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THE MEDIAEVAL MIND




  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
  LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
  MELBOURNE

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
  ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
  TORONTO




  THE MEDIAEVAL MIND

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


  BY HENRY OSBORN TAYLOR


  IN TWO VOLUMES

  VOL. I


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




TO J. I. T.




PREFACE


The Middle Ages! They seem so far away; intellectually so preposterous,
spiritually so strange. Bits of them may touch our sympathy, please our
taste; their window-glass, their sculpture, certain of their stories,
their romances,--as if those straitened ages really were the time of
romance, which they were not, God knows, in the sense commonly taken. Yet
perhaps they were such intellectually, or at least spiritually. Their
_terra_--not for them _incognita_, though full of mystery and pall and
vaguer glory--was not the earth. It was the land of metaphysical
construction and the land of spiritual passion. There lay their romance,
thither pointed their veriest thinking, thither drew their utter yearning.

Is it possible that the Middle Ages should speak to us, as through a
common humanity? Their mask is by no means dumb: in full voice speaks the
noble beauty of Chartres Cathedral. Such mediaeval product, we hope, is of
the universal human, and therefore of us as well as of the bygone
craftsmen. Why it moves us, we are not certain, being ignorant, perhaps,
of the building’s formative and earnestly intended meaning. Do we care to
get at that? There is no way save by entering the mediaeval depths,
penetrating to the _rationale_ of the Middle Ages, learning the
_doctrinale_, or _emotionale_, of the modes in which they still present
themselves so persuasively.

But if the pageant of those centuries charm our eyes with forms that seem
so full of meaning, why should we stand indifferent to the harnessed
processes of mediaeval thinking and the passion surging through the
thought? Thought marshalled the great mediaeval procession, which moved to
measures of pulsating and glorifying emotion. Shall we not press on,
through knowledge, and search out its efficient causes, so that we too may
feel the reality of the mediaeval argumentation, with the possible
validity of mediaeval conclusions, and tread those channels of mediaeval
passion which were cleared and deepened by the thought? This would be to
reach human comradeship with mediaeval motives, no longer found too remote
for our sympathy, or too fantastic or shallow for our understanding.

But where is the path through these footless mazes? Obviously, if we would
attain, perhaps, no unified, but at least an orderly presentation of
mediaeval intellectual and emotional development, we must avoid
entanglements with manifold and not always relevant detail. We must not
drift too far with studies of daily life, habits and dress, wars and
raiding, crimes and brutalities, or trade and craft and agriculture. Nor
will it be wise to keep too close to theology or within the lines of
growth of secular and ecclesiastical institutions. Let the student be
mindful of his purpose (which is my purpose in this book) to follow
through the Middle Ages the development of intellectual energy and the
growth of emotion. Holding this end in view, we, students all, shall not
stray from our quest after those human qualities which impelled the
strivings of mediaeval men and women, informed their imaginations, and
moved them to love and tears and pity.

The plan and method by which I have endeavoured to realize this purpose in
my book may be gathered from the Table of Contents and the First Chapter,
which is introductory. These will obviate the need of sketching here the
order of presentation of the successive or co-ordinated topics forming the
subject-matter.

Yet one word as to the standpoint from which the book is written. An
historian explains by the standards and limitations of the times to which
his people belong. He judges--for he must also judge--by his own best
wisdom. His sympathy cannot but reach out to those who lived up to their
best understanding of life; for who can do more? Yet woe unto that man
whose mind is closed, whose standards are material and base.

Not only shalt thou do what seems well to thee; but thou shalt do right,
with wisdom. History has laid some thousands of years of emphasis on this.
Thou shalt not only be sincere, but thou shalt be righteous, and not
iniquitous; beneficent, and not malignant; loving and lovable, and not
hating and hateful. Thou shalt be a promoter of light, and not of
darkness; an illuminator, and not an obscurer. Not only shalt thou seek to
choose aright, but at thy peril thou shalt so choose. “Unto him that hath
shall be given”--nothing is said about sincerity. The fool, the maniac, is
sincere; the mainsprings of the good which we may commend lie deeper.

So, and at _his_ peril likewise, must the historian judge. He cannot state
the facts and sit aloof, impartial between good and ill, between success
and failure, progress and retrogression, the soul’s health and loveliness,
and spiritual foulness and disease. He must love and hate, and at his
peril love aright and hate what is truly hateful. And although his
sympathies quiver to understand and feel as the man and woman before him,
his sympathies must be controlled by wisdom.

Whatever may be one’s beliefs, a realization of the power and import of
the Christian Faith is needed for an understanding of the thoughts and
feelings moving the men and women of the Middle Ages, and for a just
appreciation of their aspirations and ideals. Perhaps the fittest standard
to apply to them is one’s own broadest conception of the Christian scheme,
the Christian scheme whole and entire with the full life of Christ’s
Gospel. Every age has offered an interpretation of that Gospel and an
attempt at fulfilment. Neither the interpretation of the Church Fathers,
nor that of the Middle Ages satisfies us now. And by our further
understanding of life and the Gospel of life, we criticize the judgment of
mediaeval men. We have to sympathize with their best, and understand their
lives out of their lives and the conditions in which they were passed. But
we must judge according to our own best wisdom, and out of ourselves offer
our comment and contribution.

  HENRY OSBORN TAYLOR.


Many translations from mediaeval (chiefly Latin) writings will be found in
this work, which seeks to make the Middle Ages speak for themselves. With
a very few exceptions, mentioned in the foot-notes, these translations are
my own. I have tried to keep them literal, and at all events free from the
intrusion of thoughts and suggestions not in the originals.




CONTENTS


                                                                      PAGE

  BOOK I

  THE GROUNDWORK

  CHAPTER I

    GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS                                      3

  CHAPTER II

  THE LATINIZING OF THE WEST                                            23


  CHAPTER III

    GREEK PHILOSOPHY AS THE ANTECEDENT OF THE PATRISTIC
    APPREHENSION OF FACT                                                33

  CHAPTER IV

    INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS OF THE LATIN FATHERS                         61

  CHAPTER V

    LATIN TRANSMITTERS OF ANTIQUE AND PATRISTIC THOUGHT                 88

  CHAPTER VI

    THE BARBARIC DISRUPTION OF THE EMPIRE                              110

  CHAPTER VII

    THE CELTIC STRAIN IN GAUL AND IRELAND                              124

  CHAPTER VIII

    TEUTON QUALITIES: ANGLO-SAXON, GERMAN, NORSE                       138

  CHAPTER IX

    THE BRINGING OF CHRISTIANITY AND ANTIQUE KNOWLEDGE TO THE
    NORTHERN PEOPLES                                                   169

        I. Irish Activities; Columbanus of Luxeuil.

       II. Conversion of the English; the learning of Bede and Alfred.

      III. Gaul and Germany; from Clovis to St. Winifried-Boniface.


  BOOK II

  THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

  CHAPTER X

    CAROLINGIAN PERIOD: THE FIRST STAGE IN THE APPROPRIATION OF
    THE PATRISTIC AND ANTIQUE                                          207

  CHAPTER XI

    MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: ITALY                      238

        I. From Charlemagne to Hildebrand.

       II. The Human Situation.

      III. The Italian Continuity of Antique Culture.

       IV. Italy’s Intellectual Piety: Peter Damiani and St. Anselm.

  CHAPTER XII

    MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: FRANCE                     280

        I. Gerbert.

       II. Odilo of Cluny.

      III. Fulbert and the School of Chartres; Trivium and Quadrivium.

       IV. Berengar of Tours, Roscellin, and the coming time.

  CHAPTER XIII

    MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: GERMANY; ENGLAND           307

        I. German Appropriation of Christianity and Antique Culture.

       II. Othloh’s Spiritual Conflict.

      III. England; Closing Comparisons.

  CHAPTER XIV

    THE GROWTH OF MEDIAEVAL EMOTION                                    330

        I. The Patristic Chart of Passion.

       II. Emotionalizing of Latin Christianity.


  BOOK III

  THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL: THE SAINTS

  CHAPTER XV

    THE REFORMS OF MONASTICISM                                         353

      Mediaeval Extremes; Benedict of Aniane; Cluny; Citeaux’s
      _Charta Charitatis_; the _vita contemplativa_ accepts the
      _vita activa_.

  CHAPTER XVI

    THE HERMIT TEMPER                                                  368

      Peter Damiani; Romuald; Dominicus Loricatus; Bruno and Guigo,
      Carthusians.

  CHAPTER XVII

    THE QUALITY OF LOVE IN ST. BERNARD                                 392

  CHAPTER XVIII

    ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI                                              415

  CHAPTER XIX

    MYSTIC VISIONS OF ASCETIC WOMEN                                    442

      Elizabeth of Schönau; Hildegard of Bingen; Mary of Ognies;
      Liutgard of Tongern; Mechthild of Magdeburg.

  CHAPTER XX

    THE SPOTTED ACTUALITY                                              471

      The Testimony of Invective and Satire; Archbishop Rigaud’s
      _Register_; Engelbert of Cologne; Popular Credences.

  CHAPTER XXI

    THE WORLD OF SALIMBENE                                             494


  BOOK IV

  THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL: SOCIETY

  CHAPTER XXII

    FEUDALISM AND KNIGHTHOOD                                           521

      Feudal and Christian Origin of Knightly Virtue; the Order of
      the Temple; Godfrey of Bouillon; St. Louis; Froissart’s
      _Chronicles_.

  CHAPTER XXIII

    ROMANTIC CHIVALRY AND COURTLY LOVE                                 558

      From Roland to Tristan and Lancelot.

  CHAPTER XXIV

    PARZIVAL, THE BRAVE MAN SLOWLY WISE                                588




BOOK I

THE GROUNDWORK




CHAPTER I

GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS


The antique civilization of the Roman Empire was followed by that
depression of decadence and barbarization which separates antiquity from
the Middle Ages. Out of the confusion of this intervening period emerged
the mediaeval peoples of western Europe. These, as knowledge increased
with them, began to manifest spiritual traits having no clear counterpart
in the ancient sources from which they drew the matter of their thought
and contemplation.

The past which furnished the content of mediaeval thought was twofold,
very dual, even carrying within itself the elements of irreconcilable
conflict; and yet with its opposing fronts seemingly confederated, if not
made into one. Sprung from such warring elements, fashioned by all the
interests of life in heaven as well as life on earth, the traits and
faculties of mediaeval humanity were to make a motley company. Clearly
each mediaeval century will offer a manifold of disparity and
irrelationship, not to be brought to unity, any more than can be followed
to the breast of one mighty wind-god the blasts that blow from every
quarter over the waters of our own time. Nevertheless, each mediaeval
century, and if one will, the entire Middle Ages, seen in distant
perspective, presents a consistent picture, in which dominant mediaeval
traits, retaining their due pre-eminence, may afford a just conception of
the mediaeval genius.[1]


I

While complex in themselves, and intricate in their interaction, the
elements that were to form the spiritual constituency of the Middle Ages
of western Europe may be disentangled and regarded separately. There was
first the element of the antique, which was descended from the thought and
knowledge current in Italy and the western provinces of the Roman Empire,
where Latin was the common language. In those Roman times, this fund of
thought and knowledge consisted of Greek metaphysics, physical science,
and ethics, and also of much that the Latins had themselves evolved,
especially in private law and political institutions.

Rome had borrowed her philosophy and the motives of her literature and art
from Greece. At first, quite provincially, she drew as from a foreign
source; but as the great Republic extended her boundaries around the
Mediterranean world, and brought under her levelling power the Hellenized
or still Asiatic East, and Africa and Spain and Gaul as well, Greek
thought, as the informing principle of knowledge, was diffused throughout
all this Roman Empire, and ceased to be alien to the Latin West. Yet the
peoples of the West did not become Hellenized, or change their speech for
Greek. Latin held its own against its subtle rival, and continued to
advance with power through the lands which had spoken other tongues before
their Roman subjugation; and it was the soul of Latium, and not the soul
of Hellas, that imbued these lands with a new homogeneity of civic order.
The Greek knowledge which spread through them was transmuted in Latin
speech or writings; while the great Latin authors who modelled Latin
literature upon the Greek, and did so much to fill the Latin mind with
Greek thoughts, recast their borrowings in their own style as well as
language, and re-tempered the matter to accord with the Roman natures of
themselves and their countrymen. Hence only through Latin paraphrase, and
through transformation in the Latin classics, Greek thought reached the
mediaeval peoples; until the thirteenth century, when a better
acquaintance was opened with the Greek sources, yet still through closer
Latin translations, as will be seen.

Thus it was with the pagan antique as an element of mediaeval culture. Nor
was it very different with the patristic, or Christian antique, element.
For in the fourth and fifth centuries, the influence of pagan Greece on
pagan Rome tended to repeat itself in the relations between the Greek and
the Latin Fathers of the Church. The dogmatic formulation of Christianity
was mainly the work of the former. Tertullian, a Latin, had indeed been an
early and important contributor to the process. But, in general, the Latin
Fathers were to approve and confirm the work of Athanasius and of his
coadjutors and predecessors, who thought and wrote in Greek. Nevertheless,
Augustine and other Latin Fathers ordered and made anew what had come from
their elder brethren in the East, Latinizing it in form and temper as well
as language. At the same time, they supplemented it with matter drawn from
their own thinking. And so, the thoughts of the Greek Fathers having been
well transmuted in the writings of Ambrose, Hilary, and Augustine,
patristic theology and the entire mass of Christianized knowledge and
opinion came to the Middle Ages in a Latin medium.

A third and vaguest factor in the evolution of the mediaeval genius
consisted in the diverse and manifold capacities of the mediaeval peoples:
Italians whose ancestors had been very part of the antique; inhabitants of
Spain and Gaul who were descended from once Latinized provincials; and
lastly that widespread Teuton folk, whose forbears had barbarized and
broken the Roman Empire in those centuries when a decadent civilization
could no longer make Romans of barbarians. Moreover, the way in which
Christianity was brought to the Teuton peoples and accepted by them, and
the manner of their introduction to the pagan culture, reduced at last to
following in the Christian train, did not cease for centuries to react
upon the course of mediaeval development.

The distinguishing characteristics which make the Middle Ages a period in
the history of western Europe were the result of the interaction of the
elements of mediaeval development working together, and did not spring
from the singular nature of any one of them. Accordingly, the proper
beginning of the Middle Ages, so far as one may speak of a beginning,
should lie in the time of the conjunction of these elements in a joint
activity. That could not be before the barbaric disturbers of the Roman
peace had settled down to life and progress under the action of Latin
Christianity and the surviving antique culture. Nor may this beginning be
placed before the time when Gregory the Great (died 604) had refashioned
Augustine, and much that was earlier, to the measure of the coming
centuries; nor before Boëthius (died 523), Cassiodorus (died 575), and
Isidore of Seville (died 636), had prepared the antique pabulum for the
mediaeval stomach. All these men were intermediaries or transmitters, and
belong to the epoch of transition from the antique and the patristic to
the properly inceptive time, when new learners were beginning, in
typically mediaeval ways, to rehandle the patristic material and what
remained of the antique. Contemporary with those intermediaries, or
following hard upon them, were the great missionaries or converters, who
laboured to introduce Christianity, with antique thought incorporated in
it, and the squalid survival of antique education sheltered in its train,
to Teuton peoples in Gaul, England, and Rhenish Germany. Among these was
the truculent Irishman, St. Columbanus (died 615), founder of Luxeuil and
Bobbio, whose disciple was St. Gall, and whose contemporary was St.
Augustine of Canterbury, whom Gregory the Great sent to convert the
Anglo-Saxons. A good century later, St. Winifried-Boniface is working to
establish Christianity in Germany.[2] Thus it will not be easy to find a
large and catholic beginning for the Middle Ages until the eighth century
is reached, and we are come on what is called the Carolingian period.

Let us approach a little nearer, and consider the situation of western
Europe, with respect to antique culture and Latin Christianity, in the
centuries following the disruption of the Roman Empire. The broadest
distinction is to be drawn between Italy and the lands north of the Alps.
Under the Empire, there was an Italian people. However diverse may have
been its ancient stocks, this people had long since become Latin in
language, culture, sentiment and tradition. They were the heirs of the
Greek, and the creators of the Roman literature, art, philosophy, and law.
They were never to become barbarians, although they suffered decadence.
Like all great peoples, they had shown a power to assimilate foreigners,
which was not lost, but only degraded and diminished, in the fourth and
fifth centuries, when Teutonic slaves, immigrants, invaders, seemed to be
barbarizing the Latin order quite as much as it was Latinizing them. In
these and the following times the culture of Italy sank lamentably low.
Yet there was no break of civilization, but only a deep decline and then a
re-emergence, in the course of which the Latin civilization had become
Italian. For a lowered form of classical education had survived, and the
better classes continued to be educated people according to the degraded
standard and lessened intellectual energies of those times.[3]

Undoubtedly, in its decline this Latin civilization of Italy could no
longer raise barbarians to the level of the Augustan age. Yet it still was
making them over into the likeness of its own weakened children. The
Visigoths broke into Italy, then, as we are told, passed into southern
France; other confused barbarians came and went, and then the Ostrogoths,
with Theodoric at their head, an excellent but not very numerous folk.
They stayed in Italy, and fought and died, or lived on, changing into
indistinguishable Italians, save for flashes of yellow hair, appearing and
reappearing where the Goths had lived. And then the Lombards, crueller
than the Goths, but better able to maintain their energies effective.
Their numbers also were not great, compared with the Italians. And
thereafter, in spite of their fierceness and the tenacity of their
Germanic customs, the succeeding Lombard generations became imbued with
the culture of Italy. They became North Italians, gravitating to the towns
of Lombardy, or perhaps, farther to the south, holding together in
settlements of their own, or forming the nucleus of a hill-dwelling
country nobility.

The Italian stock remained predominant over all the incomers of northern
blood. It certainly needed no introduction to what had largely been its
own creation, the Latin civilization. With weakened hands, it still held
to the education, the culture, of its own past; it still read its ancient
literature, and imitated it in miserable verse. The incoming barbarians
had hastened the land’s intellectual downfall. But all the plagues of
inroad and pestilence and famine, which intermittently devastated Italy
from the fifth to the tenth century, left some squalid continuity of
education. And those barbarian stocks which stayed in that home of the
classics, became imbued with whatever culture existed around them, and
tended gradually to coalesce with the Italians.

Evidently in its old home, where it merely had become decadent, this
ancient culture would fill a rôle quite different from any specific
influence which it might exert in a country where the Latin education was
freshly introduced. In Italy, a general survival of Roman law and
institution, custom and tradition, endured so far as these various
elements of the Italian civilization had not been lost or dispossessed, or
left high and dry above the receding tide of culture and intelligence.
Christianity had been superimposed upon paganism; and the Christian faith
held thoughts incompatible with antique views of life. Teutonic customs
were brought in, and the Lombard codes were enacted, working some specific
supersession of the Roman law. The tone, the sentiment, the mind of the
Italian people had altered from the patterns presented by Cicero, or
Virgil, or Horace, or Tacitus. Nevertheless, the antique remained as the
soil from which things grew, or as the somewhat turgid atmosphere breathed
by living beings. It was not merely a form of education or vehicle of
edifying knowledge, nor solely a literary standard. The common modes of
the antique were there as well, its daily habits, its urbanity and its
dross.

The relationship toward the antique held by the peoples of the Iberian
peninsula and the lands which eventually were to make France, was not
quite the same as that held by the Italians. Spain, save in intractable
mountain regions, had become a domicile of Latin culture before its
people were converted to Christianity. Then it became a stronghold of
early Catholicism. Latin and Catholic Spain absorbed its Visigothic
invaders, who in a few generations had appropriated the antique culture,
and had turned from Arianism to the orthodoxy of their new home. Under
Visigothic rule, the Spanish Church became exceptionally authoritative,
and its Latin and Catholic learning flourished at the beginning of the
seventh century. These conditions gave way before the Moorish conquest,
which was most complete in the most thoroughly Romanized portions of the
land. Yet the permanent Latinization of the territory where Christianity
continued, is borne witness to by the languages growing from the vulgar
Latin dialects. The endurance of Latin culture is shown by the polished
Latinity of Theodulphus, a Spanish Goth, who left his home at the
invitation of Charlemagne, and died, the best Latin verse-maker of his
time, as Bishop of Orleans in 821. Thus the education, culture, and
languages of Spain were all from the antique. Yet the genius of the land
was to be specifically Spanish rather than assimilated to any such
deep-soiled paganism as underlay the ecclesiastical Christianization of
Italy.

As for France, in the southern part which had been Provincia, the antique
endured in laws and institutions, in architecture and in ways of life, to
a degree second only to its dynamic continuity in Italy. And this in spite
of the crude masses of Teutondom which poured into Provincia to be
leavened by its culture. In northern France there were more barbarian folk
and a less universally diffused Latinity. The Merovingian period swept
most of the last away, leaving a fair field to be sown afresh with the
Latin education of the Carolingian revival. Yet the inherited discipline
of obedience to the Roman order was not obliterated from the Gallic stock,
and the lasting Latinization of Gaul endured in the Romance tongues, which
were also to be impressed upon all German invaders. Franks, Burgundians,
or Alemanni, who came in contact with the provincials, began to be
affected by their language, their religion, their ways of living, and by
whatever survival of letters there was among them. The Romance dialects
were to triumph, were to become French; and in the earliest extant pieces
of this vernacular poetry, the effect of Latin verse-forms appears. Yet
Franks and Burgundians were not Latinized in spirit; and, in truth, the
Gauls before them had only become good imitation Latins. At all events,
from these mixed and intermediate conditions, a people were to emerge who
were not German, nor altogether Latin, in spite of their Romance speech.
Latin culture was not quite as a foreign influence upon these Gallo-Roman,
Teutonically re-inspirited, incipient, French. Nor were they born and bred
to it, like the Italians. The antique was not to dominate the French
genius; it was not to stem the growth of what was, so to speak, Gothic or
northern or Teutonic. The glass-painting, the sculpture, the architecture
of northern France were to become their own great French selves; and while
the literature was to hold to forms derived from the antique and the
Romanesque, the spirit and the contents did not come from Italy.

The office of Latin culture in Germany and England was to be more definite
and limited. Germany had never been subdued to the Roman order; in
Anglo-Saxon England, Roman civilization had been effaced by the Saxon
conquest, which, like the Moorish conquest of Spain, was most complete in
those parts of the land where the Roman influence had been strongest. In
neither of these lands was there any antique atmosphere, or antique pagan
substratum--save as the universal human soul is pagan! Latinity came to
Germans and Anglo-Saxons as a foreign culture, which was not to pertain to
all men’s daily living. It was matter for the educated, for the clergy.
Its vehicle was a formal language, having no connection with the
vernacular. And when the antique culture had obtained certain
resting-places in England and Germany, the first benign labours of those
Germans or Anglo-Saxons who had mastered the language consisted in the
translation of edifying Latin matter into their own tongues. So Latinity
in England and Germany was likely to remain a distinguishable influence.
The Anglo-Saxons and the rest in England were to become Englishmen, the
Germans were to remain Germans; nor was either race ever to become
Latinized, however deeply the educated people of these countries might
imbibe Latinity, and exercise their intellects upon all that was contained
in the antique metaphysics and natural science, literature and law.

Thus diverse were the situations of the young mediaeval peoples with
respect to the antique store. There were like differences of situation in
regard to Latin Christianity. It had been formed (from some points of view
one might say, created) by the civilized peoples of the Roman Empire who
had been converted in the course of the original diffusion of the Faith.
It was, in fact, the product of the conversion of the Roman Empire, and,
in Italy and the Latin provinces received its final fashioning and temper
from the Latin Fathers. Thus within the Latin-speaking portions of the
Empire was formed the system which was to be presented to the Teutonic
heathen peoples of the north. They had neither made it nor grown up with
it. It was brought to the Franks, to the Anglo-Saxons, and to the Germans
east of the Rhine, as a new and foreign faith. And the import of the fact
that it was introduced to them as an authoritative religion brought from
afar, did not lessen as Christianity became a formative element in their
natures.

One may say that an attitude of humble inferiority before Christianity and
Latin culture was an initial condition of mediaeval development, having
much to do with setting its future lines. In Italy, men looked back to
what seemed even as a greater ancestral self, while in the minds of the
northern peoples the ancient Empire represented all knowledge and the
summit of human greatness. The formulated and ordered Latin Christianity
evoked even deeper homage. Well it might, since besides the resistless
Gospel (its source of life) it held the intelligence and the organizing
power of Rome, which had passed into its own last creation, the Catholic
Church. And when this Christianity, so mighty in itself and august through
the prestige of Rome, was presented as under authority, its new converts
might well be struck with awe.[4] It was such awe as this that
acknowledged the claims of the Roman bishops, and made possible a Roman
and Catholic Church--the most potent unifying influence of the Middle
Ages.

Still more was the character of mediaeval progress set by the action and
effect of these two forces. The Latin culture provided the means and
method of elementary education, as well as the material for study; while
Latin Christianity, with transforming power, worked itself into the souls
of the young mediaeval peoples. The two were assuredly the moulding forces
of all mediaeval development; and whatever sprang to life beyond the range
of their action was not, properly speaking, mediaeval, even though seeing
the light in the twelfth century.[5] Yet one should not think of these two
great influences as entities, unchanging and utterly distinct from what
must be called for simplicity’s sake the native traits of the mediaeval
peoples. The antique culture had never ceased to form part of the nature
and faculties of Italians, and to some extent still made the inherited
equipment of the Latinized or Latin-descended people of Spain and France.
In the same lands also, Latin Christianity had attained its form. And even
in England and Germany, Christianity and Latin culture would be distinct
from the Teuton folk only at the first moment of presentation and
acceptance. Thereupon the two would begin to enter into and affect their
new disciples, and would themselves change under the process of their own
assimilation by these Teutonic natures.

Nevertheless, the Latin Christianity of the Fathers and the antique fund
of sentiment and knowledge, through their self-conserving strength,
affected men in constant ways. Under their action the peoples of western
Europe, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, passed through a
homogeneous growth, and evolved a spirit different from that of any other
period of history--a spirit which stood in awe before its monitors divine
and human, and deemed that knowledge was to be drawn from the storehouse
of the past; which seemed to rely on everything except its sin-crushed
self, and trusted everything except its senses; which in the actual looked
for the ideal, in the concrete saw the symbol, in the earthly Church
beheld the heavenly, and in fleshly joys discerned the devil’s lures;
which lived in the unreconciled opposition between the lust and vain-glory
of earth and the attainment of salvation; which felt life’s terror and its
pitifulness, and its eternal hope; around which waved concrete
infinitudes, and over which flamed the terror of darkness and the Judgment
Day.


II

Under the action of Latin Christianity and the antique culture the
mediaeval genius developed, as it fused the constituents of its growth
into temperament and power. Its energies were neither to produce an
extension of knowledge, nor originate substantial novelties either of
thought or imaginative conception. They were rather to expend themselves
in the creation of new forms--forms of apprehending and presenting what
was (or might be) known from the old books, and all that from century to
century was ever more plastically felt. This principle is most important
for the true appreciation of the intellectual and emotional phenomena of
the Middle Ages.

When a sublime religion is presented to capable but half-civilized
peoples, and at the same time an acquaintance is opened to them with the
education, the knowledge, the literature of a great civilization, they
cannot create new forms or presentations of what they have received, until
the same has been assimilated, and has become plastic in their minds, as
it were, part of their faculty and feeling. Manifestly the northern
peoples could not at once transmute the lofty and superabundant matter of
Latin Christianity and its accompanying Latin culture, and present the
same in new forms. Nor in truth could Italy, involved as she was in a
disturbed decadence, wherein she seemed to be receding from an
understanding of the nobler portions of her antique and Christian
heritage, rather than progressing toward a vital use of one or the other.
In Spain and France there was some decadence among Latinized provincials;
and the Teutonic conquerors were novices in both Christianity and
Latinity. In these lands neither decadence nor the novelty of the matter
was the sole embarrassment, but both combined to hinder creativeness,
although the decadence was less obvious than in Italy, and the newness of
the matter less utter than in Germany.

The ancient material was appropriated, and then re-expressed in new forms,
through two general ways of transmutation, the intellectual and the
emotional. Although patently distinguishable, these would usually work
together, with one or the other dominating the joint progress.

Of the two, the intellectual is the easier to analyze. Thinking is
necessarily dependent on the thinker, although it appear less intimately
part of him than his emotions, and less expressive of his character.
Accordingly, the mediaeval genius shows somewhat more palely in its
intellectual productions, than in the more emotional phases of literature
and art. Yet the former exemplify not only mediaeval capacities, but also
the mediaeval intellectual temperament, or, as it were, the synthetic
predisposition of the mediaeval mind. This temperament, this intellectual
predisposition, became in general more marked through the centuries from
the ninth to the twelfth. People could not go on generation after
generation occupied with like topics of intellectual interest, reasoning
upon them along certain lines of religious and ethical suggestion, without
developing or intensifying some general type of intellectual temper.

From the Carolingian period onward, the men interested in knowledge
learned the patristic theology, and, in gradually expanding compass,
acquired antique logic and metaphysics, mathematics, natural science and
jurisprudence. What they learned, they laboured to restate or expound.
With each succeeding generation, the subjects of mediaeval study were made
more closely part of the intelligence occupied with them; because the
matter had been considered for a longer time, and had been constantly
restated and restudied in terms more nearly adapted to the comprehension
of the men who were learning and restating it. At length mediaeval men
made the antique and patristic material, or rather their understanding of
it, dynamically their own. Their comprehension of it became part of their
intellectual faculties, they could think for themselves in its terms,
think almost originally and creatively, and could present as their own the
matter of their thoughts in restatements, that is in forms, essentially
new.

From century to century may be traced the process of restatement of
patristic Christianity, with the antique material contained in it. The
Christianity of the fifth century contained an amplitude of thought and
learning. To the creative work of earlier and chiefly eastern men, the
Latin intellect finally incorporate in Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine had
added its further great accomplishment and ordering. The sum of dogma was
well-nigh made up; the Trinity was established; Christian learning had
reached a compass beyond which it was not to pass for the next thousand
years; the doctrines as to the “sacred mysteries,” as to the functions of
the Church and its spiritual authority, existed in substance; the
principles of symbolism and allegory had been set; the great mass of
allegorical Scriptural interpretations had been devised; the spiritual
relationship of man to God’s ordainment, to wit, the part to be played by
the human will in man’s salvation or damnation, had been reasoned out; and
man’s need and love of God, his nothingness apart from the Source and King
and End of Life, had been uttered in words which men still use. Evidently
succeeding generations of less illumination could not add to this vast
intellectual creation; much indeed had to be done before they could
comprehend and make it theirs, so as to use it as an element of their own
thinking, or possess it as an inspiration of passionate, imaginative
reverie.

At the darkening close of the patristic period, Gregory the Great was
still partially creative in his barbarizing handling of patristic
themes.[6] After his death, for some three centuries, theologians were to
devote themselves to mastering the great heritage from the Church Fathers.
It was still a time of racial antipathy and conflict. The disparate
elements of the mediaeval personality were as yet unblended. How could the
unformed intellect of such a period grasp the patristic store of thought
in its integrity? Still less might this wavering human spirit, uncertain
of itself and unadjusted to novel and great conceptions, transform, and so
renew, them with fresh life. Scarcely any proper recasting of patristic
doctrine will be found in the Carolingian period, but merely a shuffling
of the matter. There were some exceptions, arising, as in the case of
Eriugena, from the extraordinary genius of this thinker; or again from the
narrow controversial treatment of a matter argued with rupturing
detachment of patristic opinions from their setting and balancing
qualifications.[7] But the typical works of the eighth and ninth centuries
were commentaries upon Scripture, consisting chiefly of excerpts from the
Fathers. The flower of them all was the compendious _Glossa Ordinaria_ of
Walafrid Strabo, a pupil of the voluminous commentator Rabanus Maurus.[8]

Through the tenth and eleventh centuries, one finds no great advance in
the systematic restatement of Christian doctrine.[9] Nevertheless, two
hundred years of devotion have been put upon it; and statements of parts
of it occur, showing that the eleventh century has made progress over the
ninth in its thoughtful and vital appropriation of Latin Christianity. A
man like German Othloh has thought for himself within its lines;[10]
Anselm of Canterbury has set forth pieces of it with a depth of reflection
and intimacy of understanding which make his works creative;[11] Peter
Damiani through intensity of feeling has become the embodiment of
Christian asceticism and the grace of Christian tears;[12] and Hildebrand
has established the mediaeval papal church. Of a truth, the mediaeval man
was adjusting himself, and reaching his understanding of what the past had
given him.

The twelfth century presents a universal progress in philosophic and
theological thinking. It is the century of Abaelard, of Hugo of St.
Victor, and St. Bernard, and of Peter Lombard. The first of these
penetrates into the logical premises of systematic thought as no mediaeval
man had done before him; St. Bernard moves the world through his emotional
and political comprehension of the Faith; Hugo of St. Victor offers a
sacramental explanation of the universe and man, based upon symbolism as
the working principle of creation; and Peter Lombard makes or, at least,
typifies, the systematic advance, from the _Commentary_ to the _Books of
Sentences_, in which he presents patristic doctrine arranged according to
the cardinal topics of the Christian scheme. Here Abaelard’s _Sic et non_
had been a precursor rather carping in its excessive clear-sightedness.

Thus, as a rule, each successive mediaeval period shows a more organic
restatement of the old material. Yet this principle may be impeded or
deflected, in its exemplifications, by social turmoil and disaster, or
even by the use of further antique matter, demanding assimilation. For
example, upon the introduction of the complete works of Aristotle in the
thirteenth century, an enormous intellectual effort was required for the
mastery of their contents. They were not mastered at once, or by all
people who studied the philosopher. So the works of Hugo of St. Victor, of
the first half of the twelfth century, are more original in their organic
restatement of less vast material than are the works of Albertus Magnus,
Aristotle’s prodigious expounder, one hundred years later. But Thomas
Aquinas accomplishes a final Catholic presentation of the whole enlarged
material, patristic and antique.[13]

One may perceive three stages in this chief phase of mediaeval
intellectual progress, consisting in the appropriation of Latin
Christianity: its first conning, its more vital appropriation, its
re-expression, with added elements of thought. There were also three
stages in the evolution of the outer forms of this same catholic mastery
and re-expression of doctrine: first, the Scriptural _Commentary_;
secondly, the _Books of Sentences_; and thirdly, the _Summa Theologiae_,
of which Thomas Aquinas is the final definitive creator. The philosophical
material used in its making was the substantial philosophy of Aristotle,
mastered at length by this Christian Titan of the thirteenth century. In
the _Summa_, both visibly as well as more inwardly and essentially
considered, the Latin Christianity of the Fathers received an organically
new form.

Quite as impressive, more moving, and possibly more creative, than the
intellectual recasting of the ancient patristic matter, were its emotional
transformations. The sequence and character of mediaeval development is
clearly seen in the evolution of new forms of emotional, and especially of
poetic and plastic, expression. The intellectual transformation of the
antique and more especially the patristic matter, was accompanied by
currents of desire and aversion, running with increasing definiteness and
power. As patristic thought became more organically mediaeval, more
intrinsically part of the intellectual faculties of men, it constituted
with increasing incisiveness the suggestion and the rationale of emotional
experiences, and set the lines accordingly of impassioned expression in
devotional prose and verse, and in the more serious forms of art.
Patristic theology, the authoritative statement of the Christian faith,
contained men’s furthest hopes and deepest fears, set forth together with
the divine Means by which those might be realized and these allayed. As
generation after generation clung to this system as to the stay of their
salvation, the intellectual consideration of it became instinct with the
emotions of desire and aversion, and with love and gratitude toward the
suffering means and instruments which made salvation possible--the
Crucified, the Weeping Mother, and the martyred or self-torturing saints.
All these had suffered; they were sublime objects for human compassion.
Who could think upon them without tears? Thus mediaeval religious thought
became a well of emotion.

Emotion breaks its way to expression; it feeds itself upon its expression,
thereby increasing in resistlessness; it even becomes identical with its
expression. Surely it creates the modes of its expression, seeking
continually the more facile, the more unimpeded, which is to say, the
adequate and perfect form. Typical mediaeval emotion, which was religious,
cast itself around the Gospel of Christ and the theology of the Fathers as
studied and pondered on in the mediaeval centuries. Seeking fitting forms
of expression, which are at once modes of relief and forms of added power,
the passionate energy of the mediaeval genius constrained the intellectual
faculties to unite with it in the production of these forms. They were to
become more personal and original than any mere scholastic restatement of
the patristic and antique thought. Yet the perfect form of the emotional
expression was not quickly reached. It could not outrun the intelligent
appropriation of Latin Christianity. Its media, moreover, as in the case
of sculpture, might present retarding difficulties, to be overcome before
that means of presentation could be mastered. A sequence may be observed
in the evolution of the mediaeval emotional expression of patristic
Christianity. One of the first attained was impassioned devotional Latin
prose, like that of Peter Damiani or St. Anselm of Canterbury.[14] But
prose is a halting means of emotional expression. It is too circumstantial
and too slow. Only in the chanted strophe, winged with the power of
rhythm, can emotion pour out its unimpeded strength. But before the
thought can be fused in verse, it must be plastic, molten indeed. Even
then, the finished verse is not produced at once. The perfected mediaeval
Latin strophe was a final form of religious emotional expression, which
was not attained until the twelfth century.[15]

Impassioned prose may be art; the loftier forms of verse are surely art.
And art is not spontaneous, but carefully intended; no babbling of a
child, but a mutual fitting of form and content, in which efficient unison
the artist’s intellect has worked. Such intellectual, such artistic
endeavour, was evinced in the long development of mediaeval plastic art.
The sculpture and the painted glass, which tell the Christian story in
Chartres Cathedral, set forth the patristic and antique matter in forms
expressive of the feeling and emotion which had gathered around the scheme
of Latin Christianity. They were forms never to be outdone for
appropriateness and power. Several centuries not only of spiritual growth,
but of mechanical and artistic endeavour, had been needed for their
perfecting.

In these and like emotional recastings, or indeed creations, patristic and
antique elements were transformed and transfigured. And again, in fields
non-religious and non-philosophical, through a combined evolution of the
mediaeval mind and heart, novelties of sentiment and situation were
introduced into antique themes of fiction; new forms of romance, new
phases of human love and devotion were evolved, in which (witness the
poetry of chivalric love in Provençal and Old French) the energies of
intellect and passion were curiously blended.[16] These represented a side
of human growth not unrelated to the supreme mediaeval achievement, the
vital appropriation and emotional humanizing of patristic Christianity.
For that carried an impassioning of its teachings with love and tears, a
fostering of them with devotion, an adorning of them with quivering
fantasies, a translation of them into art, into poetry, into romance. With
what wealth of love and terror, with what grandeur of imagination, with
what power of mystery and symbolism, did the Middle Ages glorify their
heritage, turning its precepts into spirit.

Of a surety the emotional is not to be separated from the intellectual
recasting of Christianity. The greatest exponents of the one had their
share in the other. Hugo of St. Victor as well as St. Bernard were mighty
agents of this spiritually passionate mode of apprehending Latin
Christianity, and transfusing it with emotion, or reviving the Gospel
elements in it. Here work, knowingly or instinctively, many men and women,
Peter Damiani and St. Francis of Assisi, St. Hildegard of Bingen and
Mechthild of Magdeburg, who, according to their diverse temperaments,
overmasteringly and burningly loved Christ. With them the intellectual
appropriation of dogmatic Christianity was subordinate.

Such men and women were poets and artists, even when they wrote no poetry,
and did not carve or paint. For their lives were poems, unisons of
overmastering thoughts and the emotions inspired by them. The life of
Francis was a living poem. It was kin to the _Dies Irae_, the _Stabat
Mater_, the hymns of Adam of St. Victor, and in a later time, the _Divina
Commedia_. For all these poems, in their different ways, using Christian
thought and feeling as symbols, created imaginative presentations of
universal human moods, even as the lives of Francis and many a cloistered
soul presented like moods in visible embodiment.

Such lives likewise close in with art. They poured themselves around the
symbols of the human person of Christ and its sacrificial presence in the
Eucharist; they grasped the infinite and universal through these
tangibilities. But the poems also sprang into being through a concrete
realizing in mood, and a visualizing in narrative, of such symbols. And
the same need of grasping the infinite and universal through symbols was
the inspiration of mediaeval art: it built the cathedrals, painted their
windows, filled their niches with statues, carving prophet types, carving
the times and seasons of God’s providence, carving the vices and virtues
of the soul and its eternal destiny, and at the same time augmenting the
Liturgy with symbolic words and acts. So saint and poet and
artist-craftsman join in that appropriation of Christianity which was
putting life into whatever had come from the Latin Fathers, by pondering
upon it, loving it, living it, imagining it, and making it into poetry and
art.

It is better not to generalize further, or attempt more specifically to
characterize the mediaeval genius. As its manifestations pass before our
consideration, we shall see the complexity of thought and life within the
interplay of the moulding forces of mediaeval development, as they strove
with each other or wrought in harmony, as they were displayed in frightful
contrasts between the brutalities of life, and the lofty, but not less
real, strainings of the spirit, or again in the opposition between
inchoately variant ideals and the endeavour for their more inclusive
reconcilement. Various phases of the mediaeval spirit were to unfold only
too diversely with popes, kings and knights, monks, nuns, and heretics,
satirists, troubadours and minnesingers; in emotional yearnings and
intellectual ideals; in the literature of love and the literature of its
suppression; in mistress-worship, and the worship of the Virgin and the
passion-flooded Christ of Canticles. Sublimely will this spirit show
itself in the resistless apotheosis of symbolism, and in art and poetry
giving utterance to the mediaeval conceptions of order and beauty. Other
of its phases will be evinced in the striving of earnest souls for
spiritual certitude; in the scholastic structure and accomplishment; in
the ways in which men felt the spell of the Classics; and everywhere and
universally in the mediaeval conflict between life’s fulness and the
insistency of the soul’s salvation.




CHAPTER II

THE LATINIZING OF THE WEST


The intellectual and spiritual life of the partly Hellenized and, at last,
Christianized, Roman Empire furnished the contents of the intellectual and
spiritual development of the Middle Ages.[17] In Latin forms the Christian
and antique elements passed to the mediaeval period. Their Latinization,
their continuance, and their passing on, were due to the existence of the
Empire as a political and social fact. Rome’s equal government facilitated
the transmission of Greek thought through the Mediterranean west; Roman
arms, Roman qualities conquered Spain and Gaul, subdued them to the Roman
order, opened them to Graeco-Latin influences, also to Christianity.
Indelibly Latinized in language and temper, Spain, Gaul, and Italy present
first a homogeneity of culture and civic order, and then a common
decadence and confusion. But decadence and confusion did not obliterate
the ancient elements; which painfully endured, passing down disfigured and
bedimmed, to form the basis of mediaeval culture.

The all-important Latinization of western Europe began with the
unification of Italy under Rome. This took five centuries of war. In
central Italy, Marsians, Samnites, Umbrians, Etruscans, were slowly
conquered; and in the south Rome stood forth at last triumphant after the
war against Tarentum and Pyrrhus of Epirus. With Rome’s political
domination, the Latin language also won its way to supremacy throughout
the peninsula, being drastically forced, along with Roman civic
institutions, upon Tarentum and the other Greek communities of Magna
Graecia.[18] Yet in revenge, from this time on, Greek medicine and
manners, mythology, art, poetry, philosophy--Greek thought in every
guise--entered the Latin pale.

At the time of which we speak, the third century before Christ, the
northern boundaries of Italy were still the rivers Arno and, to the east,
the Aesis, which flows into the Adriatic, near Ancona. North-west of the
Arno, Ligurian highlanders held the mountain lands as far as Nice. North
of the Aesis lay the valley of the Po. That great plain may have been
occupied at an early time by Etruscan communities scattered through a
Celtic population gradually settling to an agricultural life. Whatever may
be the facts as to the existence of these earlier Celts, other and ruder
Celtic tribes swarmed down from the Alps[19] about 400 B.C., spread
through the Po Valley, pushing the Etruscans back into Etruria, and
following them there to carry on the war. After this comes the well-known
story of Roman interference, leading to Roman overthrow at the river Allia
in 390, and the capture of the city by these “Gauls.” The latter then
retired northward, to occupy the Po Valley; though bands of them settled
as far south as the Aesis.

Time and again, Rome was to be reminded of the Celtic peril. Between the
first and second Punic wars, the Celts, reinforced from beyond the Alps,
attacked Etruria and threatened Rome. Defeating them, the Consuls pushed
north to subdue the Po Valley (222 B.C.). South of the river the Celts
were expelled, and their place was filled by Roman colonists. The fortress
cities of Placentia (Piacenza) and Cremona were founded on the right and
left banks of the Po, and south-east of them Mutina (Modena). The
Flaminian road was extended across the Apennines to Fanum, and thence to
Ariminum (Rimini), thus connecting the two Italian seas.

Hannibal’s invasion of Italy brought fresh disturbance, and when the war
with him was over, Rome set herself to the final subjugation of the Celts
north of the Po. Upon their submission the Latinization of the whole
valley began, and advanced apace; but the evidence is scanty. Statius
Caecilius, a comic Latin poet, was a manumitted Insubrian Celt who had
been brought to Rome probably as a prisoner of war. He died in 168 B.C.
Some generations after him, Cornelius Nepos was born in upper Italy, and
Catullus at Verona; Celtic blood may have flowed in their veins. In the
meanwhile the whole region had been organized as Gallia Cisalpina, with
its southern boundary fixed at the Rubicon, which flows near Rimini.

The Celts of northern Italy were the first palpably non-Italian people to
adopt the Latin language. Second in time and thoroughness to their
Latinization was that of Spain. Military reasons led to its conquest.
Hamilcar’s genius had created there a Carthaginian power, as a base for
the invasion of Italy. This project, accomplished by Hamilcar’s son,
brought home to the Roman Senate the need to control the Spanish
peninsula. The expulsion of the Carthaginians, which followed, did not
give mastery over the land; and two centuries of Roman persistence were
required to subdue the indomitable Iberians.

So, in the end, Spain was conquered, and became a Latin country. Its
tribal cantons were replaced with urban communities, and many Roman
colonies were founded, to grow to prosperous cities. These were
strongholds of Latin. Cordova became a very famous home of education and
letters. Apparently the southern Spaniards had fully adopted the ways and
speech of Rome before Strabo wrote his _Geography_, about A.D. 20. The
change was slower in the mountains of Asturia, but quite rapid in the
north-eastern region known as Nearer Spain, Hispania Citerior, as it was
called. There, at the town of Osca (Huesca), Sertorius eighty years before
Christ had established the first Latin school for the native Spanish
youth.

The reign of Augustus, and especially his two years’ sojourn in Spain (26
and 25 B.C.) brought quiet to the peninsula, and thereafter no part of the
Empire enjoyed such unbroken peace. Of all lands outside of Italy, with
the possible exception of Provincia, Spain became most completely Roman in
its institutions, and most unequivocally Latin in its culture. It was the
most populous of the European provinces;[20] and no other held so many
Roman citizens, or so many cities early endowed with Roman civic
rights.[21] The great Augustan literature was the work of natives of
Italy.[22] But in the Silver Age that followed, many of the chief Latin
authors--the elder and younger Seneca, Lucan, Quintilian--were Spaniards.
They were unquestioned representatives of Latin literature, with no
provincial twang in their writings. Then, of Rome’s emperors, Trajan was
born in Spain, and Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius were of Spanish blood.

Perhaps even more completely Latinized was Narbonensis, commonly called
Provincia. Its official name was drawn from the ancient town of Narbo
(Narbonne), which in 118 B.C. was refounded as a Roman colony in partial
accomplishment of the plans of Caius Gracchus. The boundaries of this
colony touched those of the Greek city-state Massilia (Marseilles), whose
rights were respected until it sided against Caesar in the Civil War. Save
for the Massilian territory, which it later included, Provincia stretched
from the eastern Pyrenees by the way of Nemausus (Nîmes) and the Arelate
(Arles) north-easterly through the Rhone Valley, taking in Vienne and
Valence in the country of the Allobroges, and then onward to the edge of
Lake Geneva; thence southerly along the Maritime Alps to the sea. Many of
its towns owed their prosperity to Caesar. In his time the country west of
the Rhone was already half Latin, and was filling up with men from
Italy.[23] Two or three generations later, Pliny dubbed it _Italia verius
quam provincia_. At all events, like northern Italy and Spain, Provincia,
throughout its length and breadth, had appropriated the Latin civilization
of Rome; that civilization city-born and city-reared, solvent of cantonal
organization and tribal custom, destructive of former ways of living and
standards of conduct; a civilization which was commercial as well as
military in its means, and urban in its ends; which loved the life of the
forum, the theatre, the circus, the public bath, and seemed to gain its
finest essence from the instruction of the grammarian and rhetorician. The
language and literature of this civilization were those of an imperial
city, and were to be the language and literature of the Latin city
universal, in whatever western land its walls might rise.

North of Provincia stretched the great territory reaching from the
Atlantic to the Rhine, and with its edges following that river northerly,
and again westerly to the sea. This was Caesar’s conquest, his _omnis
Gallia_. The resistlessness of Rome, her civic and military superiority
over the western peoples whom she conquered, may be grasped from the
record of Gallic subjugation by one in whom great Roman qualities were
united. Perhaps the deepest impression received by the reader of those
_Commentaries_ is of the man behind the book, Caesar himself. The Gallic
War passes before us as a presentation, or medium of realization, of that
all-compelling personality, with whom to consider was to plan, and to
resolve was to accomplish, without hesitation or fear, by the force of
mind. It is in the mirror of this man’s contempt for restless
irresolution, for unsteadiness and impotence, that Gallic qualities are
shown, the reflection undisturbed either by intolerance or sympathy. The
Gauls were always anxious for change, _mobiliter celeriterque_ inflamed to
war or revolution, says Caesar in his memorable words; and, like all men,
they were by nature zealous for liberty, hating the servile state--so it
behoved Caesar to distribute his legions with foresight in a certain
crisis.[24] Thus, without shrug or smile, writes the greatest of
revolutionists who for himself was also seeking liberty of action, freely
and devisingly, not hurried by impatience or any such planless
restlessness as, for example, drove Dumnorix the Aeduan to plot feebly,
futilely, without plan or policy, against fate, to wit Caesar--so he met
his death.[25]

Instability appears as peculiarly characteristic of the Gauls. They were
not barbarians, but an ingenious folk, quick-witted and loquacious.[26]
Their domestic customs were reasonable; they had taxes and judicial
tribunals; their religion held belief in immortality, and in other
respects was not below the paganism of Italy. It was directed by the
priestly caste of Druids, who possessed considerable knowledge, and used
the Greek alphabet in writing. They also presided at trials, and
excommunicated suitors who would not obey their judicial decrees.[27]

The country was divided into about ninety states (_civitates_). Monarchies
appear among them, but the greater number were aristocracies torn with
jealousy, and always in alarm lest some noble’s overweening influence
upset the government. The common people and poor debtors seem scarcely to
have counted. Factions existed in every state, village, and even
household, says Caesar,[28] headed by the rival states of the Aedui and
Sequani. Espousing, as he professed to, the Aeduan cause, Caesar could
always appear as an ally of one faction. At the last a general confederacy
took up arms against him under the noble Auvernian, Vercingetorix.[29] But
the instability of his authority forced the hand of this brilliant leader.

In fine, it would seem that the Gallic peoples had progressed in
civilization as far as their limited political capacity and self-control
would allow. These were the limitations set by the Gallic character. It is
a Gallic custom, says Caesar, to stop travellers, and insist upon their
telling what they know or have heard. In the towns the crowd will throng
around a merchant and make him tell where he has come from and give them
the news. Upon such hearsay the Gauls enter upon measures of the gravest
importance. The states which are deemed the best governed, he adds, have a
law that whenever any one has heard a report or rumour of public moment,
he shall communicate it to a magistrate and to none else. The magistrates
conceal or divulge such news in their discretion. It is not permitted to
discuss public affairs save in an assembly.[30]

Apparently Caesar is not joking in these passages, which speak of a
statecraft based on gossip gathered in the streets, carried straight to a
magistrate, and neither discussed nor divulged on the way! Quite otherwise
were Roman officials to govern, when Caesar’s great campaigns had subdued
these mercurial Gauls. It was after his death that Augustus established
the Roman order through the land. In those famous _partes tres_ of the
_Commentaries_ he settled it: Iberian and Celtic Aquitania, Celtic
Lugdunensis, and Celtic-Teuton Belgica, making together the three Gauls.
It is significant that the emperor kept them as imperial provinces, still
needing military administration, while he handed over Provincia to the
Senate.

Provincia had been Romanized in law and government as the “Three Gauls”
never were to be. Augustus followed Caesar in respecting the tribal and
cantonal divisions of the latter, making only such changes as were
necessary. Gallic cities under the Empire show no great uniformity. Each
appears as the continuance of the local tribe, whose life and politics
were focused in the town. The city (_civitas_) did not end with the town
walls, but included the surrounding country and perhaps many villages. A
number of these cities preserved their ancient constitutions; others
conformed to the type of Roman colonies, whose constitutions were modelled
on those of Italian cities. Colonia Claudia Agrippina (Cologne) is an
example. But all the cities of the “Three Gauls” as well as those of
Provincia, whatever their form of government, conducted their affairs with
senate, magistrates and police of their choosing, had their municipal
property, and controlled their internal finances. A diet was established
for the “Three Gauls” at Lyons, to which the cities sent delegates.
Whatever were its powers, its existence tended to foster a sense of common
Gallic nationality. The Roman franchise, however, was but sparingly
bestowed on individuals, and was not granted to any Gallic city (except
Lyons) until the time of Claudius, himself born at Lyons. He refounded
Cologne as a colony, granted the franchise to Trèves, and abolished the
provisions forbidding Gauls to hold the imperial magistracies. With the
reorganization of the Empire under Diocletian, Trèves became the capital
not only of Gaul, but of Spain and Britain also.

Although there was thus no violent Romanization of Gaul, Roman
civilization rapidly progressed under imperial fostering, and by virtue of
its own energy. Roman roads traversed the country; bridges spanned the
rivers; aqueducts were constructed; cities grew, trade increased,
agriculture improved, and the vine was introduced. At the time of Caesar’s
conquest, the quick-minded Gauls were prepared to profit from a superior
civilization; and under the mighty peace of Rome, men settled down to the
blessings of safe living and law regularly enforced.

The spread of the Latin tongue and the finer elements of Latin culture
followed the establishment of the Roman order. One Gallic city and then
another adopted the new language according to its circumstances and
situation. Of course the cities of Provincia took the lead, largely
Italian as they were in population. On the other hand, Latin made slow
progress among the hills of Auvergne. But farther north, the Roman city of
Lyons was Latin-tongued from its foundation. Thence to the remoter north
and west and east, Latin spread by cities, the foci of affairs and
provincial administration. The imperial government did not demand of its
subjects that they should abandon their native speech, but required in
Gaul, as elsewhere, the use of Latin in the transaction of official
business. This compelled all to study Latin who had affairs in law courts
or with officials, or hoped to become magistrates. Undoubtedly the rich
and noble, especially in the towns, learned Latin quickly, and it soon
became the vehicle of polite, as well as official, intercourse. It was
also the language of the schools attended by the noble Gallic youth. But
among the rural population, the native tongues continued indefinitely.
Obviously one cannot assign any specific time for the popular and general
change from Celtic; but it appears to have very generally taken place
before the Frankish conquest.[31]

By that time, too, those who would naturally constitute the educated
classes, possessed a Latin education. First in the cities of Provincia,
Nîmes, Arles, Vienne, Fréjus, Aix in Provence, then of course at Lyons and
in Aquitaine, and later through the cities of the north-east, Trèves,
Mainz, Cologne, and most laggingly through the north-west Belgic lands
lying over against the channel and the North Sea, Latin education spread.
Grammar and rhetoric were taught, and the great Classics were explained
and read, till the Gauls doubtless felt themselves Roman in spirit as in
tongue.

Of course they were mistaken. To be sure the Gaul was a citizen of the
Empire, which not only represented safety and civilization, but in fact
was the entire civilized world. He had no thought of revolting from that,
any more than from his daily habits or his daily food. Often he felt
himself sentimentally affected toward this universal symbol of his
welfare. He had Latin speech; he had Roman fashions; he took his warm
baths and his cold, enjoyed the sports of the amphitheatre, studied Roman
literature, and talked of the _Respublica_ and _Aurea Roma_. Yet he was,
after all, merely a Romanized inhabitant of Gaul. Roman law and
government, Latin education, and the colour of the Roman spirit had been
imparted; but the inworking, creative genius of Rome was not within her
gift or his capacity. The Gauls, however, are the chief example of a
mediating people. Romanized and not made Roman, their epoch, their
geographical situation, and their modified faculties, all made them
intermediaries between the Roman and the Teuton.

If the Romanization of the “Three Gauls” was least thorough in Belgica,
there was even less of it across the channel. Britain, as far north as the
Clyde and Firth of Forth, was a Roman province for three or four hundred
years. Latin was the language of the towns; but probably never supplanted
the Celtic in the country. The Romanization of the Britons however,
whether thorough or superficial, affected a people who were to be
apparently submerged. They seem to have transmitted none of their Latin
civilization to their Anglo-Saxon conquerors. Yet even the latter when
they came to Britain were not quite untouched by Rome. They were familiar
with Roman wares, if not with Roman ways; and certain Latin words which
are found in all Teutonic languages had doubtless entered Anglo-Saxon.[32]
But this early Roman influence was slight, compared with that which
afterwards came with Christianity. Nor did the Roman culture, before the
introduction of Christianity, exert a deep effect on Germany, at least
beyond the neighbourhood of the large Roman or Romanized towns like
Cologne and Mainz. In many ways, indeed, the Germans were touched by Rome.
Roman diplomacy, exciting tribe against tribe, was decimating them. Roman
influence, and sojourn at Rome, had taught much to many German princes.
Roman weapons, Roman utensils and wares of all kinds were used from the
Danube to the Baltic. But all this did not Romanize the Germans, any more
than a number of Latin words, which had crept in, Latinized their
language.[33]




CHAPTER III

GREEK PHILOSOPHY AS THE ANTECEDENT OF THE PATRISTIC APPREHENSION OF FACT


The Latin West afforded the _milieu_ in which the thoughts and sentiments
of the antique and partly Christian world were held in Latin forms and
preserved from obliteration during the fifth and succeeding centuries,
until taken up by the currents of mingled decrepitude and callowness which
marked the coming of the mediaeval time. Latin Christianity survived, and
made its way across those stormy centuries, to its mediaeval harbourage.
The antique also was carried over, either in the ship of Latin
Christianity, or in tenders freighted by certain Latin Christians who
dealt in secular learning, though not in “unbroken packages.” Those
unbroken packages, to wit, the Latin classics, and after many centuries
the Greek, also floated over. But in the early mediaeval times, men
preferred the pagan matter rehashed, as in the _Etymologies_ of Isidore.

The great ship of Christian doctrine not only bore bits of the pagan
antique stowed here and there, but itself was built with many a plank of
antique timber, and there was antique adulteration in its Christian
freight; or, in other words, the theology of the Church Fathers was partly
made of Greek philosophy, and was put together in modes of Greek
philosophic reasoning. The Fathers lived in the Roman Empire, or in what
was left of it in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Many of
them were born of pagan parents, and all received the common education in
grammar, rhetoric, and literature, which were pagan and permeated with
pagan philosophy. For philosophy did not then stand apart from life and
education; but had become a source of principles of conduct and “daily
thoughts for daily needs.” Many of the Fathers in their pagan, or at least
unsanctified youth, had deeply studied it.

Philosophy held the sum of knowledge in the Empire, and from it came the
concepts in which all the Fathers reasoned. But the _Latin_ Fathers, who
were juristically and rhetorically educated, might also reason through
conceptions, or in a terminology, taken from the Roman Law. Nevertheless,
in the rational process of formulating Christian dogma, Greek philosophy
was the overwhelmingly important factor, because it furnished knowledge
and the metaphysical concepts, and because the greater number of Christian
theologians were Hellenic in spirit, and wrote Greek; while the Latins
reset in Latin, and sometimes juristic, phrase what their eastern brethren
had evolved.[34]

Obviously, for our purpose, which is to appreciate the spiritual endowment
of the Middle Ages, it is essential to have cognizance of patristic
thought. And in order to understand the mental processes of the Fathers,
their attitude toward knowledge and their perception of fact, one must
consider their intellectual environment; which was, of course, made up of
the store of knowledge and philosophic interests prevailing in the Roman
Empire. So we have to gauge the intellectual interests of the pagan world,
first in the earlier times when thinkers were bringing together knowledge
and philosophic concepts, and then in the later period when its
accumulated and somewhat altered thought made the actual environment of
the Church.

       *       *       *       *       *

What race had ever a more genial appreciation of the facts of nature and
of mortal life, than the Greeks? The older Greek philosophies had sprung
from open and unprejudiced observation of the visible world. They were
physical inquiries. With Socrates philosophy turned, as it were, from
fact to truth, to a consideration of the validity of human understanding.
Thereupon the Greek mind became entranced with its own creations. Man was
the measure of all things, for the Sophists. More irrefragably and
pregnantly, man became the measure of all things for Socrates and Plato.
The aphorism might be discarded; but its transcendental import was
established in an imaginative dialectic whose correspondence to the
divinest splendours of the human mind warranted its truth. With
Platonists--and the world was always to be filled with them--perceptions
of physical facts and the data of human life and history, were henceforth
to constitute the outer actuality of a creation within the mind. Every
observed fact is an apparent tangibility; but its reality consists in its
unison with the ultimate realities of rational conception. The
apprehension of the fact must be made to conform to these. For this reason
every fact has a secondary, nay, primary, because spiritual, meaning. Its
true interpretation lies in that significance which accords with the
mind’s consistent system of conceptions, which present the fact as it must
be thought, and therefore as it is; it is the fact brought into right
relationship with spiritual and ethical verity. Of course, methods of
apprehending terrestrial and celestial phenomena as illustrations of
ideally conceived principles, were unlikely to foster habits of close
observation. The apparent facts of sense would probably be imaginatively
treated if not transformed in the process of their apprehension. Nor, with
respect to human story, would such methods draw fixed lines between the
narration of what men are pleased to call the actual occurrence, and the
shaping of a tale to meet the exigencies of argument or illustration.

All this is obvious in Plato. The _Timaeus_ was his vision of the
universe, in which physical facts became plastic material for the spirit’s
power to mould into the likeness of ideal conceptions. The creation of the
universe is conformed to the structure of Platonic dialectic. If any
meaning be certain through the words and imagery of this dialogue, it is
that the world and all creatures which it contains derive such reality as
they have from conformity to the thoughts or ideal patterns in the divine
mind. Visible things are real only so far as they conform to those
perfect conceptions. Moreover, the visible creation has another value,
that of its ethical significance. Physical phenomena symbolize the
conformity of humanity to its best ideal of conduct. Man may learn to
regulate the lawless movements of his soul from the courses of the stars,
the noblest of created gods.

Thus as to natural phenomena; and likewise as to the human story, fact or
fiction. The myth of the shadow-seers in the cave, with which the seventh
book of the _Republic_ opens, is just as illustratively and ideally true
as that opening tale in the _Timaeus_ of the ancient Athenian state, which
fought for its own and others’ freedom against the people of
Atlantis--till the earthquake ended the old Athenian race, and the
Atlantean continent was swallowed in the sea. This story has piqued
curiosity for two thousand years. Was it tradition, or the creation of an
artist dialectician? In either case its ideal and edifying truth stood or
fell, not by reason of conformity to any basic antecedent fact, but
according to its harmony with the beautiful and good.

Plato’s method of conceiving fact might be applied to man’s thoughts of
God, of the origin of the world and the courses of the stars; also to the
artistic manipulation of illustrative or edifying story. Matters, large,
remote, and mysterious, admit of idealizing ways of apprehension. But it
might seem idiocy, rather than idealism, to apply this method to the plain
facts of common life, which may be handled and looked at all around--to
which there is no mysterious other side, like the moon’s, for ever turned
away. Nevertheless the method and its motives drew men from careful
observation of nature, and would invest biography and history with
interests promoting the ingenious application, rather than the close
scrutiny, of fact.

Thus Platonism and its way of treating narrative could not but foster the
allegorical interpretation of ancient tradition and literature, which was
already in vogue in Plato’s time. It mattered not that he would have
nothing to do with the current allegories through which men moralized or
rationalized the old tales of the doings of the gods. He was himself a
weaver of the loveliest allegories when it served his purpose. And after
him the allegorical habit entered into the interpretation of all ancient
story. In the course of time allegory will be applied by the Jew Philo of
Alexandria to the Pentateuch; and one or two centuries later it will play
a great rôle in Christian polemics against Jew and then against Manichean.
It will become _par excellence_ the chief mode of patristic exegesis, and
pass on as a legacy of spiritual truth to the mediaeval church.

Aristotle strikes us as a man of different type from Plato. Whether his
intellectual interests were broader than his teacher’s is hardly for
ordinary people to say. He certainly was more actively interested in the
investigation of nature. Head of an actual school (as Plato had been), and
assisted by the co-operation of able men, he presents himself, with what
he accomplished, at least in threefold guise: as a metaphysician and the
perfecter, if not creator, of formal logic; as an observer of the facts of
nature and the institutions and arts of men; as a man of encyclopaedic
learning. These three phases of intellectual effort proportioned each
other in a mind of universal power and appetition. Yet it has been thought
that there was more metaphysics and formal logic in Aristotle than was
good for his natural science.

The lost and extant writings which have been ascribed to him, embraced a
hundred and fifty titles and amounted to four hundred books. Those which
have been of universal influence upon human inquiry suffice to illustrate
the scope of his labours. There were the treatises upon Logic and first
among them the _Categories_ or classes of propositions, and the _De
interpretatione_ on the constituent parts and kinds of sentences. These
two elementary treatises (the authorship of which has been questioned)
were the only Aristotelian writings generally used through the West until
the latter half of the twelfth century, when the remainder of the logical
treatises became known, to wit, the _Prior Analytics_, upon the syllogism;
the _Posterior Analytics_ upon logical demonstration; the _Topics_, or
demonstrations having probability; and the _Sophistical Elenchi_, upon
false conclusions and their refutation. Together these constitute the
_Organon_ or complete logical instrument, as it became known to the
latter half of the twelfth century, and as we possess it to-day.

The _Rhetoric_ follows, not disconnected with the logical treatises. Then
may be named the _Metaphysics_, and then the writings devoted to Nature,
to wit, the _Physics_, _Concerning the Heavens_, _Concerning Genesis and
Decay_, the _Meteorology_, the _Mechanical Problems_, the _History of
Animals_, the _Anatomical descriptions_, the _Psychology_, the _Parts of
Animals_, the _Generation of Animals_. There was a Botany, which is lost.
Finally, one names the great works on Ethics, Politics, and Poetry.

Every one is overwhelmed by the compass of the achievement of this
intellect. As to the transcendent value of the works on Logic,
Metaphysics, Psychology, Rhetoric, Ethics, Politics, and Poetry, the world
of scholarship has long been practically at one. There is a difference of
opinion as to the quantity and quality of actual investigation represented
by the writings on Natural History. But Aristotle is commonly regarded as
the founder of systematic Zoology. On the whole, perhaps one will not err
in repeating what has been said hundreds of times, that the works ascribed
to Aristotle, and which undoubtedly were produced by him or his
co-labourers under his direction, represent the most prodigious
intellectual achievement ever connected with any single name.

In the school of Aristotle, one phase or another of the master’s activity
would be likely to absorb the student’s energy and fasten his entire
attention. Aristotle’s own pupil and successor was the admirable
Theophrastus, a man of comprehensive attainment, who nevertheless devoted
himself principally to carrying on his master’s labours in botany, and
other branches of natural science. A History of Physics was one of the
most important of his works. Another pupil of Aristotle was Eudemus of
Rhodes, who became a physicist and a historian of the three sciences of
Geometry, Arithmetic, and Astronomy. He exhibits the learned activities
thenceforth to characterize the Peripatetics. It would have been difficult
to carry further the logic or metaphysics of the master. But his work in
natural science might be supplemented, while the body of his writings
offered a vast field for the labours of the commentator. And so, in fact,
Peripatetic energies in the succeeding generations were divided between
science and learning, the latter centring chiefly in historical and
grammatical labours and the exposition of the master’s writing.[35]

Aristotelianism was not to be the philosophy of the closing pre-Christian
centuries, any more than it was to be the philosophy of the thousand years
and more following the Crucifixion. During all that time, its logic held
its own, and a number of its metaphysical principles were absorbed in
other systems. But Aristotelianism as a system soon ceased to be in vogue,
and by the sixth century was no longer known.

Yet one might find an echo of its, or some like, spirit in all men who
were seeking knowledge from the world of nature, from history and humane
learning. There were always such; and some famous examples may be drawn
even from among the practical-minded Romans. One thinks at once of
Cicero’s splendid breadth of humane and literary interest. His friend
Terentius Varro was a more encyclopaedic personality, and an eager student
in all fields of knowledge. Although not an investigator of nature he
wrote on agriculture, on navigation, on geometry, as well as the Latin
tongue, and on Antiquities, divine and human, even on philosophy.[36]

Another lover of knowledge was the elder Pliny, who died from venturing
too near to observe the eruption which destroyed Pompeii. He was an
important functionary under the emperor Vespasian, just as Varro had held
offices of authority in the time of the Republic. Pliny’s _Historia
naturalis_ was an astounding compilation, intended to cover the whole
plain of common and uncommon knowledge. The compiler neither observed for
himself nor weighed the statements of others. His compilation is a happy
harbourage for the preposterous as well as reasonable, where the
traveller’s tale of far-off wonders takes its place beside the testimony
of Aristotle. All is fish that comes to the net of the good Pliny, though
it be that wonderful _piscis_, the _Echinus_, which though but a cubit
long has such tenacity of grip and purpose that it holds fast the largest
galley, and with the resistance of its fins, renders impotent the efforts
of a hundred rowers. Fish for Pliny also are all the stories of antiquity,
of dog-headed, one-legged, big-footed men, of the Pigmies and the Cranes,
of the Phoenix and the Basilisk. He delights in the more intricate
causality of nature’s phenomena, and tells how the bowels of the
field-mouse increase in number with the days of the moon, and the energy
of the ant decreases as the orb of Venus wanes.[37] But this credulous
person was a marvel of curiosity and diligence, and we are all his debtors
for an acquaintance with the hearsay opinions current in the antique
world.

Varro and Pliny were encyclopaedists. Yet before, as well as after them,
the men possessed by the passion for knowledge of the natural world, were
frequently devoted to some branch of inquiry, rather than encyclopaedic
gleaners, or universal philosophers. Hippocrates, Socrates’s contemporary,
had left a name rightly enduring as the greatest of physicians. In the
third century before Christ Euclid is a great mathematician, and
Hipparchus and Archimedes have place for ever, the one among the great
astronomers, the other among the great terrestrial physicists. All these
men represent reflection and theory, as well as investigation and
experiment. Leaping forward to the second century A.D., we find among
others two great lovers of science. Galen of Pergamos was a worthy
follower, if not a peer, of the great physician of classic Greece; and
Ptolemy of Alexandria emulated the Alexandrian Hipparchus, whose fame he
revered, and whose labours (with his own) he transmitted to posterity.
Each of these men may be regarded as advancing some portion of the
universal plan of Aristotle.

Another philosophy, Stoicism, had already reached a wide acceptance. As
for the causes of this, doubtless the decline of Greek civic freedom
before the third century B.C., had tended to throw thoughtful men back
upon their inner life; and those who had lost their taste for the popular
religion, needed a philosophy to live by. Stoicism became especially
popular among the Romans. It was ethics, a philosophy of practice rather
than of knowledge. The Stoic looked out upon the world from the inner
fortress of the human will. That guarded or rather constituted his
well-being. He cared for such knowledge, call it instruction rather, as
would make good the principle that human well-being lay in the rightly
self-directing will. He did not seriously care for metaphysics, or for
knowledge of the natural world, save as one or the other subserved the
ends of his philosophy as a guide of life. Thus the Stoic physics, so
important a part in the Stoic system, was inspired by utilitarian motives
and deflected from unprejudiced observation by teleological considerations
and reflections on the dispensations of Providence. Of course, some of the
Stoics show a further range of intellectual interest; Seneca, for example,
who was a fine moralist and wrote beautiful essays upon the conduct of
life. He, like a number of other people, composed a book of _Quaestiones
naturales_, which was chiefly devoted to the weather, a subject always
very close to man. But he was not a serious meteorologist. For him the
interest of the fact lay rather in its use or in its moral bearing. After
Seneca the Stoic interest in fact narrows still further, as with Epictetus
and Marcus Aurelius.

Like things might be said of the school of Epicurus, a child of different
colour, yet birthmate of the Stoa. For in that philosophy as in Stoicism,
all knowledge beyond ethics had a subordinate rôle. As a Stoic or
Epicurean, a man was not likely to contribute to the advance of any branch
of science. Yet habits of eclectic thought and common curiosity, or call
it love of knowledge, made many nominal members of these schools eager
students and compilers from the works of others.

We have yet to speak of the system most representative of latter-day
paganism, and of enormous import for the first thousand years of Christian
thought. Neo-Platonism was the last great creation of Greek philosophy.
More specifically, it was the noblest product of that latter-day paganism
which was yearning somewhat distractedly, impelled by cravings which
paganism could neither quench nor satisfy.

Spirit is; it is the Real. It makes the body, thereby presenting itself in
sensible form; it is not confined by body or dependent on body as its
cause or necessary ground. In many ways men have expressed, and will
express hereafter, the creative or causal antecedence of the spiritual
principle. In many ways they have striven to establish this principle in
God who is Spirit, or in the Absolute One. Many also have been the
processes of individualization and diverse the mediatorial means, through
which philosopher, apostle, or Church Doctor has tried to bring this
principle down to man, and conceive him as spirit manifesting an
intelligible selfhood through the organs of sense. Platonism was a
beautiful, if elusive, expression of this endeavour, and Neo-Platonism a
very palpable although darkening statement of the same.

All men, except fools, have their irrational sides. Who does not believe
what his reason shall labour in vain to justify? Such belief may have its
roots spread through generalizations broader than any specific rational
processes of which the man is conscious. And a man is marked by the
character of his supra-rational convictions, or beliefs or credulous
conjectures. One thinks how Plato wove and coloured his dialectic, and
angled with it, after those transcendencies that he well knew could never
be so hooked and taken. His conviction--non-dialectical--of the supreme
and beautiful reality of spirit led him on through all his arguments, some
of which appear as playful, while others are very earnest.

Less elusive than Plato’s was the supra-rationality of his distant
disciple, the Egyptian Plotinus (died 270), creator of Neo-Platonism. With
him the supra-rational represented an _élan_, a reaching beyond the
clearly seen or clearly known, to the Spirit itself. He had a disciple
Porphyry, like himself a sage--and yet a different sage. Porphyry’s
supra-rationalities hungered for many things from which his rational
nature turned askance. But he has a disciple, Iamblicus by name, whose
rational nature not only ceases to protest, but of its free will
prostitutes itself in the service of unreason.

The synthetic genius of Plotinus enabled him to weave into his system
valuable elements from Aristotle and the Stoics. But he was above all a
Platonist. He presents the spiritual triad: the One, the Mind, the Soul.
From the One comes the Mind, that is, the Nous, which embraces the
totality of the knowable or intelligible, to wit, the Cosmos of Ideas.
From that, come the Soul of the World and the souls of men. Matter, which
is no-thing, gains form and partial reality when _informed_ with soul.
Plotinus’s attitude toward knowledge of the concrete natural or historic
fact, displays a transcendental indifference exceeding that of Plato.
Perceptible facts with him are but half-real manifestations of the
informing spirit. They were quite plastic, malleable, reducible. Moreover,
thoughts of the evil of the multiple world of sense held for Plotinus and
his followers a bitterness of ethical unreality which Plato was too great
an Athenian to feel.

Dualistic ethics which find in matter the principle of unreality or evil,
diminish the human interest in physical fact. The ethics of Plotinus
consisted in purification and detachment from things of sense. This is
asceticism. And Plotinus was an ascetic, not through endeavour, but from
contempt. He did not struggle to renounce the world, but despised it with
the spontaneity of a sublimated temperament. He seemed like a man ashamed
of being in the body, Porphyry says of him. Nor did he wish to cure any
contemptible bodily ailments, or wash his wretched body.

Plotinus’s Absolute, the First or One, might not be grasped by reason. Yet
to approach and contemplate It was the best for man. Life’s crown was the
ecstasy of the supra-rational and supra-intelligible vision of It. This
Plotinean irrationality was lofty; but it was too transcendent, too
difficult, and too unrelated to the human heart, to satisfy other men. No
fear but that his followers would bring it down to the level of _their_
irrational tendencies.

The borrowed materials of this philosophy were made by its founder into a
veritable system. It included, potentially at least, the popular beliefs,
which, however, interested this metaphysical Copt very little. But in
those superstitious centuries, before as well as after him, these cruder
elements were gathered and made much of by men of note. There was a
tendency to contrast the spiritual and real with the manifold of material
nonentity, and a cognate tendency to emphasize the opposition between the
spiritual and good, and the material and evil, or between opposing
spiritual principles. With less metaphysical people such opposition would
take more entrancing shapes in the battles of gods and demons. Probably it
would cause ascetic repression of the physical passions. Both tendencies
had shown themselves before Plotinus came to build them into his system.
Friend Plutarch, for instance, of Chaeroneia, was a man of pleasant temper
and catholic curiosity. His philosophy was no great matter. He was gently
credulous, and interested in anything marvellous and every imaginable god
and demon. This good Greek was no ascetic, and yet had much to say of the
strife between the good and evil principle. Like thoughts begat asceticism
in men of a different temperament; for instance in the once famous
Apollonius of Tyana and others, who were called Neo-Pythagoreans, whatever
that meant. Such men had also their irrationalities, which perhaps made up
the major part of their natures. They did indeed belong to those centuries
when Astrology flourished at the imperial Court,[38] and every mode of
magic mystery drew its gaping votaries; when men were ravenously drawing
toward everything, except the plain concrete fact steadily viewed and
quietly reasoned on.

But it was within the schools of Neo-Platonism, in the generations after
Plotinus, that these tendencies flourished, beneath the shelter of his
elastic principles. Here three kindred currents made a resistless stream:
a transcendental, fact-compelling dialectic; unveiled recognition of the
supreme virtue of supra-rational convictions and experiences; and an
asceticism which contemned matter and abhorred the things of sense. What
more was needed to close the faculties of observation, befool the reason,
and destroy knowledge in the end?

Porphyry and Iamblicus show the turning of the tide. The first of these
was a Tyrian, learned, intelligent, austere. His life extends from about
the year 232 to the year 300. His famous _Introduction_ to the
_Categories_ of Aristotle was a corner-stone of the early mediaeval
knowledge of logic. He wrote a keenly rational work against the
Christians, in which his critical acumen pointed out that the Book of
Daniel was not composed before the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes. He did
much to render intelligible the writings of his master Plotinus, and made
a compend of Neo-Platonism in the form of _Sentences_. These survive, as
well as his work on _Abstinence from Eating Flesh_, and other treatises,
allegorical and philosophic.

He was to Plotinus as Soul, in the Neo-Platonic system, was to Mind--Soul
which somehow was darkly, passionately tangled in the body of which it was
the living principle. The individual soul of Porphyry wrestled with all
the matters which the mind of Plotinus made slight account of. Plotinus
lived aloof in a region of metaphysics warmed with occasional ecstasy.
Porphyry, willy nilly, was drawn down to life, and suffered all the pain
of keen mentality when limed and netted with the anxieties of common
superstitions. He was forever groping in a murky atmosphere. He could not
clear himself of credulity, deny and argue as he might. Nor could
asceticism pacify his mind. Philosophically he followed Plotinus’s
teachings, and understood them too, which was a marvel. Many of his own,
or possibly reflected, thoughts are excellent. No Christian could hold a
more spiritual conception of sacrifice than Porphyry when thinking of the
worship of the Mind--the Nous or Second God. Offer to it silence and
chaste thought, which will unite us to it, and make us like itself. The
perfect sacrifice is to disengage the soul from passions.[39] What could
be finer? And again says Porphyry: The body is the soul’s garment, to be
laid aside; the wise man needs only God; evil spirits have no power over a
pure soul. But, but, but--at his last statement Porphyry’s confidence
breaks. He is worried because it is so hard to know the good from evil
demons; and the latter throng the temples, and must be exorcised before
the true God will appear. This same man had said that God’s true temple
was the wise man’s soul! Alas! Porphyry’s nature reeks with
contradictions. His letter to the Egyptian priest, Anebo, consists of
sharply-put questions as to the validity of any kind of theurgy or
divination. How can men know anything as to these things? What reason to
suppose that this, that, or the other rite--all anxiously enumerated--is
rightly directed or has effect? None! none! none! such is the answer
expected by the questions.

But Porphyry’s own soul answers otherwise. His works--the _De abstinentia_
for example--teem with detailed and believing discussion of every kind of
theurgic practice and magic rite, whereby the divine and demonic natures
may be moved. He believed in oracles and sorcery. Vainly did the more
keenly intellectual side of his nature seek to hold such matters at arm’s
length; his other instincts hungered for them, craved to touch and taste
and handle, as the child hankers for what is forbidden. There is
angel-lore, but far more devil-lore, in Porphyry, and below the earth the
demons have their realm, and at their head a demon-king. Thus organized,
these malformed devil-shapes torment the lives of men, malignant
deceivers, spiteful trippers-up, as they are.

Such a man beset by demons (which his intelligence declares to have no
power over him!), such a man, austere and grim, would practise fanatically
the asceticism recognized so calmly by the system of Plotinus. With
Porphyry, strenuously, anxiously, the upper grades of virtue become
violent purification and detachment from things of sense. Here he is in
grim earnest.

It is wonderful that this man should have had a critical sense of historic
fact, as when he saw the comparatively late date of the Book of Daniel. He
could see the holes in others’ garments. But save for some such polemic
purpose, the bare, crude fact interests him little. He is an elaborate
fashioner of allegory, and would so interpret the fictions of the poets.
Plotinus, when it suited him, had played with myths, like Plato. No such
light hand, and scarcely concealed smile, has Porphyry. As for physical
investigations, they interest him no more seriously than they did his
master, and when he touches upon natural fact he is as credulous as Pliny.
“The Arabians,” says he, “understand the speech of crows, and the
Tyrrhenians that of eagles; and perhaps we and all men would understand
all living beings if a dragon licked our ears.”[40]

These inner conflicts darkened Porphyry’s life, and doubtless made some of
the motives which were turning his thoughts to suicide, when Plotinus
showed him that this was not the true way of detachment. There was no
conflict, but complete surrender, and happy abandonment in Iamblicus the
Divine (θεῖος) who when he prayed might be lifted ten cubits from the
ground--so thought his disciples--and around whose theurgic fingers,
dabbling in a magic basin of water, Cupids played and kissed each other.
His life, told by the Neo-Platonic biographer, Eunapius, is as full of
miracle as the contemporary Life of St. Antony by Athanasius. Iamblicus
floats before us a beautiful and marvellously garbed priest, a dweller in
the recesses of temples. He frankly gave himself to theurgy, convinced
that the Soul needs the aid of every superhuman being--hero, god, demon,
angel.[41] He was credulous on principle. It is of first importance, he
writes, that the devotee should not let the marvellous character of an
occurrence arouse incredulity within him. He needs above all a “science”
(ἐπιστήμη) which shall teach him to disbelieve nothing as to the gods.[42]
For the divine principle is essentially miraculous, and magic is the open
door, yes, and the way up to it, the anagogic path.

All this and more besides is set forth in the _De mysteriis_, the chief
composition of his school. It was the answer to that doubting letter of
Porphyry to Anebo, and contains full proof and exposition of the occult
art of moving god or demon. We all have an inborn knowledge (ἔμφυτος
γνῶσις)[43] of the gods. But it is not thought or contemplation that
unites us to them; it is the power of the theurgic rite or cabalistic
word, understood only by the gods. We cannot understand the reason of
these acts and their effects.[44]

There is no lower depth. Plotinus’s reason-surpassing vision of the One
(which represents in him the principle of irrationality) is at last
brought down to the irrational act, the occult magic deed or word. Truly
the worshipper needs his best credulity--which is bespoken by Iamblicus
and by this book. The work seems to argue, somewhat obscurely, that the
prayer or invocation or rite, does not actually draw the god to us, but
draws us toward the god, making our wills fit to share in his. The writer
of such a work is likely to be confused in his statement of principles;
but will expand more genially when expounding the natures of demons,
heroes, angels, and gods, and the effect of them upon humanity. Perhaps
the matter still seems dark; but the picturesque details are bright
enough. For the writer describes the manifestations and apparitions of
these beings--their ἐπιφανείαι and φάσματα. The apparitions of the gods
are μονοειδῆ, simple and uniform: those of the demons are ποικίλα, that
is, various and manifold; those of the angels are more simple than those
of the demons, but inferior to those of the gods. The archangels in their
apparitions are more like the gods; while the ἄρχοντες, the “governors,”
have variety and yet order. The gods as they appear to men, are radiant
with divine effulgence, the archangels terrible yet kind; the demons are
frightful, producing perturbation and terror--on all of which the work
enlarges. Speaking more specifically of the effect of these apparitions on
the thaumaturgist, the writer says that visions of the gods bring a mighty
power, and divine love and joy ineffable; the archangels bring
steadfastness and power of will and intellectual contemplation; the angels
bring rational wisdom and truth and virtue. But the vision of demons
brings the desires of sense and the vigour to fulfil them.

So low sank Neo-Platonism in pagan circles. Of course it did not create
this mass of superstitious fantasy. It merely fell in cordially, and over
every superstition flung the justification of its principles. In the
process it changed from a philosophy to a system of theurgic practice. The
common superstitions of the time, or their like, were old enough. But
now--and here was the portentous fact--they had wound themselves into the
natures of intellectual people; and Neo-Platonism represents the chief
formal facilitation of this result.

A contemporary phenomenon, and perhaps the most popular of pagan cults in
the third and fourth centuries, was the worship of Mithra, around which
Neo-Platonism could throw its cloak as well as around any other form of
pagan worship. Mithraism, a partially Hellenized growth from the old
Mazdaean (even Indo-Iranian) faith, had been carried from one boundary of
the Empire to the other, by soldiers or by merchants who had imbibed its
doctrines in the East. It shot over the Empire like a flame. A warrior
cult, the late pagan emperors gave it their adhesion. It was, in fine, the
pagan Antaeus destined to succumb in the grasp of the Christian Hercules.

