thither, as a child, he was sent to school to the monks, and stayed with them through child- hood's formative period. His education did not create the mind which it may have had part in directing to sacred study. Near his tenth year, the extraordinary boy was returned to Naples, there to study the humanities and philosophy under selected masters. When eighteen, he launched himself upon the intellectual currents of the age by joining the Dominican Order. Stories have come down of the violent, but fruitless opposition of his family. In two years, with true instinct, Thomas had made his way from Naples to the feet of Albert in Cologne. Thenceforth the two were to be together, as their tasks permitted, and the loyal relationship between master and scholar was un- disturbed by the latter's transcendent genius. Plato had the greatest pupil, and Aristotle the greatest master, known to fame. That pupil's work was a redirecting of philosophy. The work of pupil Thomas perfected finally the matter upon which his master laboured ; and the master's aged eyes beheld the finished structure that was partly his, when the pupil's eyes had closed. Thomas, djdng, left Albert to defend the system that was to be called " Thomist," after him who constructed and finished it to its very turret points, rather than " Albertist," after him who prepared the materials. To return to the time when both still laboured. Thomas in 1245 accompanied his master to Paris, and three years later went back with him to Cologne. Afterwards their duties often separated them. We know that in 1252 Thomas was lecturing at Paris, and that he there received with Bonaventura the title of magister in 1257. After this he is found south of the Alps ; it was in the year 1263 that Urban IV. at Rome encouraged him to undertake a critical commentary upon Aristotle, based on a closer ^rendering into Latin of the Greek. In 1268, at the height of his academic fame, he is once more at Paris ; which he leaves for the last time in 1272, having been directed to establish a studium generale at Naples. Two years later CHAP. XLI AQUINAS 46 s he died, on his way to advise the labours of the Council assembled at Lyons.^ Thomas wrote commentaries upon the Aristotelian De interpretatione and Posterior Analytics ; the Physics, the De coelo et mundo, the Meteorum, the Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, and certain other Aristotelian treatises. His work shows such a close understanding of Aristotle as the world had not known since the days of the ancient Peripatetics. Of course, he lectured on the Sentences, and the result remains in his Commentaries on them. He lectured, and the re- sulting Commentaries exist in many tomes, on the greater part of both the Old and New Testaments. It would little help our purpose to catalogue in detail his more constructive and original works, wherein he perfected a system of philosophy and sacred knowledge. Chief among them were the Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa theologiae, the latter the most influential work of all western mediaeval scholasticism. Many of his more important shorter treatises are included in the Quaestiones disputatae, and the Quod- lihetalia. They treat of many matters finally put together in the Summa theologiae. De malo in communi, de peccatis, etc. ; De anima ; De virtutibus in communi, etc. ; De veritate ; De ideis ; De cognitione angelorum ; De bono ; De voluntate ; De libero arbitrio ; De passionibus animae ; De gratia ; — such are titles drawn from the Quaestiones. The Quodlibetalia were academic disputations held in the theological faculty, upon any imaginable thesis having theological bearing Some of them still appear philosophical, while many seem bizarre to us ; for example : Whether an angel can move from one extreme to the other without passing through the middle. One may remember that such questions had been put, and put again, from the time of the Church Fathers. This question answered by Thomas whether an angel may pass from one extreme to the other without traversing the middle is pertinent to the conception of angels as com- pletely immaterial beings, — a conception upon the elabora- tion of which theologians expended much ingenious thought. In the earlier Middle Ages, when men were busy putting ^ The Vita of Thomas by Guilielmus de Thoco, Acta sanctorum, Martius, tome i. folio 657 sqq. (March 7), is wretchedly confused. VOL. II 2 H 466 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh together the ancient matter, the personalities of the writers may not clearly appear. It is different in the twelfth century, and very different in the thirteenth, when the figures of at least its greater men are thrown out plainly by their written works. Bonaventura is seen lucidly reason- ing, but with his ardently envisioning piety ever reaching out beyond ; the personality of Albert most Teutonically wrestles itself into salience through the many-tomed results of his very visible efforts ; when we come to Roger Bacon, we shall find wormwood and many higher qualities of mind flowing in his sentences. And the consummate fashioning faculty, the devout and intellectual temperament of Thomas, are writ large in his treatises. His work has unity ; it is a system ; it corresponds to the scholasticaUy creative personality, from the efficient concord of whose faculties it proceeded. The unity of Thomas's personality lay in his conception of man's summum bonum, which sprang from his Christian faith, but was constructed by reason from foundation to pinnacle ; and it is evinced in the compulsion of an intellectual temperament that never let the pious reasoner's energies or appetitions stray loitering or aberrant from that goal. Likewise the unity of his system consists in its purpose, which is to present that same summum bonum, credited by faith, empowered, if not empassioned, by piety, and constructed by reason. To fulfil this purpose in its utmost compass, reason works with the material of all pertinent knowledge, fashioning the same to complete logical consistency of expression. Therefore, it is from his conception of this summum bonum as from a centre of illumination, that we may trace the characteristic qualities alike of Thomas and his work. His faith, his piety, and his intellectual nature are revealed in his thought of supreme felicity. With man's chief good as the ground of the system, the thought and study which Thomas puts upon the created universe and upon God, re- garded both as Creator and in the relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, conduce to make large and sure and ample this same chief good of man. To it likewise conduce the Incarnation, and the Sacraments springing therefrom ; in accord with it, Thomas accepts or constructs his meta- CHAP. XLI AQUINAS 467 physics, his psychology, his entire thought of human capacity and destiny, and sets forth how nearly man's reason may bring him to this goal, and where there is need of divine grace. In this goal, moreover, shall be found the sanction of human knowledge, and the justification of the right enjoyment of human faculties ; it determines what elements of mortal life may be gathered up and carried on, to form part of the soul's eternal beatitude. Thomas's intellectual powers work together in order to set his thought of this summum bonum on its surest foundations, and make clear its scope : his faculty of arrangement, and serious and lucid presentation ; his careful reasoning, which never trips, never overlooks, and never either hurries or is taken unprepared ; his marvellous unforgetfulness of everything which might remotely bear on the subject ; his intellectual poise, and his just weighing of every matter that should be taken into the scales of his determination. Observing these, we may realize how he seemed to his time a new intellectual manifestation of God's illuminating grace. There was in him something unknown before ; his argument, his exposition, was new in power, in interest, in lucidity. On the quality of newness the wretched old biographer rings his reiteration : " For in his lectures he put out new subdivisions {articulos), inventing a new and clear way of drawing conclusions and bring- ing new reasons into them, so that no one, who had heard him teach new doubts and allay them by new arguments, would have doubted that God had illumined with rays of new light one who became straightway of such sure judgment, that he did not hesitate to teach and write new opinions, which God had deigned newly to inspire." ^ His biographer's view is justified. Thomas was the greatest of the schoolmen. His way of teaching, his translucent exposition, came to his hearers as a new inspiration. Only Bonaventura (likewise Italian-born) may be compared with him for clearness of exposition — of solution indeed ; and Thomas is more judicial, more ^ supremely intellectual ; his way of treatment was a stronger ^ Vita, cap. iii. § 15. 468 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii incitement and satisfaction to at least the minds of his auditors. Albert, with his mass of but half-conquered material, could not fail to show, whether he would or not, the doubt-breeding difficulties of the new philosophy, which was yet to be worked into Christian theology. Thomas exposed every difficulty and revealed its depths ; but then he solved and adjusted everything with an argumentation from whose careful inclusiveness no questions strayed un- shepherded. Placed with Thomas, Albert shows as the Titan whose strength assembles the materials, while Thomas is the god who erects the edifice. The material that Thomas works with, and many of his thoughts and argu- ments, are to be found in Albert ; and the pupil knew his indebtedness to the great master, who survived him to defend his doctrines. But what is not in Albert, is Thomas, Thomas himself, with his disentangled reasoning, his clarity, his organic exposition, his final construction of the mediaeval Christian scheme.^ In the third book of his Summa philosophica contra Gentiles, and in the beginning of Pars prima secundae of his Summa fheologiae, Thomas expounds man's final end, ultimus finis, which is his supreme good or perfect beatitude. The exposition in the former work, dating from the earlier years of the author's academic activities, seems the simpler at first reading ; but the other includes more surely Thomas's last reasoning, placed in the setting of argument and relationship which he gave it in his greatest work. We shall follow the latter, borrowing, however, from the former when its phrases seem to present the matter more aptly to our non-scholastic minds. The general position of the topic is the same in both Summae ; and Thomas gives the reason in the Prologus to Pars prima secundae of the Summa theologiae. His way of doing this is significant : " Inasmuch as man is declared to be made in the image of God ^ One may see the truth of this by comparing the treatment of a matter in Albert's Sumnta theologiae with the corresponding sections in Thomas. For example, compare Albert's Summa theol. prima, Tract- vii. Quaest. xxx.-xxxiii., on the generation processio, and missio of the divine persons, with Thomas, Sum. theol. prima, Quaest. xxvii. and xliii. CHAP. xLi AQUINAS 469 in this sense (as Damascenus ^ says) that by ' image ' is meant a being intellectual and free and able to act through itself (per se potestativum) y — after what has been said of the Exemplar, to wit God and those things which proceed from the divine power according to its will, there remains for us to consider His image, to wit, man, in so far as he is himself the source {j>nnctpium) of his acts, possessing free will and power over them." Thereupon Thomas continues, opening his first Quaestio : " First one must consider the final end {ultimus finis) of human life, and then those things through which man may attain this end, or deviate from it. For one must accept from an end the rationale of those things which are ordained to that end." Assuming the final end of human life to be beatitude, Thomas considers wherein man as a rational creature may properly have one final end, on account of which he wills all that he wills. Quaestio ii. shows that man's beatitude cannot consist in riches, honours, fame, power, pleasures of the body, or in any created good, not even in the soul. Man gains his beatitude through the soul ; but in itself the soul is not man's final end. The next Quaestio is devoted to the gist of the matter : what beatitude is, and what is needed for it. Thomas first shows in what sense beatitude is something increate [increatum). He has already pointed out that end {finis) has a twofold meaning : the thing itself which we desire to obtain, and the fruition of it. " In the first sense, the final end of man is an increate good, to wit God, who alone with His infinite goodness can perfectly fulfil the wish {voluntas) of man. In the second sense, the final end of man is something created existing in himself ; which is nought else than attainment or fruition {adeptio vel fruitio) of the final end. The final end is called beatitude. If, then, man's beatitude is viewed as cause or object, it is something increate ; but if it is considered in its beatific essence (quantum ad ipsam essentiam beatitudinis) it is something created." Thomas next shows : "... that inasmuch as man's beatitude is something created existing in himself, it is necessary to regard it as action (operatio). For beatitude is man's ultimate perfection. But everything is ^ John of Damascus, often cited by Thomas. 470 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh perfect in so far as it is actually {actu, i.e. in realized actuality) : for potentiality without actuality is imperfect. Therefore beatitude should consist in man's ultimate actuality. But manifestly action (operatio) is the final actuality of the actor {operantis) ; as the Philosopher shows, demonstrating that every- thing exists for its action (propter suam operationem). Hence it follows of necessity that man's beatitude is action." The next point to consider is whether beatitude is the action of man's senses or his intellect. Drawing distinctions, Thomas points out that " the action of sense cannot pertain to beatitude essentially ; because man's beatitude essentially consists in uniting himself to the increate good, which is his final end ; to which he cannot be joined through the action of the senses. Yet sense-action may pertain to beatitude as an antecedent or consequence : as an antecedent, for the imperfect beatitude attainable in this life, where the action of the senses is a prerequisite to the action of the mind ; as a consequence, in that perfect beatitude which is looked for in heaven ; because, after the resurrection, as Augustine says, from the very beatitude of the soul, there may be a certain flowing back into the body and its senses, perfecting them in their actions. But not even then will the action by which the human mind is joined to God depend on sense." Beatitude then is the action of man's intellectual part ; and Thomas next inquires, whether it is an action of the intelligence or will [intellectus aut voluntatis). With this inquiry we touch the pivot of Thomas's attitude, wherein he departs from Augustine, in apparent reliance on the word of John : " This is eternal life that they should know thee, the one true God." Life eternal is man's final end ; and there- fore man's beatitude consists in knowledge of God, which is an act of mind. Thomas argues this at some length. He refers to the distinction between what is essential to the existence of beatitude, and what is joined to it per accidens, like enjoyment {delectatio). " I say then, that beatitude in its essence cannot consist in an act of will. For it has appeared that beatitude is the obtaining (consecutio) of the final end. But obtaining does not consist in any act of will ; for will attaches to the absent when one desires it, as well as to the present in which one rests dehghted. It is evident that the desire for an end is not an obtaining of it, but a movement CHAP. xLi AQUINAS 47 1 toward it. Enjoyment attaches to will from the presence of the end ; but not conversely does anything become present because the will shall delight in it. Therefore there must be something besides an act of will, through which the end may become present to the will. This is plain respecting the ends of sense {fines sensibiles). For if to obtain money were an act of will, the miser would have obtained it from the beginning. And so it comes to pass with respect to an end conceived by the mind ; we obtain it when it becomes present to us through an act of the intellect ; and then the deUghted will rests in the end obtained. Thus, therefore, the essence of beatitude consists in an act of mind. But the dehght which follows beatitude pertains to will, even in the sense in which Augustine says : ' beatitudo est gaudium de veritate,' because, indeed, joy is the consummation of beatitude." The supremely intellectual attitude of the Angelic Doctor, shows at once, and as it were universally, in his conviction of the primacy of the true over the good, and of knowledge over will. Sometimes he argues these points directly ; and again, his temperamental attitude appears in the course of argument upon other points. For example, Quaestio xvi. of Pars prima has for its subject Veritas. And in the first article, which discusses whether truth is in the thing {in re) or only in the mind, he argues thus : " As good signifies that upon which desire [appetitus) is bent, so true signifies that at which understanding aims. There is this difference between desire and understanding or any kind of cogni- tion : cognition exists in so far as what is known (cognitum) is in the knower ; but desire is as the desirous inchnes toward the desired. Thus the end (terminus = finis) of desire, which is the good, is in the desirable thing ; but the end of knowing, which is the true, is in the understanding." In Articulus 4, Thomas comes to his point : that the true secundum rationem (i.e. according to its formal nature) is prior to the good. " Although both the good and the true have been taken as convertible with being, yet they differ in their conception (ratione) ; and that the true is prior to the good appears from two considera- tions : First, the true is more closely related to being, which is prior to the good ; for the true refers to being itself, simply and directly ; while the ratio of the good follows being as in some way perfect and therefore desirable. It is clear from this that cognition naturally precedes desire. Therefore, since the true refers to 472 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh cognition, and the good relates to desire, the true is prior to the good secundum rationem,'* This argument, whatever validity it may have, is signifi- cant of its author's predominantly intellectual temperament, and consistent with his conception of man's supreme beatitude as the intellectual vision of God. Obviously, moreover, the setting of the true above the good is another way of stating the primacy of knowledge over will, which is also maintained : " Will and understanding {intellectus) mutually include each other. The understanding knows the will ; and the will wills that the understanding should know." ^ Evidently all rational beings have will as well as understanding ; God wills, the Angels will, man wills. Indeed, how could know- ledge progress but for the will to know ? Yet of the two, considered in themselves, understanding is higher than will — " for its object is the ratio of the desired good, while the object of will is the desired good whose ratio is in the understanding. . . . Yet will may be the higher, if it is set upon something higher than the understanding. . . , When the thing in which is the good is nobler than the soul itself, in which the ratio is known, the will, through relation to that thing, is higher than the understanding. But when the thing in which is the good, is lower than the soul, then in relation to that thing, the imderstanding is higher than the will. Wherefore the love of God is better than the cognizance {cognitio) ; but the cognizance of corporeal things is better than the love. Yet taken absolutely, the understanding is higher than the wiU." 2 These positions of the Angelic Doctor were sharply attacked in his lifetime and afterwards. Without entering the lists, let us rather follow him on his evidently Aristotelian path, which quickly brings him to his next conclusion : "That beatitude consists in the action of the speculative rather than the practical intellect, as is evident from three arguments : " First, if man's beatitude is action, it ought to be the man's best (optima) action. But man's best action is that of his best faculty in respect to the best object. The best faculty is intelli- gence, whose best object is the divine good, which is not an object ^ Pars prinuij Qu. xvi. Art. 4. * Pars prima, Qu. Ixxxii. Art. 3. CHAP. XLI AQUINAS 473 of the practical, but of the speculative intelligence. Wherefore, in such action, to wit, in contemplation of the divine attributes, beatitude chiefly consists. And because ev&Yy one seems to he that which is best in him, as is said in the Ethics, so such action is most proper to man and most enjoyable. " Secondly, the same conclusion appears from this, that con- templation above all is sought on account of itself. The perfec- tion {actus, full realization) of the practical intelUgence is not sought on account of itself, but for the sake of action : the actions themselves are directed toward some end. Hence it is evident that the final end cannot consist in the vita activa, which belongs to the practical intelhgence. " Thirdly, it is plain from this, that in the vita contemplativa man has part with those above him, to wit, God and the Angels, unto whom he is made hke through beatitude ; but in those matters which belong to the vita activa, other animals, however imperfectly, have somehow part with him. " And so the final and perfect beatitude which is looked for in the hfe to come, in principle consists altogether in contemplation. But the imperfect beatitude which may be had here, consists first and in principle in contemplation, and secondly in the true opera- tion of the practical intellect directing human actions and passions, as is said injthe tenth book of the Ethics." ^ It being thus shown that perfect beatitude lies in the action of the speculative intelligence, Thomas next shows that it cannot consist in consideration of the speculative sciences — " for the consideration of a science does not reach beyond the virtus of the principles of that science, seeing that the whole science is contained virtualiter in its principles. But the principles of speculative sciences are received through the senses, as the Philosopher makes clear. Therefore the entire consideration of the speculative sciences cannot be extended beyond that to which a cognition of sense-objects (sensihilium) is able to lead. But man's final beatitude, which is his perfection, cannot consist in the cognition of sense-objects. For no thing is perfected by something inferior, except as there may be in the inferior some participation in a superior. Evidently the nature (forma) of a stone, or any other sensible thing, is inferior to man, save in so far as something higher than the human intelhgence has part in it, like the Hght of reason. . . . But since there is in sensible forms some participation in the simiHtude of spiritual substances, the ^ Prima secundae, Qu. iii. Art. 5. 474 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh consideration of the speculative sciences is, in a certain way, participation in true and perfect beatitude." ^ Neither can perfect beatitude consist in knowledge of the higher, entirely immaterial, or, as Thomas calls them, separate {separafae) substances, to wit, the Angels.^ Because it can- not consist in that which is the perfection of intelligence only from participation. The object of the intelligence is the true. Whatever has truth only through participation in something else cannot make the contemplating intelligence perfect with a final perfection. But the angels have their being {esse) as they have their truth, from the participation of the divine in them. Whence it remains that only the contemplation of God, Who alone is truth through His essential being, can make perfectly blessed. " But," adds Thomas, ' ' nothing precludes the expectation of some imperfect beatitude from contemplating the angels, and even a higher beatitude than lies in the consideration of the speculative sciences.'* So the conclusion is that " the final and perfect beatitude can be only in the vision of the divine essence. The proof of this lies in the consideration of two matters : first, that man is not perfectly blessed {beatus) so long as there remains anything for him to desire or seek ; secondly, that the per- fection of every capacity (potentiae), is adjudged according to the nature (ratio) of its object." And a patent line of argument leads to the unavoidable conclusion ; " For perfect beatitude it is necessary that the intellect should attain to the very essence of the first cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as its object." There are few novel thoughts in Thomas's conception of man's supreme beatitude. But he has taken cognizance of all pertinent considerations, and put the whole matter together with stable coherency. He continues, discussing in the succeeding Quaestiones a number of important matters incidental to his central determination of the nature of man's supreme good. Thus he shows how joy {delectatio) is a necessary accompaniment of beatitude, which, however, in principle consists in the action of the mind, which is visio, rather than in the resulting delectatio. The latter consists * Prima secundae, Qu. iii. Art. 6. CHAP. XLI AQUINAS 475 in a quieting or satisfying of the will, through the goodness of that in which it is satisfied. When the will is satisfied in any action, that results from the goodness of the action ; and the good lies in the action itself rather than in the quieting of the will.^ Here Thomas's reasoning points to an active ideal, an ideal of energizing, rather than repose. But he concludes that for beatitude *' there must be a con- currence of visio, which is the perfect cognizance of the in- telligible end ; the getting it, which implies its presence ; and the joy or fruition, which implies the quieting of that which loves in that which is loved." ^ Thomas also shows how rectitude of will is needed, and discusses whether a body is essential ; his conclusion being that a body is not required for the perfect beatitude of the life to come ; yet he gives the counter considerations, showing the conduciveness of the perfected body to the souVs beatitude even then. Next he follows Aristotle in pointing out how material goods may be necessary for the attainment of the imperfect beati- tude possible on earth, while they are quite impertinent to the perfect beatitude of seeing God ; and likewise he shows how the society of friends is needed here, but not essential hereafter, and yet a concomitant to our supreme felicity. The course of argument of the Liber iii. of the Contra Gentiles is not dissimilar. A number of preliminary chapters show how all things tend to an end ; that the end of all is God ; and that to know God is the end of every intellectual being. Next, that human felicitas does not consist in all those matters in which the Summa theologiae also shows that beatitude does not lie ; but that it consists in contempla- tion of God. He puts his argument simply : " It remains that the ultimate feHcity of man lies in contempla- tion of truth. For this is the sole action {operatic) of man which is proper to man alone. This alone is directed to nothing else, as an end ; since the contemplation of truth is sought for its own sake. Through this action, likewise, man is joined to higher substances (beings) through hkeness of action, and through know- ing them in some way. For this action, moreover, man is most sufficient by himself, needing but little external aid. To this also ^ Prima sec. Qu. iv. Art. 2. 2 Pfiyf^^ ^ec. Qu. iv. Art. 3. 476 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii all other human acts seem to be directed as to an end. For to the perfection of contemplation, soundness of body is needed, to which all the arts of hving are directed. Also quiet from the disturbance of passions is required, to which one comes through the moral virtues, and prudence ; and quiet also from tumults, to which end all rules of civil life are ordained ; and so, if rightly conceived, all human business seems to serve the contemplation of truth. Nor is it possible for the final felicity of man to consist in the contemplation which is confined to an intelhgence of beginnings {principiorum) , which is most imperfect and general, {universalis)^ containing a knowledge of things potentially : it is the beginning, not the end of human study. Nor can that felicity lie in the con- templation of the sciences, which pertain to the lowest things, since felicity ought to lie in the action of the intelhgence in relation- ship to the noblest intelHgible verities. It remains that man's final felicity consists in the contemplation of wisdom pursuant to a consideration of things divine. From which it also is evident by the way of induction, what was before proved by arguments, that the final felicity of man consists only in contemplation of God." 1 Having reached this central conclusion of the Contra Gentiles, as well as of the Summa theologiae, Thomas proceeds to trim it further, so as clearly to differentiate that know- ledge of God in which lies the ultimate felicity of intelligent beings from other ways of knowing God, which do not fully represent this supreme and final bliss. He first excludes the sort of common and confused knowledge of God, which almost aU men draw from observing the natural order of things ; then he shuts out the knowledge of God derived from logical demonstration, through which, indeed, one rather approaches a proper knowledge of Him ; ^ next, he will not admit that supreme felicity lies in the cognition of God through faith ; since that is still imperfect. This felicity consists in seeing ^ the divine essence, an impossibility in this life, when we see as in a glass. The supreme felicity is attainable only after death. Hereupon Thomas continues with the very crucial discussion of the capacity of the ^ Sum. PhiL contra Gentiles, iii. 37. ^ One cannot avoid applying the masculine pronouns to God, and to the angels also. But, of course, this is a mere convenience of speech. Thomas ascribes no sex either to God or the angels. ^ It will, of course, be borne in mind, that Thomas's use of videre and visio to express man's perception of God's essential nature, does not mean a physical but an intellectual seeing. CHAP. XLI AQUINAS 477 rational creature to know God. But instead of following him further in the Contra Gentiles, we will rather turn to his final presentation of this question in his Summa theologiae. II The great Summa, having opened with an introductory consideration of the character of sacra doctrina,^ at once fixes its attention upon the existence and attributes of God. These having been reviewed, Thomas begins Quaestio xii. by saying, that " as we have now considered what God is in His own nature {secundum se ipsum) it remains to consider what He is in our cognition, that is, how He is known by creatures." The first question is whether any created intelligence whatsoever may be able to see God per essentiam. Having stated the counter arguments, and relying on John's " we shall see Him as He is," Thomas proceeds with his solution thus,: " Since everything is knowable so far as it exists in actuality,^ God, who is pure actuality, without any mingling of potentiality, is in Himself most knowable. But what is most knowable in itself, is not knowable to every intelligence because of the exceed- ing greatness of that which is to be known {propter excessum intelUgihilis supra intellectum) ; as the sun, which is most visible, may not be seen by a bat, because of the excess of Hght. Mindful of this, some have asserted that no created intelligence could behold the essential nature {essentiam) of God, " But this is a solecism. For since man's final beatitude consists in his highest action, which is the action of the intelligence, if the created intelligence is never to be able to see the essential nature of God, either it will never obtain beatitude, or its beatitude wiU consist in something besides God : which is repugnant to the faith. For the ultimate perfection of a rational creature lies in that which is the source or principle {principium) of its being. There is in man a natural desire to know the cause, when he observes the effect ; and from this, wonder rises in men. If then the intelUgence of the rational creature is incapable of attaining to the first cause of things, an inane desire must be ascribed to nature. * Given ante, pp. 319 sqq. ^ Secundum quod est in actu, i.e. in realized actuality as distinguished from potentiality (Aristotelian conceptions). 478 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh " Wherefore it is simply to be conceded that the blessed may see the essential nature of God." So this general conclusion, or assumption, is based on faith, and also leaps, as from the head of Jove, the creature of unconquerable human need, which never will admit the inaneness of its yearnings. And now, assuming the possibility of seeing God in his true nature, Thomas proves that He cannot be seen thus through the similitude of any created thing ; in order to behold God's essence, some divine likeness must be imparted from the seeing power {ex parte visivae potentiae), to wit, the light of divine glory (which is consummated grace) strengthening the intelligence that it may see God. And he next shows that it is impossible to see God by the sense of sight, or any other sense or power of man's sensible nature. For God is incorporeal. Therefore He cannot be seen through the imagination, but only through the intelligence. Nor can any created intelligence through its natural faculties see the divine essence. '' Cognition takes place in so far as the known is in the knower. But the known is in the knower according to the mode and capacity {modus) of the knower. Whence any knower's knowledge is according to the measure of his nature. If, then, the being of the thing to be known exceeds the measure of the knowing nature, knowledge of it will be beyond the nature of that knower." In order to see God in His essential nature, the created intellect needs light created by God : In lumine tuo videbimus lumen. And it may be given to one created intellect to see more perfectly than another. Do those who see God per essentiam, comprehend Him ? No. " To comprehend God is impossible for any created intelli- gence. To have any true thought of God is a great beatitude. . . . Since the created light of glory received by any created intelUgence cannot be infinite, it is impossible that any created intelligence should know God infinitely, and comprehend Him." Again he reasons ; They who shall see God in His essence will see what they see through the divine essence united to their intelligence ; they will see whatever they CHAP. XLI AQUINAS 479 see at once, and not successively ; for the contents of this intellectual, God-granted vision are not apprehended by means of the respective species or general images, but in and through the one divine essence. But in this life, man may not see God in His essential nature : " The mode of cognition conforms to the nature of the knower. But our soul, so long as we Hve in this life, has its existence (esse) in corporeal matter. Wherefore, by nature, it knows only things that have material form, or may through such be known. Evi- dently the divine essence cannot be known through the natures of material things. Any cognition of God through any created hke- ness whatsoever, is not a vision of His essence. . . . Our natural cognition draws its origin from sense ; it may extend itself so far as it can be conducted {manuduci) by things of sense {sensibilia). But from them our intelhgence may not attain to seeing the divine essence. . . . Yet since sensible creatures are effects, dependant on a cause, we know from them that God exists, and that as first cause He exceeds all that He has caused. From which we may learn the difference between Himself and His creatures, to wit, that He is not any of those things which He has caused. . . . " Through grace a more perfect knowledge of God is had than through natural reason. For cognition through natural reason needs both images {j)hantasmata) received from things of sense, and the natural light of intelhgence, through whose virtue we abstract inteUigible conceptions from them. In both respects human cognition is aided through the revelation of grace. For the natural hght of the intellect is strengthened through the in- fusion of Hght graciously given (luminis gratuiti) ; while the images in the man's imagination are divinely formed so that they are expressive of things divine, rather than of what naturally is received through the senses, as appears from the visions of the prophets." ^ Natural reason stops with the unity of God, and can give no knowledge of the Trinity of divine Persons. Says Thomas : ^ " It has been shown that through natural reason man can know God QvHyfrom His creatures. Creatures lead to knowledge of God as effects lead to some knowledge of a cause. Only that may be known of God by natural reason which necessarily belongs to Him as the source of all existences. The creative virtue of God is ^ The foregoing is taken from the thirteen articuH into which Quaestio xii. is divided. ^ Pars prima, Quaestio xxxii. Art. i. 48o THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh common to the whole Trinity ; it pertains to the miity of essence, not to the distinction of persons. Through natural reason, there- fore, those things concerning God may be known which pertain to the unity of essence, but not those wMch pertain to the distinction of persons. Hence, who strives to prove the Trinity of Persons by natural reason, doubly detracts from faith : first as regards the dignity of faith itself, which concerns invisible things surpassing human reason ; secondly regarding its efficiency in drawing men to it. For when any one in order to prove the faith adduces reasons which are not cogent, he falls under the derision of the faithless ; for they think that we use such arguments, and that we beheve because of them. One shall not attempt to prove things of faith save by authorities, and in discussion with those who receive the authorities. With others it is enough to prove that what the faith announces is not impossible." Here Thomas seems rationally to recognize the limits upon reason in discovering the divine nature. In the regions of faith, reason's feet lack the material footing upon which to mount. So Thomas would assert. But wUl he stand to his assertion ? The shadowy line between reason and faith wavers with him. At least so it seems to us, for whom ontological reasoning has lost reality, and who find proofs of God not so much easier than proofs of the Trinity. But Thomas and the other scholastics dwelt in the region of the metaphysically ideal. To them it was not only real, but the most real ; and it was so natural to step across the line of faith, trailing clouds of reason. The feet of such as Thomas are as firmly planted on the one side of the line as on the other. And now, as it might also seem, Thomas, having thus formally reserved the realm of faith, quickly steps across the line, to undertake a tremendous meta- physical exposition of the Trinity, of the distinctions between its Persons, of their properties, respective functions, and relationships ; and aU this is carried on largely in the categories of Aristotelian philosophy. Yet is he not still consistent with himself ? For he surely did not conceive the elements of his discussion to lie in the lucubrations or discoveries of the natural reason ; but in the data of revela- tion, and their explanation by saintly doctors. And was not he also a vessel of their inspiration, a son of faith, who might humbly hope for the light of grace, to transfigure cHAP.xLi AQUINAS 481 and glorify his natural powers in the service of revealed truth ? Thomas's ideal is intellectual, and yet ends in faith. His intellectual interests, by faith emboldened, strengthened, and pointed heavenward, make on toward the realization of that intellectual beatitude which is to be consummate here- after, when the saved soul's grace - illumined eye shall re-awaken where it may see face to face. Ill Knowledge, then, supplemented in this life by faith, is the primary element of blessedness. We now turn our attention to the forms of knowledge and modes of knowing appropriate to the three rational substances : God, angel, man. The first is the absolute incorporeal being, the primal mover, in whom there is no potentiality, but actuality simple and perfect. The second is the created immaterial or " separated " substance, which is all that it is through participation in the uncreate being of its Creator. The third is the composite creature man, made of both soul and body, his capacities conditioned upon the necessities of his dual nature, his sense-perception and imagination being as necessary to his knowledge, as his rational understanding ; for whom alone it is true that sense-apprehension may lead to the intelligible verities of God : " etiam sensibilia intellecta manuducunt ad intelligibilia divinorum/' ^ The earlier Quaestiones of Pars prima, on the nature of God, lead on to a consideration of God's knowledge and ways of knowing. Those Quaestiones expounded the qualities of God quite as far as comported with Thomas's realization of the limitation of the human capacity to know God in this life. Quaestio iii, upon the Simplicitas of God, shows that God is not body (corpus) ; that in Him there is no compositeness of form and material ; that throughout His nature. He is one and the same, and therefore that He is His Deitas, His vita, and whatever else may be predicated of Him. Next it is shown (Qu. iv.) that God is perfect ; * Quaestiones disputatae : De Veritatej x. 6. Citing Rom. i. 20. VOL. II 2 1 482 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh that in Him are the perfectiones of all things, since whatever there may be of perfection in an effect, should be found in the effective cause ; and as God is self -existent being, He must contain the whole perfection of being in Himself {totam perfectionem essendi in se). Next, that God is the good {bonum) and the summum bonum ; He is infinite ; He is in all things (Qu. viii. Art. i) not as a part of their essence, but as accidenSy and as the doer is in his deeds ; and not only in their beginning, but so long as they exist ; He acts upon everything immediately, and nothing is distant from Him ; God is everywhere : as the soul is altogether in every part of the body, so God entire is in all things and in each. God is in all things created by Him as the working cause ; but He is in the rational creature, through grace ; as the object of action is in the actor, as the known is in the knower, and the desired in the wishful. God is immutable (Qu. ix.) ; for as final actuality {actus purus), with no admixture of potentiality, He cannot change ; nor can He be moved ; since His infinitude comprehends the plenitude of all perfection, there is nothing that He can acquire, and no whither for Him to extend. God is eternal (Qu. x.) ; for him there is no beginning, nor any succession of time ; but an interminable now, an all at once {tota simul), which is the essence of eternity, as distinguished from the successiveness of even infinite time. And God is One (Qu. xi.). "One does not add anything to being, save negation of division. For One signifies nothing else than undivided being [ens indivisum). And from this it follows that One is convert- ible with being." That God is One, is proved by His simplicitas ; by the infiniteness of His perfection ; and by the oneness of the world. " After a consideration," now says Thomas, " of those matters which pertain to the divine substance, we may consider those which pertain to its action (operatio). And because certain kinds of action remain in the doer, while others pass out into external effect, we first treat of knowledge and will (for knowing is in the knower and willing in him who wills) ; and then of God's power, which is regarded as the source of the divine action passing out into external effect. Then, since knowing is a kind of Kving, after considering the divine knowledge, the divine life will be considered. And because knowledge is of the true, there will be CHAP. xLi AQUINAS 483 need to consider truth and falsity. Again, since every cognition is in the knower, the rafiones (types, essential natures) of things as they are in God the Knower {Deo cognoscente) are called ideas (ideae) ; and a consideration of these will be joined to the con- sideration of knowledge." ^ Thus clearly laying out his topic, Thomas begins his discussion of God's knowledge (scientia Dei) ; of the modes in which God knows and the knowledge which He has. In God is the most perfect knowledge. God knows Himself through Himself ; in Him knowledge and Knower {intellectum and intellectus) are the same.^ He perfectly comprehends Himself ; for He knows Himself so far as He is knowable ; and He is absolutely ^ knowable being utter reality {actus purus). Likewise He knows things other than Himself. For He knows Himself perfectly, which implies a know- ledge of those things to which His power {virtus) extends. Moreover, He knows all things in their special natures and distinctions from each other : for the perfection, or perfected actuality, of everything is contained in Him ; and therefore God in Himself is able to know all things perfectly, and the special nature of everything exists through some manner of participation in the divine per- fection. God knows all things in one, to wit, Himself ; and not successively, or by means of discursive reasoning. " God's knowledge is the cause of things. It stands to all created beings as the knowledge of the artificer to the things he makes. God causes things through His knowledge, since His being is His knowing {cum suum esse sit suum intelli- gere)/* His knowledge causes things when it has the will joined with it, and, in so far as it is the cause of things, is called scientia approhationis. God knows things which are not actually {actu). Whatever has been or will be, He knows by the knowledge of sight {scientia visionis, which by im- plication is equivalent to scientia approbationis). For God's knowing, which is His being, is measured by eternity ; and eternity includes all time, as present, and without succession ; so the present vision {intuitus) of God embraces all time and ^ Prooemium to Qu. xiv. Pars prima. * Qu. xiv. Art. 2 — a point which Thomas reasons out in interesting scholastic Aristotelian fashion, but in language too technical to translate. 484 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii all things existing at any time, as if present. As for what- ever is in the power of God or creature, but which never has been or will be, God knows it not as in vision, but simply knows it. God also knows evil : " Whoever knows anything perfectly should know whatever might happen to it. There are some good things to which it may happen to be corrupted through evils : wherefore God would not know the good perfectly, unless He also knew the evil. Every- thing is knowable so far as it ^5 ; but the being (esse) of evil is the privation of good : hence inasmuch as God knows good. He knows evil, as darkness is known through hght." Thomas now takes up a point curious perhaps to us, but of importance to him and Aristotle : does God know individuals [singularia), the particular as opposed to the universal ? This point might seem disposed of in the argument by which Thomas maintained that God knew things in their special and distinct natures. But he now proves that God knows singularia by an argument which bears on his contention that man does not know singularia through the intelligence, but perceives them through sense ; and as we shall see, that the angels have no direct know- ledge of individuals, being immaterial substances. *' God knows individuals {cognoscit singularia). For all perfections found in creatures pre-exist in higher mode in God. To know (cognoscere) individuals pertains to our perfection. Whence it follows that God must know them. The Philosopher [Aristotle] holds it to be illogical that anything should be known to us, and not to God. . . . But the perfections which are divided in inferior beings, exist simply and as one in God. Hence, although through one faculty we know universals and what is immaterial, and through another, individuals and what is material ; yet God simply, through His intelligence, knows both. . . . One must hold that since God is the cause of things through His knowledge, the knowledge of God extends itself as far as His causaUty extends. Wherefore, since God's active virtue extends itself not only to forms, from which is received the ratio of the universal, but also to matter, it is necessary that God's know- ledge should extend itself to individuals, which are such through matter." And replying to a counter-argument Thomas continues : CHAP. xLi AQUINAS 485 " Our intelligence abstracts the intelligible species from the individuating principles. Therefore the intelligible species of our intelHgence cannot be the hkeness of the individual principles ; and, for this reason, our intelligence does not know individuals. But the intelligible species of the divine intelUgence, which is the essence of God, is not immaterial through abstraction, but through itself ; and exists as the principle of all principles enter- ing the composition of the thing, whether principles of species or of the individual. Therefore through His essence God knows both universals and individuals." ^ With these arguments still echoing, Thomas shows that God can know infinite things ; also future contingencies ; also whatever may be stated {enuntiabilia). His knowledge, which is His substance, does not change. It is speculative knowledge in so far as relating to His own unchangeable nature, and to whatever He can do, but does not ; it is practical knowledge so far as it relates to anything which He does. Thomas concludes his direct discussion of God's know- ledge by an application of the Platonic theory of ideas, in which he mainly follows Augustine. *' It is necessary to place ideas in the divine mind. Idea is the Greek for the Latin forma. Thus through ideas are understood the forms of things existing beyond the things themselves. By which we mean the prototype {exemplar) of that of which it is called the form ; or the principle of its cognition, in so far as the forms of things knowable are said to be in the knower." There must be many ideas or (as Augustine phrases it) stable rationes of things. There is a ratio in the divine mind corresponding to whatever God does or knows. " Ideas were set by Plato as the principles both of the cognition and the generation of things, and in both senses they are to be placed in the divine mind. So far as idea is the principle of the making of a thing, it may be called the prototype (exemplar), and pertains to practical knowledge {practicam cognitionem) ; but as the principle of cognition {principium cognoscitivum), it is properly called ratiOy and may also pertain to speculative knowledge. In the signification of exemplar, it relates to everything created at any time by God : but when it means principium cognoscitivum, it relates to all things which are known by God, although never coming into existence." ^ ^ Pars prima, Qu. xiv. Art. 11. ^ Pars prima, Qu. xv. Art. r-3. 