With it, or after it, came Manicheism, also from the East. This was quite
as good a philosophy as the Neo-Platonism of Iamblicus. The system called
after Manes was a crass dualism, containing fantastic and largely borrowed
speculation as to the world and man. Satan was there and all his devils.
He was the begetter of mankind, in Adam. But Satan himself, in previous
struggles with good angels, had gained some elements of light; and these
passed into Adam’s nature. Eve, however, is sensuality. After man’s
engendering, the strife begins between the good and evil spirits to
control his lot. In ethics, of course, Manicheism was dualistic and
ascetic, like Neo-Platonism, and also like the Christianity of the Eastern
and Western Empire. Manicheism, unlike Mithraism, was not to succumb, but
merely to retreat before Christianity. Again and again from the East,
through the lower confines of the present Russia, through Hungary, it made
advance. The Bogomiles were its children; likewise the Cathari in the
north of Italy, and the Albigenses of Provence.[45]

Platonism, Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Mithraism, and Manicheism, these
names, taken for simplicity’s sake, serve to indicate the mind and temper
of the educated world in which Christianity was spreading. Obviously the
Christian Fathers’ ways of thinking were given by all that made up their
environment, their education, their second natures. They were men of
their period, and as Christians their intellectual standards did not rise
nor their understanding of fact alter, although their approvals and
disapprovals might be changed. Their natures might be stimulated and
uplifted by the Faith and its polemic ardours, and yet their manner of
approaching and apprehending facts, _its_ facts, for example, might
continue substantially those of their pagan contemporaries or
predecessors.

In the fourth century the leaders of the Church both in the East and West
were greater men than contemporary pagan priests or philosophers or
rhetoricians. For the strongest minds had enlisted on the Christian side,
and a great cause inspired their highest energies with an efficient
purpose. There is no comparison between Athanasius, Basil, Gregory
Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa and Chrysostom in the East; Ambrose, Jerome,
and Augustine in the West; and pagans, like Libanius, the favourite of the
Emperor Julian, or even Julian himself, or Symmachus, the opponent of St.
Ambrose in the cause of the pagan Altar of Victory. That was a lost cause,
and the cause of paganism was becoming more and more broken, dissipated,
uninspiring. Nevertheless, in spite of the superiority of the Christian
doctors, in spite also of the mighty cause which marshalled their
endeavours so efficiently, they present, both in their higher intelligence
and their lower irrationalities, abundant likeness to the pagans.

It has appeared that metaphysical interests absorbed the attention of
Plotinus, who has nevertheless his supreme irrationality atop of all.
Porphyry also possessed a strong reasoning nature, but was drawn
irresistibly to all the things, gods, demons, divination and theurgy, of
which one half of him disapproved. Plotinus, quite in accordance with his
philosophic principles, has an easy contempt for physical life. With
Porphyry this has become ardent asceticism. It was also remarked that
Plotinus’s system was a synthesis of much antecedent thought; and that its
receptivity was rendered extremely elastic by the Neo-Platonic principle
that man’s ultimate approach to God lay through ecstasy and not through
reason. Herein, rather latent and not yet sorely taxed, was a broad
justification of common beliefs and practices. To all these Iamblicus
gladly opened the door. Rather than a philosopher, he was a priest, a
thaumaturgist and magician. Finally, it is obvious that neither Iamblicus
nor Porphyry nor Plotinus was primarily or even seriously interested in
any clear objective knowledge of material facts. Plotinus merely noticed
them casually in order to illustrate his principles, while Iamblicus
looked to them for miracles.

Christianity as well as Neo-Platonism was an expression of the principle
that life’s primordial reality is spirit. And likewise with Christians, as
with Neo-Platonists, phases of irrationality may be observed in ascending
and descending order. At the summit the sublimest Christian
supra-rationality, the love of God, uplifts itself. From that height the
irrational conviction grades down to credulity preoccupied with the
demoniacal and miraculous. Fruitful comparisons may be drawn between
Neo-Platonists and Christian doctors.[46]

Origen (died 253), like Plotinus, of Coptic descent, and the most
brilliant genius of the Eastern Church, was by some fifteen years the
senior of the Neo-Platonist. It is not certain that either of them
directly influenced the other. In intellectual power the two were peers.
Both were absorbed in the higher phases of their thought, but neither
excluded the more popular beliefs from the system which he was occupied in
constructing. Plotinus had no mind to shut the door against the beliefs of
polytheism; and Origen accepted on his part the demons and angels of
current Christian credence.[47] In fact, he occupied himself with them
more than Plotinus did with the gods of the Hellenic pantheon. Of course
Origen, like every other Christian doctor, had his fundamental and saving
irrationality in his acceptance of the Christian revelation and the risen
Christ. This had already taken its most drastic form in the _credo quia
absurdum_ of Tertullian the Latin Father, who was twenty-five years his
senior. Herein one observes the acceptance of the miraculous on principle.
That the great facts of the Christian creed were beyond the proof or
disproof of reason was a principle definitely accepted by all the Fathers.

Further, since all Catholic Christians accepted the Scriptures as revealed
truth, they were obliged to accept many things which their reason,
unaided, might struggle with in vain. Here was a large opportunity, as to
which Christians would act according to their tempers, in emphasizing and
amplifying the authoritative or miraculous, _i.e._ irrational, element.
And besides, outside even of these Scriptural matters and their
interpretations, there would be the general question of the educated
Christian’s interest in the miraculous. Great mental power and devotion to
the construction of dogma by no means precluded a lively interest in this,
as may be seen in that very miraculous life of St. Anthony, written
probably by Athanasius himself. This biography is more preoccupied with
the demoniacal and miraculous than Porphyry’s _Life of Plotinus_; indeed
in this respect it is not outdone by Eunapius’s _Life of Iamblicus_.
Turning to the Latin West, one may compare with them that charming
prototypal Vita Sancti, the _Life of St. Martin_ by Sulpicius Severus.[48]
A glance at these writings shows a similarity of interest with Christian
and Neo-Platonist, and in both is found the same unquestioning acceptance
of the miraculous.

Thus one observes how the supernatural manifestation, the miraculous
event, was admitted and justified on principle in both the Neo-Platonic
and the Christian system. In both, moreover, metaphysical or symbolizing
tendencies had withdrawn attention from a close scrutiny of any fact,
observed, imagined, or reported. With both, the primary value of
historical or physical fact lay in its illumination of general convictions
or accepted principles. And with both, the supernatural fact was the fact
_par excellence_, in that it was the direct manifestation of the divine or
spiritual power.

Iamblicus had announced that man must not be incredulous as to superhuman
beings and their supernatural doings. On the Christian side, there was no
bit of popular credence in miracle or magic mystery, or any notion as to
devils, angels, and departed saints, for which justification could not be
found in the writings of the great Doctors of the Church. These learned
and intellectual men evince different degrees of interest in such matters;
but none stands altogether aloof, or denies _in toto_. No evidence is
needed here. A broad illustration, however, lies in the fact that before
the fourth century the chief Christian rites had become sacramental
mysteries, necessarily miraculous in their nature and their efficacy. This
was true of Baptism; it was more stupendously true of the Eucharist.
Mystically, but none the less really, and above all inevitably, the bread
and wine have miraculously become the body and the blood. The process, one
may say, began with Origen; with Cyril of Jerusalem it is completed;
Gregory of Nyssa regards it as a continuation of the verity of the
Incarnation, and Chrysostom is with him.[49] One pauses to remark that the
relationship between the pagan and Christian mysteries was not one of
causal antecedence so much as one of analogous growth. A pollen of terms
and concepts blew hither and thither, and effected a cross-fertilization
of vigorously growing plants. The life-sap of the Christian mysteries, as
with those of Mithra, was the passion for a symbolism of the unknown and
the inexpressible.

But one must not stop here. The whole Christian Church, as well as
Porphyry and Iamblicus, accepted angels and devils, and recognized their
intervention or interference in human affairs. Then displacing the local
pagan divinities come the saints, and Mary above all. They are honoured,
they are worshipped. Only an Augustine has some gentle warning to utter
against carrying these matters to excess.

In connection with all this, one may notice an illuminating point, or
rather motive. In the third and fourth centuries the common yearning of
the Graeco-Roman world was for an approach to God; it was looking for the
anagogic path, the way up from man and multiplicity to unity and God. An
absorbing interest was taken in the means. Neo-Platonism, the creature of
this time, whatever else it was, was mediatorial, a system of mediation
between man and the Absolute First Principle. Passing halfway over from
paganism to Christianity, the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius is
also essentially a system of mediation, which has many affinities (as well
it might!) with the system of Plotinus.[50] Within Catholic Christianity
the great work of Athanasius was to establish Christ’s sole and
all-sufficient mediation. Catholicism was permanently set upon the
mediatorship of Christ, God and man, the one God-man reconciling the
nature which He had veritably, and not seemingly, assumed, to the divine
substance which He had never ceased to be. Athanasius’s struggle for this
principle was bitter and hard-pressed, because within Christianity as well
as without, men were demanding easier and more tangible stages and means
of mediation.

Of such, Catholic Christianity was to recognize a vast multitude, perhaps
not dogmatically as a necessary part of itself; but practically and
universally. Angels, saints, the Virgin over all, are mediators between
man and God. This began to be true at an early period, and was established
before the fourth century.[51] Moreover, every bit of rite and mystery and
miracle, as in paganism, so in Catholicism, was essentially a means of
mediation, a way of bringing the divine principle to bear on man and his
affairs, and so of bringing man within the sphere of the divine
efficiency.

Let us make some further Christian comparisons with our Neo-Platonic
friends Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblicus. As we have adduced Origen, it
would also be easy to find other parallels from the Eastern Church. But as
the purpose is to mark the origin of the intellectual tendencies of the
Western Middle Ages, we may at once draw examples from the Latin Fathers.
For their views set the forms of mediaeval intellectual interests, and for
centuries directed and even limited the mediaeval capacity for
apprehending whatever it was given to the Middle Ages to set themselves to
know. To pass thus from the East to the West is permissible, since the
same pagan cults and modes of thought passed from one boundary of the
Empire to the other. Plotinus himself lived and taught in Rome for the
last twenty-five years of his life, and there wrote his _Enneads_ in
Greek. So on the Christian side, the Catholic Church throughout the East
and West presents a solidarity of development, both as to dogma and
organization, and also as to popular acceptances.

Let us train our attention upon some points of likeness between Plotinus
and St. Augustine. The latter’s teachings contain much Platonism; and with
this greatest of Latin Fathers, who did not read much Greek, Platonism was
inextricably mingled with Neo-Platonism. It is possible to search the
works of Augustine and discover this, that, or the other statement
reflecting Plato or Plotinus.[52] Yet their most interesting effect on
Augustine will not be found in Platonic theorems consciously followed or
abjured by the latter. Platonism was “in the air,” at least was in the air
breathed by an Augustine. Our specific bishop of Hippo knew little of
Plato’s writings. But Plato had lived: his thoughts had influenced many
generations, and in their diffusion had been modified, and had lost many a
specific feature. Thereafter Plotinus had constructed Neo-Platonism; that
too had permeated the minds of many, itself loosened in the process. These
views, these phases of thought and mood, were held or felt by many men,
who may not have known their source. And Augustine was not only part of
all this, but in mind and temper was Platonically inclined. Thus the most
important elements of Platonism and Neo-Platonism in Augustine were his
cognate spiritual mood and his attitude toward the world of physical fact.

Note the personal affinity between Augustine and Plotinus. Both are
absorbed in the higher pointings of their thought; neither is much
occupied with its left-handed relationships, which, however, are by no
means to be disowned. The minds and souls of both are set upon God the
Spirit; the minds and eyes of both are closed to the knowledge of the
natural world. Thus neither Plotinus nor Augustine was much affected by
the popular beliefs of Christianity or paganism. The former cared little
for demon-lore or divination, and was not seriously touched by polytheism.
No more was the latter affected by the worship of saints and relics, or by
other elements of Christian credulity, which when brought to his attention
pass from his mind as quickly as his duties of Christian bishop will
permit.

But it was _half_ otherwise with Porphyry, and altogether otherwise with
Iamblicus. The first of these was drawn, repelled, and tortured by the
common superstitions, especially the magic and theurgy which made men
gape; but Iamblicus gladly sported in these mottled currents. On the
Christian side, Jerome might be compared with them, or a later man, the
last of the Latin Fathers, Gregory the Great. Clear as was the temporal
wisdom of this great pope, and heavy as were his duties during the
troubled times of his pontificate (590-604), still his mind was busy with
the miraculous and diabolic. His mind and temperament have absorbed at
least the fruitage of prior superstitions, whether Christian or pagan need
not be decided. He certainly was not influenced by Iamblicus. Nor need one
look upon these phases of his nature as specifically the result of the
absorption of pagan elements. He and his forebears had but gone the path
of credulity and mortal blindness, thronged by both pagans and Christians.
And so in Gregory the tendencies making for intellectual obliquity do
their perfect work. His religious dualism is strident; his resultant
ascetism is extreme; and finally the symbolical, the allegorical, habit
has shut his mind to the perception of the literal (shall we say, actual)
meaning, when engaged with Scripture, as his great Commentary on Job bears
witness. The same tendencies, but usually in milder type, had shown
themselves with Augustine, who, in these respects, stands to Gregory as
Plotinus to Iamblicus. Augustine can push allegory to absurdity; he can
be ascetic; he is dualistic. But all these things have not barbarized his
mind, as they have Gregory’s.[53] Similarly the elements, which in
Plotinus’s personality were held in innocuous abeyance, dominated the
entire personality of Iamblicus, and made him a high priest of folly.

Thus we have observed the phases of thought which set the intellectual
conditions of the later pagan times, and affected the mental processes of
the Latin Fathers. The matter may be summarized briefly in conclusion.
Platonism had created an intellectual and intelligible world, wherein a
dissolving dialectic turned the cognition of material phenomena into a
reflection of the mind’s ideals. This was more palpable in Neo-Platonism
than it had been in Plato’s system. Stoicism on the other hand represented
a rule of life, the sanction of which was inner peace. Its working
principle was the rightly directed action of the self-controlling will.
Fundamentally ethical, it set itself to frame a corresponding conception
of the universe. Platonism and Neo-Platonism found in material facts
illustrations or symbols of ideal truths and principles of human life.
Stoicism was interested in them as affording a foundation for ethics. None
of these systems was seriously interested in facts apart from their
symbolical exemplification of truth, or their bearing on the conduct of
life; and the same principles that affected the observation of nature were
applied to the interpretation of myth, tradition, and history.

In the opening centuries of the Christian Era the world was becoming less
self-reliant. It was tending to look to authority for its peace of mind.
In religion men not only sought, as formerly, for superhuman aid, but were
reaching outward for what their own rational self-control no longer gave.
They needed not merely to be helped by the gods, but to be sustained and
saved. Consequently, prodigious interest was taken in the means of
bringing man to the divine, and obtaining the saving support which the
gods alone could give. The philosophic thought of the time became palpably
mediatorial. Neo-Platonism was a system of mediation between man and the
Absolute First Principle; and soon its lower phases became occupied with
such palpable means as divination and oracles, magic and theurgy.

The human reason has always proved unable to effect this mediation between
man and God. The higher Neo-Platonism presented as the furthest goal a
supra-rational and ecstatic vision. This was its union with the divine.
The lower Neo-Platonism turned this lofty supra-rationality into a
principle of credulity more and more agape for fascinating or helpful
miracles. Thus a constant looking for divine or demonic action became
characteristic of the pagan intelligence.

The Gospel of Christ, in spreading throughout the pagan world, was certain
to gather to itself the incidents of its apprehension by pagans, and take
various forms, one of which was to become the dominant or Catholic.
Conversely, Christians (and we have in mind the educated people) would
retain their methods of thinking in spite of change in the contents of
their thought. This would be true even of the great and learned Christian
leaders, the Fathers of the Church. At the same time the Faith reinspired
and redirected their energies. Yet (be it repeated for the sake of
emphasis) their mental processes, their ways of apprehending and
appreciating facts, would continue those of that paganism which in them
had changed to Christianity.

Every phase of intellectual tendency just summarized as characteristic of
the pagan world, entered the modes in which the Fathers of the Latin
Church apprehended and built out their new religion. First of all, the
attitude toward knowledge. No pagan philosophy, not Platonism or any
system that came after it, had afforded an incentive for concentration of
desire equal to that presented in the person and the precepts of Jesus.
The desire of the Kingdom of Heaven was a master-motive such as no
previous idealism had offered. It would bring into conformity with itself
not only all the practical considerations of life, but verily the whole
human desire to know. First it mastered the mind of Tertullian; and in
spite of variance and deviation it endured through the Middle Ages as the
controlling principle of intellectual effort. Its decree was this: the
knowledge which men need and should desire is that which will help them
to save and perfect their souls for the Kingdom of God. Some would
interpret this broadly, others narrowly; some would actually be
constrained by it, and others merely do it a polite obeisance. But
acknowledged it was by well-nigh all men, according to their individual
tempers and the varying times in which they lived.

Platonism was an idealistic cosmos; Stoicism a cosmos of subjective ethics
and teleological conceptions of the physical world. The furthest outcome
of both might be represented by Augustine’s cosmos of the soul and God. As
for reasoning processes, inwardly inspired and then applied to the world
of nature and history, Christianity combined the idealizing,
fact-compelling ways of Platonic dialectic with the Stoical interest in
moral edification. And, more utterly than either Platonist or Stoic, the
Christian Father lacked interest in knowledge of the concrete fact for its
own sake. His mental glance was even more oblique than theirs, fixed as it
was upon the moral or spiritual--the anagogic--inference. Of course he
carried symbolism and allegory further than Stoic and Platonist had done,
one reason being that he was impelled by the specific motive of
harmonizing the Old Testament with the Gospel, and thereby proving the
divine mission of Jesus.

Idealism might tend toward dualistic ethics, and issue in asceticism, as
was the tendency in Stoicism and the open result with Plotinus and his
disciples. Such, with mightier power and firmer motive, was the outcome of
Christian ethics, in monasticism. Christianity was not a dualistic
philosophy; but neither was Stoicism nor Neo-Platonism. Yet, like them, it
was burningly dualistic in its warfare against the world, the flesh, and
the devil.

We turn to other but connected matters: salvation, mediatorship, theory
and practice. The need of salvation made men Christians; the God-man was
the one and sufficient mediator between man and God. Such was the high
dogma, established with toil and pain. And the practice graded downward to
mediatorial persons, acts, and things, marvellous, manifold, and utterly
analogous to their pagan kin. The mediatorial persons were the Virgin and
the saints; the sacraments were the magic mediatorial acts; the relic was
the magic mediatorial thing. And, as with Neo-Platonism, there was in
Christianity a principle of supra-rational belief in all these matters. At
the top the revelation of Christ, and the high love of God which He
inspired. This was not set on reason, but above it. And, as with
Neo-Platonism, the supra-rational principle of Christianity was led down
through conduits of credulity, resembling those we have become familiar
with in our descent from Plotinus to Iamblicus.




CHAPTER IV

INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS OF THE LATIN FATHERS


So it was that the intellectual conditions of the Roman Empire affected
the attitude of the Church Fathers toward knowledge, and determined their
ways of apprehending fact. There was, indeed, scarcely a spiritual
tendency or way of thinking, in the surrounding paganism, that did not
enter their mental processes and make part of their understanding of
Christianity. On the other hand, the militant and polemic position of the
Church in the Empire furnished new interests, opened new fields of effort,
and produced new modes of intellectual energy. And every element emanating
from the pagan environment was, on entering the Christian pale, reinspired
by Christian necessities and brought into a working concord with the
master-motive of the Faith.

Salvation was the master Christian motive. The Gospel of Christ was a
gospel of salvation unto eternal life. It presented itself in the
self-sacrifice of divine love, not without warnings touching its
rejection. It was understood and accepted according to the capacities of
those to whom it was offered, capacities which it should reinspire and
direct anew, and yet not change essentially. The young Christian
communities had to adjust their tempers to the new Faith. They also fell
under the unconscious need of defining it, in order to satisfy their own
intelligence and present it in a valid form to the minds of men as yet
unconverted. Consequently, the new Gospel of Salvation drew the energies
of Christian communities to the work of defining that which they had
accepted, and of establishing its religious and rational validity. The
intellectual interests of these communities were first unified by the
master-motive of salvation, and then ordered and redirected according to
the doctrinal and polemic exigencies of this new Faith precipitated into
the Graeco-Roman world.

The intellectual interests of the Christian Fathers are not to be
classified under categories of desire to know, for the sake of knowledge,
but under categories of desire to be saved, and to that end possess
knowledge in its saving forms. Their desire was less to know, than to know
how--how to be saved and contribute to the salvation of others. Their need
rightly to understand the Faith, define it and maintain it, was of such
drastic power as to force into ancillary rôles every line of inquiry and
intellectual effort. This need inspired those central intellectual labours
of the Fathers which directly made for the Faith’s dogmatic substantiation
and ecclesiastical supremacy; and then it mastered all provinces of
education and inquiry which might seem to possess independent intellectual
interest. They were either to be drawn to its support or discredited as
irrelevant distractions.

This compelling Christian need did not, in fact, impress into its service
the total sum of intellectual interests among Christians. Mortal curiosity
survived, and the love of _belles lettres_. Yet its dominance was real.
The Church Fathers were absorbed in the building up of Christian doctrine
and ecclesiastical authority. The productions of Christian authorship
through the first four centuries were entirely religious, so far as the
extant works bear witness. This is true of both the Greek and the Latin
Fathers, and affords a prodigious proof that the inspiration and the
exigencies of the new religion had drawn into one spiritual vortex the
energies and interests of Christian communities.

Some of the Fathers have left statements of their principles, coupled with
more or less intimate accounts of their own spiritual attitude. Among the
Eastern Christians Origen has already been referred to. With him
Christianity was the sum of knowledge; and his life’s endeavour was to
realize this view by co-ordinating all worthy forms of knowledge within
the scheme of salvation through Christ. His mind was imbued with a vast
desire to know. This he did not derive from Christianity. But his
understanding of Christianity gave him the schematic principle guiding
his inquiries. His aim was to direct his labours with Christianity as an
end--τελικῶς εἰς χριστιανισμόν, as he says so pregnantly. He would use
Greek philosophy as a propaedeutic for Christianity; he would seek from
geometry and astronomy what might serve to explain Scripture; and so with
all branches of learning.[54]

This was the expression of a mind of prodigious energy. For more personal
disclosures we may turn at once to the Latin Fathers. Hilary, Bishop of
Poictiers (d. 367), was a foremost Latin polemicist against the Arians in
the middle of the fourth century. He was born a pagan; and in the
introductory book to his chief work, the _De Trinitate_, he tells how he
turned, with all his intellect and higher aspirations, to the Faith.
Taking a noble view of human nature, he makes bold to say that men usually
spurn the sensual and material, and yearn for a more worthy life. Thus
they have reached patience, temperance, and other virtues, believing that
death is not the end of all. He himself, however, did not rest satisfied
with the pagan religion or the teachings of pagan philosophers; but he
found doctrines to his liking in the books of Moses, and then in the
Gospel of John. It was clear to him that prophecy led up to the revelation
of Jesus Christ, and in that at length he gained a safe harbour. Thus
Hilary explains that his better aspirations had led him on and upward to
the Gospel; and when he had reached that end and unification of spiritual
yearning, it was but natural that it should thenceforth hold the sum of
his intellectual interests.

A like result appears with greater power in Augustine. His _Confessions_
give the mode in which his spiritual progress presented itself to him some
time after he had become a Catholic Christian.[55] His whole life sets
forth the same theme, presenting the religious passion of the man drawing
into itself his energies and interests. God and the Soul--these two would
he know, and these alone. But these alone indeed! As if they did not
embrace all life pointed and updrawn toward its salvation. God was the
overmastering object of intellectual interest and of passionate love. All
knowledge should direct itself toward knowing Him. By grace, within God’s
light and love, was the Soul, knower and lover, expectant of eternal life.
Nothing that was transient could be its chief good, or its good at all
except so far as leading on to its chief good of salvation, life eternal,
in and through the Trinity. One may read Augustine’s self-disclosures or
the passages containing statements of the ultimate religious principles
whereby he and all men should live, or one may proceed to examine his long
life and the vast entire product of his labour. The result will be the
same. His whole strength will be found devoted to the cause of Catholic
Church and Faith; and all his intellectual interests will be seen
converging to that end. He writes nothing save with Catholic religious
purpose; and nothing in any of his writings had interest for the writer
save as it bore upon that central aim. He may be engaged in a great work
of ultimate Christian doctrine, as in his _De Trinitate_; he may be
involved in controversy with Manichean, with Donatist or Pelagian; he may
be offering pastoral instruction, as in his many letters; he may survey,
as in the _Civitas Dei_, the whole range of human life and human
knowledge; but never does his mind really bear away from its
master-motive.

The justification for this centering of human interests and energies lay
in the nature of the _summum bonum_ for man. According to the principles
of the _City of God_, eternal life is the supreme good and eternal death
the supreme evil. Evidently no temporal satisfaction or happiness compares
with the eternal. This is good logic; but it is enforced with arguments
drawn from the Christian temper, which viewed earth as a vale of tears.
The deep Catholic pessimism toward mortal life is Augustine’s in full
measure: “Quis enim sufficit quantovis eloquentiae flumine, vitae hujus
miserias explicare?” Virtue itself, the best of mortal goods, does nothing
here on earth but wage perpetual war with vices. Though man’s life is and
must be social, how filled is it with distress! The saints are blessed
with hope. And mortal good which has not that hope is a false joy and a
great misery. For it lacks the real blessedness of the soul, which is the
true wisdom that directs itself to the end where God shall be all in all
in eternal certitude and perfect peace. Here our peace is with God through
faith; and yet is rather a _solatium miseriae_ than a _gaudium
beatitudinis_, as it will be hereafter. But the end of those who do not
belong to the City of God will be _miseria sempiterna_, which is also
called the second death, since the soul alienated from God cannot be said
to live, nor that body be said to live which is enduring eternal
pains.[56] Augustine devotes a whole book, the twenty-first, to an
exposition of the sempiternal, non-purgatorial, punishment of the damned,
whom the compassionate intercession of the saints will not save, nor many
other considerations which have been deemed eventually saving by the
fondly lenient opinions of men. His views were as dark as those of Gregory
the Great. Only imaginative elaboration was needed to expand them to the
full compass of mediaeval fear.

Augustine brought all intellectual interests into the closure of the
Christian Faith, or discredited whatever stubbornly remained without. He
did the same with ethics. For he transformed the virtues into accord with
his Catholic conception of man’s chief good. That must consist in cleaving
to what is most blessed to cleave to, which is God. To Him we can cleave
only through _dilectio_, _amor_, and _charitas_. Virtue which leads us to
the _vita beata_ is nothing but _summus amor Dei_. So he defines the four
cardinal virtues anew. Temperance is love keeping itself whole and
incorrupt for God; fortitude is love easily bearing all things for God’s
sake; justice is love serving God only, and for that reason rightly ruling
in the other matters, which are subject to man; and prudence is love well
discriminating between what helps and what impedes as to God (_in
deum_).[57] Conversely, the heathen virtues, as the heathen had in fact
conceived them, were vices rather than virtues to Augustine. For they
lacked knowledge of the true God, and therefore were affected with
fundamental ignorance, and were also tainted with pride.[58] Through his
unique power of religious perception, Augustine discerned the
inconsistency between pagan ethics, and the Christian thoughts of divine
grace moving the humbly and lovingly acceptant soul.

The treatise on Christian Doctrine clearly expresses Augustine’s views as
to the value of knowledge. He starts, in his usual way, from a fundamental
principle, which is here the distinction between the use of something for
a purpose and the enjoyment of something in and for itself. “To enjoy is
to cleave fast in the love of a thing for its own sake. But to use is to
employ a thing in obtaining what one loves.” For an illustration he draws
upon that Christian sentiment which from the first had made the Christian
feel as a sojourner on earth.[59]

    “It is as if we were sojourners unable to live happily away from our
    own country, and we wished to use the means of journeying by land and
    sea to end our misery and return to our fatherland, which is to be
    enjoyed. But the charm of the journey or the very movement of the
    vehicle delighting us, we are taken by a froward sweetness and become
    careless of reaching our own country whose sweetness would make us
    happy. Now if, journeying through this world, away from God, we wish
    to return to our own land where we may be happy, this world must be
    used, not enjoyed; that the invisible things of God may be apprehended
    through those created things before our eyes, and we may gain the
    eternal and spiritual from the corporeal and temporal.”

From this illustration Augustine leaps at once to his final inference that
only the Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--is to be enjoyed.[60] It
follows as a corollary that the important knowledge for man is that which
will bring him to God surely and for eternity. Such is knowledge of Holy
Writ and its teachings. Other knowledge is valuable as it aids us to this.

Proceeding from this point of view, Augustine speaks more specifically. To
understand Scripture one needs to know the words and also the things
referred to. Knowledge of the latter is useful, because it sheds light on
their figurative significance. For example, to know the serpent’s habit of
presenting its whole body to the assailant, in order to protect its head,
helps to understand our Lord’s command to be wise as serpents, and for the
sake of our Head, which is Christ, present our whole bodies to the
persecutors. Again, the statement that the serpent rids itself of its skin
by squeezing through a narrow hole, accords with the Scriptural injunction
to imitate the serpent’s wisdom, and put off the old man that we may put
on the new, and in a narrow place--Enter ye in at the strait gate, says
the Lord.[61] The writer gives a rule for deciding whether in any instance
a literal or figurative interpretation of Scripture should be employed, a
rule representing a phase of the idealizing way of treating facts which
began with Plato or before him, and through many channels entered the
practice of Christian doctors. “Whatever in the divine word cannot
properly be referred to _morum honestas_ or _fidei veritas_ is to be taken
figuratively. The first pertains to love of God and one’s neighbour; the
second to knowing God and one’s neighbour.”[62]

Augustine then refers to matters of human invention, like the letters of
the alphabet, which are useful to know. History also is well, as it helps
us to understand Scripture; and a knowledge of physical objects will help
us to understand the Scriptural references. Likewise a moderate knowledge
of rhetoric and dialectic enables one the better to understand and expound
Scripture. Some men have made useful vocabularies of the Scriptural Hebrew
and Syriac words and compends of history, which throw light on Scriptural
questions. So, to save Christians from needless labour, I think it would
be well if some one would make a general description of unknown places,
animals, plants and minerals, and other things mentioned in Scripture; and
the same might be done as to the _numbers_ which Scripture uses. These
suggestions were curiously prophetic. Christians were soon to produce just
such compends, as will be seen when noticing the labours of Isidore of
Seville.[63] Augustine speaks sometimes in scorn and sometimes in sorrow
of those who remain ignorant of God, and learn philosophies, or deem that
they achieve something great by curiously examining into that universal
mass of matter which we call the world.[64]

Augustine’s word and his example sufficiently attest the fact that the
Christian Faith constituted the primary intellectual interest with the
Fathers. While not annihilating other activities of the mind, this
dominant interest lowered their dignity by forcing them into a common
subservience. Exerting its manifold energies in defining and building out
the Faith, in protecting it from open attack or insidious corruption, it
drew to its exigencies the whole strength of its votaries. There resulted
the perfected organization of the Catholic Church and the production of a
vast doctrinal literature. The latter may be characterized as constructive
of dogma, theoretically interpretative of Scripture, and polemically
directed against pagans, Jews, heretics or schismatics, as the case might
be.

It was constructive of dogma through the intellectual necessity of
apprehending the Faith in concepts and modes of reasoning accepted as
valid by the Graeco-Roman world. In the dogmatic treatises emanating from
the Hellenic East, the concepts and modes of reasoning were those of the
later phases of Greek philosophy. Prominent examples are the _De
principiis_ of Origen or the _Orationes_ of Athanasius against the Arians.
For the Latin West, Tertullian’s _Adversus Marcionem_ or the treatises of
Hilary and Augustine upon the Trinity serve for examples. The Western
writings are distinguished from their Eastern kin by the entry of the
juristic element, filling them with a mass of conceptions from the Roman
Law.[65] They also develop a more searching psychology. In both of these
respects, Tertullian and Augustine were the great creators.

Secondly, this literature, at least in theory, was interpretative or
expository of Scripture. Undoubtedly Origen and Athanasius and Augustine
approached the Faith with ideas formed from philosophical study and their
own reflections; and their metaphysical and allegorical treatment of
Scripture texts elicited a significance different from the meaning which
we now should draw. Yet Christianity was an authoritatively revealed
religion, and the letter of that revelation was Holy Scripture, to wit,
the gradually formed canon of the Old and New Testaments. If the reasoning
or conclusions which resulted in the Nicene Creed were not just what
Scripture would seem to suggest, at all events they had to be and were
confirmed by Scripture, interpreted, to be sure, under the stress of
controversy and the influence of all that had gone into the intellectual
natures of the Greek and Latin Fathers. And the patristic faculty of
doctrinal exposition, that is, of reasoning constructively along the lines
of Scriptural interpretation, was marvellous. Such a writing as
Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian _De spiritu et littera_ is a striking example.

Moreover, the Faith, which is to say, the Scriptures rightly interpreted,
contained the sum of knowledge needful for salvation, and indeed
everything that men should seek to know. Therefore there was no question
possessing valid claim upon human curiosity which the Scriptures, through
their interpreters, might not be called upon to answer. For example,
Augustine feels obliged to solve through Scriptural interpretation and
inference such an apparently obscure question as that of the different
degrees of knowledge of God possessed by demons and angels.[66] Indeed,
many an unanswerable question had beset the ways by which Augustine
himself and other doctors had reached their spiritual harbourage in
Catholic Christianity. They sought to confirm from Scripture _their_
solutions of their own doubts. At all events, from Scripture they were
obliged to answer other questioners seeking instruction or needing
refutation.[67]

Thirdly, it is too well known to require more than a mere reminder, that
dogmatic treatises commonly were controversial or polemic, directed as
might be against pagans or Jews, or Gnostics or Manicheans, or against
Arians or Montanists or Donatists. Practically all Christian doctrine was
of militant growth, advancing by argumentative denial and then by
counter-formulation.

As already noticed at some length, the later phases of pagan philosophic
inquiry had other motives besides the wish for knowledge. These motives
were connected with man’s social welfare or his relations with
supernatural powers. The Stoical and Epicurean interest in knowledge had a
practical incentive. And Neo-Platonism was a philosophy of saving union
with the divine, rather than an open-minded search for ultimate knowledge.
But no Hellenic or quasi-Romanized philosophy so drastically drew all
subjects of speculation and inquiry within the purview and dominance of a
single motive at once intellectual and emotional as the Christian Faith.

Naturally the surviving intellectual ardour of the Graeco-Roman world
passed into the literature of Christian doctrine. For example, the Faith,
with its master-motive of salvation, drew within its work of militant
formulation and pertinent discussion that round of intellectual interest
and energy which had issued in Neo-Platonism. Likewise such ethical
earnestness as had come down through Stoicism was drawn within the master
Christian energy. And so far as any interest survived in zoology or
physics or astronomy, it also was absorbed in curious Christian endeavours
to educe an edifying conformity between the statements or references of
Scripture and the round of phenomena of the natural world. Then history
likewise passed from heathenism to the service of the Church, and became
polemic narrative, or filled itself with edifying tales, mostly of
miracles.

In fine, no branch of human inquiry or intellectual interest was left
unsubjugated by the dominant motives of the Faith. First of all,
philosophy itself--the general inquiry for final knowledge--no longer had
an independent existence. It had none with Hilary, none with Ambrose, and
none whatsoever with Augustine after he became a Catholic Christian.
Patristic philosophy consisted in the formulation of Christian doctrine,
which in theory was an eliciting of the truth of Scripture. It embodied
the substantial results, or survivals if one will, of Greek philosophy, so
far as it did not controvert and discard them. As for the reasoning
process, the dialectic whereby such results were reached, as
distinguished from the results themselves, that also passed into doctrinal
writings. The great Christian Fathers were masters of it. Augustine
recognized it as a proper tool; but like other tools its value was not in
itself but in its usefulness. As a tool, dialectic, or logic as it has
commonly been called, was to preserve a distinct, if not independent,
existence. Aristotle had devoted to it a group of special treatises.[68]
No one had anything to add to this Organon, or Aristotelian tool, which
was to be preserved in Latin by the Boëthian translations.[69] No attempt
was made to supplant them with Christian treatises.

So it was with elementary education. The grammarians, Servius, Priscianus,
and probably Donatus, were pagans. As far as concerned grammatical and
rhetorical studies, the Fathers had to admit that the best theory and
examples were in pagan writings. It also happened that the book which was
to become the common text-book of the Seven Arts was by a pagan, of
Neo-Platonic views. This was the _De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii_, by
Martianus Capella.[70] Possibly some good Christian of the time could have
composed a worse book, or at least one somewhat more deflected from the
natural objects of primary education. But the _De nuptiis_ is
astonishingly poor and dry. The writer was an unintelligent compiler, who
took his matter not from the original sources, but from compilers before
him, Varro above all. Capella talks of Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Euclid,
Ptolemy; but if he had ever read them, it was to little profit. Book VI.,
for example, is occupied with “Geometria.” The first part of it is simply
geography; then come nine pages[71] of geometry, consisting of
definitions, with a few axioms; and then, instead of following with
theorems, the maid, who personifies “Geometria,” presents as a bridal
offering the books of Euclid, amid great applause. Had she ever opened
them, one queries. Book VII., “Arithmetica,” is even worse. It begins with
the current foolishness regarding the virtues and interesting qualities of
the first ten numbers: “How shall I commemorate thee, O Seven, always to
be revered, neither begotten like the other numbers, nor procreative, a
virgin even as Minerva?” Capella never is original. From Pythagoras on,
the curiosities of numbers had interested the pagan mind.[72] These
fantasies gained new power and application in the writings of the Fathers.
For them, the numbers used in Scripture had prefigurative significance.
Such notions came to Christianity from its environment, and then took on a
new apologetic purpose. Here an intellect like Augustine’s is no whit
above its fellows. In arguing from Scripture numbers he is at his very
obvious worst.[73] Fortunately the coming time was to have better
treatises, like the _De arithmetica_ of Boëthius, which was quite free
from mysticism. But in Boëthius’s time, as well as before and after him,
it was the allegorical significance of numbers apologetically pointed that
aroused deepest interest.

Astronomy makes one of Capella’s seven _Artes_. His eighth book, a rather
abject compilation, is devoted to it. His matter, of course, is not yet
Christianized. But Christianity was to draw Astronomy into its service;
and the determination of the date of Easter and other Church festivals
became the chief end of what survived of astronomical knowledge.

The patristic attitude toward cosmogony and natural science plainly
appears in the _Hexaëmeron_ of St. Ambrose.[74] This was a commentary on
the first chapters of Genesis, or rather an argumentative exposition of
the Scriptural account of the Creation, primarily directed against those
who asserted that the world was uncreated and eternal. As one turns the
leaves of this writing, it becomes clear that the interest of Ambrose is
always religious, and that his soul is gazing beyond the works of the
Creation to another world. He has no interest in physical phenomena,
which have no laws for him except the will of God.

    “To discuss the nature and position of the earth,” says he, “does not
    help us in our hope of the life to come. It is enough to know what
    Scripture states, ‘that He hung up the earth upon nothing’ (Job xxvi.
    7). Why then argue whether He hung it up in air or upon the water, and
    raise a controversy as to how the thin air could sustain the earth; or
    why, if upon the waters, the earth does not go crashing down to the
    bottom?... Not because the earth is in the middle, as if suspended on
    even balance, but because the majesty of God constrains it by the law
    of His will, does it endure stable upon the unstable and the void.”

The archbishop then explains that God did not fix the earth’s stability as
an artisan would, with compass and level, but as the Omnipotent, by the
might of His command. If we would understand why the earth is unmoved, we
must not try to measure creation as with a compass, but must look to the
will of God: “voluntate Dei immobilis manet et stat in saeculum terra.”
And again Ambrose asks, Why argue as to the elements which make the
heaven? Why trouble oneself with these physical inquiries? “Sufficeth for
our salvation, not such disputation, but the verity of the precepts, not
the acuteness of argument, but the mind’s faith, so that rather than the
creature, we may serve the Creator, who is God blessed forever.”[75]

Thus with Ambrose, the whole creation springs from the immediate working
of God’s inscrutable will. It is all essentially a miracle, like those
which He wrought in after times to aid or save men: they also were but
operations of His will. God said _Fiat lux_, and there was light. Thus His
will creates; and nature is His work (_opus Dei natura est_). And God
said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it
divide the waters from the waters; and it was so. “Hear the word, Fiat.
His will is the measure of things; His word ends the work.” The division
of the waters above and beneath the firmament was a work of His will; just
as He divided the waters of the Red Sea before the eyes of the Jews in
order that those things might be believed which the Jews had not seen. He
could have saved them by another means. The fiat of God is nature’s
strength (_virtus_) and the substance of its endurance (_diurnitatis
substantia_) so long as He wishes it to continue where He has appointed
it.[76]

According to this reasoning, the miracle, except for its infrequency, is
in the same category with other occurrences. Here Ambrose is fully
supported by Augustine. With the latter, God is the source of all
causation: He is the cause of usual as well as of extraordinary
occurrences, _i.e._ miracles. The exceptional or extraordinary character
of certain occurrences is what makes them miracles.[77]

Here are fundamental principles of patristic faith. The will of God is the
one cause of all things. It is unsearchable. But we have been taught much
regarding God’s love and compassionateness, and of His desire to edify and
save His people. These qualities prompt His actions toward them. Therefore
we may expect His acts to evince edifying and saving purpose. All the
narratives of Scripture are for our edification. How many mighty saving
acts do they record, from the Creation, onward through the story of
Israel, to the birth and resurrection of Christ! And surely God still
cares for His people. Nor is there any reason to suppose that He has
ceased to edify and save them through signs and wonders. Shall we not
still look for miracles from His grace?

Thus in the nature of Christianity, as a miraculously founded and revealed
religion, lay the ground for expecting miracles, or, at least, for not
deeming them unlikely to occur. And to the same result from all sides
conspired the influences which had been obscuring natural knowledge. We
have followed those influences in pagan circles from Plato on through
Neo-Platonism and other systems current in the first centuries of the
Christian era. We have seen them obliterate rational conceptions of
nature’s processes and destroy the interest that impels to unbiassed
investigation. The character and exigencies of the Faith intensified the
operation of like tendencies among Christians. Their eyes were lifted from
the earth. They were not concerned with its transitory things, soon to be
consumed. Their hope was fixed in the assurance of their Faith; their
minds were set upon its confirmation. They and their Faith seemed to have
no use for a knowledge of earth’s phenomena save as bearing illustrative
or confirmatory testimony to the truth of Scripture. Moreover, the
militant exigencies of their situation made them set excessive store on
the miraculous foundation and continuing confirmation of their religion.

For these reasons the eyes of the Fathers were closed to the natural
world, or at least their vision was affected with an obliquity parallel to
the needs of doctrine. Any veritable physical or natural knowledge rapidly
dwindled among them. What remained continued to exist because explanatory
of Scripture and illustrative of spiritual allegories. To such an
intellectual temper nothing seems impossible, provided it accord, or can
be interpreted to accord, with doctrines elicited from Scripture. Soon
there will cease to exist any natural knowledge sufficient to distinguish
the normal and possible from the impossible and miraculous. One may recall
how little knowledge of the physiology and habits of animals was shown in
Pliny’s _Natural History_.[78] He had not even a rough idea of what was
physiologically possible. Personally, he may or may not have believed that
the bowels of the field-mouse increase in number with the waxing of the
moon; but he had no sufficiently clear appreciation of the causes and
relations of natural phenomena to know that such an idea was absurd. It
was almost an accident, whether he believed it or not. It is safe to say
that neither Ambrose nor Jerome nor Augustine had any clearer
understanding of such things than Pliny. They had read far less about
them, and knew less than he. Pliny, at all events, had no motive for
understanding or presenting natural facts in any other way than as he had
read or been told about them, or perhaps had noticed for himself.
Augustine and Ambrose had a motive. Their sole interest in natural fact
lay in its confirmatory evidence of Scriptural truth. They were constantly
impelled to understand facts in conformity with their understanding of
Scripture, and to accept or deny accordingly. Thus Augustine denies the
existence of Antipodes, men on the opposite side of the earth, who walk
with their feet opposite to our own.[79] That did not harmonize with his
general conception of Scriptural cosmogony.

For the result, one can point to a concrete instance which is typical of
much. In patristic circles the knowledge of the animal kingdom came to be
represented by the curious book called the _Physiologus_. It was a series
of descriptions of animals, probably based on stories current in
Alexandria, and appears to have been put together in Greek early in the
second century. Internal evidence has led to the supposition that it
emanated from Gnostic circles. It soon came into common use among the
Greek and Latin Fathers. Origen draws from it by name. In the West, to
refer only to the fourth and fifth centuries, Ambrose seems to use it
constantly, Jerome occasionally, and also Augustine.

Well known as these stories are, one or two examples may be given to
recall their character: The Lion has three characteristics; as he walks or
runs he brushes his footprints with his tail, so that the hunters may not
track him. This signifies the secrecy of the Incarnation--of the Lion of
the tribe of Judah. Secondly, the Lion sleeps with his eyes open; so slept
the body of Christ upon the Cross, while His Godhead watched at the right
hand of the Father. Thirdly, the Lioness brings forth her cub dead; on the
third day the father comes and roars in its face, and wakes it to life.
This signifies our Lord’s resurrection on the third day.

The Pelican is distinguished by its love for its young. As these begin to
grow they strike at their parents’ faces, and the parents strike back and
kill them. Then the parents take pity, and on the third day the mother
comes and opens her side and lets the blood flow on the dead young ones,
and they become alive again. Thus God cast off mankind after the Fall, and
delivered them over to death; but He took pity on us, as a mother, for by
the Crucifixion He awoke us with His blood to eternal life.

The _Unicorn_ cannot be taken by hunters, because of his great strength,
but lets himself be captured by a pure virgin. So Christ, mightier than
the heavenly powers, took on humanity in a virgin’s womb.

The Phoenix lives in India, and when five hundred years old fills his
wings with fragrant herbs and flies to Heliopolis, where he commits
himself to the flames in the Temple of the Sun. From his ashes comes a
worm, which the second day becomes a fledgling, and on the third a
full-grown phoenix, who flies away to his old dwelling-place. The Phoenix
is the symbol of Christ; the two wings filled with sweet-smelling herbs
are the Old and New Testaments, full of divine teaching.[80]

These examples illustrate the two general characteristics of the accounts
in the _Physiologus_: they have the same legendary quality whether the
animal is real or fabulous; the subjects are chosen, and the accounts are
shaped, by doctrinal considerations. Indeed, from the first the
_Physiologus_ seems to have been a selection of those animal stories which
lent themselves most readily to theological application. It would be
pointless to distinguish between the actual and fabulous in such a book;
nor did the minds of the readers make any such distinction. For Ambrose or
Augustine the importance of the story lay in its doctrinal significance,
or moral, which was quite careless of the truth of facts of which it was
the “point.” The facts were told as introductory argument.

The interest of the Fathers in physics and natural history bears analogy
to their interest in history and biography. Looking back to classical
times, one finds that historians were led by other motives than the mere
endeavour to ascertain and state the facts. The Homeric Epos was the
literary forerunner of the history which Herodotus wrote of the Persian
Wars; and the latter often was less interested in the closeness of his
facts than in their aptness and rhetorical probability. Doubtless he
followed legends when telling how Greek and Persian spoke or acted. But
had not legend already sifted the chaff of irrelevancy from the story,
leaving the grain of convincing fitness, which is also rhetorical
probability? Likewise, Thucydides, in composing the _History of the
Peloponnesian War_, that masterpiece of reasoned statement, was not
over-anxious as to accuracy of actual word and fact reported. He carefully
inquired regarding the events, in some of which he had been an actor.
Often he knew or ascertained what the chief speakers said in those
dramatic situations which kept arising in this war of neighbours. Yet,
instead of reporting actual words, he gives the sentiments which,
according to the laws of rhetorical probability, they must have uttered.
So he presents the psychology and turning-point of the matter.

This was true historical rhetoric; the historian’s art of setting forth a
situation veritably, by presenting its intrinsic necessities. Xenophon’s
_Cyropaedia_ went a step farther; it was a historical romance, which
neither followed fact nor proceeded according to the necessities of the
actual situation. But it did proceed according to moral proprieties, and
so was edifying and plausible.

The classical Latin practice accorded with the Greek. Cicero speaks of
history as _opus oratorium_, that is, a work having rhetorical and
literary qualities. It should set forth the events and situations
according to their inherent necessities which constitute their rhetorical
truth. Then it should possess the civic and social qualities of good
oratory: morals and public utility. These are, in fact, the
characteristics of the works of Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus. None of them
troubled himself much over an accuracy of detail irrelevant to his larger
purpose. Tacitus is interested in memorable facts; he would relate them in
such form that they might carry their lesson, and bear their part in the
education of the citizen, for whom it is salutary to study the past. He
condemns, indeed, the historians of the Empire who, under an evil emperor,
lie from fear, and, upon his death, lie from hate. But such condemnation
of immoral lying does not forbid the shaping of a story according to
artistic probability and moral ends. Some shaping and adorning of fact
might be allowed the historian, acting with motives of public policy, or
seeking to glorify or defend his country.[81] This quite accords with the
view of Varro and Cicero, that good policy should sometimes outweigh
truth: whether or not the accounts of the gods were true, it was well for
the people to believe.

Thus the Fathers of the Church were accustomed to a historical tradition
and practice in which facts were presented so as to conduce to worthy
ends. Various motives lie back of human interest in truth. A knowledge of
the world’s origin, of man’s creation, destiny, and relationship to God,
may be sought for its own sake as the highest human good; and yet it may
be also sought for the sake of some ulterior and, to the seeker, more
important end. With the Christian Fathers that more important end was
salvation. To obtain a saving knowledge was the object of their most
strenuous inquiries. Doubtless all men take some pleasure simply in
knowing; and, on the other hand, there are few among wisdom’s most
disinterested lovers that have not some thought of the connection between
knowledge and the other goods of human life, to which it may conduce. Yet
if seekers after knowledge be roughly divided into two classes, those who
wish to know for the sake of knowing, and those who look to another end to
which true knowledge is a means, then the Fathers of the Church fall in
the latter class.

If truth be sought for the sake of something else, why may it not also be
sacrificed? A work of art is achieved by shaping the story for the drama’s
sake, and if we weave fiction to suit the end, why not weave fiction with
fact, or, still better, _see_ the fact in such guise as to suit the
requirements of our purpose? Many are the aspects and relationships of any
fact; its _actuality_ is exhaustless.[82] In how many ways does a human
life present itself? What narrative could exhaust the actuality and
significance of the assassination of Julius Caesar? Indeed, no fact has
such narrow or compelling singleness of significance or actuality that all
its truth can be put in any statement! And again, who is it that can draw
the line between reality and conviction?

It is clear that the limited and special interest taken by the Church
Fathers in physical and historic facts would affect their apprehension of
them. One may ask what was real to Plato in the world of physical
phenomena. At all events, Christian Platonists, like Origen or Gregory of
Nyssa,[83] saw the paramount reality of such phenomena in the spiritual
ideas implicated and evinced by them. The world’s reality would thus be
resolved into the world’s moral or spiritual significance, and in that
case its truth might be educed through moral and allegorical
interpretation. Of course, such an understanding of reality involves hosts
of assumptions which were valid in the fourth century, but are not
commonly accepted now; and chief among them is this very assumption that
the deepest meaning of ancient poets, and the Scriptures above all, is
allegorical.

This is but a central illustration of what would determine the Fathers’
conception of the truth of physical events. Again: the Creation was a
great miracle; its cause, the will of God. The Cause of the Creation was
spiritual, and spiritual was its purpose, to wit, the edification and
salvation of God’s people; the building, preservation, and final
consummation of the City of God. Did not the deepest truth of the matter
lie in this spiritual cause and purpose? And afterwards to what other end
tended all human history? It was one long exemplification of the purpose
of God through the ways of providence. The conception of what constituted
a fitting exemplification of that purpose would control the choice of
facts and shape their presentation. Then what was more natural than that
events should exhibit this purpose, that it might be perceived by the
people of God? It would clearly appear in saving interpositions or
remarkable chronological coincidences. Such, even more palpably than the
other links in the providential chain, were direct manifestations of the
will of God, and were miraculous because of their extraordinary character.
History, made anew through these convictions, became a demonstration of
the truth of Christian doctrine--in other words, _apologetic_.

The most universal and comprehensive example of this was Augustine’s _City
of God_, already adverted to. Its subject was the ways of God with men. It
embraced history, philosophy, and religion. It was the final Christian
apology, and the conclusive proof of Christian doctrine, _adversum
paganos_. To this end Augustine unites the manifold topics which he
discusses; and to this end his apparent digressions eventually return,
bearing their sheaves of corroborative evidence. In no province of inquiry
does his apologetic purpose appear with clearer power than in his
treatment of history, profane and sacred.[84] Through the centuries the
currents of divine purpose are seen to draw into their dual course the
otherwise pointless eddyings of human affairs. Beneath the Providence of
God, a revolving succession of kingdoms fill out the destinies of the
earthly Commonwealth of war and rapine, until the red torrents are pressed
together into the terrestrial greatness of imperial Rome. No power of
heathen gods effected this result, nor all the falsities of pagan
philosophy: but the will of the one true Christian God. The fortunes of
the heavenly City are traced through the prefigurative stories of
antediluvian and patriarchal times, and then on through the prophetic
history of the chosen people, until the end of prophecy appears--Christ
and the Catholic Church.

The _Civitas Dei_ is the crowning example of the drastic power with which
the Church Fathers conformed the data of human understanding into a
substantiation of Catholic Christianity.[85] At the time of its
composition, the Faith needed advocacy in the world. Alaric entered Rome
in 410; and it was to meet the cry of those who would lay that catastrophe
at the Church’s doors that Augustine began the _Civitas Dei_. Soon after,
an ardent young Spaniard named Orosius came on pilgrimage to the great
doctor at Hippo, and finding favour in his eyes, was asked to write a
profane history proving the abundance of calamities which had afflicted
mankind before the time of Christ. So Orosius devoted some years (417-418)
to the compilation of a universal chronicle, using Latin sources, and
calling his work _Seven Books of Histories “adversum paganos.”_[86]
Addressing Augustine in his prologue, he says:

    “Thou hast commanded me that as against the vain rhetoric of those
    who, aliens to God’s Commonwealth, coming from country cross-roads and
    villages are called pagans, because they know earthly things, who seek
    not unto the future and ignore the past, yet cry down the present time
    as filled with evil, just because Christ is believed and God is
    worshipped;--thou hast commanded that I should gather from histories
    and annals whatever mighty ills and miseries and terrors there have
    been from wars and pestilence, from famine, earthquake, and floods,
    from volcanic eruptions, from lightning or from hail, and also from
    monstrous crimes in the past centuries; and that I should arrange and
    set forth the matter briefly in a book.”

Orosius’s story of the four great Empires--Babylonian, Macedonian,
African, and Roman--makes a red tale of carnage. He deemed “that such
things should be commemorated, in order that with the secret of God’s
ineffable judgments partly laid open, those stupid murmurers at our
Christian times should understand that the one God ordained the fortunes
of Babylon in the beginning, and at the end those of Rome; understand also
that it is through His clemency that we live, although wretchedly because
of our intemperance. Like was the origin of Babylon and Rome, and like
their power, greatness, and their fortunes good and ill; but unlike their
destinies, since Babylon lost her kingdom and Rome keeps hers”; and
Orosius refers to the clemency of the barbarian victors who as Christians
spared Christians.[87]

At the opening of his seventh book he again presents his purpose and
conclusions:

    “I think enough evidence has been brought together, to prove that the
    one and true God, made known by the Christian Faith, created the world
    and His creature as He wished, and that He has ordered and directed it
    through many things, of which it has not seen the purpose, and has
    ordained it for one event, declared through One; and likewise has made
    manifest His power and patience by arguments manifold. Whereat, I
    perceive, straitened and anxious minds have stumbled, to think of so
    much patience joined to so great power. For, if He was able to create
    the world, and establish its peace, and impart to it a knowledge of
    His worship and Himself, what was the need of so great and (as they
    say) so hurtful patience, exerted to the end that at last, through the
    errors, slaughters and the toils of men, there should result what
    might rather have arisen in the beginning by His virtue, which you
    preach? To whom I can truly reply: the human race from the beginning
    was so created and appointed that living under religion with peace
    without labour, by the fruit of obedience it might merit eternity; but
    it abused the Creator’s goodness, turned liberty into wilful licence,
    and through disdain fell into forgetfulness; now the patience of God
    is just and doubly just, operating that this disdain might not wholly
    ruin those whom He wished to spare, but might be reduced through
    labours; and also so that He might always hold out guidance although
    to an ignorant creature, to whom if penitent He would mercifully
    restore the means of grace.”

Such was the point of view and such the motives of this book, which was to
be _par excellence_ the source of ancient history for the Middle Ages.
But, concerned chiefly with the Gentile nations, Orosius has few palpable
miracles to tell. The miracle lies in God’s _ineffabilis ordinatio_ of
events, and especially in marvellous chronological parallels shown in the
histories of nations, for our edification. Likewise for mediaeval men
these ineffable chronological correspondences (which never existed in
fact) were to be evidence of God’s providential guidance of the world.

Some thirty years after Orosius wrote, a priest of Marseilles, Salvian by
name, composed a different sort of treatise, with a like object of
demonstrating the righteous validity of God’s providential ordering of
affairs, especially in those troubled times of barbarian invasion through
which the Empire then was passing. The book declared its purpose in its
title--_De gubernatione Dei_.[88] Its tenor is further elucidated by the
title bestowed upon it by a contemporary: _De praesenti_ (_Dei_)
_judicio_. It is famous for the pictures (doubtless overwrought) which it
gives of the low state of morals among the Roman provincials, and of the
comparative decency of the barbarians.

These examples sufficiently indicate the broad apologetic purpose in the
patristic writing of history. There was another class of composition,
biographical rather than historical, the object of which was to give
edifying examples of the grace of God working in holy men. The reference,
of course, is to the _Vitae sanctorum_ whose number from the fourth
century onward becomes legion. They set forth the marvellous virtues of
anchorites and their miracles. In the East, the prime example is the
Athanasian Life of Anthony; Jerome also wrote, in Latin, the lives of
Anthony’s forerunner Paulus and of other saints. But for the Latin West
the typical example was the _Life_ of St. Martin of Tours, most popular of
saints, by Sulpicius Severus.

To dub this class of compositions (and there are classes within classes
here) uncritical, credulous, intentionally untruthful, is not warranted
without a preliminary consideration of their purpose. That in general was
to edify; the writer is telling a moral tale, illustrative of God’s grace
in the instances of holy men. But the divine grace is the real matter; the
saint’s life is but the example. God’s grace exists; it operates in this
way. As to the illustrative details of its operation, why be over-anxious
as to their correctness? Only the _vita_ must be interesting, to fix the
reader’s attention, and must be edifying, to improve him. These principles
exerted sometimes a less, sometimes a greater influence; and accordingly,
while perhaps none of the _vitae_ is without pious colouring, as a class
they range from fairly trustworthy biographies to vehicles of edifying
myth.[89]

Miracles are never lacking. The _vita_ commonly was drawn less from
personal knowledge than from report or tradition. Report grows passing
from mouth to mouth, and is enlarged with illustrative incidents. Since no
disbelief blocked the acceptance of miracles, their growth outstripped
that of the other elements of the story, because they interested the most
people. Yet there was little originality, and the _vitae_ constantly
reproduced like incidents. Especially, Biblical prototypes were followed,
as one sees in the _Dialogi_ of Gregory the Great, telling of the career
of St. Benedict of Nursia. The Pope finds that the great founder of
western monasticism performed many of the miracles ascribed to Scriptural
characters.[90] Herein we see the working of suggestion and imitation upon
a “legend”; but Gregory found rather an additional wonder-striking
feature, that God not only had wrought miracles through Benedict, but in
His ineffable wisdom had chosen to conform the saint’s deeds to the
pattern of Scriptural prototypes. And so, in the _Vitae sanctorum_, the
joinder of suggestion and the will to believe literally worked marvels.

Usually the Fathers of the Church were as interested in miracles as the
uneducated laity. Ambrose, the great Archbishop of Milan, writes a long
letter to his sister Marcellina upon finding the relics of certain
martyrs, and the miracles wrought by this treasure-trove.[91] As for
Jerome, of course, he is very open-minded, and none too careful in his own
accounts. His passion for the relics of the saints appears in his polemic
_Contra Vigilantium_. What interest, either in the writing or the hearing,
would men have taken in a hermit desert life that was bare of miracles?
The desert and the forest solitude have always been full of wonders. In
Jerome’s Lives of Paulus and Hilarion, the romantic and picturesque
elements consist exclusively in the miraculous. And again, how could any
one devote himself to the cult of an almost contemporary saint or the
worship of a martyr, and not find abundant miracles? Sulpicius Severus
wrote the _Vita_ of St. Martin while the saint was still alive; and there
would have been no reason for the worship of St. Felix, carried on through
years by Paulinus of Nola, if Felix’s relics had not had saving power. It
was to this charming tender of the dead, afterwards beatified as St.
Paulinus of Nola,[92] that Augustine addressed his moderating treatise on
these matters, entitled _De cura pro mortuis_. He can see no advantage in
burying a body close to a martyr’s tomb unless in order to stimulate the
prayers of the living. How the martyrs help us surpasses my understanding,
says the writer; but it is known that they do help. Very few were as
critical as the Bishop of Hippo; and all men recognized the efficacy of
prayers to the martyred saints, and the magic power of their relics.

Having said so much of the intellectual obliquities of the Church Fathers,
it were well to dwell a moment on their power. Their inspiration was the
Christian Faith, working within them and bending their strength to its
call. Their mental energies conformed to their understanding of the Faith
and their interpretation of its Scriptural presentation. Their achievement
was Catholic Christianity consisting in the union of two complements,
ecclesiastical organization and the complete and consistent organism of
doctrine. Here, in fact, two living organisms were united as body and
soul. Each was fitted to the other, and neither could have existed alone.
In their union they were to prove unequalled in history for coherence and
efficiency. Great then was the energy and intellectual power of the men
who constructed Church and doctrine. Great was Paul; great was Tertullian;
great were Origen, Athanasius, and the Greek Gregories. Great also were
those Latin Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, Augustine their
last and greatest, who finally completed Church and doctrine for
transmission to the Middle Ages--the doctrine, however, destined to be
re-adjusted as to emphasis, and barbarized in character by him whose mind
at least is patristically recreative, but whose soul is mediaeval,
Gregorius Magnus.[93]




CHAPTER V

LATIN TRANSMITTERS OF ANTIQUE AND PATRISTIC THOUGHT


For the Latin West the creative patristic epoch closes with the death of
Augustine. There follows a period marked by the cessation of intellectual
originality. Men are engaged upon translations from the Greek; they are
busy commenting upon older writings, or are expounding with a change of
emphasis the systematic constructions of their predecessors. Epitomes and
compendia appear, simplified and mechanical abstracts of the bare elements
of inherited knowledge and current education. Compilations are made, put
together of excerpts taken unshriven and unshorn into the compiler’s
writing. Knowledge is brought down to a more barbaric level. Yet
temperament lingers for a while, and still appears in the results.

The representatives of this post-patristic period of translation, comment,
and compendium, and of re-expression with temperamental change of
emphasis, are the two contemporaries, Boëthius and Cassiodorus; then
Gregory the Great, who became pope soon after Cassiodorus closed his eyes
at the age of ninety or more; and, lastly, Isidore, Archbishop of Seville,
who died in 636, twenty-two years after Gregory. All these were Latin
bred, and belonged to the Roman world rather than to those new peoples
whose barbarism was hastening the disruption of a decadent order, but
whose recently converted zeal was soon to help on the further diffusion of
Latin Christianity. They appear as transmitters of antique and patristic
thought; because, originating little, they put together matter congenial
to their own lowering intellectual predilections, and therefore suitable
mental pabulum for times of mingled decadence and barbarism, and also for
the following periods of mediaeval re-emergence which continued to hark
back to the obvious and the easy.

Instead of _transmitters_, a word indicating function, one might call
these men _intermediaries_, and so indicate their position as well as
rôle. Both words, however, should be taken relatively. For all the Fathers
heretofore considered were in some sense transmitters or intermediaries,
even though creative in their work of systematizing, adding to, or
otherwise transforming their matter. Yet one would not dub Augustine a
transmitter, because he was far more of a remaker or creator. But a dark
refashioner indeed will Gregory the Great appear; while Boëthius,
Cassiodorus, Isidore are rather sheer transmitters, or intermediaries, the
last-named worthy destined to be the most popular of them all, through his
unerring faculty of selecting for his compilations the foolish and the
flat.

Among them, Boëthius alone was attached to the antique by affinity of
sentiment and temper. Although doubtless a professing Christian, his
sentiments were those of pagan philosophy. The _De consolatione
philosophiae_, which comes to us as his very self, is a work of eclectic
pagan moralizing, fused to a personal unity by the author’s artistic and
emotional nature, then deeply stirred by his imprisonment and peril. He
had enjoyed the favour of the great Ostrogoth, Theodoric, ruler of Italy,
but now was fallen under suspicion, and had been put in prison, where he
was executed in the year 525 at the age of forty-three. His book moves all
readers by its controlled and noble pathos, rendered more appealing
through the romantic interest surrounding its composition. It became _par
excellence_ the mediaeval source of such ethical precept and consolation
as might be drawn from rational self-control and acquiescence in the ways
of Providence. But at present we are concerned with the range of
Boëthius’s intellectual interests and his labours for the transmission of
learning. He was an antique-minded man, whose love of knowledge did not
revolve around “salvation,” the patristic focus of intellectual effort.
Rather he was moved by an ardent wish to place before his Latin
contemporaries what was best in the classic education and philosophy. He
is first of all a translator from Greek to Latin, and, secondly, a helpful
commentator on the works which he translates.

He was little over twenty years of age when he wrote his first work, the
_De arithmetica_.[94] It was a free translation of the _Arithmetic_ of
Nichomachus, a Neo-Pythagorean who flourished about the year 100.
Boëthius’s work opens with a dedicatory _Praefatio_ to his father-in-law
Symmachus. In that and in the first chapter he evinces a broad conception
of education, and shows that lovers of wisdom should not despise
arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, the fourfold path or
_quadrivium_, a word which he may have been the first to use in this
sense.[95] With him arithmetic treats of quantity in and by itself; music,
of quantity related to measure; geometry, of moveless, and astronomy, of
moving, quantity. He was a better Greek scholar than mathematician; and
his free translation ignores some of the finer points of Nichomachus’s
work, which would have impressed one better versed in mathematics.[96]

The young scholar followed up his maiden work with a treatise on Music,
showing a knowledge of Greek harmonics. Then came a _De geometria_, in
which the writer draws from Euclid as well as from the practical knowledge
of Roman surveyors.[97] He composed or translated other works on
elementary branches of education, as appears from a royal letter written
by Cassiodorus in the name of Theodoric: “In your translations Pythagoras
the musician, Ptolemy the astronomer, Nichomachus the arithmetician,
Euclid the geometer are read by Italians, while Plato the theologian and
Aristotle the logician dispute in Roman voice; and you have given back the
mechanician Archimedes in Latin to the Sicilians.”[98] Making all
allowance for politeness, this letter indicates the large accomplishment
of Boëthius, who was but twenty-five years old when it was written. We
turn to the commentated Aristotelian translations which he now
undertook.[99] “Although the duties of the consular office[100] prevent
the bestowal of our time upon these studies, it still seems a proper part
of our care for the Republic to instruct its citizens in the learning
which is gained by the labours of the lamp. Since the valour of a bygone
time brought dominion over other cities to this one Republic, I shall not
merit ill of my countrymen if I shall have instructed the manners of our
State with the arts of Greek wisdom.”[101] These sentences open the second
book of Boëthius’s translation of the _Categories_ of Aristotle. His plan
of work enlarged, apparently, and grew more definite, as the years passed,
each adding its quota of accomplishment. At all events, some time
afterwards, when he may have been not far from thirty-five, he speaks in
the flush of an intellectual anticipation which the many years of labour
still to be counted on seemed to justify:

    “Labour ennobles the human race and completes it with the fruits of
    genius; but idleness deadens the mind. Not experience, but ignorance,
    of labour turns us from it. For what man who has made trial of labour
    has ever forsaken it? And the power of the mind lies in keeping the
    mind tense; to unstring it is to ruin it. My fixed intention, if the
    potent favour of the deity will so grant, is (although others have
    laboured in this field, yet not with satisfactory method) to translate
    into Latin every work of Aristotle that comes to my hand, and furnish
    it with a Latin commentary. Thus I may present, well ordered and
    illustrated with the light of comment, whatever subtilty of logic’s
    art, whatever weight of moral experience, and whatever insight into
    natural truth, may be gathered from Aristotle. And I mean to translate
    all the dialogues of Plato, or reduce them in my commentary to a Latin
    form. Having accomplished this, I shall not have despised the opinions
    of Aristotle and Plato if I evoke a certain concord between them and
    show in how many things of importance for philosophy they agree--if
    only life and leisure last. But now let us return to our
    subject.”[102]

One sees a veritable love of intellectual labour and a love of the
resulting mental increment. It is distinctly the antique, not the
patristic, attitude towards interests of the mind. In spite of his unhappy
sixth century way of writing, and the mental fallings away indicated by
it, Boëthius possessed the old pagan spirit, and shows indeed how tastes
might differ in the sixth century. He never translated the whole of
Aristotle and Plato; and his idea of reconciling the two evinces the
shallow eclectic spirit of the closing pagan times. Nevertheless, he
carried out his purpose to the extent of rendering into Latin, with
abundant comment, the entire _Organon_, that is, all the logical writings
of Aristotle. First of all, and with elaborate explanation, he rendered
Porphyry’s famous Introduction to the _Categories_ of the Master. Then the
_Categories_ themselves, likewise with abundant explanation. Then
Aristotle’s _De interpretatione_, in two editions, the first with simple
comment suited to beginners, the second with the best elaboration of
formal logic that he could devise or compile.[103] These elementary
portions of the _Organon_, as transmitted in the Boëthian translations,
made the logical discipline of the mediaeval schools until the latter part
of the twelfth century. He translated also Aristotle’s _Prior_ and
_Posterior Analytics_, the _Topics_, and the _Sophistical Elenchi_. But
such advanced treatises were beyond the requirements of the early
mediaeval centuries. With the lessening of intellectual energy they passed
into oblivion, to re-emerge only when called for by the livelier mental
activities of a later time.

The list of Boëthius’s works is not yet exhausted, for he wrote some minor
logical treatises, and a voluminous commentary on Cicero’s _Topica_. He
was probably the author of certain Christian theological tracts,
themselves less famous than the controversy which long has raged as to
their authorship.[104] If he wrote them, he did but make polite obeisance
to the ruling intellectual preoccupations of the time.

Boëthius’s commentaries reproduced the comments of other
commentators,[105] and he presents merely the logical processes of
thought. But these, analyzed and tabulated, were just the parts of
philosophy to be seized by a period whose lack of mental originality was
rapidly lowering to a barbaric frame of mind. The logical works of
Boëthius were formal, pedantic, even mechanical. They necessarily
presented the method rather than the substance of philosophic truth. But
their study would exercise the mind, and they were peculiarly adapted to
serve as discipline for the coming centuries, which could not become
progressive until they had mastered their antique inheritance, including
this chief method of presenting the elemental forms of truth.

The “life and leisure” of Boëthius were cut off by his untimely death.
Cassiodorus, although a year or two older, outlived him by half a century.
He was born at Squillace, a Calabrian town which looks out south-easterly
over the little gulf bearing the same name. His father, grandfather, and
great-grandfather had been generals and high officials. He himself served
for forty years under Theodoric and his successors, and at last became
praetorian praefect, the chief office in the Gothic Roman kingdom.[106]
Through his birth, his education, his long official career, and perhaps
his pliancy, he belonged to both Goths and Romans, and like the great king
whom he first served, stood for a policy of reconcilement and assimilation
of the two peoples, and also for tolerance as between Arian and Catholic.

Some years after Theodoric’s death, when the Gothic kingdom had passed
through internecine struggles and seemed at last to have fallen before the
skill of Belisarius, Cassiodorus forsook the troubles of the world. He
retired to his birthplace Squillace, and there in propitious situations
founded a pleasant cloister for coenobites and an austerer hermitage for
those who would lead lives of arduous seclusion. For himself, he chose the
former. It was the year of grace 540, three years before the death of
Benedict of Nursia. Cassiodorus was past sixty. In retiring from the world
he followed the instinct of his time, yet temperately and with an
increment of wisdom. For he was the first influential man to recognize the
fitness of the cloister for the labours of the pious student and copyist.
It is not too much to regard him as the inaugurator of the learned,
compiling, commenting and transcribing functions of monasticism. Not only
as a patron, but through his own works, he was here a leader. His writings
composed after his retirement represent the intellectual interests of
western monasticism in the last half of the sixth century. They indicate
the round of study proper for monks; just the grammar, the orthography,
and other elementary branches which they might know; just the history with
which it behoved them to be acquainted; and then, outbulking all the rest,
those Scriptural studies to which they might well devote their lives for
the sake of their own and others’ souls.

In passing these writings in review, it is unnecessary to pause over the
interesting collection of letters--_Variae epistolae_--which were the
fruit of Cassiodorus’s official life, before he shut the convent’s outer
door against the toils of office. He “edited” them near the close of his
public career. Before that ended he had made a wretched _Chronicon_,
carelessly and none too honestly compiled. He had also written his Gothic
History, a far better work. It survives only in the compend of the
ignorant Jordanes, a fact the like of which will be found repeatedly
recurring in the sixth and following centuries, when a barbaric mentality
continually prefers the compend to the larger and better original, which
demands greater effort from the reader. A little later Cassiodorus
composed his _De anima_, a treatise on the nature, qualities, and
destinies of the Soul. Although made at the request of friends, it
indicated the turning of the statesman’s interest to the matters occupying
his latter years, during which his literary labours were guided by a
paternal purpose. One may place it with the works coming from his pen in
those thirty years of retirement, when study and composition were rather
stimulated than disturbed by care of his convent and estates, the modicum
of active occupation needed by an old man whose life had been passed in
the management of State affairs. Its preface sets out the topical
arrangement in a manner prophetic of scholastic methods:

    “Let us first learn why it is called Anima; secondly, its definition;
    thirdly, its substantial quality; fourthly, whether any form should be
    ascribed to it; fifthly, what are its moral virtues; sixthly, its
    natural powers (_virtutes naturales_) by which it holds the body
    together; seventhly, as to its origin; eighthly, where is its especial
    seat; ninthly, as to the body’s form; tenthly, as to the properties of
    the souls of sinners; eleventhly, as to those of the souls of the
    just; and twelfthly, as to the resurrection.”[107]

The short treatise which follows is neither original nor penetrating. It
closes with an encomium on the number twelve, with praise of Christ and
with a prayer.

Soon after Cassiodorus had installed himself in Vivaria, as he called his
convent, from the fishponds and gardens surrounding it, he set himself to
work to transcribe the Scriptures, and commenced a huge Commentary on the
Psalms. But he interrupted these undertakings in 543 in order to write for
his monks a syllabus of their sacred and secular education. The title of
the work was _Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum_.[108] In
opening he refers to his failure to found a school of Christian teaching
at Rome, on account of the wars. Partially to repair this want, he will
compose an introduction to the study of Scripture and letters. It will not
set out his own opinions, but those of former men. Through the expositions
of the Fathers we ascend to divine Scripture, as by a ladder. The proper
order is for the “tiros of Christ” first to learn the Psalms, and then
proceed to study the rest of Scripture in carefully corrected codices.
When the “soldiers of Christ” have completed the reading of Scripture, and
fixed it in their minds by constant meditation, they will begin to
recognize passages when cited, and be able to find them. They should also
know the Latin commentators, and even the Greek, who have expounded the
various books.

The first book of these _Institutiones_ is strictly a guide to Scripture
study, and in no way a commentary. For example, beginning with the
“Octateuch,” as making up the first “codex” of Scripture, Cassiodorus
tells what Latin and what Greek Fathers have expounded it. He proceeds,
briefly, in the same way with the rest of the Old and New Testaments. He
mentions the Ecumenical Councils, which had passed upon Christian
doctrine, and then refers to the division of Scripture by Jerome, by
Augustine, and in the Septuagint. He states rules for preserving the
purity of the text, exclaims over its ineffable value, and mentions famous
doctrinal works, like Augustine’s _De Trinitate_ and the _De officiis_ of
Ambrose. He then recommends the study of Church historians and names the
great ones, who while incidentally telling of secular events have shown
that such hung not on chance nor on the power of the feeble gods, but
solely on the Creator’s will. Then he shortly characterizes the great
Latin Doctors, Cyprian, Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, and
mentions a convenient collection of excerpts from the works of the
last-named saint, made by a certain priest. Next he admonishes the student
as to the careful reading of Scripture, and suggests convenient
abbreviations for noting citations. He speaks of the desirability of
knowing enough cosmography to understand when Scripture speaks of
countries, towns, mountains, or rivers, and then reverts to the need of an
acquaintance with the Seven Arts; this secular wisdom, having been
originally pilfered from Scripture, should now be called back to its true
service. Those monks who lack intelligence for such studies may properly
work in the fields and gardens which surround Vivaria (Columella and other
writers on agriculture are to be found in the convent library), and to all
the care of the sick is recommended. The second book of the
_Institutiones_ is a brief and unequal compend of the Seven Arts, in which
Dialectic is treated at greatest length.

The remaining works of Cassiodorus appear as special aids to the student
in carrying out the programme of the first book of the _Institutiones_.
Such an aid was the bulky Commentary on the Psalms; another such was the
famous _Historia tripartita_, made of the Church histories of Socrates,
Sozomen, and Theodoret, translated by a friend of Cassiodorus, and crudely
thrown together by himself into one narrative. Finally, such another work
was the compilation upon Latin orthography which the good old man made for
his monks in his ninety-third year.

This long and useful life does not display the zeal for knowledge for its
own sake which marks the labours of Boëthius. It is the Christian
utilitarian view of knowledge that Cassiodorus represents, and yet not
narrowly, nor with a trace of that intolerance of whatever did not bear
directly on salvation, which is to be found in Gregory. From Boëthius’s
love of philosophy, and from the practical interest of Cassiodorus in
education, it is indeed a change to the spiritual anxiousness and fear of
hell besetting this great pope.[109]

In appreciating a man’s opinions and his mental clarity or murkiness, one
should consider his temperament and the temper of his time. Gregory was
constrained as well as driven by temperamental yearnings and aversions,
aggravated by the humour of the century that produced Benedict of Nursia
and was contemplating gloomily the Empire’s ruin and decay, now more
acutely borne in upon the consciousness of thoughtful people than in the
age of Augustine. His temper drew from prevailing moods, and in turn
impressed its spiritual incisiveness upon the influences which it
absorbed; and his writings, so expressive of his own temperament and all
that fed it, were to work mightily upon the minds and moods of men to
come.

Born of a distinguished Roman family about the year 540, he was some
thirty-five years old when Cassiodorus died. His education was the best
that Rome could give. In spite of disclaimer on his part, rhetorical
training shows in the antithetic power of his style; for example, in that
resounding sentence in the dedicatory letter prefixed to his _Moralia_,
wherein he would seem to be casting grammar to the winds. Although quoted
until threadbare, it is so illustrative as to justify citation: “Nam sicut
hujus quoque epistolae tenor enunciat, non metacismi collisionem fugio,
non barbarismi confusionem devito, situs motusque et praepositionum casus
servare contemno, quia indignum vehementer existimo, ut verba coelestis
oraculi restringam sub regulis Donati.”[110] By no means will he flee the
concussion of the oft-repeated M, or avoid the confusing barbarism; he
will despise the laws of place and case, because he deems it utterly unfit
to confine the words of the heavenly oracle beneath the rules of Donatus.
By all of which Gregory means that he proposes to write freely, according
to the needs of his subject, and to disregard the artificial rules of the
somewhat emptied rhetoric, let us say, of Cassiodorus’s epistles.

In his early manhood naturally he was called to take part in affairs, and
was made _Praetor urbanus_. But soon the prevalent feeling of the
difficulty of serving God in the world drove him to retirement. His
father’s palace on the Coelian hill he changed to a convent, upon the site
of which now stands the Church of San Gregorio Magno; and there he became
a monk. Passionately he loved the monk’s life, for which he was to long in
vain through most of the years to come. Soon he was dragged forth from the
companionship of “Mary” to serve with “Martha.” The toiling papacy could
not allow a man of his abilities to remain hidden. He was harnessed to its
active service, and sent as the papal representative to the Imperial Court
at Constantinople; whence he returned, after several years, in 585.
Re-entering his monastery on the Coelian, he became its abbot; but was
drawn out again, and made pope by acclamation and insistency in the year
590. There is no need to speak of the efficient and ceaseless activity of
this pontiff, whose body was never free from pain, nor his soul released
from longing for seclusion which only the grave was to bring.

Gregory’s mind was less antique, and more barbarous and mediaeval than
Augustine’s, whose doctrine he reproduced with garbling changes of tone
and emphasis. In the century and a half between the two, the Roman
institutions had broken down, decadence had advanced, and the patristic
mind had passed from indifference to the laws of physical phenomena to
something like sheer barbaric ignorance of the same. Whatever in Ambrose,
Jerome, or Augustine represented conviction or opinion, has in Gregory
become mental habit, spontaneity of acceptance, matter of course. The
miraculous is with him a frame of mind; and the allegorical method of
understanding Scripture is no longer intended, not to say wilful, as with
Augustine, but has become persistent unconscious habit. Augustine desired
to know God and the Soul, and the true Christian doctrine with whatever
made for its substantiation. He is conscious of closing his mind to
everything irrelevant to this. Gregory’s nature has settled itself within
this scheme of Christian knowledge which Augustine framed. He has no
intellectual inclinations reaching out beyond. He is not conscious of
closing his mind to extraneous knowledge. His mental habits and
temperament are so perfectly adjusted to the confines of this circle, that
all beyond has ceased to exist for him.

So with Gregory the patristic limitation of intellectual interest,
indifference to physical phenomena, and acceptance of the miraculous are
no longer merely thoughts and opinions consciously entertained; they make
part of his nature. There was nothing novel in his views regarding
knowledge, sacred and profane. But there is a turbid force of temperament
in his expressions. In consequence, his vehement words to Bishop
Desiderius of Vienne[111] have been so taken as to make the great pope a
barbarizing idiot. He exclaims with horror at the report that the bishop
is occupying himself teaching grammar; he is shocked that an episcopal
mouth should be singing praises of Jove, which are unfit for a lay brother
to utter. But Gregory is not decrying here, any more than in the sentence
quoted from the letter prefixed to his _Moralia_, a decent command of
Latin. He is merely declaring with temperamental vehemence that to teach
grammar and poetry is not the proper function of a bishop--the bishop in
this case of a most important see. Gregory had no more taste for secular
studies than Tertullian four centuries before him. For both, however,
letters had their handmaidenly function, which they performed effectively
in the instances of these two great rhetoricians.[112]

It is needless to say that the entire literary labour of Gregory was
religious. His works, as in time, so in quality, are midway between those
of Ambrose and Augustine and those of the Carolingian rearrangers of
patristic opinion. Gregory, who laboured chiefly as a commentator upon
Scripture, was not highly original in his thoughts, yet was no mere
excerpter of patristic interpretations, like Rabanus Maurus or Walafrid
Strabo, who belong to the ninth century.[113] In studying Scripture, he
thought and interpreted in allegories. But he was also a man experienced
in life’s exigencies, and his religious admonishings were wise and
searching. His prodigious Commentary upon Job has with reason been called
Gregory’s _Moralia_.[114] And as the moral advice and exhortation sprang
from Gregory the bishop, so the allegorical interpretations largely were
his own, or at least not borrowed and applied mechanically.

Gregory represents the patristic mind passing into a more barbarous stage.
He delighted in miracles, and wrote his famous _Dialogues on the Lives and
Miracles of the Italian Saints_[115] to solace the cares of his
pontificate. The work exhibits a naïve acceptance of every kind of
miracle, and presents the supple mediaeval devil in all his deceitful
metamorphoses.[116]

Quite in accord with Gregory’s interest in these stories is his
elaboration of certain points of doctrine, for example, the worship of the
saints, whose intercession and supererogatory righteousness may be turned
by prayer and worship to the devotee’s benefit. Thus he comments upon the
eighth verse of the twenty-fourth chapter of Job:

    “They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rocks
    as a shelter. The showers of the mountains are the words of the
    doctors. Concerning which mountains it is said with the voice of the
    Church: ‘I will lift up my eyes unto the hills.’ The showers of the
    mountains water these, for the streams of the holy fathers saturate.
    We receive the ‘shelter’ as a covering of good works, by which one is
    covered so that before the eyes of omnipotent God the filthiness of
    his perversity is concealed. Wherefore it is written, ‘Blessed are
    those whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered’ (Ps.
    xxxii. 1). And under the name of stones whom do we understand except
    the strong men of the Church? To whom it is said through the first
    shepherd: ‘Ye also as living stones are built up a spiritual house’ (1
    Peter ii. 5). So those who confide in no work of their own, run to the
    protection of the holy martyrs, and press with tears to their sacred
    bodies, pleading to obtain pardon through their intercession.”[117]

Another point of Gregorian emphasis: no delict is remitted without
punishment.[118] To complement which principle, Gregory develops the
doctrine of penance in its three elements, _contritio_, _conversio
mentis_, _satisfactio_. Our whole life should be one long penitence and
penance, and baptism of tears; for our first baptism cannot wash out later
sins, and cannot be repeated. In the fourth book of the _Dialogi_ he
develops his cognate doctrine of Purgatory,[119] and amplifies upon the
situation and character of hell. These things are implicit in Augustine
and existed before him: with Gregory they have become explicit,
elaborated, and insisted on with recurrent emphasis. Thus Augustinianism
is altered in form and barbarized.[120]

Gregory is throughout prefigurative of the Middle Ages, which he likewise
prefigures in his greatness as a sovereign bishop and a man of
ecclesiastical affairs. He is energetic and wise and temperate. The
practical wisdom of the Catholic Church is in him and in his rightly famed
book of _Pastoral Rule_. The temperance and wisdom of his letters of
instructions to Augustine of Canterbury are admirable. The practical
exigency seemed always to have the effect of tempering any extreme opinion
which apart from it he might have expressed; as one sees, for example, in
those letters to this apostle to the English, or in his letter to Serenus,
Bishop of Marseilles, who had been too violent as to paintings and images.
Gregory’s stand is moderate and reasonable. Likewise he opposes the use of
force to convert the Jews, although insisting firmly that no Jew may hold
a Christian slave.[121]

There has been occasion to remark that decadence tends to join hands with
barbarism on a common intellectual level. Had Boëthius lived in a greater
epoch, he might not have been an adapter of an elementary arithmetic and
geometry, and his best years would not have been devoted to the
translation and illustration of logical treatises. Undoubtedly his labours
were needed by the times in which he lived and by the centuries which
followed them in spirit as well as chronologically. He was the principal
purveyor of the strictly speaking intellectual grist of the early Middle
Ages; and it was most apt that the great scholastic controversy as to
universals should have drawn its initial text from his translation of
Porphyry’s Introduction to the _Categories_ of Aristotle.[122] Gregory, on
the other hand, was a purveyor of theology, the subject to which logic
chiefly was to be applied. He purveyed matter very much to the mediaeval
taste; for example, his wise practical admonishments; his elaboration of
such a doctrine as that of penance, so tangible that it could be handled,
and felt with one’s very fingers; and, finally, his supreme intellectual
endeavour, the allegorical trellising of Scripture, to which the Middle
Ages were to devote their thoughts, and were to make warm and living with
the love and yearning of their souls. The converging currents--decadence
and barbarism--meet and join in Gregory’s powerful personality. He
embodies the intellectual decadence which has lost all independent wish
for knowledge and has dropped the whole round of the mind’s mortal
interests; which has seized upon the near, the tangible, and the ominous
in theology till it has rooted religion in the fear of hell. All this may
be viewed as a decadent abandonment of the more intellectual and spiritual
complement to the brute facts of sin, penance, and hell barely escaped.
But, on the other hand, it was also barbarization, and held the strength
of barbaric narrowing of motives and the resistlessness of barbaric fear.