486 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii Such are the divine modes of knowledge. Thomas proceeds to discuss other aspects of the divine nature, the Hfe and power, will and love, which may be ascribed to God. He then passes on to a discussion of the Persons of the Trinity. This completed, he turns to the world of created substances ; into which we will follow him so far as to observe the forms of knowledge and ways of knowing proper to angels and mankind. We shall hereafter have to speak of the divine and angelic love, and of man's love of God ; but here, as our field is intellectual, we will simply recall to mind that Thomas applies a like intellectual conception of beati- tude to both God and His rational creatures ; " Beatitude, as has been said, signifies the perfect good of the intellectual nature ; as everything desires its perfection, the intel- lectual [substance] desires to be beata. That which is most perfect in every intellectual nature, is the intellectual operation wherein, in a measure, it grasps all things. Wherefore the beatitude of any created intellectual nature consists in knowing {in intelligendo)" ^ IV Thomas regards the creation as a processio, a going out of all creatures from God. Every being {ens) that in any manner {quocumque modo) is, is from God. " God is the prima causa exemplaris of all things. In proof of which one must consider that for the production of anjTthing, there is needed a prototj^e {exemplar), in order that the effect may follow a determined form. . . . The determination of forms must be sought in the divine wisdom. . . . Hence one ought to say that in the divine wisdom are the rationes of all things : these we have called ideas, to wit, prototypal forms existing in the divine mind. Although such may be multiplied in respect to things, yet really they are not other than the divine essence, according as its simihtude can be participated in by divers things in divers ways. Thus God Himself is the first exemplar of all. There may also be said to be in created things certain exemplaria of other things, when they are made in the hkeness of such others, or according to the same species or after the analogy of some resemblance." ^ ^ Pars prima, Qu. xxvi. Art. 2. ^ Pars prima, Qu. xliv. Art. 3. CHAP. XLI AQUINAS 487 God not only is the efficient and exemplary cause, but also the final cause of all things {Divina bonitas est finis omnium rerum). " The emanation (emanatio) of all being from the universal cause, which is God, we call creation." ^ God alone may be said to create. The function pertains not to any Person, but to the whole Trinity in common. And there is found some image of the Trinity in rational creatures in whom is intelligence and will ; and in all creatures may be found some vestiges of the creator. Thomas, after a while, takes up the distinction between spiritual and corporeal creatures, and considers first the purely spiritual, called Angels. We enter with him upon the contemplation of these conceptions, which scholasticism did not indeed create, but elaborated with marvellous logic, and refined to a consistent intellectual beauty. None had \ larger share in perfecting the logical conception of the \ angelic nature, as immaterial and essentially intellectual, | than our Angelic Doctor. A volume might well be devoted I to tracing the growth of these beings of the mind, from their not unmilitant career in the Old Testament and the Jewish Apocrypha, their brief but classically beautiful mention in the Gospels, and their storm-red action in the Apocalypse ; then through their treatment by the Fathers, to their hierarchic ordering by the great Pseudo-Areopagite ; and so on and on, through the earlier Scholastics, the Lombard's Sentences, and Hugo of St. Victor's appreciative presentation ; up to the gathering of all the angelic matter by Albertus Magnus, its further encyclopaedizing by Vincent of Beauvais, and finally its perfect intellectual disembodi- ment by Thomas ; — while all the time the people's mytho- poeic love went on endowing these guardian spirits with heart and soul, and fashioning responsive stories of their doings. For men loved and feared them, and looked to them as God's peculiar messengers. Thus they flash past us in the Divina Commedia; and their forms become lovely in Christian art. As we enter upon the contemplation of the angelic nature, let us not as of course regard angels simply as imaginative conceptions of Scripture and of the patristic ^ Pars prima, Qu. xlv. Art. i. 488 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii and mediaeval mind. Thomas will show his reasons for their necessary existence, which may not convince us. Yet we may believe in angels, inasmuch as any real conception of the world's governance by God requires the fulfilling of His thoughts through media that bring them down to move and live and realize themselves with each of us. Who, in striving to express, can do more than symbolize, the ways of God ? What symbols truer than angels have been devised ? ** It is necessary," opens Thomas,^ '' to affirm {ponere) that there are incorporeal creatures. For in created things God chiefly intends the good, which consists in assimilation to Him. Perfect assimilation of the effect to the cause is seen when the effect resembles the cause in that through which the cause produces the effect. God produces the creature through intelligence and will. Consequently the perfection of the universe requires that there should be intellectual creatures. To know cannot be the act {actus) of the body or of any corporeal faculty (virtus) ; because all body is limited to here and now. Therefore it is necessary, in order that the universe may be perfect, that there should be incorporeal creatures." Thomas then argues that the intellectual substance is entirely immaterial. " Angelic substances are above our understanding. So our understanding cannot attain to apprehending them as they are in themselves ; but only in its own fashion as it apprehends composite things." These immaterial substances exist in exceeding great number, and each is a species, because there cannot be several immaterial beings of one species, any more than there could be separate whitenesses or many humanities. Angels in their nature are imperishable. For nothing is corrupted save as its form is separated from its matter. But these immaterial substances are not composed of matter and form, being themselves subsisting forms and indestructible. Brass may have and lose a circular shape ; but the circular shape cannot be separated from the circle, which it is. Thomas next shows {Pars primUy Qu. li.) that angels ^ Summa theol. pars prima, Qu. 1. Art. i. As heretofore, I follow the expositioa of the Summa theologiae. But Thomas began a large and almost historical treat- ment of angels in his unfinished Tract, de substantiis separatism seu de Angelorum naiura (unfinished, in Opuscula theol.). He has another and important tractatus, De cognitione Angelorum, Quaestiones disput. de veritaie, viii. cHAP.xLi AQUINAS 489 have no bodies by nature joined to them. Body is not of the ratio of intellectual substances. These (when perfect and not like the human soul) have no need to acquire know- ledge through sensation. But though angels are intellectual substances, separate (separatae) from bodies, they sometimes assume bodies. In these they can perform those actions of life which have something in common with other kinds of acts ; as speech, a living act, has something in common with inanimate sounds. Thus far only can physical acts be performed by angels, and not when such acts essentially belong to living bodies. Angels may appear as living men, but are not ; neither are they sentient through the organs of their assumed bodies ; they do not eat and digest food ; they move only per accidens, incidentally to the inanimate motion of their assumed bodies ; they do not beget, nor do they really speak ; " but it is something like speech, when these bodies make sounds in the air like human voices." Dropping the sole remark, that scholasticism has no sense of humour, we pass on to Thomas's careful considera- tion of the angelic relations to space or locality (Qu. lii. and liii.). " Equivocally only may it be said that an angel is in a place {in loco) : through application of the angelic virtue to some corporeal spot, the angel may be said in some sense to be there." But, as angels are finite, when one is said, in this sense, to be in a place, he is not elsewhere too (like God). Yet the place where the angel is need not be an indivisible point, but may be larger or smaller, as the angel wills to apply his virtue to a larger or smaller body. Two angels may not be in the same place at the same time, ** because it is impossible that there should be two complete immediate causes of one and the same thing." Angels are said, likewise equivocally, to move, in a sense analogous to that in which they are said to be in a place. Such equivocal motion may be continuous or not. If not continuous, evidently the angel may pass from one place to another without traversing the intervening spaces. The angelic movement must take place in time ; there must be a before and after to it, and yet not necessarily with any period intervening. Now as to angelic knowledge : De cognitione Angelorum, 490 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii Knowing is no easy thing for man ; and we shall see that it is not a simple matter to know, without the senses to provide the data and help build up knowledge in the mind. The function of sense, or its absence, conditions much besides the mere acquisition of the elements from which men form their thoughts. Thomas's exposition of angelic knowledge and modes of knowing is a logical and consistent presentation of a supersensual psychology and theory of knowledge. Entering upon his subject, Thomas shows (Qu. Uv.) that knowing [intelligere) is not the substantia or the esse of an angel. Knowing is actiOy which is the actuality of faculty, as being {esse) is the actuality of substance. God alone is actus purus (absolute realized actuahty), free from potentiality. His substantia is His being and His action [suunt esse and suum agere), " But neither in an angel, nor in any creature, is virtus or the potentia operativa the same as the creature's essentia/' or its esse or substantia. The difficult scholastic-Aristotelian categories of intellectus agens and possibilis do not apply to angelic cognition (for which the reader and the angels may be thankful). The angels, being immaterial intelligences, have no share in those faculties of the human soul, like sight or hearing, which are exercised through bodily organs. They possess only intelligence and will. " It accords with the order of the universe that the supreme intellectual creature should be intelligent altogether, and not intelligent in part, like our souls/' Quaestio Iv., concerning the medium cognitionis angelicae, is a scholastic discussion scarcely to be rendered in modem langijage. The angelic intelligence is capable of knowing all things ; and therefore an angel does not know through the medium of his essentia or substantia, which are limited. God alone knows all things through His essentia. The angelic intellect is made perfect for knowing by means of certain forms or ideas (species). These are not received from things, but are part of the angelic nature (connaturales). The angelic intelligence {potentia intellectiva) is completed through general concepts, of the same nature with itself {species intelligihiles connaturales). These come to angels CHAP. xLi AQUINAS 49 1 from God at the same time with their being. Such concepts or ideas cover everything that they can know by nature {naturaliter). And Thomas proves that the higher angels know through fewer and more universal concepts than the lower. " In God an entire plenitude of intellectual cognition is held in one, to wit, in the divine essence through which God knows all things. Intelligent creatures possess such cognition in inferior mode and less simply. What God knows through one, inferior intelligences know through many ; and this many becomes more as the inferiority increases. Hence the higher angel may know the sum total of the intelligible {universitatem intelUgihilium) through fewer ideas or concepts {species) ; which, however, are more universal since each concept extends to more [things]. We find illustration of this among our fellows. Some are incapable of grasping intelligible truth, unless it be set forth through particular examples. This comes from the weakness of their intelligence. But others, of stronger mind, can seize many things from a few statements " (Qu. Iv. Art. 3). Through this argument, and throughout the rest of his exposition of the knowledge of God, angel, and man, we perceive that, with Thomas, knowledge is superior and more delightful, as it is abstract in character, and universal in applicability. By knowing the abstract and the uni- versal we become like to God and the angels ; knowledge of and through the particular is but a necessity of our half- material nature. Thomas turns now to consider the knowledge had by angels of immaterial beings, i.e. themselves and God (Qu. Ivi.) : " An angel, being immaterial, is a subsisting form, and therefore intelligible actually {actu, i.e. not potentially). Wherefore, through its form, which is its substance, it knows itself." Then as to knowledge of each other : God from the beginning impressed upon the angelic mind the likenesses of things which He created. For in Him, from the beginning, were the rationes of all things, both spiritual and corporeal. Through the impression of these rationes upon the angelic mind, an angel knows other angels as well as corporeal creatures. Their natures also yield them some knowledge of God. The angelic nature is a mirror holding the divine similitude. Yet without the illumination of grace the angelic 492 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh nature knows not God in His essence, because no created likeness may represent that. As for material things (Qu. Ivii.), angels have know- ledge of them through the intelligible species or concepts impressed by God on the angelic mind. But do they know particulars — singularia ? To deny it, says Thomas, would detract from the faith which accords to angels the ministra- tion of affairs. This matter may be thought thus : " Things flow forth from God both as they subsist in their own natures and as they are in the angeUc cognition. Evidently what flowed from God in things pertained not only to their universal nature, but to their principles of individuation. . . . And as He causes, so He also knows. . . . Likewise the angel, through the concepts {species) planted in him by God, knows things not only according to their universal nature, but also according to their singularity, in so far as they are manifold representations of the one and simple essence." One observes that the whole scholastic discussion of universals lies back of arguments like these. The main principles of angelic knowledge have now been set forth ; and Thomas pauses to point out to what extent the angels know the future, the secret thoughts of our hearts, and the mysteries of grace. He has still to consider the mode and measure of the angelic knowledge from other points of view. Whatever the angels may know through their implanted natures, they know perfectly \actu) ; but it may be otherwise as to what is divinely revealed to them. What they know, they know without the need of argument. And the discussion closes with remarks on Augustine's phrase and conception of the matutina and vesperfina know- ledge of angels : the former being the knowledge of things as they are in the Word ; the latter being the knowledge of things as they are in their own natures.* V That the abstract and the universal is the noble and ^ All that has been stated concerning the knowledge of angels relates to what they know through their own natures as created. Further enlightenment (as with men) comes through grace as soon as they become beati through turning to good. Pars prima^ Qu. Ixii. Art. i sqq. CHAP. xLi AQUINAS 49 3 delectable, we learn from this exposition of angelic knowledge. We may learn the same from Thomas's presentation of the modes and contents of human understanding. The Summa theologiae follows the Scriptural order of presentation ; ^ which is doubtless the reason why Thomas, instead of passing from immaterial creatures to the partly immaterial creature man, considers first the creation of physical things — the Scriptural work of the six days. After this he takes up the last act of the Creation — -man. In the Summa he considers man so far as his composite nature comes within the scope of theology. Accordingly the principal topic is the human soul {anima) ; and the body is regarded only in relation to the soul, its qualities and its fate. Thomas will follow Dionysius (Pseudo - Areopagite) in considering first the nature {essentia) of the soul, then its faculties {virtus sive potentiae), and thirdly, its mode of action {operatic) . Under the first head he argues {Pars prima, Qu. Ixxv.) that the soul, which is the primum principium of life, is not body, but the body's consummation {actus) and forma. Further, inasmuch as the soul is the principium of mental action, it must be an incorporeal principle existing by itself. It cannot properly be said to be the man ; for man is not soul alone, but a composite of soul and body. But the soul, being immaterial and intellectual, is not a composite of form and matter. It is not subject to corruption. Concerning its union with the body (Qu. Ixxvi.), " it is necessary to say that the mind {intellectus) y-whioh is the principle of intellectual action, is the form {forma) of the human body.'' One and the same intellectual principle does not pertain to all human bodies : there is no common human soul, but as many souls as there are men.^ Yet no man has a plurality of souls. " If indeed the anima intellectiva were not united to the body as form, but only as motor (as the Platonists affirm), it would be necessary to find in man another substantial form, through which the body should be set in its being. But if, as we have shown, the soul is united to the body as substantial form, there cannot be another substantial form beside it " (Qu. Ixxvi. Art. 4). The human soul is fitly 1 Ante, Chapter XXXVI., i. * A burning controversy between the Averroists and the orthodox schoolmen. 494 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh joined to its body ; for it holds the lowest grade among intellectual substances, having no knowledge of truth im- planted in it, as the angels have ; it has to gather know- ledge per viam sensus. " But nature never omits what is necessary. Hence the anima intellectiva must have not only the faculty of knowing, but the faculty of feeling {sentiendi). Sense-action can take place only through a corporeal instru- ment. Therefore the anima intellectiva ought to be united to such a body, which should be to it a convenient organ of sense " (Art. 5). Moreover, " since the soul is united to the body as form, it is altogether in any and every part of the body " (Art. 8). It is a cardinal point (Qu. Ixxvii.) with Thomas that the soul's essentia is not its potentia : the soul is not its faculties. That is true only of God. In Him there is no diversity. There is some diversity of faculty in an angel ; and more in man, a creature on the confines of the corporeal and spiritual creation, in whom concur the powers of both. There is order and priority among the powers of the soul : the potentiae intellectivae are higher than the potentiae sensitivae, and control them ; while the latter are above the potentiae nutritivae. Yet the order of their generation is the reverse. The highest of the sensitive faculties is sight. The anima is the subject in which are the powers of know- ing and willing {potentiae intellectivae) ; but the subject in which are the powers of sensation is the combination of the soul and body. All the powers of the soul, whether the subject be soul alone or soul and body, flow from the essence of the soul, as from a source {principium). Thomas follows (Qu. Ixxviii.) Aristotle in dividing the powers of the soul into vegetative, sensitive, appetitive, motor, and intellectual. In taking up the last, he points out (Qu. Ixxix.) that intelligence (intellectus) is a power of the soul, and not the soul itself. He then follows the Philosopher in showing how intelligence {intelligere) is to be regarded as a passive power, and he presents the difficult Aristotelian device of the intellectus agens, and argues that memory and reason are not to be regarded as powers distinct from the intelligence [intellectus). How does the soul, while united to the body (the anima cHAP.xLi AQUINAS 495 conjuncta), (i) know corporeal things which are beneath it ? (2) how does it know itself and what is in itself ? and (3) how does it know immaterial substances which are above it ? The exposition of these problems is introduced by (Qu. Ixxxiv.) a historical discussion of the primi philosophi who thought there was nothing but body in the world. Then came Plato, seeking " to save some certain cognition of truth " by means of his theory of Ideas. But Plato seems to have erred in thinking that the form of the known must be in the knower as it is in the known. This is not necessary. In sense -perception the form of the thing is not in sense as it is in the thing. " And likewise the intelli- gence receives the species (Ideas) of material and mobile bodies immaterially and immutably, after its own mode ; for the received is in the recipient after the mode of the recipient. Hence it is to be held that the soul through the intelligence knows bodies by immaterial, universal, and necessary cognition." Thomas sets this matter forth in a manner very illuminat- ing as to his general position regarding knowledge : " It foUows that material things which are known must exist in the knower, not materially, but immaterially. And the reason of this is that the act of cognition extends itself to those things which are outside of the knower. For we know things outside of us. But through matter the form of the thing is limited to what is single (aliqutd unum). Hence it is plain that the ratio (proper nature) of cognition is the opposite of the ratio of materiality. And therefore things, like plants, which receive forms only materially, are in no way cognoscitivae, as is said in the second book of De anima. The more immaterially anything possesses the form of the thing known, the more perfectly it knows. Wherefore the intelligence, which abstracts the species (Idea) not only from matter, but also from individuahzing material conditions, knows more perfectly than sense, which receives the form of the thing known without matter indeed, but with material conditions. Among the senses themselves, sight is the most cognoscitivus, because least material. And among intelh- gences, that is the more perfect which is the more immaterial " (Qu. Ixxxiv. Art. 2). Then Thomas again differs from Plato, and holds with Aristotle, that the intelligence through which the soul knows 496 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh has not its ideas written upon it by nature, but from the first is capable of receiving them all (sed est in principio in potentia ad hujusmodi species omnes). Hereupon, and with further arguments, Thomas shows " that the species intelli- gibiles, by which our soul knows, do not arise from separate forms " or ideas. To the converse question, whether intelligent cognition comes from things of sense, Thomas answers, following Aristotle : " One cannot say that sense perception is the whole cause of intellectual cognition, but rather in a certain way is the matter of the cause {materia causae),'' On the other hand, "it is impossible that the mind, in the state of the present life, wherein it is joined to the passive body {passihili corpori), should know anything actually {actu) except by turning itself to images {phantasmata). And this appears from two arguments. In the first place, since the mind itself is a power {vis) using no bodily organ, its action would not be interrupted by an injury to any bodily organ, if for its action there was not needed the action of some faculty using a bodily organ. Sense and imagination use a bodily organ. Hence as to what the mind knows actually {actu), there is needed the action of the imagination and other faculties, both in receiving new knowledge and in using knowledge already acquired. For we see that when the action of the imaginative faculty is interrupted by injury to an organ, as with the delirious, the man is prevented from actually knowing those things of which he has knowledge. Secondly (as any one may observe in himself), whenever he attempts to know {intelligere) anything, he forms images by way of example, in which he may contemplate what he is trying to know. And whenever we wish to make any one else understand, we suggest examples, from which he may make for himself images to know by. " The reason of this is that the knowing faculty is suited to the knowable {potentia cognosdtiva proportionatur cognoscibili). The appropriate object of the intelligence of an angel, who is separate from all body, is intelligible inunaterial substance {substantia intelligibilis a corpore separata) ; through this kind of intelligible he cognizes also material things. But the appropriate object of the human mind, which is joined to a body, is the essence or nature {quidditas sive natura) existing in material body ; and through the natures of visible things of this sort it ascends to some cognition of invisible things. It belongs to the ratio of this nature that it should exist in some individual having corporeal matter, as it is of CHAP. xLi AQUINAS 497 the ratio of the nature of stone or horse that it should be in this stone or this horse. Hence the nature of a stone or any material thing cannot be known completely and truly, unless it is known as existing in some particular [instance]. We apprehend the particular through sense and imagination ; and so it is necessary, in order that the mind should know its appropriate object, that it should turn itself to images, in order to behold the universal natinre existing in the particular. If, indeed, the appropriate object of our intelligence were the separate form, or if the form of sensible things did not subsist in the particular [instances], as the Platonists say, our mind in knowing would have no need always to turn itself to images " (Qu. Ixxxiv. Art. 7). It is next queried whether the judgment of the mind is impeded through binding {per ligamentum) the senses. In view of the preceding argument the answer is, that since " all that we know in our present state, becomes known to us through comparison with sensible things, it is impossible that there should be in us perfect mental judgment when the senses are tied, through which we take cognizance of sensible things " (Qu. Ixxxiv. Art. 8). This entire argument shows in what firm Aristotelian manner, scholasticism, in the person of Thomas, set itself upon a basis of sense perception ; through which it still pressed to a knowledge of the supersensible and abstract. In this argument we also see, as always with Thomas, that knowledge is perfect and blessed, the more immaterial and abstract are its modes. All of which will continue to impress us as we follow Thomas, briefly, through his exposition of the modus and ordo of knowing [intelligendi) (Qu. Ixxxv.). The first question is whether om: mind knows corporeal things by abstracting the species from the images — ^the type from the particular. There are three grades of the cognizing faculty {virtutis cognoscitivae). The lowest is sensation, which is the act of a bodily organ. Its appropriate object is form as existing in matter. And since matter is the principle of individuation {i.e, the particularizing principle from which results the particular or individual), sense perception is con- fined to the particular. The highest grade of the cognizing faculty is that which is independent of bodily organs and separate from matter, as the angelic intelligence ; and its object is form subsisting without matter. For though VOL. II 2 K 498 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh angels know material things, they view them only in the immaterial, to wit, themselves or God. Between the two is the human mind, which " is the forma of the body. So it naturally knows form existing individually in corporeal matter, and yet not as form is in such matter. But to know form, which is in concrete matter, and yet know it not as it is in such matter, is to abstract it from this particular matter which the images represent. It follows that our intelligence knows material things by abstracting them from images ; and through reflecting on these material abstractions we reach some cognition of the immaterial, just as conversely the angels know the material through the immaterial " (Qu. Ixxxv, Art. I). It is next proved that the soul, through the intelligible species or forms abstracted from particulars, knows things which are outside the soul. In a way, intellection arises from sense perception ; therefore the sense perception of the particular precedes the intellectual knowledge of universals. But, on the other hand, the intelligence, in coming to perfect cognition, proceeds from the undistinguished to the dis- tinguished, from the more to the less general, and so knows animal before it knows homo, and homo before it knows Socrates. The next conclusion reads very neatly in scholastic Latin, but is difficult to paraphrase : it is that the intelli- gence may know many things at once {simul) per modum unius, but not per modum multorum ; that is to say, the mind may grasp at once whatever it may grasp under one species, but cannot know a number of things at once which , fall under different species. Next as to what our mind knows in material things (Qu. Ixxxvi.). It does not know the particular or singular {singularia) in them directly ; for the principle of singularity in material things is the particular matter. But our mind knows by abstracting from such the species, that is, the universal. This it knows directly. But it knows singularia indirectly, inasmuch as, when it has abstracted the intelligible species, it must still, in order to know completely {adu), turn itself to the images in which it knows the species. How does the anima intellectiva know itself, and those things which are in it (Qu. Ixxxvii.) ? Everything is know- CHAP. XLI AQUINAS 499 able in so far as it is actually {in actu) and not merely potenti- ally. So the human intelligence knows itself not through its essence, which is still but potential, but in so far as it has actually realized itself ; knows itself, that is, through its actuality. The permanent qualities {habitus) of the soul exist in a condition between potentiality and actuality. The mind knows them when they are actually present or operative. Does the human intelligence know its own act — ^know that it knows ? In God, knowing and being are one. Although this is not true of the angelic intelligence, never- theless with an angel the prime object of knowledge is his own essence. With one and the same act an angel knows that it knows, and knows its essence. But the primal object of the human intelligence is neither its knowledge (knowing, intelligere) nor its essence, but something extrinsic, to wit, the nature of the material thing. Hence that is the first object known by the human intelligence ; and next is known its own actus, by which that first object is known. Likewise the human intelligence knows the acts of will. An act of will is nothing but a certain inclination toward some form of the mind (formam intellectam) as natural appetite is an inclina- tion toward a natural form. The act of will is in the know- ing mind and so is known by it. So far as to how the soul knows material things, which are below it, and its own nature and qualities. It is another question whether the soul knows those things which are above it, to wit, the immaterial substances. Can the soul in the state of the present life know the angels in themselves ? With lengthy argument, differing from Plato and adhering to Aristotle, Thomas proves the negative : that in the present life we cannot know substantias separatas im- materiales secundum seipsas. Nor can we come to a know- ledge of the angelic substances through knowing material things. " For immaterial substances are altogether of another nature {ratio) from the whatnesses {quidditates) of material things ; and however much our inteUigence abstracts from matter the essence (quidditas) of the material thing, it will never arrive at any- thing like an immaterial substance. And so, through material Soo THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii substances, we cannot know immaterial substances perfectly " (Qu. Ixxxviii. Art. 2). Much less can we thus know God. The discussion hitherto has been confined to the intel- lectual capacities of souls united to their bodies. As to the knowledge which the " separated " soul may have, other ', considerations arise akin to those touching the knowledge J possessed by the separated substances called angels. Is the separated soul able to know ? Thomas has shown that so long as the soul is joined to the body it cannot know any- thing except by turning itself to images. If this were a mere accident of the soul, incidental to its existence in the body, then with that impediment removed, it would return to its own nature and know simply. But if, as we suppose, this turning to images is of the nature of the soul, the difficulty grows. Yet the soul has one mode of existence when united to the body, and another when separated, but with its nature remaining. Souls united to bodies may know through resort to images of bodies, which are in the bodily organs ; but when separated, they may know by turning to that which is intelligible simply, as other separate substances do. Yet still this raises doubt ; for why did not God appoint a nobler way for the soul to know thair that which is natural to it when joined to the body ? The perfection of the universe required that there should be diverse grades among intellectual substances. The soul is the lowest of them. Its feeble intelligence was not fit to receive perfect knowledge through universal conceptions, save when assisted by concrete examples. Without these, souls would have had but a confused knowledge. Hence, for their more perfect knowledge of things, they are naturally united to bodies, and so receive a knowledge from things of sense proper to their condition ; just as rude men can be led to know only through examples. So it was for a higher end that the soul was united to the body, and knows through resort to images' ; yet, when separated, it will be capable of another way of knowing.^ Separated from the body, the soul can know itself through * This is the substance of Qu. Ixxxix. Art. i. CHAP. xLi AQUINAS 501 itself. It can know other separated souls perfectly, but the angels, who are higher natures, only imperfectly, at least through the knowledge which the separated soul has from its nature ; but that may be increased through grace and glory. The separated soul will know natural objects through the species (ideas) received from the inflowing divine light ; yet less perfectly than the angels. Likewise, less universally than angels, will separated souls, by like means of species received from the divine light, know particular things, and only such as they previously knew, or may know through some affection or aptitude or the divine decree. For the habit and aptitude of knowledge, and the knowledge already acquired, will remain in the separated soul, so far as relates to the knowledge which is in the intellect and no longer in the lower perceptive faculties. Neither will distance from the object affect the soul's knowledge, since it will know through the influx of forms {species) from the divine light. *' Yet through the cognition belonging to their nature, separated souls do not know what is done here below. For such souls know the particular and concrete {singularia) only as from the traces [vestigia) of previous cognition or affection, or by divine appointment. And the souls of the dead by divine decree, and in accordance with their mode of existence, are separated from the intercourse of the living and joined to the society of spiritual substances. Therefore they are ignorant of those things which are done among us." Nevertheless, it would seem, according to opinions of Augustine and Gregory, " that the souls of the saints who see God know all that is done here. Yet, perfectly joined to the divine righteousness, they are not grieved, nor do they take part in the affairs of the living, save as the divine disposition requires." " Still the souls of the dead are able to care for the affairs of the living, although ignorant of their condition ; just as we have care for the dead, though ignorant of their state, by invoking the suffrages of the Church. And the souls of the dead may be in- formed of the affairs of the living from souls lately departed hence, or through angels or demons, or by the revealing spirit of God. But if the dead appear to the Uvihg, it is by God's special dispensation, and to be reckoned as a divine miracle." ^ ^ Qu. Ixxxix. Art. 8 (condensed). 502 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh VI We have thus traced Thomas's view of the faculty of knowledge, the primary constituent of beatitude in God and in angels and men. There are other factors which not only supplement this faculty, but even flow as of necessity from a full and true conception of it and its perfect energizing. These are the faculties of will and love and natural appetite ; though the last does not exist in God or angel or in " separated soul." The composite creature man shares it with brutes : it is of enormous importance, since it may affect his spiritual progress in this life, and so determine his state after death. Let us observe these qualities in God, in the immaterial substances called angels, and in man. In God there is volition as well as intelligence ; for voluntas intellectum consequitur ; and as God's being (esse) is His knowing [intelligere), so likewise His being is His will [velle)} Essentially alike in God and man and angel are the constituents of spiritual beatitude and existence — knowing, willing, loving. From Creator down to man, knowledge differs in mode and in degree, yet is essentially the same. The like is true of will. As to love, because passion is of the body, love and every mode of turning from or to an object is passionless in God and the angels. Yet man through love, as well as through willing and through knowing, may prove his kinship with angels and with God. God is love; says John's Epistle. " It is necessary to place love in God," says Thomas. " For the first movement of will and any appetitive faculty {appetitivae virtutis) is love [amor],*' It is objected that love is a passion; and the passionless God cannot love. Answers Thomas, " Love and joy and delight are passions in so far as they signify acts (or actualities, actus) of the appetitus sensitivi ; but they are not passions when they signify the actus of the appetitus intellectivi ; and thus are they placed in God " {Pars prima, Qu. xx. Art. i). God loves all existences. Now all existences, in so far ^ Pats prima, Qu. xix. Art. i. CHAP. XLI AQUINAS 503 as they are, are good. For being itself (esse) is in a sense the good of any thing, and likewise its perfection. It has been shown that God's will is the cause of all things ; and thus it is proper that a thing should have being, or good, in so far as it is willed by God. God wills some good to every existent thing. And since to love is nothing else than to will good to something, it is evident that God loves all things that are, yet not in the way we love. For since our will is not the cause of the goodness of things, but is moved by it as by an object, our love by which we will good to anything is not the cause of its goodness ; but its goodness calls forth the love by which we wish to preserve and add to the good it has ; and for this we work. But God's love imparts and creates goodness in things. The divine love embraces all things in one and the same act of will ; but inasmuch as His love creates good- ness, there could be no greater goodness in one thing than in another unless He willed greater good to one than to the other : in this sense He may be said to love one creature more than another ; and in this way He loves the better things more. Besides love, the order of the universe proves God's justitia ; an attribute which is to be ascribed to Him, as Dionysius says, in that He grants to all things what is appropriate, according to the dignity of the existence of each, and preserves the nature of each in its own order and virtue. Likewise misericordia is to be ascribed to God, not as if He were affected by pitying sadness, but in that He remedies the misery or defects of others. Thus far as to will and love in God. Next, as to these qualities in Angels. Have angels will ? {Pars primUy Qu. lix.). Thomas argues: All things proceed from the divine will, and all per appetitu;m incline toward good. In plants this is called natural appetite. Next above them come those creatures who perceive the particular good as of the senses ; their inclination toward it is appetitus sensitivus. Still above them are such as know the ratio of the good uni- versally, through their intelligence. Such are the angels ; and in them inclination toward the good is will. Moreover, since they know the nature of the good, they are able to 504 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh form a judgment as to it ; and so they have free will : ubicumque est intelledus, est liberum arbitrium. And as their knowledge is above that of men, so in them free will exists more excellently. The angels have only the appetitus intellectivus which is will ; they are not irascible or concupiscent, since these belong to the appetitus sensitivus. Only metaphorically can furor and evil concupiscence be ascribed to demons, as anger is to God — propter similitudinem effectus. Consequently amor and gaudium do not exist as passions in angels. But in so far as these qualities signify solely an act of will, they are intellectual. In this sense, to love is to will good to anything, and to rejoice (gaudere) is to rest the will in a good obtained. Similarly, caritas and spes^ in so far as they are virtues, lie not in appetite, but in will ; and thus exist in angels. With man the virtues of temperance and fortitude may relate to things of sense ; but not so with angels, who have no passions to be bridled by these virtues. Temperance is ascribed to them when they temper their will according to the will divine, and fortitude, when they firmly execute it (Qu. lix. Art. 4). In a subsequent portion of Pars prima (Qu. ex.), Thomas has occasion to point out that, as in human affairs, the more particular power is governed by the more universal, so among the angels. " The higher angels who preside over the lower have more universal knowledge. It is Ukewise clear that the virtus of a body is more particular than the virtus of a spiritual substance ; for every corporeal form is form particularized (individuata) through matter, and limited to the here and now. But immaterial forms are unconditioned and intelligible. And as the lower angels, who have forms less universal, are ruled by the higher angels, so ail corporeal things are ruled by angels. And this is maintained not only by the holy Doctors, but by all philosophers who have recognized incorporeal substances." Next Thomas considers the action of angels upon men, and shows that men may have their minds illumined by the lower orders of angels, who present to men intelligibilem veritatem sub similitudinibus sensibilium. God sends the angels to minister to corporeal creatures ; in which mission their acts proceed from God as a cause {principio). They CHAP. xLi AQUINAS 505 are His instruments. They are sent as custodians of men, to guide and move them to good. " To every man an angel is appointed for his guard : of which the reason is, that the guardianship {custodia) of the angels is an execution of divine providence in regard to men." Every man, while as viator he walks life's via non tuta, has his guardian angel. And the archangels have care of multitudes of men (Qu. cxiii.). Thus Thomas's, or rather, say the Christian doctrine as to angels, becomes a corollary necessary to Christian theism, and true at least symbolically. But — and this is the last point as to these ministering spirits — do the angels, who love without passion, grieve and suffer when those over whom they minister are lost ? " Angels grieve neither over the sins nor the punishment of men. For, as says Augustine, sadness and grief arise only from what contravenes the will. But nothing happens in the world that is contrary to the will of the angels and other blessed ones. For their will is entirely fixed {totaliter inhaeret) in the order of the divine righteousness (justitiae) ; and nothing takes place in the world, save what takes place and is permitted by the same. And so, in brief, nothing takes place in the world contrary to the will of the blessed " (Qu. cxiii. Art. 7). We come to man. He has will, and free will or choice, as the angels have. Will is part of the intellectual nature : it is as the intellectivus appetitus. But man differs from the angels in possessing appetites which belong to his sense- nature and do not perceive the good in its common aspects ; because sense does not apprehend the universal, but only the particular.