Such were the rôles of Boëthius and Gregory in the transmission of antique
and patristic intellectual interests into the mediaeval time. Quite
different was that of Gregory’s younger contemporary, Isidore, the
princely and vastly influential Bishop of Seville, the primary see in that
land of Spain, which, however it might change dynasties, was destined
never to be free from some kind of sacerdotal bondage. In Isidore’s time,
the kingdom of the Visigoths had recently turned from Arianism to
Catholicism, and wore its new priestly yoke with ardour. Boëthius had
provided a formal discipline and Gregory much substance already
mediaevalized. But the whole ground-plan of Isidore’s mind corresponded
with the aptitudes and methods of the Carolingian period, which was to be
the schoolday of the Middle Ages. By reason of his own habits of study, by
reason of the quality of his mind, which led him to select the palpable,
the foolish, and the mechanically correlated, by reason, in fine, of _his_
mental faculties and interests, Isidore gathered and arranged in his
treatises a conglomerate of knowledge, secular and sacred, exactly suited
to the coming centuries.

In drawing from its spiritual heritage, an age takes what it cares for;
and if comparatively decadent or barbarized or childlike in its
intellectual affinities, it will still manage to draw what is like itself.
In that case, probably it will not draw directly from the great sources,
but from intermediaries who have partially debased them. From these turbid
compositions the still duller age will continue to select the obvious and
the worse. This indicates the character of Isidore’s work. His writings
speak for themselves through their titles, and are so flat, so
transparent, so palpably taken from the nearest authorities, that there is
no call to analyze them. But their titles with some slight indication of
their contents will show the excerpt character of Isidore’s mental
processes, and illustrate by anticipation the like qualities reappearing
with the Carolingian doctors.

Isidore’s _Quaestiones in vetus Testamentum_[123] is his chief work in the
nature of a Scripture commentary. It is confined to those passages of the
Old Testament which were deemed most pregnant with allegorical meaning.
His Preface discloses his usual method of procedure: “We have taken
certain of those incidents of the sacred history which were told or done
figuratively, and are filled with mystic sacraments, and have woven them
together in sequence in this little work; and, collecting the opinions of
the old churchmen, we have made a choice of flowers as from divers
meadows; and briefly presenting a few matters from so many, with some
changes or additions, we offer them not only to studious but fastidious
readers who detest prolixity.” Every one may feel assured that he will be
reading the interpretations of the Fathers, and not those of Isidore--“my
voice is but their tongue.” He states that his sources are Origen,
Victorinus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Fulgentius, Cassian, and “Gregory
so distinguished for his eloquence in our own time.” The spirit of the
mediaeval commentary is in this Preface. The phrase about “culling the
opinions of the Fathers like flowers from divers meadows,” will be
repeated hundreds of times. Such a commentary is a thing of excerpts; so
it rests upon authority. The writer thus comforts both his reader and
himself; neither runs the peril of originality, and together they repose
on the broad bosom of the Fathers.

Throughout his writings, Isidore commonly proceeds in this way, whether he
says so or not. We may name first the casual works which represent
separate parcels of his encyclopaedic gleanings, and then glance at his
putting together of them, in his _Etymologiae_.[124] The muster opens with
two books of Distinctions (_Differentiarum_). The first is concerned with
the distinctions of like-sounding and like-meaning words. It is
alphabetically arranged. The second is concerned with the distinctions of
_things_: it begins with God and the Creation, and passes to the physical
parts and spiritual traits of man. No need to say that it contains nothing
that is Isidore’s own. Now come the _Allegoriae quaedam sacrae
Scripturae_, which give in chronological order the allegorical
signification of all the important persons mentioned in the Old Testament
and the New. It was one of the earliest hand-books of Scriptural
allegories, and is a sheer bit of the Middle Ages in spirit and method.
The substance, of course, is taken from the Fathers. Next, a little work,
_De ortu et obitu Patrum_, states in short paragraphs the birthplace, span
of life, place of sepulture, and noticeable traits of Scriptural
personages.

There follows a collection of brief Isidorean prefaces to the books of
Scripture. Then comes a curious book, which may have been suggested to the
writer by the words of Augustine himself. This is the _Liber numerorum_,
the book of the _numbers_ occurring in the Scriptures. It tells the
qualities and mystical significance of every number from one to sixteen,
and of the chief ones between sixteen and sixty. These numbers were “most
holy and most full of mysteries” to Augustine,[125] and Augustine is the
man whom Isidore chiefly draws on in this treatise--Augustine at his very
worst. One might search far for an apter instance of an ecclesiastical
writer elaborately exploiting the most foolish statements that could
possibly be found in the writings of a great predecessor.

Isidore composed a polemic treatise on the Catholic Faith against the
Jews--_De fide Catholica contra Judaeos_. The good bishop had nothing to
add to the patristic discussion of this weighty controversy. His book is
filled with quotations from Scripture. It put the matter together in a way
suited to his epoch and the coming centuries, and at an early time was
translated into the German and other vernacular tongues. Three books of
_Sententiae_ follow, upon the contents of Christian doctrine--as to God,
the world, evil, the angels, man, Christ and the Church. They consist of
excerpts from the writings of Gregory the Great and earlier Church
Fathers.[126] A more original work is the _De ecclesiasticis officiis_,
upon the services of the Church and the orders of clergy and laity. It
presents the liturgical practices and ecclesiastical regulations of
Isidore’s epoch.

Isidore seems to have put most pious feeling into a work called by him
_Synonyma_, to which name was added the supplementary designation: _De
lamentatione animae_. First the Soul pours out its lament in excruciating
iteration, repeating the same commonplace of Christian piety in synonymous
phrases. When its lengthy plaint is ended, Reason replies with admonitions
synonymously reiterated in the same fashion.[127] This work combined a
grammatical with a pious purpose, and became very popular through its
doubly edifying nature, and because it strung together so many easy
commonplaces of Christian piety. Isidore also drew up a _Regula_ for
monks, and a book on the Order of Creation has been ascribed to him. This
completes the sum of his extant works upon religious topics, from which we
pass to those of a secular character.

The first of these is the _De rerum natura_, written to enlighten his
king, Sisebut, “on the scheme (_ratio_) of the days and months, the bounds
of the year and the change of seasons, the nature of the elements, the
courses of the sun and moon and stars, and the signs of tempests and
winds, the position of the earth, and the ebb and flow of the sea.” Of all
of which, continues Isidore, “we have made brief note, from the writings
of the ancients (_veteribus viris_), and especially those who were of the
Catholic Faith. For it is not a vain knowledge (_superstitiosa scientia_)
to know the nature of these things, if we consider them according to sound
and sober teaching.”[128] So Isidore compiles a book of secular physical
knowledge, the substance of which is taken from the _Hexaemeron_ of
Ambrose and the works of other Fathers, and also from the lost _Prata_ of
pagan Suetonius.[129]

Of course Isidore busied himself also with history. He made a dismal
universal _Chronicon_, and perhaps a History of the Kings of the Goths,
through which stirs a breath of national pride; and after the model of
Jerome, he wrote a _De viris illustribus_, concerned with some fifty
worthies of the Church flourishing between Jerome’s time and his own.

Here we end the somewhat dry enumeration of the various works of Isidore
outside of his famous “twenty books of Etymologies.” This work has been
aptly styled a _Konversationslexikon_, to use the excellent German word.
It was named _Etymologiae_, because the author always gives the etymology
of everything which he describes or defines. Indeed the tenth book
contains only the etymological definitions of words alphabetically
arranged. These etymologies follow the haphazard similarities of the
words, and often are nonsensical. Sometimes they show a fantastic caprice
indicating a mind steeped in allegorical interpretations, as, for example,
when “_Amicus_ is said to be, by derivation, _animi custos_; also from
_hamus_, that is, chain of love, whence we say _hami_ or hooks because
they hold.”[130] This is not ignorance so much as fancy.

The _Etymologiae_ were meant to cover the current knowledge of the time,
doctrinal as well as secular. But the latter predominates, as it would in
a _Konversationslexikon_. The general arrangement of the treatise is not
alphabetical, but topical. To indicate the sources of its contents would
be difficult as well as tedious. Isidore drew on many previous authors and
compilers: to Cassiodorus and Boëthius he went for Rhetoric and Dialectic,
and made frequent trips to the _Prata_ of Suetonius for natural
knowledge--or ignorance. In matters of doctrine he draws on the Church
Fathers; and for his epitome of jurisprudence in the fifth book, upon the
Fathers from Tertullian on, and (probably) upon some elementary book of
legal Institutes.[131] Glancing at the handling of topics in the
_Etymologies_ one feels it to have been a huge collection of terms and
definitions. The actual information conveyed is very slight. Isidore is
under the spell of words. Were they fetishes to him? did they carry moral
potency? At all events the working of his mind reflects the age-long
dominance of grammar and rhetoric in Roman education, which treated other
topics almost as illustrations of these chief branches.[132]




CHAPTER VI

THE BARBARIC DESTRUCTION OF THE EMPIRE[133]


The Latinizing of northern Italy, Spain, and Gaul was part of the
expansion of Roman dominion. Throughout these lands, alien peoples
submitted to the Roman order and acquired new traits from the training of
its discipline. Voluntarily or under compulsion they exchanged their
institutions and customs for those of Roman Italy, and their native
tongues for Latin. The education and culture of the upper classes became
identical with that gained in the schools about the Forum, and Roman
literature was the literature which they studied and produced. In a
greater or less degree their characters were Latinized, while their
traditions were abandoned for those of Rome. Yet, although Romanized and
Latinized, these peoples were not Roman. Their culture was acquired, their
characters were changed, yet with old traits surviving. In character and
faculties, as in geographical position, they were intermediate, and in
rôle they were mediatorial. Much of what they had received, and what they
had themselves become, they perforce transmitted to the ruder humanity
which, as the Empire weakened, pressed in, serving, plundering, murdering,
and finally amalgamating with these provincials. The surviving Latin
culture passed to the mingled populations which were turning to inchoate
Romance nations in Italy, Spain, and Gaul. Likewise Christianity,
Romanized, paganized, barbarized, had been accepted through these
countries. And now these mingled peoples, these inchoate Romance nations,
were to accomplish a broader mediation in extending the rudiments of
Latin culture, along with the great new Religion, to the barbarous peoples
beyond the Romance pale.

The mediating rôles of the Roman provincials began with their first
subjection to Roman order. For barbarians were continually brought into
the provinces as slaves or prisoners of war. Next, they entered to serve
as auxiliary troops, coming especially from the wavering Teutonic
outskirts of the Empire. And during that time of misrule and military
anarchy which came between the death of Commodus (A.D. 192) and the
accession of Diocletian (A.D. 284), Teutonic inroads threatened the
imperial fabric. But, apart from palpable invasions, there was a constant
increase in the Teutonic inflow from the close of the second century. More
and more the Teutons tilled the fields; more and more they filled the
armies. They became officers of the army and officials of the Government.
So long as the vigour of life and growth continued in the Latinized
population of the Empire, and so long as the Roman law and order held, the
assimilative power of Latin culture and Roman institutions was enormous;
the barbarians became Romanized. But when self-conserving strength and
coercive energy waned with Romans and provincials, when the law’s
protection was no longer sure, and a dry rot infected civic institutions,
then Roman civilization lost some of its transforming virtue. The
barbarism of the Teutonic influx became more obstinate as the transmuting
forces of civilization weakened. Evidently the decadent civilization of
the Empire could no longer raise these barbarians to the level of its
greater periods; it could at most impress them with such culture and such
order as it still possessed. Moreover, reacting upon these disturbed and
infirm conditions, barbarism put forth a positive transforming energy,
tending to barbarize the Empire, its government, its army, its
inhabitants. The decay of Roman institutions and the grafting of Teutonic
institutions upon Roman survivals were as universal as the mingling of
races, tempers, and traditions. The course of events may briefly be
reviewed.

In the third century the Goths began, by land and sea, to raid the eastern
provinces of the undivided Roman Empire; down the Danube they sailed, and
out upon the Euxine; then their plundering fleets spread through the
eastern Mediterranean. They were attacked, repulsed, overthrown, and
slaughtered in hordes in the year 270. Some of the survivors remained in
bondage, some retired north beyond the Danube. Aurelian gave up to them
the province of Dacia: the latest conquest of the Empire, the first to be
abandoned. These Dacian settlers thenceforth appear as Visigoths. For a
century the Empire had no great trouble from them. Dacia was the scene of
the career of Ulfilas (b. 311, d. 380), the Arian apostle of the Goths.
They became Christian in part, and in part remained fiercely heathen.
About 372, harassed by the Huns, they pressed south to escape over the
Danube. Valens permitted them to cross; then Roman treachery followed,
answered by desperate Gothic raids in Thrace, till at last Valens was
defeated and slain at Hadrianople in 378.

It was sixteen years after this that Theodosius the Great marched from the
East to Italy to suppress Arbogast, the overweening Frank, who had cast
out his weak master Valentinian. The leader of the Visigothic auxiliaries
was Alaric. When the great emperor died, Alaric was proclaimed King of the
Visigoths, and soon proceeded to ravage and conquer Greece. Stilicho, son
of a Vandal chief--one sees how all the high officers are Teutons--was the
uncertain stay of Theodosius’s weakling sons, Honorius and Arcadius. In
400 Alaric attempted to invade Italy, but was foiled by Stilicho, who five
years later circumvented and destroyed another horde of Goths, both men
and women, who had penetrated Italy to the Apennines. In 408 Alaric made a
second attempt to enter, and this time was successful, for Stilicho was
dead. Thrice he besieged Rome, capturing it in 410. Then he died, his
quick death to be a warning to Attila. The new Gothic king, Ataulf,
conceived the plan of uniting Romans and Goths in a renewed and
strengthened kingdom. But this task was not for him, and in two years he
left Italy with his Visigoths to establish a kingdom in the south of Gaul.

Attila comes next upon the scene. The eastern Empire had endured the
oppression of this terrible Turanian, and had paid him tribute for some
years, before he decided to march westward by a route north of the Alps,
and attack Gaul. He penetrated to Orleans, which he besieged in vain. Many
nations were in the two armies that were now to meet in battle on the
“Catalaunian Plains.” On Attila’s side, besides his Huns, were subject
Franks, Bructeri, Thuringians, Burgundians, and the hosts of Gepidae and
Ostrogoths. Opposed were the Roman forces, Bretons, Burgundians, Alans,
Saxons, Salian Franks, and the army of the Visigoths. Defeated, but not
overthrown, the lion Hun withdrew across the Rhine; but the next spring,
in 452, he descended from the eastern Alps upon Aquileia and destroyed it,
and next sacked the cities of Venetia and the Po Valley as far as Milan.
Then he passed eastward to the river Mincio, where he was met by a Roman
embassy, in which Pope Leo was the most imposing figure. Before this
embassy the Scourge of God withdrew, awed or persuaded, or in
superstitious fear. The following year, upon Attila’s death, his realm
broke up; Gepidae and Goths beat the Huns in battle, and again Teutons
held sway in Central Europe.

The fear of the Hun had hardly ceased when the Vandals came from Africa,
and leisurely plundered Rome. They were Teutons, perhaps kin to the Goths.
But theirs had been a far migration. At the opening of the fifth century
they had entered Gaul and fought the Franks, then passed on to Spain,
where they were broken by the Visigoths. So they crossed to Africa and
founded a kingdom there, whence they invaded Italy. By this time, the
middle of the fifth century, the fighting and ruling energy in the western
Empire was barbarian. The stocks had become mixed through intermarriage
and the confusion of wars and frequent change of sides. An illustrative
figure is Count Ricimer, whose father was a noble Suevian, while his
mother was a Visigothic princess. He directed the Roman State from 456 to
472, placing one after another of his Roman puppets on the imperial
throne.

In the famous year 476 the Roman army was made up of barbarians, mainly
drawn from lands now included in Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary. There were
large contingents of Rugii and Heruli, who had flocked in bands to Italy
as adventurers. Such troops had the status of _foederati_, that is,
barbarian auxiliaries or allies. Suddenly they demanded one-third of the
lands of Italy.[134] Upon refusal of their demand, they made a king from
among themselves, the Herulian Odoacer, and Romulus Augustulus flitted
from the shadowy imperial throne. By reason of his dramatic name, rather
than by any marked circumstance of his deposition, he has come to typify
with historians the close of the line of western emperors.

The Herulian soldier-king or “Patrician,” Odoacer, a nondescript
transition personage, ruled twelve years. Then the nation of the
Ostrogoths, which had learned much from the vicissitudes of fortune in the
East, obtained the eastern emperor’s sanction, and made its perilous way
to the gates of Italy under the king, Theodoric. This invading people
numbered perhaps two hundred thousand souls; their fighting men were forty
thousand. Odoacer was beaten on the river Isonzo; he retreated to the line
of the Adige, and was again defeated at Verona. After standing a long
siege in Ravenna, he made terms with Theodoric, and was murdered by him.

The Goths were among the best of the barbarians, and Theodoric was the
greatest of the Goths. The eastern emperors probably regarded him as their
representative in Italy; and he coined money only with the Emperor’s
image. But in fact he was a sovereign; and, through his sovereignty over
both Goths and Romans, from a Teutonic king he became an absolute monarch,
even as his contemporary Clovis became, under analogous circumstances. He
was a just despot, with his subjects’ welfare at heart. The Goths received
one-third of the Italian lands, in return for which their duty was to
defend the whole. This third may have been that previously possessed by
Odoacer’s troops. Under Theodoric the relations between Goths and “Romans”
were friendly. It was from the Code of Theodosius and other Roman sources
that he drew the substance of his legislation, the _Edictum_ which about
the year 510 he promulgated for both Goths and Romans (_barbari
Romanique_).[135] His aim--and here the influence of his minister
Cassiodorus appears--was to harmonize the relations of the two peoples and
assimilate the ways of the Goths to those of their more civilized
neighbours. But if his rule brought prosperity to Italy, after his death
came desolating wars between the Goths under their noble kings, and
Justinian’s great generals, Belisarius and Narses. These wars ruined the
Ostrogothic nation. Only some remnants were left to reascend the Alps in
553. Behind them Italy was a waste.

An imperial eastern Roman restoration followed. It was not to endure. For
already the able and savage Lombard Alboin was making ready to lead down
his army of Lombards, Saxons, Gepidae and unassorted Teutons, and perhaps
Slavs. No strength was left to oppose him in plague-stricken Italy. So the
Lombard conquered easily, and set up a kingdom which, united or divided
under kings and dukes, endured for two hundred years. Then
Charlemagne--his father Pippin had been before him--at the entreaty of the
Pope, invaded Italy with a host of mingled Teuton tribes, and put an end
to the Lombard kingdom, but not to Lombard blood and Lombard traits.

The result of all these invasions was a progressive barbarization of
Italy, which was not altogether unfortunate, because fraught with some
renewal of strength. The Teutons brought their customs; and at least one
Teuton people, the Lombards, maintained them masterfully. The Ostrogoth,
Theodoric, had preserved the Italian municipal organization, and had drawn
his code for all from Roman sources. But the first Lombard Code, that of
King Rothari, promulgated about 643, ignored Roman law, and apparently the
very existence of Romans. Though written in barbarous Latin, it is Lombard
through and through. So, to a scarcely less degree, is the Code of King
Liutprand, promulgated about 725.[136] Even then the Lombards looked upon
themselves as distinct from the “Romans.” Their laws were still those of
the Lombards, yet of Lombards settling down to urban life. Within Lombard
territories the “Romans” were subjects. In Liutprand’s Code they seem to
be referred to under the name of _aldii_ and _aldiae_, male and female
persons, who were not slaves and yet not free. Instead of surrendering
one-third of the land, the Romans were obliged to furnish one-third of its
produce. Hence their Lombard masters were interested in keeping them fixed
to the soil, perhaps in a state of serfdom. Little is known as to the
intermarriage of the stocks, or when the Lombards adopted a Latin
speech.[137]

It is difficult, either in Italy or elsewhere, to follow the changes and
reciprocal working of Roman and Teutonic institutions through these
obscure centuries. They wrought upon each other universally, and became
what neither had been before. The Roman State was there no longer; where
the names of its officials survived they stood for altered functions. The
Roman law prevailed within the dominions of the eastern Empire and the
popes. Everywhere the crass barbarian law and the pure Roman institution
was passing away, or changing into something new. In Italy another
pregnant change was taking place, the passing of the functions of
government to the bishops of Rome. Its stages are marked by the names of
great men upon whose shoulders fell the authority no longer held by a
remote ruler. Leo the Great heads the embassy which turns back the Hun; a
century and a half afterwards Gregory the Great leads the opposition to
the Lombards, still somewhat unkempt savages. Thereafter each succeeding
pope, in fact the papacy by necessity of its position and its aspirations,
opposes the Lombards when they have ceased to be either savage or Arian.
It is an absent supporter that the papacy desires, and not a rival close
at hand: Charlemagne, not Desiderius.

When the Visigoths under Ataulf left Italy they passed into southern Gaul,
and there established themselves with Toulouse as the centre of the
Visigothic kingdom. They soon extended their rule to Spain, with the
connivance of sundry Roman rulers. Some time before them Vandals, Suevi
and Alans, having crossed the Rhine into Gaul, had been drawn across the
Pyrenees by half-traitorous invitations of rival Roman governors. The
Visigoths now attacked these peoples, with the result that the Suevi
retreated to the north-west of the peninsula, and at length the restless
Vandals accepted the invitation of the traitor Count Boniface, and crossed
to Africa. Visigothic fortunes varied under an irregular succession of
non-hereditary and occasionally murdered kings. Their kingdom reached its
farthest limit in the reign of Euric (466-486), who extended its
boundaries northward to the Loire and southward over nearly all of
Spain.[138]

Under the Visigoths the lot of the Latinized provincials, who with their
ancestors had long been Roman citizens, was not a hard one. The Roman
system of quartering soldiers upon provincials, with a right to one-third
of the house, afforded precedent for the manner of settlement of the
Visigoths and other Teuton invaders after them. The Visigoths received
two-thirds not only of the houses but also of the lands, which indeed were
bare of cultivators. The municipal organization of the towns was left
intact, and in general the nomenclature and structure of Roman officialdom
were preserved. As the Romans were the more numerous and the cleverer,
they regained their wealth and social consideration. In 506, Alaric II.
promulgated his famous code, the _Lex Romana Visigothorum_, usually called
the “Breviarium,” for his Roman subjects. Although the next year Clovis
broke down the Visigothic kingdom in Gaul, and confined it to narrow
limits around Narbonne, this code remained in force, a lasting source of
Roman law for the inhabitants of the south and west of Gaul.[139]

Throughout Visigothic Spain there existed, in conflict if not in force, a
complex mass of diverse laws and customs, written and unwritten, Roman,
Gothic, ecclesiastical. Soon after the middle of the seventh century a
general code was compiled for both Goths and Roman provincials, between
whom marriages were formally sanctioned. This codification was the legal
expression of a national unity, which however had no great political
vigour. For what with its inheritance of intolerable taxation, of
dwindling agriculture, of enfeebled institutions and social degeneracy,
the Visigothic state fell an easy victim before the Arabs in 711. It had
been subject to all manner of administrative abuse. In name the government
was secular. But in fact the bishops of the great sees were all-powerful
to clog, if not to administer, justice and the affairs of State within
their domains; the nobles abetted them in their misgovernment. So it came
that instead of a united Government supported by a strong military power,
there was divided misrule, and an army without discipline or valour. This
misrule was also cruelly intolerant. The bitter persecution of the Jews,
and the law that none but a Catholic should live in Spain, if not causes,
were at least symptoms, of a fatal impotence, and prophetic of like
measures taken by later rulers in that chosen land of religious
persecution.[140]

In Gaul, contact between Latinized provincials and Teutonic invaders
produced interesting results. Mingled peoples came into being, whose
polity and institutions were neither Roman nor Teutonic, and whose
literature and intellectual achievement were to unite the racial qualities
of both. The hybrid political and social phenomena of the Frankish period
were engendered by a series of events which may be outlined as follows.
The Franks, Salic and Ripuarian, were clustered in the region of the lower
and middle Rhine. Like other Teutonic groups dwelling near the boundaries
of the weakening Empire, they were alternately plunderers of Roman
territory and auxiliaries in the imperial army, or its independent allies
against Huns or Saxons or Alans. One Childeric, whose career opens in saga
and ends in history, was king or hereditary leader of a part of the Salian
Franks. This active man appears in frequent relations with Aegidius, the
half-independent Roman ruler of that north-western portion of Gaul which
was not held by Visigoths or Burgundians. If Childeric’s forefathers had
oftener been enemies than allies of the Empire, he was its ally, and
perhaps commander of the forces which helped to preserve this outlying
portion of its territory.

Aegidius died in 463, and the territories ruled by him passed to his son
Syagrius practically as an independent kingdom. Childeric in the next
eighteen years increased his power among the Salian Franks, and extended
his territories through victories over other Teutonic groups. Upon his
death in 481 his kingdom passed to his son Chlodoweg, or, as it is easier
to call him, Clovis, then in his sixteenth year. The next five years were
employed by this precocious genius of barbarian craft in strengthening his
kingship among the Salians. At the age of twenty he attacked Syagrius, and
overthrew his power at Soissons. The last Roman ruler of a part of Gaul
fled to the Visigoths for refuge: their king delivered him to Clovis, who
had him killed. So Clovis’s realm was extended first to the Seine and then
to the Loire. The Gallo-Romans were not driven out or dispossessed, but
received a new master, who on his part treated them forbearingly and
accepted them as subjects. The royal domains of Syagrius perhaps were
large enough to satisfy the cupidity of the victors.

Clovis was now king of Gallo-Romans as well as Salian Franks. Thus
strengthened he could fight other Franks with success, and carry on a
great war against the Alemanni to the south-east. At the “battle of
Tolbiac,” in which he finally overthrew these people, the heathen Frank
invoked the Christian God (so tells Gregory of Tours), and vowed to accept
the Faith if Christ gave him the victory. This is like the legend of
Constantine at the battle of the Malvern Bridge, nor is the probability of
its essential truth lessened because of this resemblance. Both Roman
emperor and Frankish king turned from heathenism to Christianity as to the
stronger supernatural support. And if ever man received tenfold reward in
this world from his faith it was this treacherous and bloody Frank.

Hitherto the Teuton tribes, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Burgundians
who had accepted Christianity, were Arians by reason of the circumstances
of their “conversion.” On the other hand, the Romanized inhabitants of
Italy, Spain, and Gaul were Catholics, and the influence of their
Arian-hating clergy was enormous. Evidently when Clovis, under the
influence of Catholic bishops and a Catholic wife, became a Catholic, the
power of the Church and the sympathy of the laity would make his power
irresistible. For the Catholic population was greatly in the majority,
even in the countries held by Burgundian or Visigothic kings. The
Burgundian rulers had half turned to Catholicism, and the Visigothic
monarchy treated it with respect. Yet the Burgundian kings did not win the
Church’s confidence, nor did the Visigoths disarm its active hostility.
With such ability as Clovis and his sons possessed, their conversion to
Catholicism ensured victory over their rivals, and made a bond of
friendship between them and their Gallo-Roman subjects.[141]

The extension of Clovis’s kingdom, his overthrow of the Visigothic power,
his partial conquest of the Burgundians, would have been even more rapid
and decisive but for the opposing diplomacy of the great Arian ruler,
Theodoric the Ostrogoth, whose prestige and power even the bold Frank
dared not defy. Moreover, the Burgundians stood well with their Roman
subjects, whom they treated generously, and permitted to live under a code
of Roman law. When it came to war between them and Clovis, the advantage
rested with the latter; but possibly the fear of Theodoric, or the
pressure of war with the Alemanni, deferred the final conquest of the
Burgundian kingdom for another generation.

In 507 Clovis attacked the Visigothic kingdom, and incorporated it with
his dominions in the course of the next year. Whether or not he had cried
out, in the words of Gregory of Tours, “it is a shame that these Arians
should hold a part of Gaul; let us attack them with God’s help and take
their land,” at all events the war had a religious sanction, and its
successful issue was facilitated by the Catholic clergy within the
Visigothic territory. Clovis’s career was now nearing its end. In his last
years, by treachery, murder, and open war when needed, he made himself
king of all the Franks, Ripuarian and Salian. The intense partisan
sympathy of the Church for this its eldest royal Teuton son speaks in the
words of Gregory of Tours, concluding his recital of these deeds of
incomparable villainy: “Thus day by day God cast down his (Clovis’s)
enemies before him, because he did what was right in His eyes”!

The unresting sons and grandsons of Clovis not only conquered Burgundy,
but extended their rule far to the east, into the heart of Germany, and
Merovingians became masters of Thuringia and Bavaria. That such a realm
should hold together was impossible. From Clovis to Charlemagne it was the
regular practice to divide the realm at death among the ruler’s sons, and
for the ablest among them to pursue and slay the others, and so unite the
realm again. Besides this principle of internecine conflict, differences
of race and language and degrees of Latinization ensured eventual
disruption.

Nothing passes away, and very little quite begins, but all things change;
and so the verity of social and political phenomena lies in the
_becoming_, rather than in any temporary phase--as one may perceive in the
Merovingian, later Carolingian, _regnum Francorum_. Therein Roman
institutions survived either as decayed actualities or as names or
effigies; therein were conditions and even institutions which arose and
were developed through the decay of previous institutions, through the
weakening of the imperial peace and justice, the growth of abuses, and the
need of the weak to put themselves under the protection of the nearest
strong. This huge conglomerate of a government also held sturdy Teuton
elements. There was the kingship and the strong body of personal
followers, the latter an outgrowth of the _comitatus_, or rather of the
needs of any barbaric chieftaincy. There was _wergeld_, not so much
exclusively a Teutonic institution, as belonging to a rough society which
sees the need of checking feuds, and finds the means in a system of
compensation to the injured person or his kin, who would otherwise make
reprisals; there was also _Sippe_, the rights and duties of kin among
themselves, and of the kinship as a corporate unit toward the world
without; and therein, in general, was continuance of the warrior spirit of
the Franks and other Teutons, of their social ways and mode of dress, of
their methods of warfare and their thoughts of barbaric hardihood.

These elements, and much more besides, were in process of mutual interplay
and amalgamation. Childeric had been king of some of the Salian Franks,
and had allied himself with the last fragment of the Roman Empire in Gaul.
Clovis, his son, is greater: he makes himself king of more Franks, and
becomes the head of the Roman-Frankish combination by overthrowing
Syagrius and taking his place as lord of the Gallo-Romans. As towards them
he becomes even as Syagrius and the emperors before him, absolute ruler,
_princeps_. This authority enhanced the dignity of Clovis’s kingship over
his own Franks and the Alemanni, and his personal power increased with
each new conquest. He became a novel sort of monarch, combining
heterogeneous prerogatives. Hence his sovereignty and that of his
successors was not a simple development of Teutonic kingship, nor was it a
continuation of Roman imperial or proconsular rule, but rather a new
composite evolution. Some of its contradictions and anomalies were
symbolized by Clovis’s acceptance of the title of Consul and stamping the
effigies of the eastern emperors upon his coins--as if they held any power
in the _regnum Francorum_! As between Gallo-Romans and Franks, the
headship had gone over to the latter; yet there was neither hatred on the
one side nor oppression from the other. A common catholicism and many
similarities of condition promoted mutual sympathy and union. For example,
through the decay of the imperial power, oppression had increased, and the
common Gallo-Roman people were compelled to place themselves under the
patronage of powerful personages who could give them the protection which
they could no longer look for from the Government. So relationships of
personal dependence developed, not essentially dissimilar from those
subsisting between the Franks and their kings, when the kings were mere
leaders of small tribes or war bands. But the vastness of the Salian realm
impaired the personal relationship between king and subjects, and again
the latter, Frankish or Gallo-Roman, needed nearer protectors, and found
them in neighbouring great proprietors and functionaries, Frankish or
Gallo-Roman as the case might be.[142]

Through all the turmoil of the Merovingian period, there was doubtless
individual injustice and hardship everywhere, but no racial tyranny. The
Gallo-Roman kept his language and property, and continued to live under
the Roman law. He was not inferior to the Frank, except that the latter
was entitled to a higher _wergeld_ for personal injury, which, however,
soon was equalized. The Frank also lived under his own law, Salic or
Ripuarian. But the general mingling of peoples in the end made it
impossible to distinguish the law personally applicable; and thereupon,
both as to Franks and Gallo-Romans, the territorial law superseded the law
of race.[143] And when, after two centuries, the Merovingian kingdom,
through change of dynasty, became the Carolingian, political discrepancies
between Frank and Gallo-Roman had passed away. Yet this huge colossus of a
realm with its shoulders of iron and its feet of clay, still included
enough disparities of race and land, language and institution, to ensure
its dissolution.




CHAPTER VII

THE CELTIC STRAIN IN GAUL AND IRELAND


The northern races who were to form part of the currents of mediaeval life
are grouped under the names of Celts and Teutons.[144] The chief sections
of the former, dwelling in northern Italy and Gaul and Spain, were
Latinized and then Christianized long before the mediaeval period, and
themselves helped to create the patristic and even the antique side of the
mediaeval patrimony. Their rôle was largely mediatorial, and
geographically, as well as in their time of receiving Latin culture, they
were intermediaries between the classic sources and the Teutons, who also
were to drink of these magic draughts, but not so deeply as to be
transformed to Latin peoples. The rôle of the Teutons in the mediaeval
evolution was to accept Christianity and learn something of the pagan
antique, and then to react upon what they had received and change it in
their natures.

Central Europe seems to have been the early home alike of Celts and
Teutons. Thence successive migratory groups appear to have passed
westwardly and southerly. Both races spoke Aryan tongues, and according to
the earliest notices of classic writers resembled each other
physically--large, blue-eyed, with yellow or tawny hair. The more
penetrating accounts of Caesar and Tacitus disclose their distinctive
racial traits, which contrast still more clearly in the remains of the
early Celtic (Irish) and Teutonic literatures. Whatever were the
ethnological affinities between Celt and Teuton, and however imperceptibly
these races may have shaded into each other, for example, in northern
France and Belgium, their characters were different, and their opposing
racial traits have never ceased to display themselves in the literature as
well as in the political and social history of western Europe.

The time and manner of the Celtic occupation of Gaul and Spain remain
obscure.[145] It took place long before the turmoils of the second century
B.C., when the Teutonic tribes began to assert themselves, probably in the
north of the present Germany, and to press south-westwardly upon Celtic
neighbours on both sides of the Rhine. Some of them pushed on towards
lands held by the Belgae, and then passed southward toward Aquitania,
drawing Belgic and Celtic peoples with them. Afterwards turning eastwardly
they invaded the Roman Provincia in southern Gaul, and through their
victories threatened the great Republic. This was the peril of the Cimbri
and Teutones, which Marius quelled by the waters of the Durance and then
among the hills of Piedmont. The invasion did not change the ethnology of
Gaul, which, however, was not altogether Celtic in Caesar’s time. The
opening sentences of his _Commentaries_ indicate anything but racial
unity. The Roman province was mainly Ligurian in blood. West of the
province, between the Pyrenees and the Garonne, were the “Aquitani,”
chiefly of Iberian stock. The Celtae, whose western boundary was the
ocean, reached from the Garonne as far north as the Seine, and eastwardly
across the centre of Gaul to the head waters of the Rhine. North of them
were the Belgae, extending from the Seine and the British Channel to the
lower Rhine. These Belgae also apparently were Celts, and yet, as their
lands touched those of the Germans on the Rhine, they naturally show
Teutonic affinities, and some of their tribes contained strains of Teuton
blood. But it is not blood alone that makes the race; and Gaul, with its
dominant Celtic element, was making Gauls out of all these peoples. At all
events a common likeness may be discerned in the picture of Gallic traits
which Caesar gives.[146]

Gallic civilization had then advanced as far as the native political
incapacity of the Gauls would permit. Quick-witted and intelligent, they
were to gain from Rome the discipline they needed. Once accustomed to the
enforcement of a stable order, their finer qualities responded by a ready
acceptance of the benefits of civilization and a rapid appropriation of
Latin culture. Not a sentence of the Gallic literature survives. But that
this people were endowed with eloquence and possessed of a sense of form,
was to be shown by works in their adopted tongue.[147] Romanized and
Latinized, they were converted to Christianity and then renewed with fresh
Teutonic blood. So they enter upon the mediaeval period; and when, after
the millennial year, the voices of the Middle Ages cease simply to utter
the barbaric or echo the antique, it becomes clear that nowhere is there a
happier balance of intellectual faculty and emotional capacity than in
these peoples of mingled stock who long had dwelt in the country which we
know as France.

Since the Celts of Gaul have left no witness of themselves in Gallic
institutions or literature, it is necessary to turn to Ireland for clearer
evidence of Celtic qualities. There one may see what might come of a
predominantly Celtic people who lacked the lesson of Roman conquest and
the discipline of Roman order. The early history of the Irish, their
presentation of themselves in imaginative literature, their attainment in
learning and accomplishment in art, are not unlike what might have been
expected from Caesar’s Gauls under similar conditions of comparative
isolation. Irish history displays the social turmoil and barbarism
resulting from the insular aggravation of the Celtic weaknesses noticeable
in Caesar’s sketch; and the same are carried to burlesque excess in the
old Irish literature. On the other hand, Irish qualities of temperament
and mind bear such fair fruit in literature and art as might be imagined
springing from the Gallic stem but for the Roman graft.[148]

No trustworthy story can be put together from the myth, tradition, and
conscious fiction which record the unprogressive turbulence of
pre-Christian Ireland. But the Irish character and capacities are clearly
mirrored in this enormous Gaelic literature. Truculence and vanity pervade
it, and a passion for hyperbole. A weak sense of fact and a lack of steady
rational purpose are also conspicuous. It is as ferocious as may be. Yet,
withal, it keeps the charm of the Irish temperament. Its pathos is moving,
even lovely. Some of the poetry has a mystic sensuousness; the lines fall
on the ear like the lapping of ripples on an unseen shore; the imagery has
a fantastic and romantic beauty, and the reader is wafted along on waves
of temperament and feeling.[149]

Whatever themes sprang from the pagan age, probably nothing was written
down before the Christian time, when Christian matter might be foisted
into the pagan story. The Sagas belonging to the so-called Ulster Cycle
afford the best illustration of early Irish traits.[150] They reflect a
society apparently at the “Homeric” stage of development, though the
Irish heroes suffer in comparison with the Greek by reason of the
immeasurable inferiority of these Gaelic Sagas to the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_. There is the same custom of fighting from chariots, the same
tried charioteer, the hero’s closest friend, and the same unstable
relationship between the chieftains and the king.[151]

The Achilles of the Ulster Cycle is Cuchulain. The Tain Bo Cuailgne
(Englished rather improperly as the “Cattle-raid of Cooley”) is the long
and famous Saga that brings his glory to its height.[152] Other Sagas tell
of his mysterious birth, his youthful deeds, his wooing, his various
feats, and then the moving, fateful story of his death. Loved by many
women, cherished by heroes, beautiful in face and form, possessed of
strength, agility, and skill in arms beyond belief, uncontrolled,
chivalric, his battle-ardour unquenchable, he is a brilliant epic hero.
But his story is weakened by hyperbole. Even to-day we know how
sword-strokes and spear-thrust kill. So do great narrators, who likewise
realize the literary power of truth. Through the _Iliad_ there is no
combat between heroes where spear and sword do not pierce and kill as they
do in fact. So in the Sagas of the Norse, the man falls before the mortal
blow. But in the Ulster Cycle, day after day, two heroes may mangle each
other in every impossible and fantastic way, beyond the bounds of the
faintest shadow of verisimilitude.[153] In this weakness of hyperbole the
Irish Sagas are outdone only by the monstrous doings of the epics of
India.

Besides hyperbole, Irish tales display another weakness, which is not
unpleasing, although an element of failure both in the people and their
literature. This is the quality of non-arrival. Some old tales evince it
in the unsteadfast purpose of the narrative, the hero quite forgetting the
initial motive of his action. In the _Voyage of Mældun_, for instance, a
son sets out upon the ocean to seek his father’s murderers, a motive which
is lost sight of amid the marvels of the voyage.[154] As may be imagined,
qualities of vanity, truculence, irrationality, hyperbole, and non-arrival
or lack of sequence, frequently impart an air of _bouffe_ to the Irish
Sagas, making them humorous beyond the intention of their composers.[155]

Yet true heroic notes are to be heard.[156] And however rare the tales
which have not the makings of a brawl on every page, these truculent Sagas
sometimes speak with power and pathos, and sweetly present the loveliness
of nature or the charms of women; all in a manner happily indicative of
the impressionable Irish temperament. Examples are the moving tales of
_The Children of Usnach_ and the _Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne_.[157]
They bring to mind the Tristram story, which grew up among a kindred
people. The first of them only belongs to the Ulster Cycle. Both are
stories of a beautiful and headstrong maiden betrothed to an old king.
Each maid rebels against union with an old man; each falls in love with a
young hero, and, unabashed, asks him to flee with her. In the former tale
the heroine’s charms win the hero, while in the latter he is overcome by
the violent insistence of a woman not to be gainsaid. In both stories love
brings the hero to his death.

The Irish genius also showed an aptitude for lyric expression, and at an
early period developed elaborate modes of rhymed and alliterative
verse.[158] Peculiarly beautiful are the poems reflecting the Gaelic
belief in a future life. A charming description of Elysium is offered by
_The Voyage of Bran_, a Saga of the Otherworld, dating from the seventh
century. Its verse portions preponderate, the prose serving as their
frame.[159] But it opens in prose, telling how one day, walking near his
stronghold, Bran heard sweet music behind him, and as often as he turned
the music was still behind him. He fell asleep at last from the sweetness
of the strains. When he awoke, he found by him a branch silvery with white
blossoms. He took it to his home, where was seen a woman who sang:

  “A branch of the apple-tree from Emain I bring;
   Twigs of white silver are on it,
   Crystal boughs with blossoms.
   There is a distant isle,
   Around which sea-horses (waves) glisten:”

And the woman sings on, picturing “Mag Mell of many flowers,” and of the
host ever rowing thither from across the sea; till at last Bran and his
people set forth in their boat and row on and on, till they are welcomed
by sweet women with music and wine in island-fields of flowers and
bird-song. There is no sad strain in the music from this Gaelic land
beyond the grave.

Irish traits observed in poem and Saga are reflected in accounts of not
improbable events, and exemplified in Christian saints; for the Irish did
not change their spots upon conversion. How Christianity failed to affect
the manners of the ancient Irish is illustrated in the story of the
Cursing of Tara, where tradition says the high-kings of Ireland held sway.
The account is scarcely historical; yet Tara existed, and fell to decay in
the sixth century.[160] Its cursing was on this wise. King Dermot was
high-king of Ireland. His laws were obeyed throughout the land, and over
its length and breadth marched his spear-bearer asserting the royal
authority, and holding the king’s spear across his body before him. Every
town and castle must open wide enough to let this spear pass, carried
crosswise. The spear-bearer comes to the strong house of Ædh. He finds the
outer palisade breached to let the spear through, but not the inner house.
The bearer demands that it be torn open. “Order it so as to please
thyself,” quoth Ædh, as he smote off his head.

King Dermot sent his men to lay waste to Ædh’s land and seize his person.
Ædh flees, and at last takes refuge with St. Ruadhan. The king again sends
messengers, but they are foiled, till he comes himself, seizes the outlaw,
and carries him off to hang him at Tara. Thereupon St. Ruadhan seeks St.
Brendan of Birr and others. They proceed to Tara and demand the prisoner.
The king answers that the Church cannot protect law-breakers. So all the
clergy rang their bells and chanted psalms against the king before Tara,
and fasted on him (in order that their imprecations might be more potent),
and he fasted on them. King and clergy fasted on each other, till one
night the clergy made a show of eating in sight of the town, but passed
the meat and ale beneath their cowls. So the king was tricked into taking
meat; and an evil dream came to him, by which he knew the clergy would
succeed in destroying his kingdom.

In the morning the king went and said to the clergy: “Ill have ye done to
undo my kingdom, because I maintained the righteous cause. Be thy diocese,
Ruadhan, the first one ruined, and may thy monks desert thee.”

Said the saint: “May thy kingdom droop speedily.”

Said the king: “Thy see shall be empty, and swine shall root up thy
churchyards.”

Said the saint: “Tara shall be desolate, and therein shall no dwelling be
for ever.”

It was the custom of ancient bards to utter an imprecation or “satire”
against those offending them.[161] The irate fasting and cursing by the
Irish clergy was a thinly Christianized continuation of the same Irish
habit, inspired by the same Irish temper. There was no chasm between the
pagan bards and the Christian clergy, who loved the Sagas and preserved
them. They had also their predecessors in the Druids, who had performed
the functions of diviners, magicians, priests, and teachers, which were
assumed by the clergy in the fifth and sixth centuries.[162] Doubtless
many of the Druids became monks.

Christianity came to the Irish as a new ardour, effacing none of their
characteristics. Irish monks and Irish saints were as irascible as Irish
bards and Saga heroes. The Irish temper lived on in St. Columba of Iona
and St. Columbanus of Luxeuil and Bobbio. Both of these men left Ireland
to spread monastic Christianity, and also because, as Irishmen, they loved
to rove, like their forefathers. Christianity furnished this Irish
propensity with a definite aim in the mission-passion to convert the
heathen. It likewise brought the ascetic hermit-passion, which drove these
travel-loving islanders over the sea in search of solitude; and so a
yearning came on Irish monks to sail forth to some distant isle and gain
within the seclusion of the sea a hermitage beyond the reach of man. There
are many stories of these explorers. They sailed along the Hebrides, they
settled on the Shetland Islands, they reached the Faroes, and even brought
back news of Iceland. But before the seventh century closed, their sea
hermitages were harried by Norsemen who were sailing upon quite different
ventures. From an opposite direction they too had reached the Shetlands
and the Hebrides, and had pushed on farther south among the islands off
the west coast of Scotland. So there come sorry tales of monks fleeing
from one island to another. These harryings and flights had gone on for a
century and more before the Vikings landed in Ireland, apparently for the
first time, in 795.[163] There followed two centuries of fierce struggle
with the invaders, during which much besides blows was exchanged. Vikings
and Irish learned from each other; Norse strains passed into Irish
literature, and conversely the Norse story-tellers probably obtained the
Saga form of composition.

The rôle of the Irish in the diffusion of Christianity with its
accompaniment of Latin culture will be noted hereafter, and a sketch of
the unquestionably Irish saint Columbanus will be given in illustration. A
few paragraphs on his almost namesake of Iona, whose career hardly
extended beyond Celtic circles, may fitly close the present chapter on the
Celtic genius. In him is seen the truculent Irishman and the clan-abbot of
royal birth, violent, dominating by his impetuosity and the strident
fervour of his voice; also the saint, devoted, loving, to his followers.
Colum,[164] surnamed Cille, “of the church,” from his incessant devotions,
and by his Latin name known as Columba, was born at Gartan, Donegal, in
the extreme north-west of Ireland, about the year 520. His family was
chief in that part of the country, and through both his parents he was
descended from kings. He does not belong to those early Irish saints
represented by Patrick and his storied coadjutors of both sexes, whose
missionary activities were not constrained within any ascetic rule; but to
the later generation who lived in those monastic communities which were so
very typically Irish.[165]

Columba appears to have passed his youth wandering from one monastery to
another, and his manhood in founding them. But so strong a nature could
not hold aloof from the wars of his clan, which belonged to the northern
branch of the Hy-neill race, then maintaining its independence against the
southern branch. The head of the latter was that very King Dermot (usually
called Diarmaid or Diarmuid) against whom St. Ruadhan[166] and the clergy
fasted and rang their bells. Columba appears to have had no part in the
cursing of Tara. But Dermot was the king against whom the wars of his
family were waged, and all the traditions point to the saint as their
instigator. The account given by Keating, the seventeenth century
historian of Gaelic Ireland, is curious.[167]

    “Diarmuid ... King of Ireland, made the Feast of Tara, and a nobleman
    was killed at that feast by Curran, son of Aodh; wherefore Diarmuid
    killed him in revenge for that, because he committed murder at the
    Feast of Tara, against the law and the sanctuary of the feast; and
    before Curran was put to death he fled to the protection of
    Colum-Cille, and notwithstanding the protection of Colum-Cille he was
    killed by Diarmuid. And from that it arose that Colum-Cille mustered
    the Clanna Neill of the North, because his own protection and the
    protection of the sons of Earc was violated. Whereupon the battle of
    Cul Dreimhne was gained over Diarmuid and over the Connaughtmen, so
    that they were defeated through the prayer of Colum-Cille.”

Keating adds that another book relates another cause of this battle, to
wit:

    “... the false judgment which Diarmuid gave against Colum-Cille when
    he wrote the gospel out of the book of Finnian without his
    knowledge.[168] Finnian said that it was to himself belonged the
    son-book which was written from his book, and they both selected
    Diarmuid as judge between them. This is the decision that Diarmuid
    made: that to every book belongs its son-book, as to every cow belongs
    her calf.”

Less consistent is the tradition that Columba left Ireland because of the
sentence passed upon him by certain of his fellow-saints, as penance for
the bloodshed which he had occasioned. Indeed, for his motives one need
hardly look beyond the desire to spread the Gospel, and the passion of the
Irish monk _peregrinam ducere vitam_. Reaching the west of Scotland,
Columba was granted that rugged little island then called Hy, but Iova
afterwards, and now Iona. This was in 563, and he continued abbot of Hy
until his death in 597. Not that he stayed there all these years, for he
moved about ceaselessly, founding churches among the Picts and Scots. Some
thirty foundations are attributed to him, besides his thirty odd in
Ireland.

Adamnan’s _Vita_ largely consists of stories of the saint’s miracles and
prophecies and the interpositions of Providence in his behalf. It
nevertheless gives a consistent picture of this man of powerful frame and
mighty voice, restless and unrestrained, ascetically tempered, working
always for the spread of his religion. We see him compelling men to set
sail with him despite the tempest, or again rushing into “the green glass
water up to his knees” to curse a plunderer in the name of Christ. “He was
not a gentle hero,” says an old Gaelic Eulogy. Yet if somewhat quick to
curse, he was still readier to bless, and if he could be masterful, his
life had its own humility. “Surely it was great lowliness in Colomb Cille
that he himself used to take off his monks’ sandals and wash their feet
for them. He often used to carry his portion of corn on his back to the
mill, and grind it and bring it home to his house. He never used to put
linen or wool against his skin. His side used to come against the bare
mould.”[169]

So this impetuous life passes before our eyes filled with adventure,
touched with romance, its colours heightened through tradition. As it
draws to its close the love in it seems to exceed the wrath; and thus it
ends: as the old man was resting himself the day before his death, seated
by the barn of the monastery, the white work-horse came and laid its head
against his breast. Late the same night, reclining on his stone bed he
spoke his last words, enjoining peace and charity among the monks. Rising
before dawn, he entered the church alone, knelt beside the altar, and
there he died.[170]--His memory still hangs the peace of God and man over
the Island of Iona.




CHAPTER VIII

TEUTON QUALITIES: ANGLO-SAXON, GERMAN, NORSE


There were intellectual as well as emotional differences between the Celts
and Teutons. A certain hard rationality and grasp of fact mark the
mentality of the latter. On land or sea they view the situation, realize
its opportunities, their own strength, and the opposing odds: with
definite and persistent purpose they move, they fight, they labour. The
quality of purposefulness becomes clearer as they emerge from the forest
obscurity of their origins into the open light of history. To a definite
goal of conquest and settlement Theodoric led the Ostrogoths from Moesia
westward, and fought his way into Italy. With persistent purposefulness
Clovis and his Merovingian successors intrigued and fought. Among
Anglo-Saxon pirates the aim of plunder quickly grew to that of conquest.
And in times which were to follow, there was purpose in every voyage and
battle of the Vikings. The Teutons disclose more strength and persistency
of desire than the Celts. Their feelings were slower, less impulsive; also
less quickly diverted, more unswerving, even fiercer in their strength.
The general characteristic of Teutonic emotion is its close connection
with some motive grounded in rational purpose.

Caesar’s short sketch of the Germans[171] gives the impression of
barbarous peoples, numerous, brave, overweening. They had not reached the
agricultural stage, but were devoted to war and hunting. There were no
Druids among them. Their bodies were inured to hardship. They lived in
robust independence, and were subject to their chiefs only in war. Their
fiercest folk, the Suevi, from boyhood would submit neither to labour nor
discipline, that their strength and spirit might be unchecked. It was
deemed shameful for a youth to have to do with women before his twentieth
year.

The Roman world knew more about these Germans by the year A.D. 99 when
Tacitus composed his _Germania_. They had scarcely yet turned to
agriculture. Respect for women appears clearly. These barbarians are most
reluctant to give their maidens as hostages; they listen to their women’s
voices and deem that there is something holy and prophetic in their
nature. Upon marriage, oxen, a horse, and shield and lance make up the
husband’s _morgengabe_ to his bride: she is to have part in her husband’s
valour. Fornication and adultery are rare, the adulteress is ruthlessly
punished; men and maidens marry late. The men of the tribe decide
important matters, which, however, the chiefs have previously discussed
apart. The people sit down armed; the priests proclaim silence; the king
or war-leader is listened to, and the assembly is swayed by his persuasion
and repute. They dissent with murmurs, or assent brandishing their spears.
There is thus participation by the tribe, and yet deference to reputation.
This description discloses Teutonic freedom as different from Celtic
political unrestraint. Tacitus also speaks of the Germanic _Comitatus_,
consisting of a chief and a band of youths drawn together by his repute,
who fight by his side and are disgraced if they survive him dead upon the
field. In time of peace they may seek another leader from a tribe at war;
for the Germans are impatient of peace and toil, and slothful except when
fighting or hunting. They had further traits and customs which are
barbaric rather than specifically Teutonic: cruelty and faithlessness
toward enemies, feuds, _wergeld_, drinking bouts, gambling, slavery,
absence of testaments.

Between the time of Tacitus and the fifth century many changes came over
the Teuton tribes. Early tribal names vanished, while a regrouping into
larger and apparently more mobile aggregates took place. The obscure
revolutions occurring in Central Europe in the second, third, and fourth
centuries do not indicate social progress, but rather retrogression from
an almost agricultural state toward stages of migratory unrest.[172] We
have already noted the fortunes of those tribes that helped to barbarize
and disrupt the Roman Empire, and lost themselves among the Romance
populations of Italy, Gaul, and Spain. We are here concerned with those
that preserved their native speech and qualities, and as Teuton peoples
became contributories to the currents of mediaeval evolution.


I

When the excellent Apollinaris Sidonius, writing in the middle of the
fifth century to a young friend about to enter the Roman naval service off
the coasts of Gaul, characterized the Saxon pirates as the fiercest and
most treacherous of foes, whose way is to dash upon their prey amid the
tempest, and for whom shipwreck is a school, he spoke truly, and also
illustrated the difference that lies in point of view.[173] Fierce they
were, and hardy seamen, likewise treacherous in Roman eyes, and insatiate
plunderers. From the side of the sea they represented the barbarian
disorder threatening the world. The Roman was scarcely interested in the
fact that these men kept troth among themselves with energy and sacrifice
of life. The Saxons, Angles, Jutes, whose homes ashore lay between the
Weser and the Elbe and through Sleswig, Holstein, and Denmark, possessed
interesting qualities before they landed in Britain, where under novel
circumstances they were to develop their character and institutions with a
rapidity that soon raised them above the condition of their kin who had
stayed at home. Bands of them had touched Britain before the year 411,
when the Roman legions were withdrawn. But it was only with the landing of
Hengest and Horsa in 449 that they began to come in conquering force. The
Anglo-Saxon conquest of the island went on for two centuries. Information
regarding it is of the scantiest; but the Britons seem to have been
submerged or driven westward. There is at least no evidence of any
friendly mingling of the races. The invaders accepted neither Christianity
nor Roman culture from the conquered, and Britain became a heathen
England.

While these Teuton peoples were driving through their conquest and also
fighting fiercely with each other, their characters and institutions were
becoming distinctively Anglo-Saxon. Under stress of ceaseless war,
military leaders became hereditary kings, whose powers, at least in
intervals of peace, were controlled by the Witan or Council of the Wise,
and limited by the jurisdiction of the Hundred Court. Likewise the
temporary ties of the Teutonic _Comitatus_ became permanent in the body of
king’s companions (thegns, thanes), whose influence was destined to
supplant that of the eorls, the older nobility of blood. The _Comitatus_
principle pervades Anglo-Saxon history as well as literature; it runs
through the _Beowulf_ epic; Anglo-Saxon Biblical versifiers transfer it to
the followers of Abraham and the disciples of Christ; and every child
knows the story of Lilla, faithful thegn, who flung himself between his
Northumbrian king, Edwin, and the sword of the assassin--the latter sent
by a West Saxon king and doubtless one of _his_ faithful thegns. Their law
consisted mainly in the graded _wergeld_ for homicide, in an elaborate
tariff of compensation for personal injuries, and in penalties for
cattle-raiding. Beyond the matter of theft, property law was still
unwritten custom, and contract law did not exist. The rules of procedure,
for instance in the Hundred Court, were elaborate, as is usual in a
primitive society where the substantial rights are simple, and the
important thing is to induce the parties to submit to an adjudication.
Similar Teutonic customs obtained elsewhere. But the course of their
development in Saxon England displays an ever clearer recognition of
fundamental principles of English law: justice is public; the parties
immediately concerned must bring the case to court and there conduct it
according to rules of procedure; the court of freemen hear and determine,
but do not extend the inquiry beyond the evidence adduced before them; to
interpret and declare the law is the function of the court, not of the
king and his officers.[174]

During these first centuries in England, the Anglo-Saxon endowment of
character and faculty becomes clearly shown in events and expressed in
literature. A battle-loving people whose joy in fight flashes from their
“shield-play” and “sword-game” epithets, even as their fondness for
seafaring is seen in such phrases as “wave-floater,” “foam-necked,” “like
a swan” breasting the “swan-road” of the sea. But their sword-games and
wave-floatings had purpose, a quality that became large and steady as
generation after generation, unstopped by fortress, forest, or river,
pushed on the conquest of England. When that conquest had been completed,
and these Saxons were in turn hard pressed by their Danish kin more lately
sailing from the north, their courage still could not be overborne. It is
reflected in the overweening mood of _Maldon_, the poem which is also
called _The Death of Byrhtnoth_. The cold grey scene lies in the north of
England. The Viking invaders demand rings of gold; Byrhtnoth, the Alderman
of the East Saxons, retorts scornfully. So the fight begins with arrows
and spear throwings across the black water. The Saxons hold the ford. The
Sea-wolves cannot force it. They call for leave to cross. In his overmood
Byrhtnoth answers: “To you this is yielded: come straightway to us; God
only wots who shall hold fast the place of battle.” In the bitter end when
Byrhtnoth is killed, still speaks his thane: “Mind shall the harder be,
heart the keener, mood the greater, as our might lessens. Here lies our
Elder hewn to death. I am old; I will not go hence. I think to lay me down
by the side of my lord.”

The spiritual gifts of the Anglo-Saxons are discernible in their language,
which so adequately could render the Bible[175] and the phraseology of the
Seven Liberal Arts. Its terms were somewhat more concrete and physical
than the Latin, but readily lent themselves to figurative meanings. More
palpably the poetry with its reflection upon life shows the endowment of
the race. Marked is its elegiac mood. In an old poem is heard the voice of
one who sails with hapless care the exile’s way, and must forego his dear
lord’s gifts: in sleep he kisses him, and again lays hands and head upon
those knees, as in times past. Then wakes the friendless man, and sees the
ocean’s waves, the gulls spreading their wings, rime and snow falling.
More impersonal is the heavy tone of a meditative fragment over the ruins,
apparently, of a Roman city:

  “Wondrous is this wall-stone,
   fates have broken it,
   have burst the stronghold,
   roofs are fallen,
   towers tottering,
   hoar gate-towers despoiled,
   shattered the battlements,
   riven, fallen.

    *       *       *       *

   Earth’s grasp holdeth
   the mighty workmen
   worn away, done for,
   in the hard grip of the grave.”

But the noblest presentation of character in pagan Anglo-Saxon poetry is
afforded by the epic poem of _Beowulf_, which tells the story of a Geatic
hero who sets out for Denmark to slay a monster, accomplishes the feat, is
nobly rewarded by the Danish king, and returns to rule his own people
justly for fifty winters, when his valiant and beneficent life ends in a
last victorious conflict with a hoard-guarding dragon. Here myth and
tradition were not peculiarly Anglo-Saxon; but the finally recast and
finished work, noble in diction, sentiment, and action, expresses the
highest ethics of Anglo-Saxon heathendom. Beowulf does what he ought to
do, heroically; and finds satisfaction and reward. He does not seek his
pleasure, though that comes with gold and mead-drinking; consciousness of
deeds done bravely and the assurance of fame sweeten death at last.[176]

A century or more after the composition of this poem, there lived an
Anglo-Saxon whose aims were spiritualized through Christianity, whose
vigorous mind was broadened by such knowledge and philosophy as his epoch
had gathered from antique sources, and whose energies were trained in
generalship and the office of a king. He presents a life intrinsically
good and true, manifesting itself in warfare against heathen barbarism and
in endeavour to rule his people righteously and enlarge their knowledge.
Many of the qualities and activities of Alfred had no place in the life of
Beowulf. Yet the heathen hero and the Christian king were hewn from the
same rock of Saxon manhood. Alfred’s life was established upon principles
of right conduct generically the same as those of the poem. But
Christianity, experience, contact with learned men, and education through
books, had informed him of man’s spiritual nature, and taught him that
human welfare depended on knowledge and intent and will. Accordingly, his
beneficence does not stop with the armed safe-guarding of his realm, but
seeks to compass the instruction of those who should have knowledge in
order the better to guide the faith and conduct of the people. “He seems
to me a very foolish man and inexcusable, who will not increase his
knowledge the while that he is in this world, and always wish and will
that he may come to the everlasting life where nothing shall be dark or
unknown.”[177]


II

In spite of the general Teutonic traits and customs which the Germans east
and west of the Rhine possessed in common with the Anglo-Saxons, distinct
qualities appear in the one and the other from the moment of our nearer
acquaintance with their separate history and literature. So scanty,
however, are the literary remains of German heathendom that recourse must
be had to Christian productions to discover, for example, that with the
Germans the sentiment of home and its dear relationships[178] is as marked
as the Anglo-Saxon’s elegiac meditative mood. Language bears its witness
to the spiritual endowment of both peoples. The German dialects along the
Rhine were rich in abstract nouns ending in _ung_ and _keit_ and _schaft_
and _tum_.[179]

There remains one piece of untouched German heathenism, the
_Hildebrandslied_, which dates from the end of the eighth century, and may
possibly be the sole survivor of a collection of German poems made at
Charlemagne’s command.[180] It is a tale of single combat between a father
and son, the counterpart of which is found in the Persian, Irish, and
Norse literatures. Such an incident might be diversely rendered; armies
might watch their champions engage, or the combat might occur unwitnessed
in some mountain gorge; it might be described pathetically or in warrior
mood, and the heroes might fight in ignorance, or one of them know well,
who was the man confronting him. In German, this story is a part of that
huge mass of legend which grew up around the memory of the terrible Hun
Attila, and transformed him to the Atli of Norse literature, and to the
worthy King Etzel of the _Nibelungenlied_, at whose Court the flower of
Burgundian chivalry went down in that fierce feud in which Etzel had
little part. Among his vassal kings appears the mighty exile Dietrich of
Bern, who in the _Nibelungen_ reluctantly overcomes the last of the
Burgundian heroes. This Dietrich is none other than Theodoric the
Ostrogoth, transformed in legend and represented as driven from his
kingdom of Italy by Odoacer, and for the time forced to take refuge with
Etzel; for the legend was not troubled by the fact that Attila was dead
before Theodoric was born. Bern is the name given to Verona, and legend
saw Theodoric’s castle in that most beautiful of Roman amphitheatres,
where the traveller still may sit and meditate on many things. It is told
also that Theodoric recovered his kingdom in the legendary Rabenschlacht
fought by Ravenna’s walls. Old Hildebrand was his master-at-arms, who had
fled with him. In the _Nibelungen_ it is he that cuts down Kriemhild,
Etzel’s queen, before the monarch’s eyes; for he could not endure that a
woman’s hand had slain Gunther and Hagen, whom, exhausted at last,
Dietrich’s strength had set before her helpless and bound. And now, after
years of absence, he has recrossed the mountains with his king come to
claim his kingdom, and before the armies he challenges the champion of the
opposing host. Here the Old German poem, which is called the
_Hildebrandslied_, takes up the story:

    “Hildebrand spoke, the wiser man, and asked as to the other’s
    father--‘Or tell me of what race art thou; ’twill be enough; every one
    in the realm is known to me.’

    “Hadubrand spoke, Hildebrand’s son: ‘Our people, the old and knowing
    of them, tell me Hildebrand was my father’s name; mine is Hadubrand.
    Aforetime he fled to the east, from Otacher’s hate, fled with Dietrich
    and his knights. He left wife to mourn, and ungrown child. Dietrich’s
    need called him. He was always in the front; fighting was dear to him.
    I do not believe he is alive.’

    “‘God forbid, from heaven above, that thou shouldst wage fight with so
    near kin.’ He took from his arm the ring given by the king, lord of
    the Huns. ‘Lo! I give it thee graciously.’

    “Hadubrand spoke: ‘With spear alone a man receives gift, point against
    point. Too cunning art thou, old Hun. Beguiling me with words thou
    wouldst thrust me with thy spear. Thou art so old--thou hast a trick
    in store. Seafaring men have told me Hildebrand is dead.’

    “Hildebrand spoke: ‘O mighty God, a drear fate happens. Sixty summers
    and winters, ever placed by men among the spearmen, I have so borne
    myself that bane got I never. Now shall my own child smite me with the
    sword, or I be his death.’”

There is a break here in the poem; but the uncontrolled son evidently
taunted the father with cowardice. The old warrior cries:

    “‘Be he the vilest of all the East people who now would refuse thee
    the fight thou hankerest after. Happen it and show which of us must
    give up his armour.’”

The end fails, but probably the son was slain.

Stubborn and grim appears the Old German character. Point to point shall
foes exchange gifts. Such also was the way when a lord made reward; on the
spear’s point presenting the arm-ring to him who had served, he accepting
it in like fashion, each on his guard perhaps. The _Hildebrandslied_
exhibits other qualities of the German spirit, as its bluntness and lack
of tact; even its clumsiness is evinced in the seventy lines of the poem,
which although broken is not a fragment, but a short poem--a ballad
graceless and shapeless because of its stiff unvarying lines.

In a later poem, which gives the story of Walter of Aquitaine, the same
set and stubborn mood appears, although lightened by rough banter. This
legend existed in Old German as well as Anglo-Saxon. In the tenth century,
Ekkehart, a monk of St. Gall, freely altering and adding to the tale, made
of it the small Latin epic which is extant.[181] Monk as he was, he tells
a spirited story in his rugged hexameters. He had studied classic authors
to good purpose; and his poem of Walter fleeing with his love Hildegund
from the Hunnish Court (for the all-pervasive Attila is here also) is
vivid, diversified, well-constructed--qualities which may not have been in
the story till he remodelled it. Its leading incidents still present
German traits. Walter and Hildegund carry off a treasure in their flight;
and it is to get this treasure that Gunther urges Hagen (for they are here
too) to attack the fugitive. This is Teutonic. It was for plunder that
Teuton tribes fought their bravest fights from the time of Alaric and
Genseric to the Viking age, and the hoard has a great part in Teutonic
story. In the _Waltarius_ Gunther’s driving avarice, Walter’s stubborn
defence of his gold are Teutonic. The humour and the banter are more
distinctly German, and nobly German is the relationship of trust and
honour between Walter and the maiden who is fleeing with him. Yet the
story does not revolve around the woman in it, but rather around the
shrewdly got and bravely guarded treasure.

German traits obvious in the _Hildebrandslied_, and strong through the
Latin of the _Waltarius_, evince themselves in the epic of the
_Nibelungenlied_ and in the _Kudrun_, often called its companion piece.
The former holds the strength of German manhood and the power of German
hate, with the edged energy of speech accompanying it. In the latter,
German womanhood is at its best. Both poems, in their extant form, belong
to the middle or latter part of the twelfth century, and are not
unaffected by influences which were not native German.

The _Nibelungenlied_ is but dimly reminiscent of any bygone love between
Siegfried and Brunhilde, and carries within its own narrative a sufficient
explanation of Brunhilde’s jealous anger and Siegfried’s death. Kriemhild
is left to nurse the wrath which shall never cease to devise vengeance for
her husband’s murderers. Years afterwards, Hagen warns Gunther, about to
accept Etzel’s invitation, that Kriemhild is _lancraeche_ (long vengeful).
The course of that vengeance is told with power; for the constructive soul
of a race contributed to this Volksepos. The actors in the tragedy are
strikingly drawn and contrasted, and are lifted in true epic fashion above
the common stature by intensity of feeling and the power of will to
realize through unswerving action the prompting of their natures. The
fatefulness of the tale is true to tragic reality, in which the far
results of an ill deed involve the innocent with the guilty.

A comparison of the poem with the _Hildebrandslied_ shows that the sense
of the pathetic had deepened in the intervening centuries. There is
scarcely any pathos in the earlier composition, although its subject is
the fatal combat between father and son. But the _Nibelungen_, with a
fiercer hate, can set forth the heroic pathos of the lot of one, who,
struggling between fealties, is driven on to dishonour and to death. This
is the pathos of the death of Rüdiger, who had received the Burgundians
in his castle on their way to Etzel’s Court, had exchanged gifts with
them, and betrothed his daughter to the youngest of the three kings. He
was as unsuspecting as Etzel of Kriemhild’s plot. But in the end Kriemhild
forces him, on his fealty as liegeman, to outrage his heart and honour,
and attack those whom he had sheltered and guided onward--to their death.

Not much love in this tale, only hate insatiable. But the greatness of
hate may show the passional power of the hating soul. The centuries have
raised to high relief the elemental Teutonic qualities of hate, greed,
courage and devotion, and human personality has enlarged with the
heightened power of will. The reader is affected with admiration and
sympathy. First he is drawn to Siegfried’s bright morning courage, his
noble masterfulness--his character appears touched with the ideals of
chivalry.[182] After his death the interest turns to Kriemhild planning
for revenge. It may be that sympathy is repelled as her hate draws within
its tide so much of guiltlessness and honour; and as the doomed Nibelungen
heroes show themselves haughty, strong-handed, and stout-hearted to the
end, he cheers them on, and most heartily that grim, consistent Hagen in
whom the old German troth and treachery for troth’s sake are incarnate.

The _Kudrun_[183] is a happier story, ending in weddings instead of death.
There was no licentiousness or infidelity between man and wife in the
_Nibelungen_, and through all its hate and horror no outrage is done to
woman’s honour. That may be taken as the leading theme of the _Kudrun_. An
ardent wooer, to be sure, may seize and carry off the heroine, and his
father drag her by the hair on her refusal to wed his son; but her honour,
and the honour of all women in the poem, is respected and maintained. The
ideal of womanhood is noble throughout: an old king thus bids farewell to
his daughter on setting forth to be married: “You shall so wear your crown
that I and your mother may never hear that any one hates you. Rich as you
are, it would mar your fame to give any occasion for blame.”[184]

A mediaeval epic may tell of the fortunes of several generations, and the
_Kudrun_ devotes a number of books to the heroine’s ancestors, making a
half-savage narrative, in which one feels a conflict between ancient
barbarities and a newer and more courtly order. When the venturesome
wooing and wedded fortune of Kudrun’s mother have been told, the poem
turns to its chief heroine, who grows to stately maidenhood, and becomes
betrothed to a young king, Herwig. A rejected wooer, the “Norman” Prince
Hartmuth, by a sudden descent upon the land in the absence of its
defenders, carries off Kudrun and her women by force of arms, and the
king, her father, is killed in an abortive attempt to recapture her. In
Hartmuth’s castle by the sea Kudrun spends bitter years waiting for
deliverance. His sister, Ortrun, is kind to her, but his mother, Gerlint,
treats her shamefully. The maiden is steadfast. Between her and Hartmuth
stands a double barrier: his father had killed hers; she was betrothed to
Herwig. Hartmuth repels his wicked mother’s advice to force her to his
will. In his absence on a foray Gerlint compels Kudrun to do unfitting
tasks. Hartmuth, returning, asks her: “Kudrun, fair lady, how has it been
with you while I and my knights were away?”

“Here I have been forced to serve, to your sin and my shame,”[185]
answers Kudrun--a great answer, in its truth and self-control.

After an interval of kind treatment the old “she-wolf” Gerlint sets Kudrun
with her faithful Hildeburg to washing clothes in the sea. It is winter;
their garments are mean, their feet are naked. They see a boat
approaching, in which are Kudrun’s brother Ortwin, and Herwig her
betrothed, who had come before their host as spies. A recognition follows.
Herwig is for carrying them off; Ortwin forbids it. “With open force they
were taken; my hand shall not steal them back”; dear as Kudrun is, he can
take her only _nâch êren_ (as becomes his honour). When they have gone,
Kudrun throws the clothes to be washed into the sea. “No more will I wash
for Gerlint; two kings have kissed me and held me in their arms.”

Kudrun returns to the castle, which soon is stormed. She saves Hartmuth
and his sister from the slaughter, and all sail home, where the thought is
now of wedding festivals.

Kudrun is married to Herwig; at her advice Ortwin weds Ortrun, and then
she thinks of Hartmuth’s plight, and asks her friend Hildeburg whether she
will have him for a husband. Hildeburg consents. Kudrun commands that
Hartmuth be brought, and bids him be seated by the side of her dear friend
“who had washed clothes along with her!”

“Queen, you would reproach me with that. I grieved at the shame they put
on you. It was kept from me.”

“I cannot let it pass. I must speak with you alone, Hartmuth.”

“God grant she means well with me,” thought he. She took him aside and
spoke: “If you will do as I bid, you will part with your troubles.”

Hartmuth answered: “I know you are so noble that your behest can be only
honourable and good. I can find nothing in my heart to keep me from doing
your bidding gladly, Queen.”[186] The high quality of speech between these
two will rarely be outdone.

There is directness and troth in all these German poems. Troth is an ideal
which must carry truth within it. The more thoughtful and reflecting
German spirit will evince loyalty to truth itself as an ideal. Wolfram’s
poem of _Parzival_ has this; and by virtue of this same ideal, Walter von
der Vogelweide’s judgments upon life and emperors and popes are whole and
steady, unveiling the sham, condemning the lie and defying the liar.[187]
In them dawns the spirit of Luther and the German Reformation, with its
love of truth stronger than its love of art.


III

Chronologically these last illustrations of German traits belong to the
mediaeval time; and in fact the _Nibelungenlied_ and _Kudrun_, and much
more Wolfram’s _Parzival_ and Walter’s poems, are mediaeval, because to
some extent affected by that interplay of influences which made the
mediaeval genius.[188] On the other hand, the almost contemporaneous Norse
Sagas and the somewhat older Eddic poems exhibit Teutonic traits in their
northern integrity. For the Norse period of free and independent growth
continued long after the distinctive barbarism of other Teutons had become
mediaevalized. There resulted under the strenuous conditions of Norse life
that unique heightening of energy which is manifested in the deeds of the
Viking age and reflected in Norse literature.[189]

This time of extreme activity opens in the eighth century, toward the end
of which Viking ravagers began to harry the British Isles. St. Cuthbert’s
holy island of Lindisfarne was sacked in 793, and similar raids multiplied
with portentous rapidity. The coasts of Ireland and Great Britain, and the
islands lying about them, were well plundered while the ninth century was
young. In Ireland permanent conquests were made near Dublin, at Waterford,
and Limerick. The second half of this century witnesses the great Danish
Viking invasion of England. On the Continent the Vikings worried the
skirts of the Carolingian colossus, and the Lowlands suffered before
Charlemagne was in his grave. After his death the trouble began in
earnest. Not only the coasts were ravaged, but the river towns trembled,
on the Elbe, the Rhine, the Somme, the Seine, the Loire. Paris foiled or
succumbed to more than one fierce siege. About the middle of the ninth
century the Vikings began to winter where they had plundered in the
summer.

The north was ruled by chiefs and petty kings until Harold Fairhair
overcame the chiefs of Norway and made himself supreme about the year 870.
But he established his power only after great sea-fights, and many of the
conquered choosing exile rather than submission, took refuge in the
Orkneys, the Faroes, and other islands. Harold pursued with his fleets,
and forced them to further flight. It was this exodus from the islands and
from Norway in the last years of the ninth century that gave Iceland the
greater part of its population. Thither also came other bold spirits from
the Norse holdings in Ireland.

While these events were happening in the west, the Scandinavians had not
failed to push easterly. Some settled in Russia, by the Gulf of Finland,
others along the south shore of the Baltic between the Vistula and Oder.
So their holdings in the tenth century encircled the north of Europe; for
besides Sleswig, Denmark, and Scandinavia, they held the coast of Holland,
also Normandy, where Rollo came in 912. Of insular domain, they held
Iceland, parts of Scotland, and the islands north and west of it, some
bits of Ireland, and much of England. Moreover, Scandinavians filled the
Varangian corps of the Byzantine emperors, and old Runic inscriptions are
found on marbles at Athens. Their narrow barks traversed the eastern
Mediterranean[190] long before Norman Roger and Norman Robert conquered
Sicily and southern Italy. Such reach of conquest shows them to have been
moved by no passion for adventure. Their fierce valour was part of their
great capacity for the strategy of war. As pirates, as invaders, as
settlers, they dared and fought and fended for a purpose--to get what they
wanted, and to hold it fast. When they had mastered the foe and conquered
his land, they settled down, in England and Normandy and Sicily.

Such genius for fighting was in accord with shrewdness and industry in
peace. The Vikings laboured, whether in Norway or in Iceland. In the
_Edda_ the freeman learns to break oxen, till the ground, timber houses,
build barns, make carts and ploughs.[191] So a tenth-century Viking king
may be found in the field directing the cutting and stacking of his corn
and the gathering of it into barns. They were also traders and even
money-lenders. The Icelanders, whom we know so intimately from the Sagas,
went regularly upon voyages of trade or piracy before settling down to
farm and wife. Sharp of speech, efficient in affairs, and often adepts in
the law, they eagerly took part in the meetings of the Althing and its
settlement of suits. If such settlement was rejected, private war or the
_holmgang_ (an appointed single combat on a small island) was the regular
recourse. But it was murder to kill in the night or without previous
notice. Nothing should be said behind an enemy’s back that the speaker
would not make good; and every man must keep his plighted word.

Much of the Norse wisdom consists in a shrewd wariness. Contempt for the
chattering fool runs through the _Edda_.[192] Let a man be chary of
speech and in action unflinching. Eddic poetry is full of action; even its
didactic pieces are dramatic. The _Edda_ is as hard as steel. In the
mythological pieces the action has the ruthlessness of the elements, while
the stories of conduct show elemental passions working in elemental
strength. The men and women are not rounded and complete; but certain
disengaged motives are raised to the Titanic and thrown out with power.
Neither present anguish, nor death surely foreseen, checks the course of
vengeance for broken faith in those famous Eddic lays of Atli, of Sigurd
and Sigrifa, Helgi and Sigrun, Brynhild and Gudrun, out of which the
Volsunga Saga was subsequently put together, and to which the
_Nibelungenlied_ is kin. They seem to carry the same story, with change of
names and incidents. Always the hero’s fate is netted by woman’s vengeance
and the curse of the Hoard. But still the women feel most; the men strike,
or are struck. Hard and cold grey, with hidden fire, was the temper of
these people. Their love was not over-tender, and yet stronger than death:
cries Brynhild’s ghost riding hellward, “Men and women will always be born
to live in woe. We two, Sigurd and I, shall never part again.” And the
power of such love speaks in the deed and word of Sigrun, who answers the
ghostly call of slain Helgi from his barrow, and enters it to cast her
arms about him there: “I am as glad to meet thee as are the greedy hawks
of Odin when they scent the slain. I will kiss thee, my dead king, ere
thou cast off thy bloody coat. Thy hair, my Helgi, is thick with rime, thy
body is drenched with gory dew, dead-cold are thy hands.”

The characters which appear in large grey traits in the _Edda_, come
nearer to us in the Icelandic Sagas. The _Edda_ has something of a far,
unearthly gloom; the Saga the light of day. Saga-folk are extraordinarily
individual; men and women are portrayed, body and soul, with homely,
telling realism. Nevertheless, within a fuller round of human trait,
Eddic qualities endure. There is the same clear purpose and the strong
resolve, and still the deed keeps pace with the intent.[193]

The period which the Sagas would delineate commences when the Norse chiefs
sail to Iceland with kith and kin and following to be rid of Harold
Fairhair, and lasts for a century or more on through the time of King Olaf
Tryggvason who, shield over head, sprang into the sea in the year 1000,
and the life of that other Olaf, none too rightly called the Saint, who in
1030 perished in battle fighting against overwhelming odds. Following hard
upon this heroic time comes the age of telling of it, telling of it at the
mid-summer Althing, telling of it at Yuletide feasts, and otherwise
through the long winter nights in Iceland. These tellings are the Sagas in
process of creation; for a Saga is essentially a tale told by word of
mouth to listeners. Thus pass another hundred years of careful telling,
memorizing, and retelling of these tales, kept close to the old incidents
and deeds, yet ever with a higher truth intruding. They are becoming true
to reality itself, in concrete types, and not simply narratives of facts
actually occurring--if indeed facts ever occur in any such unequivocal
singleness of actuality and with such compelling singleness of meaning,
that one man shall not read them in one way and another otherwise. And the
more imaginative reading may be the truer.

This century of Saga-growth in memory and word of mouth came to an end,
and men began to write them down. For still another hundred years
(beginning about 1140) this process lasted. In its nature it was something
of a remodelling. As oral tales to be listened to, the Sagas had come to
these scribe-authors, and as such the latter wrote them down, yet with
such modification as would be involved in writing out for mind and eye and
ear that which the ear had heard and the memory retained. In some
instances the scribe-author set himself the more ambitious task of casting
certain tales together in a single, yet composite story. Such is the
Njála, greatest of all Sagas; it may have been written about the year
1220.[194]

As representative of the Norse personality, the Sagas, like all national
literature, bear a twofold testimony: that of their own literary
qualities, and that of the characters which they portray. In the first
place, a Saga is absolute narrative: it relates deeds, incidents, and
sayings, in the manner and order in which they would strike the eye and
ear of the listener, did the matter pass before him. The narrator offers
no analysis of motives; he inserts no reflections upon characters and
situations. He does not even relate the incidents from the vantage-ground
of a full knowledge of them, but from the point of view of each instant’s
impression upon the participants or onlookers. The result is an objective
and vivid presentation of the story. Next, the Sagas are economical of
incident as well as language. That incident is told which the story needs
for the presentation of the hero’s career; those circumstances are given
which the incident needs in order that its significance may be perceived;
such sayings of the actors are related as reveal most in fewest words.
There is nothing more extraordinary in these stories than the significance
of the small incident, and the extent of revelation carried by a terse
remark.

For example, in the Gisli Saga, Gisli has gone out in the winter night to
the house of his brother Thorkel, with whom he is on good terms, and there
has slain Thorkel’s wife’s brother in his bed. In the darkness and
confusion he escapes unrecognized, gets back to his own house and into
bed, where he lies as if asleep. At daybreak the dead man’s friends come
packing to Gisli’s farm:

    “Now they come to the farm, Thorkel and Eyjolf, and go up to the
    shut-bed where Gisli and his wife slept; but Thorkel, Gisli’s brother,
    stepped up first on to the floor, and stands at the side of the bed,
    and sees Gisli’s shoes lying all frozen and snowy. He kicked them
    under the foot-board, so that no other man should see them.”[195]

This little incident of the shoes not only shows how near was Gisli to
detection and death, but also discloses the way in which Thorkel meant to
act and did act toward his brother: to wit, shield him so long as it might
be done without exposing himself.

Another illustration. The Njáls Saga opens with a sketch of the girl
Hallgerda, so drawn that it presages most of the trouble in the story.
There were two well-to-do brothers, Hauskuld and Hrut:

    “It happened once that Hauskuld bade his friends to a feast, and his
    brother Hrut was there, and sat next to him. Hauskuld had a daughter
    named Hallgerda, who was playing on the floor with some other girls.
    She was fair of face and tall of growth, and her hair was as soft as
    silk; it was so long, too, that it came down to her waist. Hauskuld
    called out to her, ‘Come hither to me, daughter.’ So she went up to
    him, and he took her by the chin and kissed her; after that she went
    away. Then Hauskuld said to Hrut, ‘What dost thou think of this
    maiden? Is she not fair?’ Hrut held his peace. Hauskuld said the same
    thing to him a second time, and then Hrut answered, ‘Fair enough is
    this maid, and many will smart for it; but this I know not, whence
    thief’s eyes have come into our race.’ Then Hauskuld was wroth, and
    for a time the brothers saw little of each other.”[196]

The picture of Hallgerda will never leave the reader’s mind throughout the
story, of which she is the evil genius. It is after she has caused the
death of her first husband and is sought by a second, that she is sent for
by her father to ask what her mind may be:

    “Then they sent for Hallgerda, and she came thither, and two women
    with her. She had on a cloak of rich blue woof, and under it a scarlet
    kirtle, and a silver girdle round her waist; but her hair came down on
    both sides of her bosom, and she had turned the locks up under her
    girdle. She sat down between Hrut and her father, and she greeted them
    all with kind words, and spoke well and boldly, and asked what was the
    news. After that she ceased speaking.”