^ Sometimes Thomas speaks of amor as in- cluding every form of desire, intellectual or pertaining to the world of sense. " The first movement of will and of any appetitive faculty {virtus) is amor." ^ So in this most general signification, amor " is something belonging to appetite ; for the object of both is the good." " The first effect of the desirable (appetibilis) upon the appetitus, is called amor ; thence follows desiderium, or the movement * Pars prima, Qu. Ixxxii. and ;^lxxxiii. ^ Pars prima, Qu. xx. i. 5o6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii toward the desirable ; and at last the quies which is gaudium. Since then amor consists in an effect upon the appetitus, it is evidently passio ; most properly speaking when it relates to the yearning element {concupiscibile) , but less properly when it relates to will " {Pars prima, Qu. xxvi. Art. 2). Further distinguishing definitions are now in order : " Four names are applied to what pertains to the same : amor, dilectio, caritas, et amicitia. Of the three first, amor has the broadest meaning. For all dilectio or caritas is amor ; but not conversely. Dilectio adds to amor a precedent choice (electionem praecedentem) as its name indicates. Hence dilectio is not in the concupiscent nature, but in the will, and therefore in the rational nature. Caritas adds to am^r a certain perfectionem amoris, inasmuch as what is loved, is esteemed as very precious, as the name shows" {ibid. Art. 3). Moreover, amor may be divided into amor amicitiae, whereby we wish good to the amicus, and amor concupiscentiae, whereby properly we desire a good to ourselves. The Good is the object and, in that sense, the cause, of amor (Qu. xxvii.). " But love requires a cognition of the good which is loved, Therefore the Philosopher says, that bodily sight is the cause of amoris sensitivi. Likewise contemplation of spiritual beauty or goodness is the cause of amoris spiritualis. Thus, therefore, cogni- tion is the cause of love, inasmuch as the good cannot be loved unless known." From this broad conception of am^or the argument rises to amor in its purest phases, which correspond to the highest modes of knowledge man is capable of. They are considered in their nature, in their causes, and effects. It is evident whither we are travelling in this matter. " Love {amor) may be perfect or imperfect. Perfect love is that by which some one is loved for himself, as a man loves a friend. Imperfect love is that by which some one loves a thing, not for itself, but in order that that good may come to him, as a man loves the thing he desires. The first love pertains to caritas which cleaves to God {inhaeret Deo) for Himself (secundum seipsum)." ^ Caritas is one of the theological virtues, and as such Thomas treats it. To it corresponds the " gift " of sapientia, * Summa theol. Pars secunda secundae, Qu. xvii. Art. 8. CHAP. XLI AQUINAS 507 likewise a virtue bestowed by God, but more particularly regarded as the " gift " of the Holy Spirit. Caritas is set not in the appetifus sensitivus, but in the will. Yet as it exceeds our natural faculties, "it is not in us by nature, nor acquired through our natural powers ; but through the infusion of the Holy Spirit, who is the amor Patris et Filii." He infuses caritas according to His will ; and it will increase as we draw near to God ; nor is there any bound to its augmentation. May caritas be perfect in this life ? In one sense it never can be perfect, because no creature ever can love God according to His infinite lovableness. " But on the part of him who wills to love (ex parte diligentis), caritas is perfect when he loves as much as he is able. Which' may be taken in three ways. In one way, as the whole heart of man is always borne toward God ; and this is the perfection of the love of heaven {caritas patriae), unattainable here, where because of this life's infirmities it is impossible always actually to think upon God, and be drawn toward Him by voluntary love (dilectione). In another way, as a man may strive to keep himself free for God and things divine, laying other matters aside, save as life's need requires : and that is the perfection of caritas, possible in this life, yet not for all who have caritas. And the third way, when any one habitually sets his heart on God, so that he thinks and wills nothing that is contrary to the divine love : this perfection is common to all who have caritas,'* ^ The caritas with which we love God, extends to our neighbours, and even to our enemies, for God's sake ; also to ourselves, including our bodies ; it embraces sinners, but not their sinfulness. It embraces the angels. There is order and grade in caritas, according to its relationship to God, the source of beatitude and voluntary love [dilectionis). God is to be loved ex caritate above all ; for He is loved as the cause of beatitude, while our neighbour is loved as a participant with us in the beatitude from God. We should love God more than ourselves ; because beatitude is in God as in the common and fontal source of all things that participate in beatitude. " But, after God, man should love himself, in so far as he is spirit [secundum naturam spiritualem), more than any one else. ^ Pars secunda secundae, Qu. xxiv. Art. 8. 5o8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh This is plain from the very reason of loving. Grod is loved as the principle of good, on which the dilectio caritatis is based. Man loves himself ex caritate for the reason that he is a participator in that good. He loves his neighbour because of his association {societas) in that good. . . . Participation in the divine good is a stronger reason for loving, than association in this participation. Therefore, man ex caritate should love himself more than his neighbour ; and the mark (signum) of this is, that man should not commit any sin barring his participation in this beatitude, in order to free his neighbour from sin. . . . But one should love his neighbour's salvation more than his own body.*' ^ We may love some of our neighbours more than others ; for those bound to us by natural ties and proximity can be loved more and in more actual ways. The order and grades of love will endure when our natures are perfected in glory. Love {caritas) is the supreme theological virtue. It comes to us in this life through grace ; it can be perfected only when grace is consummated in glory. Likewise the highest knowledge possible in this life comes through grace, to be perfected in glory. All is from God, and that which, of all the rest, seems most freely given is the divine influence disposing the intelligence and will toward good, and illmninat- ing these best God-given faculties. This, as par excellence, through the exceeding bounty of its free bestowal, is called gratia (grace). It is a certain habitual disposition of the soul ; it is not the same as virtus, but a divinely implanted disposition, in which the virtues must be rooted ; it is the imparted similitude of the divine nature, and perfects the nature of the soul, so far as that has part in likeness to the divine : it is the medial state between nature and that further consummation of the grace-illumined nature, which is glory ; and so it is the beginning, the inchoatio, of our glorified beatitude. Clearly, grace is no part of our inborn nature, and does not belong to our natural faculties. It is a divinely bestowed increment, directing our natural faculties toward God and uplifting them to higher capacities of know- ing and loving. To follow Thomas's exposition of grace a little more closely : ^ man, through his natural powers, may know ^ Pars secunda secundae, Qu. xxvi. Art. 4 and 5. ^ Pars prima secundae^ Qu. cix. sqq. CHAP. xLi AQUINAS 509 truth, but not the highest ; and without grace, our fallen nature cannot will all the good belonging to it {connaturale), nor love God above all else, nor merit eternal life. " Grace is something supernatural in man coming from God." It " is not the same as virtue ; and its subject (i,e. its possessor, that in which it is set) cannot be a faculty {potentia) of the soul ; for the soul's faculties, as perfected, are conceived to be virtues. Grace, which is prior to virtue, is set, not in the faculties, but in the essence of the soul. Thus, as through his faculty of knowing {potentiam intellectivam) , man shares the divine knowledge by the virtue of faith, and through the faculty of will shares the divine love by the virtue of caritas, so by means of a certain similitude he shares in the divine nature through some regeneration or recreation " {Pars I. ii., Qu. ex. Art. 4). Grace may be conceived either as " divine aid, moving us to willing and doing right, or as a formative and abiding (habituale) gift, divinely placed in us" (Qu. cxi. Art. 2). " The gift of grace exceeds the power of any created nature ; and is nothing else than a sharing {participatio) in the divine nature" (Qu. cxii. Art. i). So it is clear that without grace man cannot rise to the highest knowledge and the purest love of which he is capable in this life ; far less can he reach that final and perfected blessedness which is expected hereafter. For this he must possess the virtue of Faith, which comes not without grace. " The perfection of the rational creature consists not only in that which may be his, in accordance with his nature ; but also in that which may come to him from some supernatural sharing in the divine goodness. The final beatitude of man consists in some supernatural vision of God. Man can attain to that only through some mode of learning from God the Teacher, and he must beUeve God as a disciple beheves his master " {Pars II. ii., Qu. ii. Art. 3). Within the province of the Christian Faith "it is necessary that man should accept per modum fidei not only what is above reason, but also what may be known through reason " (Art. 4). He must believe explicitly the prima credibilia, that is to say, the Articles of Faith ; it is enough if he believes other credibilia implicitly, by holding bis mind prepared to accept whatever Scripture teaches (Art. 5). 5IO THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii " To believe is an act of the intellect (actus intellectus) as moved by will to assenting. It proceeds from the will and from the intellect. . . . Yet it is the immediate act of the intellect, because its object is the true ; and therefore faith is in the in- tellect as in a subject [i,e, possessor] " (Qu. iv. Art. 2). And Thomas, having shown the function of will in any act of faith, passes on by the same path to connect fides with caritas : " Voluntary acts take their species from the end which is the object of vohtion. That from which anything receives its species, occupies the place held by form in material things. Hence, as it were, the form of any volimtary act is the end to which it is directed (ordinatur). . . . Manifestly, an act of faith is directed to the object wiUed (which is the good) as to an end. But good which is the end of faith, to wit, the divine good, is the proper object of caritas. And so caritas is called the/orw of faith, in so far as through caritas the act of faith is perfected and given form " (Qu. iv. Art. 3). Thomas makes his conclusion more precise : " As faith is the consummation of the intellect, that which pertains to the intellect, pertains, per se, to faith. What pertains to will, does not, per se, pertain to faith. The increment making the difference between the faith which has form and the faith which lacks it {fides formata, fides informis), consists in that which pertains to will, to wit, to caritas, and not in what pertains to intellect " (Qu. iv. Art. 4). Only the fides which is formed and completed in caritas is a virtue (Art. 5). And Thomas says concisely (Qu. vi. Art. i) what in many ways has been made evident before : for Faith, it is necessary that the credibilia should be pro- pounded, and then that there should be assent to them ; but since man, in assenting to those things which are of the Faith, is lifted above his nature, his assent must proceed from a supernatural principle working within him, which is God moving him through grace. It is not hard to see why two gifts [dona) of the Holy Spirit should belong to the virtue Faith, to wit, understand- ing and knowledge, intellectus et scientia. Thomas gives the reasons in an argument germane to his Aristotelian theory of cognition : CHAP. xLi AQUINAS S 1 1 " The object of the knowing faculty is that which is Many- kinds of things he hidden within, to which the intellectus of man should penetrate. Beneath the accidens the substantial nature of the thing hes hidden ; beneath words lie their meanings ; beneath similes and figures, lies the figured truth — Veritas figurata (for things intelligible are, as it were, within things sensible) ; and in causes he hidden the effects, and conversely. Now, since human cognition begins with sense, as from without, it is clear that the stronger the Ught of the intellect, the further it will penetrate to the inmost depths. But the hght of our natural intellect is of finite virtue, and may reach only to what is hmited. Therefore man needs the supernatural light, in order to penetrate to the knowledge which through the natural light he is not able to know ; and that supernatural light given to man is called the donum intellectus " (Qu. viii. Art. i). This gift follows grace. Grace is more perfect than nature. It does not abrogate, but perfects the natural faculties. Nor does it fail in those matters in which man's natural power is competent (Qu. ix. Art. i). So, besides the donum intellectus, to Faith belongs the donum scientiae also, which brings and guides knowledge of human things (Art. 2). And now we shall not be surprised to find sapientia, the very highest gift of the Spirit, attached to the grace-given virtue caritas. For caritas is the informing principle of Faith, and the highest virtue of the grace-illumined will. The will, be it remembered, belongs to man's intellectual nature ; its object is the good which is known by the mind (bonum intellectum). ''Sapientia (wisdom, right knowledge as to the highest cause, which is God) signifies rectitude of judgment in accordance with the rationes divinae/* the ideas and reasons which exist in God. Rectitude of judgment regarding things divine may arise from rational inquiry ; in which case it pertains to the sapientia which is an intellectual virtue. But it may also spring from affinity to those things themselves ; and then it is a gift of the Holy Spirit (II. ii., Qu. xlv. Art. 2). Says Thomas : " By the name beatitude is understood the final perfection of the rational or intellectual nature. This consists for this life in such contemplation as we may have here of the highest intelhgible good, which is God ; but above this feUcity is that other felicity 512 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh which we expect when we shall see God as He is " (Pars I., Qu. Ixii. Art. i). But mark : the perfection of the intellectual nature does not consist merely in knowing, narrowly taken. The right action of will is also essential, of the will directed toward the highest good, which is God : and this is caritas, of which the corresponding gift from the Spirit is wisdom. In accord with this full consummation of human nature, comprising the perfection of cognition and will, Thomas outlines his conception of the vita contemplativa, the life of most perfect beatitude attainable on earth : " The vita contemplativa is theirs whose resolve is set upon the contemplation of truth. Resolve is an act of will ; because resolve is with respect to the end, which is the object of will. Thus the vita contemplativa, according to the essence of its action, is of the intelligence ; but so far as it pertains to what moves us to engage in such action, it is of the will, which moves all the other faculties, including the inteUigence, to act. Appetitive energy (vis appetitiva) moves toward contemplating something, either sensibly or intellectually : sometimes from love of the thing seen, and sometimes from love of the knowledge itself, which arises from contemplation. And because of this, Gregory sets the vita contemplativa in the love of God — in caritate Dei — to wit, inasmuch as some one, from a wiUing love (dilectio) of God bums to behold His beauty. And because any one is rejoiced when he attains what he loves, the vita contemplativa is directed toward dilectio ^ which lies in affect (in affectu) ; by which amor also is intended " (II. ii., Qu. clxxx. Art. i). The moral virtues, continues Thomas, do not pertain essentially to this vita. But they may promote it, by regulating the passions and quieting the tumult of outside affairs. In principle it is fixed upon the contemplation of truth, which here we see but in a glass darkly ; and so we help ourselves along by contemplating the effects of the divine cause in the world. Thus final beatitude, and its mortal approach in the vita contemplativa of this earth, is of the mind, both in its knowledge and its love. Immateriality, spirituality, is with Thomas primarily intellectual. Yet his beatitude is not limited to the knowing faculties. It embraces will and love. ^ Another reading is delectatiOj i.e. enjoyment. CHAP. xLi AQUINAS 5 1 3 The grace of God and the gifts of the Holy Spirit touch love as well as knowledge, raising one and both to final unison of aim. Thus far in this life, while in the life to come, these grace-uplifted qualities of knowledge, and that choosing love [dilectio) which rises from knowledge of the good, are per- fected in gloria. Further than this we shall not go with Thomas, nor follow him, for example, through his exposition of the means of salvation — the Incarnation and the sacraments. Nor need we further mark the prodigious range of his theology, or his metaphysics, logic, or physics. To all this many books have been devoted. We are but seeking to realise his intel- lectual interests and qualities, in such way as to bring them within the compass of our sympathy. A more encyclopaedic and systematic presentation of his teaching is proper for those who would trace, or perhaps attach themselves to, particular doctrines ; or would find in scholasticism, even in Thomas, some special authoritativeness. For us these doctrines have but the validity of all human striving after truth. Moreover, perhaps a truer view of Thomas, the theologian and philosopher, is gained from following a few typical forms of his teaching presented in his own exposition, than by analyzing his thought with later solvents which he did not apply, and presenting his matter classified as he would not have ordered it, and in modern phrases, which have as many meanings foreign to scholasticism as scholas- ticism has thoughts not to be translated into modern ways of thinking. VOL. II 2 L CHAPTER XLII ROGER BACON Of all mediaeval men, Thomas^quinas. achieved the most organic and comprehensive union of the results of human reasoning and the data of Christian theology. He may be regarded as the,^to^,Qcpaaent jii.sch£la£bra perfected in method, universal in scope, and still integral in purpose. The scholastic method was soon to be impugned and the scholastic universality broken. T^ ^premature attack up on the me thod came from Roge r BaconT^ the fatal breacETiT the scholastic wholeness resulted~irom the'constructive, as well as critical, achievements of Duns Scotus and Occam. Bacon is a perplexing personality. With other mediaeval thinkers one qtdckly feels the point of view from which to regard them. Not so with this most disparate genius of the Middle Ages. Reading his rugged statements, and trying to form a coherent thought of him, we are puzzled at the contradictions of his mind. One may not say that he was not of his time. Ever y man is of hi s ^ Bacon*s Opus majus was edited in incomplete form by Jebb in 1733, and reprinted in 1750 at Venice. This edition is superseded by that of Bridges, in two volumes, pubUshed with the Moralis philosophia and MulUpUceUio specierum by the Clarendon Press in 1897. The text of this edition had many errors, which have been corrected by a third volume published in 1900 by Williams and Norgate, who are now the publishers of the three volumes. In 1859 Brewer edited the Opus tertium, the Opus minus, and Compendium philosophiae for the Master of the Rolls Series. In 1861 appeared the excellent monograph by ^mUe Charles, entitled Roger Bacons sa vie, ses ouvrages, ses doctrines. " An unpublished Fragment of a work by Roger Bacon " was discovered by F. A. Gasquet ia the Vatican Library, and published in the English Historical Review for July 1897. It appears to be a letter to Clement IV., written in 1267. Bacon's Greek Grammar has been edited by Nolan and Hirsch (Cambridge, 1902). Lately Dr. Rashdall has edited the Compendium Studii Theologiae (Brit. Soc. Franciscan Studies, 1911), a writing important for Bacon's scholastic position; and R. Steele is editing the Communia Naturalium (Oxford, 1911 et seq.). 514 cHAP.xLii ROGER BACON 515 time, an d c annot raise himself very far out^o Ltlie mass of knowledge an d opinion furnished by it, any more than a swimmer cah'^lift himselt out of the"water that sustains him. Yet personal temper and inclination may align a man with less potent tendencies, which are obscured and hampered by the dominant intellectual interests of the period. Assuredly, through all the Middle Ages, there were men who noticed such physical phenomena as bore upon their lives, even men who cared for the dumb beginnings of what eventually might lead to natural science. But they were not repre- sentative of their epoch's master energies ; and in the Middle Ages, as always, the man of evident and great achievement will be one who, like Aquinas, stands upon the whole attainment of his age. Roger Bacon, on the contrary, was as one about whose loins the currents of his time drag and pull ; they did not aid him, and yet he could not extricate himself. It was his intellectual misfortune that he was held by his time so fatally, so fatally, at least, for the proper doing of the work which was to be his contribution to human enlightenment, a contribution well ignored while he lived, and for long afterward. Bacon accepted the dominant mediaeval convictions : the entire truth of Scripture ; the absolute validity of the revealed religion, with its dogmatic formulation ; also (to his detriment) the universally prevailing view that the end of all the sciences is to serve their queen, theology. Yet he hated the ways of mediaeval natural selection and survival of the mediaeval fittest, and the methods by which Albert or Thomas or Vincent of Beauvais were at last presenting the sum of mediaeval knowledge and conviction. Well might he detest those ways and methods, seeing that he was Roger Bacon, one impelled by his genius to critical study, to observation and experiment. He was impassioned for linguistics, for mathematics, for astronomy, optics, chemistry, and for an experimental science which should confirm the contents of all these, and also enlarge the scope of human ingenuity. Yet he was held fast, and his thinking was confused, by what he took from his time. Especially he was obsessed by the idea that philosophy, including every branch of knowledge, must serve theology, and even in that 5i6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvu service find its justification. But what has chemistry to do with theology ? What has mathematics ? And what has the physical experimental method ? By maintaining the utility of these for theology, Bacon saved his mediaeval orthodoxy, and it may be, his skin from the fire. But it wrecked the working of his genius. His writings remain, such of them as are known, astounding in their originality and insight, and almost as remarkable for their inconsistencies ; they are marked by a confusion of method and a distortion of purpose, which sprang from the contradictions between Bacon's genius and the current views which he adopted. The career of Bacon was an intellectual tragedy, con- forming to the old principles of tragic art : that the hero's character shall be large and noble, but not flawless, inasmuch as the fatal consummation must issue from character, and not happen through chance. He died an old man, as in his youth, so in his age, a devotee of tangible knowledge. His pursuit of a knowledge which was not altogether learning had been obstructed by the Order of which he was an unhappy and rebellious member ; quite as fatally his achievement was deformed from within by the principles which he accepted from his time. But he was responsible for his acceptance of current opinions ; and as his views roused the distrust of his brother Friars, his intractable temper drew their hostility (of which we know very little) on his head. Persuasiveness and tact were needed by one who would impress such novel views as his upon his fellows, or, in the thirteenth century, escape persecution for their divulgence. Bacon attacked dead and living worthies, tact- lessly, fatuously, and unfairly. Of his life scarcely anything is known, save from his allusions to himself and others ; and these are insufficient for the construction of even a slight consecutive narrative. Bom ; studied at Oxford ; went to Paris, studied, experimented ; is at Oxford again, and a Franciscan ; studies, teaches, becomes suspect to his Order, is sent back to Paris, kept under surveillance, receives a letter from the pope, writes, writes, writes, — ^his three best- known works ; is again in trouble, confined for many years released, and dead, so very dead, body and fame alike, until partly unearthed after five centuries. cHAP.xLii ROGER BACON 517 Inference and construction may fill out this sombre outline. England was the land of Bacon's birth, and Ilchester is said to have been the natal spot. The approxi- mate day may be guessed at from his reference to himself as senex in 1267, and his remark that he had then been studying forty years. His family seems to have been wealthy. Besides the letter of Pope Clement, hereafter to be quoted, there is one contemporary reference to him. Mathew Paris has a story of a certain clericus de curia, scilicet Rogerus Bacum, speaking up with bold wit to King Henry in. at Oxford in 1233. Bacon when a young man studied there under Robert Grosseteste and Adam of Marsh. He frequently refers to both, and always with respect. His chief enthusiasm is for the former.^ From Oxford Bacon went to Paris, where apparently he remained for a number of years ; he was made a doctor there, and afterwards became a Franciscan. Since a monk could own nothing, one may perhaps infer that Bacon did not join the Order until after the lapse of certain twenty years of scientific research, in which he spent much money, as he says in 1267, in an often-quoted passage of the Opus tertium : " For now I have laboured from my youth in the sciences and languages, and for the furtherance of study, getting together much that is useful. I sought the friendship of all wise men among the Latins, and caused youth to be instructed in languages and geometric figures, in numbers and tables and instruments, and many needful matters. I examined everything useful to the purpose, and I know how to proceed, and with what means, and what are the impediments : but I cannot go on for lack of the necessary funds. Through the twenty years in which I laboured specially in the study of wisdom, careless of the crowd's opinion, I spent more than two thousand pounds in these pursuits on occult books {libros secretos) and various experiments, and languages and instruments, and tables and other things." ^ After his first stay at Paris Bacon returned to Oxford. There he doubtless continued his researches, and divulged them, or taught in some way. For he roused the suspicions ^ For Grosseteste, see ante, p. 146 and post, p. 541. ^ Opus tertium, chap. xvii. (pp. 58-59, Brewer's ed.). Si8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh of his Order, and in the course of time was sent or conducted back to Paris, where constraint seems to have been put upon his actions and utterances. Like the first, this second, possibly enforced, stay was a long one ; he speaks of himself in the first chapter of the Opus tertium as "for ten years an exile." Yet here as always, one is not quite certain how literally to take Bacon's personal statements, either touching himself or others. A short period of elation was at hand. He had evidently been forbidden to write, or spread his ideas ; he had been disciplined at times with a diet of bread and water. All this had failed to sweeten his temper, or conform his mind to current views. In 1265, an open-minded man who had been a jurist, a warrior, and the counsellor of a king, before X.1 becoming an ecclesiastic, was made Pope Clement IV. While living in Paris he had been interested in Bacon's work. Soon after the papal election our sore - bestead philosopher managed to communicate with him, as - ' appears by the pope's reply, written from Viterbo, in July 1266 : ' " To our beloved son. Brother Roger, caUed Bacon, of the Order of Brothers Minorites. We have received with pleasure the letter of thy devotion ; and we have well considered what our beloved son called Bonecor, Knight, has by word of mouth set forth to us, with fidelity and prudence. So then, that we may understand more clearly what thou purposest, it is our will, and we command thee by our Apostohc mandate that, notwithstanding the prohibition of any prelate, or any constitution of thy Order, thou sendest to us speedily in good script that work which, wMle we held a minor office, we requested thee to communicate to our beloved son Raymond, of Laudunum. Also, we commaad thee to set forth in a letter what remedies thou deemest should be applied to those matters which thou didst recently speak of as fraught with such peril. Do this as secretly as possible without delay." 1 Poor Bacon ! The pope's letter roused him to ecstasy, then put him in a quandary, and elicited elaborate apologies, and the flood of persuasive exposition which he poured forth with tremulous haste in the eighteen months following. ^ Brewer, R. Bacon, Opera inedita, p. i. cHAP.xui ROGER BACON 519 Delight at being solicited by the head of Christendom breaks out in hyperbole, not to be wondered at : he is uplifted and cast prone ; that his littleness and multiple ignorance, his tongue-tied mouth and rasping pen, and himself unlistened to by all men, a buried man delivered to oblivion, should be called on by the pope's wisdom for wisdom's writings {sapientales scripturas) ! " The Saviour's vicar, the ruler of the orb, has deigned to solicit me, who am scarcely to be numbered among the particles of the world — inter partes universi ! Yet, while my weakness is oppressed with the glory of this mandate, I am raised above my own powers ; I feel a fervour of spirit ; I rise up in strength. And indeed I ought to overflow with gratitude since your beatitude commands what I have desired, what I have worked out with sweat, and winnowed through great expenditures." ^ The word " expenditures " touches one horn of Bacon's dilemma. He is a Franciscan ; therefore penniless ; and, besides that, apparently under the restraining ban of his own Order. The pope has enjoined secrecy ; therefore Bacon cannot set up the papal mandate against the probable interference of his own superiors. The pope has sent no funds ; sitting in culmine mundi he was too busy with high affairs to think of that.^ And now comes the chief matter for Bacon's apologies : his Beatitude mis- apprehends, has been misinformed : the work is not yet written ; it is still to be composed. In spite of these obstacles, the friendless but resourceful philosopher somehow obtained opportunity to write, and the means needed for the fair copy. And then in those great eighteen, or perhaps but fifteen, months, what a flood of enlightenment, of reforming criticism, of plans of study and methods of investigation, of examples and sketches of the matter to be prepared or discovered, is poured forth. Four ^ opus tertium, pp. 7 and 8. 2 In Opus tertium, chap. iii. (Brewer, p. 15), Bacon plainly tells the pope the difficulties in which he had been placed by this injunction of secrecy : " The first cause of delay came through those who are over me. Since you have written nothing to them in my excuse, and I could not reveal to them your secret, they insisted with unspeakable violence that I should obey their will ; but I refused, because of the bond of your mandate, which boimd me to your work, notwith- standing any order from my prelates. And, of a surety, as I was not excused by you, I met with obstacles too great and many to enumerate. . , . And another obstacle, enough to defeat the whole business, was the lack of funds." 520 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh works we know of,^ and they may have made the greater part of all that Bacon ever actually wrote. With variations of emphasis, of abridgement and elaboration, the four have the one purpose to convince the pope of the enormous value of Bacon's scheme of useful and saving knowledge. To a great extent they set forth the same matters ; indeed the Opus tertium was intended to convey the substance of the Opus majus, should that fail to reach the pope. So there is much repetition and some disorder in these eager, hurried works, defects which emphasise the dramatic situation of the impetuous genius whose pent-up utterance was loosed at last. The Opus minus and the Vatican Fragment are as from a man overpowered by the eagerness to say everything at once, lest the night close in before he have chance of speech. And when the Opus majus was at last sent forth, accompanied by the Opus minus, as a battleship by a light armed cruiser, the Opus tertium was despatched after them, filled with the same militant exposition, for fear the former two should perish en voyage. Did they ever reach the pope ? We may presume so. Did he read any one of them ? Here there is no informa- tion. Popes were the busiest men in Europe, and death was so apt to cut short their industry. Clement died the next year, and so far as known, no syllable of acknowledge- ment from him ever reached the feverishly expectant philosopher. A few words will tell the rest. In 1271, apparently. Bacon wrote his Compendium studii philosophiae, taking the occasion to denounce the corruptions of Church and society in unmeasured terms. He rarely measured his vituperation ! His life was setting on toward its long last trial. In 1277, Jerome of Ascoli, the General of the Franciscan Order, held a Chapter at Paris, and Bacon was condemned to imprison- ment {carceri condempnatus) because of his teachings, which contained aliquas novitates suspectas.^ Jerome became Pope ^ These are, of course, the Optcs majuSj the Opus minus^ and the Opus tertium ; also the Vatican Fragment^ the position of which is not quite clear ; but it is part of the writings of this year, and constitutes apparently the introductory letter to Clement. ^ The authority for this is the Chronica XXIV., Generalium Ordinis Minorum ; see Bridges, vol. iii. p. 158. cHAP.xLii ROGER BACON 521 Nicholas IV. At a Chapter of the Order held in Paris in 1292, just after his death, certain prisoners condemned in 1277, were set free. Roger Bacon probably was among the number. If so, it was in the year of his liberation that he wrote a tract entitled Compendium theologiae ; for that was written in 1292. This is the last we hear of him. But as he must now have been hard on to eighty, probably he did not live much longer. There seems to have been nothing exceptional in Bacon's attitude toward Scripture and the doctrines of the Church. He deemed, with other mediaeval men, that Scripture held, at least implicitly, the sum of knowledge useful or indeed possible for men. True, neither the Old Testament nor the New treats of grammar, or physics, or of minerals, or plants, or animals. Nevertheless, the statements in these revealed writings are made with complete knowledge of every topic or thing considered or referred to — ^bird, beast, and plant, the courses of the stars, the earth and its waters, yea, the arts of song or agriculture, and the principles of every science. Conversely (and here Bacon even gave fresh emphasis and novel pointings to the current view) all knowledge whatso- ever, every art and science, is needed for the full under- standing of Scripture, sacra doctrina, in a word, theology. This opinion may hold large truth ; but Bacon's advocacy of it sometimes affects us as a reductio ad absurdum, especially when he is proceeding on the assumption that the patriarchs and prophets had knowledge of all sciences, including astrology and the connection between the courses of the stars and the truth of Christianity. There was likewise nothing startling in Bacon's view of the Fathers, and their knowledge and authoritativeness. Thomas did not regard them as inspired. Neither did Bacon ; he respects them, yet discerns limitations to their knowledge ; by reason of their circumstances they may have neglected certain of the sciences ; but this is no reason why we should.^ As for the ancient philosophers. Bacon holds to their partial inspiration. " God illuminated their minds to desire and perceive the truths of philosophy. He even disclosed ^ See Op. tertium, p. 26 sqq. (Brewer). 522 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh the truth to them/' ^ They received their knowledge from God, indirectly as it were, through the prophets, to whom God revealed it directly. More than once and with every detail of baseless tradition, he sets forth the common view that the Greek philosophers studied the prophets, and drew their wisdom from that source.^ But their knowledge was not complete ; and it behoves us to know much that is not in Aristotle.^ " The study of wisdom may always increase in this life, because nothing is perfect in human discoveries. Therefore, we later men ought to supplement the defects of the ancients, since we have entered into their labours, through which, unless we are asses, we may be incited to improve upon them. It is most wretched always to be using what has been attained, and never that which is to be attained." * It may be that Bacon was suspected of raising the philosophers too near the Christian level ; and perhaps his argument that their knowledge had come from the prophets may have seemed a vain excuse. Says he, for example : " There was a great book of Aristotle upon civil science,^ well agreeing with the Christian law ; for the law of Aristotle has precepts like the Christian law, although much is added in the latter excelling all human science. The Christian law takes what- ever is worthy in the civil philosophical law. For God gave the philosophers all truth, as the saints, and especially Augustine, declare. . . . And what noble thoughts have they expressed upon God, the blessed Trinity, the Incarnation, Christ, the blessed Virgin, and the angels." ® Possibly one is here reminded of Abaelard, and his thought of Christianity as reformatio legis naturalis. Yet Christ had said, He came not to destroy, but to fulfil ; and the chief Christian theologians had followed Augustine in " despoiling the Egyptians " as he phrased it ; the very ^ opus majus, pars ii. end of chap. v. and begiiming of chap. vi. (Bridges, iii. p. 49) ; see Op, tertium (Brewer), p. 81. ^ Op. maj. pars ii. chap. xv. (Bridges, iii. p. 71). ^ Op, tertium^ p. 39. * Op. maj. pars ii. (Bridges, iii. pp. 69-70). Of. ante, p. 208. ® The reference seems to be to the Ethics and Politics. " Compendium studii, p. 424 (Brewer). cHAP.xLii ROGER BACON 523 process which in fact was making the authority of Aristotle supreme in Bacon's time. So there was httle that was peculiar or suspicious in Bacon's admiration of the philo- sophers. The trouble with Bacon becomes clearer as we turn to his views upon the state of knowledge in his time, and the methods of contemporary doctors in rendering it worse, rather than better. These doctors were largely engaged upon sacra doctrina ; they were primarily theologians and expounders of the truth of revelation. Bacon's criticism of their methods might disparage that to which those methods were applied. His caustic enumeration of the four ever- lasting causes of error, and the seven vices infecting the study of theology, will show reason enough why his error- stricken and infected contemporaries wished to close his mouth. The anxiousness of some might sour to enmity under the acerbity of his attack ; nor would their hearts be softened by Bacon's boasting that these various doctors, of course including Albert, could not write in ten years what he is sending to the pope.^ Bacon declares that there is at Paris a great man (was it Albert ? was it Thomas ?), who is set up as an authority in the schools, like Aristotle or Averroes ; and his works display merely " infinite puerile vanity," " ineffable falsity," superfluous verbiage, and the omission of the most needful parts of philosophy. ^ Bacon is not content with abusing members of the rival Dominican Order ; but includes in his contempt the venerable Alexander of Hales, the defunct light of the Franciscans. " Nullum ordinem excludo/' cries he, in his sweeping denunciation of his epoch's rampant sins. As for the seculars, why, they can only lecture by stealing the copy-books of the " boys " in the " aforesaid Orders." ^ " Never," says Bacon in the Compendium studii from which the last phrases are taken, " has there been such a show of wisdom, nor such prosecu- tion of study in so many faculties through so many regions as in the last forty years. Doctors are spread everywhere, especially in theology, in every city, castle, and burg, chiefly through the two student Orders. Yet there was never so ^ op. tertium, p. 14. ^ Op. tertium, p. 30. ^ Compendium studii phil. p. 429 (Brewer). S24 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh great ignorance and so much error — as shall appear from this writing." ^ Bacon never loses a chance of stating the four causes of the error and ignorance about him. These causes preyed upon his mind — ^he would have said they preyed upon the age. They are elaborately expounded in pars i. of the Opus majus : ^ " There are four principal stumbhng blocks (offendicula) to comprehending truth, which hinder weU-nigh every scholar : the example of frail and unworthy authority, long-established ^ cust om, the sense of ^ejgnorant crowd {vulgi sensus imperiti), and the hiding of one's own ignorance under the show of wisdom. In these, every man is involve'd and every state besetT FoFin every act of Life, or business, or study, these three worst arguments are used for the same conclusion : this was the way of our ancestors, this is the custom, this is the common view : therefore should be held. But the opposite of this conclusion follows much better from the premises, as I will prove through authority, experience, and reason. If these three are sometimes refuted by the glorious power of reason, the fourth is always ready, as a gloss for foohshness ; so that, though a man know nothing of any value, he wiU impudently magnify it, and thus, soothing his wretched folly, defeat truth. From these deadly pests come all the evils of the human race ; for the noblest and most useful documents of wisdom are ignored, and the secrets of the arts and sciences. Worse than this, men blinded by the darkness of these four do not see their ignorance, but take every care to palliate that for which they do not find the remedy ; and what is the worst, when they are in the densest shades of error, they deem themselves in the fuU Hght of truth." ^ Therefore they think the true the false, and spend their time and money vainly, says Bacon with many strainings of phrase. " There is no remedy," continues Bacon, " against the first three causes of error save as with all our strength we set the sound authors above the weak ones, reason above custom, and the opinions of the wise above the humours of the crowd ; and do not trust in the triple argument : this has precedent, ^ Compendium studii phil. p. 398 — written in 1271. ^ I follow the paging of Bridges, vol. iii. These four causes of error are also given in Opus tertiumj p. 69, Compendium studii, p. 414 (Brewer), and the Gasquet , Fragment^ p. 504. ^ Op. maj. pp. 2 and 3. cHAP.xLii ROGER BACON 525 this is customary, this is the common view." But the fourth cause of error is the worst of all. " For this is a lone and savage beast, which devours and destroys all reason, — this desire of seeming wise, with which every man is born." Bacon arraigns this cause of evil, through numerous witnesses, sacred and profane. It has two sides : display of pretended knowledge, and excusing of ignorance. Infinite are the verities of God and the creation : let no one boast of knowledge. It is not for man to glory in his wisdom ; faith goes beyond man's knowledge ; and still much is un- revealed. In forty years we learn no more than could be taught a youth in one. I have profited more from simple men " than from all my famous doctors." Bacon's four universal causes of ignorance indicate his general attitude. More specific criticisms upon the academic methods of his time are contained in his septem peccata studii principalis quod est theologiae. This is given in the Opus minus} Bacon, it will be remembered, says again and again that all sciences must serve theology, and find their value from that service : the science of theology includes every science, and should use each as a handmaid for its own ends. Accordingly, when Bacon speaks of the seven vices of the studium principale quod est theologia, we may expect him to point out vicious methods touching all branches of study, yet with an eye to their common service of their mistress. " Seven are the vices of the chief study which is theology ; the first is that philosophy in practice dominates theology. But it ought not to dominate in any province beyond itself, and surely not the science of God, which leads to eternal life. . . . The greater part of all the quaestiones in a Summa theologiae is pure philosophy, with arguments and solutions ; and there are infinite quaestiones concerning the heavens, and concerning matter and being, and concerning species and the similitudes of things, and concerning cognition through such ; also concerning eternity and time, and how the soul is in the body, and how angels move locally, and how they are in a place, and an infinitude of like matters which are determined in the books of the philosophers. To investigate these difficulties does not belong to theologians, according to the main intent and subject of their work. They ^ p. 322 sqq. (Brewer). 526 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh ought briefly to recite these truths as they find them determined in philosophy. Moreover, the other matter of the quaestiones which concerns what is proper to theology, as concerning the Blessed Trinity, the Incarnation, the Sacraments, is discussed principally through the authorities, arguments, and distinctions of philosophy." Evidently, this first vice of theological study infected the method of Albert and Thomas, and of practically all other theologians ! Its correction might call for a complete reversal of method. But the reversal desired by Bacon would scarcely have led back to Gospel simplicity, as may be seen from what follows. " The second vice is that the best sciences, which are those most clearly pertinent to theology, are not used by theologians. I refer to the grammar of the foreign tongues from which aU theology comes. Of even more value are mathematics, optics, moral science, experimental science, and alchemy. But the cheap sciences [scientiae viles) are used by theologians, Hke Latin grammar, logic, natural philosophy in its baser part, and a certain side of metaphysics. In these there is neither the good of the soul, nor the good of the body, nor the good things of fortune. But moral philosophy draws out the good of the soul, as far as philosophy may. Alchemy is experimental and, with mathe- matics and optics, promotes the good of the body and of fortune. . . . While the grammar of other tongues gives theology and moral philosophy to the Latins. . . , Oh ! what madness is it to neglect sciences so useful for theology, and be sunk in those which are impertinent ! " The third vice is that the theologians are ignorant of those four sciences which they use ; and therefore accept a mass of false and futile propositions, taking the doubtful for certain, the obscure for evident ; they suffer ahke from superfluity and the lack of what is necessary, and so stain theology with infinite vices which proceed from sheer ignorance. ' ' For they are ignorant of Greek and Hebrew and Arabic, and therefore ignorant of all the sciences contained in these tongues ; and they have relied on Alexander of Hales and others as ignorant as themselves. The fourth vice is that they study and lecture on the Sentences of the Lombard, instead of the text of Scripture ; and the lecturers on the Sentences are preferred in honour, while any one who would lecture on Scripture has to beg for a room and hour to be set him.^ ^ These sentences condense several pages of the Latin. cHAP.xLii ROGER BACON 527 " The fifth fault is greater than all the preceding. The text of Scripture is horribly corrupt in the Viilgate copy at Paris." Bacon goes at some length into the errors of the Vulgate, and gives a good account of the various Latin versions of the Bible. Next, the " sextum peccatum is far graver than all, and may be divided into two peccata maxima : one is that through these errors the hteral sense of the Vulgate has infinite falsities and intolerable uncertainties, so that the truth cannot be known. From this follows the other peccatum, that the spiritual sense is infected with the same doubt and error." These errors, first in the literal meaning, and thence in the spiritual or allegorical significance, spring from ignorance of the original tongues, and from ignorance of the birds and beasts and objects of all sorts spoken of in the Bible. " By far the greater cause of error, both in the literal and spiritual meaning, rises from ignorance of things in Scripture. For the literal sense is in the natures and properties of things, in order that the spiritual meaning may be elicited through convenient adaptations and con- gruent similitudes." Bacon cites Augustine to show that we cannot understand the precept, Estate prudentes sicut serpentes, unless we know that it is the serpent's habit to expose his body in defence of his head, as the Christian should expose all things for the sake of his head, which is Christ. Alack ! is it for such ends as these that Bacon would have a closer scholarship fostered, and natural science prosecuted ? The text of the Opus minus is broken at this point, and one cannot say whether Bacon had still a seventh peccatum to allege, or whether the series ended with the second of the vices into which he divided the sixth. Bacon's strictures upon the errors of his time were connected with his labours to remedy them, and win a firmer knowledge than dialectic could supply. To this end he advocated the study of the ancient languages, which he held to be " the first door of wisdom, and especially for the Latins, who have not the text, either of theology or philosophy, except from foreign languages." ^ His own knowledge of Greek was sufficient to enable him to read ^ Optts tertium, p. 102. 528 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh passages in that tongue, and to compose a Greek grammar.