This is the woman that the girl has grown to be; and she is still at the
beginning of her mischief. Such narrative art discloses both in the
tale-teller and the audience an intelligence which sees the essential fact
and is impatient of encumbrance. It is the same intelligence that made
these Vikings so efficient in war, and in peace quick to seize cogent
means.

Truthfulness is another quality of the Sagas. Indeed their respect for
historical or biographical fact sometimes hindered the evolution of a
perfect story. They hesitated to omit or alter well-remembered incidents.
Nevertheless a certain remodelling came, as generation after generation of
narrators made the incidents more striking and the characters more marked,
and, under the exigencies of storytelling, omitted details which, although
actual, were irrelevant to the current of the story. The disadvantages
from truthfulness were slight, compared with the admirable artistic
qualities preserved by it. It kept the stories true to reality, excluding
unreality, exaggeration, absurdity. Hence these Sagas are convincing: no
reader can withhold belief. They contain no incredible incidents. On
occasions they tell of portents, prescience, and second sight, but not so
as to raise a smile. They relate a very few encounters with trolls--the
hideous, unlaid, still embodied dead. But those accounts conform to the
hard-wrung superstitions of a people not given to credulity. So they are
real. The reality of Grettir’s night-wrestling with Glam, the troll, is
hardly to be matched.[197] Truthfulness likewise characterizes their
heroes: no man lies about his deeds, and no man’s word is doubted.

While the Saga-folk include no cowards or men of petty manners, there is
still great diversity of character among them. Some are lazy and some
industrious, some quarrelsome and some good-natured, some dangerous, some
forbearing, gloomy or cheerful, open-minded or biassed, shrewd or stupid,
generous or avaricious. Such contrasts of character abound both in the
Sagas of Icelandic life and those which handle the broader matter of
history. One may note in the _Heimskringla_[198] of the Kings of Norway
the contrasted characters of the kings Olaf Tryggvason and St. Olaf. The
latter appears as a hard-working, canny ruler, a lover of order, a
legislator and enforcer of the laws; in person, short, thick-set, carrying
his head a little bent. A Viking had he been, and was a fighter, till he
fell in his last great battle undaunted by odds.

But the other Olaf, Norway’s darling hero, is epic: tall, golden-haired,
peerless from his boyhood, beloved and hated. His marvellous physical
masteries are told, his cliff-climbing, his walking on the sweeping oars
keeping three war-axes tossing in the air. He smote well with either hand
and cast two spears at once. He was the gladdest and gamesomest of men,
kind and lowly-hearted, eager in all matters, bountiful of gifts, glorious
of attire, before all men for high heart in battle, and grimmest of all
men in his wrath; marvellous great pains he laid upon his foes. “No man
durst gainsay him, and all the land was christened wheresoever he came.”
Five short years made up his reign. At the end, neither he was broken nor
his power. But a plot, moved by the hatred of a spurned heathen queen,
delivered him to unequal combat with his enemies, the Kings of Denmark and
Sweden, and Eric the great Viking Earl.

Olaf is sailing home from Wendland. The hostile fleet crouches behind an
island. Sundry of Olaf’s ships pass by. Then the kings spy a great ship
sailing--that will be Olaf’s _Long Worm_ they say; Eric says no. Anon come
four ships, and a great dragon amid them--the _Long Worm_? not yet. At
last she comes, greatest and bravest of all, and Olaf in her, standing on
the poop, with gilded shield and golden helm and a red kirtle over his
mail coat. His men bade to sail on, and not fight so great a host; but
Olaf said, “Never have I fled from battle.” So Olaf’s ships are lashed in
line, at the centre the _Long Worm_, its prow forward of the others
because of her greater length. Olaf would have it thus in spite of the
“windy weather in the bows” predicted by her captain. The enemies’ ships
close around them. Olaf’s grapplings are too much for the Danes; they draw
back. Their places are taken by the ships of Sweden. They fare no better.
At last Earl Eric lays fast his iron-beaks to Olaf’s ships; Danes and
Swedes take courage and return. It is hand to hand now, the ships laid
aboard of each other.

At last all of Olaf’s ships are cleared of men and cut adrift, save the
_Long Worm_. There fight Olaf’s chosen, mad with battle. Einar, Olaf’s
strong bowman, from the _Worm_ aft in the main hold, shot at Earl Eric;
one arrow pierced the tiller by his head, the second flew beneath his arm.
Says the Earl to Finn, his bowman, “Shoot me yonder big man.” Finn shot,
and the arrow struck full upon Einar’s bow as he was drawing it the third
time, and it broke in the middle.

“What broke there so loud?” said Olaf.

“Norway, king, from thine hands,” answered Einar.

“No such crash as that,” said the king; “take my bow and shoot.”

But the foeman’s strength was overpowering. Olaf’s men were cut down
amidships. They hardly held the poop and bow. Earl Eric leads the
boarders. The ship is full of foes. Olaf will not be taken. He leaps
overboard. About the ship swarm boats to seize him; but he threw his
shield over his head and sank quickly in the sea.

The private Sagas construct in powerful lines the characters of the heroes
from the stories of their lives. A great example is the Saga of Egil,[199]
whose father was a Norse chief who had sailed to Iceland, where Egil was
born. As a child he was moody, intractible, and dangerous, and once killed
an older lad who had got the better of him at ball playing. There was no
great love between him and his father. When he was twelve years old his
father used him roughly. He entered the great hall and walked up to his
father’s steward and slew him. Then he went to his seat. After that,
father and son said little to each other. The boy was bent on going
cruising with his older brother, Thorolf. The father yields, and Egil goes
a-harrying. Fierce is his course in Norway, where they come. On the sea
his vessel bears him from deed to deed of blood and daring. His strength
won him booty and reward; he won a friend too, Arinbjorn, and there was
always troth between them.

Thorolf and Egil took service with King Athelstane, who was threatened
with attack from the King of the Scots. The brothers led the Vikings in
Athelstane’s force. In the battle Thorolf loses his life; but Egil hears
the shout when Thorolf falls. His furious valour wins the day for
Athelstane. After the fight he buries his brother and sings staves over
his grave.

    “Then went Egil and those about him to seek King Athelstan, and at
    once went before the king, where he sat at the drinking. There was
    much noise of merriment. And when the king saw that Egil was come in,
    he bade the lower bench be cleared for them, and that Egil should sit
    in the high-seat facing the king. Egil sat down there, and cast his
    shield before his feet. He had his helm on his head, and laid his
    sword across his knees; and now and again he half drew it, and then
    clashed it back into the sheath. He sat upright, but with head bent
    forward. Egil was large-featured, broad of forehead, with large
    eye-brows, a nose not long but very thick, lips wide and long, chin
    exceeding broad, as was all about the jaws; thick-necked was he, and
    big-shouldered beyond other men, hard-featured, and grim when angry.
    He would not drink now, though the horn was borne to him, but
    alternately twitched his brows up and down. King Athelstan sat in the
    upper high-seat. He too laid his sword across his knees. When they had
    sat there for a time, then the king drew his sword from the sheath,
    and took from his arm a gold ring large and good, and placing it upon
    the sword-point he stood up, and went across the floor, and reached it
    over the fire to Egil. Egil stood up and drew his sword, and went
    across the floor. He stuck the sword-point within the round of the
    ring, and drew it to him; then he went back to his place. The king
    sate him again in his high-seat. But when Egil was set down, he drew
    the ring on his arm, and then his brows went back to their place. He
    now laid down sword and helm, took the horn that they bare to him, and
    drank it off. Then sang he:

      ‘Mailed monarch, god of battle,
       Maketh the tinkling circlet
       Hang, his own arm forsaking,
           On hawk-trod wrist of mine.
       I bear on arm brand-wielding
       Bracelet of red gold gladly.
       War-falcon’s feeder meetly
           Findeth such meed of praise.’

    “Thereafter Egil drank his share, and talked with others. Presently
    the king caused to be borne in two chests; two men bare each. Both
    were full of silver. The king said: ‘These chests, Egil, thou shalt
    have, and, if thou comest to Iceland, shalt carry this money to thy
    father; as payment for a son I send it to him: but some of the money
    thou shalt divide among such kinsmen of thyself and Thorolf as thou
    thinkest most honourable. But thou shalt take here payment for a
    brother with me, land or chattels, which thou wilt. And if thou wilt
    abide with me long, then will I give thee honour and dignity such as
    thyself mayst name.’

    “Egil took the money, and thanked the king for his gifts and friendly
    words. Thenceforward Egil began to be cheerful; and then he sang:

      ‘In sorrow sadly drooping
       Sank my brows close-knitted;
       Then found I one who furrows
           Of forehead could smooth.
       Fierce-frowning cliffs that shaded
       My face a king hath lifted
       With gleam of golden armlet:
           Gloom leaveth my eyes.’”

Like many of his kind in Iceland and Norway, this fierce man was a poet.
Once he saved his life by a poem, and poems he had made as gifts. It was
when the old Viking’s life was drawing to its close at his home in Iceland
that he composed his most moving lay. His beautiful beloved son was
drowned. After the burial Egil rode home, went to his bed-closet, lay down
and shut himself in, none daring to speak to him. There he lay, silent,
for a day and night. At last his daughter knocks and speaks; he opens. She
enters and beguiles him with her devotion. After a while the old man takes
food. And at last she prevails on him to make a poem on his son’s death,
and assuage his grief. So the song begins, and at length rises clear and
strong--perhaps the most heart-breaking of all old Norse poems.[200]

In the portrayal of contrasted characters no other Saga can equal the
great Njála, a Saga large and complex, and doubtless composite; for it
seems put together out of three stories, in all of which figured the just
Njal, although he is the chief personage in only one of them. The story,
with its multitude of personages and threefold subject-matter, lacks unity
perhaps. Yet the different parts of the Saga successively hold the
attention. In the first part, the incomparable Gunnar is the hero; in the
second, Njal and his sons engage our interest in their varied characters
and common fate. These are great narratives. The third part is perhaps
epigonic, excellent and yet an aftermath. Only a reading of this Saga can
bring any realization of its power of narrative and character delineation.
Its chief personages are as clear as the day. One can almost see the
sunlight of Gunnar’s open brow, and certainly can feel his manly heart.
The foil against which he is set off is his friend Njal, equally good,
utterly different: unwarlike, wise in counsel, a great lawyer, truthful,
just, shrewd and foreseeing. Hallgerda, of the long silken hair, is
Gunnar’s wife; she has caused the deaths of two husbands already, and will
yet prove Gunnar’s bane. Little time passes before she is the enemy of
Njal’s high-minded spouse, Bergthora. Then Hallgerda beginning, Bergthora
following quick, the two push on their quarrel, instigating in
counter-vengeance alternate manslayings, each one a little nearer to the
heart and honour of Gunnar and Njal. Yet their friendship is unshaken. For
every killing the one atones with the other; and the same blood-money
passes to and fro between them.

Gunnar’s friendship with the pacific Njal and his warlike sons endured
till Gunnar’s death. That came from enmities first stirred by the thieving
of Hallgerda’s thieving thrall. She had ordered it, and in shame Gunnar
gave her a slap in the face, the sole act of irritation recorded of this
generous, forbearing, peerless Viking, who once remarked: “I would like to
know whether I am by so much the less brisk and bold than other men,
because I think more of killing men than they?” At a meeting of the
Althing he was badgered by his ill-wishers into entering his stallion for
a horse-fight, a kind of contest usually ending in a man-fight.
Skarphedinn, the most masterful of Njal’s sons, offered to handle Gunnar’s
horse for him:

“Wilt thou that I drive thy horse, kinsman Gunnar?”

“I will not have that,” says Gunnar.

“It wouldn’t be amiss, though,” says Skarphedinn; “we are hot-headed on
both sides.”

“Ye would say or do little,” says Gunnar, “before a quarrel would spring
up; but with me it will take longer, though it will be all the same in the
end.”

Naturally the contest ends in trouble. Gunnar’s beaten and enraged
opponent seizes his weapons, but is stopped by bystanders. “This crowd
wearies me,” said Skarphedinn; “it is far more manly that men should fight
it out with weapons.” Gunnar remained quiet, the best swordsman and bowman
of them all. But his enemies fatuously pushed on the quarrel; once they
rode over him working in the field. So at last he fought, and killed many
of them. Then came the suits for slaying, at the Althing. Njal is Gunnar’s
counsellor, and atonements are made: Gunnar is to go abroad for three
winters, and unless he go, he may be slain by the kinsmen of those he has
killed. Gunnar said nothing. Njal adjured him solemnly to go on that
journey: “Thou wilt come back with great glory, and live to be an old man,
and no man here will then tread on thy heel; but if thou dost not fare
away, and so breakest thy atonement, then thou wilt be slain here in the
land, and that is ill knowing for those who are thy friends.”

Gunnar said he had no mind to break the atonement, and rode home. A ship
is made ready, and Gunnar’s gear is brought down. He rides around and bids
farewell to his friends, thanking them for the help they had given him,
and returns to his house. The next day he embraces the members of his
household, leaps into the saddle, and rides away. But as he is riding down
to the sea, his horse trips and throws him. He springs from the ground,
and says with his face to the Lithe, his home: “Fair is the Lithe; so fair
that it has never seemed to me so fair; the cornfields are white to
harvest, and the home mead is mown; and now I will ride back home, and not
fare abroad at all.”

So he turns back--to his fate. The following summer at the Althing, his
enemies give notice of his outlawry. Njal rides to Gunnar’s home, tells
him of it, and offers his sons’ aid, to come and dwell with him: “they
will lay down their lives for thy life.”

“I will not,” says Gunnar, “that thy sons should be slain for my sake, and
thou hast a right to look for other things from me.”

Njal rode to his home, while Gunnar’s enemies gathered and moved secretly
to his house. His hound, struck down with an axe, gives a great howl and
expires. Gunnar awoke in his hall, and said: “Thou hast been sorely
treated, Sam, my fosterling, and this warning is so meant that our two
deaths will not be far apart.” Single-handed, the beset chieftain
maintains himself within, killing two of his enemies and wounding eight.
At last, wounded, and with his bowstring cut, he turns to his wife
Hallgerda: “Give me two locks of thy hair, and do thou and my mother twist
them into a bowstring for me.”

“Does aught lie on it?” she says.

“My life lies on it,” he said; “for they will never come to close quarters
with me if I can keep them off with my bow.”

“Well,” she says, “now I will call to thy mind that slap on the face which
thou gavest me; and I care never a whit whether thou holdest out a long
while or a short.”

Then Gunnar sang a stave, and said, “Every one has something to boast of,
and I will ask thee no more for this.” He fought on till spent with
wounds, and at last they killed him.

Here the Njála may be left with its good men and true and its evil
plotters, all so differently shown. It has still to tell the story and
fate of Njal’s unbending sons, of Njal himself and his high-tempered dame,
who will abide with her spouse in their burning house, which enemies have
surrounded and set on fire to destroy those sons. Njal himself was offered
safety if he would come out, but he would not.

Perhaps we have been beguiled by their unique literary qualities into
dwelling overlong upon the Sagas. These Norse compositions belong to the
Middle Ages only in time; for they were uninfluenced either by
Christianity or the antique culture, the formative elements of mediaeval
development. They are interesting in their aloofness, and also important
for our mediaeval theme, because they were the ultimate as well as the
most admirable expression of the native Teutonic genius as yet integral,
but destined to have mighty part in the composite course of mediaeval
growth. More specifically they are the voice of that falcon race which
came from the Norseland to stock England with fresh strains of Danish
blood, to conquer Normandy, and give new courage to the
Celtic-German-Frenchmen, and thence went on to bring its hardihood, war
cunning, and keen statecraft to southern Italy and Sicily. In all these
countries the Norse nature, supple and pliant, accepted the gifts of new
experience, and in return imparted strength of purpose to peoples with
whom the Norsemen mingled in marriage as well as war.

This chapter has shown Teutonic faculties still integral and unmodified by
Latin Christian influence. Their participation in the processes of
mediaeval development will be seen as Anglo-Saxons and Germans become
converted to Latin Christianity, and apply themselves to the study of the
profane Latinity, to which it opened the way.




CHAPTER IX

THE BRINGING OF CHRISTIANITY AND ANTIQUE KNOWLEDGE TO THE NORTHERN PEOPLES

      I. IRISH ACTIVITIES; COLUMBANUS OF LUXEUIL.

     II. CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH; THE LEARNING OF BEDE AND ALFRED.

    III. GAUL AND GERMANY; FROM CLOVIS TO ST. WINIFRIED-BONIFACE.


The northern peoples, Celts and Teutons for the most part as they are
called, came into contact with Roman civilization as the great Republic
brought Gaul and Britain under its rule. Since Rome was still pagan when
these lands were made provinces, an unchristianized Latinity was grafted
upon their predominantly Celtic populations. The second stage, as it were,
of this contact between Rome and the north, is represented by that influx
of barbarians, mostly Teutonic, which, in both senses of the word,
_quickened_ the disruption of the Empire in the fourth and following
centuries. The religion called after the name of Christ had then been
accepted; and invading Goths, Franks, Burgundians, Lombards, and the rest,
were introduced to a somewhat Christianized Latindom. Indeed, in the
Latin-Christian combination, the latter was becoming dominant, and was
soon to be the active influence in extending even the antique culture. For
Christianity, with Latinity in its train, was to project itself outward to
subjugate heathen Anglo-Saxons in England, Frisians in the Low Countries,
and the unkempt Teutondom which roved east of the Rhine, and was ever
pressing southward over the boundaries of former provinces, now reverting
to unrest. In past times the assimilating energy of Roman civilization had
united western Europe in a common social order. Henceforth Christianity
was to be the prime amalgamator, while the survivals of Roman
institutions and the remnants of antique culture were to assist in
secondary rôles. With Charles Martell, with Pippin, and with Charlemagne,
Latin Christianity is the symbol of civilized order, while heathendom and
savagery are identical.


I

The conversion of the northern peoples, and their incidental introduction
to profane knowledge, wrought upon them deeply; while their own qualities
and the conditions of their lives affected their understanding of what
they received and their attitude toward the new religion. Obviously the
dissemination of Christianity among rude peoples would be unlike that
first spreading of the Gospel through the Empire, in the course of which
it had been transformed to Greek and Latin Christianity. Italy, Spain, and
Gaul made the western region of this primary diffusion of the Faith. Of a
distinctly missionary character were the further labours which resulted in
the conversion of the fresh masses of Teutons who were breaking into the
Roman pale, or were still moving restlessly beyond it. Moreover, between
the time of the first diffusion of Christianity within the Empire and that
of its missionary extension beyond those now decayed and fallen
boundaries, it had been formulated dogmatically, and given ecclesiastical
embodiment in a Catholic church into which had passed the conquering and
organizing genius of Rome. This finished system was presented to simple
peoples, sanctioned by the authority and dowered with the surviving
culture of the civilized world. It offered them mightier supernatural aid,
nobler knowledge, and a better ordering of life than they had known. The
manner and authority of its presentation hastened its acceptance, and also
determined the attitude toward it of the new converts and their children
for generations. Theirs was to be the attitude of ignorance before
recognized wisdom, and that of a docility which revered the manner and
form as well as the substance of its lesson. The development of mediaeval
Europe was affected by the mode and circumstances of this secondary
propagation of Christianity. For centuries the northern peoples were to
be held in tutelage to the form and constitution of that which they had
received: they continued to revere the patristic sources of Christian
doctrines, and to look with awe upon the profane culture accompanying
them.

Thus, as under authority, Christianity came to the Teutonic peoples, even
to those who, like the Goths, were converted to the Arian creed. Likewise
the orthodox belief was brought to the Celtic Britons and Irish as a
superior religion associated with superior culture. But the qualities or
circumstances of these western Celts reacted more freely upon their form
of faith, because Ireland and Britain were the fringe of the world, and
Christianity was hardly fixed in dogma and ritual when the conversion at
least of Britain began.

Certain phrases of Tertullian indicate that Christianity had made some
progress among the Britons by the beginning of the third century. For the
next hundred years nothing is known of the British Church, save that it
did not suffer from the persecution under Diocletian in 304, and ten years
afterwards was represented by three bishops at the Council of Arles. It
was orthodox, accepting the creed of Nicaea (A.D. 325) and the date of
Easter there fixed. The fourth century seems to have been the period of
its prosperity. It was affiliated with the Church of Gaul; nor did these
relations cease at once when the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain
in 410. But not many decades later the Saxon invasion began to cut off
Britain from the Christian world. After a while certain divergences appear
in rite and custom, though not in doctrine. They seem not to have been
serious when Gildas wrote in 550. Yet when Augustine came, fifty years
later, the Britons celebrated Easter at a different date from that
observed by the Roman Catholic Church; for they followed the old
computation which Rome had used before adopting the better method of
Alexandria. Also the mode of baptism and the tonsure differed from the
Roman.

At the close of the sixth century the British Church existed chiefly in
Wales, whither the Britons had retreated before the Saxons. Formerly there
had been no unwillingness to follow the Church of Rome. But now a long
period had elapsed, during which Britain had been left to its misfortunes.
The Britons had been raided and harassed; their country invaded; and at
last they had been driven from the greater portion of their land. How they
hated those Saxon conquerors! And forsooth a Roman mission appears to
convert those damned and hateful heathen, and a somewhat haughty summons
issues to the expelled or downtrodden people to abandon their own
Christian usages for those of the Roman communion, and then join this
Roman mission in its saving work among those Saxons whom the Britons had
met only at the spear’s point. Love of ancient and familiar customs soured
to obstinacy in the face of such demands; a sweeping rejection was
returned. Yet to conform to Roman usages and join with Augustine in his
mission to the Saxons, was the only way in which the dwindling British
Church could link itself to the Christian world, and save its people from
exterminating wars. By refusing, it committed suicide.

A refusal to conform, although no refusal to undertake missions to the
Saxons, came from the Irish-Scottish Church. As Ireland had never been
drawn within the Roman world, its conversion was later than that of
Britain. Yet there would seem to have been Christians in Ireland before
431; for in that year, according to an older record quoted by Bede,
Palladius, the first bishop (_primus episcopus_), was sent by Celestine
the Roman pontiff “ad Scottos in Christum credentes.”[201] The mission of
Palladius does not appear to have been acceptable to the Irish. Some
accounts have confused his story with that of Patrick, the “Apostle of
Ireland,” whose apostolic glory has not been overthrown by criticism. The
more authentic accounts, and above all his own _Confession_, go far to
explain Patrick’s success. His early manhood, passed as a slave in Antrim,
gave him understanding of the Irish; and doubtless his was a great
missionary capacity and zeal. The natural approach to such a people was
through their tribal kings, and Patrick appears to have made his prime
onslaught upon Druidical heathendom at Tara, the abode of the high king of
Ireland. The earliest accounts do not refer to any authority from Rome.
Patrick seems to have acted from spontaneous inspiration; and a like
independence characterizes the monastic Christianity which sprang up in
Ireland and overleapt the water to Iona, to Christianize Scotland as well
as northern Anglo-Saxon heathendom.

Irish monasticism was an ascetically ordered continuance of Irish society.
If, like other early western monasticism, it derived suggestions from
Syria or Egypt, it was far more the product of Irish temperament, customs,
and conditions. One may also find a potent source in the monastic
communities alleged to have existed in Ireland in the days of the Druids.
Doubtless many members of that caste became Christian monks.

The noblest passion of Irish monastic Christianity was to _peregrinare_
for the sake of Christ, and spread the Faith among the heathen; the most
interesting episodes of its history are the wanderings and missionary
labours and foundations of its leaders. The careers of Columba and
Columbanus afford grandiose examples. Something has been said of the
former. The monastery which he founded on the Island of Iona was the
Faith’s fountainhead for Scotland and the Saxon north of England in the
sixth and seventh centuries. About the time of Columba’s birth, men from
Dalriada on the north coast of Ireland crossed the water to found another
Dalriada in the present Argyleshire, and transfer the name of Scotia
(Ireland) to Scotland. When Columba landed at Iona, these settlers were
hard pressed by the heathen Picts under King Brude or Bridius. Accompanied
by two Pictish Christians, he penetrated to Brude’s dwelling, near the
modern Inverness, converted that monarch in 565, and averted the overthrow
of Dalriada. For the next thirty years Columba and his monks did not cease
from their labours; numbers of monasteries were founded, daughters of
Iona; and great parts of Scotland became Christian at least in name. The
supreme authority was the Abbot of Iona with his council of monks;
“bishops” performed their functions under him. Early in the seventh
century, St. Aidan was ordained bishop in Iona and sent to convert the
Anglo-Saxons of Northumberland. The story of the Irish Church in the north
is one of effective mission work, but unsuccessful organization, wherein
it was inferior to the Roman Church. Its representatives suffered defeat
at the Synod of Whitby in 664. Fifty years afterward Iona gave up its
separate usages and accepted the Roman Easter.[202]

The missionary labours of the Irish were not confined to Great Britain,
but extended far and wide through the west of Europe. In the sixth and
seventh centuries, Irish monasteries were founded in Austrasia and
Burgundy, Italy, Switzerland, Bavaria; they were established among
Frisians, Saxons, Alemanni. And as centres of Latin education as well as
Christianity, the names of Bobbio and St. Gall will occur to every one. Of
these, the first directly and the second through a disciple were due to
Columbanus. With him we enter the larger avenues of Irish missions to the
heathen, the semi-heathen, and the lax, and upon the question of their
efficacy in the preservation of Latin education throughout the rent and
driven fragments of the western Roman Empire. The story of Columban’s life
is illuminating and amusing.[203]

He was born in Leinster. While yet a boy he felt the conflict between
fleshly lusts and that counter-ascetic passion which throughout the
Christian world was drawing thousands into monasteries. Asceticism, with
desire for knowledge, won the victory, and the youth entered the monastery
of Bangor, in the extreme north-east of Ireland. There he passed years of
labour, study, and self-mortification. At length the pilgrim
mission-passion came upon him (_coepit peregrinationem desiderare_) and
his importunity overcame the abbot’s reluctance to let him depart. Twelve
disciples are said to have followed him across the water to the shores of
Britain. There they hesitated in anxious doubt, till it was decided to
cross to Gaul.

This was about the year 590. Columban’s austere and commanding form, his
fearlessness, his quick and fiery tongue, impressed the people among whom
he came. Reports of his holiness spread; multitudes sought his blessing.
He traversed the country, preaching and setting his own stern example,
until he reached the land of the Burgundians, where Gontran, a grandson of
Clovis, reigned. Well received by this ruler, Columban established himself
in an old castle. His disciples grew in numbers, and after a while Gontran
granted him an extensive Roman structure called Luxovium (Luxeuil)
situated at the confines of the Burgundian and Austrasian kingdoms.
Columban converted this into a monastery, and it soon included many noble
Franks and Burgundians among its monks. For them he composed a monastic
_regula_, stern and cruel in its penalties of many stripes imposed for
trivial faults. “Whoever may wish to know his strenuousness
(_strenuitatem_) will find it in his precepts,” writes the monk Jonas, who
had lived under him.

The strenuousness of this masterful and overbearing man was displayed in
his controversy with the Gallican clergy, upon whom he tried to impose the
Easter day observed by the Celtic Church in the British Isles. In his
letter to the Gallican synod, he points out their errors, and lectures
them on their Christian duties, asking pardon at the end for his loquacity
and presumption. Years afterwards, entering upon another controversy, he
wrote an extraordinary letter to Pope Boniface IV. The superscription is
Hibernian: “To the most beautiful head of all the churches of entire
Europe, the most sweet pope, the most high president, the most reverent
investigator: O marvellous! mirum dictu! nova res! rara avis!--that the
lowest to the loftiest, the clown to the polite, the stammerer to the
prince of eloquence, the stranger to the son of the house, the last to the
first, that the Wood-pigeon (Palumbus) should dare to write to Father
Boniface!” Whereupon this Wood-pigeon writes a long letter in which
belligerent expostulation alternates with self-debasement. He dubs himself
“garrulus, presumptuosus, homunculus vilissimae qualitatis,” who caps his
impudence by writing unrequested. He implores pardon for his harsh and too
biting speech, while he deplores--to him who sat thereon--the _infamia_ of
Peter’s Seat, and shrills to the Pope to watch: “Vigila itaque, quaeso,
papa, vigila; et iterum dico: vigila”; and he marvels at the Pope’s lethal
sleep.

One who thus berated pope and clergy might be censorious of princes.
Gontran died. After various dynastic troubles, the Burgundian land came
under the rule nominally of young Theuderic, but actually of his imperious
grandmother, the famous Brunhilde. In order that no queen-wife’s power
should supplant her own, she encouraged her grandson to content himself
with mistresses. The youth stood in awe of the stern old figure ruling at
Luxeuil, who more than once reproved him for not wedding a lawful queen.
It happened one day when Columban was at Brunhilde’s residence that she
brought out Theuderic’s various sons for him to bless. “Never shall
sceptre be held by this brothel-brood,” said he.

Henceforth it was war between these two: Theuderic was the pivot of the
storm; the one worked upon his fears, the other played upon his lusts.
Brunhilde prevailed. She incited the king to insist that Luxeuil be made
open to all, and with his retinue to push his way into the monastery. The
saint withstood him fiercely, and prophesied his ruin. The king drew back;
the saint followed, heaping reproaches on him, till the young king said
with some self-restraint: “You hope to win the crown of martyrdom through
me. But I am not a lunatic, to commit such a crime. I have a better plan:
since you won’t fall in with the ways of men of the world, you shall go
back by the road you came.”

So the king sent his retainers to seize the stubborn saint. They took him
as a prisoner to Besançon. He escaped, and hurried back to Luxeuil. Again
the king sent, this time a count with soldiers, to drive him from the
land. They feared the sacrilege of laying hands on the old man. In the
church, surrounded by his monks praying and singing psalms, he awaited
them. “O man of God,” cried the count, “we beseech thee to obey the royal
command, and take thy way to the place from which thou earnest.” “Nay, I
will rather please my Creator, by abiding here,” returned the saint. The
count retired, leaving a few rough soldiers to carry out the king’s will.
These, still fearing to use violence, begged the saint to take pity on
them, unjustly burdened with this evil task--to disobey their orders meant
their death. The saint reiterates his determination to abide, till they
fall on their knees, cling to his robe, and with groans implore his pardon
for the crime they must execute.

From pity the saint yields at last, and a company of the king’s men make
ready and escort him from the kingdom westward toward Brittany. Many
miracles mark the journey. They reach the Loire, and embark on it.
Proceeding down the river they come to Tours, where the saint asks to be
allowed to land and worship at St. Martin’s shrine. The leader bids the
rowers keep the middle of the stream and row on. But the boat resistlessly
made its way to the landing-place. Columban passed the night at the
shrine, and the next day was hospitably entertained by the bishop, who
inquired why he was returning to his native land. “The dog Theuderic has
driven me from my brethren,” answered the saint. At last Nantes was
reached near the mouth of the Loire, where the vessel was waiting to carry
the exile back to Ireland. Columban wrote a letter to his monks, in which
he poured forth his love to them with much advice as to their future
conduct. The letter is filled with grief--suppressed lest it unman his
beloved children. “While I write, the messenger comes to say that the ship
is ready to bear me, unwilling, to my country. But there is no guard to
prevent my escape, and these people even seem to wish it.”

The letter ends, but not the story. Columban did not sail for Ireland.
Jonas says that the vessel was miraculously impeded, and that then
Columban was permitted to go whither he would. So the dauntless old man
travelled back from the sea, and went to the Neustrian Court, the people
along the way bringing him their children to bless. He did not rest in
Neustria, for the desire was upon him to preach to the heathen. Making his
way to the Rhine, he embarked near Mainz, ascended the river, and at last
established himself, with his disciples, upon the lake of Constance. There
they preached to the heathen, and threw their idols into the lake. He had
the thought to preach to the Wends, but this was not to be.

The time soon came when all Austrasia fell into the hands of Brunhilde and
Theuderic, and Columbanus decided to cross over into northern Italy,
breaking out in anger at his disciple Gall, who was too sick to go with
him. With other disciples he made the arduous journey, and reached the
land of the Lombards. King Agilulf made him a gift of Bobbio, lying in a
gorge of the Apennines near Genoa, and there he founded the monastery
which long was to be a stronghold of letters. For himself, his career was
well-nigh run; he retired to a solitary spot on the banks of the river
Trebbia, where he passed away, being, apparently, some seventy years of
age.

It may seem surprising that this strenuous ascetic should occasionally
have occupied a leisure hour writing Latin poems in imitation of the
antique. There still exists such an effusion to a friend:

  “Accipe, quaeso,
   Nunc bipedali
   Condita versu
   Carminulorum
   Munera parva.”

The verses consist mainly of classic allusions and advice of an antique
rather than a Christian flavour: the wise will cease to add coin to coin,
and will despise wealth, but not the pastime of such verse as the

  “Inclyta Vates
   Nomine Sappho”

was wont to make. “Now, dear Fedolius, quit learned numbers and accept our
squibs--_frivola nostra_. I have dictated them oppressed with pain and old
age: ‘Vive, vale, laetus, tristisque memento senectae.’” The last is a
pagan reminiscence, which the saint’s Christian soul may not have deeply
felt. But the poem shows the saint’s classic training, which probably was
exceptional. For there is no evidence of like knowledge in any Irishman
before him; and after his time, in the seventh century, or the eighth,
Latin education in Ireland was confined to a few monastic centres. A small
minority studied the profanities, sometimes because they liked them, but
oftener as the means of proficiency in sacred learning.

The Irish had cleverness, facility, ardour, and energy. They did much for
the dissemination of Christianity and letters. Their deficiency was lack
of organization; and they had but little capacity for ordered discipline
humbly and obediently accepted from others. Consequently, when the period
of evangelization was past in western Europe, and organization was needed,
with united and persistent effort for order, the Irish ceased to lead or
even to keep pace with those to whom once they had brought the Gospel. In
Anglo-Saxon England and on the Carolingian continent they became strains
of influence handed on. This was the fortune which overtook them as
illuminators of manuscripts and preservers of knowledge. Their emotional
traits, moreover, entered the larger currents of mediaeval feeling and
imagination. Strains of the Irish, or of a kindred Celtic temperament
passed on into such “Breton” matters as the Tristan story, wherein love is
passion unrestrained, and is more distinctly out of relationship with
ethical considerations than, for example, the equally adulterous tale of
Lancelot and Guinevere.[204]


II

The Saxon invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries drove Christianity
and letters from the land where the semi-Romanized Britons and their
church had flourished. To reconvert and instruct anew a relapsed heathen
country was the task which Gregory the Great laid on the willing
Augustine. The story of that famous mission (A.D. 597) need not be
told;[205] but we may note the manner of the presentation of Christianity
to the heathen Saxons, and the temper of its reception. Most impressive
was this bringing of the Faith. Augustine and his band of monks came as a
stately embassy from Rome, the traditionary centre of imperial and
spiritual power. Their coming was a solemn call to the English to
associate themselves with all that was most august and authoritative in
heaven and earth. According to Bede, Augustine sent a messenger to
Ethelbert, the Kentish king, to announce that he had come from Rome
bearing the best of messages, and would assure to such as hearkened,
eternal joys in heaven and dominion without end with the living and true
God. To Ethelbert, whose kingdom lay at the edge of the great world, the
message came from this world’s sovereign pontiff, who in some awful way
represented its almighty God, and had authority to admit to His kingdom.
He was not ignorant of what lay within the hand of Rome to give. His wife
was a Catholic Christian, daughter of a Frankish king, and had her own
ministering bishop. Doubtless the queen had spoken with her lord. Still
Ethelbert feared the spell-craft of this awe-inspiring embassy, and would
meet Augustine only under the open sky. Augustine came to the meeting, a
silver cross borne before him as a banner, and the pictured image of
Christ, his monks singing litanies and loudly supplicating their Lord for
the king’s and their own salvation. Knowledge, authority, supernatural
power, were represented here. And how could the king fail to be struck by
the nobility of Augustine’s Gospel message, by its clear assurance, its
love and terror,[206] so overwhelming and convincing, so far outsoaring
Ethelbert’s heathen religion? To be sure, in Christian love and
forgiveness lay some reversal of Saxon morality, for instance of the duty
of revenge. But this was not prominent in the Christianity of the day; and
experience was to show that only in isolated instances did this teaching
impede the acceptance of the Gospel.[207]

Ethelbert spoke these missionaries fair; accorded them a habitation in
Canterbury with the privilege of celebrating their Christian rites and
preaching to his people. There they abode, zealous in vigils and fastings,
and preaching the word of life. Certain heathen men were converted, then
the king, and then his folk in multitudes--the usual way. Under the
direction of Gregory, Augustine proceeded with that combination of
insistence, dignity, and tolerance, so well understood in the Roman
Church. There was insistence upon the main doctrines and requirements of
the Faith--upon the Roman Easter day and baptism, as against the practices
of the British Church. Tolerance was shown respecting heathen fanes and
sacrificial feastings; the fanes should be reconsecrated as Christian
churches; the feasts should be continued in honour of the true God.[208]

Besides zeal and knowledge and authority, miracles advanced Augustine’s
enterprise. To eliminate by any sweeping negation the miraculous element
from the causes of success of such a mission is to close the eyes to the
situation. All men expected miracles; Gregory who sent Augustine was
infatuated with them. Augustine performed them, or believed he did, and
others believed it too. Throughout these centuries, and indeed late into
the mediaeval period, the power and habit of working miracles constituted
sainthood in the hermit or the monk, thereby singled out as the special
instrument of God’s will or the Virgin’s kindness. Of course miracles were
ascribed to the great missionary apostles like Augustine or Boniface; and
this conviction brought many conversions.

Among the heathen English about to be converted, there was diversity of
view and mood as to the Faith. They stood in awe of these newcomers from
Rome, fearing their spell-craft. From their old religion they had sought
earthly victory and prosperity; and some had found it of uncertain aid.
“See, king, how this matter stands,” says Coifi, at the Northumbrian
Witenagemot held by Edwin to decide as to the new religion: “I have
learned of a certainty that there is no virtue or utility whatever in that
religion which we have been following. None of your thanes has slaved in
the worship of our gods more zealously than I. Yet many have had greater
rewards and dignities from you, and in every way have prospered more. Were
the gods worth anything, they would wish rather to aid me, who have been
so zealous in serving them. So if these new teachings are better and
stronger, let us accept them at once.”[209] Coifi expressed the common
motives of converts of all nations from the time of Constantine. No better
thought of Christian expediency had inspired Gregory of Tours’s story of
Clovis’s career; and Bede in no way condemns Coifi’s _verba prudentiae_,
as he terms them. Naturally in times of adversity such converts were quick
to abandon their new religion, proved ineffectual.[210]

Among these Angles of Northumberland, however, finer souls were looking
for light and certitude. Such a one was that thane who followed Coifi with
the wonderful illustration of man’s mortal need of enlightenment, the
thane for whom life was as the swallow flying through the warmed and
lighted hall, from the dark cold into the dark cold: “So this life of men
comes into sight for a little; we are ignorant of what shall follow or
what may have preceded. If this new doctrine offers anything more certain,
I think we should follow it.” The heathen poetry had given varied voice to
this contemplative melancholy so wont to dwell on life’s untoward changes;
and there was ghostly evidence of the other world before the coming of the
Roman monks. Now, as those monks came with authority from the traditionary
home of ghostly lore, why question their knowledge of the life beyond the
grave? Many Anglo-Saxons were prepared to fix their gaze upon a life to
come and to let their fancies fill with visions of the great last
severance unto heaven and hell. When once impressed by the monastic
Christianity[211] of the Roman, or the Irish, mission, they were quick to
throw themselves into the ascetic life which most surely opened heaven’s
doors. So many a noble thane became an anchorite or a monk, many a noble
dame became a nun; and Saxon kings forsook their kingdoms for the
cloister: “Cenred, who for some time had reigned most nobly in Mercia,
still more nobly abandoned his sceptre. For he came to Rome, and there was
tonsured and made a monk at the church of the Apostles, and continued in
prayers and fastings and almsgiving until his last day.”[212]

As might be expected, the re-expression of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon
writings was martial and emotional. A martial tone pervades the epic
paraphrases of Scripture, the Anglo-Saxon _Genesis_ for example. On the
other hand, adaptations of devotional Latin compositions[213] evince a
realization of Christian feeling and prevalent ascetic sentiments. The
“elegiac” Anglo-Saxon feeling seems to reach its height in a more original
composition, the _Christ_ of Cynewulf, while the emotional fervour coming
with Christianity is disclosed in Bede’s account of the inspiration which
fell upon the cowherd Cædmon, in St. Hilda’s monastery of Whitby, to sing
the story of creation.[214] A pervasive monastic atmosphere also surrounds
the visions of hell and purgatory, which were to continue so typically
characteristic of monastic Christianity.[215]

What knowledge, sacred and profane, came to the Anglo-Saxons with
Christianity? Quite properly learned were Augustine and the other
organizers of the English Church. Two generations after him, the Greek
monk Theodore was sent by the Pope to become Archbishop of Canterbury,
complete Augustine’s work, and instruct the English monks and clergy.
Theodore was accompanied by his friend Hadrian, as learned as himself.
Their labours finally established Roman Christianity in England. The two
drew about them a band of students, and formed at Canterbury a school of
sacred learning, where liberal studies were conducted by these foreigners
with a knowledge and intelligence novel in Great Britain. In the north,
Benedict Biscop, a Northumbrian, promoted the ends of Roman Catholicism
and learning by establishing the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow under
the monastic _regula_ of St. Benedict of Nursia, as modified by the
practices of continental monasteries in the seventh century. He had been
in Italy, and brought thence many books. It was among these books that
Bede grew up at Jarrow.

Thus strong currents of Roman ecclesiasticism and liberal knowledge
reached England. On the other hand, Irish monastic Christianity had
already made its entry in the south-western part of Great Britain, and
with greater strength established itself in the north, converting
multitudes to the Faith and instructing such as would learn. The Irish
teaching had been eagerly received by those groups of Anglo-Saxons who
henceforth were to prosecute their studies with the aid of the further
knowledge and discipline brought from the Continent by Theodore. Some of
them had even journeyed to Ireland to study.

From this dual source was drawn the education of Aldhelm. He was born in
Wessex about the year 650, and was nephew of the powerful King Ini. He
became abbot of Malmesbury in 675. An Irish monk was his first teacher;
his second, the learned Hadrian. From the two he received a broader
education than any Anglo-Saxon had possessed before him. Always holding in
view the perfecting of his sacred knowledge, he studied grammar and
kindred topics, produced treatises himself, and as a Catholic student and
teacher was a true forerunner of the greatest scholar among his younger
contemporaries, Bede.[216]

Bede the Venerable, and we may add the still beloved, was Aldhelm’s junior
by some twenty-five years. He was born in 673 and died in 735. He passed
his whole life reading, teaching, and writing in the Cloister of Jarrow
near where he was born, and not far from where, beneath the “Galilee” of
Durham Cathedral, his bones have long reposed. Back of him was the double
tradition of learning, the Irish and the Graeco-Roman. Through a long life
of pious study, Bede drew into his mind, and incorporated in his writings,
practically the total sum of knowledge then accessible in western Europe.
He stands between the great Latin transmitters (Boëthius, Cassiodorus,
Gregory and Isidore) and the epoch known as the Carolingian. He was
himself a transmitter of knowledge to that later time. If in spirit, race,
epoch and circumstances, Aldhelm was Bede’s direct forerunner, Bede had
also a notable predecessor in Isidore. The writings of the Spanish bishop
contributed substance and suggestions of plan and method to the
Anglo-Saxon monk, whose works embrace practically the same series of
topics as Isidore’s, whose intellectual interests also, and attitude
toward the Church Fathers, appear the same. But Bede was the more genial
personality, and could not help imbuing his compositions with something
from his own temperament. Even in his Commentaries upon the books of
Scripture, which were made up principally of borrowed allegorical
interpretations, there is common sense and some endeavour to present the
actual meaning and situation.[217] But he disclaimed originality, as he
says in the preface to his Commentary on the Hexaemeron, addressed to
Bishop Acca of Hexham:

    “Concerning the beginning of Genesis where the creation of the world
    is described, many have said much, and have left to posterity
    monuments of their talents. Among these, as far as our feebleness can
    learn, we may distinguish Basil of Caesarea (whom Eustathius
    translated from Greek to Latin), Ambrose of Milan, and Augustine,
    Bishop of Hippo. Of whom the first-named in nine books, the second
    following his footprints in six books, the third in twelve books and
    also in two others directed against the Manichaeans, shed floods of
    salutary doctrine for their readers; and in them the promise of the
    Truth was fulfilled: ‘Whoso believeth in me, as the Scripture saith,
    out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water....’ But since
    these works are so great that only the rich may own them, and so
    profound that they may be fathomed only by the learned, your holiness
    has seen fit to lay on us the task of plucking from them all, as from
    the sweetest wide-flowering fields of paradise, what might seem to
    meet the needs of weaklings.”[218]

Bede was also a lovely story-teller. His literary charm and power appear
in his Life of St. Cuthbert, and still more in his ever-famous
_Ecclesiastical History of the English People_, so warm with love of
mankind, and presenting so wonderful a series of dramatic stories animate
with vital motive and the colour of incident and circumstance. Midway
between the spontaneous genius of this work and the copied Scripture
Commentary, stand Bede’s grammatical, metrical, and scientific
compositions, compiled with studious zeal. They evince a broad interest in
scholarship and in nature. Still, neither material nor method was
original. For instance, his _De rerum natura_ took its plan and much of
its substance from Isidore’s work of the same name. Bede has, however, put
in further matter and made his work less of a mere shell of words than
Isidore’s. For he is interested in connecting natural occurrences with
their causes, stating, for example, that the tides depend on the
moon.[219] In this work as in his other _opera didascalica_, like the _De
temporum ratione_ and his learned _De arte metrica_,[220] he shows himself
a more intelligent student than his Spanish predecessor. Yet he drew
everything from some written source.

One need not wonder at the voluminousness of Bede’s literary
productions.[221] Many of the writings emanating from monasteries are
transcriptions rather than compositions. The circumstance that books,
_i.e._ manuscripts, were rare and costly was an impelling motive. Isidore
and Bede made systematic compilations for general use. They and their
congeners would also make extracts from manuscripts, of which they might
have but the loan, or from unique codices in order to preserve the
contents. Such notes or excerpts might have the value of a treatise, and
might be preserved and in turn transcribed as a distinct work. Yet whether
made by a Bede or by a lesser man, they represent mainly the labour of a
copyist.

Bede’s writings were all in Latin, and were intended for the instruction
of monks. They played a most important rôle in the transmission of
learning, sacred and profane, in Latin form. For its still more popular
diffusion, translations into the vernacular might be demanded. Such at all
events were made of Scripture; and perhaps a century and a half after
Bede’s death, the translation of edifying Latin books was undertaken by
the best of Saxon kings. King Alfred was born in 849 and closed his eyes
in 901. In the midst of other royal labours he set himself the task of
placing before his people, or at least his clergy, Anglo-Saxon versions of
some of the then most highly regarded volumes of instruction. The wise
_Pastoral Care_ of Gregory the Great; his _Dialogues_, less wise according
to our views; the _Histories_ of Orosius[222] and Bede; and that
philosophic vade-mecum of the Middle Ages, the _De consolatione
philosophiae_ of Boëthius. Of these, Alfred translated the _Pastoral Care_
and the _De consolatione_, also Orosius; the other works appear to have
been translated at his direction.[223] Alfred’s translations contain his
own reflections and other matter not in the originals. In rendering
Orosius, he rewrote the geographical introduction, inserted a description
of Germany and accounts of northern Europe given by two of his Norse
liegemen, Ohthere and Wulfstan. The alertness of his mind is shown by this
insertion of the latest geographical knowledge. Other and more personal
passages will disclose his purpose, and illustrate the manner in which his
Christianized intelligence worked upon trains of thought suggested perhaps
by the Latin writing before him.

Alfred’s often-quoted preface to Gregory’s _Pastoral Care_ tells his
reasons for undertaking its translation, and sets forth the condition of
England. He speaks of the “wise men there formerly were throughout
England, both of sacred and secular orders,” and of their zeal in learning
and teaching and serving God; and how foreigners came to the land in
search of wisdom and instruction. But “when I came to the throne,” so
general was the decay of learning in England “that there were very few on
this side of the Humber who could understand their rituals in English, or
translate a letter from Latin into English; and I believe there were not
many beyond the Humber.... Thanks be to God Almighty that we have any
teachers among us now.” Alfred therefore commands the bishop, to whom he
is now sending the copy, to disengage himself as often as possible from
worldly matters, and apply the Christian wisdom God has given him. “I
remembered also how I saw, before it had been all ravaged and burnt, how
the churches throughout the whole of England stood filled with treasures
and books, and there was also a great multitude of God’s servants, but
they had very little knowledge of books, for they could not understand
anything of them because they were not written in their own language.” It
therefore seemed wise to me “to translate some books which are most
needful for all men to know, into the language which we can all
understand, and ... that all the youth now in England of free men, who are
rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, be set to learn so long
as they are not fit for any other occupation, until that they are well
able to read English writing: and let those be afterwards taught more in
the Latin language who are to continue learning and be promoted to a
higher rank.”

In the _De consolatione_ of Boëthius, the antique pagan thought, softened
with human sympathy, and in need of such comfort and assurance as was
offered by the Faith, is found occupied with questions (like that of
free-will) prominent in Christianity. The book presented meditations which
were so consonant with Christian views that its Christian readers from
Alfred to Dante mistook them for Christian sentiments, and added further
meanings naturally occurring to the Christian soul. Alfred’s reflections
in his version of the _De consolatione_ are very personal to Saxon Alfred
and show how he took his life and kingly office:

    “O Philosophy, thou knowest that I never greatly delighted in
    covetousness and the possession of earthly power, nor longed for this
    authority”--so far Boëthius,[224] and now Alfred himself: “but I
    desired instruments and materials to carry out the work I was set to
    do, which was that I should virtuously and fittingly administer the
    authority committed unto me. Now no man, as thou knowest, can get full
    play for his natural gifts, nor conduct and administer government,
    unless he hath fit tools, and the raw material to work upon. By
    material I mean that which is necessary to the exercise of natural
    powers; thus a king’s raw material and instruments of rule are a
    well-peopled land, and he must have men of prayer, men of war, and men
    of work. As thou knowest, without these tools no king may display his
    special talent. Further, for his materials he must have means of
    support for the three classes above spoken of, which are his
    instruments; and these means are land to dwell in, gifts, weapons,
    meat, ale, clothing, and what else soever the three classes need.
    Without these means he cannot keep his tools in order, and without
    these tools he cannot perform any of the tasks entrusted to him. [I
    have desired material for the exercise of government that my talents
    and my power might not be forgotten and hidden away[225]] for every
    good gift and every power soon groweth old and is no more heard of, if
    Wisdom be not in them. Without Wisdom no faculty can be fully brought
    out, for whatsoever is done unwisely can never be accounted as skill.
    To be brief, I may say that it has ever been my desire to live
    honourably while I was alive, and after my death to leave to them that
    should come after me my memory in good works.”

The last sentence needs no comment. But those preceding it will be
illuminated by another passage inserted by Alfred:

    “Therefore it is that a man never by his authority attains to virtue
    and excellence, but by reason of his virtue and excellence he attains
    to authority and power. No man is better for his power, but for his
    skill he is good, if he is good, and for his skill he is worthy of
    power, if he is worthy of it. Study Wisdom then, and, when ye have
    learned it, contemn it not, for I tell you that by its means ye may
    without fail attain to power, yea, even though not desiring it.”

Perhaps from the teaching of his own life Alfred knew, as well as
Boëthius, the toil and sadness of power: “Though their false hope and
imagination lead fools to believe that power and wealth are the highest
good, yet it is quite otherwise.” And again, speaking of friendship, he
says that Nature unites friends in love, “but by means of these worldly
goods and the wealth of this life we oftener make foes than friends,”
which doubtless Alfred had discovered, as well as Marcus Aurelius. Perhaps
the Saxon king knew wherein lay peace, as he makes Wisdom say: “When I
rise aloft with these my servants, we look down upon the storms of this
world, even as the eagle does when he soars in stormy weather above the
clouds, where no storm can harm him.” The king was thinking of man’s peace
with God.[226]


III

Christianity came to the cities of Provincia and the chief Roman colonies
of Gaul (Lyons, Trèves, Cologne) in the course of the original
dissemination of the Faith. There were Roman, Greek, or Syrian Christians
in these towns before the end of the second century. Early Gallic
Christianity spoke Greek and Latin, and its rather slow advance was due
partly to the tenacity of Celtic speech even in the cities; while outside
of them heathen speech and practices were scarcely touched. Through Gaul
and along the Rhine, the country in the main continued heathen in religion
and Celtic or Germanic in speech during the fifth century.[227] The
complete Latinizing of Gaul and the conversion of its rural population
proceeded from the urban churches, and from the labours and miracles of
anchorites and monks. In contrast with the decay of the municipal
governments, the urban churches continued living institutions. Their
bishops usually were men of energy. The episcopal office was elective, yet
likely to remain in the same influential family, and the bishop, the
leading man in the town, might be its virtual ruler. He represented
Christianity and Latin culture, and when Roman officials yielded to
Teutonic conquerors, the bishop was left as the spokesman of the
Gallo-Roman population. Thus the Gallic churches, far from succumbing
before the barbarian invasions, rescued and appropriated the derelict
functions of government, and emerged aggrandized from the political and
racial revolution. In the year 400 the city of Trèves was Latin in speech
and Roman in government; in the year 500 the Roman government had been
overthrown, and a German-speaking population predominated in what was left
of the city, but the church went on unchanged in constitution and in
language.

There was constant intercourse between Teutons and Romans along the
northern boundaries of the Empire. In the Danube regions many of the
former were converted. The Goths, through the labours of Ulfilas and
others in the fourth century, became Arian Christians; their conversion
was of moment to themselves and others, but destiny severed the continuity
of its import for history. In the provinces of Rhaetia, Vindelicia, and
Noricum there were Christians, some of them Teutons, as early as the time
of Constantine. For the next century, when disruption of the Empire was in
full progress, the Life of St. Severinus by Eugippius, his disciple, gives
the picture.[228] Bits and fragments of Roman government endured; letters
were not quite quenched; but Alemanni and Rugii moved as they would,
marauding, besieging, and destroying. Everywhere there was uncertainty and
confusion, and yet civilized Roman provincials still clung to a driven
life. Through this mountain land, the monk Severinus went here and there,
barefoot even in ice and snow, austere, commanding. He encouraged the
townspeople to maintain decency and courage; he turned the barbarians from
ruthlessness. Clear-seeing, capable, his energies shielded the land. He
was an ascetic who took nothing for himself, and won men to the Faith by
this guarantee of disinterestedness. So he shepherded his harrowed flocks,
and more than once averted their destruction. But his arm was too feeble;
after his death even his cell was plundered, while the confusion swept on.

Such were fifth-century conditions on the northern boundary of what had
been the Empire, conditions amid which the culture and doctrine germane to
Christianity went down, although the Faith still glimmered here and there.
Farther to the west, the Burgundians had gained a domicile in a land
sparsely tenanted by Roman and Catholic provincials. Here on the left bank
of the Rhine, in the neighbourhood of Worms, this people accepted the
Christianity which they found. Afterwards, in the year 430, their heathen
kin on the right bank were baptized as a people; for they hoped, through
aid from fellow-Christians, to ward off the destruction threatening from
the Huns. Yet five years later they were overthrown by those savage
riders--an overthrow out of which was to rise the _Nibelungenlied_. The
Burgundian remnants found a new home by the Rhone.

The Christianity of Burgundians and Goths was subject to the vicissitudes
of their fortunes. The permanent conversion to Catholicism of the great
masses of the Germans commenced somewhat later, when the turmoil of
fifth-century migration was settling into contests for homes destined to
prove more lasting. Its beginning may be dated from the baptism of Clovis
as a Catholic on Christmas Day in the year 496. His retainers followed him
into the consecrated water. By reason of the king’s genius for war and
politics, this event was the beginning of the final triumph of
Catholicism.[229]

The baptism of Clovis and his followers was typical of early Teutonic
conversions. King and tribal following acted as a unit. Christ gave
victory; He was the mightier God: such was the crude form of the motive.
Its larger scope was grasped by the far-seeing king. Believing in
supernatural aid, he desired it from the mightiest source, which, he was
persuaded, was the Christian God. It was to be obtained by such homage to
Christ as heretofore the king had paid to Wuotan. Any doubt as to the
sincerity of his belief presupposes a point of view impossible for a
fifth-century barbarian. But to this sincere expectation of Christ’s aid,
to be gained through baptism, Clovis joined careful consideration of the
political situation. Catholic Christianity was the religion of the
Gallo-Roman population forming the greater part of the Frankish king’s
subjects. He knew of Arian peoples; probably attempts had been made to
draw him to their side. They constituted the great Teutonic powers at the
time; for Theodoric was the monarch of Italy, and Arian Teutons ruled in
southern France, in Spain, and Africa. Nevertheless, it was of paramount
importance for the establishment of his kingdom that there should be no
schism between the Franks and the Gallo-Roman people who exceeded them in
number and in wealth and culture. Catholic influences surrounded Clovis;
Catholic interests represented the wealth and prosperity of his dominions,
and when he decided to be baptized he did not waver between the Catholic
and the Arian belief. Thus the king attached to himself the civilized
population of his realm. A common Catholic faith quickly obliterated
racial antagonism within its boundaries and gained him the support of
Catholic church and people in the kingdoms of his Arian rivals.

So under Clovis and his successors the Gallic Church became the Frankish
Church, and flourished exceedingly. Tithes were paid it, and gifts were
made by princes and nobles. Its lands increased, carrying their dependent
population, until the Church became the largest landholder in the
Merovingian realm. It was governed by Roman law, but the clergy were
subject to the penal jurisdiction of the king.[230] It was he that
summoned councils, although he did not vote, and left ecclesiastical
matters to the bishops, who were his liegemen and appointees.[231] They
recognized the king’s virtually unlimited authority, which they patterned
on the absolute power of the Roman Emperors and the prerogatives of David
and Solomon. In fine, the Merovingian Church was a national church,
subject to the king. Until the seventh century it was quite independent of
the Bishop of Rome.[232]

It is common knowledge--especially vivid with readers of the famous
_Historia Francorum_ of Gregory of Tours--that ethically viewed, the
conduct of the Merovingian house was cruel, treacherous, and abominable;
and likewise the conduct of their vassals. Frankish kings and nobles
appear as men no longer bound by the ethics of the heathenism which they
had foresworn, and as yet untouched by the moral precepts of the Christian
code. Not Christianity, however, but contact with decadent civilization,
and rapid increase of power and wealth, had loosened their heathen
standards. Merovingian history leaves a unique impression of a line of
rulers and dependents among whom mercy and truth and chastity were
unknown. The elements of sixth-century Christianity which the Franks made
their own were its rites, its magic, and its miracles, and its expectation
of the aid of a God and His saints duly solicited. Here the customs of
heathenism were a preparation, or themselves passed into Frankish
Christianity. Nevertheless, the general character of Christian
observances--baptism, the mass, prayer, the sign of the cross, the rites
at marriage, sickness, and death--could not fail to impress a certain tone
and demeanour upon the people, and impart some sense of human sinfulness.
The general conviction that patent and outrageous crime would bring divine
vengeance gained point and power from the terrific doctrine of the Day of
Wrath, and the system of penances imposed by the clergy proved an
excellent discipline with these rough Christians. Many bishops and priests
were little better than the nobles, yet the Church preserved Christian
belief and did something to improve morality. Everywhere the monk was the
most striking object-lesson, with his austerities, his terror-stricken
sense of sinfulness, and conviction of the peril of the world. No martial,
grasping bishop, no dissolute and treacherous priest denied that the
monk’s was the ideal Christian life; and the laity stood in awe, or
expectation, of the wonder-working power of his asceticism. Indeed
monasticism was becoming popular, and the Merovingian period witnessed the
foundation of numberless cloisters.

In the fifth and through part of the sixth century the Gallic monastery of
Lerins, on an island in the Mediterranean, near Fréjus, was a chief source
of ascetic and Christian influence for Gaul. Its monks took their
precepts from Syria and Egypt, and some of the zeal of St. Martin of Tours
had fallen on their shoulders. As the energy of this community declined,
Columban’s monastery at Luxeuil succeeded to the work. The example of
Columbanus, his precepts and severe monastic discipline, proved a source
of ascetic and missionary zeal. With him or following in his steps came
other Irishmen; and heathen German lands soon looked upon the walls of
many an Irish monastery. But Columbanus failed, and all the Irish failed,
in obedience, order, and effective organization. His own monastic
_regula_, with all its rigour, contained no provisions for the government
of the monasteries. Without due ordering, bands of monks dwelling in
heathen communities would waver in their practices and even show a lack of
doctrinal stability. Sooner or later they were certain to become confused
in habit and contaminated with the manners of the surrounding people.
These Irish monasteries omitted to educate a native priesthood to
perpetuate their Christian teaching. The best of them, St. Gall (founded
by Columbanus’s disciple Gallus), might be a citadel of culture, and
convert the people about it, through the talents and character of its
founder and his successors. But other monasteries, farther to the east,
were tainted with heathen practices. In fine, it was not for the Irish to
convert the great heathen German land, or effect a lasting reform of
existing churches there or in Gaul.

The labours of Anglo-Saxons were fraught with more enduring results.
Through their abilities and zeal, their faculty of organization and
capacity of submitting to authority, through their consequent harmony with
Rome and the support given them by the Frankish monarchy, these
Anglo-Saxons converted many German tribes, established permanent churches
among them, reorganized the heterogeneous Christianity which they found in
certain German lands, and were a moving factor in the reform of the
Frankish Church. The most striking features of their work on the Continent
were diocesan organization, the training of a native clergy, the
establishment of monasteries under the Benedictine constitution, union
with Rome, obedience to her commands, strenuous conformity to her law, and
insistence on like conformity in others. Their presentation of
Christianity was orthodox, regular, and authoritative.

Some of these features appear in the work of the Saxon Willibrord among
the Frisians, but are more largely illustrated in the career of St.
Boniface-Winfried. Willibrord moved under the authority of Rome; the
varying fortunes of his labours were connected with the enterprises of
Pippin of Heristal, the father of Charles Martel. They advanced with the
power of that Frankish potentate. But after his death, during the strife
between Neustria and Austrasia, the heathen Frisian king Radbod drove back
Christianity as he enlarged his dominion at the expense of the divided
Franks. Later, Charles Martel conquered him, and the Frankish power
reached (718) to the Zuyder Zee. Under its protection Willibrord at last
founded the bishopric of Utrecht (734). He succeeded in educating a native
clergy; and his labours had lasting result among the Frisians who were
subject to the Franks, but not among the free Frisians and the Danes.

Evidently there was no sharp geographical boundary between Christianity
and heathendom. Throughout broad territories, Christian and heathen
practices mingled. This was true of the Frisian land. It was true in
greater range and complexity of the still wider fields of Boniface’s
career. This able man surrendered his high station in his native Wessex in
order to serve Christ more perfectly as a missionary monk among the
heathen. He went first to Frisia and worked with Willibrord, yet refused
to be his bishop-coadjutor and successor, because planning to carry
Christianity into Germany.

Strikingly his life exemplifies Anglo-Saxon faculties working under the
directing power of Rome among heathen and partly Christian peoples. On his
first visit to Rome he became imbued with the principles, and learned the
ritual, of the Roman Church. He returned to enter into relations with
Charles Martell, and to labour in Hesse and Thuringia, and again with
Willibrord in Frisia. Not long afterwards, at his own solicitation,
Gregory II. called him back to Rome (722), where he fed his passion for
punctilious conformity by binding himself formally to obey the Pope,
follow the practices of the Roman Church, and have no fellowship with
bishops whose ways conflicted with them. Gregory made him bishop over
Thuringia and Hesse, and sent him back there to reform Christian and
heathen communities. Thus Gregory created a bishop within the bounds of
the Frankish kingdom--an unprecedented act. Nevertheless, Charles, to whom
Boniface came with a letter from Gregory, received him favourably and
furnished him with a safe conduct, only exacting a recognition of his own
authority.

Boniface set forth upon his mission. In Hesse he cut down the ancient
heathen oak, and made a chapel of its timber; he preached and he
organized--the land was not altogether heathen. Then he proceeded to
Thuringia. That also was a partly Christian land; many Irish-Scottish
preachers were labouring or dwelling there. Boniface set his face against
their irregularities as firmly as against heathenism. Again he dominated
and reorganized, yet continued unfailing in energetic preaching to the
heathen. Gregory watched closely and zealously co-operated.

On the death of the second Gregory in 731, the third Gregory succeeded to
the papacy and continued his predecessor’s support of the Anglo-Saxon
apostle, making him archbishop with authority to ordain bishops. Many
Anglo-Saxons, both men and holy women, came to aid their countryman, and
brought their education and their nobler views of life to form centres of
Christian culture in the German lands. Cloisters for nuns, cloisters for
monks were founded. The year 744 witnessed the foundation of Fulda by
Sturm under the direction of Boniface, and destined to be the very apple
of his eye and the monastic model for Germany. It was placed under the
authority of Rome, with the consent of Pippin, who then ruled. The
reorganization rather than the conversion of Bavaria was Boniface’s next
achievement. The land long before had been partially Romanized, and now
was nominally Christian. Here again Boniface acted as representative of
the Pope, and not of Charles, although Bavaria was part of the Frankish
empire.

The year 738 brought Boniface to Rome for the third time. He was now
yearning to leave the fields already tilled, and go as missionary to the
heathen Saxons. But Gregory sent him back to complete the reorganization
of the Bavarian Church, and to this large field of action he added also
Alemannia with its diocesan centre at Speyer. Here he came in conflict
with Frankish bishops, firm in their secular irregularities. Yet again he
prevailed, reorganized the churches, and placed them under the authority
of Rome. Evidently the two Gregories had in large measure turned the
energies of Boniface from the mission-field to the labours of reform.

On the death of Charles in 741 (and in the same year died Gregory, to be
succeeded by the lukewarm Zacharias) his sons Carloman and Pippin
succeeded to his power. The following year Carloman in German-speaking
Austrasia called a council of his church (_Concilium Germanicum primum_)
under the primacy of Boniface. Its decrees confirmed the reforms for which
the latter had struggled:

    “We Carloman, Duke and Prince of the Franks, in the year 742 of the
    Incarnation, on the 21st of April, upon the advice of the servants of
    God, the bishops and priests of our realm, have assembled them to take
    counsel how God’s law and the Church’s discipline (fallen to ruin
    under former princes) may be restored, and the Christian folk led to
    salvation, instead of perishing deceived by false priests. We have set
    up bishops in the cities, and have set over them as archbishop
    Bonifatius, the legate of St. Peter.”

The council decreed that yearly synods should be held, that the
possessions taken from the Church should be restored, and the false
priests deprived of their emoluments and forced to do penance. The clergy
were forbidden to bear arms, go to war, or hunt. Every priest should give
yearly account of his stewardship to his bishop. Bishops, supported by the
count in the diocese, should suppress heathen practices. Punishments were
set for the fleshly sins of monks and nuns and clergy, and for the
priestly offences of wearing secular garb or harbouring women. The
Benedictine rule was appointed for monasteries. It was easier to make
these decrees than carry them out against the opposition of such martial
bishops as those of Mainz and Trèves, whose support was necessary to
Carloman’s government; and military conditions rendered the restoration of
Church lands impracticable. Yet the word was spoken, and something was
done.

The next year in Neustria Pippin instituted like reforms. He was aided by
Boniface, although the latter held no ecclesiastical office there. In 747
Carloman abdicated and retired to a monastery;[233] and Pippin became sole
ruler, and at last formally king, anointed by Boniface under the direction
of the Pope in 752. After this, Boniface, withdrawing from the direction
of the Church, turned once more to satisfy his heart’s desire by going on
a mission among the heathen Frisians, where he crowned a great life with a
martyr’s death.

Thus authoritatively, supported by Rome and the Frankish monarchy,
Christianity was presented to the Germans. It carried suggestions of a
better order and some knowledge of Latin letters. The extension of Roman
Catholic Christianity was the aim of Boniface first and last and always.
But a Latin education was needed by the clergy to enable them to
understand and set forth this some-what elaborated and learned scheme of
salvation. Boniface and his coadjutors had no aversion to the literary
means by which a serviceable Latin knowledge was to be obtained, and
their missionary and reorganizing labours necessarily worked some
diffusion of Latinity.

The Frankish secular power which had supported Boniface, advanced to
violent action when Charlemagne’s sword bloodily constrained the Saxons to
accept his rule and Christianity, the two inseverable objects which he
tirelessly pursued. Nor could this ruler stay his mighty hand from the
government of the Church within his realm. With his power to appoint
bishops, he might, if he chose, control its councils. But apparently he
chose to rule the Church directly; and his, and his predecessors’ and
successors’ Capitularies (rather than Conciliar decrees) contain the chief
ecclesiastical legislation for the Frankish realm.

In its temporalities and secular action the Church was the greatest and
richest of all subjects; it possessed the rights of lay vassals and was
affected with like duties.[234] But in ritual, doctrine, language and
affiliation, the Frankish Church made part of the Roman Catholic Church.
It used the Roman liturgy and the Latin tongue. The ordering of the clergy
was Roman, and the regulation of the monasteries was Romanized by the
adoption of the Benedictine _regula_. Within the Church Rome had
triumphed. Prelates were vassals of the king who had now become Emperor;
and the great corporate Church was subject to him. Nevertheless, this
great corporate institution was Roman rather than Gallic or Frankish or
German. It was Teuton only in those elements which represented
ecclesiastical abuses, for example, the remaining irregularities of
various kinds, the lay and martial habits of prelates, and even their
appointment by the monarch. These were the elements which the Church in
its logical Roman evolution was to eliminate. Charlemagne himself, as well
as his lesser successors, strove just as zealously to bring the people
into obedience to the Church as into obedience to the lay rulers. While
the Carolingian rule was strong, its power was exerted on behalf of
ecclesiastical authority and discipline; and when the royal administration
weakened after Charlemagne’s death, the Church was not slow to revolt
against its temporal subjection to the royal power.

But the Church, in spite of Latin and Roman affinities, strove also to
come near the German peoples and speak to them in their own tongues. This
is borne witness to by the many translations from Latin into Frankish,
Saxon, or Alemannish dialects, made by the clergy. Christianity deeply
affected the German language. Many of its words received German form, and
the new thoughts forced old terms to take on novel and more spiritual
meanings. To be sure these German dialects were there before Christianity
came, and the capacities of the Germans acquired in heathen times are
attested by the sufficiency of their language to express Christian
thought. Likewise the German character was there, and proved its range and
quality by the very transformation of which it showed itself capable under
Christianity. And just as Christianity was given expression in the German
language, which retained many of its former qualities, so many fundamental
traits of German character remained in the converted people. Yet so
earnestly did the Germans turn to Christianity, and such draughts of its
spirit did they draw into their nature, that the early Germanic
re-expression of it is sincere, heartfelt, and moving, and illumined with
understanding of the Faith.

These qualities may be observed in the series of Christian documents in
the German tongues commencing in the first years of Charlemagne’s reign.
They consist of baptismal confessions of belief, the first of which (cir.
769) was composed for heathen Saxons just converted by the sword, and of
catechisms presenting the elements of Christian precept and dogma. The
earliest of the latter (cir. 789), coming from the monastery at
Weissenburg in Alsace, contains the Lord’s Prayer, with explanations, an
enumeration of the deadly sins according to the fifth chapter of the
Epistle to the Galatians, the Apostles’ Creed and the Athanasian. Further,
one finds among these documents a translation of the _De fide Catholica_
of Isidore of Seville, and of the Benedictine _regula_; also
Charlemagne’s _Exhortatio ad plebem Christianam_, which was an admonition
to the people to learn the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. There are likewise
general confessions of sins. Less dependent on a Latin original is the
so-called _Muspilli_, a spirited description in alliterative verse of the
last times and the Day of Judgment.

German qualities, however, express themselves more fully in two Gospel
versions, the first the famous Saxon _Heliand_ (cir. 835), (which follows
Tatian’s “Harmony”); the second the somewhat later _Evangelienbuch_ of
Otfrid the Frank. They were both composed in alliterative verse, though
Otfrid also made use of rhyme.[235] The martial, Teutonic ring of the
former is well known. Christ is the king, the disciples are His thanes
whose duty is to stand by their lord to the death; He rewards them with
the promised riches of heaven, excelling the earthly goods bestowed by
other kings. In the “betrayal” they close around their Lord, saying: “Were
it thy will, mighty Lord of ours, that we should set upon them with the
spear, gladly would we strike and die for our Lord.” Out broke the wrath
of the “ready swordsman” (_snel suerdthegan_)[236] Simon Peter; he could
not speak for anguish to think that his lord should be bound. Angrily
strode the bold knight before his lord, drew his weapon, the sword by his
side, and smote the nearest foe with might of hands. Before his fury and
the spurting blood the people fled fearing the sword’s bite.

The _Heliand_ has also gentler qualities, as when it calls the infant
Christ the _fridubarn_ (peace-child), and pictures Mary watching over her
“little man.” But German love of wife and child and home speak more
clearly in Otfrid’s book. Although a learned monk, his pride of Frankish
race rings in his oft-quoted reasons for writing _theotisce_, _i.e._ in
German: Why shall not the Franks sing God’s praise in Frankish tongue?
Forcible and logical it is, although not bound by grammar’s rules. Yes,
why should the Franks be incapable? they are brave as Romans or Greeks;
they are as good in field and wood; wide power is theirs, and ready are
they with the sword. They are rich, and possess a good land, with honour.
They can guard their own; what people is their equal in battle? Diligent
are they also in the Word of God. Otfrid is quite moving in his
sympathetic sense of the sorrow of the Last Judgment, when the mother from
child shall be parted, the father from son, the lord from his faithful
thane, friend from friend--all human kind. Deep is the mystic love and
yearning with which he realizes Heaven as one’s own land: there is life
without death, light without darkness, the angels and eternal bliss. We
have left it--that must we bewail always, banished to a strange land, poor
misled orphans. The antithesis between the _fremidemo lant_ (_fremdes
land_) of earth, and the _heimat_, the _eigan lant_ of Heaven, which is
home, real home, is the keynote strongly felt and movingly expressed.




BOOK II

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES




CHAPTER X

CAROLINGIAN PERIOD: THE FIRST STAGE IN THE APPROPRIATION OF THE PATRISTIC
AND ANTIQUE


With the conversion of Teuton peoples and their introduction to the Latin
culture accompanying the new religion, the factors of mediaeval
development came at last into conjunction. The mediaeval development was
to issue from their combined action, rather than from the singular nature
of any one of them.[237] Taking up the introductory theme concerning the
meeting of these forces, we followed the Latinizing of the West resulting
from the expansion of the Roman Republic, which represents the political
and social preparation of the field. Then we considered the antique pagan
gospel of philosophy and letters, which had quickened this Latin
civilization and was to form the spiritual environment of patristic
Christianity. Next in order we observed the intellectual interests of the
Latin Fathers, and then turned to the great Latin transmitters of the
somewhat amalgamated antique and patristic material--Boëthius,
Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great, and Isidore of Seville--who gathered what
they might, and did much to reduce the same to decadent forms, suited to
the barbaric understanding. Then the course of the barbaric disruption of
the Empire was reviewed; and this led to a consideration of the qualities
and circumstances of the Celts and Teutons, both those who to all
appearances had been Latinized, and those who took active part in the
barbarization and disruption of the Roman order. And finally we closed
these introductory, though essential, chapters by tracing the ways in
which Christianity, with the now humbled and degraded antique culture, was
presented to this renewed and largely Teutonic barbarism.

Having now reached the epoch of conjunction of the various elements of the
mediaeval evolution, it lies before us to consider the first stage in the
action of true mediaeval conditions upon the two chief spiritual forces,
the first stage, in other words, of the mediaeval appropriation of the
patristic and antique material. The period is what is called Carlovingian
or Carolingian, after the great ruler Charlemagne. Intellectually
considered, it may be said to have begun when Charles palpably evinced his
interest in sacred and liberal studies by calling Alcuin and other
scholars to his Court about the year 781. Let us note the political and
social situation.

The Merovingian kingdom created by Clovis and his house has been spoken
of.[238] One may properly refer to it in the singular, although
frequently, instead of one, there were several kingdoms, since upon the
death of a Merovingian monarch his realm was divided among his sons. But
no true son of the house could leave the others unconquered or unmurdered;
and therefore if the Merovingian kingdom constantly was divided, it also
tended to coalesce again, coerced to unity. Constituted both of Roman and
Teutonic elements, it operated as a mediating power between Latin
Christendom and barbaric heathendom. Its energies were great, and were not
waning when its royal house was passing into insignificance before the
power of the nobles and the chief personage among them who had become the
_major domus_ (“Mayor of the palace”) and virtual ruler. Moreover,
experience, contact with Latin civilization, membership in the Roman
Catholic Church, were informing the Merovingian energies. They were
becoming just a little less barbarous and a little more instructed; in
fine, were changing from Merovingian to Carolingian.

In the latter part of the seventh century, Pippin, called “of Heristal,”
ruled as _major domus_ (as one or more of his ancestors before him) in
Austrasia, the eastern Frankish kingdom. Many were his wars, especially
with the Neustrian or western Frankish kingdom, under its _major domus_,
Ebroin. This somewhat unconquerable man at last was murdered, and one of
the two Merovingian kings being murdered likewise, Pippin about the year
688 became _princeps regiminis ac major domus_ for the now united realm.
From this date the Merovingians are but shadow kings, whose names are not
worth recording. Pippin’s rule marks the advent of his house to virtual
sovereignty, and also the passing of the preponderance of power from
Neustria to Austrasia. These two facts became clear after Pippin’s death
(714), when his redoubtable son Charles in a five years’ struggle against
great odds made himself sole _major domus_, and with his Austrasians
overwhelmed the Neustrian army. Thenceforth this Charles, called Martell
the Hammer, mightily prevailed, smiting Saxons, Bavarians, and Alemanni,
and, after much warfare in the south with Saracens, at last vindicated the
Cross against the Crescent at Tours in 732. Nine years longer he was to
reign, increasing his power to the end, and supporting the establishment
of Catholicism in Frisia, by the Anglo-Saxon Willibrord, and in heathen
German lands by St. Boniface.[239] He died in 741, dividing what virtually
was his realm between his sons Carloman and Pippin: the former receiving
Austrasia, Alemannia, Thuringia; the latter, Neustria, Burgundy, Provence.

These two sons valiantly took up their task, reforming the Church under
the inspiration of Boniface, and ruling their domains without conflict
with each other until 747, when Carloman retired and became a monk,
leaving the entire realm to Pippin. The latter in 751 at Soissons, with
universal approval and the consent of the Pope, was crowned king, and
anointed by the hand of Boniface. This able and energetic sovereign
pursued the course of his father and grandfather, but on still larger
scale; aiding the popes and reducing the Lombard power in Italy, carrying
on wars around the borders of his realm, bringing Aquitania to full
submission, and expelling the Saracens from Narbonne and other fortress
towns. In 768 he died, again dividing his vast realm between his two sons
Carloman and Charles.

These bore each other little love; but fortunately the former died (771)
before an open breach occurred. So Charles was left to rule alone, and
prove himself, all things considered, the greatest of mediaeval
sovereigns. Having fought his many wars of conquest and subjugation
against Saracens, Saxons, Avars, Bavarians, Slavs, Danes, Lombards; having
conquered much of Italy and freed the Pope from neighbouring domination;
having been crowned and anointed emperor in the year 800; having restored
letters, uplifted the Church, issued much wise legislation, and
Christianized with iron hand the stubborn heathen; and above all, having
administered his vast realm with never-failing energy, he died in
814--just one hundred years after the time when his grandfather Charles
was left to fight so doughtily for life and power.

Poetry and history have conspired to raise the fame of Charlemagne. In
more than one _chanson de geste_, the old French _épopée_ has put his name
where that of Pippin, Charles Martell, or perhaps that of some Merovingian
should have been.[240] Sober history has not thus falsified its matter,
and yet has over-dramatized the incidents of its hero’s reign. For
example, every schoolboy has been told of the embassy to Charlemagne from
Harun al Raschid, Caliph of Bagdad. But not so many schoolboys know that
Pippin had sent an embassy to a previous caliph, which was courteously
entertained for three years in Bagdad;[241] and Pippin, like his son,
received embassies from the Greek emperor. The careers of Charles Martell
and Pippin have not been ignored; and yet historical convention has
focused its attention and its phrases upon “the age of Charlemagne.” One
should not forget that this exceedingly great man stood upon the shoulders
of the great men to whose achievement he succeeded.

Neither politically, socially, intellectually, nor geographically[242] was
there discontinuity or break or sudden change between the Merovingian and
the Carolingian periods.[243] The character of the monarchy was scarcely
affected by the substitution of the house of Pippin of Heristal for the
house of Clovis. The baleful custom of dividing the realm upon a monarch’s
death survived; but Fortune rendered it innocuous through one strong
century, during which (719-814) the realm was free from internecine war,
while the tossing streams of humanity were driven onward by three great
successive rulers.

The Carolingian, like the Merovingian, realm included many different
peoples who were destined never to become one nation; and the whole
Carolingian system of government virtually had existed in the Merovingian
period. Before, as well as after, the dynastic change, the government
throughout the realm was administered by _Counts_. Likewise the famous
_missi dominici_, or royal legates, are found in Merovingian times; but
they were employed more effectively by Charles Martell, Pippin, and,
finally, by Charlemagne, who enlarged their sphere of action. He
elaborately defined their functions in a famous Capitulary of the year
802. It was set forth that the emperor had chosen these legates from among
his best and greatest (_ex optimatibus suis_), and had authorized them to
receive the new oaths of allegiance, and supervise the observance of the
laws, the execution of justice, the maintenance of the military and fiscal
rights of the emperor. They were given power to see that the permanent
functionaries (the counts and their subordinates) duly administered the
law as written or recognized. The _missi_ had jurisdiction over
ecclesiastical as well as lay officials; and many of them were entrusted
with special powers and duties in the particular instance.

Thus Charlemagne developed the functions of these ancient officers.
Likewise his Court and royal council, the synods and assemblies of his
reign, the military service, modes of holding land, methods of collecting
revenue, were not greatly changed from Merovingian prototypes. Yet the old
institutions had been renewed and bettered. A vast misjoined and unrelated
realm was galvanized into temporary unity. And, most impressive and
portentous thing of all, an _Empire_--the _Holy_ Roman Empire--was
resurrected for a time in fact and verity: the same was destined to endure
in endeavour and contemplation.

So there was no break politically or socially between the Carolingian
Empire and its antecedents, which had made it possible. Likewise there was
no discontinuity spiritually and intellectually between the earlier time
and that epoch which begins with Charlemagne’s first endeavours to restore
knowledge, and extends through the ninth and, if one will, even the tenth
century.[244] Western Europe (except Scandinavia) had become nominally
Christian, and had been made acquainted with Latin education to the extent
indicated in the preceding chapter, the purpose of which was to tell how
Christianity and the antique culture were brought to the northern peoples.
The present chapter, on the other hand, seeks to describe how the eighth
and ninth centuries proceeded to learn and consider and react upon this
newly introduced Christianity and antique culture, out of which the
spiritual destinies of the Middle Ages were to be forged. The task of
Carolingian scholars was to learn what had been brought to them. They
scarcely excelled even the later intermediaries through whom this
knowledge had been transmitted. One need not look among them for better
scholarship than was possessed by Bede, who died in 735, the birth year of
Alcuin who drew so much from him, and was to be the chief luminary of the
palace school of Charlemagne. Undoubtedly, Charlemagne’s exertions caused
a revival of sacred and profane studies through the region of the present
France and Rhenish Germany. His primary motive was the purification and
extension of Catholic Christianity. Here Charles Martell and Pippin (with
his brother Carloman) had done much, as their support of Boniface bears
witness to. But Charlemagne’s efforts went beyond those of his
predecessors. More clearly than they he understood the need of education,
and he was himself intensely interested in knowledge. Hence his
endeavours, primarily to uplift the Faith, brought a revival of learning
and a literary productivity, consisting mostly in reproduction or
rearrangement of old material, doctrinal or profane.[245]

Another preliminary consideration may help us to appreciate the
intellectual qualities of the period before us. Charlemagne was primarily
a ruler in the largest sense, conqueror, statesman, law-giver, one who
realized the needs of the time, and met or forestalled them. His monarchy,
with its powers inherited, as well as radiating from his own personality,
provided an imperial government for western Europe. The chief activities
of this ruler and his epoch were practical, to wit, political and
military. In laws, in institutions, and in deeds, he and his Empire
represent creativeness and progress; although, to be sure, that
conglomerate empire of his had itself to fall in pieces before there could
take place a more lasting and national evolution of States. And, of
course, Carolingian political creativeness included the conservation of
existing social, political, and, above all, ecclesiastical, institutions.
In fine, this period was creative and progressive in its practical
energies. The factors were the pressing needs and palpable opportunities,
which were met or availed of. And to the same effective treatment of
problems ecclesiastical and doctrinal was due the modicum of originality
in the Carolingian literature. Aside from this, the period’s intellectual
accomplishment, in religious as well as secular studies, shows merely a
diligent learning and imitation of pagan letters, and a rehandling and
arrangement of the work of the Church Fathers and their immediate
successors. Its efforts were exhausted in rearranging the heritage of
Christian teaching coming from the Church Fathers, or in endeavours to
acquire the transmitted antique culture and imitate the antique in phrase
and metre. The combined task, or occupation, absorbed the minds of men.
The whole period was at school, where it needed to be: at school to the
Church Fathers, at school to the transmitters of antique culture. Its task
was one of adjustment of its materials to itself, and of itself to its
materials.

The reinvigoration of studies marking the life-time of Charlemagne did not
extend to Italy, where letters, although decayed, had never ceased, nor to
Anglo-Saxon England, where Bede had taught and whence Alcuin had come. The
revival radiated, one may say, from the palace school attached to the
Court, which had its least intermittent domicile at Aix-la-Chapelle. It
extended to the chief monastic centres of Gaul and Germany, and to
cathedral schools where such existed. From many lands scholars were drawn
by that great hand so generous in giving, so mighty to protect. Some came
on invitation more or less compelling, and many of their own free will.
The first and most famous of them all was the Anglo-Saxon, Alcuin of York.
Charles first saw him at Parma in the year 781, and ever after kept him in
his service as his most trusted teacher and director of studies. Love of
home drew Alcuin back, once at least, to England. In 796 Charles permitted
him to leave the Court, and entrusted him with the re-establishment of the
Abbey of St. Martin at Tours and its schools. There he lived and laboured
till his death in 804.