^ But he shows no interest in the classical Greek literature, nor is there evidence of his having studied any important Greek philosopher in the original. He was likewise zealous for the study of Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic, the other foreign tongues which held the learning so inade- quately represented by Latin versions. He spoke with some exaggeration of the demerits of the existing transla- tions ; 2 but he recognised the arduousness of the translator's task, from diversity of idiom and the difficulty of finding an equivalent in Latin for the statements, for example, in the Greek. The Latin vocabulary often proved inadequate ; and words had to be taken bodily from the original tongue. Likewise he saw, and so had others, though none had declared it so clearly, that the translator should not only be master of the two languages, but have knowledge of the subject treated by the work to be translated.^ After the languages. Bacon urged the pursuit of the sciences, which he conceived to be interdependent and corroborative ; the conclusions of each of them being susceptible of proof by the methods and data of the others. " Next to languages," says Bacon in chapter xxix. of the Opus tertium, " I hold mathematics necessary in the second place, to the end that we may know what may be known. It is not planted in us by nature, yet is closest to inborn knowledge, of all the sciences which we know through discovery and learning (inventionem et doctrinam). For its study is easier than all other sciences, and boys learn its branches readily. Besides, the laity can make diagrams, and calculate, and sing, and use musical instruments. All these are the opera of mathematics." Thus, with antique and mediaeval looseness. Bacon con- ceived this science. He devotes to it the long Pars quarta of the Opus majus : saying at the beginning that of — " the four great sciences the gate and key is mathematics, which ^ Ante, p. 155* ® As, e.g. where he says that it would have been better for the Latins " that the wisdom of Aristotle should not have been translated, than to have been translated with such perverseness and obscurity." Compend. studii, p. 469 (Brewer). ' See Opus majus, pars iii. cHAP.xLii ROGER BACON 529 the saints found out {invenerunt) from the beginning of the world, and used more than all the other sciences. Its neglect for the past thirty or forty years has ruined the studies (studium) of the Latins. For whoso is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences, nor the things of this world. But knowledge of this science prepares the mind and Hfts it to the tested cognition (certificaiam cognitionem) of all things." Bacon adduces authorities to prove the need of mathe- matics for the study of grammar and logic ; he shows that its processes reach indubitable certitude of truth ; and '' if in other sciences we would reach certitude free from doubt, and truth without error, we must set the foundations of cognition in mathematics," ^ He points out its obvious necessity in the study of the heavens, and in everything pertaining to speculative and practical astrologia ; also for the study of physics and optics. Thus his interest lay chiefly in its application. As human science is nought unless it may be applied to things divine, mathematics must find its supreme usefulness in its application to the matters of theology. It should aid us in ascertaining the position of paradise and hell, and promote our knowledge of Scriptural geography, and more especially, sacred chronology. Next it affords us knowledge of the exact forms of things mentioned in Scripture, like the ark, the tabernacle, and the temple, so that from an accurate ascertainment of the literal sense, the true spiritual meaning may be deduced. It should not be confused with its evil namesake magic, ^ yet the true science is useful in determining the influence of the stars on the fortunes of states. Moreover, mathe- matics, through astrology, is of great importance in the certification of the faith, strengthening it against the sect of Antichrist ; ^ then in the correction of the Church's calendar ; and finally, as all things and regions of the earth are affected by the heavens, astrology and mathe- matics are pertinent to a consideration of geography. And Bacon concludes Pars quarta with an elaborate description of the regions, countries, and cities of the known world. Bacon likewise was profoundly interested in optics, the ^ opus majus, Bridges, vol. i. p. io6. '^ Commonly called " mathematica." " Opus majus (Bridges, i. p. 253)- Bacon goes into this matter elaborately. VOL. II 2 M S30 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh scientia perspediva, which he sets forth elaborately in Pars quinta of the Opus majus. Much space would be needed to discuss his theories of light and vision, and the propaga- tion of physical force, treated in the De mulUplicatione specierum. He knew all that was to be learned from Greek and Arabic sources, and, unlike Albert, who com- piled much of the same material, he used his knowledge to build with. Bacon had a genius for these sciences : his Scientia perspectiva is no mere compilation, and no work used by him presented either a theory of force or of vision containing as many adumbrations of later theorizing.^ Yet he fails to cast off his obsession with the " spiritual meaning " and the utility of science for theology. He discussed the composition of Adam's body while in a state of innocence,^ a point that may seem no more tangible than Thomas's reasonings upon the movements of Angels, which Bacon ridicules. Again in his Optics, after an interesting dis- cussion of refraction and reflection, he cannot forego a consideration of the spiritual significations of refracted rays.^ Even his discussion of experimental science has touches of mediaevalism, which are peculiarly dissonant in this most original and " advanced " product of Bacon's genius, which now must be considered more specifically. The speculative intellect of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was so widely absorbed with the matter and methods of the dominant scholasticism, that no one is likely to think of the eminent scholastics as isolated phenomena. Plainly they were but as the highest peaks which somewhat overtop the other moimtains, through whose aggregation and support they were lifted to their supreme altitude. But with Bacon the danger is real lest he seem separate and imsupported ; for the influences which helped to make him are not over-evident. Yet he did not make himself. The directing of his attention to linguistics is sufficiently accounted for by the influence of Grosseteste and others, who had inaugurated the study of Greek, and perhaps ^ Cf. S. Vogl, Die Physik Roger Bacos (Erlangen, 1906). Gives Bacon's sources. ^ Opus minuSj pp. 367-371. " Opus majus, pars v. dist. iii. (Bridges, ii. p. 159 sqq.)» cHAP.xLii ROGER BACON 531 Hebrew at Oxford. As for physics or optics, Grosseteste^ and others also were interested — or there would have been no translations of Greek and Arabic treatises for him to use ] ^ and in mathematics there was a certain older contemporary, Jordanus Nemorarius (not to mention Leonardo Fibonacci), who far overtopped him. It is safe to assume that in the thirteenth, as in the twelfth and previous centuries, there were men who studied the phenomena of nature.^ But they have left scant record. A period is remembered by those features of its main accompUshment which are not super- seded or obliterated by the further advance of later times. Nothing has obliterated the work of the scholastics for those who may still care for such reasonings ; and Aquinas to-day holds sway in the Roman Catholic Church. On the other hand, the sparse footprints of the mediaeval men who essayed the paths of natural science have long since been trodden out by myriad feet passing far beyond them along those ways. Yet there were these wayfarers, who I made little stir in their own time, and have long been well I forgotten. Had it not been for the letter from Pope Clement,! Bacon himself might be among them ; and only his writings keep from utter oblivion the name of an individual who, according to Bacon, carried the practice of '* experimental science " further than he could hope to do. It may be fruitful to approach Bacon's presentation of this science, or ^ The interest of Grosseteste in physical knowledge is shown by the titles of his works. They were usually short, and much of their substance was drawn from Aristotle : for example, De iride et speculo, De colore, De calore solis, De gene- ratione sonorum, De sphaera, De generatione stellarum, De cometis, De lineis anguUs d figuris seu de fractionibus et refiexionibus radiorum. See Baur's edition {1912). ^ A contemporary of Bacon named Witelo composed a PerspecHva about 1270, following an Arab source ; and a few years later a Dominican, Theodoric of Freiburg, was devoted to optics, and wrote on light, colour, and the rainbow. Baeumker, " Witelo, ein Philosoph und Naturforscher des XIII. Jahr." {Beitrdgej etc., Miinster, 1908} ; Krebs, " Meister Dietrich, sein Leben, etc." (Baeimiker's Beitrdge, 1906). In the fourteenth century arose at least one veritable physicist, Albertus de Saxonia, who was to influence Nicholas of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci and Kepler {Duhem, Bulletin Italien, vii. and viii., 1907, igo8)- Moreover, one should not overlook John Holywood (de Sacro Bosco), who worked in Paris in 1230, writing upon Mathematics and composing his famous TractcUus de sphaera, drawing its substance from Ptolemy and his Arabic commentators. It became the text-book of the later Middle Ages and was reprinted many times in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. ^ E.g. William of Conches, ante, p. 402. 532 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh scientific method, through his references to this extraordinary Picard, named Peter of Mahamcuria, or Maricourt. In the Opus tertium, Bacon has been considering optics and mathematics, and has spoken of this Peter as proficient in them ; and thus he opens chapter xiii., which is devoted to the scientia experimentalis : " But beyond these sciences is one more perfect than all, which all serve, and which in a wonderful way certifies them aU : this is called the experimental science, which neglects arguments, since they do not make certain, however strong they may be, unless at the same time there is present the experientia of the conclusion. Experimental science teaches experiri, that is, to test by observation or experiment the lofty conclusions of all sciences." This science none but Master Peter knows. By following the text further, we may be able to appreciate what Bacon will shortly say of him : " Another dignity of this science is that it attests these noble truths in terms of the other sciences, which they cannot prove or investigate : Hke the prolongation of human Hfe ; for this truth is in terms of medicine, but the art of medicine never extends itself to this truth, nor is there anything about it in medical treatises. But the fidelis experimentator has considered that the eagle, and the stag, and the serpent, and the phoenix prolong life, and renew their youth, and knows that these things are given to brutes for the instruction of men. Wherefore he has thought out noble plans {vias nobiles) with this in view, and has commanded alchemy to prepare a body of like constitution (aequalis complexionis), that he may use it." It may be pertinent to our estimate of Bacon's experi- mental science to query where the experimentator ever observed an eagle or a phoenix renewing its youth, outside of the Physiologus ? " The third dignity of this science is that it does not accept truths in terms of the other sciences, yet uses them as hand- maids. . . . And this science attests all natural and artificial data specifically and in the proper province, per expenentiam perfectam ; not through arguments, like the purely speculative sciences, and not through weak and imperfect experientiaSt like the operative sciences (scientiae operativae)?- So this is the ^ With Bacon, experientia does not always mean observation ; and may mean either experience or experiment. cHAP.xLii ROGER BACON 533 mistress of all, and the goal of all speculation. But it requires great expenditures for its prosecution ; Aristotle, by Alexander's authority, besides those whom he used at home in experientia, sent many thousands of men through the world to examine [ad experiendum) the natixres and properties of all things, as Pliny tells. And certainly to set on fire at any distance would cost more than a thousand marks, before adequate glasses could be prepared ; but they would be worth an army against the Turks and Saracens. For the perfect experimenter could destroy any hostile force by this combustion through the sun's rays. This is a marvellous thing, yet there are many other things more wonder- ful in this science ; but very few people are devoted to it, from lack of money. I know but one, who deserves praise for the prosecution of its works ; he cares not for wordy controversies, but prosecutes the works of wisdom, and in them rests. So what others as purbhnd men try to see, like bats in the twilight, he views in the full brightness of day, because he is dominus experi- mentorum. He knows natural matters per experientiam, and those of medicine and alchemy, and aU things celestial and below. He is ashamed if any layman, or old woman, or knight, or rustic, knows what he does not. He has studied everything in metal castings, and gold and silver work, and the use of other metals and minerals ; he knows everything pertaining to war and arms and himting ; he has examined into agriculture and surveying ; also into the experiments and fortune-teUings of old women, knows the speUs of wizards ; hkewise the tricks and devices of jugglers. In fine, nothing escapes him that he ought to know, and he knows how to expose the frauds of magic." It is impossible to complete philosophy, usefully and with certitude, without Peter ; but he is not to be had for a price ; he could have had every honour from princes ; and if he wished to publish his works, the whole world of Paris would foUow him. But he cares not a whit for honours or riches, though he could get them any time he chose through his wisdom. This man has worked at such a burning-glass for three years, and soon wiQ perfect it by the grace of God. There is a great deal of Roger Bacon in these curious passages ; much of his inductive genius, much of his sanguine hopefulness, not to say inventive imagination ; and enough of his credulity. No one ever knew or could perform all he ascribes to this astounding Peter, from whom, apparently, there is extant a certain intelligent treatise upon the magnet.^ ^ See Charles, Roger Bacon^ pp. 17-18. 534 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh And as for those burning-glasses, or possibly reflectors, by which distant fleets and armies should be set afire — did they ever exist ? Did Archimedes ever bum with them the Roman ships at Syracuse ? Were they ever more than a myth ? It is, at all events, safe to say that no device from the hand and brain of Peter of Mahamcuria ever threatened Turk or Saracen. It is knowledge that gives insight. Modem critical methods amount chiefly to this, that we know more. Bacon did not have such knowledge of animal physiology as would assure him of the absurdity of the notion that an eagle or any animal could renew its youth. Nor did he know enough to realise the vast improbability of Greek philosophers draw- ing their knowledge from the books of Hebrew prophets. And one sees how loose must have been the practice, or the dreams, of his " experimental science." His fundamental conception seems to waver : Scientia experimentalis, is it a science, or is it a means and method universally applicable to all scientific investigation ? The sciences serve it as handmaids, says Bacon ; and he also says, that it alone can test and certify, make sure and certain, the conclusions of the other sciences. Perhaps he thought it the master-key fitting all the doors of knowledge ; and held that aU sciences, so far as possible, should proceed from experience, through further observation and experiment. But he has not said quite this. He is little to be blamed for his vagueness, and greatly to be admired for having reached his possibly inconsistent conception. Observation and experiment were as old as hiunan thought upon human experience. And Albert the Great says that the conclusions of aU sciences should be tested by them. But he evinces no formal conception of either an experimental science or method ; though he has much to say as to logic, and ponderously considers whether it is a science or the means or method of all sciences.^ ^ AntBj pp. 343-345. Duns Scotus puts clearly the double aspect of logic, which Albertus Magnus approached : " It should be understood that logic is to be considered in two ways. First, in so far as it is docens (instructs, holds its own school) : and from its own necessary and proper principles proceeds to necessary conclusions, and is therefore a science. Secondly, in so far as we use it, by applying it to those matters in which it is used : and then it is not cHAP.xLii ROGER BACON 535 Herein he is discussing consciously with respect to logic, the very point as to which Bacon, in respect to experimental science, rather unconsciously wavers : is it a science, and almost the queen ? Or is it the true scientific method to be followed by all sciences when applicable ? ^ Bacon had no high regard for the study of logic, deeming thattEeThou^ts of;;5ntanightrna€nr-natui^y ' its Jaws.^ TTiis~was doubtless true, and just as true, moreover, of experimental science as of logic. The one and the other were built up from the ways of the common man and universal processes a science " {Super universalia Porphyrii, Quaestrio i., Duns Scotus, Opera, t. i. p. 51)- ^ The two aspects of the experimental science appear in the following statement from the Gasquet Fragment : " The antepenuUima science is called experimental ; and is the mistress of those which precede it ; for it excels the others in three chief prerogatives. One is that all the sciences except this either use arguments alone to prove their conclusions, like the purely speculative sciences, or possess general and imperfect experiences. But only the perfect experience {experientia perfectaj i.e. the scientific experiment or observation), sets the mind at rest in the light of truth ; which is certain and is proved in that part [of my work]. Where- fore it was necessary that there should be one science which should certify for us, all the magnificent truths of the other sciences, through the truth of experience, and this is that whereof I say that it is called scientia experimentalis of its own right from the truth of experience {per autonomasiam ab experiendae veritate) ; and I show by the illustration of the rainbow and other things, how this prerogative is reserved to that science. " The second prerogative is the dignity which relates to those chief truths which, although they are to be formulated {nominandae) in the terms {vocabulis) of the other sciences, yet the other sciences cannot furnish {procurare) them ; and of this character are the prolongation of Ufe through remedies to counteract the lack of a hygienic regimen from infancy, or constitutional debility inherited from parents who have not followed such a regimen. I shall show how it is possible thus to prolong life to the term set by God. But men, through neglecting the rules of health, pass quickly to old age, and die before reaching that term. The art of medicine is not able to furnish {dare) these remedies, nor does it ; but it says they are possible {sed fatetur ea possibilia), and so experimental science has devised remedies known to the wisest men alone, by which the ills of old age are delayed, or are mitigated when they arrive. " The third prerogative of this science belongs to it secundum se et absolute ; for here it leaves the two ways already touched on, and addresses itself to all things which do not concern the other sciences, save that often it requires the service of the others. As a mistress it commands the others as servants . . . and orders them to do its work, and furnish the wise instruments which it uses ; as navigation directs the art of carpentry, to make a ship for it ; and the military art directs the forger*s art to make it a breastplate and other arms. In like manner, this science [the experimental], as a mistress, directs geometry to make it a burning-glass, which shall set on fire things near or far, one of the most sublime wonders that can come to pass through geometry. So it commands the other sciences in all the wonderful and hidden things of nature and art'* {pp. 510-511). 2 Opus tertiuMt chap, xxviii. 536 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii of thought. Yet the logic of the trained mind is the surer ; and so experimental science may reach out beyond the crude observations of unscientific men. Manifestly with Roger Bacon the scientia experimentalis held the place which logic held with Albert, or queenly dialectic with Abaelard. He repeats himself continually in stating its properties and prerogatives, yet without advancing to greater clearness of conception. Pars sexta of the Opus majus is devoted to it : and we may take one last glance to see whether the statements there throw any further light upon the matter. '' The roots of the wisdom of the Latins having been laid in Languages, Mathematics, and Perspective, I now wish to re-examine these radices from the side of scientia experimentalis ; because, without experientia nothing can be known adequately. There are two modes of arriving at knowledge {cognoscendi), to wit, argument and experimentum, Argiunent draws a conclusion and forces us to concede it, but does not make it certain or remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the perception of truth, unless the mind find truth by the way of experience." And Bacon says, as illustration, that you could never by mere argument convince a man that fire would bum ; also that " in spite of the demonstration of the properties of an equilateral triangle, the mind would not stick to the conclusion sine experientia" After referring to Aristotle, and adducing some examples of foolish things believed by learned and common, men alike, because they had not applied the tests of observation, he concludes : " Oportet ergo omnia certificari per viam experientiae." He continues with something unexpected : " Sed duplex est experientia : one is through the external senses, and thus those experimenta take place which are made through suitable instruments in astronomy, and by the tests of observation as to things below. And whatever like matters may not be observed by us, we laiow from other wise men who have observed them. This experientia is human and philosophical ; but it is not sufiicient for man, because it does not give plenary assurance as to things corporeal ; and as to things spiritual it reaches nothing. The intellect of man needs other aid, and so the holy patriarchs and prophets, who first gave the sciences to the world, received inner illuminations and did not stand on sense cHAP.xLii ROGER BACON S37 alone. Likewise many believers after Christ. For the grace of faith illuminates much, and divine inspirations, not only in spiritual but corporeal things, and in the sciences of philosophy. As Ptolemy says, the way of coming to a knowledge of things is duplex, one through the experientia of philosophy, and the other through divine inspiration, which is much better." ^ Any doubt as to the religious and Christian meaning of the last passage is removed by Bacon's statement of the " seven grades of this inner science : the first is through illumina- Hones pure scientiales ; the next consists in virtues, for the bad man is ignorant ; . . . the third is in the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, which Isaiah enumerates ; the fourth is in the beatitudes which the Lord defines in the Gospel ; the fifth is in the sensibus spiritualihus ; the sixth is in frudibus, from which is the peace of God which passes omnem sensum ; the seventh consists in raptures (in raptibus) and their modes, as in various ways divers men have been enraptured, so that they saw many things which it is not lawful for man to tell. And who is diligently exercised in these experiences, or some of them, can certify both to himself and others not only as to spiritual things, but as to all human sciences." ^ These utterances are religious, and bring us back to the religious, or practical, motive of Bacon's entire endeavour after knowledge : knowledge should have its utility, its practical bearing ; and the ultimate utility is that which promotes a sound and saving knowledge of God. The true method of research, says Bacon in the Compendium studii, " . . . is to study first what properly comes first in any science, the easier before the more difficult, the general before the particu- lar, the less before the greater. The student's business should he m^ chosen and useful jopi cs. becaj ise^hfe^is^hort : and these should be set forth with clearness and certitude, which is impossible without experientia. Because, although we know through three means, authority, reason, and experientia, yet authority is not ^ opus majiis, pars vi. i (Bridges, ii. p. 169). ^ Ibid. p. 170. Doubtless the meaning of the above is connected with Bacon's view of the Aristotelian intellectus agens, which he takes to signify the direct illumination of the mind of man by God. " All the wisdom of philosophy is revealed by God and given to the philosophers, and it is Himself that illuminates the minds of men in all wisdom. That which illuminates our minds is now called by the theologians intellectus agens. But my position is that this intellectus agens is God prindpaliter, and secondarily, the angels, who illuminate us " {Opus tertium, p. 74 ; cf. Op. majus, pars i, chap, v.). 538 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii wise unless its reason be given [auctoYitas non sapit nisi detur ejus ratio), nor does it give knowledge, but belief. We believe, but do not know, from authority. Nor can reason distinguish sophistry from demonstration, unless we know that the conclusion is attested by facts {experiri per opera). Yet the fruits of study are insignificant at the present time, and the secret and great matters of wisdom are unknown to the crowd of students." ^ It is as with an echo of this thought, that Bacon begins the second chapter of his exposition of experimental science in the sixth part of the Opus majus, from which we have but now withdrawn our attention. He anxiously reiterates what he has already said more than once, as to the properties and prerogatives of this scientia experimentalis. Then he gives his most interesting and elaborate example of its application in the investigation of the rainbow, an example too lengthy and too difficult to reproduce. In stating the three prerogatives, he makes but slight change of phrasing ; yet his restatement of the last of them : — " The third dignitas of this science is that it investigates the secrets of nature by its own competency and out of its own qualities, irrespective of any connection with the other sciences," — signifies an autonomous science, rather than a method applicable to all investigation. The illustrations which Bacon now gives, range free indeed ; yet in the main relate to " useful dis- coveries " as one might say : to ever-burning lamps, Greek fire, explosives, antidotes for poison, and matters useful to the Church and State. Along these lines of discovery through experiment. Bacon lets his imagination travel and lead him on to surmises of inventions that long after him were reaHsed. " Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne with greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise cars may be made so that without a draught animal they may be moved cum impetu inaestimabili, as we deem the scythed chariots to have been from which antiquity fought. And flying machines are possible, so that a man may sit in the middle turning some device by which artificial wings may beat the air ia the manner of a fljdng bird." ^ ^ Compendium studii (Brewer), p. 397. ^ De secretis operibus artis et naturae, et de nulUtaie magiae, p. 533 (Brewer), Of. Charles, Roger Bacon, p. 296 sqq. CHAPTER XLIII DUNS SCOTUS AND OCCAM The thirteenth century was a time of potent Church unity when the papacy, triumphant over emperors and kings, was drawing further strength from the devotion of the two Orders, who were renewing the spiritual energies of Western Christendom. Scholasticism was still whole and unbroken, in spite of Roger Bacon, who attacked its methods with weapons of his own forging, yet asserting loudly the single- eyed subservience of aU the sciences to theology. This assertion from a man of Bacon's views, was as vain as the Unam sanctum of Pope Boniface VIII., fulminated in 1302, arrogating for the papacy every power on earth. In earlier decades such pretensions had been almost acquiesced in ; but the Unam sanctam was a senile outcry from a papacy vanquished by the new-grown power of the French king, sustained by the awakening of a French nation. The opening years of the fourteenth century, so fatal for the papacy, were also portentous for scholasticism. The Summa of Thomas was impugned by Johannes Duns Scotus, whose entire work, constructive as well as critical, was im- pressed with qualities of finahty, signifjdng that in the forms of reasoning represented by him as well as Thomas, thought should advance no further. Bacon's attack upon scholastic methods had proved abortive from its tactlessness and confusion, and because men did not care for, and perhaps did not understand, his arguments. It was not so with the arguments of Duns Scotus. Throughout the academic world, thought still was set to chords of metaphysics ; and although men had never listened to quite such dialectic 539 S40 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh orchestration as Duns provided, they liked it, perceived its motives, and comprehended the meaning of its themes. So his generation understood and appreciated him. That he was the beginning of the end of the scholastic system, could not be known until the manner of that ending had disclosed itself more fully. We, however, discern the symptoms of scholastic dissolution in his work. His criticism of his predecessors was disintegrating, even when not destructive. His own dialectic was so surpassingly intricate and dizzy that, Hke the choir of Beauvais, it might some day collapse. With Duns Scotus, scholasticism reasoned itself out of human reach. And with him also, the wholeness of the scholastic purpose finally broke. For he no longer main- tained the union of metaphysics and theology. The latter, to be sure, was valid absolutely ; but, from a speculative, it has become a practical science. It neither draws its principles from metaphysics, nor subordinates the other sciences — all hmnan knowledge — to its service. Although rational in content, it possesses proofs stronger than dialectic, and stands on revelation. There had always been men who maintained similar propositions. But it was quite another matter that the severance between metaphysics and theology should be demonstrated by a prodigious metaphysical theologian after a different view had been carried to its farthest reaches by the great Aquinas. Henceforth philosophy and theology were set on opposite pinnacles, only with theology's pinnacle the higher. In spite of the last circumstance, the coming time showed that men cannot for long possess in peace two standards of truth — philosophy and revelation ; but will be driven to hold to the one and ignore the other. By break- ing the rational union of philosophy and theology. Duns Scotus prepared the way for Occam. The latter also asserts vociferously the superiority of the divine truth over human knowledge and its reasonings. But the popes are at Avignon, and^ the Christian world no longer bows down before those willing Babylonian captives. Under such a blasted condition of the Church, how should any inclusive Christian synthesis of thought and faith be main- tained ? cHAP.xLiii SCOTUS AND OCCAM 541 Duns Scotus ^ could not have been what he was, had he not Uved after Thomas. He was indeed the pinnacle of scholasticism ; set upon all the rest. Yet this pinnacle had its more particular supports — or antecedents. And their special line may be noted without intending thereby to suggest that the influences affecting the thought of Duns Scotus did not include all the men he heard or read, and criticised. That Duns Scotus was educated at Oxford, and became a Franciscan, and not a Dominican, had done much to set the lines of thought reflected in his doctrines. Anselm of Aosta, of Bee, of Canterbury, had been an intellectual force in England. Dims was strongly influenced by his bold realism, by his emphasis upon the power and freedom of the will, and by his doctrine of the atonement.^ But Anselm also affected Scotus indirectly through the English worthy who stancis between them. This, of course, was Robert Grosseteste, to whom we have had occasion to refer, yet, despite of his intrinsic worth, always in relation to his effect on others.^ He was a great man ; in his day a many-sided force, strong in the business of Church and State, strong in censuring and bridling the wicked, strong in the guidance of the young university of Oxford, and a mighty friend of the Franciscan Order, then establishing itself there. To his pupils, and their pupils apparently, he was a fruitful inspiration ; yet the historian of thought may be less interested in the master than in certain of these pupils who brought to explicit form divers matters which in Grosseteste seem to have been but inchoate. One thinks immediately of Roger Bacon, who was his pupil ; and then of Duns, the metaphysician, who possibly may have listened to some aged pupil of Grosseteste. In different ways. Duns as well as Bacon took much from the master. And it is possible to see how the great teacher and bishop may have incited the genius of Scotus as well as ^ The most convenient edition of the works of Johannes Duns Scotus is that published by Vives, at Paris (1891 sqq.) in twenty-six volumes. It is little more than a reprint of Wadding's Edition. 2 See Seeberg, Die Theologie des Johannes Duns Scotus (Leipzig, 1900), p. 8 sqq., a work to which the following pages owe much. ' Cf. ante, pp. 146, 421, 53i- 542 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh that of Bacon to perform its task. For Grosseteste was a rarely capable and clear-eyed man, honest and resolute, who with the entire strength of a powerfid personality insisted upon going to the heart of every proposition, and testing its validity by the surest means obtainable. By virtue of his training and intellectual inheritance, he was an Augustinian and a Platonist ; a successor of Anselm, rather than a pre- decessor of the great Dominican Aristotelians. He was accordingly an emphatic realist, yet one who woidd co- ordinate the reality of his " universals " with the reaUty of experience. Even had he not been an Augustinian, such a masterful character would have realised the power of the human will, and felt the practical insistencies of the art of human salvation, which was the science of theology. Views like these prevailed at Oxford. They may be found clearly stated by Richard of Middleton, an Oxford Franciscan somewhat older than Duns Scotus. He declares that theology is a practical science, and emphasises the primacy and freedom of the will. Voluntas est nobilissima potentia in anima. Again : Voluntas simpliciter nobilior est quam intellectus : the intellect indeed goes before the Will, as the servant who carries the candle before his lord. So the idea of the Good, toward which the Will directs itself, is higher than that of the True, which is the object of the mind ; and loving is greater than knowing.^ Roger Bacon had also held that Will {Voluntas) was higher than the knowing faculty {intellectus) ; and so did Henry of Ghent,^ a man of the Low Countries, doctor solemnis fiight, and a ruling spirit at the Paris University in the latter part of the thirteenth century. Many of his doctrines substantially resembled those of Scotus, although attacked by him. So we seem to see the pit in which Duns may have digged. This man, who was no mere fossor, but a builder, and might have deserved the name of Poliorcetes, as the overthrower of many bulwarks, has left few traces of himself, beyond his twenty tomes of metaphysics, which contain no personal references to their author. The birthplace of ^ Seeberg, ox. p. i6 sqq. ^ See De Wulf, History of Medieval Philosophy, p. 363 sqq. cHAP.xLiii SCOTUS AND OCCAM 543 Johannes Duns Scotus, whether in Scotland, England or Ireland, is unknown. The commonly accepted date, 1274, probably should be abandoned for an earlier year. It is known that he was a Franciscan, and that the greater part of his life as student and teacher was passed at Oxford. In a letter of commendation, written by the General of his Order in 1304, he is already termed suhtilissimus. He was then leaving for Paris, where, two or three years later, in 1307, he was made a Doctor. The following year he was sent to Cologne, and there he died an enigmatical death on November 8, 1308. Report has it that he was buried alive while in a trance.^ Probably there was little to tell of the life of Duns Scotus. His personality, as well as his career, seems completely included and exhausted in his works. Yet back of them, besides a most acutely reasoning mind, lay an indomitable will. The man never faltered in his labour any more than his reasoning wavered in its labjrrinthic course to its conclusions. His learning was complete : he knew the Bible and the Fathers ; he was a master of theology, of philosophy, of astronomy, and mathematics. The constructive processes of his genius appear to issue out of the action of its critical energies. Duns was the most penetrating critic produced by scholasticism. Whatever he considered from the systems of other men he subjected to tests that were apt to leave the argument in tatters. No logical inconsequence escaped him. And when every point had been examined with respect to its rational consistency, this dialectic genius was inclined to bring the matter to the bar of psychological experience. On the other hand he was a churchman, holding that even as Scripture and dogma were above question, so were the decrees of the Church, God's sanctioned earthly Civitas. Having thus tested whatever was presented by human reason, and accepting what was declared by Scripture or the Church, Duns proceeds to build out his doctrine as the case may call for. No man ever drove either constructive logic or the subtilties of critical distinctions closer to the limits of human comprehension or human patience than Duns Scotus. And here lies the trouble with him. The endless ramifica- ^ See Seeberg, o.c. p. 34 sqq. 544 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh tion and refinement of his dialectic, his devious processes of conclusion, make his work a reductio ad absurdum of scholastic ways of reasoning. Logically, eristically, the argumentation is inerrant. It nevers wanders aimlessly, but winding and circling, at last it reaches a conclusion from some point unforeseen. Would you run a course with this master of the syllogism ? If you enter his lists, you are lost. The right way to attack him, is to stand without, and laugh. That is what was done afterwards, when whoever cared for such reasonings was called a Dunce, after the name of this most subtle of mediaeval metaphysicians. Thus a man is judged by his form and method, and by the bulk of his accomplishment. Form, method, bulk of accompHshment, with Scotus were preposterous. When the taste or mania for such dialectics passed away, this kind of form, this maze of method, this hopelessness of bulk, made an unfit vehicle for a philosophy of life. Men would not search it through to find the living principles. Yet hving principles were there ; or, at least, tenable and consistent views. The main positions of Duns Scotus, some of which he held in opposition to Thomas, may strike us as quite reasonable : we may be incUned to agree with him. Perhaps it wiU surprise us to find sane doctrine so well hidden in such dialectic. He held, for example, that there is no real difference between the soul and its faculties. Thomas never demon- strated the contrary quite satisfactorily. Again, Duns Scotus was a reaUst : the Idea exists, since it is conceived. For the intellect is passive, and is moved by the intelligible. Therefore the Universal must be a something, in order to occasion the conception of it. Thus the reality of the concept proves the actuality of the Idea.^ Duns adds further explanations and distinctions regarding the actuality of universals, which are somewhat beyond the comprehension ^ The kernel of Duns's proof is contained in the following passage, which is rather simple in its Scotian Latin : '* Dicendum, quod Universale est ens, quia sub ratione non entis, nihil inteUigitur : quia intelligibile movet intellectum. Cum enim intellectus sit virtus passiva (per Aristotelem 3, de Anima, cont. 5 et inde saepe), non operatur, nisi moveatur ab objecto ; non ens non potest movere aliquid ut objectum ; quia movere est entis in actu ; ergo nihil inteUigitur sub ratione non entis. Quidquidautem inteUigitur, inteUigitur sub ratione Universalis : ergo Ula ratio non est omnino non ens" [Super universalia Porphyriit Quaestio iv.). cHAP.xLiii SCOTUS AND OCCAM 545 of the modem mind. But one may remark that he reaches his views of the actuality of universals through analysis of the processes of thought. Sense-perception occasions the Idea in us ; there must exist some objective correspondence to our general concepts, as there must also be in things some objective correspondence to our perception of them as individuals, whereby they become to us this or that indi- vidual thing. Such individual objectivity is constituted by the thisness of the thing, its haecceitas which is to be contra- distinguished from its general essence, to wit, its whatness, or quiddita^s. Duns holds that we think individual things directly as we think abstract Ideas ; and so their haecceitas is as true an object of our thought as their quiddifas. This seems a reasonable conclusion, seeing that the individual and not the type is the final end of creation. So our conceptions prove for us the actuality both of the universal and the con- crete ; and the proof of one and the other is rooted in sense- perception. Nothing was of greater import with Duns than the doctrine of the primacy of the Will over the intellect. Duns supports it with intricate argument. The soul in substance is identical with its faculties ; but the latter are formally distinguishable from it and from each other. Knowing and willing are faculties or properties of the soul. The will is purely spiritual, and to be distinguished from sense-appetite : the will, and the will alone, is free ; absolutely undetermined by any cause beyond itself. Even the intellect, that is the knowing faculty, is determined from without. Although some cognition precedes the act of willing, the will is not determined by cognition, but uses it. So the will, being free, is higher than the intellect. It is the will that con- stitutes man's greatness ; it raises him above nature, and liberates him from her coercions. Not the intellect, but the will directs itself toward the goal of blessedness, and is the subject of the moral virtues. Such seems to be Duns's main position ; but he distinguishes and refines the matter beyond the limits of our comprehension.^ Another fundamental doctrine with Duns Scotus is that theology is not a speculative, but a practical, science — a ^ Cf. the far from clear exposition in Seeberg, o.c. p. 86 sgq. and 660 sqq. VOL. II 2 N 546 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh position which Duns unfortunately disproved with his tomes of metaphysics ! But in spite of the personal reductio ad absurdum of his argument, the position taken by him be- tokens the breaking up of the scholastic system. The subject of theology, at least for men, is the revelation of God contained in Scripture. " Holy Scripture is a kind of knowledge (quaedam notitia) divinely given in order to direct men to a supernatural end — in finem supernaturalem/' ^ The knowledge revealed in Scripture relates to God's free will and ordainment for man ; which is, that man should attain blessedness. Therefore the truths of Scripture are practical, having an end in view ; they are such as are necessary for Salvation. The Church has authority to declare the meaning of Scripture, and supplement it through its Catholic tradition. Is theology, then, properly a science ? Duns will not deny it ; but thinks it may more properly be called a $apientia, since according to its nature, it is rather a know- ledge of principles than a method of conclusions. It consists in knowledge of God directly revealed. Therefore its principles are not those of the human sciences : for example, it does not accept its principles from metaphysics, although that science treats of much that is contained in theology. Nor are the sciences — ^we can hardly say the other sciences — subordinated to it ; since their province is natural know- ledge obtained through natural means. Theology, if it be a science, is one apart from the rest. The knowledge which makes its substance is never its end, but always means to its end ; which is to say, that it is practical and not specula- tive. By virtue of its primacy as well as character, theology pertains to the WiU, and works itself out in practice : practical alike are its principles and conclusions. Appar- ently, with Duns, theology is a science only in this respect, that its substance, which is most rational, may be logically treated with a view to a complete and consistent imder- standing of it.^ * Miscell. quaest. 