Another scholar was Peter of Pisa, a grammarian, who seems to have shared
with Alcuin the honourable task of instructing the king. Of greater note
was Paulus Diaconus, who, like Alcuin himself, was to sigh for the pious
or scholarly quiet which the seething, half-barbarous, and loose-mannered
Court did not afford. Paulus at last gained Charles’s consent to retire
to Monte Cassino. He was of the Lombard race, like another favourite of
Charles, Paulinus of Aquileia. From Spain, apparently, came Theodulphus,
by descent a Goth, and reputed the most elegant Latin versifier of his
time. Charles made him Bishop of Orleans. A little later, Einhart the
Frank appears, who was to be the emperor’s secretary and biographer.
Likewise came certain sons of Erin, among them such a problematic poet as
he who styled himself “Hibernicus Exul”--not the first or last of his
line!

These belonged to the generation about the emperor. Belonging to the next
generation, and for the most part pupils of the older men, were Abbot
Smaragdus, grammarian and didactic writer; the German, Rabanus Maurus,
Abbot of Fulda and, against his will, Archbishop of Mainz, an
encyclopaedic excerpter and educator, _primus praeceptor Germaniae_; his
pupil was Walafrid Strabo, the cleverest putter-together of the excerpt
commentary, and a pleasing poet. In Lorraine at the same time flourished
the Irishman, Sedulius Scotus, and in the West that ardent classical
scholar, Servatus Lupus, Abbot of Ferrières, and Agobard, Bishop of Lyons,
a man practical and hard-headed, with whom one may couple Claudius, Bishop
of Turin, the opponent of relic-worship. One might also mention those
theological controversialists, Radbertus Paschasius and Ratramnus,
Hincmar, the great Archbishop of Rheims, and Gottschalk, the unhappy monk,
ever recalcitrant; at the end John Scotus Eriugena should stand, the
somewhat too intellectual Neo-Platonic Irishman, translator of
Pseudo-Dionysius, and announcer of various rationalizing propositions for
which men were to look on him askance.

There will be occasion to speak more particularly of a number of these
men. They were all scholars, and interested in the maintenance of
elementary Latin education as well as in theology. They wished to write
good Latin, and sometimes tried for a classical standard, as Einhart did
in his _Vita Caroli_. Few of them refrained from verse, for they were
addicted to metrical compositions made of borrowed classic phrase and
often of reflected classic sentiment, sometimes prettily composed, but
usually insipid, and in the mass, which was great, exceptionally
uninspired. Such metrical effort, quite as much as Einhart’s consciously
classicizing Latin prose, represents a survival of the antique excited to
recrudescence in forms which, if they were not classical, at least had not
become anything else. Stylistically, and perhaps temperamentally, it
represented the ending of what had nearly passed away, rather than the
beginning of the more organic development which was to come.[246]

Among these men, Alcuin and Rabanus broadly represent at once the
intellectual interests of the period and the first stage in the process of
the mediaeval appropriation of the patristic and antique material. The
affectionate and sympathetic personality of the former[247] appears
throughout his voluminous correspondence with Charles and others, which
shows, among other matters, the interest of the time in elementary points
of Latinity, and the alertness of the mind of the great king, who put so
many questions to his genial instructor upon grammar, astronomy, and such
like knowledge. An examination of the works of Alcuin will indicate the
range and character of the educational and more usual intellectual
interests of the epoch. In fact, they are outlined in a simple fashion
suited to youthful minds in his treatise upon Grammar.[248] Its opening
colloquy presents a sort of programme and justification of elementary
secular studies.

“We have heard you saying,” begins Discipulus, “that philosophy is the
teacher (_magistra_) of all virtues, and that she alone of secular riches
has never left the possessor miserable. Lend a hand, good Master,”--and
the pupil becomes self-deprecatory. “Flint has fire within, which comes
out only when struck; so the light of knowledge exists by nature in human
minds, but a teacher is needed to knock it out.”

“It is easy,” responds the Master, “to show you wisdom’s path, if only you
will pursue it for the sake of God, for the sake of the soul’s purity and
to learn the truth, and also for its own sake, and not for human praise
and honour.”

We confess, answers little Discipulus, that we love happiness, but know
not whether it can exist in this world. And the dialogue rambles on in
discursive comment upon the superiority of the lasting over the
transitory, with some feeble echoing of notes from Boëthius’s _De
consolatione_. There is talk to show that man, a rational animal, the
image of his Creator, and immortal in his better part, should seek what is
truly of himself, and not what is alien, the abiding and not the fugitive.
In fine, one should adorn the soul, which is eternal, with wisdom, the
soul’s true lasting dignity. There is some coy demurring over the
steepness of the way; but the pupil is ardent, and the Master confident
that with the aid of Divine Grace they will ascend the seven grades of
philosophy, by which philosophers have gained honour brighter than that of
kings, and the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith have
triumphed over all heresiarchs. “Through these paths, dearest son, let
your youth run its daily course, until its completed years and
strengthened mind shall attain to the heights of the Holy Scriptures upon
which you and your like shall become armed defenders of the Faith and
invincible assertors of its truth.” This means, of course, that the
Liberal Arts are the proper preparation for the study of Scripture, that
is, theology. But Alcuin’s discourse seems to tarry with those studies as
if detained by some love of them for their own sake.

The body of this treatise is in form a disputation between two youthful
pupils, a Frank and a Saxon. A _Magister_ makes a third interlocutor, and
sets the subject of the argument. These _personae_ discuss letters and
syllables in definitions taken from Donatus, Priscian, or Isidore; and
whenever Alcuin permits any one of them to stray from the words of those
authorities, the language shows at once his own confused ideas regarding
the parts of speech. He uses terms without adequately comprehending them,
and thus affords one of the myriad examples of how, under decadent or
barbarized conditions, phrases may outlive an intelligent understanding of
their meaning. “Grammar,” says the _Magister_, when solicited to define
it, “is the science of letters, and the guardian of correct speech and
writing. It rests on nature, reason, authority, and custom.” “In how many
species is it divided?” “In twenty-six: words, letters, syllables,
clauses, dictions, speeches, definitions, feet, accent, punctuation,
signs, spelling, analogies, etymologies, glosses, differences, barbarism,
solecism, faults, metaplasm, schemata, tropes, prose, metre, fables and
histories.”[249] The actual treatise does not cover these twenty-six
topics, but confines itself to the division of grammar commonly called
Etymology.

Though the mental processes of an individual preserve a working harmony,
some of them appear more rational than others. Such disparities may be
glaring in men who enter upon the learning of a higher civilization
without proper pilotage. How are they to discriminate between the valuable
and the foolish? The common sense, which they apply to familiar matters,
contrasts with their childlike lucubrations upon novel topics of education
or philosophy. And if that higher culture to which such pupils are
introduced be in part decadent, it will itself contain disparities between
the stronger thinking held in the surviving writings of a prior time and
the later degeneracies which are declining to the level, it may be, of
these new learners.

There would naturally be disparities in the mental processes of an
Anglo-Saxon like Alcuin introduced to the debris of Latin education and
the writings of the Fathers; and his state would typify the character of
the studies at the palace school of Charlemagne and at monastic schools
through his northern realm. This newly stimulated scholarship held the
same disparities that appear in the writings of Alcuin. He may seem to be
adapting his teaching to barbaric needs, but it is evident that his matter
accords with his own intellectual tastes, as, for example, when he
introduces into his educational writings the habit of riddling in
metaphors, so dear to the Anglo-Saxon.[250] The sound but very elementary
portions of his teaching were needed by the ignorance of his scholars. For
instance, no information regarding Latin orthography could come amiss in
the eighth century. And Alcuin in his treatise on that subject[251] took
many words commonly misspelled and contrasted them with those which
sounded like them, but were quite different in meaning and derivation. One
should not, for example, confuse _habeo_ with _abeo_; or _bibo_ and
_vivo_. Such warnings were valuable. The use of the vulgar Romance-forms
of Latin spoken through a large part of Charles’s dominions implied no
knowledge of correct Latinity. Even among the clergy, there was almost
universal ignorance of Latin orthography and grammar.

As a companion to his _Grammar_ and _Orthography_, Alcuin composed a _De
rhetorica et virtutibus_,[252] in the form of a dialogue between Charles
and himself. The king desired such instruction to equip him for the civil
disputes (_civiles quaestiones_) which were brought before him from all
parts of his realm. And Alcuin proceeded to furnish him with a compend of
the _scientia bene dicendi_, which is Rhetoric. This crude epitome was
based chiefly on Cicero’s _De inventione_, but indicates a use of other of
his oratorical writings, and has bits here and there which apparently have
filtered through from the _Rhetoric_ of Aristotle. Some illustrations are
taken from Scripture. The work is most successful in showing the
difference between Cicero and Alcuin. The genius, the spirit, the art of
the great orator’s treatises are lost; a naked skeleton of statement
remains. We have words, terms, definitions, even rules; and Alcuin is not
conscious that beyond them there is the living spirit of discourse.

A more complete descent from substance to a clatter of words and
definitions is exhibited by Alcuin’s _De dialectica_.[253] In logical
studies _facilis descensus_! Others had illustrated this before him. His
treatise is again a dialogue, with Charlemagne for questioner. Opening
with the stock definitions and divisions of philosophy, it arrives at
logic, which is composed (as Isidore and Cassiodorus said) of dialectic
and rhetoric, “the shut and open fist,” a simile which had come down from
Varro. Says Charles: “What are the _species_ of dialectic?” Answers
Alcuin: “Five principal ones: Isagogae, categories, forms of syllogisms
and definitions, topics, periermeniae.” What a classification!
Introductions, categories, syllogisms, topics, _De interpretatione_-s! It
is not a classification but in reality an enumeration of the treatises
which had served as sources for those men from whom Alcuin drew! Evidently
this excerpter is not really thinking in the terms and categories of his
subject. His work shows no intelligence beyond Isidore’s, from whose
_Etymologies_ it is largely taken. And the genius of our author for
metaphysics may be perceived from the definition which he offers Charles
of substance--_substantia_ or _usia_ (_i.e._ οὐσία): it is that which is
discerned by corporeal sense; while _accidens_ is that which changes
frequently and is apprehended by the mind. _Substantia_ is the underlying,
the _subjacens_, in which the _accidentia_ are said to be.[254] One
observes the crassness and inconsistency of these statements.

There are illustrations of the knowledge and methods shown in the
educational writings of the man who, next to Charles himself, was the
guiding spirit of the intellectual revival. No mention has been made of
those of his works that were representative of the chief intellectual
labour of the period--that of exploiting the Patristic material. Here
Alcuin contributed a compend of Augustine’s doctrines on the Trinity,[255]
and a book on the Vices and Virtues, drawn chiefly from Augustine’s
sermons.[256] Like most of his learned contemporaries, he also compiled
Commentaries upon Scripture, the method of which is prettily told in a
prefatory epistle placed by him before his Commentary on the Gospel of
John, and addressed to two pious women:

    “Devoutly searching the pantries of the holy Fathers, I let you taste
    whatever I have been able to find in them. Nor did I deem it fitting
    to cull the blossoms from any meadow of my own, but with humble heart
    and head bowed low, to search through the flowering fields of many
    Fathers, and thus safely satisfy your pious pleasure. First of all I
    seek the suffrage of Saint Augustine, who laboured with such zeal upon
    this Gospel; then I draw something from the tracts of the most holy
    doctor Saint Ambrose; nor have I neglected the homilies of Father
    Gregory the pope, or those of the blessed Bede, nor, in fact, the
    works of others of the holy Fathers. I have cited their
    interpretations, as I found them, preferring to use their meanings and
    their words, than trust to my own presumption.”[257]

In the next generation, a most industrious compiler of such Commentaries
was Alcuin’s pupil, Rabanus Maurus.[258] More deeply learned than his
master, his conception of the purposes of study has not changed
essentially. Like Alcuin, he sets forth a proper intellectual programme
for the instruction of the clergy: “The foundation, the state, and the
perfection, of wisdom is knowledge of the Holy Scriptures.” The Seven Arts
are the ancillary _disciplinae_; the first three constitute that
grammatical, rhetorical, and logical training which is needed for an
understanding of the holy texts and their interpretation. Likewise
arithmetic and the rest of the quadrivium have place in the cleric’s
education. A knowledge of pagan philosophy need not be avoided: “The
philosophers, especially the Platonists, if perchance they have spoken
truths accordant with our faith, are not to be shunned, but their truths
appropriated, as from unjust possessors.”[259] And Rabanus continues with
the never-failing metaphor of Moses despoiling the Egyptians.

Raban, however, had somewhat larger thoughts of education than his master.
For example, he takes a broader view of grammar, which he regards as the
_scientia_ of interpreting the poets and historians, and the _ratio_ of
correct speech and writing.[260] Likewise he treats _Dialectica_ more
seriously. With him it is the “_disciplina_ of rational investigation, of
defining and discussing, and distinguishing the true from the false. It is
therefore the _disciplina disciplinarum_. It teaches how to teach and how
to learn; in this same study, reason itself demonstrates what it is and
what it wills. This art alone knows how to know, and is willing and able
to make knowers. Reasoning in it, we learn what we are, and whence, and
also to know Creator and creature; through it we trace truth and detect
falsity, we argue and discover what is consequent and what inconsequent,
what is contrary to the nature of things, what is true, what is probable,
and what is intrinsically false in disputations. Wherefore the clergy
ought to know this noble art, and have its laws in constant meditation, so
that subtly they may discern the wiles of heretics, and confute their
poisoned sayings with the conclusions of the syllogism.”[261]

This somewhat extravagant but not novel view of logic’s function was
prophetic of the coming scholastic reliance upon it as the means and
instrument of truth. Rabanus had no hesitancy in commending this edged
tool to his pupils. But the operations of his mind were predominantly
Carolingian, which is to say that ninety-nine per cent of the contents of
his _opera_ consist of material extracted from prior writers. His
Commentaries upon Scripture outbulk all his other works taken together,
and are compiled in this manner. So is his encyclopaedic compilation, _De
universo libri XXII._,[262] two books more than those of Isidore’s
_Etymologies_, from which he chiefly drew; but he changed the arrangement,
and devoted a larger part of his parchment to religious topics; and he
added further matter gleaned from the Church Fathers, from whom he had
drawn his Commentaries. This further matter consisted of the mystical
interpretations of things, which he subjoined to their “natural”
explanations. He says, in his Praefatio, addressed to King Louis:

    “Much is set forth in this work concerning the natures of things and
    the meanings of words, and also as to the mystical signification of
    things. Accordingly I have arranged my matter so that the reader may
    find the historical and mystical explanations of each thing set
    together--_continuatim positam_; and may be able to satisfy his desire
    to know both significations.”

These allegorical elaborations accorded with the habits of this compiler
of allegorical comment upon Scripture.[263]

Rabanus was a full Teutonic personality, a massive scholar for his time,
untiring in labour and intrinsically honest. Except when involved in the
foolishness of the mystic qualities of numbers, or following the
will-o’-wisps of allegory, he evinces much sound wisdom. He abhors the
pretence of teaching what one has not first diligently learned; and his
good sense is shown in his admonition to teachers to use words which their
pupils or audience will understand. His views upon profane knowledge were
liberal: one should use the treasured experience and accumulated wisdom of
the ancients, for that is still the mainstay of human society; but one
should shun their vain as well as pernicious idolatries and
superstitions.[264] Let us by all means preserve their sound educational
learning and the elements of their philosophy which accord with the
verities of Christian doctrine. Raban also realized the sublimity of the
study of Astronomy, which he deemed “a worthy argument for the religious
and a torment for the curious. If pursued with chaste and sober mind, it
floods our thoughts with immense love. How admirable to mount the heavens
in spirit, and with inquiring reason consider that whole celestial fabric,
and from every side gather in the mind’s reflective heights what those
vast recesses veil.”[265] He then rebukes the folly of those who vainly
would draw auguries from the stars.[266]

Raban’s mental activities were commonly constrained by the need felt by
him and his pious contemporaries to master the works of the Latin Fathers.
Perhaps more than any other one man (though here his pupil Walafrid Strabo
made a skilful second) he contributed to what necessarily was the first
stage in this mediaeval achievement of appropriating patristic
Christianity, to wit, the preliminary task of rearranging the doctrinal
expositions of the Fathers conveniently, and for the most part in
Commentaries following verse and chapter of the canonical books of
Scripture. But, like many of his contemporaries, Raban, when compelled by
controversial exigencies, would think for himself if the situation could
not be met with matter taken from a Father. Accordingly, individual and
personal views are vigorously put in some of his writings, as in his
_Liber de oblatione puerorum_,[267] directed against the attempt of the
interesting Saxon, Gottschalk, to free himself from the vows made by those
who dedicated him in boyhood as an _oblatus_ at the monastery of Fulda, of
which Raban was abbot. Raban’s tract maintained that the monastic vows
made upon such dedication of children could not be broken by the latter on
reaching years of discretion.

This same Gottschalk was the centre of the storm, which he indeed blew up,
over Predestination; and again Raban was his fierce opponent. This
controversy, with that relating to the Eucharist, will serve to illustrate
the doctrinal interests of the time, and also to exemplify the
quasi-originality of its controversial productions.

Of course Predestination and the Eucharist had been exhaustively discussed
by the Latin Fathers. No man of the ninth century could really add
anything to the arguments touching the former set forth in the works of
Augustine and his Pelagian adversaries. And the substance of the
discussion as to the eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ had permeated
countless tomes, both Greek and Latin, from the time of Irenaeus, Bishop
of Lyons (d. 202); and yet neither as to the impossible topic of
Predestination, nor as to the distinctly Christian mystery of the
Eucharist, had the Latin Church authoritatively and finally fixed doctrine
in dogma or put together the arguments. The ninth century with its lack of
elastic thinking, and its greater need of tangible authority, was
compelled by its mental limitations to attempt in each of these matters to
drag a definite conclusion from out of its entourage of argument, and
strip it of its decently veiling obscurities. Thereupon, and with its
justifying and balanced foundation of reasons and considerations knocked
from under, the conclusion had to sustain itself in mid air, just at the
level of the common eye.

Such, obviously, was the result of the Eucharistic or Paschal controversy.
The symbol, all indecision brushed away, hardened into the tangible
miraculous reality. Radbertus, Abbot of Corbie, who was so rightly named
Paschasius, was the chief agent in the process. His method of procedure,
just as the result which he obtained, was what the time required. The
method was almost a bit of creation in itself: he put the matter in a
separate monograph, _De corpore et sanguine Domini_,[268] the first work
exclusively devoted to the subject. This was needed as a matter of
arrangement and presentation. Men could not endure to look here and
thither among many books on many subjects, for arguments one way and the
other. That was too distraught. There was call for a compendium, a manual
of the matter; and in providing it Paschasius was a master mechanic for
his time. Inevitably the discussion and the conclusion took on a new
definiteness. It is impossible to glean and gather arguments and matter
from all sides, and bring them together into a single composition, without
making the thesis more organic, tangible, definite. Thus Paschasius
presented the scattered, wavering discussion--the victorious side of
it--as a clear dogma reached at last. And whatever qualification of
counter-doctrine there was in his grouped arguments, there was none in the
conclusion; and the definite conclusion was what men wanted.

And practically for the whole western Church, clergy and laity, the
conclusion was but one, and accorded with what was already the current
acceptance of the matter. Radbert’s arguments embraced the spiritual
realism of Augustine, according to which the ultra reality of the
eucharistic elements consisted in the _virtus sacramenti_, that is in
their miraculous and real, but invisible, transformation into the
veritable substance of Christ’s veritable body. This took place through
priestly consecration, and existed only for believers. For the brute to
eat the elements was nothing more than to consume other similar natural
substances. For the misbeliever it was not so simple. He indeed ate not
Christ’s body, but his own _judicium_, his own deeper damnation. Here lay
the terror, which made more anxious, more poignant, the believer’s hope,
that he was faithful and humbled, and was eating the veritable Christ-body
to his sure salvation. For the Eucharist could not fail, though the
partaker might.

Out of all of this emerged the one clear thing, the point, the practical
conclusion, which was transubstantiation, though the word was not yet
made. Here it is in Paschasius; says he: “That body and blood veritably
come into existence (_fiat_) by the consecration of the Mystery, no one
doubts who believes the divine words; hence Truth says, ‘For my flesh
verily is food, and my blood verily is drink’ (John vi. 55). And that it
should be clearer to the disciples who did not rightly understand of what
flesh He spoke, or of what blood, He added, to make this plain, ‘Whoso
eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me and I in him’
(_ibid._ 56). Therefore, if it is veritably food, it is veritable flesh;
and if it is veritably drink, it also is veritable blood. Otherwise how
could He have said, ‘The bread which I will give is my flesh for the life
of the world’ (_ibid._ 52)?”

Could anything be more positive and simplified? At first sight it is a
marvel how Paschasius, even though treading in the steps of so many who
had gone before, could give a literal interpretation to words which
Christ seems to have used as figuratively as when He said, “I am the vine,
ye are the branches.” A marvel indeed, when we think that Paschasius and
all of his generation, as well as those who went before, had abandoned
themselves to the most wonderful and far-fetched allegorical
interpretations of every historical and literal statement in the
Scriptures. And this same Paschasius, and all the rest too, do not
hesitate to interpret and explain by allegory the significance of every
accompanying act and circumstance of the mass. This might seem the climax
of the marvel, but it is a step toward explaining it. For the literal
interpretation of the phrases which Paschasius quotes was followed for the
sake of the more absolute miracle, the deeper mystery, the fuller
florescence of encompassing allegorical meaning. Only thus could be
brought about the transformation of the palpable symbol into the
miraculous reality; and only _then_ could that bread and wine be what
Cyril of Alexandria and others, five hundred years before Paschasius, had
called it: “the drug of immortality.” Only through the miraculous and real
identity of the elements of the Eucharist with the body and blood of
Christ could they save the souls of the partakers.

In partial disagreement with these hard and fast conclusions, Ratramnus,
also of Corbie,[269] and others might still try to veil the matter, with
utterances capable of more equivocal meaning; might try to make it all
more dim, and therefore more possibly reasonable. That was not what the
Carolingian time, or the centuries to come, wanted; but rather the
definite tangible statement, which they could grasp as readily as they
could see and touch the elements before their eyes. In disenveloping the
question and conclusion from every wavering consideration and veiling
ambiguity, the Carolingian period was creative in this Paschal
controversy. New propositions were not devised; but the old, such of them
as fitted, were put together and given the unity and force of a
projectile.

It was the same and yet different with the Predestination strife.
Gottschalk, who raised the storm, stated doctrines of Augustine. But he
set them out naked and alone, with nothing else as counterpoise, as
Augustine had not done. Thus to draw a single doctrine out from the
totality of a man’s work and the demonstrative suggestiveness of all the
rest of his teachings, whether that man be Paul or Augustine, is to
present it so as to make it something else. For thereby it is left naked
and alone, and unadjusted with the connected and mitigating considerations
yielded by the rest of the man’s opinions. Such a procedure is a garbling,
at least in spirit. It is almost like quoting the first half of a sentence
and leaving off everything following the author’s “but” in the middle of
it.

At all events the hard and fast, complete and twin (_gemina_), divine
predestination, unto hell as well as heaven, was too unmitigated for the
Carolingian Church. This doctrine, and his own intractible temper, immured
the unhappy announcer of it in a monastic dungeon till he died. It was
monstrous, as monstrous as transubstantiation, for example! But
transubstantiation saved; and while the Church could stand the doctrine of
the election of the Elect to salvation, it revolted from the
counter-inference, of the election of the damned to hell, which
contradicted too drastically the sweet and lovely teaching that Christ
died for all. The theologians of one and more generations were drawn into
the strife, which was to have a less definitive result than the Paschal
controversy. Even to-day the adjustment of human free-will with omnipotent
foreknowledge has not been made quite clear.[270]

There was one man who was drawn into the Predestination strife, although
for him it lacked cardinal import. For the Neo-Platonic principles of John
Scotus Eriugena scarcely permitted him to see in evil more than
non-existence, and led him to trace all phases of reality downward from
the primal Source. His intellectual attitude, interests, and faculties
were exceptional, and yet nevertheless partook of the characteristics of
his time, out of which not even an Eriugena could lift himself. He was an
Irishman, who came to the Court of Charles the Bald on invitation, and
for many years, until his orthodoxy became too suspect, was the head of
the palace school. He may have died about the year 877.

Eriugena was in the first place a man of learning, widely read in the
works of the Greek Fathers. From the _Celestial Hierarchy_ of
Pseudo-Dionysius and other sources, he had absorbed huge draughts of
Neo-Platonism. One must not think of him always as an original thinker. A
large part of his literary labours correspond with those of
contemporaries. He was a translator of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, for
he knew Greek. Then he composed or compiled Commentaries upon those
writings. He cared supremely for the fruits of those faculties with which
he was pre-eminently endowed. He, the man of acquisitive powers, loved
learning; and he, the man with a faculty of constructive reason, loved
rational truth and the labour of its systematic and syllogistic
presentation. He ascribed primal validity to what was true by force of
logic, and in his soul set reason above authority. Certain of his
contemporaries, with a discernment springing from repugnance, perceived
his self-reliant intellectual mood. The same ground underlay their
detestation, which centuries after underlay St. Bernard’s, for Abaelard.
That Abaelard should deem himself to be something! here was the root of
the saint’s abhorrence. And, similarly, good Deacon Florus of Lyons wrote
a vituperative polemic quite as much against the man Eriugena as against
his detestable views of Predestination. Eriugena, forsooth, would be
disputing with human argument, which he draws from philosophy, and for
which he would be accountable to none. He proffers no authority from the
Fathers, “as if daring to define with his own presumption what should be
held and followed.”[271] Such was not the way that Carolingian Churchmen
liked to argue, but rather with attested sentences from Augustine or
Gregory. Manifestly Eriugena was not one of them.

Had his works been earlier understood, they would have been earlier
condemned. But people did not realize what sort of Neo-Platonic,
pantheistic and emanational, principles this Irishman from over the sea
was setting forth. St. Denis, the great saint who was becoming St. Denis
of France, had been authoritatively (and most preposterously) identified
with Dionysius the Areopagite who heard Paul preach, and, according to the
growing legend, won a martyr’s crown not far from Paris. This was set
forth in his Life by Abbot Hilduin;[272] this was confirmed by Hincmar,
the great Archbishop of Rheims, who said, closing his discussion of the
matter: “veritas saepius agitata magis splendescit in lucem!”[273]
Eriugena seemed to be a translator of his holy writings, and might be
regarded as a setter forth of his exceptionally resplendent truths. He
could use the Fathers’ language too. So in his book on Predestination he
quotes Augustine as saying, Philosophy, which is the study of wisdom, is
not other than religion.[274] But he was not going to keep meaning what
Augustine meant. He slowly extends his talons in the following sentences
which do _not_ stand at the _beginning_ of his great work _De divisione
naturae_.

Says the Magister, for the work is in dialogue form: “You are aware, I
suppose, that what is prior by nature is of greater dignity than what is
prior in time.”

Answers Discipulus: “This is known to almost all.”

Continues Magister: “We learn that reason is prior by nature, but
authority prior in time. For although nature was created at the same
moment with time, authority did not begin with the beginning of time and
nature. But reason sprang with nature and time from the beginning of
things.”

Discipulus clenches the matter: “Reason itself teaches this. Authority
sometimes proceeds from reason; but reason never from authority. For all
authority which is not approved by true reason seems weak. But true
reason, since it is stablished in its own strength, needs to be
strengthened by the assent of no authority.”[275]

No doubt of the talons here! Reason superior to authority--is it not also
prior to faith? Eriugena does not press that reversal of the Christian
position. But his _De divisione naturae_ was a reasoned construction,
although of course the materials were not his own. It was no loosely
compiled encyclopaedia, such as Isidore or Bede or Rabanus would have
presented under such a title. It did not describe every object in nature
known to the writer; but it discussed Nature metaphysically, and presented
its lengthy exposition as a long argument in linked syllogistic form. Yet
it respected its borrowed materials, and preserved their
characteristics--with the exception of Scripture, which Eriugena
recognized as supreme authority! That he interpreted figuratively of
course; so had every one else done. But he differed from other
commentators and from the Church Fathers, in degree if not in kind. For
his interpretation was a systematic moulding of Scriptural phrase to suit
his system. He transformed the meaning with as clear a purpose as once
Philo of Alexandria had done. The pre-Christian Jew changed the
Pentateuch--holding fast, of course, to its authority!--into a Platonic
philosophy; and so, likewise by figurative interpretations, Eriugena
turned Scripture into a semi-Christianized Neo-Platonic scheme.[276] The
logical nature of the man was strong within him, so strong, indeed, that
in its working it could not but present all topics as component parts of a
syllogistic and systematized philosophy.[277] If he borrowed his
materials, he also made them his own with power. He appears as the one man
of his time that really could build with the material received from the
past.

Even beyond the range of such acute theological polemics as we have been
considering, the pressing exigencies of political or ecclesiastical
controversy might cause a capable man to think for himself even in the
ninth century. Such a man was Claudius, Bishop of Turin, the foe of image
and relic-worship, and of other superstitions too crass for one who was a
follower of Augustine.[278] And another such a one even more palpably was
Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons (d. 840), a brave and energetic man,
clear-seeing and enlightened, and incessantly occupied with questions of
living interest, to which his nature responded more quickly than to
theologic lore. Absorbed in the affairs of his diocese, of the Church at
large, and of the Empire, he expresses views which he has made his own.
Practical issues, operating upon his mind, evoked a personal originality
of treatment. His writings are clear illustrations of the originality
which actual issues aroused in the Carolingian epoch. They were directed
against common superstitions and degraded religious opinion, or against
the Jews whose aggressive prosperity in the south of France disturbed him;
or they were political. In fine, they were the fruit of the living issue.
For example, his so often-cited pamphlet, “Against the silly opinion of
the crowd as to hail and thunder,”[279] was doubtless called forth by the
intolerable conditions stated in the first sentence:

    “In these parts almost all men, noble and common, city folk and
    country folk, old and young, think that hail storms and thunder can be
    brought about at the pleasure of men. People say when they hear
    thunder and see lightning ‘_Aura levatitia est_.’ When asked what
    _aura levatitia_ may be, some are ashamed or conscience-stricken,
    while others, with the boldness of ignorance, assert that the air is
    raised (_levata_) by the incantations of men called Tempestarii, and
    so is called ‘raised air.’”

Agobard does not marshal physical explanations against this folly, but
texts of Scripture showing that God alone can raise and lay the storms.
Perhaps he thought such texts the best arguments for those who needed any.
The manner of the writing is reasonable, and the reader perceives that the
clear-headed archbishop, apart from his Scriptural arguments, deemed these
notions ridiculous, as well as harmful.[280]

In like spirit Agobard argued against trials by combat and ordeal.
Undoubtedly, God might thus announce His righteous judgment, but one
should not expect to elicit it in modes so opposed to justice and
Scripture; again, he cites many texts while also considering the matter
rationally.[281] On the other hand, his book against image-worship is made
up of extracts from Augustine and other Church authorities. There was no
call for originality here, when the subject seemed to have been so
exhaustively and authoritatively treated.[282]

One cannot follow Agobard so comfortably in his rancorous tracts against
the Jews. Doubtless this subject also presented itself to him as an
exigency requiring handling, and he was just in his contention that
heathen slaves belonging to Jews might be converted and baptized, and then
should not be given back to their former masters, but a money equivalent
be made instead. The question was important from its frequency. Yet one
would be loath to approve his arguments, unoriginal as they are. He gives
currency to the common slanders against the Jews, and then at great length
cites passages from the Church Fathers, to show in what detestation they
held that people. Then he sets forth the abominable opinions of the hated
race, and ransacks Scripture to prove that the Jews are therein
authoritatively and incontestably condemned.[283]

The years of Agobard’s maturity belong to the troubled time which came
with the accession of the incompetent Louis, in 814, to the throne of his
father Charlemagne. In the contentions and wars that followed, Agobard
proved himself an apt political partisan and writer. His political tracts,
notwithstanding their constant citation of Scripture, are his own, and
evince an originality evoked by the situation which they were written to
influence.

Something of the originality which the pressing political exigency
imparted to these tracts of Agobard might be transmitted to such history
as was occupied with contemporary events. As long as the historian was a
mere excerpting chronicler extracting his dry summaries from the writings
of former men, his work would not rouse him to independence of conception
or presentation. That would have come with criticism upon the old
authorities. But criticism had scarcely begun to murmur among the
Carolingians, too absorbed with the task of grasping their inherited
material to weigh it, and too overawed by the authority of the past to
question the truth of its transmitted statements. Excerpts, however, could
not be made to tell the stirring events of the period in which the
Carolingian historian lived. He would have to set forth his own perception
and understanding of them, and in manner and language which to a less or
greater extent were his own: to a less extent with those feebly beginning
Annals, or Year-books, which set down the occurrences of cloister life or
the larger happenings of which the report penetrated from the outer
world;[284] to a greater extent, however, with a more veritable history of
some topic of living and coherent interest. In the latter case the writer
must present his conception of events, and therewith something of
himself.[285]

An example of this necessitated originality in the writing of contemporary
history is the work of Count Nithard. He was the son of Charlemagne’s
daughter Bertha and of Angilbert, the emperor’s counsellor and lifelong
friend. His parents were not man and wife, because Charles would not let
his daughters marry, from reasons of policy; but the relationship between
them was open, and apparently approved by the lady’s sire. Angilbert
studied in the palace school with Charlemagne, and became himself a writer
of Latin verse. He was often his sovereign’s ambassador, and continued
active in affairs until his closing years, when he became the lay-abbot of
a rich monastery in Picardy, and received his emperor and virtual
father-in-law as his guest. He died the same year with Charles.

Like his father, Nithard was educated at the palace school, perhaps with
his cousin who was to become Charles the Bald. His loyalty continued
staunch to that king, whose tried confidant he became. He was a
diplomatist and a military leader in the wars following the death of Louis
the Pious; and he felt impelled to present from his side the story of the
strife among the sons of Louis, in “four books of histories” as they grew
to be.[286] Involved with his king in that same hurricane (_eodem
turbine_) he describes those stormy times which they were fighting out
together even while he was writing. This man of action could not but
present himself, his views, his temperament, in narrating the events he
moved in. Throughout, one perceives the pen of the participant, in this
case an honest partisan of his king, and the enemy of those whose conduct
had given the divided realm over to rapine. So the vigorous narrative of
this noble Frank partakes of the originality which inheres in the writings
of men of action when their literary faculty is sufficient to enable them
to put themselves into their compositions.

Engaged, as we have been, with the intellectual or scholarly interests of
the Carolingian period, we should not forget how slender in numbers were
the men who promoted them, and how few were the places where they throve.
There was the central group of open-minded laymen and Churchmen about the
palace school, or following the Court in its journeyings, which were far
and swift. Then there were monastic or episcopal centres of education as
at Tours, or Rheims, or Fulda. The scholars carried from the schools their
precious modicum of knowledge, and passed on through life as educated men
living in the world, or dwelt as learned compilers, reading in the
cloister. But scant were the rays of their enlightening influence amidst
that period’s vast encompassing ignorance.

To have classified the Carolingian intellectual interests according to
topics would have been misleading, since that would have introduced a
fictitious element of individual preference and aptitude, as if the
Carolingian scholar of his spontaneous volition occupied himself with
mathematical studies rather than grammar, or with astronomy rather than
theology. In general, all was a matter of reading and learning from such
books as Isidore’s _Origines_, which handled all topics indiscriminately,
or from Bede, or from the works of Augustine or Gregory, in which every
topic did but form part of the encyclopaedic presentation of the
relationship between the soul and God, and the soul’s way to salvation.

What then did these men care for? Naturally, first of all, for the
elements of their primary education, their studies in the Seven Arts. They
did what they might with Grammar and Rhetoric, and with Dialectic, which
sometimes was Rhetoric and formal Logic joined. Logic, for those who
studied it seriously, was beginning to form an important mental
discipline. The four branches of the quadrivium were pursued more
casually. Knowledge of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (one may
throw in medicine as a fifth) was as it might be in the individual
instance--always rudimentary, and usually rather less than more.

All of this, however, and it was not very much, was but the preparation,
if the man was to be earnest in his pursuit of wisdom. Wisdom lay chiefly
in Theology, to wit, the whole saving contents of Scripture as understood
and interpreted by Gregory and Augustine. There was little mortal
knowledge which this range of Scriptural interpretation might not include.
It compassed such knowledge of the physical world as would enable one to
understand the work of Creation set forth in Genesis; it embraced all that
could be known of man, of his physical nature, and assuredly of his
spiritual part. Here Christian truth might call on the better pagan
philosophy for illustration and rational corroboration, so far as that did
corroborate. When it did not, it was pernicious falsity.

So Christian piety viewed the matter. But the pious commonly have their
temporal fancies, sweet as stolen fruit. These Carolingian scholars, the
man in orders and the man without, studied the Latin poets, historians,
and orators. And in their imaginative or poetic moods, as they followed
classic metre, so they reproduced classic phrase and sentiment in their
verses. The men who made such--it might be Alcuin, or Theodulphus, or
Walafrid Strabo--chose what they would as the subject of their poems; but
the presentation took form and phrase from Virgil and other old poets. The
antique influence so strong in the Carolingian period, included much more
than matters of elegant culture, like poetry and art, or even rhetoric and
grammar. It held the accumulated experience in law and institution, which
still made part of the basis of civic life. Rabanus Maurus recognized it
thus broadly. And, thus largely taken, the antique survives in the
Carolingian time as a co-ordinate dominant, with Latin Christianity.
Neither, as yet, was affected by the solvent processes of transmutation
into new human faculty and power. None the less, this same antique
survival was destined to pass into modes and forms belonging quite as much
to the Middle Ages as to antiquity; and, thus recast, it was to become a
broadening and informing element in the mediaeval personality.

Likewise with the patristic Christianity which had been transmitted to the
Carolingian time, to be then and there not only conned and studied, but
also rearranged by these painful students, so that they and their
successors might the better comprehend it. It was not for them to change
the patristic forms organically, by converting them into the modes of
mediaeval understanding of the same. These would be devised, or rather
achieved, by later men, living in centuries when the patristic heritage of
doctrine, long held and cherished, had permeated the whole spiritual
natures of mediaeval men and women, and had been itself transmuted in what
it had transformed.




CHAPTER XI

MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: ITALY

      I. FROM CHARLEMAGNE TO HILDEBRAND.

     II. THE HUMAN SITUATION.

    III. THE ITALIAN CONTINUITY OF ANTIQUE CULTURE.

     IV. ITALY’S INTELLECTUAL PIETY: PETER DAMIANI AND ST. ANSELM.


I

The Empire of Charlemagne could not last. Two obvious causes, among
others, were enough to prevent it. No single government (save when
temporarily energized by some extraordinary ruler) could control such
enormous and widely separated regions, which included much of the present
Germany and Austria, the greater part of Italy, France, and the Low
Countries. Large portions of this Empire were almost trackless, and
nowhere were there good roads and means of transportation. Then, as the
second cause, within these diverse and ununited lands dwelt or moved many
peoples differing from each other in blood and language, in conditions of
life and degrees of civilization or barbarism. No power existed that could
either hold them in subjection or make them into proper constituents of an
Empire.[287]

There were other, more particular, causes of dissolution: the Frankish
custom of partitioning the realm brought war between Louis the Pious and
his sons, and then among the latter; no scion of the Carolingian house was
equal to the situation; under the ensuing turbulence, the royal power
weakened, and local protection, or oppression, took its place; constant
war exhausted the strength of the Empire, and particularly of Austrasia,
while from without Norsemen, Slavs, and Saracens were attacking, invading,
plundering everywhere. These marauders still were heathen, or obstinate
followers of the Prophet; while Christianity was the bond of unity and
empire. Charlemagne and his strong predecessors had been able thus to view
and use the Church; but the weaker successors, beginning with Louis the
Pious, too eager for the Church’s aid and condonation, found their
subservience as a reed that broke and pierced the hand.

These causes quickly brought about the Empire’s actual dissolution. On the
other hand, a potent conception had been revived in western Europe. Louis
the Pious, himself made emperor in Charlemagne’s lifetime, associated his
eldest son with him as co-emperor, and made his two younger sons kings,
hoping thus to preserve the Empire’s unity. If that unity forthwith became
a name, it was a name to conjure with; and the corresponding imperial fact
was to be again made actual by the first Saxon Otto, a man worthy to reach
back across the years and clasp the hand of the great Charles.

That intervening century and a half preceding the year 962 when Otto was
crowned emperor, carried political and social changes. To the West, in the
old Neustrian kingdom which was to form the nucleus of mediaeval France,
the Carolingian line ran out in degenerates surnamed the Pious, the Bald,
the Stammerer, the Simple, and the Fat. The Counts of Paris, Odo, Robert,
Hugh the Great, and, finally, Hugh Capet, playing something like the old
rôle of the palace mayors, were becoming the actual rulers, although not
till 987 was the last-named Hugh formally elected and anointed king.

Other great houses also had arisen through the land of France, which was
very far from being under the power of the last Carolingians or the first
Capetians. The year 911 saw the treaty between Norman Rollo and Charles
the Simple, and may be taken to symbolize the settling down of Norsemen
from freebooters to denizens, with a change of faith. Rollo received the
land between the Epte and the sea, to the borders of Brittany, along with
temporary privileges, granted by the same Simple Charles, of sack and
plunder over the latter. But a generation later the valiant Count Alan of
the Twisted Beard drove out the plunderers, and established the feudal
duchy long to bear the name of Brittany. Likewise, aided by the need of
protection against invading plunderers, feudal principalities were formed
in Flanders, Champagne, Burgundy, Aquitaine, Languedoc.

At the time when Hugh Capet drew near his royal destiny, his brother was
Duke of Burgundy, the Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine were his
brothers-in-law, and Adalberon, Archbishop of Rheims, was his partisan. As
a king elected by his peers, his royal rights were only such as sprang
from the feudal homage and fidelity which they tendered him. Yet he, with
the clergy, deemed that his consecration by the Church gave him the
prerogatives of Frankish sovereigns, which were patterned on those of
Roman emperors and Old Testament kings. It was to be the long endeavour of
the Capetian line to make good these higher claims against the
counter-assumptions of feudal vassals, who individually might be stronger
than the king.[288]

Austrasia, the eastern Frankish kingdom, formed the centre of those
portions of the Carolingian Empire which were to remain German. Throughout
these lands, as in the West, feudal disintegration was progressing. The
great territorial divisions were set by differences of race or _stamm_.
Saxons, Franks, Bavarians, Suabians, had never been one people. In the
tenth century each of these _stamms_, with the land it dwelt in, made a
dukedom; and there were besides marks or frontier lordships, each under
its markgrave, upon whom lay the duty of repelling outer foes. These
divisions, fixed in differences of law, language, and blood, were
destined to prevent the formation of a strong kingdom like that of France.

Yet what was to prove a veritable German royalty sprang from the ducal
Saxon house. Upon the failure of the German Carolingian branch in 911,
Conrad, Duke of Franconia, was elected king, the Saxons and Suabians
consenting. After struggling a few years, mainly against the power of the
Saxon duke Henry, Conrad at his death in 918 pronounced in favour of his
stronger rival. Thereupon Henry, called by later legend “The Fowler,”
became king, and having maintained his royal authority against
recalcitrants, and fought successfully with Hungarians and Bohemians, he
died in 936, naming his son Otto as his successor.

The latter’s reign was to be a long and great one. He was consecrated at
Aix-la-Chapelle in Charlemagne’s basilica, thus at the outset showing what
and whom he had in mind. Then and thereafter all manner of internal
opposition had to be suppressed. His own competing brothers were, first of
all, to be put down; and with them the Dukes of Bavaria, Franconia, and
Lorraine, whom Otto conquered and replaced with men connected with him by
ties of blood or marriage. Far to the West he made his power felt,
settling affairs between Louis and Hugh the Great. Hungarians and Slavs
attacked his realm in vain. New _marks_ were established to hold them in
check, and new bishoprics were founded, fonts of missionary Christianity
and fortresses of defence.

Thereupon Otto looked southward, over the Alps. To say that Italy was sick
with turmoil and corruption, and exposed to the attack of every foe, is to
give but the negative and least interesting side. She held more of
civilized life and of education than any northern land; she differed from
the north in her politics and institutions. Feudalism did not fix itself
widely there, although the Roman barons, who made and unmade popes,
represented it; and in many regions, as later among the Normans in the
south, there was to be a feudal land-holding nobility. But in Italy, it
was the city, whether under civic or episcopal government, or in a
despot’s grip, that took the lead, and was to keep the life of the
peninsula predominantly urban, as it had been in the Roman time.

Tenth-century Italy contained enough claimants to the royal, even the
imperial, title. Rome reeked with faction; and the papal power was nearly
snuffed out. Pope followed pope, to reign or be dragged from his
throne--eight of them between 896 and 904. Then began at Rome the
domination of the notorious, but virile, Theodora and her daughter
Marozia, makers and perhaps mistresses of popes, and leaders in feudal
violence. Marozia married a certain valiant Alberic, “markgrave of
Camerino” and forerunner of many a later Italian soldier and tyrant of
fortune. When he fell, she married again, and overthrew Pope John X., who
had got the better of her first husband. In 931 she made her son pope as
John XI. For yet a third husband she took a certain King Hugo, a
Burgundian; but another son of hers, a second Alberic, roused the city,
drove him out, and proclaimed himself “Prince and Senator of all the
Romans.”

It was in this Italy that Otto intervened, in 951, drawn perhaps by the
wrongs of Queen Adelaide, widow of Hugo’s son, Lothaire, a landless king,
since Markgrave Berengar had ousted him from his Italian holdings. This
Berengar now persecuted and imprisoned the queen-widow. She escaped; Otto
descended from the Alps, and married her; Lombardy submitted; Berengar
fled. This time Otto did not advance to Rome, being impeded by many
things--Alberic’s refusal to admit him, and behind his back in Germany the
rebellion of his own son Liudolf aided by the Archbishop of Mainz, and
later by those whom Otto left in Italy to represent him as he hurried
north. These were straitened times for the king, and the Hungarians poured
over the boundaries to take advantage of the confusion. But Otto’s star
triumphed over both rebels and Hungarians--a bloody star for the latter,
as the plains of Lech might testify, where they were so handled that they
never ravaged German lands again.

Otto’s power now reached its zenith. He reordered the German dukedoms,
filled the archbishoprics with faithful servants, bound the German clergy
to himself with gifts and new foundations, and ruled them like another
Charlemagne. It was his time to become emperor, an emperor like
Charlemagne, and not like later weaklings. In 961 he again entered Italy,
to be greeted with universal acclaim as by men longing for a deliverer. He
was crowned king in Pavia; the levies of the once more hostile Berengar
dispersed before him. In February 962 he was anointed emperor at Rome by
John XII., son of that second Alberic who had refused to open the gates,
but whose debauched son had called for aid upon the mighty German. Once
more the Holy Roman Empire of the Germans was refounded to endure a while
with power, and continue a titular existence for eight centuries.

The power of the first Otto was so overwhelming that the papacy could not
escape the temporary subjection which its vile state deserved. And the
Empire was its honest patron, for the good of both. So on through the
reigns of Otto II., who died in 983, aged twenty-eight, and his son Otto
III., who died in 1002, at the age of twenty-two, a dreamer and would-be
universal potentate. Then came the practical-minded rule of the second
Henry (1002-1024), who still aided and humbly ruled the Church. Conrad
II., of Franconia, followed, faithful to the imperial tradition.[289] He
was succeeded in 1039 by his son Henry III., beneficent and prosperous, if
not far-seeing, who again cared for both Church and State, and imperially
constrained the papacy, itself impotent in the grip of the Roman barons
and the Counts of Tusculum. Henry did not hesitate to clear away at once
three rival popes (1046) and name a German, Clement II. It was this worthy
man, but still more another German, his successor, Leo IX. (1049-1054),
who lifted the papacy from its Italian mire, and launched it full on its
course toward an absolute spiritual supremacy that was to carry the
temporal control of kings and princes. But the man already at the helm was
a certain deacon Hildebrand, who was destined to guide the papal policy
through the reigns of successive popes until he himself was hailed as
Gregory VII. (1073-1085).[290]

With Hildebrand’s pontificate, which in truth began before he sat in
Peter’s chair, the reforming spirits among the clergy, aroused to his keen
policy, set themselves to the uplifting of their order. In all countries
the Church, heavy with its possessions, seemed about to become feudal and
secular. Bishops and abbots were appointed by kings and the great
feudatories, and were by them _invested_ with their lands as fiefs, for
which the clerical appointee did homage, and undertook to perform feudal
duties. Church fiefs failed to become hereditary only because bishops and
abbots could not marry; yet in fact great numbers of the lower clergy
lived in a state of marriage or “concubinage.” Evidently the celibacy of
the clergy was a vital issue in Church reform; and so were investitures
and the matter of simony. Under mediaeval conditions, the most open form
of this “heresy” called after Simon Magus, was the large gift from the new
incumbent to his feudal lord who had invested him with abbey or bishopric.
Such simony was not wrong from the feudal point of view, and might
properly represent the duty of bishop or abbot to his lord.

Obviously, for the reform and emancipation of the Church, and in order
that it should become a world-power, and not remain a semi-secular local
institution in each land, it was necessary that the three closely
connected corruptions of simony, lay investitures, and clerical
concubinage should be destroyed. To this enormous task the papacy
addressed itself under the leadership of Hildebrand.[291] In his
pontificate the struggle with the supreme representative of secular power,
to wit, the Empire, came to a head touching investitures. Gregory’s
secular opponent was Henry IV., of tragic and unseemly fame; for whom the
conflict proved to be the road by which he reached Canossa, dragged by the
Pope’s anathema, and also driven to this shame by a rebellious Germany
(1076, 1077). Henry was conquered, although a revulsion of the
long-swaying war drove Gregory from Rome, to die an exile for the cause
which he deemed that of righteousness.

Between the papacy and the secular power represented in this struggle by
the Empire, a peaceful co-equality could not exist. The superiority of the
spiritual and eternal over the carnal and temporal had to be vindicated;
and in terms admitting neither limit nor condition, Hildebrand maintained
the Church’s universal jurisdiction upon earth. The authority granted by
Christ to Peter and his successors, the popes, was absolute for eternity.
Should it not include the passing moment of mortal life, important only
because determining man’s eternal lot? The divine grant was made without
qualification or exception _in saeculo_ as well as for the life to come.
If spiritual men are under the Pope’s jurisdiction, shall he not also
constrain secular folk from their wickedness?[292] Were kings excepted
when the Lord said, Thou art Peter?[293] Nay; the salvation of souls
demands that the Pope shall have full authority _in terra_ to suppress the
waves of pride with the arms of humility. The _dictatus papae_ of the year
1075 make the Pope the head of the Christian world: the Roman Church was
founded by God alone; the Roman pontiff alone by right is called
_universal_; he alone may use the imperial insignia; his feet alone shall
be kissed by all princes; he may depose emperors and release subjects from
fealty; and he can be judged by no man.[294]

In the century and a half following Gregory’s reign the papacy well-nigh
attained the realization of the claims made by this great upbuilder of its
power.[295] Constantine’s forged donation was outdone, in fact; and the
furthest hopes of Leo I. and the first, second, and third Gregories were
more than realized.


II

One might liken the Carolingian period to a vessel at her dock, taking on
her cargo, casks of antique culture and huge crates of patristic theology.
Then western Europe in the eleventh century would be the same vessel
getting under way, well started on the mediaeval ocean.

This would be one way of putting the matter. A closer simile already used
is the likening of the Carolingian period to the lusty schoolboy learning
his lessons, thinking very little for himself. By the eleventh century he
will have left school, though still impressionable, still with much to
learn; but he has begun to turn his conned lessons over in his mind, and
to think a little, in the terms, of what he has acquired--has even begun
to select therefrom tentatively, and still under the mastery of the whole.
He perceives the charm of the antique culture, of the humanly inspiring
literature, so exhaustless in its profane fascinations; he is realizing
the spiritual import of the patristic share of his instruction, and
already feels the power of emotion which lay implicit in the Latin
formulation of the Christian Faith. Withal he is beginning to evolve an
individuality of his own.

Speaking more explicitly, it should be said that instead of one such
hopeful youth there are several, or rather groups of them, differing
widely from each other. The forefathers of certain of these groups were
civilized and educated men, at home in the antique and patristic
curriculum with which our youths are supposed to have been busy. The
forefathers of other groups were rustics, or rude herdsmen and hunters,
hard-hitting warriors, who once had served, but more latterly had rather
lorded it over, the cultivated forbears of the others. Still, again, the
forefathers of other numerous groups had been partly cultivated and partly
rude. Evidently these groups of youths are diverse in blood and in
ancestral traits; evidently also the antique and patristic curriculum is
quite a new thing to some of them, while others had it at their fathers’
knees.

Our different youthful groups represent Italians, Germans, and the
inhabitants of France and the British Isles. One may safely speak of the
ninth-century Germans as schoolboys just brought face to face with
Christianity and the antique culture. So with the Saxon stock in England.
The propriety is not so clear as to the Italians; for they are not newly
introduced to these matters. Yet their household affairs have been
disturbed, and they themselves have slackened in their study. So they too
have much to learn anew, and may be regarded as truants, dirtied and
muddied, and perhaps refreshed, by the scrambles of their time of truancy,
and now returning to lessons which they have pretty well forgotten.

Obviously, in considering the intellectual condition of western Europe in
the tenth and eleventh centuries, it will be convenient to regard each
country in turn: and, besides, a geographical is more appropriate than a
topical arrangement, because there was still little choice of one branch
of discipline rather than another. The majority still were conning
indiscriminately what had come from the past, studying heterogeneous
matters in the same books, the same forlorn compendia. They read the
_Etymologies_ of Isidore or the corresponding works of Bede, and followed
as of course the Trivium and Quadrivium. In sacred learning they might
read the Scriptural Commentaries of Rabanus Maurus or Walafrid Strabo, or
study the works of Augustine. This was still the supreme study, and all
else, properly viewed, was ancillary to it. Nevertheless, as between
sacred study and profane literature, an even violent divergence of choice
existed. Everywhere there were men who loved the profanities in
themselves, and some who felt that for their souls’ sake they must abjure
them.

For further diverging lines of preference, one should wait for the twelfth
century. Many men will then be found absorbed in religious study, while
others cultivate logic and metaphysics, with the desire to know more
active in them than the fear of hell. Still others will study “grammar”
and the classics, or, again, with conscious specializing choice, devote
their energies to the civil or the canon law. In later chapters, and
mainly with reference to this culminating mediaeval time which includes
the twelfth, the thirteenth, and at least, for Dante’s sake, the first
part of the fourteenth, century, we shall review these various branches of
intellectual endeavour in topical order. But for the earlier time which
still enshrouds us, we pass from land to land as on a tour of intellectual
inspection.


III

We start with Italy. There was no break between her antique civilization
and her mediaeval development, but only a period of depression and decay.
Notwithstanding the change from paganism to Christianity and the influx of
barbarians, both a race-continuity and a continuity of culture persisted.
The Italian stock maintained its numerical preponderance, as well as the
power of transforming newcomers to the likeness of itself. The natural
qualities of the country, and the existence of cities and antique
constructions, assisted in the Italianizing of Goth, Lombard, German,
Norman. Latin civic reminiscence, tradition, custom, permeated society,
and prevented the growth of feudalism. Italy remained urban, and continued
to reflect the ancient time. “Consuls” and “tribunes” long survived the
passing of their antique functions, and the fame endured of antique
heroes, mythical and historical. Florence honoured Mars and Caesar; Padua
had Antenor, Cremona Hercules. Such names remained veritably eponymous.
Other cities claimed the birthplace of Pliny, of Ovid, of Virgil. An altar
might no longer be dedicated to a pagan hero, yet the town would preserve
his name upon monuments, would adorn his fancied tomb, stamp his effigy on
coins or keep it in the communal seal. Of course the figments of the
Trojan Saga were current through the land, which, however divided, was
conscious of itself as Italy. _Te Italia plorabit_ writes an
eleventh-century Pisan poet of a young Pisan noble fallen in Africa.

In Italy, as in no other country, the currents of antique education,
disturbed yet unbroken, carried clear across that long period of
invasions, catastrophes, and reconstructions, which began with the time of
Alaric. Under the later pagan emperors, and under Constantine and his
successors, the private schools of grammar and rhetoric had tended to
decline. There were fewer pupils with inclination and ability to pay. So
the emperors established municipal schools in the towns of Italy and the
provinces. The towns tried to shirk the burden, and the teachers, whose
pay came tardily, had to look to private pupils for support. In Italy
there was always some demand for instruction in grammar and law. The
supply rose and fell with the happier or the more devastated condition of
the land. Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, re-established municipal schools
through his dominion. After him further troubles came, for example from
the Lombards, until they too became gentled by Italian conditions, and
their kings and nobles sought to encourage and acquire the education and
culture which their coming had disturbed. In the seventh and eighth
centuries the grade of instruction was very low; but there is evidence of
the unintermitted existence of lay schools, private or municipal, in all
the important towns, from the eighth century to the tenth, the eleventh,
and so on and on. These did not give religious instruction, but taught
grammar and the classic literature, law and the art of drawing documents
and writing letters. The former branches of study appear singularly
profane in Italy. The literature exemplifying the principles of grammar
was pagan and classical, and the fictitious themes on which the pupils
exercised their eloquence continued such as might have been orated on in
the time of Quintilian. Intellectually the instruction was
poverty-stricken, but the point to note is, that in Italy there never
ceased to be schools conducted by laymen for laymen, where instruction in
matters profane and secular was imparted and received for the sake of its
profane and secular value, without regard to its utility for the saving of
souls. There was no barbaric contempt for letters, nor did the laity fear
them as a spiritual peril. Gerbert before the year 1000 had found Italy
the field for the purchase of books;[296] and about 1028 Wipo, a native of
Burgundy and chaplain of the emperor Conrad II., contrasts the ignorance
of Germany with Italy, where “the entire youth (_tota juventus_) is sent
to sweat in the schools”;[297] and about the middle of the twelfth
century, Otto of Freising suggests a like contrast between the Italy and
Germany of his time.[298]

In Italy the study of grammar, with all that it included, was established
in tradition, and also was regarded as a necessary preparation for the
study both of law and medicine. Even in the eleventh century these
professions were followed by men who were “grammarians,” a term to be
taken to mean for the early Middle Ages the profession of letters. In the
eleventh century, a lawyer or notary in Italy (where there were always
such, and some study of law and legal forms) needed education in a
Latinity different from the vulgar Latin which was turning into Italian. A
little later, Irnerius, the founder of the Bologna school, was a teacher
of “grammar” before he became a teacher of law.[299] As for medicine, that
appears always to have been cultivated at least in southern Italy; and a
knowledge of grammar, even of logic, was required for its study.[300]

The survival of medical knowledge in Italy did not, in means and manner,
differ from the survival of the rest of the antique culture. Some
acquaintance had continued with the works of Galen and other ancient
physicians; but more use was made of compendia, the matter of which may
have been taken from Galen, but was larded with current superstitions
regarding disease. Such compendia began to appear in the fifth century,
and through these and other channels a considerable medical knowledge
found its way to a congenial home in Salerno. There are references to this
town as a medical community as early as the ninth century. By the
eleventh, it was famous for its medicine. About the year 1060 a certain
Constantine seems to have brought there novel and stimulating medical
knowledge which he had gained in Africa from Arabian (ultimately Greek)
sources. Nevertheless, translations from the Arabic seem scarcely to have
exerted much influence upon medicine for yet another hundred years.[301]

Thus in Italy the antique education never stopped, antique reminiscence
and tradition never passed away, and the literary matter of the pagan past
never faded from the consciousness of the more educated among the laity
and clergy. Some understanding of the classic literature, as well as a
daily absorption of the antique from its survival in habits, laws, and
institutions, made part of the capacities and temperament of Italians.
Grammarians, lawyers, doctors, monks even, might think and produce under
the influence of that which never had quite fallen from the life of Italy.
And just as the ancient ways of civic life and styles of building became
rude and impoverished, and yet passed on without any abrupt break into the
tenth and the eleventh centuries, so was it with the literature of Italy,
or at least with those productions which were sheer literature, and not
deflected from traditional modes of expression by any definite business or
by the distorting sentiments of Christian asceticism. This literature
proper was likely to take the form of verse in the eleventh century. A
practical matter would be put in prose; but the effervescence of the
soul, or the intended literary effort, would fall into rhyme or resort to
metre.

We have an example of the former in those often-cited tenth-century verses
exhorting the watchers on the walls of Modena:

  “O tu qui servas armis ista moenia,
   Noli dormire, moneo, sed vigila.
   Dum Hector vigil extitit in Troia,
   Non eam cepit fraudulenta Graecia.

  “Vigili voce avis anser candida
   Fugavit Gallos ex arce Romulea.”

The antique reminiscence fills this jingle, as it does the sensuous

  “O admirabile Veneris ydolum
   Cuius materiae nichil est frivolum:
   Archos te protegat, qui stellas et polum
   Fecit et maria condidit et solum.”[302]

And so on from century to century. At the beginning of the twelfth, a
Pisan poet celebrates Pisa’s conquest of the Balearic Isles:

  “Inclytorum Pisanorum scripturus historiam,
   Antiquorum Romanorum renovo memoriam,
   Nam ostendit modo Pisa laudem admirabilem,
   Quam olim recepit Roma vincendo Carthaginem.”

For an eleventh-century example of more literary verse, one may turn to
the metres of Alphanus, a noble Salernian, lover of letters, pilgrim
traveller, archbishop of his native town, and monk of Monte Cassino, the
parent Benedictine monastery, which had been the cultured retreat of
Paulus Diaconus in the time of Charlemagne. It was destroyed by the
Saracens in 884. Learning languished in the calamitous decades which
followed. But the convent was rebuilt, and some care for learning
recommences there under the abbot Theobald (1022-1035). The monastery’s
troubles were not over; but it re-entered upon prosperity under the
energetic rule of the German Richer (1038-1055).[303] Shortly after his
death two close friends were received among its monks, Alphanus and
Desiderius. The latter was of princely Lombard stock, from Beneventum. He
met Alphanus at Salerno, and there they became friends. Afterwards both
saw something of the world and experienced its perils. Desiderius was born
to be monk, abbot, and at last pope (Victor III.) against his will.
Alphanus, always a man of letters, was drawn by his friend to monastic
life. Long after, when Archbishop of Salerno, he gave a refuge and a tomb
to the outworn Hildebrand.

The rebuilding and adorning of Monte Cassino by Desiderius with the aid of
Greek artists is a notable episode in the history of art.[304] Under the
long rule of this great abbot (1058-1087) the monastery reached the summit
of its repute and influence. It was the home of theology and
ecclesiastical policy. There law and medicine were studied. Likewise
“grammar” and classic literature, the latter not too broadly, as would
appear from the list of manuscripts copied under Desiderius--Virgil, Ovid,
Terence, Seneca, Cicero’s _De natura deorum_. But then there was the whole
host of early Christian poets, historians, and theologians. Naturally,
Christian studies were dominant within those walls.

Alphanus did not spend many of his years there. But his loyalty to the
great monastery never failed, nor his intercourse with its abbot and
monks. He has left an enthusiastic poem descriptive of the place and the
splendour of its building.[305] A general and interesting feature of his
poetry is the naturalness of its classical reminiscence and its feeling
for the past, which is even translated into the poet’s sentiments toward
his contemporaries and toward life. In his metrical verses _ad
Hildebrandum archidiaconum Romanum_, his stirring praise of that statesman
is imbued with pagan sentiment.

    “How great the glory which so often comes to those defending the
    republic, has not escaped thy knowledge, Hildebrand. The Via Sacra
    and the Via Latina recall the same, and the lofty crown of the
    Capitol, that mighty seat of empire.... The hidden poison of envy
    implants its infirmity in wretched affairs, and brings overthrow only
    to such. That thou shouldst be envied, and not envy, beseems thy
    skill.... How great the power of the anathema! Whatever Marius and
    Julius wrought with the slaughter of soldiers, thou dost with thy
    small voice.... What more does Rome owe to the Scipios and the other
    Quirites than to thee?”

Perhaps the glyconic metre of this poem was too much for Alphanus. His
awkward constructions, however, constantly reflect classic phrases. And
how naturally his mind reproduced the old pagan--or fundamental
human--views of life, appears again in his admiring sapphics to Romuald,
chief among Salerno’s lawyers:

  “Dulcis orator, vehemens gravisque,
   Inter omnes causidicos perennem
   Gloriam juris tibi, Romoalde,
       Prestitit usus.”

Further stanzas follow on Romuald’s wealth, station, and mundane felicity.
Then comes the sudden turn, and Romuald is praised for having spurned them
all:

  “Cumque sic felix, ut in orbe sidus
   Fulseris, mundum roseo jacentem
   Flore sprevisti....”

Apparently Romuald had become a monk:

  “Rite fecisti, potiore vita
        Perfruiturus.”[306]

This turn of sentiment curiously accorded with the poet’s own fortune and
way of life; for Alphanus, with all his love of antique letters, was also
a monk and an ascetic, of whom a contemporary chronicler tells that in
Lent he ate but twice a week and never slept on a bed. Yet monk, and
occasional ascetic, as he was, the ordinary antique-descended education
and inherited strains of antique feeling made the substratum of his
nature, and this although he could inveigh against the philosophic and
grammatical studies flourishing in a neighbouring monastery, and advise
one of its studious youths to turn from such:

  “Si, Transmunde, mihi credis, amice,
   His uti studiis desine tandem;
   Fac cures monachi scire professum,
   Ut vere sapiens esse puteris.”[307]

Eleventh-century Italian “versificatores” were interested in a variety of
things. Some of them gave the story of a saint’s or bishop’s life, or were
occupied with an ecclesiastic theme. Others sang the fierce struggle
between rival cities, or some victory over Saracens, or made an idyl of
very human love with mythological appurtenances. The verse-forms either
followed the antique metres or were accentual deflections from them with
the new added element of rhyme; the ways of expression copied antique
phrase and simile, except when the matter and sentiment of the poem
compelled another choice. In that case the Latin becomes freer, more
mediaeval, ruder, if one will; and still antique turns of expression and
bits of sentences show how naturally it came to these men to construct
their verses out of ancient phrases. Yet borrowed phrases and the
constraint of metre impeded spontaneity, and these feeble versifiers could
hardly create in modes of the antique. A fresher spirit breathes in
certain anonymous poems, which have broken with metre, while they give
voice to sentiments quite after the feeling of the old Italian paganism.
In one of these, from Ivrea, the poet meets a nymph by the banks of the
Po, and in leonine elegiacs bespeaks her love, with all the paraphernalia
of antique reference, assuring her that his verse shall make her immortal,
a perfectly pagan sentiment--or affectation:

  “Sum sum sum vates, musarum servo penates,
     Subpeditante Clio queque futura scio.
   Me minus extollo, quamvis mihi cedit Apollo,
     Invidet et cedit, scire Minerva dedit.
   Laude mea vivit mihi se dare queque cupivit,
     Immortalis erit, ni mea Musa perit.”[308]

It is obvious that in the tenth and eleventh centuries there were Italians
whose sentiments and intellectual interests were profane, humanistic in a
word. These men might even be high ecclesiastics, like Liutprand, Bishop
of Cremona (d. 972).[309] He was of Lombard stock, and yet a genuine
Italian, bred in an atmosphere of classical reminiscence and contemporary
gossip and misdeed. Politically, at least, the Italy of John XII. was not
so much better than its pope; and the _Antapodosis_ of Liutprand goes
along in its easy, and often dramatic way, telling of crime and perfidy,
and showing scant horror. It was a general history of the historian’s
times, written while in exile in Germany; for Liutprand had been driven
out of Italy by King Berengar, whom he had once served. He hated Berengar
and his wife, and although well received at the Court of the great Otto,
he did not love his place of exile.[310]

In exile Liutprand wrote his book to requite Berengar. The work had also a
broader purpose, yet one just as consolatory to the writer. It should
acknowledge and show the justice of the divine judgments exemplified in
history. Herein lay a fuller, although less Italian, consolation for his
exile than in Berengar’s requital. Liutprand keeps in mind Boëthius and
his _De consolatione_, and regards his own work as a Consolation of
History, as that of Boëthius was a Consolation of Philosophy. The paths of
Liutprand’s Consolation are as broad as the justice and power of the
Trinity, “which casts down these for their wicked deeds and raises up
those for their merits’ sake.”[311]

Quite explicitly he explains the title and reason of his work at the
opening of its third book:

    “Since it will show the deeds of famous men, why call it Antapodosis?
    I reply: Its object is to set forth and cry aloud the acts of this
    Berengar who at this moment does not reign but tyrannize in Italy, and
    of his wife Willa, who for the boundlessness of her tyranny should be
    called a second Jezebel, and Lamia for her insatiate rapines. Me and
    my house, my family and kin, have they harassed with so many javelins
    of lies, so many spoliations, so many essays of wickedness, that
    neither tongue nor pen can avail to set them forth. May then these
    pages be to them an antapodosis, that is retribution, to make their
    wickedness naked before men living and unborn. None the less may it
    prove an antapodosis for the benefits conferred on me by holy and
    happy men.”[312]

Liutprand’s narrative is breezy and interspersed with ribald tales. The
writer meant to amuse his readers and himself. These literary qualities
give picturesqueness to his well-known _Embassy to Constantinople_, where
he was sent by Otto the Great, for purposes of peace and to ask the hand
of the Byzantine princess for Otto II. The highly coloured ceremonial life
of the Greek Court, the chicane and contemptuous treatment met with, the
spirited words of Liutprand, and the rancour of this same thwarted envoy,
all appear vividly in his report.[313]

There were also many laymen occupied with Latin studies. Such a one was
Gunzo of Novara, a curiously vain grammarian of the second half of the
tenth century. According to his own story, the fame of his learning
incited Otto the Great to implore his presence in Germany. So he
condescended to cross the Alps, with all his books, perhaps in the year
965. On his way he stopped with the monks of St. Gall, themselves proud of
their learning, and perhaps jealous of the southern scholar. As the weary
Gunzo was lifted, half frozen, from his horse at the convent door, and the
brethren stood about, a young monk caught at a slip in grammar, and made a
skit on him--because, forsooth, he had used an accusative when it should
have been an ablative.

Gunzo neither forgave nor forgot. Passing on to the rival congregation of
Reichenau, he composed a long and angry epistle of pedantic excuse and
satirical invective, addressed to his former hosts.[314] In it he parades
his wide knowledge of classic authors, justifies what the monks of St.
Gall had presumed to mock as a ridiculous barbarism, and closes with a
prayer for them in hexameters. His letter contains the interesting avowal,
that, although the monk of St. Gall had wrongly deemed him ignorant of
grammar, his Latin sometimes was impeded by the “usu nostrae vulgaris
linguae, quae latinitati vicina est.” So a slip would be due not to
unfamiliarity with Latin, but to an excessive colloquial familiarity with
the vulgar tongue which had scarcely ceased to be Latin--an excuse no
German monk could have given. It is amusing to see an Italian grammarian
of this early period enter the lists to defend his reputation and assuage
his wounded vanity. Later, such learned battles became frequent.[315]

Gunzo died as the tenth century closed. Other Italians of his time and
after him crossed the Alps to learn and teach and play the orator. From
the early eleventh century comes a satirical sketch of one. The subject
was a certain Benedict, Prior of the Abbey of St. Michael of Chiusa, and
nephew of its abbot--therefore doubtless born to wealth and position. At
all events as a youth he had moved about for nine years “per multa loca in
Longobardia et Francia propter grammaticam,” spending the huge sum of two
thousand gold soldi. His pride was unmeasured. “I have two houses full of
books; there is no book on the earth that I do not possess. I study them
every day. I can discourse on letters. There is no instruction to be had
in Aquitaine, and but little in Francia. Lombardy, where I learned most,
is the cradle of knowledge.” So the satire makes Benedict speak of
himself. Then it makes a monk sketch Benedict’s sojourn at a convent in
Angoulême: “He knows more than any man I ever saw. We have heard his
chatter the whole day. _O quam loquax est!_ He is never tired. Wherever he
may be, standing, sitting, walking, lying, words pour from his mouth like
water from the Tigris. He orders the whole convent about as if he were
Abbot. Monks, laity, clergy, do nothing without his nod. A multitude of
the people, knights too, were always hastening to hear him, as the goal of
their desires. Untired, hurling words the entire day, he sends them off
worn out. And they depart, saying: Never have we seen sic eloquentem
grammaticum.”[316]

Another of these early wandering Italian humanists won kinder notice, a
certain Lombard Guido, who died where he was teaching in Auxerre, in 1095,
and was lamented in leonine hexameters: “Alas, famous man, so abounding,
so diligent, so praised, so venerated through many lands--

  “Filius Italiae, sed alumnus Philosophiae.

Let Gaul grieve, and thou Philosophy who nourished him: Grieve Grammar,
thou. With his death the words of Plato died, the work of Cicero is
blotted out, Maro is silent and the muse of Naso stops her song.”[317]

A final instance to close our examples. In the middle of the eleventh
century flourished Anselm the Peripatetic, a rhetorician and humanist of
Besate (near Milan). In his _Rhetorimachia_ he tells of a dream in which
he finds himself in Heaven, surrounded and embraced by saintly souls.
Their spiritual kisses were still on his lips when three virgins of
another ilk appear, to reproach him with forsaking them. These are
Dialectic and Rhetoric and Grammar--we have met them before! Now the
embraces of the saints seem cold! and to the protests of the blessed
throng that Anselm is theirs, the virgins make reply that he is altogether
their own fosterling. Anselm gives up the saints and departs with the
three.[318] This was his humanistic choice.

This rather pleasant dream discloses the conflict between Letters and the
call of piety, which might harass the learned and the holy in Italy.
Distrust of the enticements of pagan letters might transform itself to
diabolic visions. Such a tale comes from the neighbourhood of Ravenna, in
the late tenth century. It is of one Vilgard, a grammarian, who became
infatuated with the great pagan poets, till their figures waved through
his dreams and he heard their thanks and assurances that he should
participate in their glory. He foolishly began to teach matters contrary
to the Faith, and in the end was condemned as a heretic. Others were
infected with his opinions, and perished by the sword and fire.[319]

Evidently Vilgard’s profane studies made him a heretic. But, ordinarily,
the Italians with their antique descended temperament were not troubled in
the observance and the expression of their Faith by the paganism of their
intellectual tastes. Such tastes did not produce open heretics in Italy in
the eleventh century any more than in the fifteenth. A pagan disposition
seldom prevented an Italian from being a good Catholic.

Yet the monastic spirit in Italy, as elsewhere, in the eleventh century
defied and condemned the pagan literature, and in fact all Latin studies
beyond the elements of grammar. The protest of the monk or hermit might
represent his individual ignorance of classic literature; or, as in the
case of Peter Damiani, the ascetic soul is horrified at the seductive
nature of the pagan sweets which it knows too well. Peter indeed could say
in his sonorous Latin: “Olim mihi Tullius dulcescebat, blandiebantur
carmina poetarum, philosophi verbis aureis insplendebant, et Sirenes usque
in exitium dulces meum incantaverunt intellectum.”[320] So a few decades
after Peter’s death, Rangerius, Bishop of Lucca, writes the life of an
episcopal predecessor in elegiacs which show considerable knowledge of
grammar and prosody; and yet he protests against liberal
studies--philosophy, astronomy, grammar--with pithy commonplace:

  “Et nos ergo scholas non spectamus inanes

         *       *       *       *       *

   Scire Deum satis est, quo nulla scientia maior.”[321]

So with the Italians the antique never was an influence brought from
without, but always an element of their temperament and faculties. We have
not seen that they recast it into novel and interesting forms in the
eleventh century; yet they used it familiarly as something of their own,
being quite at home with it. As one may imagine some grand old Roman
garden, planned and constructed by rich and talented ancestors, and still
remaining as a home and heritage to descendants whose wealth and
capacities have shrunken. The garden is somewhat ruinous, and fallen to
decay; yet these sons are still at home in it, their daily steps pursue
its ancient avenues; they still recline upon the marble seats by the
fountains where perhaps scant water runs. Fauns and satyrs--ears gone and
noses broken--with even an occasional god, still haunt the courts and
sylvan paths, while everywhere, above and about these lazy sons, the
lights still chase the shadows, and anon the shadows darken the green and
yellow flashes. Perhaps nothing in the garden has become so subtly in and
of the race as this play of light and shade. And when the Italian genius
shall revive again, and children’s children find themselves with power,
still within this ancient garden the great vernacular poems will be
composed; great paintings will be painted in its light and shade and under
the influence of its formal beauties; and Italian buildings will never
escape the power of the ruined structures found therein.


IV

In the tenth and eleventh centuries, as remarked already, studiously
inclined people made no particular selection of one study rather than
another. But men discriminated sharply between religious devotion and all
profane pursuits. Energies which were regarded as religious might have a
political-ecclesiastical character, and be devoted to the purification and
upbuilding of the Church; or they might be intellectual and aloof; or
ascetic and emotional. All three modes might exist together in
religious-minded men; but usually one form would dominate, and mark the
man’s individuality. Hildebrand, for example, was a monk, fervent and
ascetic; but his strength was devoted to the discipline of the clergy and
the elevation of the papal power. In the great Hildebrandine Church which
was his more than any other man’s achievement, the organizing and
political genius of Rome re-emerges, and Rome becomes again the seat of
Empire.[322]

Eminent examples of Italians who illustrate the ascetic-emotional and the
intellectual mode of religious devotion are the two very different saints,
Peter Damiani and Anselm. The former, to whom we shall again refer when
considering the ideals of the hermit life, was born in Ravenna not long
after the year 1000. His parents, who were poor, seem to have thought him
an unwelcome addition to their already burdensome family. His was a hard
lot until he reached the age of ten, when his elder brother Damianus was
made an archpresbyter in Ravenna and took Peter to live with him, to
educate the gifted boy. From his brother’s house the youth proceeded in
search of further instruction, first to Faenza, then to Parma. He became
proficient in the secular knowledge comprised in the Seven Liberal Arts,
and soon began to teach. A growing reputation brought many pupils, who
paid such fees that Peter had amassed considerable property when he
decided upon a change of life. For some years he had been fearful of the
world, and he now turned from secular to religious studies. He put on
haircloth underneath the gentler garb in which he was seen of men, and
became earnest in vigils, fasts, and prayers. In the night-time he quelled
the lusts of the flesh by immersing himself in flowing water; he overcame
the temptations of avarice and pride by lavishly giving to the poor, and
tending them at his own table. Still he felt unsafe, and yearned to escape
the dangers of worldly living. A number of hermits dwelt in a community
known as the Hermitage of the Holy Cross of Fonte Avellana, near Faenza;
Peter became one of them shortly before his thirtieth year. They lived
ascetically, two in a cell together, spending their time in watching,
fasting, and prayer: thus they fought the Evil One. Damiani was not
satisfied merely with following the austerities practised at Fonte
Avellana. Quickly he surpassed all his fellows, except a certain mail-clad
Dominic, whose scourgings he could not equal. His chief asceticism lay in
the temper of his soul.

From this congenial community (the hermits had made him their prior)
Damiani was drawn forth to serve the Church more actively, sorely against
his will, and was made Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia by Pope Stephen IX. in
1058. It was indeed the hand of Hildebrand, already directing the papal
policy, that had fastened on this unwilling yet serviceable tool. Peter
feared and also looked askance upon the relentless spirit, whom he called
Sanctus Satanas, not deeming him to be altogether of the kingdom of
heaven. He deprecates his censure upon one occasion: “I humbly beg that my
Saint Satan may not rage so cruelly against me, and that his worshipful
pride may not destroy me with long-reaching rods; rather, may it,
appeased, quiet to a calm around his servant.” In this same letter, which
is addressed to the two conspiring souls, Pope Alexander II. and
Archdeacon Hildebrand, he sarcastically likens them to the Wind and the
Sun of Aesop’s fable, who contended as to which could the sooner strip the
Traveller of his cloak.[323] Peter’s tongue was sharp enough, and apt to
indulge in epigram:

  “Wilt thou live in Rome, cry aloud:
   The Pope’s lord more than the Pope I obey.”

And another squib he writes on Hildebrand:

  “Papam rite colo, sed te prostratus adoro;
   Tu facis hunc dominum, te facit iste deum.”[324]

It was, however, for his own soul that Damiani feared, while in the
service of the Curia. To Desiderius, Abbot of Monte Cassino, he exclaims:
“He errs, Father, errs indeed, who imagines he can be a monk and at the
same time serve the Curia. Ill he bargains, who presumes to desert the
cloister, that he may take up the warfare of the world.”[325]

Albeit against his will, Damiani became a soldier of the Church in the
fields of her secular militancy against the world. He was sent on more
than one important mission--to Milan, to crush the married priests and
establish the Pope’s authority, or to Mainz, there to quell a rebellious
archbishop and a youthful German king. Such missions and others he might
accomplish with holy strenuousness; his more spontaneous zeal, however,
was set upon the task of cleansing the immoralities of monks and clergy.
In spite of his enforced relations with the powers of the world, he was a
fiery reforming ascetic, a scourge of his time’s wickedness, rather than a
statesman of the Church. His writings were a vent for the outcries of his
horror-stricken soul. The corruption of the clergy filled his nostrils:
they were rotten, like the loin-cloth of Jeremiah, hidden by the
Euphrates; their bellies were full of drunkenness and lust.[326] As for
the apostolic see:

  “Heu! sedes apostolica,
   Orbis olim gloria,
   Nunc, proh dolor! efficeris
   Officina Simonis.”[327]

These, with other verses written in tears, relate to schisms of pope and
antipope which so often rent the papacy in Peter’s lifetime.[328] He never
ceased to cry out against monks and clergy, denouncing their simony and
avarice, their luxury, intemperance and vile unchastity, their viciousness
of every kind. Such denunciations fill his letters, while many of his
other writings chiefly consist of them.[329] They culminate in his
horrible _Liber Gomorrhianus_, which was issued with the approval of one
pope, to be suppressed by another as too unspeakable.

Naturally over so foul a world, flame and lower the terrors of the Day of
Judgment. For Damiani it was near at hand. He writes to a certain judge:

    “Therefore, most dear brother now while the world smiles for thee,
    while thy body glows in health, while the prosperity of earth is sweet
    and fair, think upon those things which are to come. Deem whatever is
    transitory to be but as the illusion of a dream. And that terrible day
    of the last Judgment keep ever present to thy sight, and brood with
    quaking bowels over the sudden coming of such majesty--nor think it to
    be far off!”[330]

Beware of penitence postponed!

    “O how full of grief and dole is that late unfruitful repentance, when
    the sinful soul, about to be loosed from its dungeon of flesh, looks
    behind it, and then directs its gaze into the future. It sees behind
    it that little stadium of mortal life, already traversed; it sees
    before it the range of endless aeons. That flown moment which it has
    lived it perceives to be an instant; it contemplates the infinite
    length of time to come.”[331]

From Damiani’s stricken thoughts upon the wickedness of the age, we may
turn to the more personal disclosures of one who wrote himself _Petrus
peccator monachus_. There is one tell-tale letter of confession to his
brother Damianus, whom he loved and revered:

    “To my lord Damianus, my best loved brother, Peter, sinner and monk,
    his servant and son.

    “I would not have it hid from thee, my sweetest father and lord in
    Christ, that my mind is cast down with sadness while it contemplates
    its own exit which is so near. For I count now many long years that I
    wait to be thrown to dogs; and I notice that in whatever monastery I
    come nearly all are younger than myself. When I consider this, I
    ponder upon death alone, I meditate upon my tomb; I do not withdraw
    the eyes of my mind from my tomb. Nor is my mind content to limit its
    fear and its consideration to the death of the body; for it is at once
    haled to judgment, and meditates with terror upon what might be its
    plea and defence. Wretched me! with what fountains of tears must I
    lament! I who have done every evil, and through my long life have
    fulfilled scarce one commandment of the divine law. For what evil have
    not I, miserable man, committed? Where are the vices, where are the
    crimes in which I am not implicated; I confess my life has fallen in a
    lake of misery; my soul is taken in its iniquities. Pride, lust,
    anger, impatience, malice, envy, gluttony, drunkenness, concupiscence,
    robbery, lying, perjury, idle talking, scurrility, ignorance,
    negligence, and other pests have overthrown me, and all the vices like
    ravening beasts have devoured my soul. My heart and my lips are
    defiled. I am contaminate in sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch.
    And in every way, in cogitation, in speech or action, I am lost. All
    these evils have I done; and alas! alas! I have brought forth no fruit
    meet for repentance.

    “One pernicious fault, among others, I acknowledge: scurrility has
    been my besetting sin; it has never really left me. For howsoever I
    have fought against this monster, and broken its wicked teeth with the
    hammer of austerity, and at times repelled it, I have never won the
    full victory. When, in the ways of spiritual gladness, I wish to show
    myself cheerful to the brethren, I drop into words of vanity; and when
    as it were discreetly for the sake of brotherly love, I think to throw
    off my severity, then indiscreetly my tongue unbridled utters
    foolishness. If the Lord said: ‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they
    shall be comforted,’ what judgment hangs over those who not only are
    slack at weeping, but act like buffoons with laughter and vain
    giggling. Consolation is due to those who weep, not to those who
    rejoice; what consolation may be expected from that future Judge by
    those who now are given to foolish mirth and vain jocularity? If the
    Truth says: ‘Woe unto ye who laugh, for ye shall weep,’ what fearful
    judgment shall be theirs who not only laugh themselves, but with
    scurrilities drag laughter from their listeners?”

The penitent saint then shows from Scripture how that our hearts ought to
be vessels of tears, and concludes with casting himself at the feet of his
beloved “father” in entreaty that he would interpose the shield of his
holy prayers between his petitioner and that monster, and exorcise its
serpentine poison, and also that he would ever pour forth prayers to God,
and beseech the divine mercy in behalf of all the other vices confessed in
this letter.[332]

A strange confession this--or, indeed, is it strange? This cowled Peter
Damiani who passes from community to community, seeing more keenly than
others may, denouncing, execrating every vice existent or imagined, who
wears haircloth, goes barefoot, lives on bread and water, scourges himself
with daily flagellations, urging others to do likewise,--this Peter
Damiani is yet unable quite to scourge out the human nature from him, and
evidently cannot always refrain from that jocularity and _inepta laetitia_
for which the Abbess Hildegard also saw sundry souls in hell.[333]
Perhaps, with Peter, revulsions from the strain of austerity took the form
of sudden laughter. His imagination was fine, his wit too quick for his
soul’s safety. His confession was no matter of mock humility, nor did he
deem laughter vulgar or in bad taste. He feared to imperil his soul
through it. Of course, in accusing himself of other, and as we should
think more serious crimes--drunkenness, robbery, perjury--Peter was merely
carrying to an extreme the monkish conventions of self-vilification.

If it appears from this letter that Damiani had been unable quite to
scourge his wit out of him, another letter, to a young countess, will show
more touchingly that he had been unable quite to fast out of him his human
heart.

    “To Guilla, most illustrious countess, Peter, monk and sinner, [sends]
    the instancy of prayer.

    “Since of a thing out of which will issue conflict it is better to
    have ignorance without cost, than with dear-bought forgetting wage
    hard war, we prudently accord to young women, whose aspect we fear,
    audience by letter. Certainly I, who now am an old man, may safely
    look upon the seared and wrinkled visage of a blear-eyed crone. Yet
    from sight of the more comely and adorned I guard my eyes as boys from
    fire. Alas my wretched heart which cannot hold Scriptural mysteries
    read through a hundred times, and will not lose the memory of a form
    seen but once! There where the divine law remains not, no oblivion
    blurs vanity’s image. But of this another time. Here I have not to
    write of what is hurtful to me but of what may be salutary for thee.”

Peter then continues with excellent advice for the young noblewoman,
exhorting her to deeds of mercy and kindness, and warning her against the
enjoyment of revenues wrung from the poor.[334] Indeed Damiani’s writings
contain much that still is wise. His advice to the great and noble of the
world was admirable,[335] and though couched in austere phrase, it
demanded what many men feel bound to fulfil in the twentieth century. His
little work on Almsgiving[336] contains sentences which might be spoken
to-day. He has been pointing out that no one can be exercising the ascetic
virtues all the time: no one can be always praying and fasting, washing
feet and subjecting the body to pain. Some people, moreover, shun such
self-castigation. But one can always be benevolent; and, though fearing to
afflict the body, can stretch forth his hand in charity: “Those then who
are rich should seek to be dispensers rather than possessors. They ought
not to regard what they have as their own: for they did not receive this
transitory wealth in order to revel in luxury, but that they should
administer it so long as they continue in their stewardship. Whoever gives
to the poor does not distribute his own but restores another’s.”[337]

This sounds modern--it also sounds like Seneca.[338] Yet Damiani was no
modern man, nor was he antique, but very fearful of the classics. Having
been a rhetorician and grammarian, when he became a hermit-monk he made
Christ his grammar (_mea grammatica Christus est_).[339] Horror-stricken
at the world, and writhing under his own contamination, he cast body and
soul into the ascetic life. That was the harbour of escape from the carnal
temptations which threatened the soul’s hope of pardon from the Judge at
the Last Day. Therefore Peter is fierce in execration of all lapses from
the hermit-life, so rapturously praised with its contrition, its
penitence, and tears. His ascetic rhapsodies, with which, as a poet might,
he delighted or relieved his soul, are eloquent illustrations of the
monastic ideal.[340]

Other men in Italy less intelligent than Damiani, but equally picturesque,
were held by like ascetic and emotional obsession. Intellectual interest,
however, in theology was less prominent, because the Italian concern with
religion was either emotional or ecclesiastical, which is to say,
political. The philosophic or dialectical treatment of the Faith was to
run its course north of the Alps; and those men of Italian birth--Anselm,
Peter Lombard, Bonaventura, and Aquinas--who contributed to Christian
thought, early left their native land, and accomplished their careers
under intellectual conditions which did not obtain in Italy. Nevertheless,
Anselm and Bonaventura at least did not lose their Italian qualities; and
it is as representative of what might come out of Italy in the eleventh
century that the former may detain us here.

The story of Anselm is told well and lovingly by his companion
Eadmer.[341] His life, although it was drawn within the currents of
affairs, remained intellectual and aloof, a meditation upon God. It opens
with a dream of climbing the mountain to God’s palace-seat. For Anselm’s
boyhood was passed at Aosta, within the shadows of the Graian Alps.[342]
Surely the heaven rested upon them. Might he not then go up to the hall
where God, above in the heaven, as the boy’s mother taught, ruled and held
all?

    “So one night it seemed he must ascend to the summit of the mountains,
    and go to the hall of the great King. In the plain at the first
    slopes, he saw women, the servants of the King, reaping grain
    carelessly and idly. He would accuse them to their Lord. He went up
    across the summit and came to the King’s hall. He found Him there
    alone with His seneschal, for it was autumn and He had sent His
    servants to gather the harvest. The Lord called the boy as he entered;
    and he went and sat at His feet. The Lord asked kindly (_jucunda
    affabilitate_) whence he came and what he wished. He replied just as
    he knew the thing to be (_juxta quod rem esse sciebat_). Then, at the
    Lord’s command, the Seneschal brought him bread of the whitest, and he
    was there refreshed in His presence. In the morning he verily believed
    that he had been in Heaven and had been refreshed with the bread of
    the Lord.”

A pious mother had been the boy’s first teacher. Others taught him
Letters, till he became proficient, and beloved by those who knew him. He
wished to be made a monk, but a neighbouring abbot refused his request,
fearing the displeasure of Anselm’s father, of whom the biographer has
nothing good to say. The youth fell sick, but with returning health the
joy of living drew his mind from study and his pious purpose. Love for his
mother held him from over-indulgence in pastimes. She died, and with this
sheet-anchor lost, Anselm’s ship was near to drifting out on the world’s
slippery flood. But here the impossible temper of the father wrought as
God’s providence, and Anselm, unable to stay with him, left his home, and
set out across Mount Senis attended by one clericus. For three years he
moved through Burgundy and Francia, till Lanfranc’s repute drew him to
Bec. Day and night he studied beneath that master, and also taught. The
desire to be a monk returned; and he began to direct his purpose toward
pleasing God and spurning the world.

But where? At either Cluny or Bec he feared to lose the fruit of his
studies; for at Cluny there was the strictness of the rule,[343] and at
Bec Lanfranc’s eminent learning would “make mine of little value.” Anselm
says that he was not yet subdued, nor had the contempt of the world become
strong in him. Then the thought came: “Is this to be a monk to wish to be
set before others and magnified above them? Nay,--become a monk where, for
the sake of God, you will be put after all and be held viler than all.
And where can this be? Surely at Bec. I shall be of no weight while he is
here, whose wisdom and repute are enough for all. Here then is my rest,
here God alone will be my purpose, here the single love of Him will be my
thought, and here the constant remembrance of Him will be a happy
consolation.”

Scripture bade him: Do all things with counsel. Whom but Lanfranc should
he consult? So he laid three plans before him--to become a monk, a hermit,
or (his father being dead) for the sake of God administer his patrimony
for the poor. Lanfranc persuaded Anselm to refer the decision to the
venerable Archbishop of Rouen. Together they went to him, and such, says
the biographer, was Anselm’s reverence for Lanfranc, that on the way,
passing through the wood near Bec, had Lanfranc bade him stay in that
wood, he would not have left it all his days.

The archbishop decided for the monastic life. So Anslem took the vows of a
monk at Bec, being twenty-seven years of age. Lanfranc was then Prior, but
soon left to become Abbot of St. Stephen’s at Caen.[344] Made Prior in his
place, Anselm devoted himself in gentleness and wisdom to the care of the
monks and to meditation upon God and the divine truths. He was especially
considerate of the younger monks, whose waywardness he guided and whose
love he won. The envy of cavillers was stilled. Yet the business of office
harassed one whose thoughts dwelled more gladly in the blue heaven with
God. Again he sought the counsel of the archbishop; for Herluin, the first
Abbot and founder of Bec, still lived on, old and unlettered, and
apparently no great fount of wisdom. The archbishop commanded him _per
sanctam obedientiam_ not to renounce his office, nor refuse if called to a
higher one. So, sad but resolute, he returned to the convent, and resumed
his burdens in such wise as to be held by all as a loved father. It was at
this period that he wrote several treatises upon the high doctrinal themes
which filled his thoughts. Gradually his mind settled to the search after
some single proof of that which is believed concerning God--that He
exists, and is eternal, unchanging, omnipotent, just, and pitying, and is
truth and goodness. This thing caused him great difficulty. Not only it
kept him from food and drink and sleep, but what weighed upon him more, it
interfered with his devotion to God’s service. Reflecting thus, and unable
to reach a valid conclusion, he decided that such speculation was a
temptation of the devil, and tried to drive it from his thoughts. But the
more he struggled, the more it beset him. And one night, at the time of
the nocturnal vigils, the grace of God shed light in his heart, and the
argument was clear to his mind, and filled his inmost being with an
immense jubilation. All the more now was he confirmed in the love of God
and the contempt of the world, of which one night he had a vision as of a
torrent filled with obscene filth, and carrying in its flood the countless
host of people of the world, while apart and aloof from its slime rose the
sweet cloister, with its walls of silver, surrounded by silvery herbage,
all delectable beyond conception.

In the year 1078 old Herluin died. Anselm long had guided the convent, and
with one voice the brethren chose him Abbot. He reasoned and argued, but
could not dissuade them, and in his anxiety he knew not what to do. Some
days passed. He had recourse to entreaties; with tears he flung himself
prostrate before them all, praying and protesting in the name of God, and
beseeching them, if they had any bowels of compassion, to permit him to
remain free from this great burden. But they only cast themselves upon the
earth, and prayed that he would rather commiserate them, and not disregard
the convent’s good. At length he yielded, for the command of the
archbishop came to his mind. Such a scene occurs often in monastic
history. None the less is it moving when the participants are in earnest,
as Anselm was, and his monks.

So Anselm’s life opened; so it sought counsel, gathered strength, and
centred to its purpose, pursuing as its goal the thought of God. Anselm
had love and gentleness for his fellows; he drew their love and reverence.
Yet, aloof, he lived within his spirit. Did he open its hidden places even
to Lanfranc? Although one who in his humility always desired counsel,
perhaps neither Lanfranc nor Eadmer, the friend whom the Pope gave him for
an adviser, knew the meditations of his heart. We at all events should
discern little of them by following the outer story of his life. It might
even be fruitless to sail with him across the channel to visit Lanfranc,
now Primate of England. The biographer has nothing to tell of the converse
between the two, although quite rightly impressed at the meeting between
him who was pre-eminent in _auctoritas_ and _scientia_ and him who
excelled in _sanctitas_ and _sapientia Dei_. Nor would it enlighten us to
follow Anselm’s archiepiscopal career, save so far as to realize that he
who lives in the thought of God will fear no brutal earthly majesty, such
as that of William Rufus, to admonish whom Anselm once more crossed the
Channel after Lanfranc’s death. Whatever this despoiler of bishoprics then
thought, he fell sick afterwards, and, being terrified, named Anselm
archbishop, this being in the year 1093. One may imagine the unison
between them! and how little the Red King’s ways would turn the enskied
steadfastness of Anselm’s soul. But the king had the power, and could keep
the archbishop in trouble and in peril. Anselm asked and asked again for
leave to go to Rome, and the king refused. After more than one stormy
scene--the storm being always on the Red King’s part--Anselm made it plain
that he would obey God rather than man in the matter. At the very last he
went in to the king and his Court, and seating himself quietly at the
king’s right he said: “I, my lord, shall go, as I have determined. But
first, if you do not decline it, I will give you my blessing.” So the king
acquiesced.

The archbishop went first to Canterbury, to comfort and strengthen his
monks, and spoke to them assembled together:

    “Dearly beloved brothers and sons, I am, as you know, about to leave
    this kingdom. The contention with our lord the king as to Christian
    discipline, has reached this pass that I must either do what is
    contrary to God and my own honour, or leave the realm. Gladly I go,
    hoping through the mercy of God that my journey may advance the
    Church’s liberty hereafter. I am moved to pity you, upon whom greater
    tribulations will come in my absence. Even with me here you have not
    been unoppressed, yet I think I have given you more peace than you
    have had since the death of our Father Lanfranc. I think those who
    molest you will rage the more with me away. You, however, are not
    undisciplined in the school of the Lord. Nevertheless I will say
    something, because, since you have come together within the close of
    this monastery to fight for God, you should always have before your
    eyes how you should fight.

    “All retainers do not fight in the same way either for an earthly
    prince, or for God whose are all things that are. The angels
    established in eternal beatitude wait upon Him. He has also men who
    serve Him for earthly benefits, like hired knights. He has also some
    who, cleaving to His will, contend to reach the kingdom of heaven,
    which they have forfeited through Adam’s fault. Observe the knights
    who are in God’s pay. Many you see leading a secular life and cleaving
    to the household of God for the good things which they gain in His
    service. But when, by God’s judgment, trial comes to them, and
    disaster, they fly from His love and accuse Him of injustice. We
    monks--would that we were such as not to be like them! For those who
    cannot stand to their professed purpose unless they have all things
    comfortable, and do not wish to suffer destitution for God, how shall
    they not be held like to these? And shall such be heirs of the kingdom
    of heaven? Faithfully I say, No, never, unless they repent.

    “He who truly contends toward recovering the kingdom of life, strives
    to cleave to God through all; no adversity draws him from God’s
    service, no pleasure lures him from the love of Him. _Per dura et
    aspera_ he treads the way of His commands, and from hope of the reward
    to come, his heart is aflame with the ardour of love, and sings with
    the Psalmist, Great is the glory of the Lord. Which glory he tastes in
    this pilgrimage, and tasting, he desires, and desiring, salutes as
    from afar. Supported by the hope of attaining, he is consoled amid the
    perils of the world and gladly sings, Great is the glory of the Lord.
    Know that this one will in no way be defrauded of that glory of the
    Lord, since all that is in him serves the Lord, and is directed to
    winning this reward. But I see that there is no need to say to you
    another word. My brothers, since we are separated now in grief, I
    beseech you so to strive that hereafter we may be united joyfully
    before God. Be ye those who truly wish to be made heirs of God.”

The clarity and gentle love of this high argument is Anselm. Now the story
follows of Anselm and Eadmer and another monk travelling on, sometimes
unknown, sometimes acclaimed, through France to Italy and Rome. Anselm’s
face inspired reverence in those who did not know him, and the peace of
his countenance attracted even Saracens. Had he been born and bred in
England, he might have managed better with the Red King. He never got an
English point of view, but remained a Churchman with Italian-Hildebrandine
convictions. Of course, two policies were clashing then in England, where
it happened that there was on one side an able and rapacious tyrant, while
the other was represented by a man with the countenance and temperament of
an angel. But we may leave Anselm now in Italy, where he is beyond the Red
King’s molestation, and turn to his writings.

Their choice and treatment of subject was partly guided by the needs of
his pupils and friends at Bec and elsewhere in Normandy or Francia or
England. For he wrote much at their solicitation; and the theological
problems of which solutions were requested, suggest the intellectual
temper of those regions, rather than of Italy. In a way Anselm’s works,
treating of separate and selected Christian questions, are a proper
continuation of those composed by northern theologians in the ninth
century on Predestination and the Eucharist.[345] Only Anselm’s were not
evoked by the exigency of actual controversy as much as by the insistency
of the eleventh-century mind, and the need it felt of some adjustment
regarding certain problems. Anselm’s theological and philosophic
consciousness is clear and confident. His faculties are formative and
creative, quite different from the compiling instincts of Alcuin or
Rabanus. The matter of his argument has become his own; it has been remade
in his thinking, and is presented as from himself--and God. He no longer
conceives himself as one searching through the “pantries” of the Fathers
or culling the choice flowers of their “meadows.” He will set forth the
matter as God has deigned to disclose it to him. In the _Cur Deus homo_ he
begins by saying that he has been urged by many, verbally and by letter,
to consider the reasons why God became man and suffered, and then,
assenting, says: “Although, from the holy Fathers on, what should suffice
has been said, yet concerning this question I will endeavour to set forth
for my inquirers what God shall deign to disclose to me.”[346]

Certain works of Anselm, the _Monologion_, for instance, present the dry
and the formal method of reasoning which was to make its chief home in
France; others, like the _Proslogion_, seem to be Italian in a certain
beautiful emotionalism. The feeling is very lofty, even lifted out of the
human, very skyey, even. The _Proslogion_, the _Meditationes_, do not
throb with the red blood of Augustine’s _Confessions_, the writing which
influenced them most. The quality of their feeling suggests rather Dante’s
_Paradiso_; and sometimes with Anselm a sense of formal beauty and
perfection seems to disclose the mind of Italy. Moreover, Anselm’s Latin
style appears Italian. It is elastic, even apparently idiomatic, and
varies with the temper and character of his different works. Throughout,
it shows in Latin the fluency and simple word-order natural to an author
whose _vulgaris eloquentia_ was even closer to Latin in the time of Anselm
than when Dante wrote.

So Anselm’s writings were intimately part of their author, and very part
of his life-long meditation upon God. Led by the solicitations of others,
as well as impelled by the needs of his own faculties and nature, he takes
up one Christian problem after another, and sets forth his understanding
of it with his conclusion. He is devout, an absolute believer; and he is
wonderfully metaphysical. He is a beautiful, a sublimated, and idealizing
reasoner, convinced that a divine reality must exist in correspondence
with his thought, which projects itself aloft to evoke from the blue an
answering reality. The inspiration, the radiating point of Anselm’s
intellectual interest, is clearly given--to understand that which he first
believes. It is a spontaneous intellectual interest, not altogether
springing from a desire to know how to be saved. It does not seek to
understand in order to believe; but seeks the happiness of knowing and
understanding that which it believes and loves. Listen to some sentences
from the opening of the _Proslogion_:

    “Come now, mannikin, flee thy occupations for a little, and hide from
    the confusion of thy cares. Be vacant a little while for God, and for
    a little rest in Him.... Now, O Lord my God, teach my heart where and
    how to seek thee, where and how to find thee. Lord, Lord, illuminate
    us; show us thyself. Pity us labouring toward thee, impotent without
    thee.... Teach me to seek thee, and show thyself to my search; for I
    cannot seek thee unless thou dost teach, nor find thee unless thou
    dost show thyself.... I make no attempt, Lord, to penetrate thy
    depths, for my intellect has no such reach; but I desire to understand
    some measure of thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. I do not
    seek to know in order that I may believe; but I believe, that I may
    know. For I believe this also, that unless I shall have believed, I
    shall not understand.”[347]

So Anselm is first a believer, then a theologian; and his reason devotes
itself to the elucidation of his faith. Faith prescribes his intellectual
interests, and sets their bounds. His thought does not occupy itself with
matters beyond. But it takes a pure intellectual delight in reasoning upon
the God which his faith presents and his heart cleaves to. The motive is
the intellectual and loving delight which his mind takes in this pursuit.
His faith was sure and undisturbed, and ample for his salvation. His
intellect, affected by no motive beyond its own strength and joy, delights
in reasoning upon the matter of his faith.[348]

We may still linger for a moment to observe how closely part of Anselm’s
nature was his proof of the existence of God.[349] It sprang directly from
his saintly soul and the compelling idealism of his reason. In the
_Monologion_ Anselm ranged his many arguments concerning the nature and
attributes of the _summum bonum_ which is God. Its chain of inductions
failed to satisfy him and his pupils. So he set his mind to seek a sole
and unconditioned proof (as Eadmer states in the _Vita_) of God’s
existence and the attributes which faith ascribes to Him. Anselm says the
same in the Preface to the _Proslogion_:

    “Considering that the prior work was woven out of a concatenation of
    many arguments, I set to seek within myself (_mecum_) whether I might
    not discover one argument which needed nothing else than itself alone
    for its proof; and which by itself might suffice to show that God
    truly exists, and that He is the _summum bonum_ needing nothing else,
    but needed by all things in order that they may exist and have
    well-being (_ut sint et bene sint_); and whatever we believe
    concerning the divine substance.”

The famous proof which at length flashed upon him is substantially this:
By very definition the word _God_ means the greatest conceivable being.
This conception exists even in the atheist’s mind, for he knows what is
meant by the words, the absolutely greatest. But the greatest cannot be in
the intellect alone, for then conceivably there would be a greater which
would exist in reality as well. And since, by definition, God is the
absolutely greatest, He must exist in reality as well as in the mind.[350]
Carrying out the scholia to this argument, Anselm then proves that God
possesses the various attributes ascribed to Him by the Christian Faith.

That from a definition one may not infer the existence of the thing
defined, was pointed out by a certain monk Gaunilo almost as soon as the
_Proslogion_ appeared. Anselm answered him that the argument applied only
to the greatest conceivable being. Since that time Anselm’s proof has been
upheld and disproved many times. It was at all events a great dialectic
leap; but likely one may not with such a bound cross the chasm from
definition to existence--at least one will be less bold to try when he
realizes that this chasm is there. Temperamentally, at least, this proof
was the summit of Anselm’s idealism: he could not but conceive things to
exist in correspondence to the demands of his conceptions. He never made
another so palpable leap from conception to conviction as in this proof of
God’s existence; yet his theology proceeded through like processes of
thought. For example, he is sure of God’s omnipotence, and also sure that
God can do nothing which would detract from the perfection of His nature:
God cannot lie: “For it does not follow, if God wills to lie that it is
just to lie; but rather that He is not God. For only that will can will to
lie in which truth is corrupted, or rather which is corrupted by forsaking
truth. Therefore when one says ‘if God wills to lie,’ he says in
substance, ‘if God is of such a nature as to will to lie.’”[351]

Anselm’s other famous work was the _Cur Deus homo_, upon the problem why
God became man to redeem mankind. It was connected with his view of sin,
and the fall of the angels, as set forth chiefly in his dialogue _De casu
Diaboli_. One may note certain cardinal points in his exposition: Man
could be redeemed only by God; for he would have been the bond-servant of
whoever redeemed him, and to have been the servant of any one except God
would not have restored him to the dignity which would have been his had
he not sinned.[352] Or again: The devil had no rights over man, which he
lost by unjustly slaying God. For man was not the devil’s, nor does the
devil belong to himself but to God.[353] Evidently Anselm frees himself
from the conception of any ransom paid to the devil, or any trickery put
on him--thoughts which had lowered current views of the Atonement.
Anselm’s arguments (which are too large, and too interwoven with his views
upon connected subjects, to be done justice to by any casual statement)
are free from degrading foolishness. His reasonings were deeply felt, as
one may see in his _Meditationes_, where thought and feeling mutually
support and enhance each other. So he recalls Augustine, the great model
and predecessor whom he followed and revered. And still the feeling in
Anselm’s _Meditationes_, as in the _Proslogion_, is somewhat sublimated
and lifted above human heart-throbs. Perhaps it may seem rhetorical, and
intentionally stimulated in order to edify. Even in the _Meditationes_
upon the humanity and passion of Jesus, Anselm is not very close to the
quivering tenderness of St. Bernard, and very far from the impulsive and
passionate love of Francis of Assisi. One thinks that his feelings rarely
distorted his countenance or wet it with tears.[354]




CHAPTER XII

MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: FRANCE

      I. GERBERT.

     II. ODILO OF CLUNY.

    III. FULBERT AND THE SCHOOL OF CHARTRES; TRIVIUM AND QUADRIVIUM.

     IV. BERENGAR OF TOURS, ROSCELLIN, AND THE COMING TIME.


I

It appeared in the last chapter that Anselm’s choice of topic was not
uninfluenced by his northern domicile at Bec in Normandy, from which, one
may add, it was no far cry to the monastery (Marmoutier) of Anselm’s sharp
critic Gaunilo. These places lay within the confines of central and
northern France, the home of the most originative mediaeval development.
For this region, the renewed studies of the Carolingian period were the
proper antecedents of the efforts of the eleventh century. The topics of
study still remained substantially the same; yet the later time represents
a further stage in the appropriation of the antique and patristic
material, and its productions show the genius of the authors more clearly
than Carolingian writings, which were taken piecemeal from patristic
sources or made of borrowed antique phrase.

The difference is seen in the personality and writings of Gerbert of
Aurillac,[355] the man who with such intellectual catholicity opens the
story of this period. One will be struck with the apparently arid crudity
of his intellectual processes. Crude they were, and of necessity; arid
they were not, being an unavoidable stage in the progress of mediaeval
thinking. Yet it is a touch of fate’s irony that such an interesting
personality should have been afflicted with them. For Gerbert was the
redeeming intellect of the last part of the tenth century. The cravings of
his mind compassed the intellectual predilections of his contemporaries in
their entirety. Secular and by no means priestly they appear in him; and
it is clear that religious motives did not dominate this extraordinary
individual who was reared among monks, became Abbot of Bobbio, Archbishop
of Rheims, Archbishop of Ravenna, and pope at last.

He appears to have been born shortly before the year 950. From the
ignorance in which we are left as to his parents and the exact place of
his birth in Aquitaine, it may be inferred that his origin was humble.
While still a boy he was received into the Benedictine monastery of St.
Geraldus at Aurillac in Auvergne. There he studied grammar (in the
extended mediaeval sense), under a monk named Raymund, and grew to love
the classics. A loyal affectionateness was a life-long trait of Gerbert,
and more than one letter in after life bears witness to the love which he
never ceased to feel for the monks of Aurillac among whom his youthful
years were passed, and especially for this brother Raymund from whom he
received his first instruction.

Raymund afterwards became abbot of the convent. But it was his
predecessor, Gerald, who had received the boy Gerbert, and was still to do
something of moment in directing his career. A certain duke of the Spanish
March came on a pilgrimage to Aurillac; and Gerald besought him to take
Gerbert back with him to Spain for such further instruction as the convent
did not afford. The duke departed, taking Gerbert, and placed him under
the tuition of the Bishop of Vich, a town near Barcelona. Here he studied
mathematics. The tradition that he travelled through Spain and learned
from the Arabs lacks probability. But in the course of time the duke and
bishop set forth to pray for sundry material objects at the fountainhead
of Catholicism, and took their _protégé_ with them to Rome.

In Rome, Gerbert’s destiny advanced apace. His patrons, doubtless proud of
their young scholar, introduced him to the Pope, John XIII., who also was
impressed by Gerbert’s personality and learning. John told his own
protector, the great Otto, and informed him of Gerbert’s ability to teach
mathematics; and the two kept Gerbert in Rome, when the Spanish duke and
bishop returned to their country. Gerbert began to teach, and either at
this time or later had among his pupils the young Augustus, Otto II. But
he was more anxious to study logic than to teach mathematics, even under
imperial favour. He persuaded the old emperor to let him go to Rheims with
a certain archdeacon from that place, who was skilled in the science which
he lacked. The emperor dismissed him, with a liberal hand. In his new home
Gerbert rapidly mastered logic, and impressed all with his genius. He won
the love of the archbishop, Adalberon, who shortly set the now triply
accomplished scholar at the head of the episcopal school. Gerbert’s
education was complete, in letters, in mathematics including music, and in
logic. Thenceforth for ten years (972-982), the happiest of his life, he
studied and also taught the whole range of academic knowledge.

Fortune, not altogether kind, bestowed on Gerbert the favour of three
emperors. The graciousness of the first Otto had enabled him to proceed to
Rheims. The second Otto listened to his teaching, admired the teacher, and
early in the year 983 made him Abbot and Count of Bobbio. Long afterwards
the third Otto made him Archbishop of Ravenna, and then pope.

Bobbio, the chief foundation of Columbanus, situated not far from Genoa,
was powerful and rich; but its vast possessions, scattered throughout
Italy, had been squandered by worthless abbots or seized by lawless
nobles. The new count-abbot, eager to fulfil the ecclesiastical and feudal
functions of his position, strove to reclaim the monastery’s property and
bring back its monks to decency and learning. In vain. Now, as more than
once in Gerbert’s later life, brute circumstances proved too strong. Otto
died. Gerbert was unsupported. He struggled and wrote many letters which
serve to set forth the situation for us, though they did not win the
battle for their writer:

    “According to the largeness of my mind, my lord (Otto II.) has
    enriched me with most ample honours. For what part of Italy does not
    hold the possessions of the blessed Columbanus? So should this be,
    from the generosity and benevolence of our Caesar. Fortune, indeed,
    ordains it otherwise. Forsooth according to the largeness of my mind
    she has loaded me with most ample stores of enemies. For what part of
    Italy has not my enemies? My strength is unequal to the strength of
    Italy! There is peace on this condition: if I, despoiled, submit, they
    cease to strike; intractable in my vested rights, they attack with the
    sword. When they do not strike with the sword, they thrust with
    javelins of words.”[356]

Within a year Gerbert gave up the struggle at Bobbio, and returned to
Rheims to resume his duties as head of the school, and secretary and
intimate adviser of Adalberon. Politically the time was one of uncertainty
and turmoil. The Carolingian house was crumbling, and the house of Capet
was scheming and struggling on to a royalty scarcely more considerable. In
Germany intrigue and revolt threatened the rights of the child Otto III.
Archbishop Adalberon, guided by Gerbert, was a powerful factor in the
dynastic change in France; and the two were zealous for Otto. Throughout
these troubles Gerbert constantly appears, directing projected measures
and divining courses of events, yet somehow, in spite of his unmatched
intelligence, failing to control them.

Time passed, and Adalberon died at the beginning of the year 989. His
successor, Arnulf, a scion of the falling Carolingian house, was
subsequently unseated for treason to the new-sprung house of Capet. In 991
Gerbert himself was made archbishop. But although seeming to reach his
longed-for goal, troubles redoubled on his head. There was rage at the
choice of one so lowly born for the princely dignity. The storm gathered
around the new archbishop, and the See of Rome was moved to interfere,
which it did gladly, since at Rome Gerbert was hated for the reproaches
cast upon its ignorance and corruption by bishops at the council which
elected him and deposed his predecessor. In that deposition and election
Rome had not acquiesced; and we read the words of the papal legate:

    “The acts of your synod against Arnulf, or rather against the Roman
    Church, astound me with their insults and blasphemies. Truly is the
    word of the Gospel fulfilled in you, ‘There shall be many
    anti-Christs.’... Your anti-Christs say that Rome is as a temple of
    idols, an image of stone. Because the vicars of Peter and their
    disciples will not have as master Plato, Virgil, Terence or the rest
    of the herd of Philosophers, ye say they are not worthy to be
    door-keepers--because they have no part in such song.”[357]

The battle went against Gerbert. Interdicted from his archiepiscopal
functions, he left France for the Court of Otto III., where his intellect
at once dominated the aspirations of the young monarch. Otto and Gerbert
went together to Italy, and the emperor made his friend Archbishop of
Ravenna. The next year, 999, Gregory V. died, and the archbishop became
Pope Sylvester II. For three short years the glorious young imperial
dreamer and his peerless counsellor planned and wrought for a great united
Empire and Papacy on earth. Then death took first the emperor and soon
afterwards the pope-philosopher.

Gerbert was the first mind of his time, its greatest teacher, its most
eager learner, and most universal scholar. His pregnant letters reflect a
finished man who has mastered his acquired knowledge and transformed it
into power. They also evince the authorship of one who had uniquely
profited from the power and spirit of the great minds of the pagan past,
had imbibed their sense of form and pertinency, and with them had become
self-contained and self-controlled, master of himself and of all that had
entered in and made him what he was. Notice how the personality of the
writer, with his capacities, tastes, and temperament, is unfolded before
us in a letter to a close friend, abbot of a monastery at Tours:

    “Since you hold my memory in honour, and in virtue of relationship
    declare great friendship, I deem that I shall be happy for your
    opinion, if only I am one who in the judgment of so great a man is
    found worthy to be loved. But since I am not one who, with Panetius,
    would sometimes separate the good from the useful, but rather with
    Tully would mingle it with everything useful, I wish these best and
    holiest friendships never to be void of reciprocal utility. And as
    morality and the art of speech are not to be severed from philosophy,
    I have always joined the study of speaking well with the study of
    living well. For although by itself living well may be nobler than
    speaking well, and may suffice without its fellow for one absolved
    from the direction of affairs; yet for us, busied with the State, both
    are needed. For it is of the greatest utility to speak appositely when
    persuading, and with mild discourse check the fury of angry men. In
    preparing for such business, I am eagerly collecting a library; and as
    formerly at Rome and elsewhere in Italy, so likewise in Germany and
    Belgium, I have obtained copyists and manuscripts with a mass of
    money, and the help of friends in those parts. Permit me likewise to
    beg of you also to promote this end. We will append at the end of this
    letter a list of those writers we wish copied. We have sent for your
    disposal parchment for the scribes and money to defray the cost, not
    unmindful of your goodness. Finally, lest by saying more we should
    abuse epistolary _convenances_, the cause of so much trouble is
    contempt of faithless fortune; a contempt which not nature alone has
    given to us--as to many men--but careful study. Consequently when at
    leisure and when busied in affairs, we teach what we know, and learn
    where we are ignorant.”[358]

Gerbert’s letters are concise, even elliptical to the verge of obscurity.
He discloses himself in a few words to his old friend Raymund at the
monastery of Aurillac: “With what love we are bound to you, the Latins
know and also the barbarians,[359] who share the fruit of our studies.
Their vows demand your presence. Amid public cares philosophy is the sole
solace; and from her study we have often been the gainer, when in this
stormy time we have thus broken the attack of fortune raging grievously
against others or ourselves....”[360]

Save for the language, one might fancy Cicero speaking to some friend, and
not the future pope of the year 1000 to a monk. The sentiment is quite
antique. And Gerbert not only uses antique phrase but is touched, like
many a mediaeval man, with the antique spirit. In another letter he
writes of friendship, and queries whether the divinity has given anything
better to mortals. He refers to his prospects, and remarks: “sed involvit
mundum caeca fortuna,” and he is not certain whither it will cast
him.[361]

Doubtless such antique sentiments were a matter of mood with Gerbert; he
can readily express others of a Christian colour, and turn again to still
other topics very readily, as in the following letter--a curious one. It
is to a monk:

    “Think not, sweetest brother, that it is through my fault I lack my
    brethren’s society. After leaving thee, I had to undertake many
    journeys in the business of my father Columbanus.[362] The ambitions
    of the powers, the hard and wretched times, turn right to wrong. No
    one keeps faith. Yet since I know that all things hang on the decree
    of God, who changes both hearts and the kingdoms of the sons of men, I
    patiently await the end of things. I admonish and exhort thee,
    brother, to do the same. In the meanwhile one thing I beg, which may
    be accomplished without danger or loss to thee, and will make me thy
    friend forever. Thou knowest with what zeal I gather books everywhere,
    and thou knowest how many scribes there are in Italy, in town and
    country. Come then, quietly procure me copies of Manlius’s (Boëthius)
    _De astrologia_, Victorinus’s _Rhetoric_, Demosthenes’s
    _Optalmicus_.[363] I promise thee, brother, and will keep my word, to
    preserve a sacred silence as to thy praiseworthy compliance, and will
    remit twofold whatever thou dost demand. Let this much be known to the
    man, and the pay too, and cheer us more frequently with a letter; and
    have no fear that knowledge will come to any one of any matter thou
    mayest confide to our good faith.”[364]

When he wrote this letter, about the year 988, Gerbert was dangerously
deep in politics, and great was the power of this low-born titular Abbot
of Bobbio, head of the school at Rheims and secretary to the archbishop.
The tortuous statecraft and startling many-sidedness of this “scholar in
politics” must have disturbed his contemporaries, and may have roused the
suspicions from which grew the stories, told by future men, that this
scholar, statesman, and philosopher-pope was a magician who had learned
from forbidden sources much that should be veiled. Withal, however, one
may deem that the most veritable inner bit of Gerbert was his love of
knowledge and of antique literature, and that the letters disclosing this
are the subtlest revelation of the man who was ever transmuting his
well-guarded knowledge into himself and his most personal moods.

    “For there is nothing more noble for us in human affairs than a
    knowledge of the most distinguished men; and may it be displayed in
    volumes upon volumes multiplied. Go on then, as you have begun, and
    bring the streams of Cicero to one who thirsts. Let M. Tullius thrust
    himself into the midst of the anxieties which have enveloped us since
    the betrayal of our city, so that in the happy eyes of men we are held
    unhappy through our sentence. What things are of the world we have
    sought, we have found, we have accomplished, and, as I will say, we
    have become chief among the wicked. Lend aid, father, in order that
    divinity, expelled by the multitude of sinners, bent by thy prayers,
    may return, may visit us, may dwell with us--and if possible, may we
    who mourn the absence of the blessed father Adalberon, be rejoiced by
    thy presence.”[365]

So Gerbert wrote from Rheims, himself a chief intriguer in a city full of
treason.

Gerbert was a power making for letters. The best scholars sat at his feet;
he was an inspiration at the Courts of the second and third Ottos, who
loved learning and died so young; and the great school of Chartres, under
the headship of his pupil Fulbert, was the direct heir to his instruction.
At Rheims, where he taught so many years, he left to others the elementary
instruction in Latin. A pupil, Richer, who wrote his history, speaks of
courses in rhetoric and literature, to which he introduced his pupils
after instructing them in logic:

    “When he wished to lead them on from such studies to rhetoric, he put
    in practice his opinion that one cannot attain the art of oratory
    without a previous knowledge of the modes of diction which are to be
    learned from the poets. So he brought forward those with whom he
    thought his pupils should be conversant. He read and explained the
    poets Virgil, Statius, and Terence, the satirists Juvenal and Persius
    and Horace, also Lucan the historiographer. Familiarized with these,
    and practised in their locutions, he taught his pupils rhetoric.
    After they were instructed in this art, he brought up a sophist, to
    practise them in disputation, so that practised in this art as well,
    they might seem to argue artlessly, which he deemed the height of
    oratory.”[366]

So Gerbert used the classic poets in teaching rhetoric, and doubtless the
great prose writers too, with whom he was familiar. Following Cicero’s
precept that the orator should be a proficient reasoner, he prepared his
young rhetoricians by a course in logic, and completed their discipline
with exercises in disputation.

Richer also speaks of Gerbert’s epoch-making mathematical knowledge.[367]
In arithmetic he improved the current methods of computation; in geometry
he taught the traditional methods of measurement descended from the Roman
surveyors, and compiled a work from Boëthius and other sources. For
astronomy he made spheres and other instruments, and in music his teaching
was the best obtainable. In none of these provinces was he an original
inventor; nor did he exhaust the knowledge had by men before him. He was,
however, the embodiment of mediaeval progress, in that he drew
intelligently upon the sources within his reach, and then taught with
understanding and enthusiasm. Richer’s praise is unstinted:

    “He began with arithmetic; then taught music, of which there had long
    been ignorance in Gaul.... With what pains he set forth the method of
    astronomy, it may be well to state, so that the reader may perceive
    the sagacity and skill of this great man. This difficult subject he
    explained by means of admirable instruments. First he illustrated the
    world’s sphere by one of solid wood, the greater by the less. He fixed
    it obliquely as to the horizon with two poles, and near the upper pole
    set the northern constellations, and by the lower one those of the
    south. He determined its position by means of the circle called by the
    Greeks _orizon_ and by the Latins _limitans_, because it divides the
    constellations which are seen from those which are not. By his sphere
    thus fixed, he demonstrated the rising and setting of the stars, and
    taught his disciples to recognize them. And at night he followed their
    courses and marked the place of their rising and setting upon the
    different regions of his model.”

The historian passes on to tell how Gerbert with ingenious devices showed
on his sphere the imaginary circles called parallels, and on another the
movements of the planets, and on still another marked the constellations
of the heavens, so that even a beginner, upon having one constellation
pointed out, could find the others.[368]

In the province of philosophy, Gerbert’s labours extended little beyond
formal logic, philosophy’s instrument. He could do no more than understand
and apply as much of Boëthius’s rendering of the Aristotelian _Organon_ as
he was acquainted with. Yet he appears to have used more of the Boëthian
writings than any man before him, or for a hundred and fifty years after
his death. Richer gives the list. Beyond this evidence, curious testimony
is borne to the nature of Gerbert’s dialectic by Richer’s account of a
notable debate. The year was 980, when the fame of the brilliant young
_scholasticus_ of Rheims had spread through Gaul and penetrated Germany. A
certain master of repute at Magdeburg, named Otric, sent one of his pupils
to report on Gerbert’s teaching, and especially as to his method of laying
out the divisions of philosophy as “the science of things divine and
human.” The pupil returned with notes of Gerbert’s classification, in
which, by error or intention, it was made to appear that he subordinated
physics to mathematics, as species to genus, whereas, in truth, he made
them of equal rank. Otric thought to catch him tripping, and so managed
that a disputation was held between them at a time when Adalberon and
Gerbert were in Italy with the Emperor Otto II. It took place in Ravenna.
The emperor, then nineteen years of age, presided, there being present
many masters and dignitaries of the Church. Holding in his hand a tablet
of Gerbert’s alleged division of the sciences, His Majesty opened the
debate:

    “Meditation and discussion, as I think, make for the betterment of
    human knowledge, and questions from the wise rouse our thoughtfulness.
    Thus knowledge of things is drawn forth by the learned, or discovered
    by them and committed to books, which remain to our great good. We
    also may be incited by certain objects which draw the mind to a surer
    understanding. Observe now, that I am turning over this tablet
    inscribed with the divisions of philosophy. Let all consider it
    carefully, and each say what he thinks. If it be complete, let it be
    confirmed by your approbation. If imperfect, let it be rejected or
    corrected.

    “Then Otric, taking it before them all, said that it was arranged by
    Gerbert, and had been taken down from his lectures. He handed it to
    the Lord Augustus, who read it through, and presented it to Gerbert.
    The latter, carefully examining it, approved in part, and in part
    condemned, asserting that the scheme had not been arranged thus by
    him. Asked by Augustus to correct it, he said: ‘Since, O great Caesar
    Augustus, I see thee more potent than all these, I will, as is
    fitting, obey thy behest. Nor shall I be concerned at the spite of the
    malevolent, by whose instigation the very correct division of
    philosophy recently set forth so lucidly by me, has been vitiated by
    the substitution of a species. I say then, that mathematics, physics,
    and theology are to be placed as equals under one genus. The genus
    likewise has equal share in them. Nor is it possible that one and the
    same species, in one and the same respect, should be co-ordinate with
    another species and also be put under it as species under a genus.’”

Then in answer to a demand from Otric for a more explicit statement of his
classification, he said there could be no objection to dividing philosophy
according to Vitruvius (Victorinus) and Boëthius; “for philosophy is the
genus, of which the species are the practical and the theoretical: under
the practical, as species again, come _dispensativa_, _distributiva_ and
_civilis_; under the theoretical fall _phisica naturalis_, _mathematica
intelligibilis_, and _theologia intellectibilis_.”

Otric then wonders that Gerbert put mathematics immediately after physics,
omitting physiology. To which Gerbert replies that physiology stands to
physics as philology to philosophy, of which it is part. Otric changes his
attack to a flank movement, and asks Gerbert what is the _causa_ of
philosophy. Gerbert asks whether he means the cause by which, or the cause
for which, it is devised (_inventa_). Otric replies the latter. “Then,”
says Gerbert, “since you make your question clear, I say that philosophy
was devised that from it we might understand things divine and human.”
“But why use so many words,” says Otric, “to designate the cause of one
thing?” “Because one word may not suffice to designate a cause. Plato uses
three to designate the cause of the creation of the world, to wit, the
_bona Dei voluntas_. He could not have said _voluntas_ simply.” “But,”
says Otric, “he could have said more concisely _Dei voluntas_, for God’s
will is always good, which he would not deny.”

    “Here I do not contradict you,” says Gerbert, “but consider: since God
    alone is good in himself, and every creature is good only by
    participation, the word _bona_ is added to express the quality
    peculiar to His nature alone. However this may be, still one word will
    not always designate a cause. What is the cause of shadow? Can you put
    that in one word? I say, the cause of shadow is a body interposed to
    light. It is not ‘body’ nor even ‘body interposed.’ I don’t deny that
    the causes of many things can be stated in one word, as the genera of
    substance, quantity, or quality, which are the causes of species.
    Others cannot so simply be expressed, as _rationale ad mortale_.”

This enigmatic phrase electrifies Otric, who cries: “You put the mortal
under the rational? Who does not know that the rational is confined to
God, angels, and mankind, while the mortal embraces everything mortal, a
limitless mass?”

    “To which Gerbert: ‘If, following Porphyry and Boëthius, you make a
    careful division of substance, carrying it down to individuals, you
    will have the rational broader than the mortal as may readily be
    shown. Since substance, admittedly the most general genus, may be
    divided into subordinate genera and species down to individuals, it is
    to be seen whether all these subordinates may be expressed by a single
    word. Clearly, some are designated with one word, as _corpus_, others
    with several, as _animatum sensibile_. With like reason, the
    subordinate, which is _animal rationale_, may be predicated of the
    subject that is _animal rationale mortale_. Not that _rationale_ may
    be predicated of what is mortal simply; but _rationale_, I say, joined
    to _animal_ is predicated of _mortale_ joined to _animal rationale_.’

    “At this, Augustus with a nod ended the argument, since it had lasted
    nearly the whole day, and the audience were fatigued with the prolix
    and unbroken disputation. He splendidly rewarded Gerbert, who set out
    for Gaul with Adalberon.”[369]

Evidently Richer’s account gives merely the captions of this disputation.
There was not the slightest originality in any of the propositions stated
by the disputants; everything is taken from Porphyry and Boëthius and the
current Latin translation of Plato’s _Timaeus_. Yet the whole affair, the
selection of the questions, the nature of the answers, the limitation of
the matter to the bare poles of logical palestrics, is most illustrative
of the mentality and intellectual interests of the late tenth century. The
growth of the mediaeval intellect lay unavoidably through such courses of
discipline. And just as early mediaeval Latin had to save itself from
barbarism by cleaving to grammar, so the best intellect of this early
period grasped at logic not only as the most obviously needed discipline
and guide, but also with imperfect consciousness that this discipline and
means did not contain the goal and plenitude of substantial knowledge.
Grammar was then not simply a means but an end in the study of letters,
and so was logic unconsciously. In the one case and the other, the
palpable need of the _disciplina_ and its difficulties kept the student
from realizing that the instrument was but an instrument.

Moreover, upon Gerbert’s time pressed the specific need to consider just
such questions as the disputation affords a sample of. An enormous mass of
theology, philosophy, and science awaited mastering, the heritage from a
greater past, antique and patristic. Perhaps a true instinct guided
Gerbert and his contemporaries to problems of classification and method as
a primary essential task. Had the Middle Ages been a period when
knowledge, however crude, was perforce advancing through experience,
investigation, and discovery, the problems of classification and method
would not have presented themselves as preliminary. But mediaeval
development lay through the study of what former men had won from nature
or received from God. This was preserved in books which had to be studied
and mastered. Hence classifications of knowledge were essential aids or
sorely needed guides. With a true instinct the Middle Ages first of all
looked within this mass of knowledge for guides to its mazes, seeking a
plan or scheme by the aid of which universal knowledge might be
unravelled, and then reconstructed in forms corresponding to even larger
verities.[370]


II

The decades on either side of the year 1000 were cramped and dull. In
Burgundy, to be sure, the energies of Cluny,[371] under its great abbots,
were rousing the monastic world to a sense of religious and disciplinary
decency. This reform, however, took little interest in culture. The monks
of Cluny were commonly instructed in the rudiments of the Seven Arts. They
had a little mathematics; bits of crude physical knowledge had unavoidably
come to them; and just as unavoidably had they made use of extracts from
the pagan poets in studying Latinity.[372] But they did not follow letters
for their own sake, nor knowledge because they loved it and felt that love
a holy one. Monastic principles hardly justified such a love, and Cluny’s
abbots had enough to do in bringing the monastic world to decency, without
dallying with inapplicable knowledge or the charms of pagan poetry.

Religious reforms in the ninth century had helped letters in the cathedral
and monastic schools of Gaul. The latter soon fell back to ignorance; but
among the cathedral schools, Chartres and Rheims continued to flourish. A
moral ordering of life increases thoughtfulness and may stimulate study.
Hence, in the latter part of the tenth century, the Cluniac reforms, like
the earlier reforming movements, affected letters favourably in the
monasteries. Here and there an exceptional man created an exceptional
situation. Such a one was Abbo, Abbot of St. Benedict’s at Fleury on the
Loire, who died the year after Gerbert. He was fortunate in his excellent
pupil and biographer, Aimoin, who ascribes to him as liberal sentiments
toward study as were consistent with a stern monasticism:

    “He admonished his hearers that having cast out the thorns of sin,
    they should sow the little gardens of their hearts with the spices of
    the divine virtues. The battle lay against the vices of the flesh, and
    it was for them to consider what arms they should oppose to its
    delights. To complete their armament, after the vows of prayer, and
    the manly strife of fastings, he deemed that the study of letters
    would advantage them, and especially the exercise of composition.
    Indeed he himself, the studious man, scarcely let pass a moment when
    he was not reading, writing, or dictating.”[373]

It is curious to observe the unavoidable influence of a crude Latin
education upon the most strenuous of these reforming monks. In 994 Odilo
became Abbot of Cluny. After a most notable and effective rule of more
than half a century, he died just as the year 1049 began. The closing
scenes are typically illustrative of the passing of an early mediaeval
saint. The dying abbot preaches and comforts his monks, gives his
blessing, adores the Cross, repels the devil:

    “I warn thee, enemy of the human race, turn from me thy plots and
    hidden wiles, for by me is the Cross of the Lord, which I always
    adore: the Cross my refuge, my way and virtue; the Cross,
    unconquerable banner, the invincible weapon. The Cross repels every
    evil, and puts darkness to flight. Through this divine Cross I
    approach my journey; the Cross is my life--death to thee, Enemy!”

The next day, “in the presence of all, the Creed is read for a shield of
faith against the deceptions of malignant spirits and the attacks of evil
thoughts; Augustine is brought in to expound, intently listened to, and
discussed.”[374]

For Odilo, the Cross is a divine, not to say magic, safeguard. His prayer
and imprecation have something of the nature of an uttered spell. No
antique zephyrs seem to blow in this atmosphere of faith and fear, in
which he passed his life, and performed his miracles before and after
death. Nevertheless the antique might mould his phrases, and perhaps
unconsciously affect his ethical conceptions. He wrote a Life of a former
abbot of Cluny, ascribing to him the four _cardinales disciplinas_, in
which he strove to perfect himself “in order that through _prudentia_ he
might assure the welfare of himself and those in his charge; that through
_temperantia_ (which by another name is called _modestia_), by a proper
measure of a just discretion, he might modestly discharge the spiritual
business entrusted to him; that through _fortitudo_ he might resist and
conquer the devil and his vices; and that through _justitia_, which
permeates all virtues and seasons them, he might live soberly and piously
and justly, fight the good fight and finish his course.”[375]

Thus the antique virtues shape Odilo’s thoughts, as seven hundred years
before him the point of view and reasoning of Ambrose’s _De officiis
ministrorum_ were set by Cicero’s _De officiis_.[376] The same classically
touched phrases, if not conceptions, pass on to Odilo’s pupil and
biographer, the monk Jotsaldus, to whom we owe our description of Odilo’s
last moments. He ascribes the four cardinal virtues to his hero, and then
defines them from the antique standpoint, but with Christian turns of
thought:

    “The philosophers define Prudence as the search for truth and the
    thirst for fuller knowledge. In which virtue Odilo was so
    distinguished that neither by day nor night did he cease from the
    search for truth. The Book of the divine contemplation was always in
    his hands, and ceaselessly he spoke of Scripture for the edification
    of all, and prayer ever followed reading.

    “Justice, as the philosophers say, is that which renders each his
    due, lays no claim to what is another’s, and neglects self-advantage,
    so as to maintain what is equitable for all.” [To illustrate this
    virtue in Odilo, the biographer gives instances of his charity, by
    which one observes the Christian turn taken by the conception.]

    “Fortitude is to hold the mind above the dread of danger, to fear
    nothing save the base, and bravely bear adversity and prosperity.
    Supported by this virtue, it is difficult to say how brave he was in
    repelling the plots of enemies and how patient in enduring them. You
    might observe in him this very privilege of patience; to those who
    injured him, as another David he repaid the grace of benefit, and
    toward those who hated him, he preserved a stronger benevolence.”
    [Again the Christian turn of thought.]

    “Temperance, last in the catalogue of the aforesaid virtues, according
    to its definition maintains moderation and order in whatever is to be
    said or done. Here he was so mighty as to hold to moderation and
    observe propriety (_ordinem_) in all his actions and commands, and
    show a wonderful discretion. Following the blessed Jerome, he tempered
    fasting to the golden mean, according to the weakness or strength of
    the body, thus avoiding fanaticism and preserving continency. Neither
    elegance nor squalor was noticeable in his dress. He tempered gravity
    of conduct with gaiety of countenance. He was severe in the correction
    of vice as the occasion demanded, gracious in pardoning, in both
    balancing an impartial scale.”[377]


III

A friend of Odilo was Gerbert’s pupil Fulbert, Bishop of Chartres from
1006 to 1028. His name is joined forever with that chief cathedral school
of early mediaeval France, which he so firmly and so broadly
re-established as to earn a founder’s fame. It will be interesting to
notice its range of studies. Chartres was an ancient home of letters.
Caesar[378] speaks of the land of the Carnuti as the centre of Druidism in
Gaul; and under the Empire, liberal studies quickly sprang up in the
Gallo-Roman city. They did not quite cease even in Merovingian times, and
revived with the Carolingian revival. Thenceforth they were pursued
continuously at the convent school of St. Peter, if not at the school
attached to the cathedral. For some years before he was made bishop, the
grave and kindly Fulbert had been the head of this cathedral school,
where he did not cease to teach until his death. As bishop, widely
esteemed and influential, he rebuilt the cathedral, aided by the kings of
France and Denmark, the dukes of Aquitaine and Normandy, the counts of
Champagne and Blois. His vast crypt still endures, a shadowy goal for
thousands of pilgrim knees, and an ample support for the great edifice
above it. Admiring tradition has ascribed to him even this glory of a
later time.

From near and far, pious students came to benefit by the instruction of
the school, of which Fulbert was the head and inspiration. Close was their
intercourse with their “Venerable Socrates” in the small school buildings
near the cathedral. From the accounts, we can almost see him moving among
them, stopping to correct one here, or looking over the shoulder of
another engaged upon a geometric figure, and putting some new problem.
Among the pupils there might be rivalry, quarrels, breaches of decorum;
but there was the master, ever grave and steadfast, always ready to
encourage with his sympathy, but prepared also to reprove, either silently
by withdrawing his confidence, or in words, as when he forbade an
instructor to joke when explaining Donatus: “spectaculum factus es
omnibus; cave.”

Some of these scholars became men of sanctity and renown--Berengar of
Tours gained an unhappy fame. A fellow-student wrote to him in later years
addressing him as foster-brother:

    “I have called thee foster-brother because of that sweetest common
    life led by us while youths in the Academy of Chartres under our
    venerable Socrates. Well we proved his saving doctrine and holy
    living, and now that he is with God we should hope to be aided by his
    prayers. Surely he is mindful of us, cherishing us even more than when
    he moved a pilgrim in the body of this death, and drew us to him by
    vows and tacit prayer, entreating us in those evening colloquies
    (_vespertina colloquia_) in the garden by the chapel, that we should
    tread the royal way, and cleave to the footprints of the holy
    fathers.”[379]

The cathedral school included youths receiving their first lessons, as
well as older scholars and instructors. They lived together under rules,
and together celebrated the services of the cathedral, chanting the
matins, the hours, and the mass. The Trivium and Quadrivium made the basis
of their studies. Text-books and courses were already some centuries old.

The first branch of the Trivium was Grammar, which included literature by
way of illustration; and he who held the chair had the title of
_grammaticus_. For the beginners, _Donatus_ was the text-book, and
_Priscianus_ for the more advanced.[380] Nor was Martianus Capella
neglected. The student annotated these works with citations from the
_Etymologies_ of Isidore. Divers mnemotechnic processes assisted him to
commit the contents to memory. The grammatical course included the writing
of compositions in prose and verse, according to rule, and the reading of
classic authors. For their school verses in metre the pupils used Bede’s
_De arte metrica_, an encyclopaedia of metrical forms. They also wrote
accentual and rhymed Latin verse. Of profane authors the Library appears
to have contained Livy, Valerius Maximus, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Statius,
Servius the commentator on Virgil; and of writers who were Christian
Classics in the Middle Ages, Orosius, Gregory of Tours, Fortunatus,
Sedulius, Arator, Prudentius, and Boëthius, the last named being the most
important single source of early mediaeval education. Rhetoric, the second
branch of the Trivium, bore that vague relationship to grammar which it
bears in modern parlance. The rules of the rhetoricians were learned; the
works of profane or Christian orators were read and imitated. This study
left its mark on mediaeval sermons and _Vitae Sanctorum_.

As for the third branch, Dialectic, Fulbert’s pupils studied the logical
treatises in general use in the earlier Middle Ages: to wit, the
_Categories_ and the _De interpretatione_ of Aristotle, and Porphyry’s
_Introduction_, all in the Latin of Boëthius. For works which might be
regarded as commentaries upon these, the school had at its disposal the
_Categories_ ascribed to Augustine and Apuleius’s _De interpretatione_,
Cicero’s _Topica_, and Boëthius’s discussion of definition, division, and
categorical and hypothetical syllogisms--the logical writings expounded
by Gerbert at Rheims. The school had likewise Gerbert’s own _Libellus de
ratione uti_ and Boëthius’s _De consolatione_, that chief ethical compend
for the early Middle Ages; also the writings of Eriugena, and Dionysius
the Areopagite in Eriugena’s translation. Whether or not it possessed the
current Latin version of Plato’s _Timaeus_, Fulbert and Berengar at all
events refer to Plato in terms of eulogy.

Passing to the Quadrivium, we find that Fulbert had studied its four
branches under Gerbert. In Arithmetic the students used the treatise of
Boëthius, and also the Abacus, a table of vertical columns, with Roman
numerals at the top to indicate the order of units, tens, and hundreds
according to the decimal system. In Geometry the students likewise fell
back upon Boëthius. Astronomy, the third branch of the Quadrivium, had for
its practical object the computation of the Church’s calendar. The pupils
learned the signs of the Zodiac and were instructed in the method of
finding the stars by the _Astrolabius_, a sphere (such as Gerbert had
constructed) representing the constellations, and turning upon a tube as
an axis, which served to fix the polar star. Music, the fourth branch of
the Quadrivium, was zealously cultivated. For its theory, the treatise of
Boëthius was studied; and Fulbert and his scholars did much to advance the
music of the liturgy, composing texts and airs for organ chanting.

In addition to the Quadrivium, medicine was taught. The students learned
receipts and processes handed down by tradition and commonly ascribed to
Hippocrates. For more convenient memorizing, Fulbert cast them into verse.
Such “medicine” was not founded on observation; and a mediaeval
scholar-copyist would as naturally transcribe a medical receipt-book as
any other work coming within the range of his stylus. One may remember
that in the early Middle Ages the relic was the common means of cure.

The seven _Artes_ of the Trivium and Quadrivium were the handmaids of
Theology; and Fulbert gave elaborate instruction in this Christian queen
of the sciences, expounding the Scriptures, explaining the Liturgy, and
taking up the controversies of the time. As a part of this sacred
science, the students apparently were taught something of Canon and Roman
law and of Charlemagne’s Capitularies.[381]


IV

The Chartres Quadrivium represents the extreme compass of mathematical and
physical studies in France in the eleventh century, when slight interest
was taken in physical science--a phrase far too grand to designate the
crass traditional views of nature which prevailed. Indifference to natural
knowledge was the most palpable intellectual defect of Ambrose and
Augustine, and the most portentous. The coming centuries, which were to
look upon their writings as universal guides to living and knowing, found
therein no incentive to observe or study the natural world. Of course the
Carolingian period evolved out of itself no such desire; nor did the
eleventh century. At the best, the general understanding of physical fact
remained that which had been handed down. It was gleaned from the books
commonly read, the _Physiologus_ or the edifying stories of miracles in
the myriad _Vitae Sanctorum_, quite as much as from the scant information
given in Isidore’s _Origines_, Bede’s _Liber de temporibus_, or the _De
universo_ of Rabanus Maurus.

So much for natural science. In historical writing the quality of
composition rarely rose above that of the tenth century.[382] No sign of
critical acumen had appeared, and the writers of the period show but a
narrow local interest. There was no France, but everywhere a parcelling of
the land into small sections of misrule, between which travel was
difficult and dangerous. The chroniclers confine their attention, as
doubtless their knowledge also was confined, to the region where they
lived. To lift history over these narrow barriers, there was needed the
renewal of the royal power, which came with the century’s close, and the
stimulus to curiosity springing from the Crusades.[383]

In fine, the eleventh century was crude and inchoate, preparatory to the
intellectual activity and the unleashed energies of life which mark the
opening of the twelfth. Yet the mediaeval mind was assimilating and
appropriating dynamically its lessons from the Fathers, as well as those
portions of the antique heritage of thought which, so far, it had felt a
need of. Difficult problems were stated, but in ways presenting, as it
were, the apices of alternatives too narrow to hold truth, which lies less
frequently in warring opposites than in an inclusive and discriminating
conciliation. This century, especially when we fix our attention upon
France, appears as the threshold of mediaeval thinking, the immediate
antecedent to mediaeval formulations of philosophic and theological
conviction. The controversies and the different mental tendencies which
thereafter were to move through such large and often diverging courses,
drew their origin from still prior times. With the coming of the eleventh
century they had been sturdily cradled, and seemed safe from the danger of
dying in infancy. Thence on through the twelfth century, through the
thirteenth, the climacteric of mediaeval thought, opinions and convictions
are set in multitudes of propositions, relating to many provinces of human
meditation.

These masses of propositions, convictions, opinions, philosophic and
religious, constitute the religious philosophy of the Middle
Ages--scholasticism as it commonly is called. Hereafter[384] it will be
necessary to consider that large matter in its continuity of development,
with its roots or antecedents stretching back through the eleventh century
to the Carolingian period, and beyond. Mediaeval thinkers will then be
seen to fall into two classes, very roughly speaking, the one tending to
set authority above reason, and the other tending to set reason above
authority. Both classes appear in the ninth century, represented
respectively by Rabanus Maurus and Eriugena. In the eleventh they are also
evident. St. Anselm, who came from Italy, is the most admirable
representative of the first class, being in heart and mind a theologian
whose philosophy revolved entire around his faith. Of him we have spoken;
and here may mention in contrast with him two Frenchmen, Berengar of Tours
and Roscellinus. In place and time they come within the scope of the
present chapter; nor were their mental processes such as to attach them to
a later period. By temperament, and in somewhat confused expression, they
set reason above authority, save that of Scripture as they understood it.

Berengar was born, apparently at Tours, and of wealthy parents, just as
the tenth century closed. After studying under his uncle, the Treasurer of
St. Martin, he came to Chartres, where Fulbert was bishop. Judging from a
general consensus of expression from men who became his opponents, but had
been his fellow-pupils, he quickly aroused attention by his talents, and
anxiety or enmity by his pride and the self-confident assertion of his
opinions. He would neither accept with good grace the admonitions of those
about him, nor follow the authority of the Fathers. He was said to have
despised even the great grammarians and logicians, Priscian, Donatus, and
Boëthius. Why err with everybody if everybody errs, he asked. He appears
as a vain man eager for admiration. The report comes down that he imitated
Fulbert’s manner in lecturing, first covering his visage with a hood so as
to seem in deep meditation, and then speaking in a gentle, plaintive
voice. From Chartres he passed to Angers, where he filled the office of
archdeacon, and thence he returned to Tours, was placed over the Church
schools of St. Martin’s, and in the course of time began to lecture on the
Eucharist. This was between the years 1030 and 1040.

That a man’s fortunes and fame are linked to a certain doctrine or
controversy may be an accident of environment. Berengar chose to adduce
and partly follow the teachings of Eriugena, whose fame was great, but
whose orthodoxy was tainted. The nature of the Eucharist leant itself to
dispute, and from the time of Ratramnus, Radbertus, and Eriugena, it was
common for theologians to try their hand on it, if only in order to
demonstrate their adherence to the extreme doctrines accepted by the
Church. These were not the doctrines of Eriugena, nor were they held by
Berengar, who would not bring himself to admit an absolute substantial
change in the bread and wine. Possibly his convictions were less
irrational than the dominant doctrine. Yet he appears to have asserted
them, not because he had a clearer mind than others, but by reason of his
more self-assertive and combative temperament. He was not an original
thinker, but a controversial and turgid reasoner, who naturally enough was
forced into all kinds of tergiversation in order to escape condemnation as
a heretic. His self-assertiveness settled on the most obvious theological
dispute of the time, and his self-esteem maintained the superiority of his
own reason over the authorities adduced by his adversaries. Of course he
never impugned the authority of Scripture, but relied on it to
substantiate his views, merely asserting that a reasonable interpretation
was better than a foolish one. Throughout the controversy, one may observe
that Berengar’s understanding of fact kept somewhat closer than that of
his opponents’ to the tangible realities of sense. But a difference of
intellectual temperament lay at the bottom of his dissent; and had not the
Eucharist presented itself as the readiest topic of dispute, he would
doubtless have fallen upon some other question. As it was, his arguments
gained adherents, the dominant view being repellent to independent minds.
Still, it won the day, and Berengar was condemned by more than one
council, and forced into all manner of equivocal retractions, by which at
least he saved his life, and died in extreme old age.

It may be that a larger relative import attributed by Berengar and also
Roscellin to the tangibilities of sense-perception, led the latter at the
close of the century to put forth views on the nature of universals which
have given him a shadowy repute as the father of nominalism. The
Eucharistic controversy pertained primarily to Christian dogmatics. That
regarding universals, or general ideas, pertains to philosophy, and, from
the standpoint of formal logic, lies at the foundations of consistent
thinking. So closely does it make part of the development of
scholasticism, that its discussion had best be postponed; merely assuming
for the present that Roscellin’s thinking upon the topic to which his name
is attached was not superior in method and analysis to Berengar’s upon the
Eucharist.

One cannot escape the conclusion that intellectually the eleventh century
in France was crude. The mediaeval intellect was still but imperfectly
developed; its manifestations had not reached the zenith of their energy.
Yet doubtless the mental development of mankind proceeds at a more uniform
rate than would appear from the brilliant phenomena which crowd the eras
of apparent culmination, in contrast with the previous dulness. The
profounder constancy of growth may be discerned by scrutinizing those dumb
courses of gestation, from which spring the marvels of the great epoch.
The opening of the twelfth century was to inaugurate a brilliant
intellectual era in France. The efficient preparation stretched back into
the latter half of the eleventh, whose Catholic progress heralded a period
of awakening. The Church already was striving to accomplish its own
reordering and regeneration, free itself from things that drag and hinder,
from lay investiture and simony, abominations through which feudal
depotentiating principles had intruded into the ecclesiastic body; free
itself likewise from clerical marriage and concubinage, which kept the
clergy from being altogether clergy, and weighted the Church with the
claims of half-spurious priests’ offspring. In France the reform of the
monks comes first, impelled by Cluny; and when Cluny herself becomes less
zealous, because too great and rich, the spirit of soldiery against sin
reincarnates itself in the Grand-Chartreuse, in Citeaux and Clairvaux. The
reform of the secular clergy follows, with Hildebrand the veritable
master; for the Church was passing from prelacy to papacy, and the Pope
was becoming a true monarch, instead of nominal head of an episcopal
aristocracy.

The perfected organization and unceasing purification of the Church made
one part of the general progress of the period. Another consisted in the
disengaging of the greater powers from out the indiscriminate anarchy of
feudalism, and the advance of the French monarchy, under Louis the
Sixth,[385] toward effective sovereignty, all making for a surer law and
order throughout France. Then through the eleventh and twelfth centuries
came the struggle of the people, out of serfdom into some control over
their own persons and fortunes. The serfs were affranchised and became
peasants; the huddled dwellers in the squalid towns tended to become
burghers with actual strength and chartered power to protect themselves
against signorial tyranny. Their rights limited and fixed the exactions of
their lords. Everywhere the population increased; old cities grew apace,
and a multitude of new ones came into existence. Economic evolution
progressed, advancing with the affranchisement of industry, the
organization of guilds, the growth of trade, the opening of new markets,
fairs, and freer avenues of commerce: thus more wealth was diffused among
the many. Architecture with new civic resources was pushing on through
Romanesque toward Gothic, while the affiliated arts of sculpture and
painting were becoming more expressive. Then the Crusades began, and did
their work of spreading knowledge through the Occident, carrying foreign
ideas and institutions across provincial barriers. The Crusades could not
have taken place had it not been for the freeing of social forces during
the half century preceding their inception in the year 1099. They were led
up to and made possible by the advance of the papacy to domination, by the
growth of chivalry, and the habit of making far pilgrimages to holy
places, and by the wealth coming with more active trade and industry.

Thus humanity was universally bestirring itself throughout the land we
know as France. Such a bestirring could not fail to crown itself with a
mightier winging of the spirit through the higher provinces of thought.
This was to show itself among saints and doctors of the Church in their
philosophies and theologies of the mind and heart; with like power it was
to show itself among those hardier rationalists who with difficulty and
misgivings, or under hard compulsion, still kept themselves within the
Church’s pale. It showed itself too with heretics who let themselves be
burned rather than surrender their outlawed convictions. It was also to
show itself through things beautiful, in the strivings of art toward the
perfect symbolical presentation of what the soul cherished or abhorred;
and show itself too in the literature of the common tongues as well as the
literature of the time-honoured Latin. In fine, it was to show itself,
through every heightened faculty and appetition of the universally
striving and desirous soul of man, in a larger, bolder understanding and
appreciation of life.




CHAPTER XIII

MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: GERMANY; ENGLAND; CONCLUSION

      I. German Appropriation of Christianity and Antique Culture.

     II. Othloh’s Spiritual Conflict.

    III. England; Closing Comparisons.


I

In the Germans of the eleventh century one notes a strong sense of German
selfhood, supplemented by a consciousness that Latin culture is a foreign
matter, introduced as a thing of great value which it were exceeding well
for them to make their own. They are even conscious of having been
converted to Latin Christianity, which on their part they are imbuing with
German thoughts and feeling. They are not Romance people; they have never
spoken Latin; it has never been and will never be their speech. They will
master what they can of the antique education which has been brought to
them. But even as it was no part of their forefathers’ lives, so it will
never penetrate their own personalities, so as to make them the spiritual
descendants of any antique Latin or Latinized people. They have never been
and never will be Latinized; but will remain forever Germans.

Consequently the appropriation of the Latin culture in Germany is a labour
of translation: first a palpable labour of translation from the Latin
language into the German tongue, and secondly, and for always, a more
subtle kind of translation of the antique influence into a German
understanding of the same, and gradually into informing principles made
use of by a strong and advancing racial genius. The German genius will be
enlarged and developed through these foreign elements, but it will never
cease to use the Latin culture as a means of informing and developing
itself.

No need to say that these strong statements apply to the Germans in their
home north of the Alps and east of the Rhine; not to those who left the
Fatherland, and in the course of generations became Italians, for example.
Moreover, general phrases must always be taken subject to qualification
and rounding of the corners. No people can absorb a foreign influence
without in some degree being made over into the likeness of what they are
receiving, and to that extent ceasing to be their unmitigated selves. In
general, however, while Latin Christianity and the antique culture both
were brought to Germany from abroad, the Germans were converted or
transformed only by the former, and merely took and used the latter--a
true statement this, so far as one may separate these two great mingled
factors of mediaeval progress.

Evidently those Germans of the opening mediaeval centuries who did most to
advance the civilization of their people were essentially introducers of
foreign culture. This was manifestly true of the missionaries (chief among
whom was the Anglo-Saxon Boniface) who brought Christianity to Germany. It
was true both as to the Christian and the secular learning of Rabanus
Maurus, who was born at Mainz, a very German.[386] With all his Latin
learning he kept his interest in his mother tongue, and always realized
that his people spoke German and not Latin. He encouraged preaching in
German; and with the aid of his favourite pupil, Walafrid, he prepared
German glosses and Latin-German glossaries for Scripture.

Before Rabanus’s death popular translations of the Gospels had appeared,
imbued with the Germanic spirit. The _Heliand_ and Otfrid’s
_Evangelienbuch_ are the best known of these.[387] Then, extending through
the last part of the tenth and the first part of the eleventh century we
note the labours of that most diligent of translators, Notker the German,
a monk of St. Gall, and member of the Ekkehart family, which gave so many
excellent abbots to that cloister. He died in 1022. Like Bede, Rabanus,
and many other Teutonic scholars, he was an encyclopaedia of the knowledge
afforded by his time. He was the head of a school of German translators.
His own translations covered part of Boëthius’s _De consolatione_,
Virgil’s _Bucolics_, Terence’s _Andria_, Martianus Capella’s _De nuptiis_,
Aristotle’s _Categories_ and _De interpretatione_, an arithmetic, a
rhetoric, Job, and the Psalms. He was a teacher all his life, and a German
always, loving his mother tongue, and occupying himself with its grammar
and word forms. His method of translation was to give the Latin sentence,
with a close German rendering, accompanied by an occasional explanation of
the matter, also in German.[388] All the while, this foreign learning was
being mastered gallantly in the leading cloisters, Fulda, St. Gall,
Reichenau, Hersfeld, and others. Within their walls this Latin culture was
studied and mastered, as one with resolve and perseverance masters that to
which he is not born.

Besides those who laboured as translators, other earnest fosterers of
learning in Germany appear as introducers of the same. Bruno, youngest
brother of Otto I., is distinguished in this rôle. He promoted letters in
his archiepiscopal diocese of Cologne. From many lands learned men came to
him, Liutprand and Ratherius among others. Otto himself loved learning,
and drew foreign scholars to his Court, one of whom was that conceited
Gunzo, already spoken of.[389] Schools moved with the emperor (_scholae
translatitiae_) also with Bruno, who though archbishop, duke, and burdened
with affairs, took the time to teach. A passage in his Life by Ruotger
shows the education and accomplishments of this most worthy prince of the
Church and land:

    “Then as soon as he learned the first rudiments of the grammatic art,
    as we have heard from himself, often pondering upon this in the glory
    of the omnipotent God, he began to read the poet Prudentius, at the
    instance of his master. This one, as he is catholic in faith and
    argument, eminent for eloquence and truth, and most elegant in the
    variety of his works and metres, with so great sweetness quickly
    pleased the palate of his heart, that at once, with greater avidity
    than can be expressed, he drank up not only the knowledge of the
    foreign words, but even the marrow of the innermost meaning and most
    liquid nectar, if I may so say. Afterwards there was almost no branch
    of liberal study in all Greek or Latin eloquence, that escaped the
    quickness of his genius. Nor indeed, as often happens, did the
    multitude of riches, or the insistency of clamouring crowds, nor any
    disgust otherwise coming over him, ever turn his mind from this noble
    employment of leisure.... Often he seated himself as a learned arbiter
    in the midst of the most learned Greek and Latin doctors, when they
    argued on the sublimity of philosophy or upon some subtility of her
    glistening discipline, and gave satisfaction to the disputants, amid
    universal plaudits, than which he cared for nothing less.”[390]

One may read between these awkward lines that all this learning was
something to which Bruno had been introduced at school. Another short
passage shows how new and strange this Latin culture seemed, and how he
approached it with a timorous seriousness natural to one who did not well
understand what it all meant:

    “The buffoonery and mimic talk in comedies and tragedies, which cause
    such laughter when recited by a number of people, he would always read
    seriously; he took small count of the matter, but chiefly of
    authority, in literary compositions.”[391]

Such an attitude would have been impossible for an Italian cradled amid
Latin or quasi-Latin speech and reminiscence.

The most curious if not original literary phenomenon of the time of Bruno
and his great brother was the nun Hrotsvitha, of Gandersheim, a Saxon
cloister supported by the royal Saxon house. A niece of Otto’s was the
Abbess, and she it was who introduced Hrotsvitha to the Latin Classics,
after the completion of her elementary studies under another _magistra_,
likewise an inmate of the convent. The account bears witness to the taste
for Latin reading among this group of noble Saxon dames. Hrotsvitha soon
surpassed the rest, at least in productivity, and became a prolific
authoress. She composed a number of sacred _legendae_, in leonine or
rhymed hexameters.[392] One of them gave the legend of the Virgin, as
drawn from the Apocryphal Gospel of Matthew. She also wrote several
_Passiones_ or accounts of the martyrdoms of saints, and the story of the
Fall and Repentance of Theophilus, the oldest poetic version of a compact
with the devil. Quite different in topic was the Deeds of Otto I. (_De
gestis Oddonis I. imperatoris_) written between 962 and 967, likewise in
leonine hexameters. It told the fortunes of the Saxon house as well as the
career of its greatest member.

Possibly more interesting were six moral dramas written in formal
imitation of the _Comedies_ of Terence. As an antidote to the poison of
the latter, they were to celebrate the virtue of holy virgins in this same
kind of composition which had flaunted the adulteries of lascivious
women--so the preface explains. Again, Hrotsvitha’s sources were
_legenda_, in which Christian chastity, martyred though it be, triumphs
with no uncertain note of victory.[393] These pious imitations of the
impious Terence do not appear to have been imitated by other mediaeval
writers: they exerted no influence upon the later development of the
Mystery Play. They remain as evidence of the writer’s courage, and of the
studies of certain denizens of the cloister at Gandersheim.

Besides this convent for high-born women, and such monasteries as Fulda
and St. Gall, an interesting centre of introduced learning was Hildesheim,
fortunate in its bishops, who made it an oasis of culture in the north.
Otwin, bishop in 954, supplied its school with books from Italy. Some
years after him came that great hearty man, Bernward, of princely birth,
who began his clerical career at an early age, and was made bishop in 992.
For thirty years he ruled his see with admirable piety, energy, and
judgment; qualities which he likewise showed in affairs of State. He was a
diligent student of Latin letters, one “who conned not only the books in
the monastery, but others in divers places, from which he formed a goodly
library of codices of the divines and also the philosophers.”[394] His was
a master’s faculty and a master-hand, itself skilfully fashioning; for not
only did he build the beautiful cloister church of St. Michael at
Hildesheim, and cause it to be sumptuously adorned, but he himself carved
and painted, and set gems. Some of the excellent works of his hand remain
to-day. His biographer tells of that munificence and untiring zeal which
rendered Hildesheim beautiful, as one still may see. Yet, throughout,
Bernward appears as consciously studying and gathering and bringing to his
beloved church an art from afar and a learning which was not of his own
people. The bronze work on the Bernward column in Hildesheim is thought to
suggest an influence of Trajan’s column, while the doors of Bernward’s
church unquestionably follow those of St. Sabina on the Aventine. This
shows how Bernward noticed and learned and copied during his stay at Rome
in the year 1001, when Otto III. was imperator and Gerbert was pope.

Bernward’s successor, Godehard, continued the good work. One of his
letters closes with a quick appeal for books: “Mittite nobis librum
Horatii et epistolas Tullii.”[395] Belonging to the same generation was
Froumundus (fl. cir. 1040), a monk of Tegernsee, where Godehard had been
abbot before becoming bishop of Hildesheim. He was a sturdy German lover
of the classics--very German. At one time he writes for a copy of Horace,
apparently to complete his own, and at another for a copy of Statius;
other letters refer to Juvenal and Persius.[396] His ardour for study is
as apparent as the fact that he is learning a literature to which he was
not born. His turgid hexameters sweat with effort to master the foreign
language and metre. People would have made a priest of him; not he:

  “Cogere me certant, fatear, quod sim sapiens vir,”

and a good grin seems to escape him:

    “Discere decrevi libros, aliosque docere:

    from such work no difficulty shall repel me; be it my reward to be
    co-operator (_synergus_) with what almighty God grants to flourish in
    this time of Christ, or in the time of yore.”[397]

The spirit is grand, the literary result awful. With diligence, the
studious _élite_ of Germany applied themselves to Latin letters. And in
the course of time tremendous scholars were to rise among them. But the
Latin culture remained a thing of study; its foreign tongue was never as
their own; and in the eleventh century, at least, they used it with a
painful effort that is apparent in their writings and the Germanisms
abounding in them. There may come one like Lambert of Hersfeld, the famous
annalist of the Hildebrandine epoch, who with exceptional gifts gains a
good mastery of Latin, and writes with a conscious approach to
quasi-classical correctness. The place of his birth and the sources of his
education are unknown. He was thirty years old, and doubtless had obtained
his excellent training in Latin, when he took the cowl in the cloister of
Hersfeld in 1058. But the next year he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and
afterwards other journeys. He wrote his _Annals_[398] in his later years,
laying down his pen in 1077, when he had brought the Emperor to Canossa.
His was a practised hand, and his style the evident result of much study
of the classics. His work remains the best piece of Latin from an
eleventh-century German.

Among German scholars of the period, one can find no more charming
creature than Hermann Contractus, the lame or paralytic. His father, a
Suabian count, brought the little cripple to the convent of Reichenau. It
was in the year 1020. Hermann was seven years old. There he studied and
taught, and loved his fellows, till his death thirty-four years later. His
mind was as strong as his body was weak. He could not rise from the
movable seat on which his attendant placed him, and could scarcely sit up.
He enunciated with difficulty; his words were scarcely intelligible. But
his learning was encyclopaedic, his sympathies were broad: “Homo revera
sine querela nihil humani a se alienum putavit,” says a loving pupil who
sketched his life. Evil was foreign to his nature. Affectionate, cheerful,
happy, his sweet and engaging personality drew all men’s love, while his
learning attracted pupils from afar.

    “At length, after he had been labouring for ten days in a grievous
    pleurisy, God’s mercy saw fit to free his holy soul from prison. I who
    was his familiar above the rest,” says the biographer, “came to his
    couch at dawn of day, and asked him whether he was not feeling a
    little better. ‘Do not ask me,’ he replied, ‘but rather listen to what
    I have to tell you. I shall die very soon and shall not recover: so to
    thee and all my friends I commend my sinful soul. This whole night I
    have been rapt in ecstasy. With such complete memory as we have for
    the Lord’s Prayer, I seemed to be reading over and over Cicero’s
    _Hortensius_, and likewise to be scanning the substance and very
    written pages of what I intended to write Concerning the Vices--just
    as if I had it already written. I am so stirred and lifted by this
    reading, that the earth and all pertaining to it and this mortal life
    are despicable and tedious; while the future everlasting world and the
    eternal life have become such an unspeakable desire and joy, that all
    these transitory circumstances are inane--nothing at all. It wearies
    me to live.’”[399]

Was not this a scholar’s vision? The German dwarf reads and cares for the
_Hortensius_ even as Augustine, from whose _Confessions_ doubtless came
the recommendation of this classic. The barbarous Latin of the _Vita_ is
so uncouth and unformed as to convey no certain grammatical meaning. One
can only sense it. The biographer cannot write Latin correctly, nor write
it glibly and ungrammatically, like a man born to a Latinesque speech.
Hermann’s own Latin is but little better. It approaches neither fluency
nor style. But the scholar ardour was his, and his works remain--a long
chronicle, a treatise on the Astrolabe, and one on Music; also, perhaps, a
poem in leonine elegiacs, “The Dispute of the Sheep and the Flax,” which
goes on for several hundred lines till one comes to a welcome _caetera
desunt_.[400]

Thus, with a heavy-footed Teutonic diligence, the Germans studied the
Trivium and Quadrivium. They sweated at Latin grammar, reading also the
literature or the stock passages. Their ignorance of natural science was
no denser than that of peoples west of the Rhine or south of the Alps.
Many of them went to learn at Chartres or Paris. Within the mapped-out
scheme of knowledge, there was too much for them to master to admit of
their devising new provinces of study. They could not but continue for
many decades translators of the foreign matter into their German tongue or
German selves. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they will be
translators of the French and Provençal literatures.

Even before the eleventh century Germans were at work at Logic--one
recalls Gerbert’s opponent Otric;[401] and some of them were engaged with
dialectic and philosophy. William, Abbot of Hirschau, crudely anticipated
Anselm in attempting a syllogistic proof of God’s existence.[402] He died
in 1091, and once had been a monk in the convent of St. Emmeram at
Ratisbon in Bavaria, where he may have known a certain monk named Othloh,
who has left a unique disclosure of himself. One is sufficiently informed
as to what the Germans and other people studied in the eleventh century;
but this man has revealed the spiritual conflict out of which he hardly
brought his soul’s peace.


II

Nothing is so fascinating in the life of a holy man as the struggle and
crisis through which his convictions are established and his peace
attained. How diverse has been this strife--with Buddha, with Augustine,
with Luther, or Ignatius Loyola. Its heroes fall into two companies: in
one of them the man attains through his own thought and resolution; in the
other he casts himself on God, and it may be that devils and angels carry
on the fight, of which his soul is the battle-ground and prize.
Nevertheless, the man himself holds the scales of victory; the choice is
his, and it is he who at last goes over to the devil or accepts the grace
of God. This conflict, in which God is felt to aid, is still for men; only
its forms and setting change. Therefore the struggle and the tears,
through which souls have won their wisdom and their peace, never cease to
move us. Othloh, like many another mediaeval scholar, was disturbed over
the sinful pleasure derived from Tully and Virgil, Maro and Lucan. But his
soul’s chief turmoil came from the doubts that sprang from his human
sympathies and from moral grounds--can the Bible be true and God
omnipotent when sin and misery abound? The struggle through which he
became assured was the supreme experience of his life: it fixed his
thoughts; his writings were its fruit; they reflect the struggle and the
struggler, and present a psychological tableau of a mediaeval German soul.

He was born in the bishopric of Freising in Bavaria not long after the
year 1000, and spent his youth in the monastic schools of Tegernsee and
Hersfeld. His scholarship was made evident to men about him through his
skill in copying texts in a beautiful script, ornamented with
illuminations. In the year 1032 he took the monk’s vows in the monastery
of St. Emmeram at Ratisbon, which had been founded long before in honour
of this sainted Frankish missionary bishop, who had met a martyr’s death
in Bavaria in the late Merovingian period. The annals of the monastery are
extant. When the Ottos were emperors, grammatical and theological studies
flourished there, especially under a certain capable Wolfgang, who died
as Bishop of Ratisbon in 994, and whose life Othloh wrote. The latter, on
becoming a monk, received charge of the monastery school, which he
continued to direct for thirty years.[403] Then he left, because some of
the young monks had turned the Abbot against him; but after some years
spent mainly at the monastery of Fulda, he returned to St Emmeram’s in
1063, where he died an old man ten or fifteen years later. From his youth
he had been subject to illness, even to fits of swooning, and, writing in
the evening of his days, he speaks of his many bodily infirmities.

As Othloh looked back over his life, his soul’s crisis seemed to have been
reached soon after he was made a monk. The wisdom brought through it came
as the answer to those questionings which made up the diabolic side of
that great experience. Othloh describes it in his _Book concerning the
Temptations of a certain Monk_.