6, i8, cited by Seeberg, o,c. p. 114. ^ The last two or three pages have been drawn mainly from Seeberg, o.c. p. 113 sqq. In discussing Duns Scotus, I have given less from his writings than has been my wont with other philosophers. And for two reasons. The first, as I frankly avow, is that I have read less of him than I have of his predecessors. With the exception of such a curious treatise as the (doubtful) Grammaiica specu- cHAP.xLiii SCOTUS AND OCCAM 547 In entire consistency with these fundamental views, Duns held that man's supreme beatitude lay in the complete and perfect functioning of his will in accordance with the will of God. This was a strong and noble view of man, free to think and act and will and love, according to the will, and aided by the grace, of the Creator of his will and mind. The trouble lay, as said before, in the method by which all was set forth and proved. The truly consequent person who made theology a practical matter, was such a one as Francis of Assisi, with his ceaselessly burning Christlike love actualizing itself in living act and word — or possibly such a one as Bonaventura with his piety. But can it ever seem other than fantastic, to state this principle, and then bulwark it with volumes of dialectic and a metaphysics beyond the grasp of human understanding ? Not from such does one learn to do the will of God. This was scarcely the way to make good the ultimate practical character of religion, as against Thomas's frankly intellectual view. Duns is as intellectual as Thomas ;' but Thomas is the more consistent. And shall we say, that with Duns all makes toward God, as the final end, through the strong action of the human will and love ? So be it — ^Thomas said, through intellection and through love. Again one queries, did the Scotian reasoning ever foster love ? And then Duns set theology apart, — and supreme. Again, so be it. Let the impulsive religion of the soul assert its primacy. But this was not the way of Duns. Theology and philosophy do not rest on the same principles, says he ; but how does he demonstrate it ? By substanti- ating this severance by means of metaphysical dialectic, and using the same dialectic and the same metaphysics to prove lativa (tome i. of the Paris edition) ; and the elementary, and comparatively lucid, De rerum prindpio {tome iv. of the Paris edition) — ^with these exceptions Duns is to me unreadable. My second reason for omitting excerpts from his writings, is that I wished neither to misrepresent their quality, nor to cause my reader to lay down my book, which is heavy enough anyhow ! If I selected lucid and simple extracts, they would give no idea of the intricacy and prolixity of Duns. His commentary on the Sentences fills thirteen tomes of the Paris edition ! No short and simple extract wUl illustrate that ! On the other hand, I could not bring myself by lengthy or impossible quotations to vilify Duns. It is unjust to expose a man's worst features, nakedly and alone, to those who do not know his better side and the conditions which partly explain the rest of him. 548 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh that theology can do without either. Not by dialectic and metaphysics can theology free itself from them, and set itself on other foundations. Duns Scotus exerted great influence, both directly and through the reaction occasioned by certain of his teachings. : The next generations were full of Scotists, who were proud i if only they might be reputed more subtle than their master. V.' They succeeded in becoming more inane. There were other men, whom the critical processes of Duns led to deny the validity of his constructive metaphysics. Of those who profited by his teaching, yet represented this reaction against parts of it, the ablest was the Franciscan, William of Occam, a man but few years younger than Duns. He was born in England, in the county of Surrey ; and studied under Duns at Paris. It is known that in 1320 he was lecturing with distinction at this centre of intellectual life. Three years afterward, he quitted his chair, and in the controversies then rending his Order, hotly espoused the cause of the Spirituales — the Franciscans who would carry out the precepts of Francis to the letter. Next, he threw himself with all the ardour of his temper into the conflict with the papacy, and became the literary champion of the rights of the State. He was cited before the pope, and imprisoned at Avignon, but escaped, in 1328, and fled to the Court of the emperor, Louis of Bavaria, to whom, as the accounts declare, he addressed the proud word : Tu me defendas gladio, ego te defendant calamo. He died about 1347. The succession, as it were, of Occam to Duns Scotus, is of great interest. It was portentous for scholasticism. The pupil, for pupil in large measure he was, profited by the critical methods and negations of the master. But he denied the validity of the metaphysical constructions where- by Duns sought to rebuild what his criticism had cast down or shaken. Especially, Occam would not accept the subtle Doctor's fabrication of an external world in accord with the apparent necessities of thought. For with all Duns's critical insistency, never did a man more unhesitatingly make a universe to fit the syllogistic processes of his reason, pro- jected into the external world. Here Occajn would not follow him, as Aristotle would not follow Plato. cHAP.xLiii SCOTUS AND OCCAM 549 It were well to consider more specifically these two sides of Occam's succession to Duns Scotus, shown in his accept- ance and rejection of the master's teaching. He followed him, of course, in emphasising the functions of the will ; and accepted the conception of theology as practical, and not speculative, in its ends; and, like Duns, he distinguished, nay rather severed theology from philosophy, widening the cleft between them. If, with Duns, theology was still, in a sense, a science ; with Occam it could hardly be called one. Although Duns denied that theology was to be controlled by principles drawn from metaphysics, he labour-ed to produce a metaphysical counterfeit, wherein theology, founded on revelation and church law, should present a close parallel to what it would have been, had its controlling principles been those of metaphysics. Occam quite as resolutely as his master, proves the untenability of current theological reasonings. More unreservedly than Duns, he interdicts the testing of theology by reason : and goes beyond him in restricting the sphere of rationally demon- strable truth, denying, for instance, that reason can demonstrate God's unity, infinity, or even existence. Un- like Duns, he would not attempt to erect a quasi-scientific theology, in the place of the systems he rejects. To make up for this negative result, Occam asserted the verity of Scripture unqualifiedly, as Duns also did. With Occam, Scripture, revelation, is absolutely infallible, neither re- quiring nor admitting the proofs of reason. To be sure he co-ordinates with it the Law of Nature, which God has implanted in our minds. But otherwise theology, faith, stands alone, very isolated, although on the alleged most certain of foundations. The provinces of science and faith are different. Faith's assent is not required for what is known through evidence ; science does not depend on faith. Nor does faith or theology depend on scientia. And since, without faith, no one can assent to those verities which are to be believed {veritatibus credibilibus), there is no scientia proprie dicta respecting them. So the breach in the old scholastic, Thomist, unity was made utter and irreparable. Theology stands on the surest of bases, but isolated, un- supported ; philosophy, all human knowledge, extends 5 so THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii around and below it, and is discredited because irrelevant to highest truth. Thus far as to Occam's loyal andrebelhous succession to the theology of Duns. In philosophy, it was much the same. He accepted his critical methods, but would not follow him in his constructive metaphysics. Although the older man was pre-eminently a metaphysician, the critical side of his intellect drew empiric processes within the sweep of its energies. Occam, unconvinced of the correspondence between the logic of concepts and the facts of the external world, seeks to limit the principles of the former to the processes of the mind. Accordingly, he rejects the inferences of the Scotian dialectic which project themselves outward, as proofs of the objective existence of abstract or general ideas. It is thus from a more thoroughgoing application of the Scotian analysis of mental processes, and a more thorough- going testing of the evidence furnished by experience, that Occam refuses to recognise the existence of universals save in the mind, where evidently they are necessary elements of thinking. Manifestly, he is striving very earnestly not to go beyond the evidence ; and he is also striving to eliminate all unevidenced and unnecessary elements, and those chimeras of the mind, which become actual untruths when posited as realities of the outer world. Such were the motives of Occam's far from simple theory of cognition. In it, mental perceptions, or cognitions, were regarded as symbols (signa, termini) of the objects repre- sented by them. They are natural, as contrasted with the artificial symbols of speech and writing. They fall into three classes ; first, sense-perception of the concrete object, and thirdly, so to speak, the abstract concept representative of many objects, or of some ideal figment or quality. Inter- mediate between the two, Occam puts notitia intuitiva, which relates to the existence of concrete things. It serves as a basis for the cognition of their combinations and relation- ships, and forms a necessary antecedent to abstract know- ledge. Notitia abstradiva praesupponit intuitivam?- Occam holds that notitia intuitiva presents the concrete thing as it exists. Otherwise with abstract or general concepts. They ^ Quodlibetalia, i. Qu. 14, cited by De Wulf, o.c. p. 422. cHAP.xLiii SCOTUS AND OCCAM 551 are signa of mental presentations, or processes ; and there is no ground for transferring them to the world of outer reaUties. Their existence is confined to the mind, where they are formed from the common elements of other signa, especially those of our notitia intuitiva. '* And so," says Occam, " the genus is not common to many things through any sameness in them, but through the common nature {communitatem) of the signum, by which the same signum is common to many things signified/' ^ These universals furnish predicates for our judgments, since through them we conceive of realities as containing a common element of nature. They are not mere words ; but have a real existence in the mind, where they perform functions essential to thinking. In- directly, through their bases of notitiae intuitivae, they even reflect outer realities. " The Universal is no mere figment, to which there is no correspondence of anything like it {cui non correspondet aliquod consimile) in objective being, as that is figured in the thinker." It results from the foregoing argument, that science, ordered knowledge, which seeks co-ordination and unity, has not to do with things, but with propositions, its object being that which is known, rather than that which is. Things are singular, while science treats of general ideas, which are only in the mind. " It should be understood, that any science, whether realis or rationalis, is only con- cerned with propositions {propositionibus) ; because proposi- tions alone are known." ^ It was not so very great a leap from the realism of Duns, which ascribed a certain objective existence to general ideas, to the nominalism, or rather conceptualism, of Occam, which denied it, yet recognised the real existence and neces- sary functions of universals, in the mind. The metaphysically proved realities of Duns were rather spectral, and Occam's universals, subjective though they were, lived a real and active life. One feels that the realities of Duns's meta- physics scarcely extended beyond the thinker's mind. In ^ Expos, aurea, cited by De Wulf, o.c. p. 423, whose exposition of Occam's theory I have followed here. ^ On Occam, see Seeberg*s article in Hauck's Encyclopaedia; Siebeck, " Occams Erkenntnisslehre, etc.," in Archiv fur Ges. der Philosophie, Bd. a., Neue Folge(i897). 5 52 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh many respects Occam's philosophy was a strenuous carrying out of Duns's teachings ; and when it was not, we see the younger man pushed, or rather repelled, to the positions which he took, by the unsatisfying metaphysics of his teacher. History shows other rebounds of thought, which seem abrupt, and yet were consequential in the same dual way that Occam's doctrine followed that of Duns. Out of the Brahmin Absolute came the Buddhist wheel of change ; even as Parmenides was followed hard by Heraclitus. And how often Atheism steps on Pantheism's heels ! Thus, developing, revising, and changing, Occam carried out the work of Duns, and promulgated a theory of know- ledge which pointed on to much later phases of thinking. In his school he came to be called venerabilis inceptor, a proper title for the man who shook loose from so much previous thought, and became the source of so many novel views. He had, indeed, little fear of novelty. '' Novelties {novitates) are not altogether to be rejected ; but as what is old (vetusta), on becoming burdensome, should be abolished, so novelties when, to the sound judgment, they are useful, fruitful, necessary, expedient, are the more boldly to be embraced." ^ It is not, however, as the incept or of new philosophies or of novel views on the relations between State and Papacy that we are viewing Occam here at the close of this long presentation of the ultimate intellectual , interests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But rather as the man who represented the ways in which the old was breaking up, and embodied the thoughts rending the scholastic system ; who even was a factor in the palpable decadence of scholastic thinking that had set in before his eyes were closed. For from him came a new impulse to a renewed overstudy of formal logic — ^with Thomas, for example, logic had but filled its proper role. Withdrawing from metaphysics the matter pertaining to the problem of universals and much more besides, Occam transferred the same to logic, which he called omnium artium aptissimum instrumentum.^ This reinstatement of logic as the instrument and means of all knowledge was to be the perdition of emptier-minded men, ^ Quoted by Seeberg. ^ De Wulf, o.c. p. 425. ,— ^' cHAP.xLiii SCOTUS AND OCCAM 5 53 who felt no difference between philosophy and the war of words. And in this respect at least the decadence of scholasticism took its inception from this bold and virile mind which had small reverence for popes or for the idols of the schools. We shall not follow the lines of this decay, but simply notice where they start. In the growth and decline of thought, things so go hand in hand that it is hard to say what draws and what is drawn. In the scholastic decadence, the preposterous use of logic was a palpable element. Yet was it cause or effect ? Obviously both. Scholasticism was losing its grasp of life ; and the universities in the fourteenth century were crowded with men whose minds mistook words for thoughts ; and because of this they gave themselves to hypertrophic logic. On the other hand, this windy study promoted the increasing emptiness of philosophy. Likewise, as cause and effect, inextricably bound together, the other factors work, and are worked upon. The number of universities increases ; professors and students multiply ; but there is an awful dearth of thinkers among them. There ceases even to be a thorough knowledge of the scholastic systems ; men study from compendia ; and thereby remain most deeply ignorant, and unfecundated by the thoughts of their predecessors. Cause and effect again ! We can hardly blame them, when tomes and encyclopaedias were being heaped mountain high, with hfe crushed beneath the monstrous pile, or escaping from it. But whether cause or effect, the energies of study slackened, and even rotted, both at the universities and generally among the members of the two Student Orders, from whom had come the last creators — and perhaps destroyers — of scholasticism. Next : the language of philosophy deteriorated, becoming turbid with the barbarisms of hair-splitting technicalities. Likewise, the method of presentation lost coherence and clarity. All of which was the result of academic decadence, and promoted it. So decay worked on within the system, each failing element being both effect and cause, in a general subsidence of merit. There were also causes, as it were, from without ; which possibly were likewise effects of this scholastic decay. SS4 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh As the life of the world once had gone out of paganism, and put on the new vigour of Christianity, so the life of the world was now forsaking scholasticism, and deriding, shall we say, the womb it had escaped from. Was the embryo ripe, that the womb had become its mephitic prison ? At all events, the fourteenth century brought forth, and the next was filled with, these men who called the readers of Duns Scotus Dunces — and the word still lives. Men had new thoughts ; the power of the popes was shattered, and within the Church, popes and councils fought for supremacy ; there was no longer any actual unity of the Church to preserve the unity of thought ; Wicliffe had risen ; Huss and Luther were close to the horizon ; a new science of observation was also stirring, and a new humanism was abroad. The life of men had not lessened nor their energies and powers of thought. Yet life and power no longer pulsed and wrought within the old forms ; but had gone out from them, and disdainfully were flouting the emptied husks. CHAPTER XLIV THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS I DANTE It lies before us to draw the lines of mediaeval development together. We have been considering the Middle Ages very largely, endeavouring to fix in mind the more interesting of their intellectual and emotional phenomena. "V^ have found throughout a certain spiritual homogeneity ; but have also seen that the mediaeval period of western Europe is not to be forced to a fictitious unity of intellectual and emotional quality — contradicted by a disparity of traits and interests existing then as now. Yet just as certain ways of discerning facts and estimating their importance distinguish our own time, making it an " age " or epoch, so in spite of diversity and conflict, the same was true of the mediaeval period. From the ninth to the fourteenth century, inter- related processes of thought, beliefs, and standards prevailed and imparted a spiritual colour to the time. While not affecting all men equally, these spiritual habits tended to dominate the minds and tempers of those men who were the arbiters of opinion, for example, the church dignitaries, or the theologian-philosophers. Men who thought effect- ively, or upon whom it fell to decide for others, or to construct or imagine for them, such, whether pleasure-loving, secularly ambitious, or immersed in contemplation of the life beyond the grave, accepted certain beliefs, recognized certain authori- tatively prescribed ideals of conduct and well-being, and did not reject the processes of proof supporting them. The causes making the Middle Ages a characterizable period in human history have been scanned. We observed the antecedent influences as they finally took form and 555 SS6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh temper in the intellectual atmosphere of the latter-day pagan world and the cognate mentalities of the Church Fathers. We followed the pre-Christian Latinizing of Provence, Spain, Gaul, and the diffusion of Christianity throughout the same countries, where, save for sporadic dispossession, Christianity and Latin were to continue, and become, in the course of centuries, mediaeval and Romance. As waves of barbarism washed over the somewhat decadent society of Italy and the Latin provinces, we saw a new ignorance setting a final seal upon the inability of these epigoni to emulate bygone achievements. Plainly there was need of effort to rescue the disjecta membra of the antique and Christian heritages. The wreckers " were famous men, young Boethius, old Cassiodorus, the great pope Gregory, and princely Isidore. For their own people they were gatherers and conservers ; but they proved veritable transmitters for Franks, Anglo- Saxons and Germans, who were made acquainted with Christianity and Latinity between the sixth and the ninth centuries, the period in the course of which the Merovingian kingdoms were superseded by the Carolingian Empire. With the Carolingian period the Middle Ages unques- tionably are upon us. The factors and material of mediaeval development, howsoever they have come into conjunction, are found in interplay. It was for the mediaeval peoples, now in presence of their spiritual fortunes, to grow and draw from life. Their task, as has appeared from many points of view, was to master the Christian and antique material, and change its substance into personal faculty. Under different guises this task was for all, whether living in Italy or dwelling where the antique had weaker root or had been newly introduced. This Carolingian time of so much sheer introduction to the teaching of the past presented Uttle intellectual discrimination. That would come very gradually, when men had mastered their lesson and could set themselves to further study of the parts suited to their taste. Never- theless, there was even in the Carolingian period another sort of discrimination, towards which men's consciences were drawn by the contrast between their antique and Christian heritages, and because the latter held a criterion cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 5 57 of selection and rejection, touching all the elements of human life. Whoever reflects upon his life and its compass of thought, of inclination, of passion, action, and capacity for happiness or desolation, is likely to consider how he may best har- monize its elements. He will have to choose and reject ;• and within him may arise a conflict which he must bring to recon- cilement if he will have peace. He may need to sacrifice certain of his impulses or even rational desires. As with a thoughtful individual, so with thoughtful people of an epoch, among whom like standards of discrimination may be found prevailing. The ninth century received, with patristic Christianity, a standard of selection and rejection. In conformity with it, men, century after century, were to make their choice, and try to bring their lives to a dis- criminating unity and certain peace. Yet in every mediaeval century the soul's peace was broken in ways demanding other modes of reconcilement. What profiteth a man to gain the world and lose his eternal life ? Here was the Gospel basis of the matter. And, following their conception of Christ's teaching, the Fathers of the Church elaborated and defined the conditions of attainment of eternal life with God, which was salvation. This was man's whole good, embracing every valid and righteous element of life. Thus it had been with Christ ; thus it was with Augustine ; thus it was with Benedict of Nursia and Gregory the Great ; only in Benedict and Gregory the salvation which represented the true and un- corrupt life of man on earth, as well as the assured pre- paration for eternal life with God, had shrunken from the universality of Christ, and even from the fulness of desire with which Augustine sought to know God and the soul. In these later men the conception of salvation had contracted through ascetic exclusion and barbaric fear. Yet with Benedict and Gregory, in whom there was much constructive sanity, and indeed with all men who were not maniacally constrained, there was recognition that salvation was of the mind as well as through faith and love, or abhorrent fear. It is necessary to know the truth ; and surely it is absolutely good to desire to know the truth for- 558 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh ever, without the cumbrances of fleshly mortality. This desire is a true part of everlasting life. Through it Origan, Hilary of Poictiers, Augustine largely, and after them the great scholastics with Dante at their close, achieved salvation. But why should one desire to know the truth utterly and forever, were not the truth desirable, lovable ? Naturally one loves that which through desire and effort one has come to know. Love is required and also faith by him who will have and know the salvation which is eternal Hfe : the emotions must take active part. Yet salvation comes not through the unguided sense-desiderative nature. It is for reason to direct passionate desire, and raise it to desire rationally approved, which is volition. Thus salvation not only requires the action of the whole man, but is in and of his entire nature. It presents a unity primarily because of its agreement with the wiU of God, and then because of its unqualified and universal insistence that it, salvation, life eternal, be set absolutely first in man's endeavotir. What indeed could be more irrational, and more loveless and faithless, than that any desire should prevail over the entire good of man and the wiU of God as well ? Oneness and peace consist in singleness of purpose and endeavour for salvation. Herein lies the standard of conduct and of discrimination as touching every element of mortal life. With mediaeval men, the application of the criterion of salvation depended on how the will of God for man, and man's accordant conduct, was conceived. What kind of conduct, what elements of the intellectual and emotional life were proper for the Kingdom of Heaven ? What matters barred the way, or were unfit for the eternal spiritual state ? The history of Christian thought lies within these queries. An authoritative consensus of opinion was represented by the Church at large, holding from century to century a juste milieu of doctrine, by no means lax and yet not going to ascetic extremes. Seemingly, the Church maintained vary- ing standards of conduct for different orders of men. Yet in truth it was applying one standard according to the responsi- bilities of individuals and their vows. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 559 The Church (meaning, for our purpose, the authoritative consensus of mediaeval ecclesiastical or religious approvals) always upheld as the ideal of perfect living the religious life, led under the sanction and guidance of some recognized monastic regula. So lived monks and nuns, and in more extreme or sporadic instances, anchorites and reclusae. The main peril of this strait and narrow path was its forsaking, the breaking of its vows. Less austerely guarded and exposed to further dangers were the secular clergy, living in the world, occupied with the care of lay souls, and with other cares that hardly touched salvation. The world avowedly, the flesh in reality, and the devil in all probability, beset the souls of bishops and other clergy. In view of their exposed positions ''in the world,*' a less austerely ascetic life was expected of the seculars, whose lapses from absolute holiness God might — or perhaps might not — condone. Around, and for the most part below, regulars and seculars were the laity of both sexes, of all ages, positions, and degrees of instruction or ignorance. They had taken no vows of utter devotion to God's service, and were expected to marry, beget children, fight and barter, and fend for themselves amid the temptations and exigencies of affairs. Well for them indeed if they could live in commimion with the Church, and die repentant and absolved, eligible for purgatory. For aU these kinds of men and women like virtues were prescribed, although their fulfilment was looked for with varying degrees of expectation. For instance, the distinctly theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, especially the first, could not be completely attained by the ignorance and imperfect consecration of lajmaen. The vices, likewise, were the same for all, pride, anger, hypocrisy, and the rest ; only with married people a venial unchastity was sacramentally declared not to constitute mortal sin. For this one case, human weakness, also mankind's necessity, was recognized ; while, in practice, the Church, through its boundless oppor- tunities for penitence and absolution, mercifully condoned all delinquency save obstinate pride, impenitence, and disbelief. These were the bare poles ethical of the orthodox mediaeval Christian scheme. How as to its intellectual and S6o THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh / emotional inclusiveness ? The many-phased interest of the ' mind, i,e, the desire to know, was in principle accepted, but ; ' with the condition that the ultimate end of knowledge X should be the attainment of salvation. It was stated and re-emphasized by well-nigh every type of mediaeval thinker, that Theology was the queen of sciences, and her service alone justified her handmaids. All knowledge should make for the knowledge of God, and enlarge the soul's relation- ship to its Creator and Judge. " He that is not with me is against me." Knowledge which does not aid man to know his God and save his soul, all intellectual pursuits which are not loyal to this end, minister to the obstinacy and vain- glory of man, stiff-necked, disobedient, unsubmissive to the will of God. Knowledge is justified or condemned accord- ■ ing to its idtimate purpose. Likewise every deed, business, , occupation, which can fill out the active life of man. As I they make for Christ and salvation, the functions of ruler, j warrior, lawyer, artisan, priest, are justified and blessed — or N the reverse. But how as to the appetites and the emotions ? How as to love, between the sexes, parent and child, among- friends ? The standard of discrimination is stiU the same, though its application vary. Appetite for food, if unre- strained, is gluttony ; it must be held from hindering the great end. One must guard against love's obsession, against sense-passion, which is so forgetful of the tdtimate good : concupiscence is sinful. Through bodily begetting, the taint of original sin is transmitted ; and in all carnal desire, though sanctioned by the marriage sacrament, is lust and spiritual forgetfulness. When, in fornication and adultery, its acts contravene God's law, they are mortal sins which will, if unabsolved, cast the sinner into hell. Few men in the Middle Ages were insensible to their future lot, and therefore the criterion of salvation unto eternal life would rarely be rejected. But often there was conflict within the soul before it acquiesced in what it felt compelled to recognize ; and sometimes there was clear revolt against current convictions, or practical insistence that a larger volume of the elements of hmnan nature were fit for life eternal. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 561 Conflict before acquiescence had agitated the natures of sainted Fathers of the Church, who marked out the path to salvation which the Middle Ages were to tread. One thinks at once of Jerome's never-forgotten dream of exclusion from Paradise because of too great delight in classic reading. Another phase was Augustine's, set forth somewhat retro- spectively in his Confessions. Therein, as would seem, the drawings of the flesh were most importunate. Yet not with- out sighs and waverings did the mind of Augustine settle to its purpose of knowing only God and the soul. At all events the chafings of mortal curiosity, the promptings of cultivated taste, and the cravings of the flesh, were the moving forces of the Psychomachia which passed with Patristic Christianity to the Middle Ages. Thousands upon thousands of ardent souls were to experience this conflict before convincing themselves that classic studies should be followed only as they led heavenward, and that carnal love was an evil thing which, even when sacramentaUy sanc- tioned, might deflect the soul. The revolt against the authoritatively accepted standard declared itself along the same lines of conflict, but did not end in acquiescence and renunciation. It contended rather for a peace and reconcilement which should include much that was looked upon askance. It was not always violent, and might be dumb to the verge of unconsciousness, merely a tacit departure from standards more universally recognized than followed. There were countless instances of this silent departure from the standard of salvation. With cultivated men, it realized itself in classical studies, as with Hildebert of Le Mans or John of Salisbury. It does not appear that either of them experienced qualms of conscience or suffered rebuke from their brethren. No more did Gerbert, an earlier in- stance of catholic interest in profane knowledge, though legends of questionable practices were to encircle his fame. Other men pursued knowledge, rational or physical, in such a way as to rouse hostile attention to its irrelevancy or repugnahcy to saving faith, and this even in spite of formal demonstration by the investigator — Roger Bacon is in our mind — of the advantage of his researches to the VOL. II 20 562 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii Queen Theology. Bacon might not have been so suspect to his brethren, and his demonstration of the theological serviceableness of natural knowledge would have passed, had he not put forth bristling manifestos denouncing the blind acceptance of custom and authority. Moreover, the obvious tendencies of methods of investigation advocated by him countered methods of faith ; for the mediaeval and patristic conception of salvation, whatever collateral supports it might find in reason, was founded on the authority of revelation. Indeed it was the lifting up of the standard of rational investigation which distinguished the veritable revolt from those preliminary inner conflicts which often strengthened final acquiescence. And it was the obstinate elevation of one's individual wisdom (as it appeared to the orthodox) that separated the accredited supporters of the Church among theologians and philosophers, from those who were suspect. We mark the line of the latter reaching back through Abaelard to Eriugena. Such men, although possibly narrower in their intellectual interests than some who more surely abode within the Church's pale, may be held as broader in principle. For inasmuch as they tended to set reason above authority, it would seem that there was no bound to their pursuit of rational knowledge, wherewith to expand and fortify their reason. But if the intellectual side of man pressed upon the absolutism of the standard of salvation, more belligerent was the insistency of love — ^not of the Crucified. To the Church's disparagement of the flesh, love made answer openly, not slinking behind hedges or closed doors, nor even sheltering itself within wedlock's lawfulness. It, love, without regard to priestly sanction, proclaimed itself a coxmter-principle of worth. The love of man for woman was to be an inspiration to high deeds and noble Hving, as well as a source of ennobling power. It presented an ideal for knights and poets. It could confer no immortality on lovers save that of undying fame : but it promised the highest happiness and worth in mortal life. If only knights and ladies might not have grown old, the supremacy of love and its emprize would have been impregnable. But age cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 563 must come, and the ghastly mediaeval fear of death was like to drive lover and mistress at the last within some conVent refuge. Fear brought compunction and perhaps its tears. Renunciation of the joy of life seemed a fit penance to disarm the Judge's wrath. So at the end of life the ideal of love was prone to make surrender to salvation. Asceticism even enters its literature, as with the monkish Galahad. There was, however, another way of reconcilement between the carnal and the spiritual, the secular and the eternal, by which the secular and carnal were transformed to symbols of the spiritual and eternal — the way of the Vita nuova and the Divina Commedia, as we shall see. So in spite of conflicts or silent treasons within the natures of many who fought beneath the Christian banner, in spite of open mutinies of the mind and declared revolts of the heart, salvation remained the triumphant standard of discrimination by which the elements of mediaeval life were to be esteemed or rejected. What then were these elements to which this standard, or deflections from it, should apply ? How specify their mediaeval guise and character ? It would be possible to pass in review synopti- caUy the contents of this work. We might return, and then once more travel hitherward over the mediaeval path, the many paths and byways of mediaeval life. We might follow and again see apphed — or unapplied — these standards of discrimination, salvation over all, and the deviations of pretended acquiescence or subconscious departure. We might perhaps make one final attempt to draw the currents of mediaeval life together, or observe the angles of their divergence, and note once more the disparity of taste and interest making so motley the mediaeval picture. But this has been done so excellently, in colours of life, and presented in the person of a man in whom mediaeval thought and feeling were whole, organic, living — an achieve- ment by the Artist moving the antecedent scheme of things which made this man Dante what he was. We shall find in him the conflict, the silent departures, and the reconcile- ment at last of recalcitrant elements brought within salvation as the standard of universal discrimination. Dante accom- plishes this reconcilement in personal yet full mediaeval 564 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh manner by transmuting the material to the spiritual, the mortal to the eternal, through the instrumentality of sjnubolism. He is not merely mediaeval ; he is the end of the mediaeval development and the proper issue of the mediaeval genius. Yes, there is unity throughout the diversity of mediaeval life ; and Dante is the proof. For the elements of medi- aeval growth combine in him, demonstrating their congruity by working together in the stature of the full-grown medi- aeval man. "When the contents of patristic Christianity and the surviving antique culture had been conceived anew, and had been felt as well, and novel forms of sentiment evolved, at last comes Dante to possess the whole, to think it, feel it, visualize its sum, and make of it a poem. He had mastered the field of mediaeval knowledge, diligently cultivating parts of it, like the Graeco-Arabian astronomy ; he thought and reasoned in the terms and assmnptions of scholastic (chiefly Thomist-Aristotelian) philosophy ; his intellectual interests were mediaeval ; he felt the mediaeval reverence for the past, being impassioned with the ancient greatness of Rome and the lineage of virtue and authority moving from it to him and thirteenth-century Italy and the already shattered Holy Roman Empire. He took earnest joy in the Latin Classics, approaching them from mediaeval points of view, accepting their contents un- critically. He was affected with the preciosity of courtly or chivalric love, which Italy had made her own along with the songs of the Troubadours and the poetry of northern France. His emotions flowed in channels of current con- vention, save that they overfilled them ; this was true as to his early love, and true as to his final range of rehgious and poetic feeling. His was the emotion and the cruelty of mediaeval religious conviction ; while in his mind (so worked the genius of symbolism) every fact's apparent meaning was clothed with the significance of other modes of truth. Dante was also an Italian of the period in which he lived ; and he was a marvellous poet. One may note in him what was mediaeval, what was specifically Italian, and what, apparently, was personal. This scholar could not cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 565 but draw his education, his views of life and death, his dominant indinations and the large currents of his purpose, from the antecedent mediaeval period and the still greater past which had worked upon it so mightily. His Italian nature and environment gave point and piquancy and very concrete life to these mediaeval elements ; and his personal genius produced from it aU a supreme poetic creation. -\^The Italian part of Dante comes between the mediaeval and the personal, as species comes between the genus and the individual. The tremendous feeling which he discloses for the Roman past seems, in him, specifically Italian : child of Italy, he holds himself a Latin and a direct heir of the Republic. Yet often his attitude toward the antique will be that of mediaeval men in general, as in his disposi- tion to accept ancient myth for fact ; while his own genius appears in his beautifully apt appropriation of the Virgilian incident or image ; wherein he excels his " Mantuan " master, whose borrowings from Homer were not always felicitous. Frequently the specifically Italian in Dante, his yearning hate of Florence, for example, may scarcely be distinguished from his personal temper ; but its civic bitter- ness is different from the feudal animosities or promiscuous rages which were more generically mediaeval. As a lighter example, there are three lines in the fomrth canto of the Purgatorio which do not reflect the Middle Ages, nor yet pertain to Dante's character, but are, we feel, Italian. They are these : " Thither we drew ; and there were persons who were staying in the shadow behind the rock, as one through indolence sets himself to stay." Again, Dante's arguments in the De monarchia ^ seem to be those of an Italian Ghibelline. Yet beyond his intense reahzation of Italy's direct succession to the Roman past, his reasoning is scholastic and mediaeval, or springs occasionally from his own reflections. The Italian contribution to the book tends to coalesce either with the general or the per- sonal elements. Dante argues that the rewards or fruits of virtue belonged to the Roman people because of the pre- ^ In view of the enormous literature upon Dante, popular as well as learned, it would be absurd to give any bibliographical, biographical or historical informa- tion as to his works, himself, or his Italian circumstances. 566 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii eminent virtue, high Hneage, and royal marriage-connections, of their ancestor Aeneas.^ Here, of course, the statements of Virgil are accepted literally, and one notes that while the argument is mediaeval in its absurdity, it will be made Italian in its appUcation. Likewise his further arguments making for the same conclusion, however Italianized in their pointing, are mediaeval, or patristic, in their proven- ance : for example, that the Roman Empire was divinely helped by miracles ; that the divine arbitrament decided the world-struggle or duellum in its favour ; and that Christ was born and suffered legally to redeem mankind under the Empire's authority and jurisdiction.^ Moreover, in refuting the very mediaeval papal arguments from " the keys," from " the two swords," and from the analogy of the sun and moon, Dante himself reasons scholastically.^ \ The De vulgari eloquentia illustrates the difference ^ between Dante accepting and reproducing mediaeval views, and Dante thinking for himself. In opening he speaks of mixing the stronger potions of others with the water of his own talent, to make a beverage of sweetest hydromel — ^we have heard such phrases before ! Then the first chapters give the current ideas touching the nature and origin of speech, and describe the confusion of language at the building of Babel : each group of workmen engaged in the same sort of work found themselves speaking a new tongue understood only by themselves ; while the sacred Hebrew speech endured with that seed of Shem who had taken no part in the impious construction. After this foolishness, the eighth chapter of Book I. becomes startlingly intelligent as Dante discusses the contemporary Romance tongues of Europe and takes up the idioma which uses the particle si. Out of its many dialects he detaches his thought of a volgare, a mother tongue, which shall be the illustrious, noble, and courtly speech in Latium, and shall seem to be of every Latian city and yet of none, and afford a standard by which the speech of each city may be criticized. The mediaeval period offers no such penetrating linguistic observation ; and in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, as in the * I)& mon, ii. 3. ^ De mon. ii. chaps. 4, 10, 12, ^ D^ mpn, iii. 4 sqq. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 567 Convivio, Dante is deeply conscious of the worth of the Romance vernacular. Written in the volgare, the style of the latter nondescript work bears curious likeness to scientific Latin writing. The Latin scholastic thought shows plainly through this involved and scholastic volgare, while the scholastic substance is rendered in a scarcely altered medium. The Convivio is indeed a curious work which one need not lament that Dante did not carry out to its mediaeval interminableness in fourteen books. The four that he wrote suffice to show its futility and apparent confusion in conception and form. Besides incidentally explaining the thought of the idyllic Vita nuova, it professed to be a commentary upon fourteen of Dante's canzoni, the meaning of which had been mis- understood. Indeed they had been suspected of disclosing a passion bearing a morganatic relationship to the love of Beatrice. Truly understood they referred to that love which is the love of knowledge, philosophy to wit ; and their commentary should expound that, and might properly set forth the contents of the Seven Liberal Arts and the higher divine reaches of knowledge. The Convivio seems also to mark a stage in Dante's life : the time perhaps when he turned, or imagined himself as turning, to philosophy for consolation in youthful grief, or the time perhaps when his nature looked coldly upon its early faith and sought to stay itself with rational knowledge. The book might thus seem a De consolatione philosophiae, after the temper, if not the manner, of Boethius' work, which then was much in Dante's mind. Yet it was to be a setting forth of know- ledge for the ignorant, a sort of Summa contra Gentiles, as is hinted in the last completed chapter. These three purposes fall in with the fact that the work was apparently the ex- pression of Dante's intellectual nature, and of his spiritual condition between the experience of the Vita nuova and the time or state of the Commedia} Certainly the Cow?;mo gives evidence touching the writer's mental processes and the interests of his mind. Except for its lofty advocacy of the volgare and its personal apologetic ^ All this seems supported by Conv. i. i, and ii. 13, the main explanatory- chapters of the work. 568 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh references, it contains little that is not blankly naediaeval. And had it kept on to its completion, so as to have become no torso, but a full Summa or Tesoro of liberal knowledge, its whimsical form as a commentary upon canzoni would have made it one of the most bizarre of mediaeval composi- tions. One should not take this most repellent of Dante's writings as an adequate expression of the intellectual side of his nature ; though a significant phrase may be drawn from it : " Philosophy is a loving use of wisdom (uno amoroso uso di sapienza) which chiefly is in God, since in Him is utmost wisdom, utmost love, and utmost actuality/' ^ A loving use of wisdom — with Dante the pursuit of knowledge was no mere intellectual search, but a pilgrimage of the whole nature, loving heart as well as knowing mind, and the work- ing virtues too. This pilgrimage is set forth in the Cam- media, perhaps the supreme creation of the Middle Ages, and a work that by reason of the beautiful affinity of its speech with Latin,^ exquisitely expressed the matters which in Latin had been coming to formulation through the mediaeval centuries. The Commedia {Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) is a Summa, a Summa salvationis, a sum of saving knowledge. It is such just as surely as the final work of Aquinas is a Summa theologiae. But Aquinas was the supreme medi- aeval theologian-philosopher, while Dante was the supreme theologian-poet ; and with both Aquinas and Dante, theology includes the knowledge of all things, but chiefly of man in relation to God. Such was the matter of the divina scientia of Thomas, and such was the subject of the Commedia, which was soon recognized as the Divina Commedia in the very sense in which Theology was the divine science. The Summa of Thomas was scientia not only in substance, but in form ; the Commedia was scientia, or sapientia, in substance, while in form it was a poem, the epic of man the pilgrim of salvation. In every sense, Aristotelian and otherwise, it was a work of art ; and herein if we cannot compare it with a Summa, we may certainly liken it to a Cathedral, which also was a work of art and a Summa salvationis wrought in stone. For a Cathedral — it is the great French type we ^ Conv, iii. 12. ^ E.g. " benigna volontade," Par. xv. 1. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 5^9 have in mind — ^was a Summa of saving knowledge, as well as a place for saving acts. And presenting the substance of knowledge in the forms of art, very true art, the matter of which had long been pondered on and loved or hated, the Cathedral in its feeling and beauty, as well as in the order of its manifested thought, was a Commedia ; for it too was a poem with a happy ending, at least for those who should be saved. The Cathedral had grown from dumb barrel-vaulted Romanesque to Gothic speaking in all the terms of sculpture and painted glass. It grew out of its antecedents. The Commedia rested upon the entire evolution of the Middle Ages. Therein had lain its spiritual preparation. To be sure it had its casual forerunners {precursori) : narratives, real or feigned, of men faring to the regions of the dead.^ But these signified little ; for everywhere thoughts of the other life pressed upon men's minds : fear of it blanched their hearts ; its heavenly or hellish messengers had been seen, and not a few men dreamed that they had walked within those gates and witnessed clanging horrors or purga- torial pain. Heaven they had more rarely visited. Dante gave little attention to any so-called " fore- runners," save only two, Paul and Virgil. The former was a warrant for the poet's reticence as to the manner of his ascent to Heaven ; ^ the latter supplied much of his scheme of Hell. Yet there were one or two others possessed of some affinity of soul with the great Florentine, who perhaps knew nothing of them. One of these was Hildegard of Bingen, with her vision of the spirits in the cloud, and her pungentsights of the bitterness of thepains of hell.^ Another sort of affinity is disclosed in the allegorical Anticlaudianus of Alanus de Insulis, in which Reason can take Prudentia just so far upon her heavenly journey, and then gives place to Theology, even as Virgil, symbol of rational wisdom, gives ^ Of. A. d' Ancona, / Precursori di Dante {Florence, 1874) ; M. Dods, Fore- runners of Dante {Edinbiirgh, 1903) ; A. J. Butler, Forerunners of Dante (Oxford, 1910) ; Hettinger, Gottliche Komodie, p. 79 (2nd ed., Freiburg im Breisgau, 1889). Mussafia, ** Monumenti antichi di dialetti italiani,'* Sitzungsber. philos. hist, Classe (Vienna Academy), vol. 45, 1864, p. r36 sqq., gives two old Italian descrip- tionSf one of the heavenly Jerusalem, the other of the infernal Babylon. ^ 2 Cor. xii. 2 ; Paradiso, L 73-75. 3 Ante, Chapter XX. S70 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh place to Beatrice at the summit of the Mount of Purgatory.^ Dante might have drawn still more enlightenment from the De sacramentis of Hugo of St. Victor, in which the rational basis of the universal scheme of things is shown to lie in the principle of allegorical intendment. Yet one finds few traces of Hugo in Dante except through Hugo's pupil, Richard, whose works he had read. That such apt forerunners should scarcely have affected him shows how he was taught and inspired, not by individuals, but by the entire Middle Ages. One observes mediaeval characteristics in the Commedia raised to a higherpower. Themediaeval periodwasmarkedby contrasts of quality and of conduct such as cannot be found in the antique or the modern age. And what other poem can vie with the Commedia in contrasts of the beautiful and the loathsome, the heavenly and the hellish, exquisite refinement of expression and lapses into the reverse,^ love and hate, pity and cruelty, reverence and disdain ? These contrasts not only are presented by the story ; they evince themselves in the character of the author. Many scenes of the Inferno are loathsome : ^ Dante's own words and conduct there may be cruel and hateful * or show tender pity ; and every reader knows the poetic beauty which glorifies the Paradiso, renders lovely the Purgatorio, and ever and anon breaks through the gloom of Hell. Another mediaeval quality, sublimated in Dante's poem, is that of elaborate plan, intended symmetry of composition, the balance of one incident or subject against another.^ And finally one observes the mediaeval inclusiveness which belongs to the scope and purpose of the Commedia as a Summa of salvation. Dante brings in everything that can illuminate and fill out his theme. Even as the Summa of St. Thomas, so the Commedia must present a whole doctrinal scheme of salvation, and leave no loopholes, loose ends, broken links of argument or explanation. ^ Ante, pp. 124 sqq, ^ The coarseness of Inf. xxi. 137-139 is of a piece with the way of mediaeval art in making demons horrible through a grotesquely indecent rendering of their persons. ^ E.g. Inf. xviii. 100 sqq. ; and Inf. xxviii. and xxix. * Inf. viii. 37 sqq. ; xxxii. 97 sqq. ; xxxiii. 116 and 149. ^ Of. Moore, Dante Studies, vol. ii. pp. 266-267. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 57 1 The substance of the Commedia, practically its whole content of thought, opinion, sentiment, had source in the mediaeval store of antique culture and the partly affiliated, if not partly derivative, Latin Christianity. The mediaeval appreciation of the Classics, and of the contents of ancient philosophy, is not to be so very sharply distinguished from the attitude of the fifteenth or sixteenth, nay, if one will, the eighteenth, century, when the Federalist in the young inchoately united States, and many an orator in the revolu- tionary assemblies of France, quoted Cicero and Plutarch as arbiters of civic expediency. Nevertheless, if we choose to recognize deference to ancient opinion, acceptance of antique myth and poetry as fact,^ unbounded admiration for a shadowy and much distorted ancient world, as character- izing the mediaeval attitude toward whatever once belonged to Rome and Greece, then we must say that such also is Dante's attitude, scholar as he was ; ^ and that in his use of the Classics he differed from other mediaeval men only in so far as above them all he was a poet. Lines of illustrative examples begin with the opening canto of the Inferno, where Dante addresses Virgil as famoso saggio, an appellative strictly corresponding with the current mediaeval view of the " Mantuan.'' Mediaeval also is the grouping of the great poets who rise to meet Virgil, first Homer, then Orazio satiro, and Ovid and Lucan.^ More ^ Any one who looks through the first volume of Tiraboschi's great Storia delta letteratura italiana, written in the early part of the nineteenth century, will find a generous acceptance of myth as fact ; just as he would find the same in the Histoire ancienne of the good RoUin, written a century or more before. 2 Dante has frequently been spoken of as the '* first scholar " of his time. I do not myself know enough regarding the scholarship of every scholar in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to confirm or deny this. Personally, I do not regard him as a Titanic scholar, like Albertus Magnus for example. He studied all the classic Latin authors available. Doubtless he had a memory corresponding to his other extraordinary powers. His also was the intellectual point of view, and the intellectual interest in knowledge and its deductions. His view of life was as intellectual as that of Aquinas. But as Dante's powers of plastic visualization were unequalled, so also, it seems to me, were his faculties of using as a poet what he had acquired as a scholar. Regarding the extent of Dante's use and reading of the Classics, nothing could be added to Dr. Moore's Studies in Dante, First Series ; though I think what Dr. Moore has to say of '• Dante and Aristotle " would have cast a more direct light upon the matter, had he cited as far as possible from the Latin translation probably used by Dante, instead of from the original Greek. 3 Inf. iv. 88. Cf. Moore, Studies in Dante, i. p. 6. The application of the terra satirist to Horace is peculiarly mediaeval. S72 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh narrowly mediaeval, that is, pertaining particularly to the thirteenth century, is Dante's profound reverence for the authority of Aristotle, il maestro di color che sanno?- It may be that the poet's sense of the enormous, electy importance of Aeneas,2 and his putting Rhipeus, most righteous of the Trojans, as the fifth regal spirit in the Eagle's eye,^ belonged more especially to Dante as the Ghibelline author of the De monarchia. But generically mediaeval was his acceptance , of antique myth for fact, a most curious instance of which is his referring to the consuming of Meleager with the con- suming of the brand, to illustrate a point of physiological psychology.* Antique heroes, even monsters, seem as real to him as the people of Scripture and history. It is not, however, his mediaevalism, but his own greatness that enables him to lift his treatment of them to the level of their presentation in the Classics. Noble as an antique demigod is the damned Jason, silent and tearless, among the scourged ; ^ and Ulysses is as great in the tale he tells from out the lambent flame as he was in the palace of Alcinoos, telling the tale which Dante never read.® ^ The poet, especially in the PurgatoriOy constantly balances moral examples alternately drawn from pagan and sacred story. This propensity was quite mediaeval ; for through- out the Middle Ages the antique authority was used to fortify or parallel the Christian argument. Yet herein, as always, Dante is Dante as well as a mediaeval man ; and his moral examples, for the aid of souls who are purging themselves for Heaven, are interesting and curious enough. On the pavement of the first ledge of Purgatory, Lucifer is figured falling from Heaven and Briareus transfixed by the bolt of Jove ; then Nimrod, Niobe, Saul, Arachne, Reho- boam, Eriphyle and Sennacherib, the Assyrians routed after • Holophernes' death, and Troy in ashes.' On the third ledge, as instances of gentle forgivingness, he sees in vision the Virgin Mary, and then appear Peisistratus (tyrant of Athens) refusing to avenge himself, and Stephen asking pardon for his slayers.^ But the most wonderful instance of this com- ^ Inf. iv. 131. 2 /„y^ il 20. ^ Par. xx. 68. * Purg. XXV. 22. ^ /«/. xviii. 83 sqq. * Inf. xxvi. 88 sqq. ' Purg. xii. * Purg. xv. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 573 bining of the Christian and the antique, each at its height of feeling, occurs in the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio, where angels herald the appearance of Beatrice with the chant, Benedictus qui vents, and, as they scatter flowers, sing Manibus date lilia plenis. This unison of the hail to Christ upon His sacrificial entry into Jerusalem and the Virgilian heartbreak over the young Marcellus, shows how Dante rose in his combinings, and how potent an element of his imagina- tion was the antique.^ Of course the plan of Hell reflects the sixth Book of the Aeneidy and throughout the whole Commedia the Virgilian phrase rises aptly to the poet's lips. " Thou wouldst that I renew the desperate grief which presses my heart even before I put it into words," says Ugolino, nearly as Aeneas speaks to Dido.2 And in the Paradiso the power of the Dantesque reminiscence rouses the reader, spiritually as it were, to emu- late the glorious ones who passed to Colchos.^ A more desperate passage was the lot of those who must drop from Acheron's bank into Charon's boat ; — ^the whole scene here is quite reminiscent of Virgil. The simile : " Quam multa in silvis auctumni frigore primo Lapsa cadunt folia," is even beautified and made more pregnant with significance in Dante's " Come d' autunno si levan le foglie L' una appresso dell' altra . . ." ^ On the other hand, the threefold attempt of Aeneas to embrace Anchises is stripped of its beautiful dream-simile in Dante's use.^ A lovelier bit of borrowing is that of the quick springing up again of the rush, the symbol of humility, V umile pianta, with which the poet is girt before proceeding up the Mount of Purgatory.^ With Dante the Pagan antique represented much that ^ According to Dr. Moore, Dante quotes or refers to the " Vulgate more than 500 times, to Aristotle more than 300, Virgil about 200, Ovid about 100, Cicero and Lucan about 50 each, Statius and Boethius between 30 and 40 each, Horace, Livy, and Orosius between 10 and 20 each," — and other scattering references. 2 Inf. xxxiU. 4 ; Aen. u. 3. ' Par.ii. 16. * Aen. vi. 309 ; Inf. iii. 112. * Aen. vi. 700 ; Purg. ii. 80. * Purg. i. 135 ; cf. Aen. vi. 143 " Primo avulso non deficit alter, etc." 574 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh was philosophically true, if not veritably divine. In his mind, apparently, the heathen good stood for the Christian good, and the conflict of the heathen deities with Titan monsters symbolized, if indeed it did not continue to make part of, the Christian struggle against the power of sin.^ We may be jarred by the apostrophe ; ". . . O sommo Giove, Che fosti in terra per noi crucifisso." ^ But this is a kind of Christian antique phrase by no means unexampled in mediaeval poetry. And we feel the poetic breadth and beauty of the invocation in which Apollo symbolizes or represents, exactly what we will not presume to say, but at all events some veritable spiritual power, as Minerva does, apparently, in another passage.® In such instances the antique image which* beautifies the poem is transfigured to a Christian symbol, if it does not present actual truth. Yet however universally Dante's mind was solicited by the antique matter and his poet's nature charmed, he was profoundly and mediaevally Christian. The Commedia is a mediaeval Christian poem. Its fabric, springing from the life of earth, enfolds the threefold quasi-other world of damned, of purging, and of finally purified, spirits. It is dramatic and doctrinal. Its drama of action and suffering, like the narratives of Scripture, offers literal fact, moral teaching, and allegorical or spiritual significance. The doctrinal contents are held partly within the poem's dramatic action and partly in expositions which are not fused in the drama. Thus, whatever else it is, the poem is a Summa of saving doctrine, which is driven home by illustrations of the sovereign good and abysmal ill coming to man under the providence of God. One may perhaps discern a twofold purpose in it, since the poet works out his own salvation and gives precepts and examples to aid others and help truth and righteousness on earth. The subject is man as rewarded or punished eternally by God — says Dante in the ^ See /«/. xxxi. ; Purg. xii. 25 sqq, ^ Purg. vi. 118 : " O highest Jove that wast on earth crucified for us." ^ Par. i. 13 sqq. ; Par. ii. 8. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 57S letter to Can Grande. This subject could hardly be con- ceived as veritable, and still less could it be executed, by a poet who had no care for the effect of his poem upon men. Dante had such care. But whether he, who was first and always a poet, wrote the Commedia in order to lift others out of error to salvation, or even in order to work out his own salvation, — ^let him say who knows the mind of Dante. No divination, however, is required to trace the course of the saving teaching, which, whether dramatically exemplified or expounded in doctrinal statement, is embodied in the great poem ; nor is it hard to note how Dante drew its substance from the mediaeval past. The Inferno, which is the most dramatic and realistic, " Dantesque," part of the Commedia, and replete with terrestrial interest, is doctrinally the least rich. Its doctrine lies chiefly in its scheme of punishment, or divine vengeance, for different sins. Herein Dante followed no set series like the seven deadly sins expiated in Purgatory. Neither the Church nor authoritative writers had laid out the plan of Hell. Dante had in mind Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, also Cicero's De officiis,^ and, structurally, Virgil. His scheme also was affected by his own character, situation, and aversions, and assuredly by the movement of its own com- position. At the mouth of Hell the worthless nameless ones and the neutral angels receive their due. Then after the sad calm of the place of the unbaptized and the great blameless heathen, the veritable Hell begins, and the series of tortures unfold, the lightest being such as punish incon- tinence,whilethe most awful are reserved for those fraudulent ones who have betrayed a trust. Dante's power of pre- senting the humanly loathsome does not let the progress of hellish torment fail in climax even to the end, where Brutus, Cassius, and Judas are crunched in the dripping mouths of Lucifer at the bottom of the lowest pit of Hell. The general idea of hell torments came to the poet from ^ The provenance, etc., of Dante's classification of sins in the Inferno, like everything else in Dante, has been interminably discussed. The reference to the De offidis of Cicero is due to Dr. Moore. See " Classification of Sins in the Inferno and Purgatorio** Studies in Dante, 2nd Series. Also cf. Hettinger, Die gottliche Komodie, pp. 159-162, and notes 6 and 23 on pp. 204 and 207 (2nd ed., Freiburg in Breisgau, 1889). Dante's main statement is in Inf. xi. 576 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh current beliefs and authoritative utterances, ranging from the " outer darkness " of the Gospel to the lurid oratory of St. Bernard. Dante's thoughts were drawn generically from the stores of mediaeval convictions, approvals, and imaginings : they were given to him by his epoch. Of necessity — innocently, one may say — ^he made them into concrete realities because he was Dante. Terrifying phrases and crude ghastliness were raised through his dramatic power to living experiences. The reader goes through HeU, sees with his own eyes, hears with his own ears, and stifles in the choking air. Doubtless the narrative brought fear and contrition to the men of Dante's time. But for us the ' disproportion of the vengeance to the crime, the outrage of everlasting torments for momentary, even impulsive sin, ■ is shocking and preposterous.^ The torments themselves present conditions which become unthinkable when we try to conceive them as enduring eternally. Human flesh, or implicated spirit, could not last beneath them. And as for our impulses, there is many a tortured soul with whom we would keep company, for instance, with the excellent band of Sodomites — Priscian (!) Brunetto Latini, and those three Florentines whose " honoured names " the poet greets with reverence and affection.^ One might even wish to make a third in the flame which enwraps Diomede and Ulysses. In fact, Dante's dramatic genius has brought the mediaeval hell to a reduptio ad absurdum, to our minds. The poet is of it too. He can pity those who touch his pity. And how great he can be, how absolute. There is compacted in the story of Francesca all that can be thought or felt over unhappy love. Yet Dante never doubts the justice of the punishment he describes ; sometimes he calmly or cruelly approves. Nel mio bel San Giovanni I How many thousands have quoted these detached words to show the poet's love of his beautiful baptistery. But, in fact, he refers to the little cylindrical places where stood the baptizing priests, in order to bring home to the reader the size of the holes in the burning rock from which pro- ^ In whom does not the awful anguish of the suicides [Inf. xiii.) arouse grief and horror ? * Inf. xvi. 59. They axe more respectable than the blessed denizens of the Heaven of Venus, Par, ix. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 577 truded the quivering feet of Simoniacs ! ^ It appears that the souls of all the damned will suffer more when they shall again be joined to their bodies after the resurrection.^ The Inferno fully exemplifies the doctrinal statement obscurely set over the gate which shut out hope : moved by justice, the Trinity, " divine power, supreme wisdom, primal love, created" me (Hell) to endure eternally." Dante follows this current authoritative opinion, stated by Aquinas. Here one may repeat that Dante is the child of the Middle Ages, rather than a disciple of any single teacher. If he follows Aquinas more than any other scholastic, he follows Bona- ventura also with breadth and balance. These two, how- ever, were themselves final results of lines of previous development. Both were rational and also mystically contemplative, though the former quality predominates in Thomas and the latter in Bonaventura. And in Dante's poem, at the end of the Paradiso, Theology, the rational apprehension of divine truth, gives place to contemplation's loftier insight. Dante is kin to both these men ; but when he thinks, more frequently he thinks like Thomas, and the intellectual realization of life is dominant with him. This was evident in the Convivio ; and that the intellectual vision constitutes the substance of the Commedia, becomes luminously apparent in the Paradiso,'^ It is even suggested at the gate of Hell, within which the wretched people will be seen, who have lost the good of the Intellect,^ by which is meant knowledge of God. The Purgatorio presents more saving doctrine than the cantica of damnation. Its Mount, with the earthly paradise at the top, may have been Dante's own device, but might have come from Venerable Bede or Albertus Magnus.^ The ante-purgatory appears as a creation of the poet, influenced by certain passages of the Aeneid and by ancient disciplinary practices which kept the penitents waiting outside the ^ Inf. xix. ^ Inf. vi. 103 sqq. ^ The intellectual temperament finds voice in many great expressions, which ^ire very Dante and also very Thomas, as Par. xxviii. 106-114 ; xxix. 17 ; xxx. 40-42. ' * Inf. iii. 18. ^ Hettinger, o.c. p. 254. VOL. II 2 P 578 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh church.^ The teaching of the whole cantica relates to the purgation of pride, envy, anger, accidia (sloth), avarice, gluttony, lust. These are the seven deadly sins whose provenance is early monasticism.^ Through their purgation man is made pure and fit to mount to the stars. We shall not follow Dante through the Purgatorio and ParadisOy or observe in detail the teachings set forth and the sources whence they were derived.® But a brief refer- ence to the successive incidents and topics of instruction will show how the Commedia touches every key of saving doctrine. The soul entering Purgatory goes seeking liberty from sin,^ and as a first lesson learns to detach itself from memories of the damned.^ It receives some slight suggestion of the limits of human reason ; ® and is told that according to the correct teaching there is one soul in man with several faculties.' It learns the risk of repentance in the hour of death ; ^ and the efficacy of the prayers of others to help sotds through their purifying expiation ; also, that, after death, souls can advance only by the aid of grace.® The symbolism of the gate of Purgatory teaches the need of contrition and confession. Upon the first ledge, the proud do penance, disciplined with examples of humility, and through the Lord's Prayer are taught man's entire dependence upon God. It is fitting that Pride should be the first sin expiated, since it lies at the base of all sins in the Christian scheme. Much doctrine is inculcated by the treatment of the different sins and the appositeness of the hymns sung by the penitents.^** Ascending the second ledge, Virgil,, i.e. human reason, expounds the first principles of the doctrine of that love which is of the Good.^^ Next is set forth the theory of human free-will and the effect of the spheres in directing ^ Aendd vi. 327 sqq. ; Hettinger, o.c. p. 226. ^ See Taylor, Classical Heritage, p. 162. ^ These are pointed out in the Commentaries [e.g. Scartazzini's) and in many monographs. Hettinger*s GottUche Komodie is serviceable : also Moore's Studies in Dante and Toynbee's Dante Studies. Of. Gardner, Dante and the Mystics (1913). * Pufg. i. 71 ; John viii. 36. ^ Purg. i. 89. ^ Purg. iii. 34 sqq. ' Purg. iv. 4 sqq. ® Purg. v. 105 sqq. ^ Purg. vii. 54 ; iv. 133-135. ^^ Cf. e.g. Purg. xii. 109. ^^ Purg. XV. 40 sqq. \ cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 579 human inclination — all in strict accord with the teaching of Thomas ; ^ and then, still in accord with Thomas, the fuller nature of love (or desire) is expounded, and the allotment of purgatorial pains in expiation of the various modes of evil desire or failure to love aright, ^ These fitting pains are as a solace to the soul yearning to accomplish its purgation. ^ Next, generation is explained, the creation of the soul, and the manner of its existence after separation from the body, according to dominant scholastic theories,* In the conclud- ing cantos of the Purgatorio, much Church doctrine is sym- bolically set forth by the Mystic Procession and the rivers of the earthly paradise, Lethe and Eunoe — the latter repre- senting sacramental grace through which good works, killed by later sins, are made to live again, ^ The earthly paradise symbolizes the perfect happiness of life in the flesh, and the state wherein man is fit to pass to the heavenly Paradise. Besides doctrine directly bearing on Salvation, the Commedia contains explanations by the way, needed to understand Dante's journey through the earth and heavens, and give it verisimilitude. Apparently these explanations were also intended to afford a sufficient knowledge of the structure of the universe. The Paradiso abounds in this kind of information, largely physical and astronomical. Its first canto offers a general statement, beautifully put, of the ordering of created things. In this instance, the instruction is not exclusively astronomical or physical,® but touches upon animated creatures, and follows Thomist teaching. Another interesting instance is the explanation in the second canto of the spots on the moon and then of the influence of the heavens. Here the astronomical matter runs on into elucida- tions touching human nature, even that human nature which is to be saved through saving doctrine. In this way the Christian-Thomist-Dantesque scheme of knowledge holds together. The Commedia is the pilgrimage of the soul after ^ Purg. xvi. 64 sqq, 2 Purg. xvii. 85 sqq., and xviii. ; Hettinger, o.c. p. 235 sqq., and pp. 261-264. ^ PuYg. xxiii. 72 ; xxvi. 14. * Purg. XXV. The notes in Hettinger, o.c, are quite full in citations of passages from Thomas and other scholastics. ^ Thomas, Summa, iii. Qu- 89, Art. 5. ^ As it is rather in Par. xxvii. 76 sqq. 580 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii all wisdom, and includes, implicitly at least, the matter of the Convivio. The Paradiso contains the chief store of saving knowledge. It sets forth the ultimate problems of human life and divine salvation, with due emphasis laid upon the limitations of human understanding. Dante, conscious of the strenuousness of his high argument, warns off all but the chosen few. A first point learned in the heavenly voyage is that no soul in Paradise desires aught save what it has ; since such desire would contravene the will of God. Paradise is every- where in Heaven, though the divine grace rains not upon all in one mode.^ Beatified souls do not dwell in any particular star, though Plato seems to say so. Scripture condescends to figure the intelligible under the guise of sensible forms, as Plato may have done.^ Broken vows and their reparation are now considered. Then the history of the Roman Eagle brings out the fact that Christ was crucified under Tiberius and His death avenged by Titus, which leads on to the explanation of the Fall and the Redemption, occupying the seventh canto. The next offers comment upon the divine goodness and the diversity of human lots ; and shows how the bitter may rise from the sweet. With deep consistency the poet exclaims against the insensate toilsome reasonings through which mortals beat their wings downward, away from God.^ In canto thirteen the reader is enlightened regarding the wisdom of Adam, of Solomon, and of Christ, and then as to the existence of the beatified soul before and after it is clothed with the glorified body of the Resurrection.* Incidentally the justice of eternal punishment is adverted to.^ The depth of the divine righteousness is next presented,® and its application to the heathen, with illustrations of God's saving ways, in the instances of certain princes who loved righteousness, including Trajan and the Trojan Rhipeus.' The incomprehensibility of Predestination next receives attention. Now intervenes the marvellous and illuminative beauty of canto twenty-three, preceding Dante's declaration of his * Par, iii. 52, 64, 89. * Par. iv. " Par. xi. 1 sqq. * Par, xiv. ^ Par. XV. 10. * Par. xix. 40 sqq. ^ Par. xx. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 581 creed, upon interrogatories from the apostles, Peter, James, and John. In this way he states the dogmatic funda- mentals of the Christian Faith, and the substantiating roles of philosophic argument and authority.^ After this, the vision of the hierarchies of angels leads on to discourse upon their creation and nature, the immediate fall of those who fell, the exaltation of the steadfast with added grace, and the mode and measure of their knowledge. Thomas is followed in this scholastic argument. With the vision of the Rose, rational theology gives place to mystic contemplation ; ^ and further visions of the divine ordering precede the prayer to the Virgin, with which the last canto opens — that prayer so beautiful and so expressive of mediaeval thought and feeling as to the most kind and blessed Lady of Heaven. This prayer or hymn is made of phrases which the mediaeval mind and heart had been recasting and perfecting for centuries. It is almost a great cento, like the Dies Irae. After the Lady's answering bene- diction, there comes to Dante, in grace, the final mystic vision of the Trinity, enfolding all existence — substance, accidents and their modes, bound with love in one volume. Supreme dogmatic truth is set forth, and the furthest strainings of reason are stilled in supersensual and super- rational vision, which satisfies all intellectual desire. This vision, vouchsafed through the Virgin's grace, assures the pilgrim soul : the goal is reached alike of knowledge and salvation. One may say that the Commedia begins and ends with the Virgin. It was she who sent Beatrice into the gates of Hell to move Virgil — meaning human reason — to go to Dante's aid. The prayer which obtains her benediction, and the vision following, close the Paradiso. So the teaching of the poem ends in mediaeval strains. For the Virgin was the mediaeval goddess, beloved and universally adored, help- ful in every way, and the chief aid in bringing man to Heaven. But no more with Dante than with other mediaeval men is she the end of worship and devotion. Her eyes are turned ^ Par. xxiv.-xxvi. 2 Typified in St. Bernard, Par, xxxi. and following. Suitable reasons for this choice may be suggested by the extracts from Bernard's De deligendo Deo and Sermons on Canticles, ante. Chapter XVIII. 582 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii to God. So are those of Beatrice, of Rachel, and of all the saints in Paradise. As for man on earth, he is viator, journeying on through discipline, in righteousness and beneficence, but above all in faith and hope and love of God, with his eyes of knowledge and desire set on God. God is the goal, even of the vita activa, which is also training and enlightenment. Loving his brother whom he hath seen, man may learn to love God — practising himself in love. Even Christ's parable, *' Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these," rightly interpreted, implies that the end of human charity is God : the human charity is preparation, obedience, means of enlightenment. The brother for whom Christ died — ^that is he whom thou shalt love, and that is why thou shalt love him. In themselves human relation- ships are disciplinary, ancillary, as all the sciences are ancillary to Theology. Mediaeval religion is turned utterly toward God ; the relationship of the soul to God is its whole matter. It is not humanitarian : not human, but divina scientia, fides, et amor, make mediaeval Christianity. Thus Dante's doctrine is mediaeval. Toward God moves the desire of the viatores in Purgatory, though they still are incidentally mindful of earth's memories. In Paradise the eyes of aU the . blessed are set on Him. Because of the divine love they may for a moment turn the eyes of their knowledge and desire to aid a fellow-creature ; the occasion past, they fix them again on God : thus the Virgin, thus Bernard, thus Beatrice. As a son of the Middle Ages, Dante was possessed with the spirit of symbolism. Allegory, with him, was not merely a way of expressing that which might transcend direct statement : it embodied a principle of truth. The universally accepted allegorical interpretation of Scripture iustified the view that a deeper verity lay in aUegorical significance than in literal meaning. This principle applied to other writings also. " Now since the literal sense [of the first canzone] is sufficiently explained, it is time to proceed to the allegorical and true interpretation." ^ ^ Conv. ii. 13. The symbolism inherent in all human mental processes seems indicated by the argument of Aquinas [ante, p. 496) that the mind knows '* the particular through sense and imagination ... it must turn itself to images in order to behold the universal nature existing in the particular.' This is a necessity of our half material nature. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 583 In the Vita Nuova and somewhat more hfelessly in the Convivio, Dante explains that it is his way to invest his poetry with a secondary or allegorical sense. He proposes in the latter work to carry out the formal notion of the four kinds of meaning contained in profound writings — literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical.^ He never holds himself, however, to the lines of any such obsession, but is content in practice with the literal and the broadly allegorical sense.^ Even then the great Florentine occasionally can be jejune enough. The conception of the ten heavens figuring the Seven Liberal Arts along with metaphysics, ethics, and theology, as a plan for composition for the Convivio,^ was on a level with the structural symbolism of the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of Capella. Yet the likening of Ethics to the primum mobile and Theology to the Emp5nrean has bearing on Dante's, and the mediaeval, scheme of the sciences, among which Theology is chief. Allegory moulds the structure and permeates the sub- stance of the Commedia. For this Dante himself vouches in the famous dedicatory letter to Can Grande, where his thoughts may be heard creaking scholastically, as he de- scribes the nature of his poem, and explains why he entitled it Comoedia : " Literally, the subject is the state of souls after death taken simply. If, however, the work be accepted aUegorically, the subject is man, according as by merit or demerit through freedom of choice {arhitrii libertatem) he is subject to Justice, rewarding or punitive." This is the positive statement emanating, in all prob- ability, from the poet. Perhaps it is as well that he did not live to inaugurate the series of Commentaries upon his poem, which began within a few years of his death and show no signs of ceasing.^ So it has been left to others to 1 Convivio ii. i. Letter to Can Grande, par. 7. 2 jn ttie Can Grande letter, having stated this fourfold significance, Dante does not proceed to exemplify it in the interpretation which follows of the opening lines of the Paradiso. Possibly those lines did not admit of the fourfold inter- pretation ; yet, in general, Dante does not try to carry it out in practice, any more than other mediaeval writers commonly. ^ Convivio ii. ch. 14 and 15. * Doubtless the commentator habit is fixed in the nature of man ; but it was pre-eminently mediaeval. We have seen enough elsewhere of the multiplication 584 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvh determine the metes and bounds and special features of the Commedias allegorical intent. The task has proved hazardous, because Dante was such a great poet, so realistic in his visualizing and so masterful in forcing the different phases of his many-sided thoughts to combine in concrete creations. His drama is so living that one can hardly think it an allegory. Evidently certain matters, like the Mystic Procession and its apocalyptic appurtenances in the last cantos of the Purgatorio, are sheer allegory. Such, while suited to suggest theological tenets, are formal and lifeless, a little like the hieratic allegorical mosaics of the fourth and fifth centuries, which were composed before Christian art had become imbued with Christian feeling.^ Indeed, doffing for an instant one's reverence for the great poet, one may say , that from the point of view of art and life, Dante's symbolism I becomes jejune, or at least ceases to draw us, according as . it becomes palpable allegory.^ Beyond such incidents one recognizes that the general course of the poem, its more pointed occurrences, together with its chief characters and the scenes amid which they move, have commonly both literal and allegorical meaning.^ Usually it is wise not to press either side too rigorously. The poet's mind worked in the clearly imagined setting and dramatic action of his poem, where fact and symbolism combined in that reality which is both art and life. Surely the Commedia was completed and rendered real and beauti- ful through many a touch and incident which had no alle- gorical intent. Even as in a French cathedral, the main sculptured and painted subjects have doctrinal, that is to of Commentaries on the Sentences of the Lombard and other scholastic works. Dante's friend, Guido Cavalcanti, wrote a little poem beginning Donna mi priego, upon which we have eight Commentaries, the first from Egidio Colonna in 1316. ^ Yet, however obvious the meaning, tying the pole of the Chariot to the Tree of Life was a great stroke {Purg. xxxii. 49). ^ There is a piece of allegory in the Paradiso which almost gets on one's nerves, i.e. the ceaseless whirling of the blessed spirits, usually in wheel formations : e.g. Par. xii. 3 ; xxi. 81 ; xxiv. 10 sqq. . cf. x. 145 ; xiii. 20. ^ One notes that all the symbolizing personages of the poem — Virgil, Statius, Matilda, Lia, Beatrice — have literal reality, however subtle or far-reaching may be the allegorical intendment with which the poet has invested them. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 585 say, allegorical, significance, besides their literal truth ; but there is also much lovely carving of scroll and flowered ornament and beast and bird, which beautifies the building. For Dante's purpose, to set out the state of disembodied spirits after death, allegory might prove prejudicial, because of the intensity of his artistes vision. Much of the poem's symbolism, especially in the Paradiso, belongs to that un- avoidable imagery to which every one is driven when attempting to describe spiritual facts. Such symbolism, however, when constructed with the plastic power of a Dante, may become itself so convincing or compelling as to reduce the intended spiritual signification to the terms of its concrete embodiment in the symbol. In view of the carnality of most sin, one is not surprised to find the place of punishment a converging cavity within the earth. With Dante, as with Hildegard, the sights and torments of Hell are realistically given quite as of course. Perhaps Dante's Mount of Purgatory begins to give us pause, and its corniced mise en scene tends to enflesh the idea of spirit and materialize its purgation. But the limiting effect of symbolism is most keenly felt in the Paradiso, notwithstanding the beauty of that cantica ; for its very concrete symbolism seems some- times to ensphere the intended truths of spirit in a sort of crystalline translucency. It is all a marvellously imagined description of the state of blessed souls. Yet in the final pure and glorious image of a white rose [candida rosa) the company of the glorified spirits is so visualized as to become, surely not theatrical, but as if assembled upon the rounding tiers of seats occupied by an audience.^ There are topics in which the sheer ratiocination of Thomas is more com- pletely spiritual than the poetic vision of Dante. Dante's most admirable symbolic creation was also his dearest reality — Beatrice. And while this being in which he has immortalized his fame and hers, is eminently the creation of his genius, the elements were drawn from the many-chambered mediaeval past. Some issued out of the vast matter of chivalric love, with its high heart of service and sense of its own worth, its science, its foolish and most wise reasoning, its preciosity of temper — Dante and his ^ See e.g. Par. xxxi. 67. 586 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii literary friends were virtuosos in everything pertaining to its understanding.^ This love was of the fine-reasoning mind. The first canzone of the Vita Nuova does not begin " Donne, che sentite amore/' but : " Donne, ch' avete intelletto d* amore." Through that book, love is what it never ceases to be with Dante, inteUigenza : " InteUigenza nuova, che V Amore Piangendo mette in lui. . . ." The piangendo, the tears, have likewise part ; without them love is not had or even understood. The enormous sense of love's supreme worth — ^that too is in Dante. It had all been with the Troubadours of Provence, with Chretien de Troies, and with the great Minnesingers, and had been reasoned on, appreciated, felt and wept over, by ladies and knights who listened to their poems. From France and Provence love and its reasonings had come to Italy, even before Dante's eyes had opened to it and other matters. This was one strain that entered the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova, of the Convivio, of the Commedia. But Beatrice is something else : she is, or becomes, Theology, the God- given science of the divine and human. Long had Theo- logia {divina scientia) been a queen ; and even before her, Philosophia, as with Boethius, had been a queenly woman gowned with as full symbolical particularity as ever the Beatrice of Dante. Indeed from the time of the Psycho- machia of Prudentius to the Roman de la Rose of De Lorris and De Meun, every human quality, and many an aspect of human circumstance, had been personified, for the most part under the forms of gracious or seductive women. Above all of these rose, sweet, gracious, and potent, the Virgin Queen of Heaven. It came as of course to Dante to symbolize his conception of divine jfldsdom_in a womaji-S. form. The achievement of his genius was the tfansfusing combination of elements of courtly love, didactic allegory, and divina scientia, in a creature before whom the whole man Dante, heart and reason and religious faith, could stand and gaze and love and worship. Beatrice was his and of him always ; but with the visions ^ Cf. De Sanctis, Storia delta letteraiura italiana, i. p. 46 sqq. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 587 and experience of that mature and grace-illuminated man- hood, which expressed itself in the Commedia, she comes to be much that she had not been when she lived on earth or had just left it, and Dante was a maker of exquisite verses in Florence ; and much too that she had scarce become while the poet was consoling himself with philosophy for his bereavement and the dulling of his early faith. Beatrice lives and moves and has her ever more uplifted being as the reality as well as symbol of Dante's thoughts of life. With all first lovers idealism, he loved a girl ; then she, having passed from earth, becomes the inspiration and object of address of the young maker of sonnets and canzoni, who with such intellectual preciosity was intent on building these verses of fine-spun sentiment. Thereafter, when he is in darker mood, she does not altogether leave him, whatever variant attitudes his thought and temper take. And at last the yearning self -fulfilments of his renewed life draw together in the Beatrice of the Commedia. It is very beautiful, and the growth, as well as work, of genius ; but it is not strange. For there is no bound to the idealizing of the love which first transfuses a youth's nature with a mortal golden flame, and awakens it to new under- standing. Out of whatever of experience of life and joy and sorrow may come to the man, this first love may still vivify itself anew — often in dreams — and become again living and beautiful, in tears, and will awaken new perceptions and disclose further vistas of the intelligenza nuova which love never ceases to impart to him who has loved. Dante's mind was always turning from the obvious sense-actuality of the fact to its symbolism ; which held the truer reality. With such a man it is not strange that the beloved and adored woman, the love of whom was virtue and enlightenment, should, when dead to earth, become that divine wisdom which opens Heaven to the lover who would follow, for all eternity, whither his beloved has so surely gone. No, it was not strange, but only as wonderful as all the works of God, that she who while living had been the spring of virtue of ajl kinds and meanings in the poet's breast, should after death become the emblem, even the reality, of that whereby man is taught how to win his heavenly 588 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND bookvii salvation. Passage after passage in the Purgatorio and Paradiso show that Beatrice is this divina scientia, and yet has never ceased to be one whom the poet loves.^ Thus it is clear that mediaeval development converges at last in Dante. He, or his Commedia, might be the final j Summa, were not he, or rather it, the final poem. Man and \ work include the emotions and the intellectual interests of / the Middle Ages, embracing what had been known, — Physics, I Astronomy, Politics, History, Pagan Mythology, Christian I Theology, — all blent and moulded at last to the matter of ._ the book. Not the contents of the Commedia is Dante's own, but the poem itself — ^that is his creation. Yet even the poem itself was a climax long led up to. The power of its feeling had been preparing in the concep- tions, even in the reasonings, which through the centuries had been gaining ardour as they became part of the entire natures of men and women. Thus had mediaeval thought become emotionalized and plastic and living in poetry and art. Otherwise, even Dante's genius could not have fused the contents of mediaeval thought into a poem. How many passages in the Commedia illustrate this — like the lovely picture of Lia moving in the flowering meadow, with her fair hands making her a garland. The twenty-third canto of the Paradiso, telling of the triumph of Christ and the Virgin, yields a larger illustration ; and within it, as a very concrete lyric instance, floats that flower of angelic love, the song of Gabriel circling the Lady of Heaven with its melody, and giving quintessential utterance to the love and adoration which the Middle Ages had intoned to the Virgin. Yes, if , it be Dante's genius, it is also the gathering emotion of the centuries, which lifts the last cantos of the Paradiso from , glory to glory, and makes this closing singing of the '^' Commedia such supreme poetry. Nor is it the emotional element alone that reaches its final voice in Dante. Passage after passage of the Paradiso is the apotheosis of scholastic thought and ways of stating it, the very apotheosis, for example, of those harnessed phrases in which the line of great scholastics had endeavoured to put in words the ^ Compare Pufg. xxvii. 34 sqq, ; xxx. ; xxxi. ; Par, xviii. 13 sqq. ; xxiii. ; XXX. ; xxxi, ; xxxii. 8. cHAP.xLiv THE MEDIAEVAL SYNTHESIS 589 universalities of substance and accident and the absolute qualities of God. Yet one more feature of Dante's typifying inclusiveness of the past. Its elements exist in him at first without conscious opposition and yet not subordinated one to another, the less worthy to those of eternal validity. Then conflict arises ; the mediaeval Psychomachia awakes in Dante. Evidently he who wrote the Convivio after the Vita Nuova, had not continued spiritually undisturbed. Had there come duUings of his early faith ? Did his mind seek too exclusive satisfaction in knowledge ? Had he possibly swerved a little from some high intention ? The facts are veiled. Dante wears neither his mind nor his heart upon his sleeve. Yet a reconcilement was attained by him, though perhaps he had to fetch it out of Hell. He achieved it in his great poem, which in its long making made the poet into the likeness of itself. Fitness for salvation is the ultimate criterion with Dante respecting the elements of mortal life, as it had been through the Middle Ages. And the Commedia — truly the Divina Commedia — while it pre- sents the scheme of salvation for universal man, is the achieved salvation of the poet. INDEX Note. — Of several references to the same matter the more important are shown by heavy type Abaelard, Peter, career of, ii. 372-5 ; at Paris, ii. 373> 374, 4^3 ; popularity there, ii. 145 ; love for Heloise, ii. 30-1, 374 ; love-songs, ii. 39, 236 ; Heloise's love for, i. 601 ; ii. 29, 31, 34, 35, 41-2 ; early relations with Heloise, ii. 30-31 ; suggestion of marriage opposed by her, ii. 32-5 ; marriage, ii. 35 ; suffers vengeance of Fulbert, ii. 35 ; becomes a monk at St. Denis, ii. 36; at the Paraclete, ii- 36, 374 ; at Breton monastery, ii* 36 ; St. Bernard's denimciations of, i. 229, 4r7 ; ii. 374-6, 385 ; letters to, from Heloise quoted, ii. 37-41, 43-6, 49, 50 ; letters from, to Heloise quoted, ii. 42-3, 47-9,50-51; closing years at Cluny, ii. 51, 52, 375 ; death of, ii. 54, 375 ; estimate of, ii. 30, 372 ; rationalizing temper, i. 229 ; ii. 328-9 ; skill in dialectic, ii. 333, 375-6, 383 ; not an Aristo- telian, ii. 399 ; works on theology, ii. 382-5 ; De Unitaie et Trinitate divina, ii. 36, 328-9, 382 and n.^; Theologia, ii. 333-4, 425 ; Scito te ipsum, ii. 380-1 ; Sic et nan, i. 17 ; ii. 334-6, 382, 387 ; Dialectica, ii. 376 and nn., 379-80 ; Dialogue between Philosopher, Jew, and Christian, ii. 380, 381 ; Historia calamitatum, ii. 30-7, 328-9, 373; Carmen ad Astralabium filium, ii. 221 ; hymns, ii. 236-8 ; otherwise mentioned, ii. 161, 333 and n. Abbo, Abbot, i. 296 and n., 325 Abbots : Armed forces, with, i. 489 Cistercian, position of, i. 378-9 '^'^^ ^■ Investiture of, lay, i. 244 Social class of, i. 489 Accursiiis, Gtossa ordinana of, ii. 291, 292 Adalberon, Abp. of Rheims, i. 241, 284-5, 289 Adam of Marsh, ii. 419, 430, 517 Adam of St. Victor, editions of hymns of, ii. 113 fi.^ ; examples of the hymns, ii. 113 segg.; Latin originals, ii- 235, 238-44 Adamnan cited, i. 134 n.^, 137 Adelard of Bath, ii. 400 Aedh, i. 132 Agobard, Abp. of Lyons, i. 215, 232-4 ; cited, ii. 276 Aidan, St., i. 174 Almoin, Vita Ahbonis by, i. 296 and n. Aix, Synod of, i. 375 Aix-la-Chapelle : Chapel at, i. 212 n. School at, see Carolingian period — Palace school Alans, i. 113, 116, 119 Alanus de Insulis, career of, ii. 118-20 ; estimate of, ii. 405-6 ; works of, U. 74 n>, 120, 405 n.6, 406 ; Anticlaudianus, ii. 120-9, 221, 407, 569 ; De planctu naturae, ii. 221-2 and n.^ 406 Alaric, i. 112 Alaric II., i. 117 ; ii. 272 Alberic, Card., i. 253 nJ^ Alberic, Markgrave of Camerino, i, 243 Alberic, son of Marozia, i. 243-4 Albertus de Saxonia, ii. 531 n.^ Albertus Magnus, career of, ii. 451 ; estimate of, ii. 328, 331, 451 j estimate of work of, ii. 423, 425 ; attitude toward Gilbert de la Porree, ii. 402 ; compared with Bacon, ii. 452 ; with Aquinas, ii. 463, 468 ; relations with Aquinas, ii. 464; onlogic.ii. 344-5 ; method of, ii. 345 n. ; edition of works, ii. 454 n?-\ De praedicabilibus, ii. 344 and n.-345, 454-5 ; work on the 591 S92 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND rest of Aristotle, ii. 450-1 ; analysis of this work, ii. 454 seqq. ; attitude toward the original, ii. 452; Summa theologiae, ii. 460, 461 ; Summa de creaturis, ii. 460-1 ; De adhaerendo Deo, ii. 462 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 17; ii. 108 M.2, 313, 342, 432, 571 n.^ Albigenses, i. 49 ; persecution of, i. 382-3, 477, 497, 588 ; ii. 196 Alboin the Lombard, i. 115 Alchemy, ii. 526 Alcuin of York, career of, i. 214-15 ; works of, i. 216-21 and «.*; extracts from letters of, ii. 187 ; styleless- ness of, ii. 187, 202 ; verses by, quoted, ii. 163 ; on urbanitas, ii, 163 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 213, 359 and «.2 ; ii. 138, 342, 362 Aldhelm, i. 185 Alemanni, i. 9, 121, 122, 145 n.^, 174, 192 Alemannia, Boniface's work in, i. 199 Alexander the Great, Pseudo-Callis- thenes' Life of, ii. 253» 254> 258-9 ; Walter of Lille's work on, ii. 259 »-^ Alexander II., Pope, i. 263 n., 264 and n?- Alexander de VUla-Dei, Doctrinale of, ii. 152-4, 191 Alexander of Hales — at Paris, i. 492 ; ii. 429 ; Bacon's attack on, ii; 523, 526 ; estimate of work ofj ii. 423, 425, 429 ; Augustinianism of, ii. 433-4 I Alfred, King of England, i. 144 and n.^, I 187-90 Allegory [See also Symbolism) : Dictionaries of, ii. 73-4 and n.