    “There was a sinful clerk, who, having often been corrected by the
    Lord, at length turned to monastic life. In the monastery where he was
    made a monk he found many sorts of men, some of whom were given over
    to the reading of secular works, while some read Holy Scripture. He
    resolved to imitate the latter. The more earnest he was in this, the
    more was he molested by temptations of the devil; but committing
    himself to the grace of God, he persevered; and when, after a long
    while, he was delivered, and thought over what he had suffered, it
    seemed that others might be edified by his temptations, as well as by
    the passages of Holy Scripture which had come to him through divine
    inspiration. So he began to write as follows: I wish to tell the
    delusions of Satan which I endured sleeping and waking. His deceits
    first confounded me with doubt as to whether I was not rash in taking
    the vow perilous of the monastic life, without consulting parents or
    friends, when Scripture bids us ‘do all things with counsel.’ Diabolic
    illusion, as if sympathizing and counselling with me, brought these
    and like thoughts. When, the grace of God resisting him, the Tempter
    failed to have his way with me here, he tried to make me despair
    because of my many sins. ‘Do you think,’ said he, ‘that such a wretch
    can expect mercy from God the Judge, when it is written, Scarcely
    shall a righteous man be saved?’ So he overwhelmed me, till I could do
    nothing but weep, and tears were my bread day and night. I protest,
    from my innermost heart, that save through the grace of God alone, no
    one can overcome such delusions.

    “When the Weaver of wiles failed to cause me utterly to despair, he
    tried with other arguments of guile to lead me to blaspheme the divine
    justice, suggesting thoughts, as if condoling with my misery: ‘O most
    unhappy youth, whose grief no man deigns to consider--but men are not
    to blame, for they do not know your trouble. God alone knows, and
    since He can do all things, why does He not aid you in tribulation,
    when for love of Him you have surrendered the world and now endure
    this agony? Have done with impossible prayers and foolish grief. The
    injustice of that Potentate will not permit all to perish.’ These
    delusions were connected with what I now wish to mention: Often I was
    awakened by some imaginary signal, and would hasten to the oratory
    before the time of morning prayer; also, and for a number of years,
    though I slept at night as a man sound in body, when the hour came to
    rise, my limbs were numb, and only with uncertain trembling step could
    I reach the Church.

    “One delusion and temptation must be spoken of, which I hardly know
    how to describe, as I never read or heard of anything like it. By the
    stress of my many temptations I was driven--though by God’s grace I
    was never utterly torn from faith and hope of heavenly aid--to doubt
    as to Holy Scripture and the essence of God himself. In the struggle
    with the other temptations there was some respite, and a refuge of
    hope remained. In this I knew no alleviation, and when formerly I had
    been strengthened by the sacred book and had fought against the darts
    of death with the arms of faith and hope, now, shut round with doubt
    and mental blindness, I doubted whether there was truth in Holy
    Scripture and whether God was omnipotent. This broke over me with such
    violence as to leave me neither strength of body nor strength of mind,
    and I could not see or hear. Then sometimes it was as if a voice was
    whispering close to my ear: ‘Why such vain labourings? Can you not,
    most foolish of mortals, prove by your own experience that the
    testimony of Scripture is without sense or reason? Do you not see that
    what the divine book says is the reverse of what the lives and habits
    of mankind approve? Those many thousands who neither know nor care to
    know its doctrine, do you think they err?’ Troubled, I would urge, as
    if against some one questioning and objecting: ‘How then is there such
    agreement among all the divinely inspired writings when they speak of
    God the Founder and of obedience to His commands?’ Then words of this
    kind would be suggested in reply: ‘Fool, the Scriptures on which you
    rely for knowledge of God and religion speak double words; for the men
    who wrote them lived as men live now. You know how all men speak well
    and piously, and act otherwise, as advantage or frailty prompts. From
    which you may learn how the authors of the ancient writings wrote good
    and religious sayings, and did not live accordingly. Understand then,
    that all the books of the divine law were so written that they have an
    outer surface of piety and virtue, but quite another inner meaning.
    All of which is proved by Paul’s saying, The letter killeth; the
    spirit, that is the meaning, maketh to live. So you see how perilous
    it is to follow the precepts of these books. Likewise should one think
    concerning the essence of God. And besides, if there existed any
    person or power of an omnipotent God there would not be this apparent
    confusion in everything,--nor would you yourself have had all these
    doubts which trouble you.’”

The last diabolically insidious suggestion was just the one to bring
despair to the unaided reason seeking faith. Othloh’s soul was passing
through the depths; but the path now ascends, and rapidly:

    “I was assaulted with an incredible number of these delusions, and so
    strange and unheard of were they that I feared to speak of them to any
    of the brothers. At last I threw myself upon the ground groaning in
    bitterness, and, collecting the forces of my mind, I cried with my
    lips and from my heart: ‘O if thou art some one, Almighty, and if thou
    art everywhere, as I have read so often in so many books, now, I pray,
    show me whom thou art and what thou canst do, delivering me quickly
    from these perils; I can bear this strife no more.’ I did not have to
    wait; the grace of God scattered the whole cloud of doubt, and such a
    light of knowledge poured into my heart that I have never since had to
    endure the darkness of deadly doubt. I began to understand what I had
    scarcely perceived before. Then the grace of knowledge was so
    increased that I could no longer hide it. I was urged by ineffable
    impulse to undertake some work of gratitude for the glory of God, and
    it seemed that this new ardour should be devoted to composition. So I
    wrote what I have written concerning those diabolic delusions which
    sprang from my sins, and then it seemed reasonable to tell of the
    divine inspiration by which my mind was enabled to repel them; so that
    he who reads these delusions may at the same time know the workings of
    the divine aid, and not ascribe to me a victory which was never mine,
    or, thinking that aid was lacking in my temptation, fear lest it fail
    in his. I remember how often, especially on rising in the mornings, it
    was as if there was some one rising with me and walking with me, who
    mutely warned, or gently persuaded me to amend faults which it may be
    only the day before I was ignorantly committing and deeming of no
    consequence.

    “When surrounded by such inspirations I would enter the Church and bow
    down in prayer--God knows that I do not lie--it seemed as if some one
    besought me with like earnestness of prayer, saying: ‘As that has been
    granted which you asked of me, it will be precious to me if you will
    obey my entreaties. Do you not continue in those vices which I have
    often begged you to abandon? are you not proud and carnal, neglectful
    of God’s service, hating whom you should not hate, although the
    Scripture says, Every one who hates his brother is a murderer? Where
    now is the patience and constancy and that perfection which you
    promised God, if He would deliver you from perils and make you a monk?
    God has done as you asked, why do you delay to pay your vow? You have
    asked Him to set you in a place where you would have a store of books.
    Lo, you have been heard; you have books--from which you may learn of
    life eternal. Why do you dissipate your mind in vanities and do not
    hasten to take the desired gift? You have also asked to be tried, and
    tried you have been in temptation, and delivered. Yet you are still a
    man unfit for peace or war, since when the battle is far off you are
    ready for it, and when it approaches you flee. Which of the holy
    fathers that you have read of in the Old or New Testament was so dear
    to me that I did not seek to try him in the furnace of tribulation?
    Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness’ sake.
    Steep and narrow is the way; no one is crowned who has not striven
    lawfully. When you have read these, and many more passages of
    Scripture, why if you desire a crown of life eternal, do you wish to
    suffer no tribulation for your sins?’”

Then the Spirit of God, with many admonishings, shows Othloh how easy had
been his lot and how needful to him were his temptations, even the very
carnal temptations of the flesh, which Othloh suffered in common with all
monks. And he is bid to consider their reason and order:

    “First you were tried with lighter trials, that gradually you might
    gain strength for the weightier; as you progressed you ascribed to
    your own strength what was wrought by my grace. Wherefore I subjected
    you to the final temptation, from which you will emerge the more
    certain of my grace the less you trust in your merits.”

The “warring opposites” of Othloh’s spiritual struggle were, on the one
side, evil thoughts and delusions from the devil, and, on the other, the
strength and enlightenment imparted by the grace of God. The nearer the
crisis comes, the clearer are the devil’s whisperings and the warnings of
the instructing voice. Othloh’s part in it was his choice and acceptance
of the divine counsellor. This conflict never faded from his mind. He has
much to say of the visions[404] in which parts of his enlightenment had
come. Once reading Lucan in the monastery, he swooned, and in his swoon
was beaten with many stripes by a man of terrible and threatening
countenance. By this he was led to abandon profane reading and other
worldly vanities. These visionary floggings left him feeble and ill in
body. They were the approaches to his great spiritual conflict. His
“fourth vision” is in and of the crisis. This monk, immersed in spiritual
struggles, had also his opinions regarding the government of the
monastery, and for a time refused obedience to the abbot’s irregular
rulings, and spoke harshly of him:

    “For this I did penance before the abbot but not before God, against
    whom I had greatly sinned; and after a few days I fell sick. This
    sickness was from God, since I have always begged of His mercy, that
    for any sin committed I might suffer sickness or tribulation, and so
    it has come to me. On this occasion, when weakness had for some days
    kept me in the infirmary, one evening as it was growing dark I thought
    I should feel better if I rose and sat by my cot. Immediately the
    house appeared to be filled with flame and smoke. Horror-stricken, my
    wonted trust in God all scattered, I started, tottering, towards the
    cot of the lay brother in charge, but, ashamed, I turned back and went
    to the cot of a brother who was sick; he was asleep. Then I sank
    exhausted on my cot, thinking how to escape the horror of that vision
    of smoke. I had no doubt that the smoke was the work of evil spirits,
    who, from its midst, would try to torment me. As I gradually saw that
    it was not physical, but of the spirit, and that there was no one to
    help me, as all were asleep, I began to sing certain psalms, and,
    singing, went out and entered the nearest church, of St. Gallus, and
    fell down before the altar. At once, for my sins, strength of mind and
    body left me, and I perceived that my lips were held together by evil
    spirits, so that I could not move them, to sing a psalm. I tried till
    I was weary to open them with my hands.

    “Leaving that church, crawling rather than walking I gained the great
    church of St. Emmeram, where I hoped for some alleviation of my agony.
    But it was as before; I could barely utter a few words of prayer. So I
    painfully made my way back to my bed, hoping, from sheer weariness, to
    get some sleep. But none came, and, turn as I would, still I saw the
    vision of smoke. Suddenly--was I asleep or awake?--I seemed to be in a
    field well known to me, surrounded by a crowd of demons mocking me
    with shrieks of laughter. The louder they laughed, the sadder I was,
    seeing them gathered to destroy me. When they saw that I would not
    laugh, they became enraged, crying, ‘So! you won’t laugh and be merry
    with us! Since you choose melancholy you shall have enough.’ Then
    flying about me, with blows from all sides, they whirled me round and
    round with them over vast spaces of earth, till I thought to die.
    Suffering unspeakably, I was at length set down on the top of a peak
    which scarcely held me; no eye could fathom its abyss. Vainly I looked
    for a descent, and the demons kept flying about me, saying: ‘Where now
    is your hope in God! And where is that God of yours! Don’t you know
    that neither God is, as men say, nor is there any power in Him which
    can prevail against us? One proof of this is that you have no help,
    and there is no one who can deliver you from our hands. Choose now;
    for unless you join with us you shall be cast into the abyss.’ In this
    strait, scarcely consenting or resisting, I faintly remembered that I
    had once believed and read that God was everywhere, and so I looked
    around to see whether He would not send some aid. Now when the demons
    kept insisting that I should choose, and when I was well-nigh put to
    it to promise what they wished, a man suddenly appeared, and, standing
    by me, said: ‘Do not do it; all that these cheats say is false. Abide
    firm in that faith which you had in God. He knows all that you suffer,
    and permits it for your good.’ Then he vanished, and the demons
    returned, flying about me, and saying: ‘Miserable man, would you trust
    one who came to deceive you? Why, he dared not wait till we came! Come
    now, yield yourself to our power.’

    “Uttering these words with fury, they snatched me up, and whirled me,
    sorely beaten, across plains and deserts, over heights and precipices,
    and set me on a yet more dreadful peak, hurling at me abuse and
    threats, to make me do their will. And, as before, I was near
    succumbing, and was looking around for some aid from God, when that
    same man again stood near, and heartened me. ‘Do not yield; let your
    heart be comforted against its besiegers.’ And I replied: ‘Lord, I can
    no longer bear these perils. Stay with me, and aid, lest when you go
    away they torment me still more grievously.’ To which he said: ‘Their
    threats cannot prevail so long as you persevere in faith and hope in
    the Lord. Be comforted; the sharper the strife, the quicker will it
    end. If with constancy you wage the Lord’s battles, you shall have
    eternal rewards in the future, and in this world you shall be famous.’

    “Then he vanished the second time, and the demons, who dared do
    nothing in his presence, raged and mocked more savagely, and kept me
    in anguish, until, the divine grace effecting it, the convent bell
    rang for early prayer. I heard it as I lay in bed, and gradually
    gaining my senses, I was conscious that I was living, and I no longer
    saw the vision of smoke. With gratitude I remembered what the man in
    my vision told me that my trial would soon be over. After this, though
    for many days I lay sick in body and soul, my spiritual temptations
    began to lessen; and I have learned that without the Grace of God I
    am, and always shall be, a thing of naught.”

The struggle through which faith and peace came to Othloh became the
fountain-head of his wisdom; it fixed the point of view from which he
judged life, and set the categories in which he ordered his knowledge; it
directed his thoughts and imparted purpose and unity to his writings. His
gratitude to God incited him to write in order that others might share in
the light and wisdom which God’s grace had granted him; and his writings
chiefly enlarge upon those questions which the victory in his spiritual
conflict had solved. I will refrain from drawing further from them,
although they seem to me the most interesting works of a pious and
doctrinal nature emanating from any German of this still crude and
inchoate intellectual period.[405]


III

From the point of view of the development of mediaeval intellectual
interests in the eleventh century, England has little that is distinctive
to offer. The firm rule of Canute (1016-1035) brought some reinstatement
of order, after the times of struggle between Dane and Saxon. But his son,
Hardicanute, was a savage. The reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-1066)
followed. It wears a halo because it was the end of the old order, which
henceforth was to be a memory. Then came the revolution of the Norman
Conquest. Letters did not thrive amid these storms. At the beginning of
the period, Dunstan is the sole name of note, as one who fostered letters
in the monasteries where his energies were bringing discipline. English
piety and learning looked then, as it had looked before and was for
centuries to look, to the Continent. And Dunstan promoted letters by
calling to his assistance Abbo of St. Fleury, of whom something has been
said.[406]

In Dunstan’s time Saxon men were still translating Scripture into their
tongue--paraphrasing it rather, with a change of spirit. Such translations
were needed in Anglo-Saxon England, as in Germany. But after the Conquest
the introduction of Norman-French tended to lessen at least the
consciousness of such a need. That language, as compared with Anglo-Saxon,
came so much nearer to Latin as to reduce the chasm between the learned
tongue and the vernacular. The Normans had (at least in speech) been
Gallicized, and yet had kept many Norse traits. England likewise took on a
Gallic veneering as Norman-French became the language of the Court and the
new nobility. But the people continued to speak English. The degree of
foreign influence upon their thought and manners may be gauged by the
proportion of foreign idiom penetrating the English language; and the fact
that English remained essentially and structurally English proves the same
for England racially. In spite of the introduction of foreign elements,
people and language endured and became more and more progressively
English.

In the island before the Conquest, the round of studies had been the same
as on the Continent; and that event brought no change. The studies might
improve, but would have no novel source to draw upon. And in this period
of racial turmoil and revolution, it was unlikely that the Anglo-Saxon
temperament would present itself as clearly as aforetime in the Saxon poem
of _Beowulf_ or the personality of the Saxon Alfred, or in the Saxon
_Genesis_ and the writings of Cynewulf.[407] In a word, the eleventh
century in England was specifically the period when the old traits were
becoming obscure, and no distinct modifications had been evolved in
correspondence with the new conditions. Consequently, for presentations of
the intellectual genius of the English people, one has to wait until the
next century, the time of John of Salisbury and other English minds. Even
such will be found receiving their training and their knowledge in France
and Italy. England was still intellectually as well as politically under
foreign domination.

       *       *       *       *       *

In every way it has been borne in upon us how radically the conditions and
faculties of men differed in England, Germany, France, and Italy in the
eleventh century. Very different were their intellectual qualities, and
different also was the measure of their attainment to a palpable mediaeval
character, which in Italy was not that of the ancient Latins, in France
was not that of the Gallic provincials, and in England and Germany was not
altogether that of the original Celtic and Teutonic stocks. Neither in the
eleventh century nor afterwards was there an obliteration of race traits;
yet the mediaeval modification tended constantly to evoke a general
uniformity of intellectual interest and accepted view.

There exists a certain ancient _Chronicon Venetum_ written by a Venetian
diplomat and man of affairs called John the Deacon, who died apparently
soon after 1008.[408] He was the chaplain of the Doge, Peter Urseolus, and
the doge’s ambassador to the emperors Otto III. and Henry II. The earlier
parts of his _Chronicon_ were taken from Paulus Diaconus and others; the
later are his own, and form a facile narrative, which makes no pretence to
philosophic insight and has nothing to say either of miracles or God’s
Christian providence. Its interests are quite secular. John writes his
Latin, glib, clear, and unclassical, just as he might talk his Venetian
speech, his _vulgaris eloquentia_. There is no effort, no struggle with
the medium of expression, but a pervasive quality of familiarity with his
story and with the language he tells it in. These characteristics, it is
safe to say, are not to be found, to a like degree, in the work of any
contemporary writer north of the Alps.

The man and his story, in fine, however mediocre they may be, have
arrived: they are not struggling or apparently tending anywhither. The
writing suggests no capacity in the writer as yet unreached, nor any
imperfect blending of disparate elements in his education. One should not
generalize too broadly from the qualities exemplified in this work; yet
they indicate that the people to which the writer belonged were possessed
of a certain entirety of development, in which the component elements of
culture and antecedent human growth and decadence were blended in accord.
This old _Chronicon_ affords an illustration of the fact that the
transition and early mediaeval centuries had brought nothing to Italy that
was new or foreign, nothing that was not in the blood, nothing to deeply
disturb the continuity of Italian culture and character which moved along
without break, whether in ascending or descending curves.

Yet evidently the eleventh-century Italian is no longer a Latin of the
Empire. For one thing, he is more individualistic. Formerly the prodigious
power of Roman government united citizens and subject peoples, and
impressed a human uniformity upon them. The surplus energies of the Latin
race were then absorbed in the functions of the _Respublica_, or were at
least directed along common channels. That great unification had long been
broken; and the smaller units had reasserted themselves--the civic units
of town or district, and the individual units of human beings upon whom no
longer pressed the conforming influence of one great government.

In imperial times cities formed the subordinate units of the _Respublica_;
the Roman, like the Greek civilization, was essentially urban. This
condition remained. The civilization of Italy in the eleventh century was
still urban, but was now more distinctly the civilization of small closely
compacted bodies, which were no longer united. For the most part, the
life, the thought, of Italy was in the towns; it remained predominantly
humanistic, taken up with men and their mortal affairs, their joys and
hates, and all that is developed by much daily intercourse with fellows.
Thus the intellect of Italy continued secular, interesting itself in
mortal life, and not so much occupied with theology and the life beyond
the grave. This is as true of the intellectual energies of the Roman
papacy as it is of the mental activities of the towns which served or
opposed it, according to their politics.

On the other hand, the intense emotional nature of the Italians was apt to
be religious, and given to despair and tears and ecstasy; its love welled
up and flung itself around its object, without the mediating offices of
reason. If reflection came, it was love’s ardent musing, rather than
religious ratiocination. One does not forget that the Italians who became
scholastic theologians or philosophers left Italy, and subjected
themselves to northern spiritual influences at Paris or elsewhere. Their
greatest were Anselm, Peter Lombard, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas. None of
these remained through life altogether Italian.

Thus, with Italians, religion meant either the papal government and the
daily conventions of observance and minor mental habits, all very secular;
or it meant that which was a thing of ecstasy and not of
thought--generally speaking, of course. The mediaeval Italian (in the
eleventh century only to a slightly less degree than in the twelfth or
thirteenth) is, typically speaking, a man of urban human interests and
affairs, a politician, a trader, a doctor, a man of law or letters, an
artist, or a poet. If really religious, his religion is an emotion, and is
not occupied with dogma, nor interested in doctrinal correctness or
reform. Such a religious character may, according to individual temper,
result in a Romuald[409] or a Peter Damiani; its perfected ideal is
Francis of Assisi.

Things were already different in the country now called France. No need to
repeat what has been said as to the lesser strength and somewhat broken
continuity of the antique there, as compared with Italy. Yet there was a
sufficient power of antique influence and descent to keep the language
Romanesque, and the forms of its literature partly set by antique
tradition. But the spirit was not Latin. Perhaps it had but seemed such
with the Gallic provincials. At all events, the incoming Franks and other
Germans brought a Teutonic infusion and reinspiration that forever kept
France from being or becoming a northern Italy.

Neither was the spirit urban. To be sure, much of the energy of French
thought awoke and did its work in towns; and Paris was to become the
intellectual centre. But the stress of French life was not so surely in
the towns, nor men’s minds so characteristically urban as in Italy, and by
no means so predominantly humanistic. Even in the eleventh century the
lofty range of French thought, of French intellectual interests, is
apparent; for it embraces the problems of philosophy and theology, and
does not find its boundary and limit in phenomenal or mortal life. Gerbert
is almost too universal an intellect to offer as a fair example. Yet all
that he cared for is more than represented by other men taken together;
for Gerbert did not fully represent the interests of religious thought in
France. His was the humanism and the thirst for all the round of knowledge
included in the Seven Arts. But he scarcely reached out beyond logic to
philosophy; and theology seems not to have troubled him. Both philosophy
and theology, however, made part of the intellectual interests of France;
for there was Berengar and Roscellinus, Gaunilo and St. Anselm, and the
wrangling of many disputatious, although overwhelmingly orthodox, councils
of French Churchmen. Paris also, with its great schools of theology and
philosophy, looms on the horizon. The intellectual matter is but inchoate,
yet universally germinating, in the eleventh century.

Thus intellectual qualities of mediaeval France appear inceptively. The
French mediaeval temperament needs perhaps another century for its clear
development. Both as to temperament and intellectual interests, a line
will have to be drawn between the south and north; between the land of the
_langue d’oc_, the Roman law, the troubadour, and the easy, irreligious,
gay society which jumped the life to come; and the land of the various old
French dialects (among which that of the Isle de France will win to
dominance), the land of philosophy and theology, the land of Gothic
architecture and religion, the hearth of the crusades against the Saracen
or the Albigensian heretic; the land of the most distinctive mediaeval
thought and strongest intellectual development.

In the Germany and the England of the eleventh century there is less of
interest from this point of view. England had scarcely become her
mediaeval self; the time was one of desperate struggle, or, at most, of
tumultuous settling down and shaking together. As for Germany, it was
surely German then, and not a medley of Saxon, Dane, and Norman-French.
The people were talking in their German tongues. German song and German
epos were already heard in forms which were not to be cast aside, but
retained and developed; of course the influence of the French poetry was
not yet. The Germans were still living their own sturdy and half-barbarous
life. Those who loved knowledge had turned with earnest purpose to the
Latin culture; they were studying Latin and logic, and, as we have said,
translating it into their German tongue or temperament. But the lessons
were not fully mastered--not yet transformed into German mediaeval
intellectual capacity. And in this respect, at least, the German will
become more entirely his Germanic mediaeval self in another century, when
he has more faculty of using the store of foreign knowledge in combination
with his strongly felt and honestly considered Christianity.




CHAPTER XIV

THE GROWTH OF MEDIAEVAL EMOTION

     I. THE PATRISTIC CHART OF PASSION.

    II. EMOTIONALIZING OF LATIN CHRISTIANITY.


The characteristic passions of a period represent the emotionalized
thoughts of multitudes of men and women. Mediaeval emotional development
followed prevailing ideas, opinions, convictions, especially those of
mediaeval Christianity. Its most impressive phases conformed to the tenets
of the system which the Middle Ages had received from the Church Fathers,
and represented the complement of passion arising from the long acceptance
of the same. One may observe, first, the process of exclusion, inclusion,
and enhancement, through which the Fathers formed a certain synthesis of
emotion from the matter of their faith and the circumstances of their
environment; and, secondly, the further growth of emotion in the Middle
Ages.


I

In the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era
there took place a remarkable growth of the pathetic or emotional element
in Greek and Roman literature. Yet during the same period Stoicism, the
most respected system of philosophy, kept its face as stone, and would not
recognize the ethical value of emotion in human life.[410] But the
emotional elements of paganism, which were stretching out their hands like
the shades by Acheron, were not to be restrained by philosophic
admonition, or Virgilian _Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando_. And
though the Stoic could not consent to Juvenal’s avowal that the sense of
tears is the best part of us, Neo-Platonism soon was to uphold the
sublimated emotion of a vision transcending reason as the highest good for
man. Rational self-control was disintegrating in the Neo-Platonic
dialectic which pointed beyond reason to ecstasy. That ecstasy, however,
was to be super-sensual, and indeed came only to those who had long
suppressed all cravings of the flesh. This ascetic emotionalism of the
Neo-Platonic _summum bonum_ was strikingly analogous to the ideal of
Christian living pressing to domination in the patristic period.

No need to say that the Gospel of Jesus was addressed to the heart as well
as to the mind; and for times to come the Saviour on the Cross and at its
foot the weeping Mother were to rouse floods of tears over human sin,
which caused the divine sacrifice. The words _Jesus wept_ heralded a new
dispensation under which the heart should quicken and the mind should
guide through reaches of humanity unknown to paganism. This Christian
expansion of the spirit did not, however, address itself to human
relationships, but uplifted itself to God, its upward impulse spurning
mortal loves. In its mortal bearings the Christian spirit was more ascetic
than Neo-Platonism, and its _élan_ of emotion might have been as
sublimated in quality as the Neo-Platonic, but for the greater reality of
love and terror in the God toward whom it yearned with tears of
contrition, love, and fear.

Another strain very different from Neo-Platonism contributed to the sum of
Christian emotion. This was Judaism, which recently had shown the fury of
its energy in defence of Jerusalem against the legions of Titus.
Christians imbibed its force of feeling from the books of the Old
Testament. The passion of those writings was not as the humanly directed
passions of the Greeks. Israel’s desire and aversion, her scorn and
hatred, her devotion and her love, hung on Jehovah. “Do I not hate them, O
Jehovah, that hate thee?” This cry of the Psalmist is echoed in Elijah’s
“Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape.” Jewish wrath was
a righteous intolerance, which would neither endure idolatrous Gentiles
nor suffer idolaters in Israel. Moses is enraged by the sight of the
people dancing before the golden calf; and Isaiah’s scorn hisses over
those daughters of Israel who have turned from Jehovah’s ways of decorum:
“Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth
necks, and wanton eyes, mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with
their feet; therefore Jehovah will smite with a scab the crown of the head
of the daughters of Zion, and Jehovah will lay bare their secret parts.”

Did a like scorn and anger find harbourage in Him who likened the
Pharisees to whitened sepulchres, and with a scourge of small cords drove
the money-changers from His Father’s house? At all events a kindred hate
found an enduring home in the religion of Tertullian and Athanasius, and
in the great Church that persecuted the Montanists at Augustine’s
entreaty, and thereafter poured its fury upon Jew and Saracen and heretic
for a thousand years.

Jehovah was also a great heart of love, loving His people along the ways
of every sweet relationship understood by man. “When Israel was a child,
then I loved him, and out of Egypt called my son hither.” “Can a woman
forget her sucking child, so as not to yearn upon the son of her womb?
Yea, these may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” Again, Jehovah is the
husband, and Israel the sinning wife whom He will not put away.[411]
Israel’s responding love answers: “My soul waits on God--My heart and
flesh cry aloud to the living God--Like as the hart panteth for the
water-brooks”! Such passages throb obedience to Deuteronomy’s great
command, which Jesus said was the sum of the Law and the Prophets. No need
to say that the Christian’s love of God had its emotional antecedent in
Psalmist and Prophet. Jehovah’s purifying wrath of love also passed over
to the Christian words, “As many as I love, I reprove and chasten.” And
“the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom,” found its climax
in the Christian terror of the Judgment Day.

The Old Testament has its instances of human love: Isaac and Rebekah,
Jacob and Rachel. There is Jacob’s love of Joseph and Benjamin, and
Joseph’s love, which yearned upon his brethren who had sold him to the
Egyptians. The most loving man of all is David, with his love of Jonathan,
“wonderful and passing the love of women,” unforgotten in the king’s old
age, when he asks, “Is there yet any living of the house of Saul, that I
may show him kindness for Jonathan’s sake?” To a later time belongs the
Song of Songs. Beautiful, orientally sensuous, too glowing perhaps for
western taste, is this utterance of unchecked passion. And its fortune has
been the most wonderful that ever fell to a love poem. It became the
epithalamion of the Christian soul married to Christ, an epithalamion
which was to be enlarged with passionate thought by doctor, monk, and
saint, through the Christian centuries. The first to construe it as the
bridal of the Soul was one who, by an act more irrevocable than a monastic
vow, put from him mortal bridals--Origen, the greatest thinker of the
Eastern Church. Thus the passion of the Hebrew woman for the lover that
was to her as a bundle of myrrh lying between her breasts, was lifted,
still full of desire, to the love of the God-man, by those of sterile
flesh and fruitful souls.

Christianity was not eclecticism, which, for lack of principles of its
own, borrows whatever may seem good. But it made a synthetic adoption of
what could be included under the dominance of its own motives, that is,
could be made to accord with its criterion of Salvation. What sort of
synthesis could it make of the passions and emotions of the
Graeco-Roman-Oriental-Jewish world? That which was achieved by the close
of the patristic period, and was to be passionately approved by the Middle
Ages, proceeded partly in the way of exclusion, and partly by adding a
quality of boundlessness to the emotional elements admitted.

With the first conversions to the new religion, arose the problem: What
human feelings, what loves and interests of this world, shall the believer
recognize as according with his faith, and as offering no obstacle to the
love of God and the attainment of eternal life? A practical answer was
given by the growth of an indeterminate asceticism within the Christian
communities, which in the fourth century went forth with power, and
peopled the desert with anchorites and monks.

Ascetic suggestions came from many sources to the early Christians.
Stoicism was ascetic in tendency; Neo-Platonism ascetic in principle,
holding that the soul should be purged from contamination with things of
sense. Throughout Egypt asceticism was rife in circles interested in the
conflict of Set and his evil host with Horus seeking vengeance for Osiris
slain; and we know that some of the earliest Christian hermits had been
recluses devoted to the cult of Serapis. In Syria dwelt communities of
Jewish Essenes, living continently like monks. Nevertheless, whatever may
have been the effects of such examples, monasticism developed from within
Christianity, and was not the fruit of influences from without.

The Lord had said, “My kingdom is not of this world”; and soon enough
there came antagonism between the early Churches and the Roman Empire. The
Church was in a state of conflict. It behoved the Christian to keep his
loins girded: why should he hamper himself with ephemeral domestic ties,
when the coming of the Lord was at hand? Moreover, the Christian warfare
to the death was not merely with political tyranny, but against fleshly
lusts. Such convictions, in men and women desirous of purifying the soul
from the cravings of sense, might bring the thought that even lawful
marriage was not as holy as the virgin state. The Christian’s ascetic
abnegation had as a further motive the love of Christ and the desire to
help on His kingdom and attain to it, the motive of sacrifice for the sake
of the Kingdom of Heaven; for which one man must be burned, another must
give up his goods, and a third renounce his heart’s love. Ascetic acts are
also a natural accompaniment of penitence: the sinner, with fear of hell
before him, seeks to undergo temporal in order to avoid eternal pain; or,
better, stung by love of the Crucified, his heart cries for flagellation.
When St. Martin came to die he would lie only upon ashes: “I have sinned
if I leave you a different example.”[412] A similar strain of religious
conviction is rendered in Jerome’s “You are too pleasure-loving, brother,
if you wish to rejoice in this world and hereafter to reign with
Christ.”[413]

So currents of ascetic living early began in Christian circles; and before
long the difficulty of leading lives of self-mortification within the
community was manifest. It was easier to withdraw: ascetics must become
anchorites, “they who have withdrawn.” Here was reason why the movement
should betake itself to the desert. But the solitary life is so difficult,
that association for mutual aid will soon ensue; and then regulations will
be needed for these newly-formed ascetic groups. So anchorites tended to
become coenobites; monasticism has begun.

In both its hermit and coenobitic phases, monasticism began in the East,
in Syria and the Thebaid. It was accepted by the Latin West, and there
became impressed with Roman qualities of order, regularity, and obedience.
The precepts of the eastern monks were collected and arranged by Cassian,
a native of Gaul, in his _Institutes_ and _Conlocations_ between the years
419 and 428. And about a century afterwards, western monasticism received
its typeform in the _Regula_ of St. Benedict of Nursia (d. 543), which was
approved by the authority of Gregory the Great (d. 604).[414]

By the close of the patristic period, monasticism had become the most
highly applauded practical interpretation of Christianity. Its precepts
represented the requirements of the Christian criterion of Salvation
applied to earthly life. Like all great systems which have widely
prevailed and long endured, it was not negation, but substitution. If it
condemned usual modes of pleasure, this was because of their
incompatibility with the life it inculcated. The _Regula_ of Benedict set
forth a manner of life replete with positive demands. Its purpose was to
prescribe for those who had taken monastic vows that way of living, that
daily round of occupation, that constant mode of thought and temper, which
should make a perfected Christian, that is, a perfect monk. And so broad
and spiritually interwoven were its precepts that one of them could hardly
be obeyed without fulfilling all. Read, for example, the beautiful seventh
chapter upon the twelve grades of humility, and it will become evident
that whoever achieves this virtue will gain all the rest: he will always
have the fear of God before his eyes, the terror of hell and the hope of
heaven; he will cut off the desires of the flesh; he will do, not his own
will, but the Lord’s; since Christ obeyed His Father unto death, he will
render absolute obedience to his superior, obeying readily and cheerfully
even when unjustly blamed; in confession he will conceal no evil thought;
he will deem himself vilest of all, and will do nothing save what the
_regula_ of the monastery or the example of the elders prescribes; he will
keep from laughter and from speech, except when questioned, and then he
will speak gently and humbly, and with gravity, in few words; he will
stand and walk with inclined head and looks bent on the ground, feeling
himself unworthy to lift up his eyes to heaven: through these stairs of
humility he will reach that perfect love of God which banishes fear, and
will no longer need the fear of hell, as he will do right from habit and
through the love of Christ.

Having thus pointed out the way of righteousness, Benedict’s _regula_
gives minute precepts for the monk’s conduct and occupation through each
hour of the day and night. No time, no circumstance shall be left
unguarded, or unoccupied with those acts which lead to God. Wise was this
great prototypal _regula_ in that its abundance of positive precepts kept
the monk busy with righteousness, so that he might have no leisure for
sin. Its prohibitions are comparatively unemphatic, and the monk is guided
along the paths of righteousness rather than forbidden to go astray.

Thus monk and nun were consecrated to a calling which should contain their
whole desire, as it certainly demanded their whole strength. Was the monk
a celibate because carnal marriage was denied him? Rather he was wedded to
Christ. If this is allegory, it is also close to literal truth. “Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and
with all thy mind.” Is not love the better part of marriage? And how if
the Lord thy God has been a gracious loving figure here on earth, who
loved thee humanly as well as divinely, and died for thee at last? Will
not the complete love required by the commandment become very ardent, very
heart-filling? Shalt thou not always yearn to see Him, fall at His feet,
confess thy unworthiness, and touch His garment? Is there any end to the
compass of thy loving Him, and musing upon Him, and dwelling in His
presence? Dost thou not live with Him in a closer communion than the
sunderances of mortality permit among men, or between men and women? And
if it be thou art a nun, art thou not as close to Him in tears and washing
of those blessed feet, as ever was that other woman, who had been a
sinner? Thou shalt keep thy virginity for Him as for a bridegroom.[415]

But the great commandment to love the Lord thy God has an adjunct--“and
thy neighbour as thyself.” _As thyself_--how does the monk love himself?
why, unto Christ and his own salvation. He does not love his sinful
pleasures, nor those matters of earth which might not be sins, had he not
realized how they conflicted with his scheme of life. His love for a
fellow could not recognize those pleasures which he himself had cast
away. He must love his fellow, like himself, unto the saving, not the
undoing, of him--be his true lover, not his enemy. This vital principle of
Christian love had to recast pagan passion and direct the affections to an
immortal goal. Under it these reached a new absoluteness. The Christian
lover should always be ready to give his life for his friend’s salvation,
as for his own. So love’s offices gained enlargement and an infinity of
new relationship, because directed toward eternal life.[416]

Unquestionably in the monk’s eyes passionate love between the sexes was
mainly lust. Within the bonds of marriage it was not mortal sin; but the
virgin state was the best. Here, as we shall see, life was to claim its
own and free its currents. Monasticism did not stop the human race, or
keep men from loving women. Such love would assert itself; and ardent
natures who felt its power were to find in themselves a love and passion
somewhat novel, somewhat raised, somewhat enlarged. In the end the love
between man and woman drew new inspiration and energy from the enhancement
of all the rest of love, which came with Christianity.

Evidently the great office of Christian love in a heathen period was to
convert idolaters to the Faith. So it had been from the days of Paul.
Rapidly Christianity spread through all parts of the Roman Empire. Then
the Faith pressed beyond those crumbling boundaries into the barbarian
world. Hereupon, with Gregory the Great and his successors, it became
clear that the great pope is always a missionary pope, sending out such
Christian embassies as Gregory sent to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

If conversion was a chief office of Christian love, the great object of
Christian wrath was unbelief. That existed within and without Christendom:
within in forms of heresy, without in the practices of heathenism.
Christian wrath was moved by whatever opposed the true faith. The
Christian should discriminate: hate the sin, and love the sinner unto his
betterment. But it was so easy, so human, from hating the sin to hate the
obdurate sinner who could not be saved and could but harm the Church. One
need not recount how the disputes of the Athanasian time regarding the
nature of Christ came to express themselves in curses; nor how the
Christian sword began its slaughter of heretic and heathen. Persecution
seemed justified in reason; it was very logical; broad reasons of
Christian statecraft seemed to make for it; and often a righteous zeal
wielded the weapon. It had moreover its apparent sanction in Jehovah’s
destroying wrath against idolaters within and without the tribes of
Israel.

So the two opposites of love and wrath laid aside somewhat of grossness,
and gained new height and compass in the Christian soul. A like change
came over other emotions. As life lifted itself to further heights of
holiness, and hitherto unseen depths of evil yawned, there came a new
power of pity and novel revulsions of aversion. The pagan pity for life’s
mortality, which filled Virgil’s heart, could not but take on change.
There was no more mortality, but eternal joy and pain. Souls which had so
unavailingly stretched forth their hands to fate, had now been given wings
of faith. Yet death gained blacker terror from the Christian Hell, the
newly-assured alternative of the Christian Heaven. The great Christian
pity did not touch the mortal ebbing of the breath; that should be a
triumphant birth. But an enormous and terror-stricken pity was evoked by
sin, and the thought of the immortal soul hanging over an eternal hell.
And since all human actions were connected with the man’s eternal lot,
they became invested with a new import. So the Christian’s compassion
would deepen, his sympathy become more intense, although no longer stirred
by everything that had moved his pagan self. With him fear was raised to a
new intensity by other terrors than had driven the blood from pagan
cheeks. His sense of joy was deepened also; for a joy hitherto unrealized
came from his new love of God and the God-man, from the assurance of his
salvation, and the thought of loved human relationships never to end. So
Christian joy might have an absoluteness which it never had under the
pause-giving mortal limitations of paganism.

Within the compass of pagan joyfulness there had been no deeper passion
than the love of beauty. That had its sensuous phases, and its far blue
heights, where Plato saw the beauty of order, justice, and proportion. For
the Christian, the beauty of the flesh became a veil through which he
looked for the beauty of the soul. If a face testified to the beauty of
holiness within, it was fair. Better the pale, drawn visages of monk and
nun than the red lip too quickly smiling. Feeling as well as thought
should be adjusted to these sentiments. Yet Plato’s realization of
intellectual beauty found home within the Christian thoughts of God and
holiness, indeed helped to construct them. This is clear with the Fathers.
In the East, Gregory of Nyssa’s passion for divine beauty was Platonism
set in Christian phrase; in the West, Augustine reached his thoughts of
beauty through considerations which came to him from Greek
philosophy.[417] “Love is of the beautiful,” said Plato; “Do we love ought
else?” says Augustine. Both men shape their thoughts of beauty after their
best ideals of perfection. Augustine’s burn upward to the beauty of a God
as loving as He is omnipotent; Plato’s had been more abstract. Augustine’s
Platonism shows the highest Greek thoughts of beauty and goodness changed
into attributes of a personal God, who could be loved because He was
loving.

In these ways the loftier Christian souls suppressed, or transformed and
greatened, the emotions of their natures. It was thus with those possessed
of a faith that brought the whole of life within its dominance. There were
many such. Yet the multitude of Christians ranged downward from such great
obsession, through all stages of human half-heartedness and frailty, to
the state of those whose Christianity was but a name, or but a magic rite.
Always preponderant in numbers, and often in influence and power, these
nominal and fetichistic Christians would keep alive the loves and hates,
the interests and tastes, the approvals and disapprovals, of paganism or
barbaric heathenism, as the case might be.


II

The patristic synthesis of emotion passed on entire and authoritative to
the Middle Ages. It exercised enormous influence (usually in the way of
compulsion, but sometimes in the way of repulsion) upon emotional
phenomena both of a religious and a secular nature. Yet it was merely the
foundation, or the first stage, of mediaeval emotional development. The
subsequent stages were dependent on the conditions under which mediaeval
attitudes of mind arose, very dependent upon the maturing and blending of
the native traits of inchoate mediaeval peoples and upon their
appropriation of Latin Christianity and the antique education.

The northern races had been introduced to a novel religion and to modes of
thought considerably above them. Their old conceptions were discredited,
their feelings somewhat distraught. Emotionally as well as intellectually
they were confused. Turbid feelings, arising from ideas not fully
mastered, had to clarify and adjust themselves. From the sixth to the
eleventh century the crude mediaeval stocks, tangled but not blended,
strange to the religion and culture which held their destinies, were not
possessed of clear and dominant emotions that could create their own forms
of expression. They could not think and feel as they would when their new
acquirements had mellowed into faculty and temperament, and unities of
character had once more emerged.

Christianity and Latin culture were operative everywhere, and everywhere
tended to produce a uniform development. Yet the peoples affected by these
common influences were kept unlike each other through varieties of
environment and a diversity of racial traits which still showed clearly as
the centuries passed. In consequence, the emotional development of these
different peoples remained marked by racial characteristics, while also
becoming mediaeval under the action of common influences. It proceeded in
two parallel and partially mingling streams: the one of the religious
life, the other of earth’s desires. They may be observed in turn.

Augustine represents the sum of doctrine and emotion contained in the
Latin Christianity of the fifth century. However imperfectly others might
comprehend his thought or feel the power of his grandly reasoned love of
God, he established this love for time to come as the centre and the bound
of Christian righteousness: “Virtus non est nisi diligere quod diligendum
est.”[418] He drew within this principle the array of dogma and precept
constituting Latin Christianity. On the other hand, the practical
embodiment of the patristic synthesis of human interests and emotions was
monasticism, with its lines set by the Rule of Benedict.

Pope Gregory the Great[419] refashioned Augustine’s teachings, and placed
the seal of his approval upon Benedictine monasticism as the perfect way
of Christian living. His mind was darkened with the new ignorance and
intellectual debasement which had come in the century and a half
separating him from Augustine; and his soul was filled with the fantastic
terrors which were to constitute so large a part of the religion of the
Middle Ages. Devil lore, relic worship, miracles, permeate his
consciousness of life. The soul’s ceaseless business is so to keep itself
that it may at last escape the sentence of the awful Judge. Love and
terror struggle fearfully in Gregory. Christ’s death had shown God’s love;
and yet the Dies Irae impends. No delict is wiped out without penitence
and punishment, in this life or afterwards--let it be in Purgatory and not
in Hell!

The centuries following Gregory’s death rearranged the contents of Latin
Christianity, including Gregory’s teachings, to suit their own
intellectual capacities. This (Carolingian) period of rearrangement and
painful learning, as it was unoriginative intellectually, was likewise
unproductive of Christian emotion. Occasionally from far-off converts,
who are not troubled overmuch with learning, come utterances of simple
feeling for the Faith (one thinks of Bede’s story of Cædmon); and the
Teuton spirit, warlike as well as intimate and sentimental, enters the
vernacular interpretation of Christianity.[420] The Christian message
could not be understood at all without a stirring of the convert’s nature;
some quickening of emotion would ensue. This did not imply a development
of emotion corresponding to the credences of Latin Christianity, to which
so many people had been newly introduced. That system had to be more
vitally appropriated before it could arouse the emotional counterpart of
its tenets, and run its course in modes of mediaeval religious passion.

Accordingly one will look in vain among the Carolingian scholars for that
torrential feeling which becomes articulate in the eleventh century. They
were excerpting and rearranging patristic Christianity to suit their own
capacities. They could not use it as a basis for further thinking; nor, on
the other hand, had it become for them the ground of religious feeling.
Undoubtedly, Alcuin and Rabanus Maurus and Walafrid Strabo were pious
Christians, taking their Faith devoutly. But such religious emotion as was
theirs, was reflected rather than spontaneous. Alcuin, as well as Gregory
the Great, realizes the opposition between heaven and the _vana
delectibilia_[421] of this world. But Alcuin’s words have lost the
horror-stricken quality of Gregory; neither do they carry the floods of
tears which like thoughts bring to Peter Damiani in the eleventh century.
Odo, Abbot of Cluny in the middle of the tenth century, has something of
Gregory’s heavy horror; but even in him the gift of tears is not yet
loosed.[422]

From the eleventh century onward, the gathering religious feeling pours
itself out in passionate utterances; and in this new emotionalizing of
Latin Christianity lay the chief religious office of the Middle Ages,
wherein they went far beyond the patristic authors of their faith. The
Fathers of the Latin Church from Tertullian to Gregory the Great had been
occupied with doctrine and ecclesiastical organization. This dual
achievement was the work of the constructive mind of the Latin West,
following, of course, what had been accomplished by the Greek Fathers. It
stood forth mainly as the creation of those human faculties which are
grouped under the name of intellect. Patristic Latin Christianity hardly
presents itself as the product of the whole man. Its principles were not
as yet fully humanized, made matter of the heart, and imbued with love and
fear and pity: this creature of the intellect had yet to receive a soul.

It is true that Augustine had an enormous love of God. It was fervently
felt; it was powerfully reasoned; it impassioned his thought. Yet it did
not contain that tender love of the divinely human Christ which trembles
in the words of Bernard and makes the life of Francis a lyric poem. St.
Jerome also had even an hysterically emotional nature; Tertullian at the
beginning of the patristic period was no placid soul, nor Gregory the
Great at its close. But it does not follow that Latin Christianity was as
yet emotionalized, or that it had become a matter of the heart because it
was accepted by the mind. Its dogmas and constructive principles were
still too new; the energies of men had been spent in devising and
establishing them. Not yet had they been pondered over for generation
after generation, and hallowed through time; they had not yet become part
of human life, cherished in men’s hopes, fondled in their affections,
frozen in their fears, trembled before and loved.

What was absent from the formation of Latin Christianity constituted the
conditions of its gradual appropriation by the Middle Ages. It had come to
them from a greater past, sanctioned by the saints who now reigned above.
Through the centuries, men had come to understand it, and had made it
their own with power. Through generations its commands and promises, its
threats and rewards, had been feared and loved. Its persons, symbols, and
sacraments had become animate with human quality and were endeared with
intimate incident and association. Every one had been born to it, had been
suckled upon it, had adored it in childhood, youth, and age: it filled all
life; with hope or menace it overhung the closing hour.

The Middle Ages have been given credit for dry theologies and sublimated
metaphysics. Less frequently have they been credited with their great
achievement, the imbuing of patristic Christianity with the human elements
of love and fear and pity. Yet their religious phenomena display this
emotionalizing of transmitted theological elements. Chapters which are to
follow will illustrate it from the lives of many saints of different
temperaments. As wide apart as life will be the phases of its
manifestations. The tears of Peter Damiani are not like the love of the
God-man in St. Bernard; St. Francis’s love of Christ and love of man is
again different and new; and the mystic thought-shot visions of a
Hildegard of Bingen are as blue to crimson when compared with the
sense-passion for the Bridegroom of a Mechthild of Magdeburg. Even as
illustrated in these so different natures, it will still appear that the
emotional humanizing of Latin Christianity in the Middle Ages shaped
itself to the tenets of the system formulated by the Church Fathers. It
was an emotionalizing of that system, quite as much as a direct
appropriation of the Gospel-heart of Christ. Christ and the heart of
Christ were with the mediaeval saints; and yet the emotions as well as
thoughts through which they turned to Him received their form from
patristic Christianity.

Religious art plainly tells the story. Let one call to mind the character
of its achievements in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. That was
the period following the recognition of Christianity as the religion of
the Roman Empire. Everywhere basilicas arose.[423] Some of them may be
seen in Rome, in Ravenna, in Constantinople. They still contain many of
the mural mosaics which were their glory. Numberless artists laboured in
the composition of those stately church decorations. There was a need,
unprecedented and never afterwards paralleled, of creative composition.
Spacious surfaces were to be covered with prefigurative scenes from the
Old Testament, with scenes from the life of Christ on earth, and
representations of His apocalyptic triumph in the Resurrection. They had
all to be composed without aid from previous designs, for there were none.
The artists had need to be as constructive as the Church Fathers, who
through the same period were perfecting the formulation of the Faith. They
succeeded grandly, setting forth the subjects they were told to execute,
in noble, balanced, and decorative compositions, which presented the facts
and tenets of the Faith strikingly and correctly. Stylistically, these
great church mosaics belonged to antique art. What did they lack? Merely
the human, veritably tragic, qualities of love and fear and pity, which
had not yet come. Like the dogmatic system, this mosaic presentation was
too recently composed. Its subjects were not yet humanized through
centuries of contemplation, reverence, and love.[424]

Many of the early compositions, repeated from century to century, in time
were humanized and transformed with feeling. But this was not in the
seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, when art was but a decadent and
barbarized survival of the antique Christian manner, nor in the tenth and
eleventh. One may note also that the mediaeval expression of Christian
emotion was beginning in religious literature. This came with fulness in
the twelfth century, and along with it the emotionalizing, the veritable
humanizing, of religious art began. Yet the artists of western Europe
still lacked the skill requisite for delicate execution. A marked advance
came in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. That was the great period
of Gothic architecture; and in the sculpture on the French cathedrals,
stone seems to live and feel. The prophetic figures from the Old
Testament, the scenes of man’s redemption and final judgment, are
humanized with love and terror. Moreover, the sculptor surrounds them with
the myriad subsidiary detail of mortal life and changing beauty, showing
how closely they are knit to every human love and interest.

In Italy a like story is told in a different manner. There is sculpture,
but there also is mosaic, and above all there is and will be fresco.
Before the end of the thirteenth century, Giotto was busy with his new
dramatic art; no need to tell what power of human feeling filled the
works of that chief of painters and his school. The hard materials of the
mosaicist were also made to render emotion. If one will note the mosaics
along the nave in Santa Maria Maggiore, belonging to the fifth century,
and then turn to the mosaics of the Coronation of the Virgin in the apse,
or cross the Tiber and look at those in the lower zone of the apse of
Santa Maria in Trastevere, which tell the Virgin’s story, he will see the
change which was bringing love and sweetness into the stiff mosaic medium.
Torriti executed the former in 1295; and the latter with their gentler
feeling were made by Giotto’s pupil, Cavallini, in 1351. The art is still
as correct and true and orthodox as in the fifth century. It conforms to
Latin Christianity in the choice of topics and the manner of presenting
them, and drapes its human emotions around conceptions which the patristic
period formed and delivered to the Middle Ages. Thus, in full measure, it
has taken to itself the emotional qualities of the mediaeval
transformation of Latin Christianity, and is filled with a love and tears
and pity, which were not in the old Christian mosaics.

Quite analogous to the emotionalizing of Christian art is the example
afforded by the evolution of the Latin hymn. The earliest extant Latin
hymns are those of St. Ambrose, written in iambic dimeters. Antique in
phrase as in metre, they are also trenchantly correct in doctrine, as
behoved the compositions of the great Archbishop of Milan who commanded
the forces of orthodoxy in the Arian conflict. They were sung in anxious
seasons. Yet these dignified and noble hymns are no emotional outpour
either of anxiety or adoration. Such feeling as they carry lies in their
strength of trust in God and in the power of conviction of their stately
orthodoxy.

Between the death of Ambrose and the tenth century, Latin hymns gradually
substituted accent in the place of metrical quantity, as the dominant
principle of their rhythm. With this partial change there seems to come
increase of feeling. The

  “Jesu nostra redemptio,
   Amor et desiderium.”

of the seventh century is different from the

  “Te diligat castus amor,
   Te mens adoret sobria”

of Ambrose.[425] And the famous pilgrim chant of the tenth century, “O
Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,” has the strength of long-deepening
emotion.[426]

These hymns have but dropped the constraint of metre. Religious passion
had not yet proved its creative power, and the new verse-forms with their
mighty rhyme, fit to voice the accumulated emotions of the Liturgy, were
not in existence. The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed the
strophic evolution of the Latin hymn, in which feeling, joined with art,
at last perfected line and stanza and the passionate phrases filling
them.[427] Yet nothing could be more orthodox than the Latin hymn
throughout its course of development. Its function was liturgical. It was
correct in doctrinal expressions, and followed in every way the
authoritative teachings of the Church; its symbolism was derived from the
works of learned doctors; and its feeling took form from the tenets of
Latin Christianity. The _Dies Irae_ and the _Stabat Mater_ yield evidence
of this.[428]

From the religious phases of mediaeval emotion, one may pass to modes of
feeling which were secular and human. The antecedents were again the
racial traits of the peoples who were to become mediaeval; the formative
influences still are Christianity and the profane antique culture. The
racial traits show clearest in vernacular compositions, some of which may
carry fervent feeling, such as enkindles the Crusader’s song of _Hartmann
von Aue_:

  “Min froüde wart nie sorgelos
       Unz an die tage
   Daz ich mir Kristes bluomen kos
       Die ich hie trage.
   Die kundent eine sumerzìt,
       Die alsô gar
   In suezer augenweide lit;
       Got helfe uns dar.

  “Mich hât diu werlt also gewent (gewöhnt),
       Daz mir der muot
   Sich z’einer mâze nâch ir sent:
       Dêst mir nu guot.
   Got hat vil wol ze mir getân,
       Als ez nu stât,
   Daz ich der sorgen bin erlân
       Diu manegen hât
   Gebunden an den fuoz,
       Daz er belîben muoz
   Swenn’ ich in Kristes schar
       Mit fröuden wünneclichen var.”[429]

The secular emotional development was connected with the religious. It was
stimulated by the deepening of emotional capacity caused by Christianity,
and was not unrelated to the Christian love of God, the place of which was
taken, in secular mediaeval passion, by an idealizing, but carnal, love of
woman; and instead of the terror-stricken piety which accompanied the
Christian’s love for his Maker and his Judge, the heart was glad and the
temper open to every joy, while also subject to the fears and hates which
spring up among men of mortal passions.

In the romantic and utter abandonment required of its votaries, this
earthly love may well have drawn suggestion from that boundless love of
God which had superseded the Greek precept of “nothing in excess,”
teaching instead that no limit should be set on what was absolutely good.
The principle of love unrestrained was thus inaugurated, and did not
always turn to God. Ardent natures who felt love’s power, might hold it as
the supreme arbiter and law of life, and the giver of strength and virtue.
These thoughts will shape the tale of Lancelot and myriad poems besides.
They also may be found incarnate in the living instance: the heart of
Heloïse held a passion for her human master which she recognized as her
highest law. It was such a passion as she would hardly have conceived but
for the existence of like categories of devotion to the Christian God. Not
in her nature alone, but through many Christian generations whereof she
was the fruit, there had gone on a continual enhancement of capacities of
feeling, for which she was a greater woman when she grew to womanhood and
felt its passion. Through such heightening of her powers of loving, and
through the suggestiveness of the Christian love of God, she could
conceive and feel a like absolute devotion to a man.[430]

There were, moreover, partially humanized stages in which the love of God
was affiliated with loves of mortal hue. Many a mediaeval woman felt a
passionate love for the spiritual Bridegroom. Its expression, its
suggestions, its training, might transmit power and passion to the love of
very mortal men: while from the worship of the Blessed Virgin expressions
of passionate devotion might pass over into poems telling man’s love of
woman. And what reaches of passion might not the Song of Songs suggest,
although that imagined bridal of the Soul was never deemed a song of human
love?[431]




BOOK III

THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL: THE SAINTS




CHAPTER XV

THE REFORMS OF MONASTICISM

    MEDIAEVAL EXTREMES; BENEDICT OF ANIANE; CLUNY; CITEAUX’S _CHARTA
    CHARITATIS_; THE _VITA CONTEMPLATIVA_ ACCEPTS THE _VITA ACTIVA_


The present Book and the following will set forth the higher
manifestations of the religious energies of the Middle Ages, and then the
counter ideals which knights and ladies delighted to contemplate, and
sometimes strove to reach. In religious as well as mundane life, ideals
admired and striven for constitute human facts, make part of the human
story, quite as veritably as the spotted actuality everywhere in evidence.
The tale of piety is to be gathered from those efforts of the religious
purpose which almost attain their ideal; while as a comment on them, and a
foil and contrast, the deflections of human frailty may be observed.
Likewise the full reality of chivalry lies in its ideals, supplemented by
the illuminating contrast of failure and oppression, making what we may
call its actuality. The emotional element, reviewed in the last chapter,
will for the time be dominant.

       *       *       *       *       *

Practice always drops below the ethical standards of a period. The
contrast appears in the history of Greece and Rome. Yet in neither Greece
nor Rome could there exist the abysms of contradiction which disclose
themselves after the conversion of western Europe to the religion of
Christ.

And for the following reasons. Greek and Roman standards were finite; they
regarded only the mortal happiness of the individual and the terrestrial
welfare of the State. To Greek thought the indefinite or limitless was as
the monstrous and unformed; and therefore abhorrent to the classic ideals
of perfection. Again, Greek and Roman standards demanded only what Greek
and Roman humanity could fulfil in the mortal life of earth. But the
Christian ideal of conduct assumes the universal imperfection and infinite
perfectibility of man. It has constant regard to immortality, and eternity
is needed for its fulfilment. Moreover, whether or not Christ’s Gospel set
forth any inherent antagonism between the fulness of mortal life and the
sure attainment of heaven, its historical interpretations have never
effected a complete reconcilement. They have always presented a conflict
between the finite and the eternal, unconceived and unsuspected by the
pagan ethics of Greece and Rome.

This conflict dawned in the Apostolic age. During the patristic period it
worked itself out to a formulated opposition between the world and the
City of God. Of this, monasticism was the chief expression. Nevertheless,
pagan principle and feeling lived on in the reasonings and characters of
the Church Fathers. The Roman qualities in Ambrose, the general survival
of antique greatness in Augustine, preserved them from the rhetorical
hysteria of Jerome and the exaggeration of phrase which affects the
writings of Gregory the Great.[432] With the decadence preceding, and the
confusion following, the Carolingian period, antique qualities passed
away; and when men began again to think and feel constructively, there
remained no antique poise to restrain the strife of those mighty
opposites--the joys of life and the terrors of the Judgment Day.

This conflict, inherent in mediaeval Christianity, was in part a struggle
between temporal desires which many men approved, and their renunciation
for eternal joy. From this point of view it was a conflict of ideals,
though, to be sure, life’s common cravings were on one side, and often
unideally turned the scale. We are not immediately concerned, however,
with this conflict of ideals; but with the contrasts presented between
the actual and the ideal, between conduct and the principles which should
have controlled it. The opposition between this life and eternity is
mentioned in order to make clear the tremendous demands of the Christian
ethical ideal, and the unlikelihood of its fulfilment by mediaeval
humanity. So one may perceive a reason why the Middle Ages were to show
such extremes of contrast between principles and practices. The standards
recognized as holiest countered the natural lives of men; and for that
reason could be lived up to only under transient spiritual enthusiasm or
by exceptional people. Monasticism held the highest ideals of Christian
living, and its story illustrates the continual falling away of conduct
from the recognized ideal.

Without regard to the contrast between the ideal and the actual, the
Middle Ages were a period of extremes--of extreme humility and love as
well as cruelty and hate. Such extremes may be traceable to a certain
unlimited quality in Christian principles, according to which no man could
have too much humility or Christian love, or could too strenuously combat
the enemies of Christ. To be sure, an all-proportioning principle of
conduct lay in man’s love of God, answering to God’s love which
encompassed all His creatures. But such proportionment is difficult for
simple minds, and many of the extremes which meet us in the Middle Ages
were directly due to the simplicity with which mediaeval men and women
carried out such Christian precepts as they were taken with, in disregard
of all else that commonly balances and conventionalizes human lives.

For this reason also the Middle Ages are picturesque and poetic. Nothing
could be more picturesque and more like a poem than the simple
absoluteness with which St. Francis interpreted and lived out his Lord’s
principle of love, and made universal application of his Lord’s injunction
to the rich young man, to go and sell his goods and give to the poor, and
then come follow Him. This particular solution of the problem of God’s
service was taken by Francis, and by many another, as of general
application, and was literally carried out; just as Francis with
exquisite simplicity carried out other precepts of his Lord in a way that
would be foolishness were it not so beautiful.

There was no contrast between conduct and principle in the life of
Francis; and in other men conduct might agree with such principles as they
understood. Many a rustic layman, many a good knight, fulfilled the
standards of his calling. Many a parish priest did his whole duty, as he
thought it. And many a monk and nun lived up to their monastic _regula_,
if indeed never satisfying the inner yearning of the soul unquenchably
striving for perfection. Indeed, for the monk ever to have been satisfied
with himself would have meant a fall from humility to vainglory.

The precepts of the Gospel were for every man and woman. Nevertheless, the
same rules of living did not apply to all. In this regard, mediaeval
society falls into the two general divisions of clergy and laity, meaning
by the former all persons making special profession of religion or engaged
in the service of the Church.[433] This would include anchorites and monks
(also the _conversi_[434] or lay-brethren) and the secular clergy from the
rank of bishop downward. To such (excepting seculars below the grade of
sub-deacon) the rule of celibacy applied, as well as other ascetic
precepts dependent on the vows they had taken or the regulations under
which they lived. Conversely, certain rules like those relating to the
conduct of man and wife would touch the laity alone.

A general similarity of principle pervaded the rules of conduct applying
to all orders of the clergy, secular and regular.[435] Yet there was a
difference in the severity of the rules and the stringency of their
application. The mediaeval code of religious ethics applied in its utter
strenuousness only to monks and nuns. They alone had seriously undertaken
to obey the Gospel precept, _esto perfecti_; and they alone could be
regarded as living the life of complete Christian militancy against the
world, the flesh, and the devil. The trials, that is to say the
temptations, of this warfare could be fully known only to the monk.
“Tentatio,” says Caesar of Heisterbach, “est militia,” _i.e._ warfare; it
is possible only for those who live humanly and rationally, after the
spirit, which is to say, as monks; “the seculars (_i.e._ the clergy who
were not monks) and the carnal (_i.e._ the laity) who walk according to
the flesh, are improperly said to be tempted; for as soon as they feel the
temptation they consent, or resist lukewarmly, like the horse and the mule
who have no understanding.”[436]

We have spoken of the inception of monasticism, and of its early
motives,[437] which included the fear of hell, the love of Christ, and the
conviction of the antagonism between pleasure and that service which opens
heaven’s gates. Such sentiments were likely to develop and expand. The
fear of hell might be inflamed and made visible by the same imagination
that festered over the carnality of pleasure; the heart could impassion
and extend the love of Christ through humanity’s full capacity for loving
what was holiest and most lovable; and the mind could attain to an
overmastering conviction of the incompatibility of pleasure with absolute
devotion. Through the Middle Ages these motives developed and grew
together, until they made a mode of life, and fashioned human characters
into accord with it. Century after century the lives of thousands
fulfilled the monastic spirit, and often so perfectly as to belie
humanity’s repute for frailty. Their virtues shunned encomium. Record was
made of those whose mind and energy organized and wrought, or whose piety
and love of God burned so hotly that others were enkindled. But legion
upon legion of tacit lives are registered only in the Book with seven
seals.

Monastic abuses have usually spoken more loudly than monastic regularity.
In Christian monasticism there is an energy of renovation which constantly
cries against corruption. Its invective reaches us from all the mediaeval
centuries; while monastic regularity has more commonly been unreported. It
is well to bear this in mind when reading of monastic vice. It always
existed, and judging from the fiery denunciations which it awakened, it
was often widely prevalent. In fact, the monastic life required such love
of God or fear of hell, such renunciation of this world, its ambitions,
its lusts and its lures, that monks were likely to fall below the
prescribed standards, and then quickly into all manner of sin, from lack
of the restraints, or outlets, of secular life.

Consequently the most patent history of monasticism is the history of its
attempts to reform and renew itself. Its heroes come before us as
reformers or refounders, whose endeavour is to reinstitute the perfect
way, impassion men anew to follow it, by added precepts discipline them
for its long ascents, and so occupy them in the practice of its virtues
that all distracting impulses shall perish. Their apparent endeavour (at
least until the day of Francis of Assisi) is to renew a life from which
their contemporaries have fallen away. And yet through all there was
unconscious innovation and progress.

The greater part of the fervent piety of the Middle Ages dwelt in
cloisters, when not drawn forth unwillingly to serve the Lord in the
world. Mediaeval saints were, or yearned to be, monks or nuns.
Consequently monastic reforms, as well as attempts to raise the condition
of the secular clergy, emanated from within monasticism. Its own rules of
living had been set from within by Benedict of Nursia, and others who were
monks. There was much irregularity at first; but the seventh and eighth
centuries witnessed the conflict between different types of monastic
organization, and then the general victory of the Benedictine _regula_.
This was also a victory for monastic reform; for moral looseness,
accompanied by heathenish irregularities, easily penetrated cloisters when
not protected by a common and authoritative rule. As it was, the energy of
Benedictine uniformity seemed exhausted in the contest.

But a Benedictine refounder arose. This was the high-born Witiza of
Aquitaine, the ascetic virtuosity of whose early life had won him repute.
Assuming the name of Benedict, he established a monastery on the bank of
the little Aniane, in Aquitaine, in the year 779. His foundation
flourished in righteousness and increased in numbers, till it drew the
attention of Alcuin and Charlemagne to its abbot. Benedict was given the
task of reforming the monasteries of Aquitaine. Afterwards Louis the Pious
extended his authority; till in 817 a reforming synod, over which he
presided, was held at Aix, and the king’s authority was attached to its
decrees. All Frankish monasteries were therein commanded to observe the
_regula_ of Benedict of Nursia, with many further precepts set by him of
Aniane, aggravating the severity of the older rule; for example, by
enforcing a more rigid silence among the monks when at labour, and
restricting their intercourse with the laity. Great stress was laid upon
the labours of the field. There was little novelty in the work of this
reorganizer, with his consistent ascetic contempt for profane literature.
His labours were typical of those of many a monastic reformer after him,
who likewise sought to re-establish the strictness of the old Benedictine
rule, and in fact added to its austerities.

The next example of reform is Cluny, founded in the year 910. Its cloister
discipline followed the _regula_ of Benedict with the additions decreed by
the synod of Aix. Under Odo (d. 942) Majolus (d. 994) and Odilo (d. 1048)
it rose to unprecedented power and influence. Mainly because of the
winning and commanding qualities of its abbots, it received the support of
kings and popes; its authority and privileges were increased, until it
became the head of more than three hundred cloisters distributed through
France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. In ecclesiastical policy it stood for
decency and reform, but without giving extreme support to either emperor
or pope. Balance and temperance characterized its career. It was a
monastic organization which by precept and example, and by the wide
supervising powers it received from the papacy and from temporal
authorities, promoted regularity and propriety of life among monks, and
also among the secular clergy. The “reforms of Cluny” do not represent any
specific intensifying of monastic principles, but rather the general
endeavour of the better elements in Burgundian and French monasticism to
overcome the crass secularization of the Church, within and without the
cloister. Cluny’s influence told generally against monastic degradation,
rather than in favour of any special ascetic or ecclesiastic policy. The
prevailing simony, the clerical concubinage, the rough and warlike ways of
bishops and abbots were all corruptions standing in the way of any
monastic or ecclesiastical improvement; and Cluny opposed them, in
moderation however, and with considerable acquiescence in the apparently
necessary conditions of the time.[438]

After the comparative strictness of its first abbots, Cluny’s discipline
moderated almost to laxity; and the interests of the rich and magnificent
monastery became elegant and somewhat secular. It still maintained
monastic decencies while not going beyond their demands. Its face was no
longer set against comfortable living, nor against art and letters. And
the time came when fervent spirits demanded a more uncompromising attack
upon the world and the flesh.

Such came from Citeaux (near Dijon), where a few monks founded a
struggling monastery in 1098. Its fortunes were small and feeble until the
time of its third abbot, the Englishman, Stephen Harding (1109-1134),
whose genius set the lines of Citeaux’s larger destinies. Her great period
began when, shortly after Harding’s entrance on his abbacy, there arrived
a band of well-born youths, led by one Bernard. Then of a truth the
cloister burned with ardour. Its numbers grew, and Bernard was sent with a
Cistercian band to found a daughter monastery at Clairvaux (1115).

Like Stephen Harding, Bernard was an ascetic, and the Cistercian Order
represents a stern tightening of the reins which Cluny left lying somewhat
slackly upon the backs of her stall-fed monks.[439] Controversies arose
between the Cluniac Benedictines and the Cistercian Benedictines insisting
on a stricter rule. Bernard himself entered into heated controversy with
that great temperate personality of the twelfth century, Peter the
Venerable, Cluny’s revered lord.

The original _regula_ of Benedict provided an admirable constitution for
the single monastery, but no plan for the supervision of one monastery by
another. The mediaeval advance in monastic organization consisted in the
authoritative supervision of subordinate or “daughter” foundations by the
superior or primal monastery of the Order. The Abbot of Cluny exercised
such authority over Cluniac foundations, as well as over monasteries
which, at the instance of the secular lord of the land, had been
reorganized by Cluny.

The Cistercian Order represents a less monarchical, or more decentralized
subordination, on a plan similar to the feudal principle of
sub-infeudation, whereby the holder of the fief owed his duties to his
immediate lord, who in turn owed duties to his own lord, still above him.
Thus in the Cistercian Order the visitatorial authority over each
foundation was vested in the immediate mother abbey, rather than in the
primal abbey of Citeaux, from which the intervening mother abbey had gone
forth.

This plan was formulated by Stephen Harding’s _Charta Charitatis_,[440]
the charter of the Cistercian Order and a monument of constructive genius.
Apparently mindful of the various privileges recognized by the feudal
system, it begins by renouncing on the part of the superior monastery all
claim to temporal emolument from the daughter foundations: “Nullam
terrenae commoditatis seu rerum temporalium exactionem imponimus.” “But
for love’s sake (_gratia-charitatis_) we desire to retain the care of
their souls; so that should they swerve from the holy way and the
observance of the Holy Rule, they may through our solicitude return to
rectitude of life.”

Then follows the command that all Cistercian foundations obey implicitly
the _regula_ of Benedict, as understood and practised at Citeaux, and that
all follow the customs of Citeaux, and the same forms of chant and prayer
and service (for we receive their monks in our cloister, and they ours),
“so that without discordant actions we may live by one love, one rule, and
like practices (_una charitate, una regula, similibusque vivamus
moribus_).” A short sentence follows, forbidding all monasteries and
individual monks to accept from any source any privilege inconsistent with
the customs of the Order.

So the _Charta_ enjoined a uniformity of discipline. Wise and temperate
provision was made for the enforcement of the same when necessary by the
immediate parent monastery of the delinquent foundation. “Whenever the
Abbot of Citeaux comes to a monastery to visit it, its abbot shall make
way for him, and he shall there hold the office of abbot. Yet let him not
presume to order or conduct affairs against the wishes of its abbot and
the brethren. But if he sees that the precepts of the _Regula_ or of our
Order are transgressed, let him seek to correct the brethren with the
advice and in the presence of the abbot. If the abbot be absent, he may
still proceed.” Once a year the Abbot of Citeaux, in person or through one
of his co-abbots, must visit all the monasteries (coenobia) which he has
founded, and if more often, the brethren should the more rejoice. Likewise
must the four primary abbots of La Ferté, Pontigny, Clairvaux, and
Morimond, together visit Citeaux once a year, at such time as they may
choose, except that set for the annual meeting of the general Chapter. At
Citeaux also, let any visiting abbot be treated as if he were abbot there.

    “Whenever any of our churches (monasteries) by God’s grace so
    increases that it is able to found another brotherhood, let the same
    relationship (_definitio_) obtain between them which obtains between
    us and our _cofratres_, except that they may not hold an annual
    Chapter; but rather let all abbots come without fail every year to the
    annual Chapter at Citeaux.

    “At which Chapter let them take measures for the safety of their
    souls; if in the observance of the holy _Regula_ or the Order,
    anything should be amended or supplemented, let them ordain it; let
    them re-establish the bond of peace and love among themselves.”

The annual Chapter is also given authority to correct any abbot and settle
controversies between abbots; but when an abbot appears unworthy of his
charge, and the Chapter has not acted, it is the duty of the abbot of his
mother church to admonish him, and, upon his obduracy, summon other abbots
and move for his deposition. Thus the _Charta Charitatis_ apportioned
authority among the abbots of the Order, providing, as it were, a mutual
power of enforcement in which every abbot had part. One notices also that
the _Charta_ is neither monarchical nor democratic, but aristocratic; for
the abbots (not the Abbot of Citeaux alone) manage and control the Order,
and without any representation of the monks at the annual Chapter.[441]
The _Charta Charitatis_ seems a spiritual mirror of the feudal system.

Mediaeval monasticism, whether cloistered or sent forth into the world,
was predominantly coenobitic or communal. Yet through the Middle Ages the
anchorite or hermit way of life was not unrepresented. Both monk and
hermit existed from the beginning of Christian monasticism; they
recognized the same purpose, but employed different means to achieve it.
For their common aim was to merit the kingdom of heaven through the
suppression of sense-desires and devotion to spiritual righteousness. But
the communal system recognized the social nature of man, his essential
weakness in isolation, and his inability to satisfy his bodily wants by
himself. Thus admitting the human need of fellowship and correction, it
deemed that man’s spiritual progress could be best advanced in a way of
life which took account of these facts. On the other hand, anchoritism
looked rather to man’s self-sufficiency alone with God--and the devil. It
held that man could best conquer his carnal nature in solitude, and in
solitude best meditate upon his soul and God. The society of one’s
fellows, even though they be likeminded, is a distraction and a hindrance.
Obviously, the devoted temper has its variants; and some souls will draw
from solitude that strength which others gain from support and sympathy.

Both the coenobitic and the hermit life were, from the time of their
inception, phases of the _vita contemplativa_. Yet more active duties had
constantly been recognized, until at last monasticism, in an ardour of
love for fellow-men, broke from the cloister and went abroad in the steps
of Francis and Dominic. Even this active and uncloistered monasticism drew
its strength from its hidden meditation, and, strengthened from within
itself, entered upon the _vita activa_, and practised among men the
virtues which it had acquired through contemplation and the quiet
discipline of the cloister. So if we people of the world would have
understanding of the matter, we must never forget that at its source and
in its essence the monastic life is a _vita contemplativa_, whether the
monastic man, as a member of a fervent community, be sustained through the
support of his brethren and the counsel or command of his superior, or
whether, as an anchorite, he seclude himself in solitude. And the essence
of this _vita contemplativa_ is not to do or act, but to contemplate,
meditate upon God and the human soul. By one line of ancestry it is a
descendant of Aristotle’s βίος θεωρητικός. But its mightier parent was the
Saviour’s manifestation of God’s love of man and man’s love of God. From
this source came the emotional elements (and they were the predominant and
overwhelming) of the Christian _vita contemplativa_, its terror and
despair, its tears and hope, and its yearning love. Through these any
Hellenic calm was transformed to storm-tossed Christian ecstasy.

Monastic quietism might at any time be drafted into Christian militancy.
In the crises of the Church, or when there was call to go forth and
convert the heathen or the carnal, both monk and hermit became zealots in
the world. Yet important and frequent as these active functions were, they
were not commanded by the Benedictine _regula_, either in its original
form or in its many modifications, Cluniac, Cistercian, or Carthusian;
hence they were not treated as part of the monastic life. There was to
come a change. The _vita contemplativa_ was to take to itself the _vita
activa_ as a regular and not an occasional function of perfect Christian
piety. An evangelization of monasticism, according to the more active
spirit of the Gospel, was at hand. The monastic ideal was to become humane
and actively loving. In principle and theory, as well as practice,
Christian piety was no longer to find its entire end and aim in
contemplation, in asceticism, in purity: it was _regularly_ henceforth to
occupy itself with a loving beneficence among men.

Some of the ardent beginnings of this movement did not receive the
sanction of the Church. The Poor of Lyons, the Humbled Folk (_Humiliati_)
of Lombardy, the Beghards of Liége, were pronounced to be heretics.
Predominantly lay and ecclesiastically somewhat bizarre, they were
scarcely monks. Yet these irregular evangelists of the latter part of the
twelfth century were forerunners of that chief evangelizer of Monasticism,
Francis of Assisi.[442]

The life of Francis, as all men know, fulfilled the current demands of
monasticism. He lived and taught obedience, chastity, humility, and a more
absolute poverty than had been before conceived. With respect to the first
three virtues, it was only through his loving way of living them that
Francis set anything new before his brethren. As for the last, it may be
said that monks had always been forbidden to own property; only the
monastery or the Order might. Francis’s absolute acceptance of poverty
comes to us as inspired by the command of Christ to the rich young man: Go
and sell all, and give to the poor, and then come follow me. But had no
Christian soul read this before and accepted it absolutely? The Athanasian
Life of St. Anthony, at the very beginning of Christian monasticism, has
the same account; he too gave up all he had on reading this passage. But
then he fled to the desert, while Francis, when he had given up all,
opened his arms to mankind. In accordance with his brotherly and social
evangelization of monasticism, Francis modified certain of its practices.
He removed restrictions upon intercourse among the brethren, and took away
the barriers, save those of holiness, between the brethren and the world.
Then he lifted the veil of silence from the brethren’s lips. They should
thenceforth speak freely, in love of God and man. So monasticism stepped
forth, at last uncloistered, upon its course of love and teaching in the
world.

In spite of the temperamental differences between Francis and Dominic, and
in spite of the different tasks which they set before their Orders, the
analogy between Franciscans and Dominicans was fundamental; for the
latter, as well as the former, regularly undertook to evoke the _vita
activa_ from the _vita contemplativa_. The Dominicans were to preach and
teach true Christian doctrine, and as veritable _Domini canes_ destroy the
wolves of heresy menacing the Christian fold.

Dominic received from Pope Honorius III., in 1217, the confirmation of his
Order, as an Order of Canons according to the _Regula_ supposed to have
been taught by Augustine. The Preaching Friars were never cloistered by
their _regula_, any more than were the Minorites. Two or three years
later, Dominic added, or emphasized anew, the principle of voluntary
poverty, not only in the individuals but in the Order as a corporate
whole. Whencesoever he derived this idea--whether from the Franciscans, or
because it was rife among men--at all events it was not his originally;
for Dominic had accepted at an earlier period the one-sixth of the
revenues of the Bishop of Toulouse. This he now renounced, and instead
accepted voluntary poverty.

It was not given to Dominic to love as Francis loved. Nor was he an
incarnate poem. But it was in the spirit of Christian devotion that he
undertook and laid upon his Order the performance of active duties in the
world, especially of preaching true doctrines for the salvation of souls.
Dominic took no personal part in the Albigensian blood-shedding; and he
was not the founder of the Inquisition, although his Order was so soon to
be identified with it. He was a theologian, a teacher, and an ardent
preacher; a devoted man, given to tears. Almost the only words we have
from him are those of his Testament: “Caritatem habete, humilitatem
servate, paupertatem voluntariam possedete.”[443]




CHAPTER XVI

THE HERMIT TEMPER

    PETER DAMIANI; ROMUALD; DOMINICUS LORICATUS; BRUNO AND GUIGO,
    CARTHUSIANS


To contemplate goodness in God, and strain toward it in yearning love, is
the method of the Christian _vita contemplativa_. In this way the recluse
cultivates humility, patience, purity, and love, and perfects his soul for
heaven. And herein, in that it is more undistracted and more undisturbed,
lies the superiority of the solitary life over the coenobitic.

Yet this conceived superiority is but the reason and the conscious motive
for the solitary life. The call to it is felt as well as intellectually
accepted. It is temperament that makes the recluse; his reasons are but
his justification. In solitude he lives the reaches of his life; from
solitude he draws his utmost bliss. To leave it involves the torture of
separation, and then all the petty pains of unhappy labour and distasteful
intercourse with men. “Whoever would reach the summit of perfection should
keep within the cloister of his seclusion, cherish spiritual leisure, and
shudder at traversing the world, as if he were about to plunge into a sea
of blood. For the world is so filthy with vices, that any holy mind is
befouled even by thinking about it.”[444]

Here speaks the hermit temper, by the mouth of a supreme exponent. If
Hildebrand, who compelled all men to his purposes, kept Peter Damiani in
the world, that ascetic soul did not cease to yearn for the hermit life.
His skilful pen served it untiringly. Its temper, its merits, and its
grounds, appear with unique clarity in the writings of him who, sore
against his will, was the Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia.[445]

    “The solitary life is the school of celestial doctrine and the divine
    arts (_artes divinae_),” says Damiani, meaning every word. “For there
    God is the whole that is learned. He is also the way by which one
    advances, through which one attains knowledge of the sum of
    truth.”[446] To obtain its benefits, it must be led assiduously and
    without break or wandering abroad among men: “Habit makes his cell
    sweet to the monk, but roving makes it seem horrible.... The unbroken
    hermit life is a cooling refreshment (_refrigerium_); but, if
    interrupted, it seems a torment. Through continued seclusion the soul
    is illuminated, vices are uncovered, and whatever of himself had been
    hidden from the man, is disclosed.”[447]

Peter argues that the hermit life is free from temptations (!) and offers
every aid to victory.

    “The wise man, bent on safeguarding his salvation, watches always to
    destroy his vices; he girds his loins--and his belly--with the girdle
    of perfect mortification. Truly that takes place when the itching
    palate is suppressed, when the pert tongue is held in silence, the ear
    is shut off from distractions and the eye from unpermitted sights;
    when the hand is held from cruel striking, and the foot from vainly
    roving; when the heart is withstood, that it may not envy another’s
    felicity, nor through avarice covet what is not its own, nor through
    anger sever itself from fraternal love, nor vaunt itself arrogantly
    above its fellows, nor yield to the ticklings of lust, nor
    immoderately sink itself in grief or abandon itself wantonly to joy.
    Since, then, the human mind has not the power to remain entirely
    empty, and unoccupied with the love of something, it is girt around
    with a wall of the virtues.

    “In this way, then, our mind begins to be at rest in its Author and to
    taste the sweetness of that intimacy. At once it rejects whatever it
    deems contrary to the divine law, shrinks from what does not agree
    with the rule of supernal righteousness. Hence true mortification is
    born; hence it comes that man kissing the Cross of his Redeemer seems
    dead to the world. No longer he delights in silly fables, nor is
    content to waste his time with idle talk. But he is free for psalms
    and hymns and spiritual songs; he seeks seclusion, he longs for a
    hiding-place; he avoids the monastery’s conversation-rooms and
    rejoices in nooks and corners; and that he may the more freely attend
    to the contemplation of his Creator, so far as he may he declines
    colloquy with men.”[448]

    “In fine,” says Damiani, in another treatise, “our entire conversion,
    and renunciation of the world, aims at nothing else than rest. This
    rest is won through the man’s prior discipline in the toils of strife,
    in order that when the tumult of disturbance ceases, his mind, through
    the grace of contemplation, may be translated to gaze upon the face of
    truth. But since one attains to this rest only through labour and
    conflict, how can one reach it who has not gone down into the strife?
    By what right can one enter the halls of the King who has not
    traversed the arena before the doors?”[449]

    “It further behoves each brother who with his whole heart has
    abandoned the world, to unlearn and forget forever whatever is
    injurious. He should not be disputatious as to cookery, nor clever in
    the petty matters of the town; nor an adept in rhetoric’s jinglings,
    or in jokes or wordplay. He should love fasts and cherish penury; he
    should flee the sight of man, restrain himself under the censorship of
    silence, withdraw from affairs, keep his mouth from idle talk, and
    seek the hiding-place of his soul, and in such hiding be on fire to
    see the face of his Creator. Let him pant for tears, and implore God
    for them by daily prayer.”

With this last sentence Damiani makes his transition to the emotional side
of the Christian _vita contemplativa_. He will now pour himself out in a
rhapsody of praise of tears, which purify and refresh the soul, and open
it to the love of God.

    “From the fire of divine love rises the grace of contrition (_gratia
    compunctionis_), and again from the contrition of tears (_ex
    compunctione lacrymarum_) the ardour of celestial yearning is
    increased. The one hangs from the other, and each promotes the other;
    while the contrition of tears flows from the love of God, through
    tears again our soul burns more fervidly toward the love of God. In
    this reciprocal and alternating action, the soul is purged of the
    filth of its offence.”[450]

Elsewhere Damiani suggests how the hermit may acquire the “grace of
tears”:

    “Seclude thyself from the turmoil of secular affairs and often even
    from talk with thy brethren. Cut off the cares and anxieties of
    mundane action; clear them away as a heap of rubbish which stops the
    fountain’s flow. As water in a cavern of the earth wells up from the
    abyss, so sadness (_tristitia_) wells in a human heart from
    contemplation of the profundity of God’s Judgment, and yet will not
    flow forth in tears if checked by the clods of earthly hindrance.
    Sadness is the material of tears. But in order that the veins of this
    fount may flow more abundantly, do thou clear away all obstacles of
    secular business--and other matters also, as I know from experience.
    Even spiritual zeal in the punishment of delinquents, and the labour
    of preaching, and like matters, holy as they are and commanded by
    divine authority, nevertheless are certainly obstacles to tears.