^, 75 Greek examples of, ii. 68, 394 Metaphor distinguished from, ii. 67 n. Politics, in, ii. 86-7, 304-5, 309 Roman de la rose as exemplifying, ii. 129 Scripture, see under Scriptures Two uses of, ii. 395 Almsgiving, i. 269 Alphanus, i. 253-5 Amadas, i. 581 Ambrose, St., Abp. of Milan, on miracles, i. 85-6 ; attitude toward secular studies, i. 302 ; ii. 318 ; Hexa'emeron of, i. 72-4 ; De officiiSj i. 96 ; hymns, i. 363-4 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 70, 75, 76, 104, 186, 370 ; ii. 71 «., 301 Anacletus II., Pope, i. 410 Anchorites, see Hermits Andrew the Chaplain, Flos amoris of, i. 591-2 Angels : Aquinas' discussion of, ii. 354-5, 465, 487 seqq., 499, 603-5 Dante's views on, ii. 581 Emotionalizing of conception of, i. 364 «.4 Hugo of St. Victor on, ii. 94, 95 Symbols, regarded as, ii. 487 Vincent's Speculum as concerning, ii, 349 Writings regarding, summary of, ii. 487 Angilbert, i. 235 Angles, i. 140 Anglo-Saxons : Britain conquered by, i. 141 Characteristics of, i. 142, 196 Christian missions by, i, ig6, 197 Christian missions to, i. 172, 174, ISO seqq. Customs of, i. 141 Poetry of, i. 142-4 Roman influence slight on, i. 32 Aniane monastery, i. 374-5 Annals, i. 234 and n.^ Anselm (at Laon), ii. 373-4 Anselm, St., Abp. of Canterbury, dream of, i. 270-1 ; early career, i. 271 ; at Bee, i. 272-3 ; relations with Rufus, i. 274, 276 ; journey to Italy, i. 276 ; estimate of, i. 276, 277-9 ; ii. 195 ».«, 333, 360, 368 ; style of, i. 277 ; ii- 193-4 ; influence of, on Duns Scotus, ii. 541 ; works of, i. 277 seqq. ; Cur Deus homo, i. 276, 278 n.\ 280 ; ii. 425 ; Mono- logion, i. 277-9 ; Proslogion, i. 277- 279 ; ii. 194, 425 ; Meditationes, !• 277, 280-1 ; De grammatico, i. 278 «.2 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 16, 19, 303-4 ; ii. 166, 313, 327, 370 Anselm of Besate, i. 260 Anthony, St., i, 381-2; Life of, by Athanasius, i. 47, 52 and n. Antique Literature, see Greek thought and Latin classics Antique stories, themes of, in vernacu- lar poetry, ii. 252 seqq. ApoUinaris Sidonius, ii. 133 ApoUonius of Tyana, i. 44 Apollonius of Tyre, ii. 253 and n. Aquinas, Thomas, family of, ii. 463-4 ; career, ii. 464-5 ; relations with Albertus Magnus, ii. 464 ; transla- tions of Aristotle obtained by, ii. 421 ; Vita of, by Guilielmus de Thoco, ii. 465 n. ; works of, ii. 465 ; estimate of, and of his work, i, 17, 18 ; ii- 331, 466-8, 514; complete- ness of his philosophy, ii. 423-6 ; pivot of his attitude, ii. 470 ; pre-' sent position of, ii. 531 ; style, ii. INDEX S93 209 ; mastery of dialectic, ii. 382 ; compared with Eriugena,i. 231 n.^ ; with Albertus Magnus, ii. 463, 468 ; with Bonaventura, ii. 467 ; witli Duns, ii. 547 ; Dante compared with and influenced by, ii. 571 «.^, 577, 579, 581, 585 ; on monarchy, ii. 306 ; on faith, ii. 318 ; on differ- ence between philosophy and theo- logy, ii. 320 ; on logic, ii. 343 ; Summa theologiae, i. 17, 18 ; ii. 320 Beqq. ; style of the work, ii. 209-10 ; Bacon's charge against it, ii. 330 ; Peter Lombard's work con- trasted with it, ii. 337-40 ; its method, ii. 337 ; its classification scheme, ii. 354-9 ; analysis of the work, ii. 468 segq, 477 segq.] Summa philosophica contra Gentiles, ii. 320, 468, 476-6 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 69 «•^ 344 ; ii- 313, 328, 330, 342, 432 Aquitaine, i. 29, 241, 589 Arabian philosophy, ii. 419-20, 430-I Arabs, Spanish conquest by, i. 9, 118 Archimedes, i. 40 Architectiure, Gothic : Evolution of, i. 307 ; ii. 569 Great period of, i. 362 Argenteuil convent, ii. 35, 36 Arianism : Teutonic acceptance of, i. 120, 192, 194 Visigothic abandonment of, i. 118 nn. Aristotle, estimate of, i. 37-8 ; works of, i. 37-8 ; unliterary character of writings of, ii. 144, 145 ; philosophy as classified by, ii. 342 ; attitude of, to discussions of final cause, ii. 366 ; the Organon, i. 37, 71 ; progressive character of its treatises, ii, 363-4 ; Boethius' translation of the work, i. 71, 91-2 ; advanced treatises " lost " till r2th cent., ii. 277 n., 364 ; Porphyry's Introduction to the Categories, i. 45, 92, ro2 ; ii. 342, 344 n., 363, 369; Abaelard's knowledge of, ii. 376 ; John of Salisbury's knowledge of, ii. 403 ; Arabian translations of works, ii. 419-20 ; introduction of complete works, i. 17 ; Latin translations made in 13th cent., ii. 421 ; three stages ia scholastic appropriation of the Natural Philosophy and Metaphysics, ii. 423 ; Paris Uni- versity study of, ii. 421-2 and n, ; Albertus Magnus' work on, ii. 450- 451, 454 seqq. ; Aquinas' mastery of, i. 17, 18 ; Dominican accept- ance of system of, ii. 434 ; Dante's reverence for, ii. 572 VOL. II Arithmetic : Abacus, the, i. 301 Boethius' work on, i. 72, 90 Music in relation to, ii. 321 Patristic treatment of, i. 72 Scholastic classification of, ii. 343 Arnold of Brescia, i. 417 ; ii. 199 Arnulf, Abp. of Rheims, i. 285-6 Art, Christian {For particular arts, see their names) : Demons as depicted in, ii. 570 n.^ Early, i. 361 n. Emotionalizing of, i. 361-2 Evolution of, i. 19-20 Germany, in (nth cent.), i. 313 Symbolism the inspiration of, i. 21 ; ii. 108-12 Arthur, King, story of youth of, i. 584- 585 ; relations with Lancelot and Guinevere, i. 600 ; with Parzival, ii. 6, 14-15, 27 Arthurian romances : Comparison of, with Chansons de geste, i. 580-1 German culture influenced by, ii. 55 Origin and authorship of, question as, to, i, 581-3 Universal vogue of, i. 581, 589, 593> otherwise mentioned, i. 547, 554 Arts, the {See also Latin classics) i Classifications of, ii. 342 seg^^ Course of, shortening of, ii. 159, 414 Dictamen, ii. 148, 156, 411 Grammar, see that heading Masters in, at Paris and Oxford, ii. 414-15 ; course for, ii. 418 Seven Liberal, see that heading Asceticism : Christian : Carthusian, i. 400 Early growth of, i. 349-51 Manichean, i. 49 Women's practice of, i. 460, 478-9 Neo-Platonic, i. 43, 44, 46, 50, 347, 350 Astralabius, ii. 32, 35, 54 ; Abaelard's poem to, ii. 220-r and n?- Astrology, i. 44 and n. ; ii. 404 ; Bacon's views on, ii, 529 Astronomy : Chartres study of, i. 301 Gerbert's teaching of, i. 290-1 Patristic attitude toward, i. 72 Ataulf, i. 112, 116 Athanasius, St., estimate of work of, i.. 54, 68 ; Life of St. Anthony by, i- 47i 52 and n. , 84 ; Orationes, i. 68 Atlantis, i. 36 Attila the Hun, i. 112-13, 332 ; in legend, i. 145-7 Augustine, Abp. of Canterbury, i. 6, 2 Q 594 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND 171, 180-2 ; Gregory's letters to, cited, i. 102 Augustine, St., Bp. of Hippo, Platonism of; i- 55 ; personal affinity of, with Plotinus, i. 55-7 ; barbarization of, by Gregory the Great, i. 98, 102 ; compared with Gregory the Great, i. 98-9 ; with Anselm, i. 280 ; with Guigo, i. 401, 406 ; overwhelming influence of, in Middle Ages, ii. 433 t on numbers, i. 72 and n.2, 105 ; attitude toward physical science, i. 302 ; on love of God, i. 358, 360 ; allegorizing of Scripture by, ii. 70-1 ; modification by, of classical Latin, ii. 180 ; Confessions, i. 63 ; ii. 561 ; De Trinitate, i. 64, 68, 74, 96 ; Civitas Dei^ i. 64- 65, 69 ».2, 81-82 ; De moHhus Ecclesiae, i. 65, 67-8 ; De doctrina Christiana, i. 66-7 ; classification scheme based on the Doctrina, ii. 352 ; De spirttu et littera, i. 69 ; De cura pro mortuis, i. 86 ; De genesi ad litteram, ii. 354 ; Alcuin's compends of works of, i. 221 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 5, 53, 71, 75, 82, 87, 89, 104, 186, 226, 356, 370, 382, 386 ; ii. 133, 298, 327, 342 Augustus, Emp., i. 26, 29 Atirillac monastery, 1. 283 Ausonius, i. 126 nJ^ ; Ii. 133 Austrasia : Church organization in, i. 199 Feudal disintegration of, i. 241 Irish monasteries founded in, i. 174 Rise of, under Pippin, i. 209 Authority v> reason, see Reason Auxerre, i. 522-3 Averroes, ii. 420 Averroism, ii. 430-1 Averroists, ii. 314 n., 326 n.^ Avicenna, ii. 420 Avitus, Bp. of Vienne, i. 126 n.^ Azo, ii. 291-2 Bacon, Roger, career of, ii. 516-18 ; tragedy of career, ii. 516 ; relations with Franciscan Order, ii. 329, 516, 517-21 ; encouragement to, from Clement IV., ii. 518-19 and n.^ ; estimate of, ii. 514-16 ; estimate of work of, ii. 432 ; stylS of, ii. 208-9 ; attitude toward the classics, ii. 146-7 ; relations with Grosse- teste, ii. 146-7 ; predilection for physical science, ii. 319, 516-17 ; Albertus Magnus compared with, ii. 452 ; on four causes of ignorance, ii. 524-5 ; on seven errors in theological study, ii. 525-8 ; on experimental science, ii. 532-8 on logic, ii. 535 ; on faith, ii. 537 editions of works of, ii. 514 n. ^ Greek Grammar by, ii. 156 and nn., 514 «., 528 ; MultipUcatio specie- rum, ii. 514 n., 530 ; Opus tertium, ii. 617-20 and nn., 521-2, 527-8 ; Opus majus, ii. 528-30, 522, 524-5, 528-30, 536-8; Optics, ii. 530 ; Opus minus, ii. 520, 525-7 ; Vatican fragment, ii. 520 and n?-, 535 n.^; Compendium studii philo- sophiae, ii. 520, 522-3, 537-8; Compendium tkeologiae, ii. 521 ; otherwise mentioned, ii. 314 «., 365 «*, 419, 56r-2 Bartolomaeus, De proprietatibus rerum of, ii. 346 ».2 Bartolus, ii. 293 Baudri, Abbot of Bourgueil, ii. 221 «.^ Bavaria : Irish monasteries founded in, i. 174 Merovingian rule in, i. 121 Otto's relations with, i. 242 Reorganization of Church in, i. 198-9 Bavarians, i. 145 n.^, 209, 210 Beauty, love of, i. 356 Bee monastery, i. 263 n., 271-3 Bede, estimate of, i. 185-6 ; allegorizing of Scripture by, ii. 73 ».^ ; Church History of the English People, i. 172, 186, 234 ».2 ; De arte metrica, i. 187, 300 ; Liber de temporibus^ 302 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 184, 213 Beghards of Li6ge, i. 381 Belgae, i. 126 Belgica, i. 29, 32 Benedict, Prior, i. 259 Benedict, St., of Nursia, i. 85 and n.*, 94, 100 M.* ; Regula of, see under Monasticism Benedictus, Chronicon of, ii. 188-9 and n?- Benedictus Levita, Deacon, ii. 299 Benoit de St. More, Roman de Troie by, ii. 254, 256-8 Beowulf, i. 141, 143-4 and n.i Berengar, King, i. 257 Berengar of Tours, i. 299, 301, 304-5 ; ii. 164 Bernard, Bro., of Quintavalle, i. 518 Bernard, disciple of St. Francis, i. 441-2 Bernard of Chartres, ii. 157-9, 400 Bernard, St., Abbot of Clairvaux, at Citeaux, i. 376, 409 ; inspires Temp- lars' regula, i. 547 ; denounces and crushes Abaelard, i. 229, 417 ; ii. 374-6, 385 ; denounces Arnold of Brescia, i. 417 ; ii. 199 ; relations with Gilbert de la Porree, ii. 402 ; Lives of, i. 408 «., 409 n.^ ; appear- INDEX 59S ance and characteristics of, i. 408-9 ; estimate of, i. 400 ; ii. 397-8 ; love and tenderness of, i. 360, 361, 400 seqq. ; ii. 395; severity of , i. 416-17; his love of Clairvaux, i. 417-18 ; of his brother, i. 418-20 ; Latin style of, ii. 197-200 ; on church corrup- tion, i. 490 ; on faith, ii. 328 ; un- concerned with physics, ii. 386 ; St. Francis compared with, i. 431-2 ; extracts from letters of, i, 4 1 1 seqq. ; ii. 199 ; Sermons on Canticles — cited, i. 353 «. ; quoted, i. 425-9 ; ii. 197, 398-9 ; De consider atione, ii. 398 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 17, 20, 281, 304, 488, 517 ; Ii. 61, 196 Bernard Morlanensis, De contemptu mundi by, ii. 228 n.^ Bernard Silvestris, Commentum ... of, ii. 142-3 andn.^ ; De mundi univer- sitate, ii. 145, 401 and n. Bemardone, Peter, i. 435, 439-40 Bemward, Bp. of Hildesheim, i. 313 and n?- Bible, see Scriptures Biscop, Benedict, i. 184 Bishops : Armed forces, with, i. 489 Francis of Assisi's attitude toward, i. 446 Gallo- Roman and Frankish, position of, i. 191-2, 194 and nn., 198, 201 n. Investiture of, lay, i. 245-6 and «.* ; ii. 166 Jurisdiction and privileges of, i. 339 ; ii. 266 Papacy's ascendancy over, i. 306 Reluctance to be consecrated, i. 488 Social class of, i. 489 Vestments of, symbohsm of, ii. 103 n.^ Blancandrin, i. 581 Bobbio monastery, i. 178, 284-5 Boethius, death of, i. 89, 93 ; estimate of, i. 89, 92, 102 ; Albertus Magnus compared with, ii. 450 ; works of, i. 90-3 ; Gerbert's familiarity with works of, i. 291 ; works of, studied at Chartres, i. 300-1 ; their import- ance, i. 300 ; De arithmetica, i- 72, 90 ; De geometria, i. 90 ; com- mentary on Porphyry's Isagoge, i. 92 ; ii. 342 ; translation of the Organon, i. 71, 91-2; "loss" of advanced works, ii. 277 n., 364 ; De consolatione philosophiae, i. 89, 188, 189-90, 301 ; mediaeval study of the work, i. 89 ; ii. 162-3 Bologna : Clubs and guilds in, ii. 412 Fight of, against Parma, i. 513 Bologna (cant.) : Law school at, ii. 147, 280, 288-91, 408 Medical school at, ii. 147, 413 n. University, Law, inception and char- acter of, ii. 147, 411-13 ; affiliated universities, ii. 413 n. Bonaventura, St. {John of Fidanza), career of, ii. 433 ; at Paris, ii. 429, 433 ; estimate of, ii. 331 ; style of, ii. 2 1 o- 1 1 ; contrasted with Albertus, ii- 435 ; compared with Aquinas, ii. 435, 467 ; with Dante, ii. 577 ; on faith, ii. 328 ; on Minorites and Preachers, ii. 426 ; attitude toward Plato and Aristotle, ii. 434-5 ; to- ward Scriptures, ii. 435 seqq. ; De reductione artium ad theologiam, ii. 436-8 ; Breviloquium, ii. 438-43 ; Itinerarium mentis in Deum, ii. 443-8 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 344; ii- 313, 338 Boniface, see Winifried- Boniface Boniface VIII., Pope, Sextus of, ii. 301 ; Unam sanctam bull of, ii. 539 Books of Sentences, method of, ii. 337 {See also under Lombard) Botany, ii. 457-8 Bretons, i. 113 Breviarium, ii. 117, 272-3 Britain : Anglo-Saxon conquest of, i. 141 Antique culture in relation to, before Middle Ages, i. ro-ii Celts in, i. 127 n. Christianity of, i. r7i-2 Romanization of, i. 32 Brittany, Duchy of, i. 241 Brude (Bridius), King of Picts, i. 173 Brunhilde, i. r76, 178 Bruno, Abp. of Cologne, i. 310-ri, 399- 400 ; Ruotger's Life of, i. 311 ; ii. 190 and n?- Burgundians : Christianizing of, i. 193 Church's attitude toward, i. 120 Roman law code promulgated by [Papianus), ii. 268, 271 Roman subjects of, i. 121 otherwise mentioned, i. 9-10, 113, 145 Burgundy, i. 175, 244 n?- Byzantine architecture, i. 212 n. Byzantine Empire, see Eastern Empire Csedmon, i. 183, 359 Caesar, C. Julius, cited, i. 27-9, 138, 298 Caesar of Heisterbach, Life of Engelbert by, i. 498-502 and n. ; Dialogi miraculorum, cited, i. 504 «., 507 Canon law : Authority of, ii. 303 596 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND Canon law (cont.) : Basis of, ii. 296-8 Bulk of, ii. 298 Conciliar decrees, collections of, ii. 298 Decretals : Collections of, ii. 298, 300-1, 304 n. False, ii. 299, 302 Gratian's Decretum, ii. 297-8, 299-300, 335 Jus naturale in, ii. 297-8 Lex romana canonice compta, ii. 281 Scope of, ii. 296 Sources of, ii. 298 Supremacy of, ii. 306 Canossa, i. 245 Cantafables, i. 157 n?- Canticles, i. 366 ; Origen's interpreta- tion of, i. 349 ; St. Bernard's Sermons on, i. 353 n,, 425-9 ; ii. 197, 398-9' Capella, Martianus, De nuptiis Philo- logiae et Mercurii of, i. 71 and n.^ ; ii. 583 Catitas, ii. 506-8 ; in relation to faith, ii. 509-11 ; to wisdom, ii. 511 Carloman, King of Austrasia, i. 199-200 and n. , 209 Carloman (son of Pippin), i. 209-10 Camuti, i. 298 Carolingian period : Breviarium epitomes current during, ii. 273, 278 Continuity of, with Merovingian, i. 211-12 Criticism of records non-existent in, i. 234 Definiteness of statement a charac- teristic of, i. 225, 227 Educational revival in, i. 218-19, 222, 236 ; ii. 149, 186 ; palace school, i. 213-14, 218, 229, 236 First stage of mediaeval learning re- presented by, ii. 360, 362 History as compiled in, i. 234-5 King's law in, ii. 276 Latin poetry of, ii. 217, 223, 226 Latin prose of, ii. 185-6 Origin aUty in, circumstances evoking, i. 232-3 Restatement of antique and patristic matter in, i. 237-8, 358-9 Carthaginians, i. 25 Carthusian Order, origin of, i. 399- 400 Cassian's Institutes and ConlocationSj i- 351 Cassiodorus, life and works of, i. 93-7 ; Chronicon, i. 94 ; Variae epistolae^ i. 94 ; De anima, 94-5 ; Institu- tiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum, i. 95-6 ; ii. 387 ».* ; otherwise mentioned, i. 6, 88-9, 115 ; ii. 342 Cathari, i. 49 ; ii. 333 n. Catullus, i. 25 Cavallini, i. 363 Celsus cited, ii. 264, 266 Celtic language, date of disuse of, i. 31 and n. Celts : Gaul, in, i. 125 and n. , 126 - 7, 129 n.^ Goidelic and Brythonic, i. 127 n. Ireland, in, see Irish Italy invaded by (3rd cent. B.c.),i. 24 Latinized, i. 124 Teutons compared with, i. 125 Champagne, i. 241, 589 Chandos, Sir John, i. 570-1 Chanson de Roland, i. 12 »., 544 and W.2, 575-8 Chansons de geste, i. 574 seqq. ; ii. 196, 251 Charlemagne, age of, see Carolingian period ; estimate of, i. 213 ; rela- tions of, with the Church, i. 201, 240 ; ii. 302 ; relations with Angil- bert, i. 235 ; educational revival by, i. 213-14 ; ii. 136, 149, 186, 362 ; book of Germanic poems com- piled by order of, ii. 249 ; Capitu- laries of, ii. 136, 277 ; open letters of, i. 213 ». ; Einhard's Life of, i. 216 ; ii. 186 ; poetic fame of, i. 210 ; false Capitularies ascribed to, ii, 299 ; empire of, non-enduring, i. 239 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 9, 115, 153, 332, 578 ; ii. 34 Charles Martel, i. 197, 198, 209, 332 ; ii. 302 Charles II. (the Bald), King of France, i. 229, 235 Charles III. (the Simple), King of France, i. 240-1 Charles IV., King of France, i. 567 Chartres, industrial development at, i. 341 n. Chartres Cathedral, sculpture of, i. 20, 299 ; ii. 108-11 Chartres Schools : Classics the study of, i. 299-300 ; ii. 145 Fulbert's work at, i. 298-9, 3or Grammar as studied at, ii. 156-7 Medicine studied at, ii. 402 Orleans the rival of, ii. 145 n.^ Trivium and quadrivium at, i. 300-1 ; ii. 191 mentioned, i. 289, 295 Chartreuse, La Grande, founding of, i. 400 {See also Carthusian) Chaucer, ii. 121 Childeric, King, i. 119, 122 INDEX S97 Chivalry : Literature of : Arthurian romances, see that heading Aube (alba) poetry, i. 587 ; ii. 57 Chansons de geste, i. 574 seqq. Nature of, i. 20 Pastorelle, i. 587 Pietistic ideal recognized in, ii. 318, 563 Poems of various nations cited, i. 586 n. Religious phraseology in love poems, i. 366 n.^ Romans d'aventure, i. 680-1, 587 Three branches of, i. 574 Nature of, i. 538, 686 n. Order of, evolution of, i. 540 seqq. {See also Knighthood) Chretien de Troies, romances by, i. 582-3 ; Tristan, i. 583 ; Perceval, i. 583 ; ii. 3-4 ; Erec (Geraint), i. 583, 602 ; ii. 56 n. ; Lancelot or Le Conte de la ckarrette, i. 583, 585-6 ; 598-601; Cligis, i. 583, 602 n.^ ; Ivain, i. 587 n.^, 602 n.^ ; ii. 56 n. ; translation of Ovid's Ars amatoria, i. 590 Christianity : Appropriation of, by mediaeval peoples, stages in, i. 17-18 Aquinas' Summa as concerning, ii. 354 Art, in, see Art Atonement doctrine, Anselm's views on, i. 280-1 Basis of, ii. 297 Britain, in, i. 171-2 Buddhism contrasted with, i. 406 Catholic Church, see Church Completeness of scheme of, ii. 424-5 Dualistic element in, i. 59 Eleventh century, position in, i. 16 Emotional elements in : Fear, i. 103, 355, 358, 399 Hate, i. 348, 355 Love, i. 347, 361 Synthetic treatment of, i. 349 Emotionalizing of, angels as regarded in, i. 364 «.* Eternal punishment doctrine of, i. 65, 355, 502 Faith of, see Faith Feudalism in relation to, i. 540, 543-5 andn.2, 546 Fifth century, position in, i. 15 Gallo-Roman, i. 191-2 German language affected by, i. 202 Greek Fathers' contribution to, i. 5 Greek philosophic admixture in, i. 33-4 Christianity (cont.) : Hell-fear in, i. 103, 356, 358, 399 Hellenic influence on, i. 331 Hymns, see that heading Ideal V. actual, i. 370-1 Incarnation doctrine of, ii. 399 Irish missionaries of, see under Irish Latin as modified for expression of, ii. 180, 182, 184, 192, 200 Marriage as regarded by, ii. 34, 559 MartjTS for, see Martyrs Mediaeval devel opment in relation to, i. II, 170 Mediation doctrine of, i. 54, 59-60 Militant character of, in early cen- turies, i. 69-70, 75 Miracles, attitude toward, i. 50-1 Monasticism, see that heading Neo-Platonism compared with, i. 51 Pagan ethics inconsistent with, i. 66 Pessimism of, toward mortal life, i. 64 Saints, see that heading Salvation : Master motive, as, i. 59, 61, 79, 89 Scholasticism's main interest, as, ii. 326-7, 330, 341 Standard of discrimination, as, ii. 660, 663, 589 Scriptures, see that heading Teutonic acceptance of, see under Teutons Trinity doctrine of : Abaelard's works on, ii'. 36, 328-9, 382-3, 385 Aquinas on, ii. 479-80, 486 Bonaventura on, ii. 446-7 Dante's vision, ii. 581 Peter Lombard's Book on, ii. 353 Roscellin on, ii. 370 Vernacular presentation of, ii. 250 Visions, see that heading Chronicles, mediaeval, ii. 204 Chrysostom, i. 53 Church, Roman Catholic : Authority of, Duns' views on, ii. 546 Bishops, see that heading British Church's divergencies from, i. 171-2 Canon Law, see that heading Charlemagne's relations with, i. 201, 240 ; ii. 273 Classical study as regarded by, i. 261 ; ii. 136 Beqq., 426-7 Clergy, see thai heading Confession doctrine of, i. 505 Constantine's relations with, ii. 295 Creation of, i. 11, 68, 86-7 Decretals, etc., see under Canon Law Denimciations of, i. 490-1 ; ii. 61-2 Diocesan organization of, among Germans, i. 196 598 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND Church, Roman Catholic {cont.) : Doctrinal literature of, i. 68-70 Duns' attitude towards, ii. 543 East and West, solidarity of develop- ment of, i. 55 Empire's relations with, see under Papacy Eternal punishment doctrine of, i. 65, 365, 502 ; ii- 580 Eucharistic controversy, see that head- ing Fathers of the, see Greek thought, patristic ; Latin Fathers ; and chiefly Patristic thought Feudahsm as affected by, i. 540, 543- 6 and n.2, 546 Feudalism as affecting, i. 245, 489 Prankish, see under Franks Gallo-Roman, i. 191-2, 194 Hildegard's visions regarding, i. 473 Intolerance of, see sub-heading Per- secutions Investiture controversy, see under Bishops Irish Church's relations with, i. 172-4 and n.^ Isidore's treatise on liturgical prac- tices of, i. 106 Knights' vow of obedience to, i. 546 Mass, the : Allelma chant and Sequence-hjmin, ii. 225, 230 seqq. Symbolism of, ii. 103-4 Nicene Creed, i. 69 Papacy, Popes, see those headings Paschal controversy, see Eucharistic Penance doctrine of, i. 101, 195 Persecutions by, i. 355 ; of Albi- genses, i. 382-3, 477, 497, 588 ; ii. 196; of Jews, i. 118, 348; of Montanists, i. 348 Popes, see that heading Predestination, attitude toward, i. 228 Property of, enactments regarding, ii. 295 Rationalists in, i. 305 Reforms in {nth cent.), i. 306 Roman law for, ii. 294 and n.^ Sacraments : Definition of the word, ii. 98 and n?- Hugo of St. Victor on, ii. 90, 92, 94-5, 97, 98-100, 116 ».2 Origin of, Bonaventura on, ii. 441-3 Pagan analogy with, i. 53, 59-60 Secularization of dignities of, i. 488 Simony in, i. 246, 491 Spain, in, see under Spain Standards set by, ii. 558-9 Suspects to, estimate of, ii. 562 Church, Roman Catholic {corU.) : Synod of Aix (817), i. 375 Theodosian Code as concerning, ii. \ 295-6 and n.^ [ Transubstantiation doctrine of, i, \ 226-7 ** Truce of God " promulgated by, i. (^ 545 w.^ 4 Churches : Building of, symbolism in, ii. 104-8 Dedication of, sequence designed for, ii. 239-40 Cicero, i. 26 «.8, 39, 78, 220 ; ii. 179 «.^ Cino, ii. 293 1 Cistercian Order : Charta charitatis, i. 377-9 , Clairvaux founded, i. 409 Climiac controversies with, i. 376 Citeaux monastery : Bernard at, i. 376, 409 Foundation and rise of, i. 376-9 Cities and towns : Growth of, in nth cent., i. 339 ; in 12th cent., i. 307, 336 and n. ; ii. 409-10 ; in 13th and 14th cent., i. 341-2 and nn. Italian, see under Italy Origin of, i. 338 Unimportance of, in highest medi- aeval life, i. 344-5 Cities (civitates) of Roman provinces, i. 29-30 Clairvaux (Clara Vallis) : Founding of, i. 376, 409 Position of, i. 378 St. Bernard's love of, i. 417-18 Classics, see Latin classics Claudius, Bp. of Tmia, i. 215, 232 and n?- Claudius, Emp., i. 30 Clement II., Pope, i. 244 Clement IV., Pope, ii. 518-20 Clement V., Pope, Decretales Clemen- tinae of, ii. 301 Clement of Alexandria, ii. 90 Clergy : Accusations against, false, penalty for, ii. 295 Corruption of, i. 265-6 Legal status of, ii. 4r2 RegiUar, see Monasticism Secular : Concubinage of, i. 245 Francis of Assisi's attitude toward, i. 446, 456 Marriage of, i. 488 n.^ Reforms of, i. 375 Standard of conduct for, i. 487 ; ii. 559 Term, scope of, i. 372 Clerval, Abbe, cited, i. 302 n.^ Clopinel, Jean, see De Meun INDEX 599 Clovis (Chlodoweg), i. 114, 117, 119-21, 122, 138, 193-4 ; ii. 274 Cluny monastery : Abaelard at, ii. 51, 52, 375 Characteristics of, i. 271 andn., 375-6 Monastic reforms accomplislied by, i. 295, 306 Cologne, i. 29, 31 Columba, St., of lona, i. 133-7, 173 Columbanus, St., of Luxeuil and Bobbio, i. 6, 133, 174-9, 196 ; Life and works of, 174 n.^ Combat, trial by, i. 232 Commentaries, mediaeval : Boethius', i. 93 Excerpts as characteristic of, i. 104 General addiction to, ii. 420, 583 ».* Originals supplanted by, ii. 420 Raban's, i. 222-3 Compends : Fom"teenth century use of, ii. 553 Mediaeval preference for, i. 94 Medical, in Italy, i. 252 Saints' lives, of {Legenda aurea), ii. 213 Conrad, Duke of Franconia, i. 242 Conrad II., Emp., i. 244 Constantine, Emp., ii. 296 ; " Dona- tion '* of, ii. 62, 295, 300 Constantinus Africanus, i. 262 and n. ; ii. 402 Cordova, i. 25 Cornelius Nepos, i. 25 Cornificiani, ii. 159 and n.^ 403 Cosmogony : Aquinas* theory of, ii. 486 Mediaeval allegorizing of, ii. 91 segg. Patristic attitude toward, i. 72-4 Cosmology, Alan's, in Anticlaudiarms, ii. 407 Cremona, i. 24 Cross, Christian : Magic safeguard, as, i. 296-7 Mediaeval feeling for, ii. 226 Crusades : Constantinople, capture of, i. 334 ; as affecting Western learning, ii. 421 Furst: Chansons concerning, i. 553"4 Character of, i. 551-3 Guibert's account of, ii. 204-5 Hymn concerning, quoted, i. 365 and n. Italians little concerned in, ii. 218 Joinville's accoxmt of, quoted, i. 562-5 Language of, i. 547 Papal relations with, i. 333-4 Results of, i. 307, 332-5 Second, i. 410 Spirit and nature of, i. 332-3> 551-3 Cuchulain, i, 129 and nn.^- ^ Cunningham, W., quoted, i. 337 n. Cynewulf s Christ, i. 183 Cyprian quoted, i. 353 n. C5T:il of Alexandria, i, 227 Cyril of Jerusalem, i. 53 Da Romano, Alberic, i. 531-2 Da Romano, Eccelino, i. 621-2, 532 Dacia, Visigoths in, i, 112 Damiani, St. Peter, Card. Bp. of Ostia, career of, i. 263-5 ; attitude of, to the classics, i. 261, 268 ; ii. 138, 193 ; on the hermit life, i. 385-6 ; on tears, i. 387 and n. ; extract illustrating Latin style of, ii. 193 and n? ; works of, i. 264 n?- ; writings quoted, i. 264-8 ; Liher Gomorrhianus, i. 266, 490 ; Vita Romualdi, i. 388 seqq. ; biography of Dominicus Loricatus, i. 397-8 ; De parentelae gradibus, ii. 281 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 17, 19, 20, 261, 359. 361, 407 ; ii- 61 Damianus, i. 263, 266 Danes, i, 142, 153 Dante, estimate of, ii. 564-5 ; scholar- ship of, ii. 571 n.^ ; possessed by spirit of allegory, ii. 582-5 ; com- pared with Aquinas and influenced by him, ii. 571 ».2, 577, 579, 581, 585 ; compared with Bonaventura, ii. 577 ; attitude to Beatrice, ii. 585-8 ; on love, ii. 585-6 ; on mon- archy, ii. 307 ; De monarchia, ii. 565 ; De vulgari eloquentia, ii. 248, 566 ; Vita nuova, ii. 586, 589 ; Convito, ii. 567-8, 583 ; Divina Commedia, i. 12 n., 345 ; ii. 112, 125 ».\ 129, 248 ; commentaries on this work, ii. 583-4 ; estimate of it, ii. 568, 570-1, 574, 583-4; Inferno cited, ii. 68, 571-3, 576-7 ; Purgatorio cited, ii. 565, 5 72- 3 , 678-9, 584, 588 ; Paradiso cited, i. 411 ; ii. 572-3> 579-81, 588 Dares the Phrygian, ii. 142 and n.^, 253-4 and nn., 255-6 De hello et excidio urbis Comensis, ii. 218-19 De Boron, Robert, i. 583 De casu Diaboli, i. 280 De consolatione philosophiae, see under Boethius De Lorris, Guillaume, Roman de la rose by, i. 602-3 ; ii. 129 and n?-, 130 De Meim, Jean (Clopinel) , Roman de la rose by, ii. 129 and ».\ 130, 252 Denis, St., i. 230 Dermot {Diarmaid, Diarmuid), High- King of Ireland, i. 132-3, 135, 136 Desiderius, Bp. of Vienne, i. 99 6oo THE MEDIAEVAL MIND Desiderius, Pope, i. 264, 264 Devil, the : Mediaeval beliefs and stories as to, i. 503 seqq. Romuald's conflicts with, i. 390, 395- 396 Dialectic [See also Logic) : Abaelard's skill in, ii. 144, 145, 375-6," 383 ; his subjection of dogma to, ii. 334 ; his Dialectica, ii. 376 and nn., 379-80 Chartres study of, i. 300 Duns Scotus' mastery of, ii. 540, 544 Grammar penetrated by, ii. 154 seqq. Hugo of St. Victor on, ii. 93 Raban's view of, i. 222 Thirteenth-century study of, ii. 144-6 Diarmaid (Diarmuid), see Dermot Dictamen, ii. 148, 156, 411 Dictys the Cretan, ii. 253, 254 and n.^ Dies irae, i. 364 Dionysius the Areopagite, ii. 36, 128, 147, 374 Divina Commedia, see under Dante Divination, ii. 404 Dominic, St., i. 382-3, 513 ; ii. 426 Dominican Order : Aristotehanism of, ii. 434 Founding of, i, 382 ; ii. 426 Growth of, i. 514 ; ii. 428 Object of, ii. 426 Oxford University, at, ii. 417 Papacy, relations with, ii. 428, 539 Paris University, position in, ii. 416, 429 Dominicus Loricatus, i. 264, 397-9 Donatus, i. 71, 299-300 ; Afs minor and Barbarismus of, ii. 150-1 Donizo of Canossa, ii. 218 and n.^ Druids : Gallic, i. 28, 298 Irish, i. 133 Du Guesclin, Bertrand, Constable of France, i. 570-2, 573 n. Dims Scotus, education of, ii. 541 ; career of, ii. 543 ; estimate of, ii. 543 ; intricacy of style of, ii. 540, 544, 646 11.2 ; on logic, ii. 534 n.^ ; Occam's attitude toward, ii. 548 seqq. ; editions of works of, ii. 541 «.^ ; estimate of his work, ii. 539-40, 544 Dmistan, St., Abp. of Canterbury, i. 325 Durandus, Guilelmus, Rationale divino- rum officiorum of, ii. 102 seqq. Eadmer, i. 270, 274, 279 Eastern Empire : Architectural influence of, i. 331-2 Eastern Empire (cont.) : Frankish relations with, i. 123 Huns' relations with, i. 112-13 Norse mercenaries of, i. i53 Ostrogoths* relations with, i. 114 Roman restoration by, i. 115 Ebroin, i. 209 .^ Eckbert, Abbot of Shonau, i. 460 Ecstasy : Bernard's views on, ii. 398 Examples of, i. 460, 462 Eddas, ii. 249 Education : Carolingian period, in, i. 213-14, 218-19, 222, 236 ; ii. 136, 149, 186, 362 Chartres method of, ii. 157-8 Grammar a chief study in, ii. 149 seqq., ^Qi-'Z Italy, in, see under Italy Latin culture the means and method of, i. 12 ; ii. 135 Schools, clerical and monastic, i. 250 w.^, 295 Schools, lay, i. 250-2 Seven Liberal Arts, see that heading Shortening of academic course, ad- vocates of, ii. 169, 403 Tenth, eleventh, and twelfth cen- turies, in, i. 248 Edward I., King of England, i. 342 Edward II., King of Englandj i. 567 Edward III., King of England, i. 566-7 Edward the Black Prince, i. 570-2 Einhard the Frank, i. 234 ».^ ; Life of Charlemagne by, i. 216 ; ii. r86 Ekkehart family, i. 310 Ekkehart of St. Gall, Waltarius [Wal- tharilied) by, ii. 217 El-Farabi, ii. 420 Eleventh century : Characteristics of, i. 303 ; in France, i* 303) 306, 328-9 ; in Germany, i. 308-10 ; in England, i. 325 ; in Italy, i. 327-8 Christianity in, position of, i. 16 EUas, Minister- General of the Minorites, i- 515 Elizabeth, St., of Himgary, i. 407, 481 Elizabeth, St., of Schonau, visions of, i. 460-2 Emotional development, secular, i. 365- 366 and n.2 Empire, the, see Holy Roman Empire Encyclopaedias, mediaeval, ii. 346 n.^ ; Vincent's Speculum majus, ii. 345-52 Eneas, ii. 254, 255 Engelbert, Abp. of Cologne, i. 497-502 ; estimate of, i. 498 INDEX 6oi England {See also Britain) : Danish Viking invasion of, i. 153 Eleventh -century conditions in, i. 325 Guild merchant in, i. 340 Law in, principles of, i. 141 -2 ; Roman law almost non-existent in Middle Ages, ii. 277 Norman conquest of, linguistic result of, i. 325 Town government in, i. 342 and n.^ English language, character of, i. 325 Epicureanism, i. 41, 70 ; ii. 326, 342 Eriugena, John Scotus, estimate of, i. 215, 228-9, 231 ; ii. 360 ; on reason V. authority, ii. 328, 332 ; works of, studied at Chartres, i. 301 ; De divisione naturae, i. 230-1 ; ii. 332 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 16, 302 w.^, 305 ; ii. 314 «•, 342 Essenes, i. 350 Ethelbert, King of Kent, i. 180-1 Etymologies of Isidore, i. 33, 105 and «.^ 107-9 ; ii. 348 ; law codes glossed from, ii. 279 Eucharistic (Paschal) controversy : Berengar's contribution to, i. 304-5 Paschasius' contribution to, i. 225-7 Eucherius, Bp. of Lyons, ii. 74 n.^ Euclid, i. 40 Eudemus of Rhodes, i. 38 Eunapius, i, 47, 52 Euric, King of the Visigoths, i. 117 and n?- Eusebius, i. 81 n.^ EvU or sin : Abaelard's views concerning, ii. 380 Eriugena's views concerning, i. 228 Original sin, realism in relation to, ii. 370 n. Peter Lombard and Aquinas con- trasted as to, ii. 338-40 Experimental science. Bacon on, ii. 531-8 Fabliaux, \, 537 n.^ ; ii. 251 Facts, unlimited actuality of, i. 79-80 Faith : Abaelard's definition of, ii. 384 Bacon's views on, ii. 537 Bernard of Clairvaux's attitude toward, ii. 385 Caritas in relation to, ii. 509-11 Cognition through, Aquinas' views on, ii. 476 Occam's views on, ii. 549 Proof of matters of, Aquinas on, ii. 480 Will as functioning in, ii. 509 False Decretals^ i. 104 n., 118 n.^ Fathers of the Church [See also Patristic thought) : Greek, see Greek thought, patristic Latin, see Latin Fathers Faustus, ii. 70 Felix, St., i. 86 Feudalism {See also Knighthood) : Anarchy of, modification of, i. 306 Austrasian disintegration by, i. 241 Chansons regarding, i. 575 seqq.^ 585 Christianity in relation to, i. 540, 543-5 andn.^ 646 Church affected by, i. 245, 489 Guilds in relation to, i. 335-6 Italy not greatly under, i. 242 Marriage as affected by, i. 587, 602 Nature of, i. 337-8 Obligations of, i. 549-50 Origin of, i. 336, 638-9 Principle and practice of, at variance, i. 538 Fibonacci, Leonardo, ii. 531 Finnian, i. 136 Flamenca, i. 581 Flore et Blanchefleur, i. 581 Florence, i. 339-40 Florus, Deacon, of Lyons, i. 229-30 and n. Fonte Avellana hermitage, i. 263-4, 397 Forms, new, creation of, see Mediaeval thought — Restatement Fortimatus, Hymns by, ii. 225-6 Fourteenth century : Academic decadence in, ii. 553 Papal position in, ii. 539-40 France {For particular districts, towns, etc, see their names) : Antique, the, in relation to, before Middle Ages, i. 9-10 Arthurian romances developed in, i. 582 Cathedrals of, ii. 569, 584-5 Church in, secularization of, i. 488-9 Eleventh - century conditions in, i. 303, 306, 328-9 History of, in nth century, i. 302 Hundred Years' War, i. 566 seqq. Jacquerie in (1358), i. 572 Language modifications in, ii. 183 Literary celebrities in (12th cent.), ii. 196 Monarchy of, advance of, i. 305 North and South, characteristics of, i. 329 Rise of, in 14th century, ii. 539 Town-dwellers of, i. 511, 524 Towns in, industrial and political development of, i. 340 «,, 342 Francis, St., of Assisi, birth of, i. 431 ; parentage, i. 435 ; youth, i, 436-9 ; breach with his father, i. 439-40 ; 6o2 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND monastic career, i. 443 seqq. ; French songs sung by, i. 435 and n.2, 443, 448 ; Lives of, i. 431 «• ; style of Thomas of Celano's Life, ii. 211 ; Speculum perfectionis, i. 431 «., 432 n., 454 n.2; ii. 212-13; literal acceptance of Scripture by, i. 381, 422-3 ; on Scripture interpre- tation, i. 443 ^'^ ; "• 212 ; univer- sality of outlook, i. 433; mediaeval- ism, i. 433 ; Christ-influence, i. 433, 434, 448-9 ; inspiration, i. 435 n.^, 457 ; gaiety of spirit, i. 437, 443-4, 447-8 ; poetic temperament, i. 438, 451 ; love of God, man, and nature, i. 382, 444» 448-9, 451-3 5 sim- plicity, i. 445 ; obedience and humility, i. 381 n., 445-6 ; human- ism, i. 511 ; St. Bernard compared with, i. 431-2; St. Dominic contrasted with, ii. 426 ; Fioretti, ii. 213 ; Canticle of Brother Sun, i. 449-50, 456-6 ; last testament of, i. 456-7 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 20, 21, 281, 360, 361, 371-2 ; ii. 332 Franciscan Order : Attractiveness of, i. 514 Augustinianism of, ii. 434 Bacon's relations with, ii. 516, 617-21 Characteristics of, i. 382 Founding of, i. 443 ; ii. 426 Grosseteste's relations with, ii. 541 Object of, U. 426 Oxford University, at, ii. 417, 430 Papacy, rtelations with, ii. 428, 539 Paris University, in, ii. 416, 429 Rise of, ii. 428 Franconia, i. 242 Franks {See also Germans) : Christianity as accepted by, i. 193 Church among : Bishops, position of, i. 194 and nn., 198, 201 n. Charlemagne's relations with, i. 201, 240 ; ii. 302 Clovis, under, i. 194 Lands held by, i. 194, 199-200 ; immunities of, i. 201 and n. Organization of, i. 199 Reform of, by Boniface, i. 196 ; ii. 302 Roman character of, i. 201 Crusaders so styled, i. 333 Division of the kingdom a custom of, i. 239 Gallo- Roman relations with, i. 123 Language of, i. 145 n.^ Law of, ii. 274-5 Missi dominici, i. 211-12 Ripuarian, i. 119, 121 ; ii. 275 Romanizing of, partial, i. 9-10 Salian, i. 113, 119 ; Code, ii. 274-5 Franks (cont.) : Saracens defeated by, i. 209-10 «.^ Trojan origin of, belief as to, ii. 254 and n?- Frederic, Count of Isenburg, i. 499-502 Frederick I. (Barbarossa), Emp., i, 464 Frederick II., Emp., imder Innocent's guardianship, ii. 59-60 ; crowned, ii. 60 ; estimate of, i. 513 ; other- wise mentioned, i. 251 n.^ 334, 433, 497, 521, 526, 533 Free, meaning of term, i. 542 n.^ Free Companies, i. 572 Free will : Angelic, ii. 503 Duns Scotus on, ii. 545 Human, ii. 505 Richard of Middleton on, ii. 542 Freidank, i. 491 ; ii. 62 Frescoes, i. 362-3 Friendship, chivaMc, i. 577-8, 585-6, 599 Frisians, i. 169, 174 ; missionary work among, i. 197 ; 200, 209 Froissart, Sir John, Chronicles of, i. 565 seqq. ; estimate of the work, i. 573 Froumund of Tegemsee, i. 313-14 ; ii. 136 Fulbert, Bp. of Chartres, i. 289, 298-9, 301 Fulbert, Canon, ii. 30-2, 35 Fulco, Bp. of Toulouse, i. 477 Fulda monastery, i. 198, 221 ».*, 236 Fulk of Anjou, ii. 165 Gains, Institutes of, ii. 270, 272 Galahad, i. 585-6, 599, 600 and n.^ Galen of Pergamos, i. 40, 251-2 Gall, St., i. 6, 178, 196 GaUo- Romans : Feudal system among, i. 539 Frankish rule over, i. 120, 123 Literature of, i. 126 «.^ Gandersheim cloister, i. 312 Gaul {For particular districts, towns, etc.y see their names) : Celtic inhabitants of, i. 125 and n. , 126-7, 129 n.^ Druidism in, i. 28, 296 Ethnology of, i. 126 Heathenism in, late survival of, i. 191 n.^ Latinization of, i. 9-10, 29-32 Visigothic kingdom in south of, i. 112, 116, 117, 121 Gauls, characteristics and customs of, i. 27-8 Geoffrey of Beaulieu, Life of St. Louis by, i. 555-8 Gepidae, i. 113, 115 Geraldus, St., i. 283 INDEX 603 Gerard, brother of St. Bernard, i. 418- 420 Gerbert of Aurillac, see Sylvester II. Germajxianguage : Christianity as affecting, i. 202 High and Low, separation of, i. 145 Middle High German literature, ii. 196, 250 Old High German poetry, ii. 223, 249 Germans (Saxons) {See also Franks) : Characteristics of, i. 1 38-40, 147, 151-2 Language of, see German language Latin as studied by, i. 308-10, 314 ; ii. 160, 182-3 Literature of, ii. 249-50 {See also sub- heading Poetry) Marriage as regarded by, ii. 57 Nationalism of, in 13th cent., ii. 55 Poetry of : Hildebrandslied, i. 145-7 Kudrun (Gudrun), i. 148, 149-52 ; ii. 249 Nibelungenlied, i. 145-6, 148-9, 152, 193. 203 «.2 ; ii. 249 Waltarius, i. 147 and n., 148 otherwise mentioned, i. 113, 115, 119, 174, 209, 210 Germany : Antique, the, in relation to, before Middle Ages, i. lo-ir Art in (nth cent.), i. 313 Church in, secularization of, i. 488 Italy contrasted with, as to culture, i. 250-1 Merovingian supremacy in, i. 121 Papacy as regarded by, ii. 55, 60, 61-2 Sequence- composition in, ii. 244 Town privileges and craft guilds in, i. 343 and n. Gertrude of Hackebom, Abbess, i. 482 Gilbert de la Porree, Bp. of Poictiers, ii. i59j 402 Gnduin, Abbot of St. Victor, ii. 88 and n.^ Giraldus Cambrensis, ii. 162 and n. Girard, Bro., of Modena, i. 514 Glaber, Radulphus, Histories of, i. 504 ». Glass- pain ting, ii. 108-12 Gnosticism, i. 51 n.^ Gnostics, Eriugena compared with, i. 231 and n.^ Godehard, Bp. of Hildesheim, i. 313 Godfrey of Bouillon, i. 551-4 Godfrey of Viterbo, ii. 219 and n.* Gondebaud, King of the Burgundians, ii. 271 Good and the true compared, ii. 471, 542 Goths {See also Visigoths) : Christianity of, i. 192, 194 Roman Empire invaded by, i. in segq. Gottfried von Strassburg, i. 583 ; ii. 252 ; Tristan of, i. 593-8 ; ii. 4 Gottschalk, i. 215, 221 n.^, 224-5, 228 ; verses by, ii. 226-8 • Government : Church V. State controversy, ii. 305-6 {See also Papacy — Empire) Ecclesiastical, see Canon Law Monarchical, ii, 306-7 Natural law in relation to, ii. 307-8 Representative assemblies, ii. 307 Grace, Aquinas* definition of, ii. 508-9 Grail, the, ii. 4, 5 «., 11-13, 22, 23, 28 Grammar : Chartres studies in, i. 300 ; ii. 156-7 Ciuxent usage followed by, ii. 191 and n.^ Hugo of St. Victor on, ii. 93 Importance and predominance of, in Middle Ages, i. log and n., 294 ; ii. 361-2 Italian study of, ii. 166, 411 Language continuity preserved by, ii. 149-50, I79» 183 Law studies in relation to, ii. 148 Logic in relation to, ii. 154 seqq., 363-4 ; in Abaelard's work, ii. 376 Raban's view of, i. 222 Scholastic classification of, ii. 343 Syntax, connotation of term, ii. 152 Works on — Donatus, Priscian, Alex- ander, ii. 150 fleqq. Grammarian, meaning of term, i. 251 Gratianus, Decretum of, ii. 297-8, 299- 300, 336, 410-12 ; dicta, ii. 300 Greek classics, see Greek thought, pagan Greek language : Bacon's Grammar of, ii. 155 and nn. Oxford studies in, ii. 146-7, 421 Translations from, direct, in 13th cent., ii. 421 Greek legends, mediaeval allegorizing of, ii. 78, 82-5 Greek novels, ii. 253 and n. Greek thought, pagan : Bacon's attitude toward, ii. 521-2 Breadth of interest of, ii. 135 Christian standpoint contrasted with, i. 406 ; ii. 325-6 Church Fathers permeated by, i. 33-4 Completeness of schemes presented by, ii. 424 Limitless, the, abhorrent to, i. 369-70 Love as regarded by, i. 591 Metaphysics in, ii. 365-7 6o4 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND Greek thought, pagan {cont.) : Scholasticism contrasted with, 11- 326 Summa moralium philosophorum, 11. 403 Symbolism in, 11. 68, 82 Transmutation of, through Latin medium, i. 4 Greek thought, patristic {See also Patristic thought) : Comparison of, with Latin, i. 68 Pagan philosophic thought con- trasted with, ii. 325-6 Symbolism in, ii. 69 Transmutation of, through Latin medium, i. 5, 34 and n. Gregorianus, ii. 269, 272 Gregory, Bp. of Tours, i. 121 ; Historia Francofum by, i. 234 n.^ ; ii. 183 Gregory I. {the Great), Pope, family and education of, i. 97 ; Augustine of Hippo compared with, i. 98-9 ; Augustinianism barbarized by, i. 98, 102 ; sends mission to England, i- 6, 33, 180-1 and n.^ ; estimate of, i. 66, 89, 102-3, 358 ; estimate of his writings, i. 370 ; on miracles, i. 100, 182 ; on secular studies, ii. 318 ; letter to Theoctista cited, 1. 102 n? ; editions of works of, i. 97 n. ; works of, translated by King Alfred, i. 187 ; Dialogues on the Lives and Miracles of the Italian Saints, 1. 85 and n.^, 100 ; Moralia, i. 97, 100 ; 11. 83 ; Odo's epitome of this work, ii. 189 and n.^ ; Com- mentary on Kings, 1. roo n.^ ; Pastoral Rule, i. 102, 187-8 ; other- wise mentioned, i. 16 and «.*, 65, 87, 104, 116 Gregory II., Pope, i. r97-8 ; ii. 302 Gregory III., Pope, 1. 198 ; ii. 302 Gregory VII., Pope (Hildebrand), claims of, 1. 244-6 ; ii. 303 ; rela- tions with Damiani, i. 264 ; exile of, 1. 245, 254 ; estimate of, 1. 262 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 17, 174 n.^, 244, 306 Gregory IX., Pope, codification by, of Canon law, ii. 301 ; efforts of, to improve education of the Church, ii. 428 ; mentioned, 1. 334, 492 ; ii. 60 Gregory of Nyssa, i. 53, 80, 87, 356 Grosse teste, Robert, Chancellor of Oxford University and Bp. of Lincoln, Greek studies promoted by, ii. 146-7, 421 ; translations by, 11. 146-7 and n.^ ; estimate of, ii. 541-2 ; Bacon's estimate of, ii. 146 ; Augustinianism of, U. 433 - 4 ; attitude toward the classics, ii. 146, 419 ; relations with Franciscan Order, ii. 541 ; Bacon's relations with, 11. 517 ; titles of works of, 11. 531 n.^; edition of works of, ii. 146 n. Gudrun {Kudrun)^ i. 148, 149-52 ; ii. 249 Guibert of Nogent, ii. 204-5 Guigo, Prior, estimate of, 1- 406-7 ; re- lations with St. Bernard, 1. 42 r ; Consuetudines Carthusiae by, i. 400 ; Meditationes of, 1. 401-6 Guilds : Aim of, i. 337 Craft, i. 340 seqq. Merchant, i. 340 Nature of, 1. 336 Origin of, 1. 340 Guinevere, 1. 585, 600 and n.\ 601 Gulot de Provens, " Bible " of, i. 491-2 and n?- Guiscard, Robert, ii. 189 n.^ Gumpoldus, Bp. of Mantua, Life of Wenceslaus by, 11. 190 «.^ Gundissalinus, Archdeacon of Segovia, ii. 342 and «.*, 343 Gunther, Ligurinus of, ii. 221 and «.* Gimzo of Novara, 1. 258-9, 310 Harding, Stephen, Abbot of Citeaux, 1. 376, 377, 409 Harold Fairhair, i. 153 Hartmann von Aue, i. 364-5 and n. 583 ; ii. 59 n. Harun al Raschid, Caliph, 1. 210 Heinrich von Veldeke, 1. 583 ; ii. 56 n. Heliand, i. 203 and nn., 309 Helias, Count of Maine, ii. 164-5 Hell: Dante's descriptions of, ii. 576-7 Fear of. 1. 103, 355, 358, 399 Visions of, 1. 470-r, 472 n. Heloise, Abaelard's love for, ii. 30-1, 374 ; his love-songs to, ii. 39, 236 ; love of, for Abaelard, i. 601 ; 11. 29, 31, 34, 35, 41-2 ; burth of Astra- labius, ii. 32 ; opposes marriage with Abaelard, 11. 32-5 ; marriage, ii. 35 ; at Argenteuil, ii. 35, 36 ; takes the veil, ii. 36 ; at the Para- clete, ii. 36 seqq. ; letters of, to Abaelard quoted, ii. 37-41, 43-6, 49, 50 ; Abaelard*s letters to, quoted, 11. 42-3, 47-9, 50-1 ; Peter the Venerable's letter, ii. 51-3 ; letter of, to Peter the Venerable, 11. 53 ; death of, ii. 54 ; intellectual capacity of, ii. 29 Henry the Fowler, i. 242 Henry II., Emp., i. 244 ; dirge on death of, 11. 245 Henry HI., Emp., i. 244 Henry IV., Emp., i. 245 ; 11. 195 INDEX 60s Henry VI., Emp., ii. 59, 219 Henry I., King of England, ii. 166, 173, 205-7 Henry II., King of England, ii. 160, 162, 402 Henry of Brabant, ii. 421 Henry of Ghent, ii. 542 Henry of Huntington cited, i. 541 Henry of Septimella, ii. 219 and n.^ Heretics {For particular sects, see their names) : Abaelard's views on coercion of, ii. 380, 384 Insignificance of, in relation to medi- aeval thought, ii. 313 and n. Theodosian enactments against, ii. 295 Twelfth centiury, in, i. 307 Herluin, Abbot of Bee, i. 272-3 Hermann, Landgraf of Thuringen, ii. 4, 56 Hermann Contractus, i. 315-16 and n?- Hermits : Irish, i. 133 Motives of, i. 351, 379 Temper of, i. 384 seqq. Hermogenianus, ii. 269, 272 Herodotus, i. 77 Hesse, Boniface*s work in, i. 197-8 Hilarion, St., i. 86 Hilary, Bp. of Poictiers, i. 63, 68, 70 Hildebert of Lavardin, Bp. of Le Mans and Abp. of Tours, career of, ii. 164-8 ; love of the classics, ii. 167-9, 173, 561 ; letters of, quoted, ii. 167, 170, 171-2, 173-4 ; Latin text of letter, ii. 200 ; Latin elegy by, ii. 220 ; otherwise mentioned, ii. 87, 160, 161, 403 n.2 Hildebrand, see Gregory VII. Hildehrandslied, ii. 249 Hildegard, St., Abbess of Bingen, dedi- cation of, i. 463 ; visions of, i. 268, 465-75 ; af&nity of, with Dante, ii. 569 ; correspondence of, i. 464 ; works of, i. 462 n. ; Book of the Rewards of Life, i. 468-72 ; Scivias, i- 473-5 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 20, 361, 459 ; ii- 332, 395 Hildesheim, bishops of (nth cent.), i. 313 Hilduin, Abbot, i. 230 Hincmar, i. 215, 230, 233 n.'' Hipparchus, i. 40 Hippocrates, i. 40, 301 History : Carolingian treatment of, i. 234-5 Classical attitude toward, i. 77-8 Eleventh - century treatment of, i. 302 Historia tripartita of Cassiodorus, 1. 96-7 History {cant.) : Patristic attitude toward, i. 80-4 Seven Books of Histories adversum paganos by Orosius, i. 82-3 Holy Roman Empire : Burgundy added to, i. 244 n.^ German character of, ii. 59 Papacy, relations with, see under Papacy Refounding of, by Otto, i. 244 Rise of, under Charlemagne, i. 212 Honorius II., Pope, i. 547 Honorius III., Pope, i. 382, 498, 513 ; ii. 60, 415 n., 428 Honorius of Autun — on classical study, ii. 126, 128-9 ; Speculum ecclesiae of, ii. 76 seqq. ; Gemma animae, ii. 103 n?- Hosius, Bp. of Cordova, i. 118 n?- Hospitallers, i. 547 Hrotsvitha, i. 312 and n.^ ; ii. 244 n.^ Huesca (Osca), i. 25 Hugh, Abbot of Cluny, ii. 164 Hugh Capet, i. 240-1 and n. Hugh the Great, Count of Paris, i. 242 Hugh of Payns, i. 547 Hugo, Archdeacon of Halberstadt, ii. 88 Hugo, Bro., of Montpellier, i. 526-30 Hugo, King, i. 243 Hugo of St. Victor, estimate of, ii. 89, 137, 144, 331, 386 ; allegorizing by, ii. 397 ; on classical study, ii. 126-7 ; on logic, ii. 363 ; pupils of, ii. ri3 ; works of, ii. 87 n.^ ; Didascalicon, ii. 74 n.^, 89, 127, 342, 387 and nn.^-^ ; De sacramentis Christianae Jidei, ii. 74 n.^, 90 seqq., 395» 425, 570 ; Expositio in regulam beati Augustini, ii. 88 n.^ ; De area Noe moralij ii. loi n., 395-7 ; De area Noe mystica, ii. 397 ; De vani- tate mundi, ii. loi n., 127-8 Summa sententiarum, ii. 386 Sermons on Ecclesiastes , ii. 388-9 otherwise mentioned, i. 17, 20, 344, 473 ; ii- 434 Humanists, ii. 153 Humiliati of Lombardy, i. 381 Hungarians, i. 242-3 Huns, i. 112, 119, 193 Huon de Bordeaux, i. 580 Hy (lona) Island, i. 136, 173 Hymns, Christian : Abaelard, by, ii. 51, 236-8 Estimate of, i. 21 Evolution of, i. 363-5 and n.; ii. 125, 229 seqq. Hildegard's visions regarding, i. 475 Hugo of St. Victor, by, ii. 112 seqq. Sequences, development of, ii. 225, 230-5 ; Adam of St. Victor's, ii. 238-44 6o6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND lamblicus, i. 42, 47, 51, 56-7 ; "• 325 Iceland, Norse settlement in, i. 153 Icelanders, characteristics and customs of, i. 154 Icelandic Sagas, see Sagas Ideal V. actual, i. 369 seqq. Industrial organization, i. 335 seqq., 340-1 Innocent II., Pope, i. 410 ; ii. 36 Innocent III., Pope, i. 333, 343, 433, 497, 513 ; ii. 59, 303, 414, 428 Innocent IV., Pope, i. 522 Intellectus agens, ii. 494, 537 n.^ lona (Hy) Island, i. 136, 173 Ireland : Celts in, see Irish Church of, missionary zeal of, i. 133, 136, r72 seqq. Danish settlements in, i. 153 Monasteries in, i. 153 n.*, r73 Norse invasion of, i. 134 Scholarship in, i. 180 n., 184-5 Irenaeus, Bp. of Lyons, i. 225 Irish : Art of, i. 128 nJ- Characteristics of, i. 128, 130, 133, 179 History of, i. r27 and n. Influence of, on mediaeval feeling, i. 179 cind n. Literature of, i. 128 and n.^, 129 seqq., 134 ; poetry, ii. 223 Missionary labours of, i. 133, r36, 172 seqq. ; defect of, i. 179, 196 Norse harryings of, i. 133-4 J inter- course with, i. 152 «.3 Oxford University, at, ii. 417 Imerius, ii. 148, 289, 410-11 ; Summa codicis of, ii. 284-8 Irrationality [See also Miracles) : Neo-Platonic teaching as to, i. 42-4, 48, 52 Patristic doctrine a? to, i. 5T-3 Isabella, Queen, wife of Edward IL, i. 566-7 Isidore, Abp. of Seville, estimate of, i. 89, 103, 118 n.^ ; Bede com- pared with, i. 185-7 ; False Decretals attributed to, i. 118 n?- ; ii. 299, 302 ; works of, i. 104-9 \ Etymologiae, see Etymologies of Isidore ; Origines, i- 236, 302 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 6, 88 ; ii. 72, 342 Italian people in relation to the antique, i. 7-8 Italy [For particular districts, towns, etc., see their names) : Celtic inroads into (3rd cent, b.c), i.24 Church in, secuiarization of, i. 488 Cities in : Administration of, i. 343 Character of, i. 338-9 Italy [cont.) : Cities in [cont.) : Continuity of, through dark ages, 1- 249, 339j 510-11 ; ii- 4" Fighting amongst, i. 513-14 Importance of, i. 242, 327, 345, 510-12 Continuity of culture and character in, i. 249, 342, 513 ; ii. 147-9 Dante as influenced by, ii. 564-5 Education in — during Carolingian period, i. 214 ; lay, persistence of, i. 249-52 ; clerical and monastic, i. 250 n.^ Eleventh-century conditions in, i. 327-8 Feudalism not widely fixed in, i. 242 Feuds in, i. 531-2 Granunar as studied in, i..25o andn.^; ii. 156 Irish monasteries founded in, i. 174 Literature of, mediaeval, lack of ori- ginality in, ii. 218 ; eleventh- century verse, i. 252 seqq. ; ii. 193 «.\ 215 Lombard kingdom of (6th cent.), i. 115-16 Maritime republics, rise of, i. 334 Medicine studied in, i. 251 and «.2, 252 ; ii. 147 Unification of, under Rome, i. 23 Jacobus i Voragine, Legenda aurea by, ii. 213-14 Jacques de Vitry, Bp. and Card, of Tusculum, i. 477 and n. ; Exempla of, i. 504 n., 506 Jerome, St., estimate of, i. 360, 370 ; letter of, on asceticism, i. 351 and n.^ ; love of the classics, ii. 133, 138, 561 ; modification by, of class- ical Latin, ii. 180, 200 ; two styles of, ii. 200 and n. \ Life of Paulus by, i. 84, 86 ; Life of Hilarion, i. 86 ; Contra VigilarUium, i- 86 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 56, 75, 76, 104 Jerome of Ascoli (Pope Nicholas IV.), ii. 520-1 Jews : Agobard's tracts against, i. 232-3 Gregory the Great's attitude toward, i. 102 Louis IX. 's attitude toward, i. 56r Persecution of, i. ri8, 348 Joachim, Abbot of Flora, Evangelicum eternumoi, i. 518 «., 626, 528-9,533 John, Bro., of Vicenza, i. 519-20 John X., Pope, i. 243 John XL, Pope, i. 243 John XII., Pope, i. 244 ; ii. 188-9 John XIIL, Pope, i. 284 INDEX 607 John XXII., Pope, Decretales extra- vagantes of, ii. 301 John Holywood, ii. 531 n.^ John of Damascus, ii. 147 and n.^, 469 n.^ John of Fidanza, see Bonaventura John of Parma, Minister- General of Franciscans, i. 523, 524, 527 John of Salisbury, estimate of, ii. 144, 403-4 ; Chartres studies described by, ii. 157-9 ; attitude of, to the classics, ii. 140, 192, 202-3, 561 ; Latin style of, ii. 201-3 ; Policrati- cus, ii. 140-1 and «., 203-4 ; Meta- logicus, ii. 201-2 ; Entheticus, ii. 221 ; De septem septenis, ii. 405 John the Deacon, Chronicon Venetum by, i, 326-7 JoinvUle, Sire de, Histories of St. Louis by, i. 555> 568-65 Jordanes, compend of Gothic history by, i. 94 Jordanes of Osnabriick cited, ii. 305 n.^ Joseph of Exeter, ii. 254 nJ^ Jotsaldus, Life of Odilo by, i. 297-8 Judaism, emotional elements in, i. 347-8 Julianus, Epitome of, ii. 271, 278, 283 Jumi^ges cloister, ii. 230 Jurisprudence [See also Roman law) ; Imerius an exponent of, ii. 285, 288 Mediaeval renaissance of, ii. 294 Roman law, in, beginnings of, ii. 261 Justinian, Codex, Institutes, Novellae of, see under Roman law ; Digest of, see Roman law — Pandects Jutes, i. 140 Jutta, i. 463 Keating quoted, i. 136 Kilwardby, Richard, Abp. of Canter- bury, De ortu et divisione philo- sophiae of, ii. 343 Kilwardby, Robert, ii. 155 Knighthood, order of : Admission to, persons eligible for, i. 543 Code of, i. 540 Hospitallers, i. 547 Investiture ceremony, i. 541-4 Love the service of, i. 584^ 689 Templars, i. 547-51 Virtues and ideals of, i. 545-7, 583-4 Knowledge : Cogitation, meditation, contempla- tion (Hugo's scheme), ii. 388 seqq. Forms and modes of, Aquinas on — divine, ii. 481-5 I angelic, ii. 489- 492 ; himian, ii. 493 seqq. Grades of, Aquinas on, ii. 491, 497 Primacy of, over will maintained by Aquinas, ii. 470-1 La Fert6 Monastery, i. 378 Lambert of Hersfeld, Annals of, i. 314 ; ii. 195 Lambertus Audomarensis, Liber Flori- dus of, ii. 346 n.2 Lamprecht, Karl, cited, i. 343 n. Lancelot of the Lake, i.583, 585-6, 598- 601 ; Old French prose version of, i. 599 seqq. Land tenure, feudal, i. 539-40 Lanfranc, Primate of England, i. 174 n.^ 262 n., 271, 274 Langue d'oc, ii. 251, 277 Langue d'oil, ii. 251, 277 Languedoc, chivahric society of (nth and 12th centuries), i. 588 Laon cathedral school, i. 295 Latin classics : Abaelard's reference to, ii. 383 Alexandrian antecedents of the verse, ii. 179 n.^ Artificial character of the prose, ii, 179 n.^ Breadth of interest of, ii. 135 Characteristics of, ii. 181 Chartres a home of, i. 298 ; ii. 145 Common elements in, ii. 177, 185 Dante's attitude toward, ii. 571, 574 ; his quotations from, ii. 573 «.^ Ecclesiastical attitude toward, i. 260 ; ii. 126 seqq.\4.26-7 Familiarity wiUi, of Damiani, i. 261 ; ii. 193 ; Gerbert, i. 287-8 ; ii. 126 ; John of Salisbury, ii. 140, 192, 201, 561 ; Bernard of Chartres, ii. 157-9 ; Peter of Blois, ii. 160-1 ; Hildebert, ii. 167-9, 173, 561 Knowledge-storehouses for the Middle ' Ages, as, ii. 134 Mastery of, complete, as affecting mediaeval writings, ii. 192 Reverential attitude of mediaevals toward, ii. 133-5 Scripture study as aided by study of, ii. 126, 128, 146 Suggestions of new ideas from, for Northern peoples, ii. 163 Themes of, in vernacular poetry, ii. 252 seqq. Twelfth- century study of, ii. 143-4 Latin Fathers {See also their names and Patristic thought) : Comparison of, with Greek, i. 68 Style and diction of, ii. 178, 180 seqq. Symbolism in, ii. 69-72 Transmutation by, of Greek thought, i. 5, 34 and n. Latin language : Britain, position in, i. 10, 32 Children's letters in, ii. 150 n. Christianity as modifying, ii. 180, 182, 184, 192, 200 6o8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND Latin language {cont.) : Continuity of, preserved by universal study of grammar, ii. 149-60, i79» 183 " Cornificiani '* in regard to, ii. 159 and ».2, 403 Educational medium as, ii. 135 Genius of, susceptible of change, ii. 177 German acquisition of, i. 10, 32, 307-8, 313 ; ii. 160, 183 Grammar of, see Grammar Mediaeval modifications in, ii. 151-2, 192 Patristic modifications of, ii. 178, 180 seqq. ; Jerome's, ii. 180, 200 Spelling of, mediaeval, i. 219 Sphere of, ii. 248-9 Supremacy of (during Roman con- quest period), i. 4, 23-4 and ii.\ 25, 30-1 Translations from, scanty nature of, ii. 361 ».2 Translations into, difficulties of, ii. 528 Universality of, as language of scholars, ii. 248, 361 n.^ Vernacular, developments of, ii. 179 Vitality of, in relation to vernacular tongues, ii. 248 Latin prose, mediaeval : Antecedents of, ii. 179 seqq. Best period of, ii. 196 Bulk of, ii. 185 n. Carolingian, ii. 185-7 Characteristics of, ii. 184 Cursus, cultivation of, ii. 197 n. Estimation of, difficulties of, ii. 185 and n. Influences upon, summary of, ii. 183- 184 Prolixity and inconsequence of, ii. 181 Range of, ii. 182 Simplicity of word - order in, ii. 191 n.^ Stages of development of, ii. 185 seqq. Style in, beginnings of, ii. 192 Stylelessness of, in Carolingian period, ii. 185-7 Thirteenth-century styles, ii. 207-8 Value of, as expressing the mediaeval mind, ii. 184, 192 Latin verse, mediaeval : Accentual and rhyming compositions, ii. 223 ; two kinds of, ii. 225 Antecedents of, ii. 216 n.^ Carmina Burana (Goliardic poetry), ii. 232, 246-8 and n. Development of, stages in, ii. 216 Leonine hexameters, ii. 228 and n.^ Latin verse, mediaeval (cont.) : Metrical composition, ii- 216 seqq. ; elegiac verse, ii. 219-21 and n.^ ; hexameters, ii. 221 ; Sapphics, ii. 221-2 and n.^ Modi, ii. 244-5 North and south compared as to, ii. 193 n?- Rhyme, development of, ii. 224, 236 Law : Barbarian, Latin codes of, ii. 273 seqq. Barbaric conception of, ii. 274, 277-8 Breviarium, see under Roman law Canon, see Canon law English, principles of, i. 141-2 Grammar in relation to, ii. 148 Lombard codes, i. 115 ; ii. 271, 276 277, 282 ; Concordia, ii. 288 Natural : Gratian on, ii. 297-8 Jus gentium in relation to, ii. 263 and n., 297 Occam on, ii. 549 Sacraments of, ii. 100 and n.^ Supremacy of, ii. 298, 308 Roman, see Roman law Salic, ii. 274-5 Territorial basis of, i. 123 ; ii. 276 Tribal basis of, i. 123 ; ii. 274-6 Visigothic codification of, in Spain, i. 118 Leander, Bp. of Seville, i. 118 n?- L^gonais, Chretien, ii. 259 and n.^ Leo, Brother, Speculum perfectionis by, ii. 212-13 Leo I. (the Great), Pope, i. ri3, 116 Leo IX., Pope, i. 244 Leon, Sir Guy de, i. 568-9 Leon, Sir Herve de, i. 568-9 LeowigUd, i. 117 n.^, 118 n.^ Lerins monastery, i. 195 Lewis, Lord, of Spain, i. 568-9 Liberal arts, see Seven Liberal Arts Liutgard of Tongern, i. 479-81 Liutprand, Bp. of Cremona, i. 267-8 ; ii. 189 n.^ Liutprand, King of Lombards, i. 115-16 Logic {See also Dialectic) : Albertus Magnus on, ii. 343-5, 534, 536 "* Aristotelian, mediaeval apprehension of, ii. 359 {See also Aristotle — Organon) Bacon's attitude toward, ii. 535 Gerbert's preoccupation with, i. 284, 291, 294 Grammar in relation to, ii. 154 seqq.^ 363-4 ; in Abaelard's work, ii. 376 Importance of, in Middle Ages, i. 236; ii. 327 ■*" INDEX 6q9 Logic {cont.) : Nature of, ii. 363 ; schoolmen's views on, ii. 343-5, 363 Occam's views on, ii. 552 Patristic attitude toward, i. 71 Raban's view of, i. 222 Scholastic classification of, ii. 343 seqq. Scholastic decay in relation to, ii. 553 Second stage of mediaeval develop- ment represented by, ii. 362-4 Specialisation of, in 12th cent., ii. 145 Theology in relation to, ii. 370 n., 376 Twofold interpretation of, ii. 363 Universals, problem of, ii. 369 seqq. ; Abaelard*s treatment of, ii- 372, _ 378 Lombard, Peter, estimate of, ii. 400 ; Gratian compared with, ii. 299 ; Bacon's attitude toward, ii. 526 ; Books of Sentences by, i. 17, 18 ; ii. 161, 400 ; early forerunners of, i. 106 «. ; method of the work, ii. 336 ; Aquinas* Summa contrasted with it, ii. 337-40 ; its classification scheme, ii. 352-4 ; Bonaventura's commentary on it, ii. 438 Lombards : Italian kingdom of (6th cent.), i. 115-16 Italian influence on, i. 7, 250 Law codes of, see under Law Louis of Bavaria, Emp., ii. 548 Louis I. (the Pious), King of France, i. 234, 240, 375 ; false capitularies ascribed to, ii. 299 Louis VI. (the Fat), King of France, i. 306-7, 410, 416 ; ii. 88 ; Hilde- bert's letter on encroachments of, ii. 166, 200 Louis IX. (the Saint), King of France, Geoffrey's Vita of, i. 555-8 ; Join- ville's Histoire of, i. 558-65 ; Testa- ment of, i. 556 n.^ ; otherwise men- tioned, i. 333, 492, 523-6, 531 Love, Aquinas on distinguishing defini- tions of, ii. 505-6 Love, chivalric : Antique conception of love con- trasted with, i. 591 Chansons de geste as concerned with, i. 580 Code of, by Andrew the Chaplain, i. 591-2 Dante's exposition of, ii. 585-6 Estimate of, mediaeval, i. 584, 586 Literature of, see Chivalry — Litera- ture Marriage in relation to, i. 587 and n.^ Minnelieder as depicting, ii. 57 Nature of, i. 588-91, 598-603 VOL. II Love, chivalric {cont.) : Stories exemplifying — Tristan, i. 593 seqq. ; Lancelot, 598 seqq. Love, spiritual : Aquinas' discussion of, ii. 502-3, 506 Bernard of Clairvaux as exemplify- ing, i. 410 seqq. Luchaire, A., cited, i. 334 n., 337 n., 338 nn., 340 nn., 341 n., 343 n. ; ii. 60 n.^; Les Communes franqaises, quoted i. 336 n. Lupus, Servatus, Abbot of Ferrlferes, i. 215, 237 and n. ; ii. 139 Luxeuil, i. 175-7 Lyons : Diet of the " Three Gauls " at, i, 30 Law studies at, ii. 279 Macrobius, Saturnalia of, ii. 142 and Magic, i. 46-8 ; ii. 529 and n.^ Majolus, Abbot of Cluny i. 375 Manichaeism, i. 49 ; ii. 70, 313 Manny, Sir Walter, i. 568-70 Mapes (Map), Walter, i. 491, 583 ; ii. 248 n. Marie, Countess, de Champagne, i. 582, 589, B92 Marie de France, i. 582, 583, 589 ; Eliduc by, i. 587 n.'^ Marinus (hermit), i. 389 Marozia, i. 243 Marriage : Christian attitude toward, ii. 34 ; ecclesiastical view, ii. 559 Feudalism as affecting, i. 587, 602 German view of, ii. 57 Marsilius of Padua, ii. 306 n.^ Martin V., Pope, i. 344 Martin, St., of Tours, i. 350 ; Life of, i. 52 and n., 84, 85 n.^, 86 Martyrs : Mediaeval view of, i. 499 Patristic attitude toward, i. 86 Mary, St., of Ognies, i. 488-9 ; nature of visions of, i. 475 Massilia, i. 26 Mathematics : Bacon's views on, ii. 528-g Gerbert's proficiency in, i. 284, 290 John Holywood's treatise on, ii. 531 «-^ Mathew Paris cited, ii- 517 Matthew of Vendome, Ars versificatoria by, ii. 21% and n.^ Maurus, Rabanus, see Rabanus Mayors of the palace, i. 241 Mechthild of Magdeburg, i. 20, 361 ; ii. 395 ; Book of, i. 481 and n^ -6, Mediaeval thought : Abstractions, genius for, ii. 309 Characteristics of, i. 13 2 R 6io THE MEDIAEVAL MIND Mediaeval thought {cont.) : Commentaries characteristic of, ii. 420, 583 ».« Conflict inherent in, i. 22 ; ii. 323-4 Deference of, toward the past, i. 13 ; ii. 564 Emotionalizing by, of patristic Christianity, i. 361 Metalogics rather than metaphysics the final stage of, ii. 367 Moulding forces of, i. 3, 5, 12 ; ii. 323-4 Orthodox character of, ii. 313 and n. Political theorizing, ii. 304 seqq. Problems of, origins of, ii. 324-5 Restatement and rearrangement of antique matter the work of, i. 13- 15, 224, 238, 294, 358; ii. 327, 359, 371 : Culmination of third stage in, ii. 424 Emotional transformations of the antique, i. 18 seqq. Intellectual transformations of the antique, i. 14 seqq. Salvation the main interest of, i. 58-9, 350 ; ii. 326-7, 330 Scholasticism, see that heading Superstitions accepted by, i. 503 Symbolism the great influence in, ii. 69, 128, 395 Three stages of, ii. 359 seqq. Ultimate intellectual interests of, ii. 317 seqq. Medicine : Relics used in, i. 301 Smattering of, included in Arts course, ii. 279 Study of — ^in Italy, i. 251 and n.^, 262 ; ii. 413 n. ; at Chartres, i. 299 ; ii. 402 Mendicant Orders, see Dominican and Franciscan Merlin, referred to in SaUmbene, i. 529 Merovingian Kingdom : Character of, i. 208 Church under, i. 194 Extent of, i. 210 n.^ German conquests of, i. 121, 138 Merovingian period : Barbarism of, i. 9 Continuity of, with Carolingian, i. 210-12 King's law in, ii. 276 Merovingians, estimate of, i. 195 Metaphor distinguished from allegory, ii. 67 n. {See also Symbolism) Metaphysics : Final stage of mediaeval develop- ment represented by, ii. 365-7 Logic, mediaeval, in relation to, ii. 364 Metaphysics {cont.) : Theology dissociated from, by Duns, ii. 540, 546, 547 Michelangelo quoted, ii. 139 Middle Ages {See also Mediaeval thought) : Beginning of, i. 6 Extremes characteristic of, i. 371 Milan, i. 339 ; lawyers in, ii. 280 «.* Miles, signification of word, i. 541-2 and n.^ Minnelieder, ii. 55-8 Minorites, i. 446 {See also Franciscan Order) Miracles {See also Irrationality) : Devil, concerned with, i. 504 seqq. Nostre Dame, Miracles de, i. 507-8 Patristic attitude toward, i. 85-6, 100, 182 Roman Empire aided by, belief as to, ii. 566 Salimbene's instance of, i. 532 Universal acceptance of, i. 74, 182 Viiae sanctorum in regard to, i. 85 and n.^ Missi dominici, i. 2 11- 12 Mithraism, i. 49 Modena (Mutina), i. 24 Modi, ii. 244-5 Monasteries : Immunities granted to, i. 539 and n. Regula of, me anin g of, ii. 88 Monasticism {For particular Mona- steries, Orders, etc., see their names) : Abuses of, i. 373-4 ; Rigaud's Register quoted, i. 493-7 Benedictine rule : Adoption of — ^in Englsmd, i. 184 ; among the Franks, i. 199, 2or ; generally, i. 374 Papal approval of, i. 351 Cassiodorus a pioneer in literary functions of, i. 94 General mediaeval view regarding, i. 488 ; ii. 559 Ideal V. actual, i. 371 Ireland, in, i. 135 n.^ Lament over deprivations of, ii. 247-8 Modifications of, by St. Francis, i. 382 Motives of, i. 373 Nature of, i. 352-3 Nuns, see Women — monastic life Origin of, i. 351 Pagan literature condemned by, i- 261 Popularity of, in 5th and 6th cen- turies, i. 195-6 Poverty — of monks, 1. 381 ; of Orders, i. 382, 441, 446 Reforms of, i. 374 seqq. Schools, monastic, in Italy, i. 250 n.^ INDEX 6ii Monasticism [conL) : Sex-relations as regarded by, i. 354 Studies of, in 6th cent., i. 94, 95 Subordinate monasteries, supervision of, i. 377 Uncloistered, see Dominican and Franciscan Vita acUva accepted by, i. 379-82 Vita contemplativa, see that title Women vilified by devotees of, i. 370 n., 537 «.^ 548, 549 ; ii. 84 Montanists, i. 348 Monte Cassino, i. 251 »., 253-4 Montfort, Countess of, i. 568-70 Moorish conquest of Spain, i. 9, 118 Morimond monastery, i. 378 Mosaics, i. 361-3 Music : Arithmetic in relation to, ii. 321 Chartres studies in, i. 299 Poetry and, interaction of, ii. 224-5, 330-1 Scholastic classification of, ii. 343 Mysticism : Hugo's strain of, ii. 391-3 Nature of, i. 443 n?-\ ii. 393 and n. -4 Symbolism as expressing, see Sym- bolism Narbo, i. 26 Narbonensis, see Provincia Narbonne, law studies at, ii. 279 Natural history and science, see Physi- cal science Nemorarius, Jordanus, ii. 531 Neo-Platonism : Arabian versions of Aristotle touched with, ii. 419 Augustinian, i. 65 ; ii. 433 Christianity compared with, i. 51 ; Patristic habit of mind compared, ii. 325 Ecstasy as regarded by, i. 347 Metaphysics so named by, ii. 366 Pseudo-Dionysian, i. 54 and n.^ Tenets and nature of, i. 41-9 ; a mediatorial system, i. 50, 54, 57-8, 70 Trinity of, ii. 3S5 Neustria, i. 200, 209, 240 Nibelungenlied, i. . 145-6, 148-9, 152, 193, 203 n.^; ii. 249 Nicholas II., Pope, i. 244 «'^ Nicholas III., Pope, i. 520 Nicholas IV., Pope {Jerome of Ascoli), ii. 520-1 Nicholas, St., sequence for festival of, ii. 242-4 Nicolas of Damascus, ii. 457 Nilus, St., Abbot of Crypta-Ferrata, i. 390 n. Nithard, Count, i, 235 VOL. II Nominalism, i. 303 Norbert, ii. 374 Normandy, Norse occupation of, i. 153 Norsemen (Scandinavians, Vikings) : Characteristics of, i. 138, 164-5 Continental and insular holdings of, i. 153 Eddie poems of, i. 154-5 and n.^ Irish harassed by, i. 133-4 ; later relations, i. 152 n.^ Jumi^ges cloister sacked by, ii. 230 Metal-working among, i. 152 «.' Ravages by, in 8th and 9th centuries, i. 152-3 Sagas of, i. 155 seqq. Settling down of, i. 240-1 Notker, i. 309-10 and n.^ ; sequences of, ii. 230-1 Numbers, symboUc phantasies regard- ing, i. 72 and nn^' ^ ; ii. 75 n.' Oberon, fairy king, i. 580 and w. Occam, William of, career of, ii. 548 ; estimate of his work, ii. 552-3 ; attitude toward Duns, ii. 548 seqq.; on faith and reason, ii. 549 ; on Universals, ii. 550-1 Odilo, Abbot of Cluny, i. 296-7, 375 ; Jotsaldus' biography of, quoted, i. 297-8 Odo, Abbot of Cluny, i. 359 and n.^, 375 ; Epitome by, of Gregory's Moralia, i. 16 «.*; ii. 189 and n.^ ; Latin style of Collationes, ii. 189-90 Odo of Toumai, ii. 370 «. Odoacer, i. 114, 145 Olaf, St., i. 156, 160-1 Olaf Tryggvason, King, i. 156, 161-2 Old French : Formation of, ii. 183 Latin as studied by speakers of, ii. 150 Poetry, ii. 251, 254 aeqq. Ontology, see Metaphysics Ordeal, trial by, i. 232-3 and n.^ Ordericus Vitalis, i. 541 ; Histona ec- clesiastica by, ii. 205-6 Organon, see under Aristotle Origen, estimate of, i. 51, 62-3 ; on Canticles, i. 349 ; ii. 399 ; De prin- cipiis, i. 68 ; otherwise mentioned, i- 53» 76, 80, 87, 104, 427 ; ii. 90 Orleans School : Classical studies at, ii. 145 «.2, 153-4 Law studies at, ii. 279 Rivalry of, with Chartres, ii. 145 n.^ Orosius, i. 82 and n?- 188 Ostrogoths, i. 7, 113, 114-15, 120 Otfrid the Frank, i. 203-4, 309 Other world : Irish beliefs as to, i. 131 and n,^ Voyages to, mediaeval narratives of 1. 460 w.* 2 R 2 6l2 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND Othloh, i. 316 ; visions of, i. 459 ; Book concerning the Temptations of a certain Monk, 1. 317-24 Otric, i, 291-3 Otto I. (the Great), Emp., i. 240-4, 257-8, 284, 310, 312 Otto IL, Emp., i. 244, 284-6, 291 Otto III., Emp., i. 244, 284-6 ; Modus Ottinc in honour of, ii. 244-5 Otto IV. (of Brunswick), Emp., i. 433 ; ii. 69-60 Otto of Freising, cited i. 250 Otwin, Bp. of Hildeshelm, i. 313 Ovid, Ars amatotia of, i. 590-I ; mediae- val allegorizing of, and of Meta- mofphoseSj ii. 259 Oxford University : Characteristics of, ii. 418-19 Curriculum at, ii. 417-18 Foundation of, ii. 410, 41G'17 Franciscan fame at, ii. 430 Greek studies at, ii. 146-7, 421 Palladius, Bp., i. 172 Pandects, see under Roman law Papacy [See also Church and Popes) : Ascendancy of, over prelacy, i. 306 Character of, ii. 59 Crusades as utilised by, i. 333 Denunciations against, i. 491 ; ii. 61-2, 247 Empire*s relations with : Concordat of Worms, i. 246 ».* Conflict (nth cent.), i. 245 ; (12th cent.), i. 246 «.*; ii. 302 ; (13th cent.), ii. 60, 61-2 ; (14th cent.), ii. 548 ; allegory as a weapon in, ii. 86 Recognitionof ecclesiastical author- ity, ii. 294-6, 301-2 Reforms by Otto I., i. 244 Gregory VII.*s claims for, i. 246 ; ii. 303 Mendicant Orders* relations with, ii. 428, 539 Nepotism of, i. 620-1, 527 Schisms of popes and anti-popes, i. 265, 344 Temporal power of, rise of, i. 116; claims advanced, i. 245-6 ; realized, ii- 303. 305-6 Papinian cited, ii. 264 Paraclete oratory : Abaelard at, ii. 36, 374 Heloise at, ii. 36 seqq. Paradise : Dante*s ParadisOf see under Dante Hildegard*s visions of, i. 471-2 Paris : Craft guilds of, i. 34r Schools : Growth of, ii. 410 Paris {cont.) : Schools [cont.) : Notre Dame and St, Genevieve, ii. 413 St. Victor, ii. 87-9, 170, 4^3 University : Aristotle prohibited at, ii. 421-2 Authorities on, ii. 4ri n. Bacon at, ii. 517 Bonaventura at, ii. 433 Curriculum at, ii. 417-18 Dominicans and Franciscans at, ii. 429 Prominence of, in philosophy and theology, ii. 313, 408-9 Rise, constitution and struggles of, ii. 145-6, 413-16 Viking sieges of, i. 153 Parma, i. 513, 521-2 Parzival : Chretien's version of, i. 583 ; ii. 3 Wolfram's version of, i. 12 w., 587 «2 ; ii. 4-28, 56 Paschal controversy, see Eucharistic Paschasius, Radbertus, Abbot of Corbie, i. 215, 226-7 Patrick, St., i. 172-3 Patristic thought and doctrine [See also Greek thought, patristic, and Latin Fathers) : Abaelard's attitude toward, ii. 335 Achievement of exponents of, i. 86-7 Bacon's attitude toward, ii. 521 Completeness of schemes presented by, ii. 424 Emotion as synthesized by, i. 356-8 Intellectual rather than emotional, i. 359-60 ; emotionalizing of, by mediaeval thinkers, i. 36T Latin medium of, i. 5 Logic as regarded by, i. 71 Mediaeval attitude toward, i. 16 Miracle accepted by, i. 51-3, 85-6 Natural knowledge as treated by, i. 61 Beqq., 72-3, 76-7, 99 ; "• 423 Pagan philosophy permeating ex- ponents of, i. 33-4, 68, 61 Philosophy as classified by, ii. 342 Resirrangement of, undertaken in Carolingian period, 1. 224, 238 Symbolism of, see under Symbolism PaiUinus of Aquileia, i. 215 Paulinus, St., of Nola, i. 86, 126 «.* Paulus — on jus, ii. 266 ; SenterUiae of, ii. 272 Paulus, St., i. 84, 86 Paulus Diaconus, i. 215, 253 Pavia, law school at, ii. 280, 288 Pedro, Don, of Castille, i. 570-1 Pelagians, i. 225 Pelagius, i. 172 ». INDEX 613 Peripatetic Schbol, i. 38-9 {See also Aristotle) ^^ Peter, Bro., of Apulia, i. 528-30 Peter, disciple of Si Francis, i. 442 Peter Damiani, see pamiani Peter of Blois, ii. 160-1 Peter of Ebulo, ii. iig Peter of Maharncur.a, ii. 532-4 Peter of Pisa, i. 215 Peter the Venerab^, Abbot of Cluny, i. 376 ; letter of, to Heloise, ii. 51-3 '^^arch, i. 345^ ii. 217, 248 PetiHis^Rigar^i^Mroya of, ii. 154 Philip VI., King of France, i. 567 Philip Augustus, King of France, ii. 60 Philip Hohenstauffen, Duke of Suabia, i. 497 ; ii. 69, 60 Philo, i. 64, 231 ; allegorizing of, ii. 68, 394 Philosophy : Division of, schemes of, ii. 342 seqq. End of : Abaelard's and Hugo's views on, ii. 382, 391 John of Salisbury on, ii. 405 Philosophy, antique : Divine source of, Bacon's view as to, ii. 537 «.® " First " (Aristotelian), ii. 365 Position of, in Roman Empire (3rd- 6th cent.), i. 34 (See also Greek thought) Philosophy, Arabian, ii. 419-20, 430-I Philosophy, scholastic : Completeness of, in Aquinas, ii. 425 Divisions of, ii. 342 segq. Importance of, as intellectual in- terest, ii. 316-17 Physical sciences included in, see Phy- sical science Theology as the end of (Abaelard's and Hugo's view), ii. 382, 391 Theology distinguished from, ii. 314, 318 ; by Aquinas, ii. 320, 341 ; by Bonaventura, ii. 440 and n. ; con- sidered as superior to, by Aquinas, ii. 319-20, 322 ; dominated by (Bacon's contention), ii. 525 ; dis- sociated from, by Duns and Occam, ii. 540, 647, 549 Physical science : Albertus Magnus' attitude toward, ii. 453 ; his works on, ii. 455-9 Bacon's predilection for, ii. 516-17 Classifications of, ii. 342 seqq. Experimental science or method, ii. 532-8 Mediaeval attitude toward, i. 330 Oxford school of, ii. 419 Patristic attitude toward, i. 63, 66-7, 72-3, 76-7, 99 ; "■ 4^3 Physical science (cont.) : Theology as subserved by, ii. 93, 137, 319, 616, 621, 526, 529"30, 560; denial of the theory — by Duns, ii. 510 ; by Occam, ii. 519-20 Physiologies, i. 76-7 andn., 300 ; ii. 109 Pippin of Heristal, i. 208-9 ; ii. 226 Pippin of Neustria, i. 115, 200, 209, 210 and n.^; ii. 302 Pippin, son of Charlemagne, ii. 226 Placentia (Piacenza), i. 24 Placentinus, ii. 290-1 Plato, supra-rationalism of, i. 42 ; allegorizing by, i. 36 ; ii. 394 ; doctrine of ideas, i. 36 ; ii. 369- 370 ; Aquinas on this doctrine, ii. 485, 495 ; Augustine of Hippo as influenced by, ii. 433 ; "salvation" suggestion in, ii. 326 n.^ ; Republic^ i. 36 ; Timaeus, i. 35-6, 293 ; ii. 90, 95, 144, 378, 400, 402, 407 Platonism : Alanus' Anticlaudianus, in, ii. 126 «.* Augustinian, i. 55 Nature of, i. 36-6, 57, 59 Philosophy as classified by, ii. 342 Pliny the Elder, Historia natufalis by, i. 39-40, 75 Plotinus, estimate of, i. 43, 45 ; personal affinity of Augustine with, i. 55-7 ; philosophic system of, i. 42-6, 50, 51 ; Enneads of, i. 55 ; other- wise mentioned, i. 50, 51 ; ii. 90 Plutarch, i. 44 Poetry, mediaeval : Carmina Burana (Goliardic poetry), ii. 232, 246-8 and n. Chivalric, see Chivalry — Literature Hymns, see that heading Italian, of nth cent., i. 252 fleqq. ; ii. 225 Latin, see Latin verse Modi, ii. 244-5 Music and, interaction of, ii. 224-5, 230-1 Old High German, ii. 223 Popular verse, see sub-headings Car- mina and Modi ; also Vernacular Prosody, Alexander de Villa-Dei on, ii. 153 Vernacular : Germanic, Norse, and Anglo- Saxon, ii. 249-50 Romance, ii. 250-2, 254 seqq. Pontigny monastery, i. 378 Poor of Lyons (Waldenses), i. 380, 381 n. ; ii. 61 Popes {See also Papacy ; and for par- ticular popes see their names) : Avignon, at, ii. 540 Decretals of, see under Canon law Degradation of (loth cent.), i. 243-4 6i4 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND Popes (cont), : Election of, freed from lay control, i. 244 M.2 Popular rights, growth of, in 12th cent., i. 30^ Porphyry, i. 42, 44-7. 50, 51. 56; "■ 325 ; Isagoge (Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle), i. 45, 92, 102 ; ii. 342, 344 n., 363, 369 Preaching Friars, see Dominican Order Predestination, Gottschalk's contro- versy as to, i. 224-5, 227-8 Priscianus, i. 71 ; ii. 145 n.^ ; Institu- tiones grammaticae of [Priscianus major and minor) ^ ii. 150-1 Prosper of Aquitaine, i. 106 nK Provengal literature, i. 587 ; ii. 196 ; Alba (aube) poetry, i. 20, 687 ; ii.57 Provincia (Narbonensis) : Antique, the, in relation to, before Middle Ages, i. 9 Latinization of, i. 26-7 and n.^ Ligurian inhabitants of, i. 136 Teutonic invasion of, i. 125 Prudentius, ii. 89 ; Psychomachia of, ii. 128-30 Pseudo-Callisthenes, Life and Deeds of Alexander by, ii. 253, 254, 268-69 Pseudo-Dionysius, i. 215-16 ; ii. 332 ; Celestial Hierarchy by, i, 54 and n} Pseudo-Turpin, ii, 349 , Ptolemy of Alexandria, i. 40 Purgatory : Dante's PurgatoriOf see under Dante Hildegard's visions as to, i. 472 n. Popular belief as to, i, 502 Quadrivium, see under Seven Liberal Arts Rabanus Maurus, Abp. of Mainz, allegorizing of Scripture by, ii. 72-3 ; interest in the vernacular, i. 308 ; works of, i. 222-5 ; De universo, i. 302 ; ii. 346 n.^ ; A llegoriae in universam sacram scripturam, ii. 74-5 ; De laudibus sanctae crucis, ii. ys n.^ ; otherwise mentioned, i. 16, 100, 215, 309 ; ii- 332-3, 342, 362 Race, tests for determining, i. 124 ». Radbertus, see Paschasius Raoul de Cambrai, i. 579-80 Ratherius, i. 310 and n.^ Ratramnus of Corbie, i. 215, 227 ; ii. 228 Ravenna : Gerbert's disputation in, i. 291-3 Grammar and rhetoric studies at, ii. 147-8 Law studies at, ii. 281, 282 S. ApolUnaris in Classe, i. 389, 393 Raymond of Agiles quoted, i. 552 Realism, Dims* exposition of, ii. 544 and M. Reason v. authority controversy : Berengar's position in, i. 304-5 Eriugena's contribution to, i. 229-30 Reccared, i. 118 nn. Reinhard, Bp. of Halberstadt, ii. 88 Relics of saints and mart3a's : Arms enshrining, i. 544 Curative use of, i. 301 Patristic attitude toward, i. 86, loi «. Renaissance, misleading nature of term, i. 211 n. Renaud de Montaubon, i. 580 Rheims cathedral school, i. 295 Rhetoric : Chartres study of, i. 300 Hugo of St. Victor on, ii. 93 Predominance of, i. 109 and n. Richard, Abbot of JumiSges, i. 496-7 Richard of Middleton, ii. 542 Richard of St. Victor, ii. 106, 113 and n.% 397 n. 2, 570 Richer, Abbot of Monte Cassino> i. 253, 302 n.^ ; history of Gerbert by, quoted, i. 289-93 Ricimer, Count, i. 113 . Riddles, didactic, i. 218-19 and n.^ Rigaud, Eude (Oddo Rigaldus), Abp. of Rouen, i. 492, 624, 525 ; Register of, quoted, i. 492-7 Robert, cousin of St. Bernard, i. 411-13 Robert of Normandy, ii. 166 Rollo, Duke, of Normandy, i. 153, 240-1 Roman de la rose, i. 602-3 ; ii. 129 and nn., 130, 252 Roman de Thebes, ii. 256, 258 n. Roman Empire : Barbarization of, i. 5, 7, 111 aeqq. Billeting of soldiers, custom as to, i. 114 «., 117 Christianity accepted by, i. 361 Church, relations with, ii. 294-6, 301-2 Cities enjoying citizenship of — in Spain, i. 26 and n.^ ; in Gaul, i. 30 City life of, i. 27, 326 Clientage system under, i. 117 n.^ Dante's views on, ii. 566 Decadence of, i. 84, 97, 111 Eastern, see Eastern Empire Enduring nature of, conditions of, i. 239 «. Greek thought diffused by, i. 4 Italian people under, i. 7 Jurisconsults of, authority and capacity of, ii. 251-2 and n., 255 Latinization of Western Europe due to, i. 23 seqq., no Mediaeval attitude toward, i. 11 Scandinavians under influence of, i. 152 K.' INDEX 615 lan law : uditory, Imperial or Praetorian, ii. 262 «., 264 K.^ ologna famed for study of, ii. 147-8, 280, 288-91, 418 rachylogus, ii. 283-4 reviarium and its Interpretatio, i. 117 ; ii. 272-3 ; Epitomes of, ii. 273, 278-9; Brachylogus influenced by, ii. 283 urgundian tolerance of, i. 121 ; code (Papianus), ii. 268, 271 tiurch under, ii. 294 and n.^ Ddes of : Barbaric, nature of, ii. 273 {See also sub - headings Breviarium and B urgundian) Gregorianus*, ii. 269, 272 Hermogenianus', ii. 269, 272 Nature of, ii. 268-9 Theodosian, ii. 269 and n.^, 270 nJ^, 271-2, 278, 295-6 and n.^ odex of Justinian, ii. 269, 271, 282 : Azo's and Accursius* work on, ii. 292-3 Glosses to, ii, 278-9 Placentinus* Summa of, ii. 291 Summa Perusina an epitome of, ii. 278, 281 onstitutiones and rescripta princi- pum, ii. 264 and n.S 268, 269 jstom recognized by, ii. 265 igest of, by Justinian, see sub- heading Pandects lementary education including smattering of, ii. 279 pitomes of, various, ii. 278-9 ; Epitome of Julianus, ii. 271, 278, 283 losses : Accursius* Glossa ordinaria, ii. 292-3 Imerius', ii, 290 and n.^ Justinian's Codex, to, ii. 278-9 Dthic adoption of, i. 114 istitutes of Gains, ii. 270, 272 istitutes of Justinian, ii. 270, 272, 283 Azo's Summa of, ii. 292 Placentinus' Summa of, ii. 291 irisprudential element in early stages of, ii. 26r ts identified with aequitas, ii. 264 iS civile, ii. 266, 286 ts gentium : Jus naturale in relation to, ii. 263 and n. Origin of, ii, 262-3 Popular rights as, regarded by, ii. 307 ts praetorium, ii, 264 •X romana canonice cofnptaj ii. 281 Roman law {cont.) : Lombard attitude toward, i. 115 Novellae of Justinian, ii. 269, 271 Pandects (Justinian's Digest)^ ii. 148, 264 and ».2, 265-7, 270-1, 277, 282, 284 : Accursius* Glossa on, ii. 293 Glossators* interpretation of, ii. 294 Permanence of, ii. 265 Petrus {Petri exceptiones), ii. 281-3 Placentinus' work in, ii. 290-1 Principles of, examples of, ii. 266-7 ; possession and its rights, ii. 285-7 Principles of interpretation of, ii. 285 Provincia, in, i. 27 n.^ ' Responsa or auctoritas jurispruden- tium, ii. 264-5 Sources of, multifarious, ii. 264 Sphere of, ii. 277 Study of, centres for — in France, ii. 279 ; in Italy, ii. 148, 280 and n.^, 288-91, 408 Summa codicis Irnerii, ii. 284 Theodosian Code, see under sub- heading Codes Treatises on, mediaeval, ii. 281 seqq. Twelve Tables, ii. 261, 265 Visigothic code of, see subheading Breviarium Romance, spirit of, i. 434 Romance languages {See also Old French) ; Characteristics of, ii. 180 Dante's attitude toward, ii. 567 Latin as modified by, ii. 183 Literature of, ii. 250-2 {See also Pro- venQal literature) Strength of, i. 9 Romance nations, mediatorial role of, i. 110-11, 124 Romans d'aventure, i. 580-1, 587 n.^ Rome : Bishops of, see Popes Commune of, i. 343-4 Factions in (loth cent.}, i. 242 Law School in, ii. 280, 284 Mosaics in, i. 363 Verses to, i. 364 ; ii. 229 Romualdus, St., youth of, i. 389 ; austerities of, i. 390, 395, 397 ; relations with his father, i. 390-1 ; harshness and egotism of, i. 391-3 ; at Vallis de Castro, i. 392-3, 396 ; at Sytrio, i. 394-5 ; death of, i. 388 M.®, 396 ; Commentary of, on the Psalter, i. 395 ; Alphanus on, i. 255 Romulus Augustulus, Emp., i. 114 Roncesvalles, battle of, i. 575 n.^ -78 Roscellinus, i. 305-6 ; ii. 369-7O Rothari, King of Lombards, i. 115 ; ii. 280 6i6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND Ruadhan, St., i, 132-3 Ruotger, Life of Abp. Bruno by, i. 310 ; ii. 190 and n?- Sacra docttina, see Theology Sacraments, see under Church Sagas, Norse : Character of, i. 12 «., 155 seqq. Egil, i. 162-4 Gisliy i. 158 Heimskringla, i. 160-2 and n.^ Njala, i. 157 ««rf »., 1B9, 164-7 Oral tradition of, ii. 249 St. Denis monastery, ii. 36, 374 St. Emmeram convent (Ratisbon), i. 316, 317 St. Gall monastery, i. 258-9 ; Notker*s work at, ii. 230-1 St. Victor monastery and school, ii. 87-9, 170, 413 Saints : Austerities of, i. 390 and «., 391 Interventions of, mediaeval beliefs as to, i. 503-4, 506 Irish clergy so called, i. 135 n.^ Lives of : Compend of [Legenda Aurea), ii. 212-13 Conventionalized descriptions in, i. 409 n^ Defects of, i. 510 Estimate of, i. 84-5 and nn. otherwise mentioned, i. 300, 302 Relics of, see Relics Visions of, i. 460-1 Worship of, i. loi Salerno medical school, i. 251 n.^ 262 ; ii. 147 Salian Franks, see under Franks Salimbene, i. 511-13, 515-16 ; Chronica of, quoted and cited, i. 514 seqq, ; editions and translations of the work, i. 511 n. Salvation, see under Christianity Salvian, De gubernatione Dei by, i. 84 Saracens : Crusades against, see Crusades Frankish victories against, i. 209-10 Wars with, necessitating mounted warriors, i. 541 otherwise mentioned, i. 240, 253, 276, 348 Saxons, see Anglo-Saxons and Germans Scandinavians, see Norsemen Scholasticism : Arab analogy with, ii. 420 and n.^ Aristotle's advanced works, stages of appropriation of, ii. 423-5 Bacon's attack on, ii. 514, 623} 626-6, ^"539 Scholasticism (cont.) : Classification of topics by : Schemes of, various, ii. 342 seqq. — Twofold principle of, ii. 341 Conceptualism, ii. 550-1 Content of, i. 303 — Deference to authority a character- istic of, ii. 327, 330 - Disintegration of — through Duns, ii. 540, 546 ; through Occam, ii. 552- 553 Elementary nature of discussions of, ii- 377 Evil, problem of, see Evil Exponents of, ii. 313 and n. Final exposition of, by Aquinas, ii. 514 Greek thought contrasted with,ii. 326 Humour non-existent in, ii. 489 Method of, ii. 332, 336-7, 345 »• ; prototype of, i. 95 Nominalism, ii. 370 Philosophy of, see Philosophy, schol- astic Phraseology of, untranslatable, ii. 378, 513 Praedicables, ii. 344 n. Present interest of, ii. 315 Realism, ii. 370 ; Pantheism in rela- tion to, ii. 400 Salvation a main interest of, ii. 326-7, 330, 341 Scriptural authority, position of, ii. 319, 321-2 Secular studies as regarded by, ii. 379. 387 Stages of development of, ii. 363 seqq. Sympathetic study of, the key to con- tradictions, ii. 401 Theology of, see Theology Universals, problem of : — lAquinas* treatment of, ii. 492 Duns' treatment of, ii. 545 Occam's contribution toward, ii. 550-1 Roscellin's views on, i. 305-6 Sciences, classifications of, ii. 342 seqq. {See also Physical science) Scotland, Christianizing of, i. i73 Scriptures, Christian : Allegorizing of : Examples of : David and Bathsheba episode, ii. 70-2 Exodus, Book of, ii. 73 Good Samaritan parable, ii. 79- 82, no, 116 Hannah, story of, ii. 73 ».* Pharisee and Publican parable, ii. 77-8 Hugo of St. Victor's view of, ii. 91 »• INDEX 617 Scriptures, Christian [cont.) : Allegorizing of (cont.) : Writers exemplifying — Philo, ii. 68-9; the Fathers, ii. 69 seqq., 94-5 and «.2; Rabanus, ii. 72-6 ; Bede, ii. 73 n.^ ; Honorius oj Autun, ii. 77 seqq, ; Hugo of St. Victor, ii. 93 seqq, Anglo-Saxon version of, i. 142 n.^, 183 Authority of — in patristic doctrine, ii. 325 ; acknowledged by Eriugena, i. 231 ; by Berengar, i. 303 ; in scholasticism, ii. 319, 321-2 Bacon's attitude toward, ii. 521, 527 Bonaventura*s attitude toward, and writings on, ii. 435 seqq. Canon law based on, ii. 296-8 Classical studies in relation to, see subheading Secular Classification of topics based on, ii. 347, 354 Commentaries on — Alcuin's, i, 321 ; Raban's, i. 223 Duns' attitude toward, ii. 546 Francis of Assisi's literal acceptance of, i. 381, 442-3 ; his realization of spirit of, i. 443 n.^ ; ii. 212 Gothic version of, i. 143 n. Heliand, i. 203 and nn., 308 Hymns based on, ii. 114 seqq. Interpretation of — by the Fathers, i. 43 seqq., 6?>'(^andn,^ ; by Eriugena, i, 231 ; by Berengar, i. 303 Isidore's writings on, i. 104-5 Love, human, as treated in Old Testament, i. 348-9 Scenes from, in Gothic art, ii. 108 seqq. Secular knowledge in relation to, i. 63, 66 ; ii. 136, 138, 146, 529 Song of Songs, see Canticles Study of, by monks, i. 94 ; Cassiodo- rus* Institutiones, i. 95-6 Theology identified with, i. 236-7 ; ii. 436, 438 Vulgate, the, see that heading Sculpture, Gothic : Cathedrals, evolution of, ii. 568-9 Symbolism of, i. 457 »•*; ii* 108-12 Sedulius Scotus, i. 215 Seneca, i. 26, 41 Sentences, Books of : Isidore's, i. 106 and n? Paulus' Sententiae, ii. 272 Peter Lombard's, see under Lombard . Prosper's, i. 106 n.^ Sequence-hymns, development of, ii. 235, 230-6 ; Adam of St. Victor's, ii. 238-244 Serenus, Bp. of Marseilles, i. 102 Sermons, allegorizing : Bernard of Clairvaux, by, i. 353 «., 425-9 ; ii. 197-8, 398-9 Honorius of Autim, by, ii. 76 seqq. Seven Liberal Arts [See also separate headings Grammar, Logic, etc.) : Alanus de Insulis on functions of, ii. 124 n.^ Carolingian study of, i. 236 Clerical education in, i. 222 Compend of, by Cassiodorus, i. 96 De nuptiis as concerned with, i. 71 n.^ Hugo of St. Victor on function of, ii. 93, 137 Latin the medium for, ii. 135 Law smattering included 'with, ii, 279 Quadrivium : Boethius on, i. 90 and ».' Chartres, at, i. 301 Thierry's encyclopaedia of, ii. 156-7 Trivium : Chartres, at, i. 298-9 ; ii. 191 Courses of, as representing stages of mediaeval development, ii. 361 seqq, otherwise mentioned, i. 217 ; ii. 583 Severinus, St., i. 193 Severus, Sulpicius, i. 126 n.^; Life of St. Martin by, i. 52, 84, 85 n.^, 86 Sidonius, Apollinaris, i. 126 n.^; cited, i. 117 «.\ 140 Siger de Brabant, ii. 431 and n. Sippe, i. 122 Smaragdus, Abbot, i. 215 Socrates, i. 34-5 ; ii. 33 Songs, see Poetry Sophists, Greek, i. 35 Sorbon, Robert de, i. 560-1 Sorcery, i. 46 Spain : Antique, the, in relation to, before Middle Ages, i. 9 Arabian philosophy in, ii. 430 Church in, i. 9, 103, 118 and n. Latinization of, i. 25-6 and n.^ Moorish conquest of, i. 9, 118 Visigoths in, i. 113, ii6-17 andii.2, 118 Stabat Mater, i, 364 Statius, ii. 358 n. Statius Caecilius, i. 25 Stephen IX., Pope, i. 264 Stephen, St., sequence for festival of, ii. 240-2 Stephen of Bourbon quoted, i. 381 n. Stilicho, i. 112 Stoicism : Emotion as regarded by, i. 346 . Nature of, i. 41, 57, 59 Neo-Platonism contrasted with, ii. 326 6i8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND stoicism [cofU.) : Philosophy as classified by, ii. 342 Roman law as affected by, ii. 251 otherwise mentioned, i. 40, 70 Strabo, Walafrid, see Walafrid Suevi, i. 116-17 and n.^, 139 Summae, method of, ii. 336-7 {See also under Theology) Summum bonum, Aquinas* discussion of, ii. 468 seqq.j 486 Switzerland, Irish monasteries founded in, i. 174 Sylvester II., Pope {Gerbert of Aurillac), career of, i. 283-7; disputation with Otric, i. 291-3 ; estimate of, i. 283, 287-^ ; love of the classics, i. 289- 290; ii. 136; Latin style of, ii. 188; logical studies of, ii. 362, 368, 369, 375 ; letters of, quoted, i. 285-9 ; estimated, i. 286-7, 329 ; editions of works of, 1. 282 n. ; Libellus — de rationali etrationeuH, i. 294 n., 301 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 250 ; ii. 62, 164 Symbolism : Alanus' Anticlaudianus as exempli- fying, ii. 120-9- Angels as symbols, ii. 487 Art, mediaeval, inspired by, i. 21 Augustine and Gregory compared as to, i. 56-7 Carolingian, nature and examples of, ii. 72-6 Church edifices, of, ii. 104-8 Dante permeated with, ii. 564, 582-5 Greek, nature of, ii. 82-3 Hildegard's visions, in, i. 472 segq. Marriage relationship, in, i. 429-30 Mass, of the, ii. 103-4 Mediaeval thought deeply impressed by, ii. 69, 76 n.\ 128, 395 Mysticism in relation to, ii. 394 Neo-Platonic, i. 52 Ovid's works interpreted by, ii. 259 Patristic, i. 37, 43-6, 52, 53> 58, 80 Platonic, i. 36 Raban's addiction to, i. 223 and n.^ Signum et yes' classification, ii. 352-3 Twelfth century — in Honorius of . Autun, ii. 77 seqq. ; in Hugo of St. Victor, ii. 90 seqq. Universal in mental processes, ii. 67, 582 «. Universe explained by, ii. 90, 92 seqq, otherwise mentioned, i. 15, 22 Sytrio, Romualdus at, i. 394-5 Tacitus, i. 78 ; ii. 161 Tears, grace of, i. 386-7 am^ «•» 478, 479 Templars, i. 547-51 Tenth century, see Carolingian period Tertulhan, i. 5, 58, 87, 99, 171, 348, 360, 370 ». ; ii. 180 ; paradox of, i. 51 ; ii. 327 ; Adversus Mar- cionem, i. 68 Teutons [See also Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Germans, Norsemen) : Celts compared with, i. 125 Characteristics of, i. 138 Christianizing of : Manner of, i. 181-3, 196-7, 193; resiilts of, i. 5, 170- 1 Motives of converts, i. 193 Customs of, i. 122, 139, 141, 539 Law of, early, tribal natiure of, ii. 274-6 R61e of, in mediaeval evolution, i. 125 Roman Empire permeated by, i. in seqq, Theodora, i. 243 Theodore, Abp. of Canterbury, i. 184 Theodoric of Freiburg, ii. 531 n.^ Theodoric the Ostrogoth, i. 89, 91 ».=, 93, 114-15, 120-1, 138, 250 ; m legend, i. 145-6 ; Edict of, ii. 274 n. Theodosius the Great, Emp., i. 112 ; ii. 301 ; Code of, ii. 269 and n.^, 270 ».2, 271, 278, 295-6 and n.^ Theodulphus, Bp. of Orleans, i, 9, 215 ; Latin diction of, ii. 187 Theology, scholastic : Abaelard's treatises on, see under Abaelard Aquinas* Summa of, see under Aquinas Argumentative nature of, ii. 322-3 Augustinian character of, ii, 433 Course of study in, ii. 418 Importance of,as intellectual interest, ii. 317-18 Logic in relation to, ii. 370 n., 376 Mysticism of, ii. 393-4 Natural sciences, etc., as handmaids to, ii. 93, 137, 319, 516, 621, 626, 530, 560 ; denial of the theory — by Duns, ii. 540 ; by Occam, ii. 549- 550 {See also Physical science — Patristic attitude toward) Paris the centre for, ii. 313, 409 Philosophy in relation to, see under Philosophy Practical, not speculative, regarded as, ii. 542, 645, 549 Scientific nature of, as regarded by Albertus, ii. 321, 460 Scripture identified with, ii. 436, 438 Summae of — by Alexander of Hales, ii. 429 ; by Bonaventura, ii. 438 ; by Albertus Magnus, ii, 460-1 ; by Aquinas, see under Aquinas Thirteenth- century study of, ii. 144-6 INDEX 619 Theophrastus, i. 38 Theresa, St., i. 459 «.^ Theurgic practice, i. 46-8 Thierry, Chancellor of Chartres, ii. 145, 400-1 ; Eptateuchon of, ii, 156-7 and n. Thirteenth century : Intellectual interests of, ultimate, ii. 317 Latin prose styles of, ii. 207-8 Papal position in, ii. 539 PersonaUties of writers emergent in, ii. 466 Theology and dialectic the chief studies of, ii. 144-6 Three phenomena marking, ii. 408 Thomas k Kempis, De imiiatione Christi by, ii. 214 Thomas Aquinas, see Aquinas Thomas of Brittany, Tristan fragment by, i. 598 Thomas of Cantimpre, ii. 458-9 Thomas of Celano, Life of St. Francis by, quoted, i. 451, 452-4 ; style of the work, ii.'aii Thucydides, History of the Pelopon- nesian War by, i. 77-8 Thuringia : Boniface's work in, i. 197-8 Merovingian rule in, i. 121 Thuringians, language of, i. 145 n.^ Thurot cited, ii. 151 nn. Torriti, i. 363 Towns, see Cities Trade, see Industrial organization Trance, see Ecstasy Treves, i. 30, 31, 192 Tristan : Chretien's version of, i. 583 Gottfried von Strassburg's version of, i- 593-8 Trivium, see under Seven Liberal Arts Troubadours (trouv^res), i. 588-9 and nn, Troy, tales of, in mediaeval literature, ii. 229, 253-4 and 11.2, 256-8 True and the good compared, ii. 471, 542 Truth, Giiigo's Meditationes as concern- ing, i. 401-2 Twelfth century : Classical studies at zenith in, ii. 143-4 Growth in, various, i. 307-8 Intellectual interests of, ultimate, ii, 317 Literary zenith in, u. 196, 234-5 Mobility increased during, ii. 409 Ulfilas, i. 192 ; ii. 250 Ulpian — on jus naturale and jus gen- tium, ii. 263 and n. ; on justitia, jus and jurisprudentia, ii. 266 Ulster Cycle, Sagas of, i. 128 and n.^, 129 seqq. Universals, see under Scholasticism Universities, mediaeval (For particular universities see their names) : Increase in (r4th cent.), ii. 553 Rise of, ii. 409, 411 seqq. Studies at, ii. 418 and n. Urban II., Pope, i. 333 ; ii. 204 Urban IV., Pope, ii. 421-2, 464 Utrecht, bishopric of, i. 197 Vallombrosa, i. 393 Vandals, i. 112, 113, 120 Varro, Terentius, i. 39, 71, 78 Venice, i. 333-4» 342 Ti.\ 343 Vercingetorix, i. 28 Vernacular poetry, see under Poetry Verse, see Poetry Vikings, see Danes and Norsemen Vilgard, i. 260-1 Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum majus of, ii. 108 and n.^, 345-52 Vfrgil, Bernard Silvestris' Commentum on, ii. 142-3 and n.^; Dante in rela- tion to, ii. 565, 566, 569, 573 Vfrgin Mary : Dante's Paradiso as concerning, ii. 581 Hymns to, by Hugo of St. Victor, ii. 112-13, ir8 Interventions of, against the devil, i. 503, 506-8 Mediaeval attitude toward, i. 53, 54 fl«rf n.2 ; ii. 461, 581, 588 Virtues : Aquinas' classification of, ii. 356-8 Odilo*s Cardinales disciplinae, i. 297 Vfrtues and vices, poetic treatment of — by Alanus, ii. 128 n. ; by De Lorris and De Meun, ii. 129 Visigoths : Arianism of, i. 120 Dacian settlement of, i. 112 Gaul, Southern, kingdom in, i. 7, 112, 116 ; Clovis' conquest of, i. 121 Roman law code promulgated by, see Roman law — Breviarium Spain, in, i. 9, 113, 116-17 and n.^, 118 Visions : Examples of, i. 460-2, 467, 468-75 Monastic atmosphere in, i. 184 and Nature of, i. 459, 465 and n.^, 466, 467 and n. Vita contemplativa : Aquinas' views on, ii. 473, 511-12 Hildebert on, ii. 171-2 620 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND Vitae sanctorum, see Saints — Lives of Von Below, G., i. 337 «. Vulgate, the : Citations from, by mediaeval gram- marians, ii. 151, 153 Corruption in Paris copy of, ii. 527 Universal influence of, i. 478 n. ; ii. 200 Walafrid Strabo, i. ipo, 215 ; ii. 362 ; Glossa ordinaria of, i. 16, 221 n.* ; ii. 72 ; De cultura hortorum, ii. 217 n.^ Waldenses, i. 381 n. ; ii. 61 Walter of Lille (of ChatiUon), Alexan- dfeis of, ii. 22r and n.®, 259 n?- Walther von der Vogelweide, political views of, ii. 60 ; attitude of, toward Papacy, ii. 61-3 ; piety and crusad- ing zeal of, ii. 63 ; melancholy, ii. 63-4 ; Minnelieder of, ii. 56-8 ; Spriiche, ii. 56, 69, 63 ; Tagelied, ii. 57 ; Unter der Linde, ii. 57 ; otherwise mentioned, i. 491, 498 ; ii. 55, 252 Wergeld, i. 122, 139 ; ii. 275 Will, primacy of, over intellect, ii. 542, 545 William, Abbot of Hirschau, i. 316 William II. (Rufus), King of England, i. 274, 276 ; ii. 164-6 William of Apulia, ii. 218 and n.^ William of Champeaux — worsted by Abaelard, ii. 372-3 ; founds St. Victor, ii. 87, 170 ; Hildebert*s letter to, quoted, ii. 170 William of Conches, ii. 159, 531 n.^ ; studies and works of, ii. 402-3 ; Summa moralium. philosophorum, ii. 161-2, 402 and n,^ William of Malmsbury cited, i. 541 William of Moerbeke, ii. 421 William of Occam, see Occam William of St. Thierry, ii. 330, 374 William of Tyre, Historia transmarina of, i. 335 Willibrord, St., i. 197 Winifried- Boniface, St., i. 6, 197-200, 309 ; ii. 302 Wisdom, Aquinas on, ii. 511 Witelo, Perspectiva by, ii. 531 «.^ Witiza of Aquitaine, i. 374-5 Wolfram von Eschenbach, ii. 252 ; Parzival by, i. 12 n., 149 n.\ 152, 583, 587 »-* ; ii. 4-28, 62 ; estimate of the work, ii. 3, 56 Women : Emotion regarding, i. 365-6 Emotional Christ-love experienced by, i. 458, 475 seqq. Fabliaux* tone toward, i. 537 ».^ German prae-mediaeval attitude toward, i. 139, 150 ; mediaeval, ii. 57 Monastic life, in : Abuses among, i. 507-8 ; Rigaud's Register as concerning, i. 495-6 Consecration of, i. 353 and n. Gandersheim nims, i. 312 Visions of, i. 458 seqq., 479 seqq. Monkish vilification of, i. 370 n. , 537 «.^ 548, 649 ; ii. 84 Romantic literature as concerned with, i. 580 Romantic poems for audiences of, i. 581 Walther von der Vogelweide on, ii. 57 Worms, Concordat of (1122), i. 246 ».* Xenophon's Cyropaediuj i. 78 Year-books {Annates), i. 234 and n?- Yves, Bp. of Chartres, i. 263 n. ; ii. 166 Zacharias, Pope, i. 199 Zoology : Albertus Magnus* works on, ii. 459 Aristotle's work in, i. 38 Physiologus, i. 76-7 and n., 302 ; ii. 109 HE END Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh. 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