    “So if you would attain the grace of tears, you must even curb the
    exercise of spiritual duties, eliminate malice, anger, and hatred, and
    the other pests from your heart. And do not let your own accusing
    conscience dry up the dew of tears with the aridity of fear. Indeed
    the confidence of holiness (_sanctitatis fiducia_) and a conscience
    bearing witness to its own innocence, waters the pure soul with the
    celestial rivulets of grace, softens the hardness of the impure heart,
    and opens the floodgates of weeping.”[451]

    “Many are the ways,” says Damiani in words sounding like a final
    reflection upon the solitary life--“many are the ways by which one
    comes to God; diverse are the orders in the society of the faithful;
    but among them all there is no way so straight, so sure, so unimpeded,
    so free from obstacles which trip one’s feet, as this holy life. It
    eliminates occasions for sin; it cultivates the greatest number of
    virtues by which God may be pleased; and thus, as it removes the
    opportunities of delinquency, it lays upon good conduct the added
    strength of necessity’s insistence.”[452]

Peter Damiani, exiled from solitude, found no task more grateful than that
of writing the Life of his older contemporary, St. Romualdus, the founder
of Camaldoli and other hermit communities in Italy. That man had
completely lived the life from which the Church’s exigencies dragged his
biographer. Peter put himself, as well as his best literary powers, into
this _Vita Romualdi_, and made it one of the most vivid of mediaeval
_Vitae sanctorum_. If Romuald was a hermit in the flesh, Damiani had the
imagination to make the hermit spirit speak.[453]

    “Against thee, unclean world, we cry, that thou hast an intolerable
    crowd of the foolish wise, eloquent as regards thee, mute as to God.
    Wise are they to do evil; they know not how to do good. For behold
    almost three _lustra_[454] have passed since the blessed Romualdus,
    laying aside the burden of flesh, migrated to the heavenly realm, and
    no one has arisen from these wise people to place upon the page of
    history even a few of the lessons of that wonderful life.”

The tone of this prologue suggests the kind of lessons found by the
biographer in the Life of Romuald. He was born of an illustrious Ravenna
family about the year 950. In youth his devout mind became conscious of
the sinfulness of the flesh. Whenever he went hunting, as was his wont,
and would come to a retired nook in the woods, the hermit yearning came
over him--and in love, says Damiani, he was prescient of what he was later
to fulfil in deed.

His father chanced to kill a neighbour in knightly brawl; and for this
homicide the son entered the monastery of St. Apollinaris in Classe, to do
forty days’ penance for his parent. This introduction to the cloister had
its natural effect on such a temper. Goaded by a vision of the saint,
Romuald became a monk. He soon showed himself no easy man. His harsh
censure of the brethren’s laxities caused a plot to murder him, the first
of many attempts upon his life.

Three years he dwelt there. Then the yearning for perfection drove him
forth, and, for a master, he sought out a hermit named Marinus, who lived
in the Venetian territory, a man well meaning, but untaught as to the
method of the hermit life. He and his disciple would issue from their cell
and wander, singing together twenty psalms under one tree, and then thirty
or forty under another. The disciple was unlettered, and the master rude.
Romuald experienced intolerable tedium from straining his fixed eyes upon
a psalter, which he could not read. He may have betrayed his _ennui_. At
all events Marinus, grasping his rod in his right hand, and sitting on his
disciple’s left, continually beat him, and always on the left side of his
head. At length Romuald said humbly: “Master, if you please, would you
henceforth beat me on the right side, as I have lost the hearing of my
left ear.”

In the neighbourhood there dwelt a duke whose rapacity had brought him
into peril. It happened that the abbot of a monastery situated not far
from Chalons-sur-Marne in France came pilgrimaging that way, and the duke
took counsel of him. The two hermits were also called; and the advice to
the duke was to flee the world. So the whole party set forth, crossed the
Alps, and travelled to the abbot’s monastery. There the duke became a
monk, while Romuald and Marinus dwelt as solitaries a little way off.

From this time Romuald increased in virtue, far outstripping all the
brethren. He supplied his wants by tilling the soil, and fasted
exceedingly. He sustained continual conflicts with the devil, who was
always bringing into his mind the loves and hates of his former life in
the world.

    “The devil would come striking on his cell, just as Romuald was
    falling asleep, and then no sleep for him. Every night for nearly five
    years the devil pressed crosses upon his feet, and weighted them with
    the likeness of a phantom weight, so that Romuald could scarcely turn
    on his couch. How often did the devil let loose the raging beasts of
    the vices! and how often did Romuald put them to flight by his dire
    threats! Hence if any of the brethren came in the silence, knocking at
    his door, the soldier of Christ, always ready for battle, taking him
    for the devil, would threaten and cry out: ‘What now, wretch! what is
    there for thee in the hermitage, outcast of heaven! Back, unclean dog!
    Vanish, old snake!’ He declared that with such words as these he gave
    battle to malignant spirits; and with the arms of faith would go out
    and meet the challenge of the foe in a neighbouring field.”

Marvellously Romuald increased his fasts and austerities, after the manner
of the old anchorites of Egypt.[455] Miraculous powers became his. But
news came of his father which drew him back to Italy. That noble but
sinful parent had entered a monastery where, under the persuasion of the
devil, he was soon sorry for his conversion, and sought to return to the
world. Romuald decided to go to his perishing father’s aid. But the people
of the region hearing of it, were distressed to lose a man of such
spiritual might. They took counsel how to prevent his departure, and with
impious piety (_impia pietate_) decided to send men to kill him, thinking
that since they could not retain him alive, they would have his corpse as
a protection for the land (_pro patrocinio terrae_). Knowing of this,
Romuald shaved his head, and as the murderers approached his cell in the
dusk of morning, he began to eat ravenously. Thinking him demented, they
did him no injury. He then set forth, staff in hand, and walked from the
centre of Gaul, even to Ravenna. There finding his father still seeking to
return to the world, he tied the old sinner’s feet to a beam, fettered him
with chains, flogged him, and at length by pious severity so subjugated
his flesh that with God’s aid he brought his mind back to a state of
salvation.[456]

Thus far Romuald’s life affords striking illustration of the fact that
prodigious austerities and the consequent repute for miracles were the
chief elements in mediaeval sainthood; also of the fact that the saint’s
dead body might be as good as he. But while he lived, Romuald was much
more than a miracle-working relic. He was a strong, domineering
personality. It was soon after he brought his father back to the way of
holiness that the old man saw a vision, and happily yielded up the ghost.
The son continued to advance in his chosen way of life and in the elements
of character which it fostered. He became a prodigious solitary; one to
whom men and their ways were intolerable, and who himself was sometimes
found intolerable by men. Even his appearance might be exceptional:

    “The venerable man dwelt for a while in a swamp (near Ferrara). At
    length the poisonous air and the stench of the marsh drove him out;
    and he emerged hairless, with his flesh puffed and swollen
    (_tumefactus et depilatus_), not looking as if belonging to the _genus
    homo_; for he was as green as a newt.”[457]

Such a story displays the very extravagance of fleshly mortification. It
has also its local colour. But one should seek its explanation in the
grounds of the hermit life as set forth by Peter Damiani. Then the
incidents of Romuald’s life will appear to spring from these hermit
motives and from the hermit temperament, which became of terrible
intensity with him. Also the egotism, so frequently an element of that
temperament, rose with him to spiritual megalomania:

    “One day (apparently in the latter part of his life) some disciples
    asked him, ‘Master, of what age does the soul appear, and in what form
    is it presented for Judgment?’ He replied, ‘I know a man in Christ,
    whose soul is brought before God shining like snow, and indeed in
    human form, with the stature of the perfect time of life.’ Asked again
    who that man might be, he would not speak for indignation. And then
    the disciples talked it over, and recognized that he was certainly the
    man.”[458]

In another part of the _Vita_, Damiani, having told of his hero’s sojourn
with a company of hermits who preferred their will to his, thus continues:
“Romuald, therefore, impatient of sterility, began to search with anxious
eagerness where he might find a soil fit to bear a fruitage of souls.” It
was his passion to change men to anchorites: he yearned to convert the
whole world to the solitary life. Many were the hermit communities which
he established. But he could not endure his hermit sons for long, nor they
him. His intolerant soul revolted from the give and take of intercourse.
Such intolerance and his passion to make more converts drove him from
place to place. He seemed inspired with a superhuman power of drawing men
from the world. Now

    “therefore he sent messengers to the Counts of Camerino. When these
    heard the name of Romuald they were beside themselves with joy, and
    placed their possessions, mountains, woods, and fields at his
    disposal, to select from. He chose a spot suited to the hermit way of
    living, intrenched amid forests and mountains, and affording an ample
    space of level fruitful ground, watered with crystal streams. The
    place was called of old the Valley of the Camp (Vallis de Castro), and
    a little church was there with a convent of women who had turned from
    the world. Here having built their cells, the venerable man and his
    disciples took up their abode.

    “And what fruitage of souls the Lord there won through him, pen cannot
    describe nor tongue relate. From all directions men began to pour in,
    for penance and to bequeath in pity their goods to the poor, while
    others utterly forsook the world and with fervent spirit hastened to
    the holy way of life. For this most blessed man was as one of the
    Seraphim, himself burning with the flame of divine love, and kindling
    others, wherever he went, with the fires of his holy preaching. Often,
    while speaking, a vast contrition brought him to such floods of tears
    that, breaking off his sermon, he would flee anywhere for refuge, like
    one demented. And also when travelling on horseback with the brethren,
    he followed far behind them, always singing psalms, as if he were in
    his cell, and never ceasing to shed tears.”[459]

In that age, the hopes and fears and wonderment of men looked to the
recluse as the perfected saint. No wonder that those Italian lands, so
blithely sinful and so grievously penitent, were moved by this volcanic
tempest of a man, fierce, merciless to the flesh, convulsed with scorching
tears, famed for austerities and miracles. He lashed men from their sins;
men feared before one whose presence was a threat of hell. Said the
Marquis of Tuscany: “Not the emperor nor any mortal man, can put such fear
in me as Romuald’s look. Before his face I know not what to say, nor how
to defend myself or find excuses.” And the biographer adds that “of a
truth the holy man had this grace from the divine favour, that sinners,
and especially the great of this world, quaked in their bowels before him
as if before the majesty of God.”[460]

But some men hated, and especially those of his own persuasion who could
not endure his harshness. From such came attempts at murder, from such
also came milder outbreaks of detestation and revolt. No other founder of
ascetic communities seems to have been so rebelled against. He went from
the Valley of the Camp to Classe, where a simoniac abbot attempted to
strangle him; then he returned, but not for long, for the abbot
established in his place rejected his reproofs, and maligned him with the
lords of the land. “And in that way,” says Damiani, “the tall cedar of
Paradise was cast forth from the forest of earthly men.”[461]

His next sojourn was Vallombrosa, where after his decease one of his
disciples was to found a famous cloister. From that nest in the Tuscan
Apennines, he went to dwell permanently on the Umbrian mount of Sytrio.
At this point his biographer proceeds:

    “Whoever hears that the holy man so often changed his habitation, must
    not ascribe this to the vice of levity. For the cause of these changes
    was that wherever he stayed, an almost countless crowd assembled, and
    when he saw one place filled with converts he very properly would
    appoint a prior and at once hasten to fill another.

    “In Sytrio what insults and what indignities he endured from his
    disciples! We will set down one instance, and omit the rest for
    brevity. There was a disciple named Romanus, noble by birth, but
    ignoble by deed. Him the holy man for his carnal impurity not only
    chided by word but corrected with heavy beatings. That diabolic man
    dared to retort with the fabrication of the same charge, and to bark
    with sacrilegious mouth against this temple of the Holy Spirit, saying
    forsooth that the holy man was spotted with this same infection. The
    rage of the disciples broke out immediately against Romuald. All were
    his enemies: some declared that the wicked old man ought to be hanged
    from a gallows, others that he should be burned in his cell.

    “One cannot understand how spiritual men could have believed such
    wickedness of a decrepit old man, whose frigid blood and aridity of
    attenuated frame would have forbade him, had he had the will. But
    doubtless it is to be deemed that this scourge of adversity came upon
    the holy man by the will of Heaven, to augment his merit. For he said
    himself that he had foreknown it with certainty in the solitude which
    he had left just before, and had come with alacrity to undergo this
    shame. But that false monkish reprobate who brought the charge against
    the holy man, afterwards became Bishop of Noceria through simony, and
    in the first year of his occupancy, saw, as he deserved, his house
    with his books and bells and the rest of his sacred paraphernalia
    burned; and in the second year, the divine sentence struck him and he
    wretchedly lost both his dignity and his life.

    “In the meanwhile the disciples put a penance on the holy man as if he
    had been guilty, and deprived him of the right to celebrate the holy
    mysteries. He willingly accepted this false judgment, and took his
    penance like a culprit, not presuming to approach the altar for
    well-nigh six months. At length, as he afterwards told his disciples,
    he was divinely commanded to celebrate mass. On the next day, when
    proceeding with the sacrifice, he became rapt in ecstasy, and
    continued speechless for so long a time that all present marvelled.
    When afterwards asked the reason of his delay, he replied: ‘Carried
    into heaven, I was borne before God; and the divine voice commanded
    me, that with such intelligence as God had set in me, I should write
    and commend for use a Commentary on the Psalms. Overcome with terror,
    I could only respond: so let it be, so let it be.’ For this reason the
    holy man made a Commentary on the whole Psalter; and although its
    grammar was bad, its sense was sound and clear.”[462]

Various attempts were made in the Middle Ages to render the hermit life
practicable, through permitting a limited intercourse among a cluster of
like-minded ascetics, as well as to regulate it under the direction of a
superior. In Italy, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the picturesque
energy of the individual hermit is prodigious, while in the north, as in
the establishment of the Carthusian Order, the organization is better, the
result more permanent, but the imaginative and consistent extravagance of
personality is not there. In the hermit communities founded by Romuald
there was a prior or abbot, invested with some authority. Yet the
organization was less complete than in coenobitic monasteries; for
Romuald’s hermit methods sought to minimize the intercourse among the
brethren, to an extent which was scarcely compatible with effective
organization. An idea of these communities may be had from Damiani’s
description of one of them:

    “Such was the mode of life in Sytrio, that not only in name but in
    fact it was as another Nytria.[463] The brethren went barefoot;
    unkempt and haggard; they were content with the barest necessaries.
    Some were shut in with doomed doors (_damnatis januis_), seemingly as
    dead to the world as if in a tomb. Wine was unknown, even in extreme
    illness. The attendants of the monks (_famuli monachorum_) and those
    who kept the cattle, fasted and preserved silence. They made
    regulations among themselves, and laid penances for speaking.”[464]

For seven years Romuald lived at Sytrio as an _inclusus_, shut up in his
cell, and preserving unbroken silence. Yet though his tongue was dumb his
life was eloquent. He lived on, setting a shining example of squalor and
austerity, eating only vile food, and handing back untouched any savoury
morsel. His conflicts with the devil continued; nor was he ever
vanquished. Advancing years intensified his aversion to human society and
his passion for solitude. In proportion as he made his ways displeasing to
men, his self-approval was enhanced.[465] A solitary death kept tally with
the temper of a recluse life.

    “When he saw his end draw near he returned to the Valley of the Camp,
    and had a cell with an oratory prepared, in which to immure himself
    and keep silence until death. Twenty years before, he had foretold to
    his disciples that there he should attain his peace; and had declared
    his wish to breathe forth his spirit with no one standing by or
    bestowing the last rites. When this cell of immurement (_reclusorium_)
    was ready, the mind in Romuald was so that it scarcely could be
    imprisoned. But his body grew heavy with the increasing ills of
    extreme age, and the hard breathing of tussis. Yet not for this would
    the holy man lie on a bed or relax his fasts. One day his strength
    gradually forsook him, and he found himself sinking with fatigue. So
    as the sun was setting he directed two brothers who stood by to go out
    and shut the door of his cell after them. He told them that when the
    time came for them to celebrate the matin hymns at dawn, they might
    return. Unwillingly they went out, but did not go at once to rest; and
    waited anxiously, concealing themselves by the master’s cell. After a
    while, as they listened intent and could hear no movement of his body
    nor any sound of his voice, correctly conjecturing what had happened,
    they broke open the door, rushed in and lighted the light; and there,
    the blessed soul having been transported to heaven, they found the
    holy corpse supine. It lay as a celestial pearl neglected, but
    hereafter to be placed with honour in the treasury of the King.”[466]

The spiritual unity which lies beneath the actions of Romuald should be
sought in the reasons and temper of the hermit life. To perfect the soul
for its passage to eternity is the fundamental motive. Monastic logic
convinces the man that this can best be accomplished through withdrawal
from the temptations of the world; and the hermit temper draws
irresistibly to solitude. The only consistent social function left to such
a man is that of turning the steps of his fellows to his own recluse path
of perfection. Romuald’s life manifests such motives and such temper, and
also this one function passionately performed. We see in him no love of
kind, but only a fiery passion for their salvation. Also we see the
absorption of self in self with God, the harsh intolerance of other men,
the fierce aversions and the passionate cravings which are germane to the
hermit life.

Physical self-mortification is the element of the hermit life most
difficult for modern people to understand. Yet nothing in Romuald extorted
more entire admiration from his biographer than his austerities. And if
there was one man on earth whom Peter admired as much as he did Romuald,
it was a certain mail-coated Dominicus, a virtuoso in self-mortification.
He exhibits its purging and penitential motives. Scourging purifies the
body from carnality; that is one motive. It also atones for sins, and
lessens the purgatorial period after death; this is another. There is a
third which is rooted rather in temperament than in reason. This is
contrition; the contrite heart may love to flagellate itself in love of
Him who suffered sinless.

Dominicus was surnamed Loricatus because he wore a coat of mail against
the attacks of the devil through the frailties of the too-comfortable
flesh. In his youth, family influence had installed him in a snug
ecclesiastic berth. As he reached maturity and bethought himself, the
sense of this involuntary simoniacal contamination filled him with
remorse. He abjured the world and became a member of the hermit community
of Fonte Avellana, where Damiani exercised the authority of prior. Yet the
latter looked on Dominic as his master, whom he admired to the pitch of
marvel, while regretting that he lacked himself the strength and leisure
to equal his flagellations. So Peter was enraptured with this wonder of a
Dominic, and wrote his biography, which deserved telling if, as Peter
says, his entire life, his _tota quippe vita_, was a preaching and an
edification, instruction and discipline (_praedicatio, aedificatio,
doctrina, disciplina_).

One descriptive passage from it will suffice:

    “I am speaking of Dominic, my teacher and my master, whose tongue
    indeed is rustic, but whose life is polished and accomplished
    (_artificiosa satis et lepida_). His life indeed preaches more
    effectively by its living actions (_vivis operibus_) than a barren
    tongue which inanely weighs out the balanced phrases of a bespangled
    urbanity (_phaleratae urbanitatis_). Through a long course of gliding
    years, girt with iron mail, he has waged truceless war against the
    wicked spirits; with cuirassed body and heart always ready for battle,
    he marches eager warrior against the hostile array.

    “Likewise it is his regular and unremitting habit, with a rod in each
    hand every day to beat time upon his naked body, and thus scourge out
    two psalters. And this even in the slacker season. For in Lent or when
    he has a penance to perform (and he often undertakes a penance of a
    hundred years), each day, while he plies himself with his rods, he
    pays off at least three psalters repeating them mentally
    (_meditando_).

    “The penance of a hundred years is performed thus: With us three
    thousand blows satisfies a year of penance; and the chanting
    (_modulatio_) of ten psalms, as has often been tested, admits one
    thousand blows. Now, clearly, as the Psalter consists of one hundred
    and fifty psalms, any one computing correctly will see that five years
    of penance lie in chanting one psalter, with this discipline. Now,
    whether you take five times twenty or twenty times five you have a
    hundred. Consequently whoever chants twenty psalters, with this
    accompanying discipline, may be confident of having performed a
    hundred years of penance. Herein our Dominic outdid those who struck
    with only one hand; for he, a true son of Benjamin, warred
    indefatigably with both hands against the lawless rebels of the flesh.
    He has told me himself that he easily accomplished a penance of a
    hundred years in six days.”[467]

This loricated Dominic was conscious of his virtuosity. We find him at the
beginning of a certain Lent, requesting the imposition of a penance of a
thousand years! Again, he comes after vespers to Damiani’s cell to tell
him that between morning and evening he has broken his record by “doing”
eight psalters! And once more we read of his coming troubled to his
master, saying: “You have written, as I have just heard, that in one day I
chanted nine psalters with corporeal discipline. When I heard it, I turned
pale and groaned. ‘Woe is me,’ I said; ‘without my knowledge, this has
been written of me, and yet I do not know whether I could do it.’ So I am
going to try again, and I shall certainly find out.”[468]

Dominic probably derived more pleasure than pain from his scourgings. For
besides the vanity of achievement, and some ecstasy of contrition, the
flesh itself turns morbid and rejoices in its laceration. Yet such
austerity is pre-eminently penal, and is initially impelled by fear. With
Dominic, with Romuald, with Damiani, the fear of hell entered the motives
of the secluded life. To observe this fear writ large in panic terror, we
turn to the old legend regarding the conversion of Bruno of Cologne, the
founder of the Carthusian Order. The scene is laid in Paris, where (with
much improbability) Bruno is supposed to be studying in the year 1082. One
of the most learned and pious of the doctors of theology died. His funeral
had been celebrated, and his body was about to be carried to the grave,
when the corpse raised its head and cried aloud with a dreadful voice:
“Justo Dei judicio accusatus sum.” Then the head fell back. The people,
terror-stricken, postponed the interment to the following day, when again,
as before, with a grievous and terrible voice the corpse raised its head
and cried: “Justo Dei judicio judicatus sum.” Amid general terror the
interment was again postponed to the next day, when, as before, with a
horrible cry the corpse shrieked: “Justo Dei judicio condemnatus sum.”

At this, Bruno, impressed and terrified, said to his friends: “Beloved,
what shall we do? Unless we fly we shall all perish utterly. Let us
renounce the world, and, like Anthony and John the Baptist, seek the caves
of the desert, that we may escape the wrath of the Judge, and reach the
port of salvation.” So they flee, and the Carthusian Order, with its
terrific asceticism, begins.[469]

This story, aside from its marvellous character, does not harmonize with
the more authentic facts of Bruno’s life. It is, however, a striking
expression of the ascetic fear; it also reflects psychologic truth. Who
but the man himself knows the naughtiness of his own heart? its
never-to-be disclosed vile and morbid thoughts? The modern may realize
this. Hamlet did. And it was just such a phase of self-consciousness as
the mediaeval imagination would transform into a tale of horror. Bruno
himself had been a learned doctor, a teacher, and the head of the
cathedral school at Rheims; he had been a zealous soldier of the Church.
In all this he had not found peace. The profession of a doctor of
theology, even when coupled with more active belligerency for the Church,
afforded no certain salvation. The story of the Paris doctor may have
symbolized the anxieties which dwelt in Bruno’s breast, until under their
stimulus the yearnings of a solitary temper gathered head and at last
brought him with six followers to Carthusia (_la grande Chartreuse_),
which lies to the north of Grenoble. 1084 is the year of its beginning.

It was a hermit community, the brethren living two by two in isolated
cells, but meeting for divine service in a little chapel. Camaldoli may
have been the model. Bruno wrote no _regula_ for his followers, and the
practices of the Order were first formulated by Guigo, the fifth prior, in
his _Consuetudines Cartusiae_, about the year 1130.[470] These permit a
limited intercourse among the brethren, for the service of God and the
regulation of their own lives. Yet the broader object was seclusion. Not
only severance from the world, but the seclusion of the brethren from each
other, in solitary labour and contemplation, was their ideal. The
asceticism of these _Consuetudines_ is of the strictest. And somehow it
would seem as if in the Carthusian Order the frailties of the spirit and
the lusts of the flesh were to be permanently vanquished by this set life
of labour, meditation, and rigid asceticism. _Carthusia nunquam reformata,
quia nunquam deformata_, remained true century after century. This long
freedom from corruption was partly due to the lofty and somewhat
exclusive character of the brotherhood. Carthusia was no broad way for the
monastic multitude. Its monks were relatively few and holy, the select of
God. Men of devout piety, they must be. It was also needful that they
should be possessed of such intellectual endowment and meditative capacity
as would with God’s grace yield provision for a life of solitary thought.

The intellectual piety of Carthusia finds its loftiest expression in the
_Meditationes_ of this same prior Guigo,[471] the form of which calls to
mind the Reflections of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. In substance they
reflect Augustine’s intellectual devoutness and many of his thoughts. But
they seem Guigo’s very own, fruit of his own reflection; and thus
incidentally they afford an illustration of the general principle that by
the twelfth century the Middle Ages had made over into themselves what
they had drawn from the Fathers or from the pagan antique. Guigo’s
_Meditations_ possess spiritual calm; their logic is unhesitating; it is
remorselessly correct, however incomplete may be its premises or its
comprehension of life’s data. Whoever wishes to know the high
contemplative mind of monastic seclusion in the twelfth century may learn
it from this work. A number of its precepts are given here for the sake of
their illustrative pertinency and intrinsic merit, and because our author
is not very widely known. He begins with general reflections upon Veritas
and Pax:

    “Truth should be set in the middle, as something beautiful. Nor, if
    any one abhors it, do thou condemn, but pity. Thou indeed, who
    desirest to come to it, why dost thou spurn it when it chides thy
    faults?

    “Without form and comeliness and fastened to the cross, truth is to be
    worshipped.

    “If thou speakest truth not from love of truth but from wish to injure
    another, thou wilt not gain the reward of a truthspeaker but the
    punishment of a defamer.

    “Truth is life and eternal salvation. Therefore you ought to pity any
    one whom it displeases. For to that extent he is dead and lost. But
    you, perverse one, would not tell him the truth unless you thought it
    bitter and intolerable to him. You do still worse when in order to
    please men you speak a truth which delights them as much as if it
    were lies and flattery. Not because it displeases or pleases should
    truth be spoken, but as it profits. Yet be silent when it would do
    harm, as light to weak eyes.

    “Blessed is he whose mind is moved or affected only by the perception
    and love of truth, and whose body is moved only by his mind. Thus the
    body, like the mind, is moved by truth alone. For if there is no
    stirring in the mind save that of truth, and none in the body save
    that from the mind, then also there is no stirring in the body save
    from truth, that is from God.

    “Thou dost all things for the sake of peace, toward which the way lies
    through truth alone, which is thine adversary in this life. Therefore
    either subject thee to it or it to thee. For nothing else is left
    thee.

    “The lake does not boast because it abounds in water; for that is from
    the source. So as to thy peace. Its cause is always something else.
    Therefore thy peace is shifting and inconstant in proportion to the
    instability of its cause. How worthless is it when it arises from the
    pleasingness of a human face!

    “Let not temporal things be the cause of thy peace; for then wilt thou
    be as worthless and fragile as they. You would have such a peace in
    common with the brutes; let thine be that of the angels, which
    proceeds from truth.

    “The beginning of the return to truth is to be displeased with
    falsity. Blame precedes correction.

    “In the cares which engage thee for thy salvation, no service or
    medicine is more useful than to blame and despise thyself. Whoever
    does this for thee is thy helper.

    “Easy is the way to God, since it advances by laying down burdens.
    Thou dost unburden thyself so far as thou deniest thyself.

    “When anything good is said of thee, it is but as a rumour regarding
    which thou knowest better.

    “Consider the two experiences of filling and emptying (_ingestionis et
    egestionis_); which blesses thee more? That burdens thee with useless
    matters; this disburdens thee. To have had that is to have devoured it
    altogether. Nothing remains for hope. So in all things of sense. They
    perish all. And what of thee after these? Set thy love and hope on
    what will not pass.

    “Bestial pleasure comes from the senses of the flesh; it is diabolic,
    a thing of arrogance, envy, and deceit; philosophic pleasure is to
    know the creature; the angelic pleasure is to know and love God.

    “When we take our pleasure from that from which brutes draw
    pleasure--from lust like dogs, or from gluttony like swine--our souls
    become like theirs. Yet we do not shudder. I had rather have a dog’s
    body than his soul. It would be more tolerable if our body changed to
    bestial shape, while our soul remained in its dignity, that is, in the
    likeness of God.

    “Readily man entangles himself in love of bodies and of vanity; but,
    willy, nilly, he is torn with fear and grief at their dissolution. For
    the love of perishable things is as a fountain of useless fears and
    sorrows. The Lord frees the poor man from the mighty, by loosing him
    from the fetter of earthly love.

    “The human soul is tortured in itself as long as it can be tortured,
    that is, as long as it loves anything besides God.

    “Thou hast been clinging to one syllable of a great song, and art
    troubled when that wisest Singer proceeds in His singing. For the
    syllable which alone thou wast loving is withdrawn from thee, and
    others succeed in order. He does not sing to thee alone, nor to thy
    will, but His. The syllables which succeed are distasteful to thee
    because they drive on that one which thou wast loving evilly.

    “All matters which are called adverse are adverse only to the wicked,
    that is, those who love the creature instead of the Creator.

    “If in any way thou art tormented by fear, or anger or hate or grief
    of any kind, lay it to thyself, that is, to thy concupiscence,
    ignorance, or sloth. And if any one wishes to injure thee, lay that to
    his concupiscence. Thy distress is evidence of thy sin in loving
    anything destructible, having dismissed God. Thou dost grieve over the
    ruined show; lay it to thee and thine error because thou hast been
    cleaving to things that may be broken.

    “He seeks a long temptation who seeks a long life.

    “What God has not loved in His friends--power, rank, riches,
    dignities--do not thou love in thine.

    “Snares thou eatest, drinkest, wearest, sleepest in; all things are
    snares.

    “We are exiles through love and wantonness and inclination, not
    through locality; exiles in the country of defilement, of dark
    passions, of ignorance, of wicked loves and hates.

    “In so far as thou lovest thyself--that is, this temporal life--so far
    dost thou love what is transitory.

    “Adverse matters do not make thee wretched, but rather show thee to
    have been so; prosperity blinds the soul, by covering and increasing
    misery, not by removing it.

    “Every one ought to love all men. Whoever wishes another to show
    special love toward him is a robber, and an offender against all.

    “Mixed through this body, thou wast wretched enough; for thou wast
    subject to all its corruptions, even to the bite of the flea or the
    sorunculus. This did not suffice thee. Thou hast mixed thyself up with
    other quasi bodies, the opinion of men, admiration, love, honour, fear
    and the like. When these are harmed, pain comes to thee, as from
    bodily hurt. Thy honour is hurt when contempt is shown thee; and so
    with the rest. Think also thus regarding bodily forms.

    “Unless thou hast despised whatever men can do to thwart or aid thee,
    thou wilt not be able to contemn their disposition toward thee, their
    hate and love, their opinions, good or bad.

    “Why dost thou wish to be loved by men?

    “Who rejoices in praise, loses praise.

    “Who is pained or angered by the loss of any temporal thing, shows
    himself worth what he has lost.

    “No thing ought to wish to be loved as good, unless it blesses its
    lover in the very matter for which it is loved. But no thing does this
    if it needs its lover, or is helped by loving or being loved by
    another. Most cruel, then, is the thing which wishes another to place
    affection and hope on it when it cannot benefit that other. The devils
    do this, who wish men to be engrossed in their service instead of
    God’s. So cry to thy lovers, Cease, ye wretched, to admire or respect
    or honour me; for I, miserable wretch, can neither aid myself nor you,
    but rather need your aid.

    “So far as in thee is, thou hast destroyed all men, for thou hast put
    thyself between them and God, so that gazing on thee and ignoring God,
    they might admire and praise thee alone. This is utterly profitless to
    thee and them, not to say destructive.

    “Whatever form thou dost enjoy is as the male to thy mind. For thy
    mind yields and lies down to it. Thou dost not assimilate it, but it
    thee. Its image endures, like an idol in its temple, to which thou
    dost sacrifice neither ox nor goat, but thy rational soul and thy
    body, to wit, thy whole self, when thou enjoyest it.

    “See how, as in a wine-shop, thou dost prostitute thine as a venal
    love, and to the measure of pay weighest thyself out to men. In this
    wine-shop he receives nothing who gives nothing. And yet thou wouldst
    not have that which thou dost sell, unless freely from above it had
    been given to thee who gave nothing. Therefore thou hast received thy
    pay.

    “To be empty and removed from God is to make ready for lust.

    “Who wishes to enjoy thee in thyself, deserves from thee the thanks of
    flies and fleas who suck thy blood.

    “This is the very sum of human depravity to forsake the better, which
    is God, and to regard the lesser and cleave to them by delighting in
    them--these temporalities!

    “The beetle as it flies sees everything, and then selects nothing that
    is beautiful or wholesome or durable, but settles down upon dung. So
    thy soul in mental flight (_intuitu pervolans_) surveying heaven and
    earth and whatever is great and precious therein, cleaves to none of
    these, but embraces the cheap and dirty things occurring to its
    thought. Blush for this.

    “When thou pleadest with God not to take from thee something to which
    thou cleavest by desire, it is as if an adulteress caught by her
    husband in the act, should not ask pardon for her crime, but beg him
    not to interrupt her pleasure. It is not enough for thee to go
    wantoning from God, but thou must incline Him to save and approve the
    things in which thou takest delight to thy undoing--the forms of
    bodies, their savours and their colours.

    “The poverty of thine inner vision of God, purblind as thou art,
    although He is there, makes thee willing to go out of doors from thine
    own hearth, refusing to linger within thyself, as in the dark. So thou
    hast nothing to do but go gaping after the external forms of bodies
    and the opinions of men. Thou dost carry thyself in this world as if
    thou hadst come hither to gaze and wonder at the forms of bodies.

    “May God be gracious to thee, that the feet of thy mind may find no
    resting-place, so that somehow, O soul, thou mayest return to the Ark,
    like Noah’s dove.

    “Prosperity is a snare, adversity the knife that cuts it; prosperity
    imprisons us from the love of God; adversity breaks the dungeon in
    pieces.

    “Since you are taken only by pleasure, you should shun whatever gives
    it. The Christian soul is safe only in adversity. From what thou
    cherishest God makes thee rods.

    “The only medicine for every pain and torment is contempt for whatever
    in thee is hurt by them, and the turning of the mind to God.

    “As many carnal pleasures as thou spurnest, just so many snares of the
    devil dost thou escape. As many tribulations--especially those for
    truth’s sake--as thou dost flee, so many salutary remedies thou
    spurnest.

    “In hope thou mayest cherish the unripened grain; thus love those who
    are not yet good, Be such toward all as the Truth has shown itself
    toward thee. Just as it has sustained and loved thee for thy
    betterment, so do thou sustain and love men in order to better them.

    “You are set as a standard to blunt the darts of the enemy, that is,
    to destroy evil by opposing good to it. You should never return evil
    for evil, except very medicinally; which is not to return evil but
    good.

    “If to cleave to God is thine whole and only good, thine whole and
    only evil is separation from Him.

    “Who loves all will be saved without doubt; but who is loved by men
    will not for that reason be saved.”

The unity of these _Meditations_ lies in the absolute manner in which the
meditating soul attaches itself to God as its whole and only good. Herein
Guigo’s thoughts are Augustinian. One notes their clear intellectual tone.
Nothing lures the thinker from his aim and goal of God. He abhors whatever
might distract him; and as to all except God and God’s commands, he is
indifferent. Guigo detests impermanence as keenly as did the Brahmin and
Buddhist meditators of India. He has as high regard as any Indian or Greek
philosopher for a life of thought. But there are differences between the
Carthusian prior and the Greek or Indian sage. Guigo’s renunciation does
not (from his standpoint) penetrate life as deeply as Gotama’s; for Guigo
renounces only things comparatively insignificant, so utterly transient
are they, so completely they pale before the light of his goal of God.
Therein shall lie clearer attainment than lay at the end of any Indian
chain of reasoning. So note well, that Guigo, like other Christians, is
not essentially a renouncer, but one who attains and receives.

The difference between him and the Greek is also patent. The source of his
blue lake of thought is not himself, but God. Although calm and sustained
by reason, he is rationally the opposite of self-reliant, and so the
opposite of the ideal Stoic or Aristotelian. God is his Creator, the
source of his thoughts, the loadstar of his meditations, the
all-comprehending object of his desire.

We find in Guigo further specific elements of Christian asceticism, which
sharpen his repugnances for the world of transient phenomena. Those
phenomena mostly contain elements of sin: all pleasure is temptation and a
snare; adversity keeps the soul’s wings trimmed true. So the main content
of passing mortal life, while not evil in itself, is so charged with
temptation and allure, that it is worthy only of avoidance. The transient,
the physical, the brutal, the diabolic--one shades into the next, and
leads on to the last. Have none of them, O soul! They are snares all.

Of course, Guigo has the specific monkish horror of sexual lust, that
chief of fleshly snares. But he goes further. With him all particular,
disproportionate love is wrong; love no one, and desire not to be loved,
out of the proportionment of the common love which God has for all His
creatures: so love you, and not otherwise. Others, even women, attained
this standard. In the legend, St. Elizabeth of Hungary gives thanks that
she loves her own children no more than others’. She is no mother, but a
saint. So Guigo will love all--love indeed? one queries. Thus also will he
have others hold themselves toward him, lest he be a stumbling-block in
their or his salvation.

Yea, salvation! If indeed this monk shall not have attained that, of a
truth he would be of all men most miserable--save for the quiet,
thought-filled calm which is his inner and his veritable life. It is a
calm not riven by the storms which drove the soul of Peter Damiani. God
was not less to Guigo; but the temperaments of the two men differed. Not
beyond or out of one’s nature can one love or yearn, or even know the
stress of storm.




CHAPTER XVII

THE QUALITY OF LOVE IN SAINT BERNARD


Through the prodigious power of his personality, St. Bernard gave new life
to monasticism, promoted the reform of the secular clergy and the
suppression of heresy, ended a papal schism, set on foot the Second
Crusade, and for a quarter of a century swayed Christendom as never holy
man before or after him. An adequate account of his career would embrace
the entire history of the first half of the twelfth century.[472]

The man who was to move men with his love, and quell the proud with fear,
had, as a youth, a graceful figure, a sweet countenance, and manners the
most winning. Later in life he is spoken of as cheerfully bearing
reproaches, but shamefaced at praise, and his gentle manners are again
mentioned.

    “As a helpmeet for his holy spirit, God made his body to conform. In
    his flesh there was visible a certain grace, but spiritual rather than
    of the flesh. A brightness not of earth shone in his look; there was
    an angelic purity in his eyes, and a dove-like simplicity. The beauty
    of the inner man was so great that it would burst forth in visible
    tokens, and the outer man would seem bathed from the store of inward
    purity and copious grace. His frame was of the slightest
    (_tenuissimum_), and most spare of flesh; a blush often tinged the
    delicate skin of his cheeks. And a certain natural heat (_quidquid
    caloris naturalis_) was in him, arising from assiduous meditation and
    penitent zeal. His hair was bright yellow, his beard reddish with
    some white hairs toward the end of his life. Actually of medium
    stature, he looked taller.”[473]

This same biography says:

    “He who had set him apart, from his mother’s womb, for the work of a
    preacher, had given him, with a weak body, a voice sufficiently strong
    and clear. His speech, whatever persons he spoke to for the edifying
    of souls, was adapted to his audience; for he knew the intelligence,
    the habits and occupations of each and all. To country folk he spoke
    as if born and bred in the country; and so to other classes, as it he
    had been always occupied with their business. He was learned with the
    erudite, and simple with the simple, and with spiritual men rich in
    illustrations of perfection and wisdom. He adapted himself to all,
    desiring to gain all for Christ.”[474]

Bernard was born of noble parents at the Chateau of Fontaines, near Dijon,
in the year 1090, and was educated in a church school at Chatillon on the
Seine. It is an ofttold story, how, when little more than twenty years of
age, he drew together a band formed of his own brothers, his uncle, and
his friends, and led them to Citeaux,[475] his ardent soul unsatisfied so
long as one held back. Three years later, in 1115, the Abbot, Stephen
Harding, entrusted him with the headship of the new monastery, to be
founded in the domains of the Count of Troyes. Bernard set forth with
twelve companions, came to Clara Vallis on the river Aube, and placed his
convent in that austere solitude.

Great were the attractions of Clairvaux (Clara Vallis) under Bernard’s
vigorous and loving rule. Its monks increased so rapidly and so constantly
that during its founder’s life sixty-five bands were sent forth to rear
new convents. Meanwhile, Bernard’s activities and influence widened, till
they seemed to compass western Christendom. He had become a power in the
politics of Church and State. In 1130 he was summoned by Louis le Gros
practically to determine the claims of the rival Popes Innocent II. and
Anacletus II. He decided for the former, and was the chief instrument of
his eventual reinstatement at Rome. Before this Bernard’s health had been
broken by his extreme austerities. Yet even the lamentable failure of the
Second Crusade, zealously promoted by him, did not break his power over
Europe, which continued unimpaired until his death in 1153.

This active and masterful man was impelled by those elements of the _vita
contemplativa_ which formed his inner self. First and last and always he
was a monk. Had he not been the very monk he was, he would not have been
the dominator of men and situations that he proved himself to be.
Temperament fashions the objects of contemplation, and shapes the yearning
and aversions, of great monks. The temperamental element of love--the love
of God and man, with its appurtenant detestations--made the heart of
Bernard’s _vita contemplativa_, and impassioned and empowered his active
faculties. It was the keynote of his life: in his letters it speaks in
words of fire, while other writings of the saint analyze this great human
quality with profundity and truth. In these he renders explicit the modes
of affection which man may have for man and above all for God; he sets
them forth as the path as well as goal of life on earth, and then as the
rapt summit of attainment in the life to come. Through all its stages, as
it flows from self to fellow, as it rises from man to God, love still is
love, and forms the unifying principle among men and between them and God.

Let us trace in his letters the nature and the power of Bernard’s love,
and see with what yearning he loved his fellows, seeking to withdraw them
from the world; and how his love strove to be as sword and armour against
the flesh and the devil. By easy transition we shall pass to Bernard’s
warning wrath, flung against those who would turn the struggling soul
aside, or threaten the Church’s peace; then by more arduous, but still
unbroken stages, we may rise to the love of Jesus, and through love of the
God-man to love of God. We shall realize at the close why that last
mediaeval assessor of destinies, whose name was Dante Alighieri, selected
St. Bernard as the exponent of the blessed vision which is salvation’s
crown in the paradise of God.[476]

The way of life at Clara Vallis might discourage monks of feeble zeal.
Among the brethren of these early days was one named Robert, a cousin of
the Abbot, seemingly of weak and petulant disposition. Soon he fled, to
seek a softer cell in Cluny, the great and rich monastery to which his
parents appear to have dedicated him in childhood. For a while Bernard
suppressed his grief; but the day came when he could endure no longer
Robert’s abandonment of his soul’s safety and of the friend who yearned
for him. He stole out of the monastery, accompanied by a monk named
William. There, in the open (_sub dio_), Bernard dictated a long letter to
be sent to the deserter. While the two were busy, the one dictating, the
other writing, a rainstorm broke upon them. William wished to stop. “It is
God’s work; write and fear not,” said Bernard. So William wrote on, in the
midst of the rain; but no drop fell on him or the parchment; for the power
of love which dictated the letter preserved the parchment on which it was
being written.[477]

Whoever has read this letter in its own fervent Latin will not care to
dispute this miracle, for which it stands first in the collection of
Bernard’s correspondence. Bernard does not recriminate or argue in it; his
love shall bring the young monk back to him. Yes, yes, he says to all that
the other has urged regarding fancied slights and persecution:

    “Quite right; I admit it. I am not writing in order to contend, but to
    end contention. To flee persecution is no fault in him who flees, but
    in him who pursues; I do not deny it. I pass over what has happened; I
    do not ask why or how it happened. I do not discuss faults, I do not
    dispute as to the circumstances, I have no memory for injuries. I
    speak only what is in my heart. Wretched me, that I lack thee, that I
    do not see thee, that I am living without thee, for whom to die would
    be to live; without whom to live, is to die. I ask not why thou hast
    gone away; I complain only that thou dost not return. Come, and there
    shall be peace; return, and all shall be made good.

    “It was certainly my fault that thou didst go away. I was too austere
    with thy young years, and treated thee inhumanly. So thou saidst when
    here, and so I hear thou dost still reproach me. But that shall not be
    imputed to thee. I never meant it harshly, I was only indiscreet. Now
    thou wilt find me different, and I thee. Where before thou didst fear
    the master, thou shalt now embrace the companion. Do not think that I
    will not excuse any fault of thine. Dost thou wish to be quite free
    from fault? then return. If thou wilt forget thy fault I will pardon
    it; also pardon thou me, and I too will forget my fault.”

Bernard then argues long and passionately against those who had led the
young man away and received him with such blandishments at Cluny; and
passionately he argues against the insidious softening of monastic
principles.

    “Arise, soldier of Christ, arise, shake off the dust, return to the
    battle whence thou hast fled, and more bravely shalt thou fight and
    more gloriously triumph. Christ has many soldiers who bravely began,
    stood fast and conquered; He has few who have turned from flight and
    renewed the combat. Everything rare is precious; and thou among that
    rare company shalt the more radiantly shine.

    “Thou art fearful? so be it; but why dost thou fear where there is no
    fear, and why dost thou not fear where everything is to be feared?
    Because thou hast fled from the battle-line, dost thou think to have
    escaped the foe? It is easier for the Adversary to pursue a fugitive
    than to bear himself against manful defence. Secure, arms cast aside,
    thou takest thy morning slumbers, the hour when Christ will have
    arisen! The multitude of enemies beset the house, and thou sleepest.
    Is it safer to be caught alone and sleeping, than armed with others in
    the field? Arouse thee, seize thy arms, and escape to thy
    fellow-soldiers. Dost thou recoil at the weight of thy arms, O
    delicate soldier! Before the enemy’s darts the shield is no burden,
    nor the helmet heavy. The bravest soldiers tremble when the trumpet is
    heard before the battle is joined; but then hope of victory and fear
    of defeat make them brave. How canst thou tremble, walled round with
    the zeal of thy armed brethren, angels bearing aid at thy right hand,
    and thy leader Christ? There shalt thou safely fight, secure of
    victory. O battle, safe with Christ and for Christ! In which there is
    no wound or defeat or circumvention so long as thou fleest not. Only
    flight loses the victory, which death does not lose. Blessed art thou,
    and quickly to be crowned, dying in battle. Woe for thee, if
    recoiling, thou losest at once the victory and the crown--which may He
    avert, my beloved son, who in the Judgment will award thee deeper
    damnation because of this letter of mine if He finds thee to have
    taken no amendment from it.”

“It is God’s work,” said Bernard to the hesitating scribe. These words
suggest the character of the love which inspired this letter. He loved
Robert as man yearns for man; but his motive was to do God’s will, and win
the young man back to salvation. In after years this young man returned to
Clara Vallis.

It was Bernard’s lot to write many letters urging procrastinators to
fulfil their vows,[478] or appealing to those who had laid aside the arms
of austerity, perhaps betaking themselves to the more worldly life of the
secular clergy. This seems to have been the case with a young canon Fulco,
whom an ambitious uncle sought to draw back to the world, or at least to a
career of sacerdotal emolument. In fact, Fulco at last became an
archdeacon; from which it may be inferred that in his case Bernard’s
appeal was not successful. He had poured forth his arguments in an ardent
letter.[479] Love compels him to use words to make the recipient grieve;
for love would have him feel grief, that he might no longer have true
cause for grief--good mother love, who can cherish the weak, exercise
those who have entered upon their course, or quell the restless, and so
show herself differently toward her sons, all of whom she loves. This
letter, like the one to Robert, concludes with a burning peroration:

    “What dost thou in the city, dainty soldier? Thy fellows whom thou
    hast deserted, fight and conquer; they storm heaven (_coelum rapiunt_)
    and reign, and thou, sitting on thy palfrey (_ambulatorem_), clothed
    in purple and fine linen, goest ambling about the highways!”

Bernard also wrote letters of consolation to parents whose sons had become
monks, or letters of warning to those who sought to withdraw a monk from
his good fight. In one instance, his influence had made a monk of a youth
of gentle birth named Godfrey, to his parents’ grief. So Bernard writes to
them:

    “If God makes your son His also, what have you lost, or he? He, from
    rich, becomes richer, from being noble, still more illustrious, and
    what is more than all, from a sinner he becomes a saint. It behoved
    him to be made ready for the Kingdom prepared for him from the
    foundation of the world, and for this reason it is well for him to
    spend with us his short span of days, so that clean from the filth of
    living in the world, earth’s dust shaken off, he may become fit for
    the heavenly mansion. If you love him you will rejoice that he goes to
    his Father, and such a Father! He goes to God, but you do not lose
    him; rather through him you gain many sons. For all of us who belong
    to Clara Vallis have taken him to be our brother and you for our
    parents.

    “Perhaps you fear this hard life for his tender body--that were to
    fear where there is nothing to fear. Have faith and be comforted. I
    will be a father to him and he shall be my son until from my hands the
    Father of Mercies and God of all consolation shall receive him. Do not
    grieve; do not weep; your Godfrey is hastening to joy, not to sorrow.
    A father to him will I be, a mother too, a brother and a sister. I
    will make the crooked ways straight, and the steep places plain. I
    will so temper and provide for him that as his spirit profits, his
    body shall not want. So shall he serve the Lord in joy and gladness,
    and shall sing before Him, How great is the glory of the Lord.”[480]

Young Godfrey was a daintily nurtured plant. For all the Abbot’s eloquence
he did not stay in Clara Vallis. The world drew him back. It was now for
the saint to weep:

    “I grieve over thee, my son Godfrey; I grieve over thee. And with
    reason. For who would not lament that the flower of thy youth which,
    to the joy of angels, thou didst offer unsullied to God in the odour
    of sweetness, is now trampled on by demons, defiled with sins, and
    contaminated by the world. How could you, who were called by God,
    follow the devil recalling thee? How could you, whom He had begun to
    draw to Himself, withdraw your foot from the very entry upon glory? In
    thee I see the truth of those words: ‘A man’s foes are they of his own
    household.’ Thy friends and neighbours drew near and stood up against
    thee. They called thee back into the jaws of the lion and the gates of
    death. They have set thee in darkness, like the dead; and thou art
    nigh to go down into the belly of hell, which now is ravening to
    devour thee.

    “Turn back, I say, turn back, before the abyss swallows you and the
    pit closes its mouth, before you are engulfed whence you shall not
    escape, before, bound hand and foot, you are cast into outer darkness
    where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, before you are hurled
    into darkness, shut in with the darkness of death.

    “Perhaps you blush to return, where you have only now fallen away.
    Blush for flight, and not for turning to renew the combat. The
    conflict is not ended; the hostile arrays have not withdrawn from each
    other. We would not conquer without you, nor do we envy you your share
    of the glory. Joyful we will run to thee, and receive thee in our
    arms, crying: ‘It is meet to make merry and be glad; for this our son
    was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.’”[481]

Who knows whether this letter brought back the little monk? Bernard wrote
so lovingly to him, so gently to his parents. He could write otherwise,
and show himself insensible to this world’s pestering tears. To the
importunate parents of a monk named Elias, who would drag him away from
Clara Vallis, Bernard writes in their son’s name thus:

    “To his dear parents, Ingorranus and Iveta, Elias, monk but sinner,
    sends daily prayers.

    “The only cause for which it is permitted not to obey parents is God;
    for He said: ‘Whoso loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy
    of me.’ If you truly love me as good and faithful parents, why do you
    molest my endeavour to please the Father of all, and attempt to
    withdraw me from the service of Him, to serve whom is to reign? For
    this I ought not to obey you as parents, but regard you as enemies. If
    you loved me, you would rejoice, because I go to my Father and yours.
    But what is there between you and me? What have I from you save sin
    and misery? And indeed the corruptible body which I carry I admit I
    have from you. Is it not enough that you brought miserable me into the
    misery of this hateful world? that you, sinners, in your sin produced
    a sinner? and that him born in sin, in sin you nourished? Envying the
    mercy which I have obtained from Him who desireth not the death of a
    sinner, would you make me a child of hell?

    “O harsh father! savage mother! parents cruel and impious--parents!
    rather destroyers, whose grief is the safety of the child, whose
    consolation is the death of their son! who would drag me back to the
    shipwreck which I, naked, escaped; who would give me again to the
    robbers when through the good Samaritan I am a little recovering from
    my wounds.

    “Cease then, my parents,” concludes the letter after many other
    reproofs, “cease to afflict yourselves with vain weeping and to
    disquiet me. No messengers you send will force me to leave. Clara
    Vallis will I never forsake. This is my rest, and here shall be my
    habitation. Here will I pray without ceasing for my sins and yours;
    here with constant prayer will I implore that He whose love has
    separated us for a little while, will join us in another life happy
    and inseparable,--in whose love we may live forever and ever.
    Amen.”[482]

If Bernard was severe toward those who threatened some loved person’s
weal, his anger burned more fiercely against those whom he deemed enemies
of God. Heavy was his hand upon the evils of the Church: “The insolence of
the clergy--to which the bishop’s neglect is mother--troubles the earth
and molests the Church. The bishops give what is holy to the dogs, and
pearls to swine.”[483]

Likewise, fearlessly but with restraint arising from his respect for all
power ordained of God, Bernard opposes kings. Thus he writes to Louis the
Fat, in regard to the election of a bishop, with many protests, however,
that he would not oppose the royal power--for which we note his reason:
“If the whole world conspired to force me to do aught against kingly
majesty, yet would I fear God, and would not dare to offend the king
ordained by Him. For neither do I forget where I read that whosoever
resisteth power, resisteth the ordinance of God.” But--but--but--continues
the letter, through many qualifyings which are also admonitions. At last
come the words: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the
living God, even for thee, O king.” Thereupon the saint does not fail to
speak his mind.[484]

Bernard’s fiercest denunciations were reserved for heretics and
schismatics, for Abaelard, for Arnold of Brescia, for the Antipope
Anacletus--were they not enemies of God? Clearly the saint saw and
understood these men from his point of view. Thus in a letter to Innocent
II.[485] he sums up his attitude towards Abaelard: “Peter Abaelard is
trying to make void the merit of Christian faith, when he deems himself
able by human reason to comprehend God altogether. He ascends to the
heavens and descends even to the abyss! Nothing may hide from him in the
depths of hell or in the heights above! The man is great in his own
eyes--this scrutinizer of Majesty and fabricator of heresies.” Here was
the gist of the matter. That a man should be great in his own eyes, apart
from God, and teach others so, stirred Bernard’s bowels.[486]

Of Arnold, the impetuous clerical revolutionist and pupil of Abaelard,
Bernard writes with fury: “Arnold of Brescia, whose speech is honey and
whose teaching poison, whom Brescia vomited forth, Rome abhorred, France
repelled, Germany abominates, Italy will not receive, is said to be with
you.”[487] Again, Bernard rejoices with great joy when he hears that the
anti-pope who divided Christendom was dead.[488]

It is pleasant to turn back to Bernard’s lovingness and mercy. His God
would not condemn those who repented; and the saint can be gentle toward
sinners possibly repentant. He urges certain monks to receive back an
erring brother: “Take him back then, you who are spiritual, in the spirit
of gentleness; let love be confirmed in him, and let good intention excuse
the evil done. Receive back with joy him whom you wept as lost.”[489] In
another letter he urges a countess to be more lenient with her
children;[490] and there is a story of his begging a robber from the hands
of the executioners, and leading him to Clara Vallis, where he became at
length a holy man.[491]

So one sees Bernard’s severity, his gentle mercy, and the love burning
within him for his fellows’ good. Such were the emotions of Bernard the
saint. The man’s human heart could also yearn, and feel bereavement in
spite of faith. As his zeal draws him from land to land, he is home-sick
for Clara Vallis. From Italy, in 1137, fighting to crush the anti-pope, a
letter carries his yearning love to his dear ones there:

    “Sad is my soul, and not to be consoled, until I may return. For what
    consolation save you in the Lord have I in an evil time and in the
    place of my pilgrimage? Wherever I go, your sweet recollection does
    not leave me; but the sweeter the memory the more vexing is the
    absence. Alas! my wandering not only is prolonged but aggravated. Hard
    enough is exile from the Lord, which is common to us all while we are
    pilgrims in the body. But I endure a special exile also, compelled to
    live away from you.

    “For a third time my bowels are torn from me.[492] Those little
    children are weaned before the time; the very ones whom I begot
    through the Gospel I may not educate. I am forced to abandon my own,
    and care for the affairs of others; and it is not easy to say whether
    to be dragged from the former, or to be involved in the latter is
    harder to bear. Thus, O good Jesus, my whole life is spent in grief
    and my years in groaning! It is good for me, O Lord, to die, rather
    than to live and not among my brothers, my own household, my own
    dearest ones.”[493]

Bernard had a younger brother, Gerard, whom he deeply loved. In 1138 he
died while still young, and having recently returned with Bernard from
Italy. Bernard, dry-eyed, read the burial-service over his body; so says
his biographer wondering, for the saint was not wont to bury even
strangers without tears.[494] No other eyes were dry at that funeral.
Afterwards he preached a sermon;[495] it began with restraint, then became
a long cry of grief.

The saint took the text from Canticles where he had left off in his
previous sermon--“I am black, but comely, as the tents of Kedar.” He
proceeded to expound its meaning: the tents are our bodies, in which we
pilgrims dwell and carry on our war. Then he spoke of other portions of
the text--and suddenly deferred the whole subject till his next sermon:
Grief ordains an end, “and the calamity which I suffer.”

    “For why dissemble, or conceal the fire which is scorching my sad
    breast? What have I to do with this Song, I who am in bitterness? The
    power of grief turns my intent, and the anger of the Lord has parched
    my spirit. I did violence to my soul and dissembled till now, lest
    sorrow should seem to conquer faith. Others wept, but with dry eyes I
    followed the hateful funeral, and dry-eyed stood at the tomb, until
    all the solemnities were performed. In my priestly robes I finished
    the prayers, and sprinkled the earth over the body of my loved one
    about to become earth. Those who looked on, weeping, wondered that I
    did not. With such strength as I could command, I resisted and
    struggled not to be moved at nature’s due, at the fiat of the
    Powerful, at the decree of the Just, at the scourge of the Terrible,
    at the will of the Lord. But though tears were pressed back, I could
    not command my sadness; and grief, suppressed, roots deeper. I confess
    I am beaten. My sorrow will out before the eyes of my children who
    understand and will console.

    “You know, my sons, how just is my grief. You know what a comrade has
    left me in the path wherein I was walking. He was my brother in blood
    and still closer by religion. I was weak in body, and he carried me;
    faint-hearted, and he comforted me; lazy, and he spurred me;
    thoughtless, and he admonished me. Whither art thou snatched away,
    snatched from my hands! O bitter separation, which only death could
    bring; for living, thou wouldst never leave me. Why did we so love,
    and now have lost each other! Hard state, but my fortune, not his, is
    to be pitied. For thou, dear brother, if thou hast lost dear ones,
    hast gained those who are dearer. Me only this separation wounds.
    Sweet was our presence to each other, sweet our consorting, sweet our
    colloquy; I have lost these joys; thou hast but changed them. Now,
    instead of such a worm as me, thou hast the presence of Christ. But
    what have I in place of thee? And perhaps though thou knewest us in
    the flesh, now that thou hast entered into the power of the Lord, thou
    art mindful only of His righteousness, forgetting us.

    “I seem to hear my brother saying: ‘Can a woman forget her sucking
    child; even so, yet will I not forget thee.’ That does not help, where
    no hand is stretched out.”

Bernard speaks of Gerard’s unfailing helpfulness to him and every one, and
of his piety and religious life. He feels the cares of his life and
station closing around him, and his brother gone. Then he justifies his
grief, and pours it forth unrestrained. Would any one bid him not to weep?
as well tell him not to feel when his bowels were torn from him; he feels,
for his flesh is not brass; he grieves, and his grief is ever before him:

    “I confess my sorrow. Will some one call me carnal? Certainly I am
    human, since I am a man. Nor do I deny being carnal, for I am, and
    sold under sin, adjudged to death and punishment. I am not insensible
    to punishments; I shudder at death, my own or others’. Mine was
    Gerard, mine! He is gone, and I feel, and am wounded, grievously!

    “Pardon me, my sons; or rather lament your father’s state. Pity me,
    and think how grievously I have been requited for my sins by the hand
    of God. Though I feel the punishment, I do not impugn the sentence.
    This is human; that would be impious. Man must needs be affected
    towards those dear to him, with gladness at their presence, with
    sorrow at their absence. I grieve over thee, Gerard, my beloved, not
    because thou art to be pitied, but because thou art taken away. May it
    be that I have not lost thee, but sent thee on before! Be it granted
    me some time to follow whither thou art gone; for thou hast joined the
    company of those heavenly ones on whom in thy last hours thou didst
    call exultingly to praise the Lord. For thee death had no sting, nor
    any fear. Through his jaws Gerard passed to his Fatherland safe and
    glad and exulting. When I reached his side, and he had finished the
    psalm, looking up to heaven, he said in a clear voice: ‘Father, into
    thy hands I commend my spirit.’ Then saying over again and again the
    word, ‘Father, Father,’ he turned his joyful face to me, and said:
    ‘What great condescension that God should be father to men! What glory
    for men to be sons of God and heirs of God!’ So he rejoiced, till my
    grief was almost turned to a song of gladness.

    “But the pang of sorrow calls me back from that lovely vision, as care
    wakens one from light slumber. I grieve, but only over myself; I
    lament his loss to this household, to the poor, to all our Order; whom
    did he not comfort with deed and word and example? Grievously am I
    afflicted, because I love vehemently. And let no one blame my tears;
    for Jesus wept at Lazarus’s tomb. His tears bore witness to His
    nature, not to His lack of faith. So these tears of mine; they show my
    sorrow, not my faithlessness. I grieve, but do not murmur. Lord, I
    will sing of thy mercy and righteousness. Thou gavest Gerard; thou
    hast taken him. Though we grieve that he is gone, we thank thee for
    the gift.

    “I bear in mind, O Lord, my pact and thy commiseration, that thou
    mightest the more be justified in thy word. For when last year we were
    in Viterbo, and he fell sick, and I was afflicted at the thought of
    losing him in a strange land and not bringing him back to those who
    loved him, I prayed to thee with groans and tears: ‘Wait, O Lord,
    until our return. When he is restored to his friends, take him, if
    thou wilt, and I will not complain.’ Thou heardest me, God; he
    recovered; we finished the work thou hadst laid on us, and returned in
    gladness bringing our sheaves of peace. Then I was near to forget my
    pact, but not so thou. I shame me of these sobs, which convict me of
    prevarication. Thou hast recalled thy loan, thou hast taken again what
    was thine. Tears set an end to words; thou, O Lord, wilt set to them
    limit and measure.”[496]

We may now turn to Bernard’s love of God, and rise with him from the
fleshly to the spiritual, from the conditioned to the absolute. There is
no break; love is always love. More especially the love of Christ, the
God-man is the mediating term: He presents the Godhead in human form; to
love Him is to know a love attaching to both God and man.

Guigo, Prior of the “Grande Chartreuse,” whose _Meditations_ have been
given,[497] was Bernard’s friend, and wrote to him upon love. Bernard
replies: “While I was reading it, I felt sparks in my breast, from which
my heart glowed within me as from that fire which the Lord sent upon the
earth!” He hesitates to suggest anything to Guigo’s fervent spirit, as he
would hesitate to rouse a bride quiet in the bridegroom’s arms. Yet “what
I do not dare, love dares; it boldly knocks at a friend’s door, fearing no
repulse, and quite careless of disturbing your delightful ease with its
affairs.” Bernard is here speaking of love’s importunate devotion; his
words characterize the soul’s importuning of God:

    “I should call love undefiled because it keeps nothing of its own.
    Indeed it has nothing of its own, for everything which it has is
    God’s. The undefiled law of the Lord is love, which seeks not what
    profits itself but what profits many. It is called the law of the
    Lord, either because He lives by it, or because no one possesses it
    save by His gift. It is not irrational to speak of God as living by
    law, that law being love. Indeed in the blessed highest Trinity what
    preserves that highest ineffable unity, except love?”

So far, Bernard has been using the word _charitas_. Now, in order to
indicate love’s desire, he begins to use the words _cupiditas_ and
_amor_.[498] When these yearning qualities are rightly guided by God’s
grace, what is good will be cherished for the sake of what is better, the
body will be loved for the soul’s sake, the soul for God’s sake, and God
for His own sake.

    “Yet because we are of the flesh (_carnales_) and are begotten through
    the flesh’s concupiscence, our yearning love (_cupiditas vel amor
    noster_) must begin from the flesh; yet if rightly directed, advancing
    under the leadership of grace, it will be consummated in spirit. For
    that which is first is not spiritual, but that which is natural
    (_animale_); then that which is spiritual. First man loves (_diligit_)
    himself for his own sake. For he is flesh, and is able to understand
    nothing beyond himself. When he sees that he cannot live
    (_subsistere_) by himself alone, he begins, as it were from necessity,
    to seek and love God. Thus, in this second stage, he loves God, but
    only for his own sake. Yet as his necessities lead him to cultivate
    and dwell with God in thinking, reading, praying, and obeying, God
    little by little becomes known and becomes sweet. Having thus tasted
    how sweet is the Lord, he passes to the third stage, where he loves
    God for God’s sake. Whether any man in this life has perfectly
    attained the fourth stage, where he loves himself for God’s sake, I do
    not know. Let those say who have knowledge; for myself, I confess it
    seems impossible. Doubtless it will be so when the good and faithful
    servant shall have entered into the joy of his Lord, and shall be
    drunk with the flowing richness of God’s house. Then oblivious to
    himself, he will pass to God and become one spirit with Him.”[499]

So one sees the stages through which love of self and lust of fellow
become love of God. A responsive emotion attends each ascending step in
the saint’s intellectual apprehension of love--as one should bear in mind
while following the larger exposition of the theme in Bernard’s _De
deligendo Deo_.[500]

The cause and reason for loving God is God; the _mode_ is to love without
measure: “Causa diligendi Deum, Deus est; modus, sine modo diligere.”
Should we love God because of His desert, or our advantage? For both
reasons. On the score of His desert, because He first loved us. What stint
shall there be to my love of Him who is my life’s free giver, its
bounteous administrator, its kind consoler, its solicitous ruler, its
redeemer, eternal preserver and glorifier? On the other hand, “God is not
loved without reward; but He should be loved without regard to the
reward. _Charitas_ seeks not its own. It is affection and not a contract;
it is not bought, nor does it buy. _Amor_ is satisfied with itself. It has
the reward, which is what is loved. True love demands no reward, but
merits one. The reward, although not sought by the lover, is due him, and
will be rendered if he perseveres.”

Bernard proceeds to expound the four stages or grades (_gradus_) of love:

    “Love is a natural affection, one of the four.[501] As it exists by
    nature, it should diligently serve the Author of nature first of all.
    But as nature is frail and weak, love is compelled by necessity first
    to serve itself. This is carnal love, whereby, above everything, man
    loves himself for his own sake. It is not set forth by precept, but is
    rooted in nature; for who hates his own flesh? As love becomes more
    ready and profuse, it is not content with the channel of necessity,
    but will pour forth and overspread the broad fields of pleasure. At
    once the overflow is bridled by the command, ‘Thou shalt love thy
    neighbour as thyself.’ This is just and needful, lest what is part of
    nature should have no part in grace. A man may concede to himself what
    he will, so long as he is mindful to provide the same for his
    neighbour. The bridle of temperance is imposed on thee, O man, out of
    the law of life and discipline, in order that thou shouldst not follow
    thy desires, nor with the good things of nature serve the enemy of the
    soul, which is lust. If thou wilt turn away from thy pleasures, and be
    content with food and raiment, little by little it will not so burden
    thee to keep thy love from carnal desires, which war against the soul.
    Thy love will be temperate and righteous when what is withdrawn from
    its own pleasures is not denied to its brother’s needs. Thus carnal
    love becomes social when extended to one’s kind.

    “Yet in order that perfect justice should exist in the love of
    neighbour, God must be regarded (_Deum in causa haberi necesse est_).
    How can one love his neighbour purely who does not love in God? God
    makes Himself loved, He who makes all things good. He who founded
    nature so made it that it should always need to be sustained by Him.
    In order that no creature might be ignorant of this, and arrogate for
    himself the good deeds of the Creator, the Founder wisely decreed that
    man should be tried in tribulations. By this means, when he shall have
    failed and God have aided, God shall be honoured by him whom He has
    delivered. The result is that man, animal and carnal, who knew not how
    to love any one beside himself, begins for his own sake to love God;
    because he has found out that in God he can accomplish everything
    profitable, and without Him can do nothing.

    “So now for his own interest, he loves God--love’s second grade; but
    does not yet love God for God’s sake. If, however, tribulation keeps
    assailing him, and he continually turns to God for aid, and God
    delivers him, will not the man so oft delivered, though he have a
    breast of iron and a heart of stone, be drawn to cherish his
    deliverer, and love Him not only for His aid but for Himself? Frequent
    necessities compel man to come to God incessantly; repeatedly he
    tastes and, by tasting, proves how sweet is the Lord. At length God’s
    sweetness, rather than human need, draws the man to love Him.
    Thereafter it will not be hard for the man to fulfil the command to
    love his neighbour. Truly loving God, he loves for this reason those
    who are God’s. He loves chastely, and is not oppressed through obeying
    the chaste command; he loves justly, and willingly embraces the just
    command. That is the third grade of love, when God is loved for
    Himself.

    “Happy is he who attains to the fourth grade, where man loves himself
    only on account of God. Thy righteousness, O God, is as the mountain
    of God; love is that mountain, that high mountain of God. Who shall
    ascend into the mountain of the Lord? Who will give me the wings of a
    dove and I will fly away and be at rest. Alas! for my long-drawn
    sojourning! When shall I gain that habitation in Zion, and my soul
    become one spirit with God? Blessed and holy will I call him to whom
    in this mortal life such has been given though but once. For to be
    lost to self and not to feel thyself, and to be emptied of thyself and
    almost to be made nothing, that pertains to heavenly intercourse, not
    to human affection. And if any one among mortals here gain admission
    for an instant, at once the wicked world is envious, the day’s evil
    disturbs, the body of death drags down, fleshly necessity solicits,
    corruption’s debility does not sustain, and, fiercest of all,
    brotherly love calls back! Alas! he is dragged back to himself, and
    forced to cry: ‘O Lord, I suffer violence, answer thou for me’ (Isa.
    xxxviii. 14); ‘Who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ (Rom.
    vii. 24).

    “Yet Scripture says that God made all things for His own sake; that
    will come to pass when the creation is in full accord with its Author.
    Therefore we must sometime pass into that state wherein we do not wish
    to be ourselves or anything else, except for His sake and by reason of
    His will, not ours. Then not our need or happiness, but His will, will
    be fulfilled in us. O holy love and chaste! O sweet affection! O pure
    and purged intention of the will, in which nothing of its own is
    mingled! This is it to be made God (_deificari_). As the drop of water
    is diffused in a jar of wine, taking its taste and colour, and as
    molten iron becomes like to fire and casts off its form, and as the
    air transfused with sunlight is transformed into that same brightness
    of light, so that it seems not illumined, but itself to be the light,
    thus in the saints every human affection must in some ineffable mode
    be liquefied of itself and transfused into the will of God. How could
    God be all in all if in man anything of man remained? A certain
    substance will remain, but in another form, another glory, another
    power.”

Hereupon St. Bernard considers how this fourth grade of love will be
attained in the resurrection, and “perpetually possessed, when God only is
loved and we love ourselves only for His sake, that He may be the
recompense and aim (_praemium_) of those who love themselves, the eternal
recompense of those who love eternally.”

Christ is the universal Mediator between God and man, not only because
reconciling them, but as forming the intervening term, the concrete
instance of the One suited to the comprehension of the other. Such
thoughts and sentiments as commonly apply to man, when they are applied to
Christ become fit to apply to God. Herein especially may be perceived the
continuing identity of love, whether relating to human beings or to God.
The soul’s love of Christ is mediatorial, and symbolic of its love of God.
All of which Bernard has demonstrated with conjoined power of argument and
feeling in his famous _Sermons on Canticles_.[502]

The human personality of Christ draws men to love Him, till their love is
purged of carnality and exalted to a perfect love of God:

    “Observe that the heart’s love is partly carnal; it is affected
    through the flesh of Christ and what He said and did while in the
    flesh. Filled with this love, the heart is readily touched by
    discourse upon His words and acts. It hears of nothing more willingly,
    reads nothing more carefully, recalls nothing more frequently, and
    meditates upon nothing more sweetly. When man prays, the sacred image
    of the God-man is with him, as He was born or suckled, as He taught or
    died, rose from the dead or ascended to heaven. This image never fails
    to nerve man’s mind with the love of virtue, cast out the vices of the
    flesh and quell its lusts. I deem the principal reason why the
    invisible God wished to be seen in the flesh, and, as man, hold
    intercourse with men, was that He might draw the affections of carnal
    men, who could only love carnally, to a salutary love of His flesh,
    and then on to a spiritual love.”

Conversely, the Saviour’s example teaches men how they should love Him:

    “He loved sweetly, wisely, and bravely: sweetly, in that He put on
    flesh; wisely, in that He avoided fault; bravely, in that He bore
    death. Those, however, with whom He sojourned in the flesh, He did not
    love carnally, but in prudence of spirit. Learn then, Christian, from
    Christ how to love Christ.”

Bernard shows how even the Apostles failed sometimes to love Him according
to His perfect teaching and example:

    “Good, indeed, is this carnal love,” he concludes, “through which a
    carnal life is shut out; and the world is despised and conquered. This
    love progresses as it becomes rational, and perfected as it becomes
    spiritual.”[503]

From his own experiences Bernard could have spoken much of the winning
power of Jesus, and could have told how sweetly it drew him to love his
Saviour’s steps from Bethlehem to Calvary. The fifteenth sermon upon
Canticles is on the healing power of Jesus’ name.

    “Dry is all food for the soul unless anointed with that oil. Whatever
    you write is not to my taste unless I read Jesus there. Your talk and
    disputation is nothing unless that name is rung. Jesus is honey in the
    mouth, melody in the ear, joy in the heart. He is medicine as well. Is
    any one troubled, let Jesus come into the heart and thence leap to the
    lips, and behold! at the rising of that bright name the clouds scatter
    and the air is again serene. If any one slips in crime, and then
    desponds amid the snares of death, will he not, invoking that name of
    life, regain the breath of life? In whom can hardness of heart, sloth,
    rancour, languishment stand before that name? In whom at its
    invocation will not the dried fount of tears burst forth more
    abundantly and sweetly? To what fearful trembler did the power of that
    name ever fail to bring back confidence? To what man struggling amid
    doubts did not the clear assurance of that name, invoked, shine forth?
    Who despairing in adversity lacked fortitude if that name sounded?
    These are the languors and sickness of the soul, and that the
    medicine. Nothing is as potent to restrain the attack of wrath, or
    quell the tumour of pride, or heal envy’s wound, or put out the fire
    of lust, or temper avarice. When I name Jesus, I see before me a man
    meek and humble of heart, benignant, sober, chaste, pitying, holy, who
    heals me with His example and strengthens me with aid. I take example
    from the Man, and draw aid from the Mighty One. Here hast thou, O my
    soul, an herb of price, hidden in the vessel of that name, bringing
    thee health surely and in thy sickness failing thee never.”

This is a little illustration of Bernard’s love of the Christ-man, a love
which is ever taking on spiritual hues and changing to a love of the
Christ-God. Christians, from the time of Origen, had recognized the many
offices of Christ, the many saving potencies in which He ministered unto
each soul according to its need. And so Bernard preaches that the sick
soul needs Christ as the physician, but that the saintly soul has other
yearnings for a more perfect communion.

This perfect communion, this most complete relationship which in this
mortal life a soul can have with Christ, with God, had been symbolized,
likewise ever since the time of Origen, by the words Bride and Bridegroom,
and the Song of Songs had furnished the burning phrases. With surpassing
spirituality Bernard uses the texts of Canticles to set forth the
relationship of the soul to Christ, of man to God. The texts are what they
are, burning, sensuous, fleshly, intense, and beautiful--every one knows
them; but in Bernard’s sermons flesh fades before the spirit’s whiter
glow.

    “O love (_amor_), headlong, vehement, burning, impetuous, that canst
    think of nothing beyond thyself, detesting all else, despising all
    else, satisfied with thyself! Thou dost confound ranks, carest for no
    usage, knowest no measure. In thyself dost thou triumph over apparent
    opportuneness, reason, shame, council and judgment, and leadest them
    into captivity. Everything which the soul-bride utters resounds of
    thee and nothing else; so hast thou possessed her heart and
    tongue.”[504]

What Bernard here ejaculates as to the overwhelming sufficiency of love,
he sets forth finally in a sustained and reasoned passage, in which man’s
ways of loving God are cast together in a sequence of ardent thought and
image. He has been explaining the soul’s likeness to the Word. Although it
be afflicted and defiled by sin, it may yet venture to come to Him whose
likeness it retains, however obscured. The soul does not leave God by
change of place, but, in the manner of spiritual substance, by becoming
depraved. The return of the soul is its conversion, in which it is made
conformable to God.

    “Such conformity marries the soul to the Word, whom it is like by
    nature, and may show itself like in will, loving as it is loved. If it
    loves perfectly it weds. What more delightful than this conformity,
    what more desirable than this love, through which thou, O soul,
    faithfully drawest near to the Word, with constancy cleavest to the
    Word, consulting Him in everything, as capable in intellect as
    audacious in desire. Spiritual is the contracting of these holy
    nuptials, wherein always to will the same makes one spirit out of two.
    No fear lest the disparity of persons make but a lame concurrence of
    wills: for love does not know respect. The name love comes from loving
    and not from honouring. He may honour who dreads, who is struck dumb
    with fear and wonder. Not so the lover. Love aboundeth in itself, and
    derides and imprisons the other emotions. Wherefore she who loves,
    loves, and knows nothing else. And He who is to be honoured and
    marvelled at, still loves rather to be loved. Bridegroom and Bride
    they are. And what necessity or bond is there between spouses except
    to be loved and love?

    “Think also, that the Bridegroom is not only loving but very love. Is
    He also honour? I have not so read. I have read that God is love; not
    that He is honour, or dignity. God indeed demands to be feared as
    Lord, to be honoured as Father, and as Bridegroom to be loved. Which
    excels the rest? Love, surely. Without it, fear is penal, and honour
    graceless. Fear is slavish till manumitted by love; and the honour
    which does not rise from love is adulation. To God alone belong honour
    and glory; but He will accept neither unless it is flavoured with
    love’s honey.

    “Love asks neither cause nor fruit beyond itself. I love because I
    love; I love that I may love. A great thing is love. Among all the
    movements, sensations, and affections of the soul, it is the only one
    wherein the creature can make a return to its Author. If God be angry
    with me, shall I likewise be angry with Him? Nay, I will fear and
    tremble and beseech. If He accuse me, I will make no counter-charge,
    but plead before Him. If He judge me, I will not judge but worship.
    And when He saves me, He asks not to be saved by me; nor does He who
    frees all ask to be freed of any one. Likewise if He commands, I obey,
    and do not order Him. Now see how different it is with love. For when
    God loves, He wishes only to be loved; He loves with no other end than
    to be loved, knowing that those who love are blessed with love itself.


    “A great thing is love; but there are grades in it. The Bride stands
    at the summit. Sons love, but they are thinking of their inheritance.
    Fearing to lose that, they honour, rather than love, him from whom
    they expect it. Love is suspect when its suffrage appears to be won by
    hope of gain. Weak is it, if it cease or lessen with that hope
    withdrawn. It is impure if it desires anything else. Pure love is not
    mercenary: it gains no strength from hope, nor weakens with lack of
    trust. This love is the Bride’s, because she is what she is by love.
    Love is the Bride’s sole hope and interest. In it the Bride abounds
    and the Bridegroom is content. He seeks nothing else, nor has she
    ought beside. Hence he is Bridegroom and she Bride. This belongs to
    spouses which none else, not even a son, can attain. Man is commanded
    to honour his father and mother; but there is silence as to love.
    Which is not because parents are not to be loved by their sons; but
    because sons are rather moved to honour them. The honour of the King
    loves judgment; but the Bridegroom’s love--for He is love--asks only
    love’s return and faith.

    “Rightly renouncing all other affections, the Bride reposes on love
    alone, and returns a love reciprocal. And when she has poured her
    whole self out in love, what is that compared with the perennial flood
    of that fountain? Not equals in abundance are this loving one and
    Love, the soul and the Word, the Bride and Bridegroom, creature and
    Creator--no more than thirst equals the fount. What then? shall she
    therefore despair, and the vow of the would-be Bride be rendered
    empty? Shall the desire of this panting one, the ardour of this loving
    one, the trust of this confiding one be baffled because she cannot
    keep pace with the giant’s course, in sweetness contend with honey, in
    mildness with the Lamb, in whiteness with the Lily, in brightness with
    the Sun, in love with Him who is love? No. For although the creature
    loves less, because she is less, yet if she loves with her whole self,
    nothing lacks where there is all. Wherefore, as I have said, so to
    love is to have wedded; for no one can so love and yet be loved but
    little, and in mutual consent stands the entire and perfect
    marriage.”[505]

Who has not marvelled that the relationship of marriage should make so
large a part of the symbolism through which monks and nuns expressed the
soul’s love of God? Historically it might be traced to Paul’s precept,
“Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the Church”; still more
potently it was derived from the Song of Songs. But beyond these almost
adventitious influences, did not the holy priest, the monk, the nun, feel
and know that marriage was the great human relationship? So they drew from
it the most adequate allegory of the soul’s communion with its Maker:
differently according to their sex, with much emotion, and even with
unseemly imaginings, they thought and felt the love of God along the ways
of wedded union or even bridal passion.[506]




CHAPTER XVIII

ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI[507]


Twenty-nine years after the death of St. Bernard, Francis was born in the
Umbrian hill town of Assisi. The year was 1182. On the fourth of October
1226, in the forty-fifth year of his age, this most loving and best
beloved of mediaeval saints breathed his last, in the little church of the
Portiuncula, within the shadows of that same hill town.

Of all mediaeval saints, Bernard and Francis impressed themselves most
strongly upon their times. Neither of them was pre-eminently an
intellectual force--Francis especially would not have been what he was but
for certain childlike qualities of mind which never fell away from him.
The power of these men sprang from their personalities and the _vivida
vis_ (their contemporaries would have said, the grace of God) realizing
itself in every word and act. Bernard’s power was more directly dependent
upon the conditions of his epoch, and his influence was more limited in
duration.

The reason is not far to seek. Both men were of the Middle Ages, even of
those decades in which they lived. But Bernard’s strength was part of the
medium wherein he worked and the evil against which he fought--the
clerical corruptions, the heresies, the schisms and political
controversies, the warfare of Christ with Mahomet,--all matters of vital
import for his time, but which were to change and pass.

Francis, on the other hand, was occupied with none of these. He was no
scourge of clerical corruptions, no scourge of anything; he knew nought of
heresy or schism, nothing of politics or war; into the story of his life
there comes not even a far-off echo of the Albigensian Crusade or the
conflict between pope and emperor. His life appears detached from the
special conditions of his time; it is neither held within them nor
compelled by them, but only by its inner impulse. For it was not occupied
with the exigencies of Italy and Germany, or Southern France, during that
first quarter of the thirteenth century, when De Montfort was hurling the
orthodox and brutal north upon the fair but heretical provinces of
Languedoc, and when Innocent III. was excommunicating Otho IV., and
Frederick II. was disclosing himself as the most dangerous foe the papacy
had yet known. The passing turmoil and danger of the time did not touch
this life; the man knew naught of all these things. He was not considering
thirteenth-century Italians, Frenchmen, and Germans; he was fascinated
with men as men, with the dumb brutes as fellow-creatures, and even with
plants and stones as vessels of God’s loveliness or symbols of His Word;
above all he was absorbed in Christ, who had taken on humanity for him,
had suffered for him, died for him, and who now around, above, within him,
inspired and directed his life.

So Francis’s life was not compassed by its circumstances; nor was its
effect limited to the thirteenth century. His life partook of the eternal
and the universal, and might move men in times to come as simply and
directly as it turned men’s hearts to love in the years when Francis was
treading the rough stones of Assisi.

On the other hand, Francis was mediaeval and in a way to give concrete
form and colour to the elements of universal manhood that were his. He was
mediaeval in complete and finished mode; among mediaeval men he offers
perhaps the most distinct and most perfectly consistent individuality. He
is Francis of Assisi, born in 1182 and dying in 1226, and no one else who
ever lived either there and then or elsewhere at some other time. He is
Francis of Assisi perfectly and always, a man presenting a complete
artistic unity, never exhibiting act or word or motive out of character
with himself.

From a slightly different point of view we may perceive how he was a
perfect individual and at the same time a perfect mediaeval type. There
was no element in his character which was not assimilated and made into
Francis of Assisi. Anterior and external influences contributed to make
this Francis. But in entering him they ceased to be what they had been;
they changed and became Francis. For example, nothing of the antique, no
distinct bit of classical inheritance, appears in him; if, in any way, he
was touched by it--as in his joyous love of life and the world about
him--the influence had ceased to be anything distinct in him; it had
become himself. Likewise, whatever he may have known of the Fathers and of
all the dogmatic possession and ecclesiastical tradition of the Church,
this also was remade in Francis. Evidently such an all-assimilating and
transforming individuality could not have existed in those earlier
centuries when the immature mediaeval world was taking over its great
inheritance from the pagan and Christian antique--those centuries when men
could but turn their heritage of thought and knowledge this way and that,
disturb and distort and rearrange it. Such an individuality as Francis
could exist only at the climax of the Middle Age, at the period of its
fullest strength and greatest distinction, when it had masterfully changed
after its own heart whatever it had received from the past, and had made
its transformed acquisitions into itself.

Francis is of this grand mediaeval climacteric. The Middle Ages were no
longer in a stage of transition from the antique; they had attained; they
were themselves. Sides of this distinctive mediaeval development and
temper express themselves in Francis--are Francis verily. The spirit of
romance is incarnate in him. Roland, Oliver, Charlemagne (he of the
_Chansons de geste_), and the knights of the Round Table, are part of
Francis;--his first disciples are his paladins. Again, instead of emperor
or paladin, he is himself the _jongleour_, the _joculator Dei_ (God’s
minstrel).

And of all that had become Francis the greatest was Christ. He had not
taken the theology of Augustine; he had not taken the Christ handed over
by the transition centuries to the early Middle Ages; he had not adopted
the Christ of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He took Jesus from the Gospel,
or at least such elements of Jesus’ life and teaching as he felt and
understood. Francis modelled his life on his understanding of Christ and
His teaching. So many another saint had done; in fact, so must all
Christians try to do. Francis accomplished it with completeness and power;
he created a new Christ life; a Christ life partial and reduced from the
breadth and balance of the original, yet veritable and living. Francis
himself felt that his whole life was Christ-directed and inspired, and
that even because of his own special insignificance Christ had chosen him
to show forth the true Gospel life again--but chosen him indeed.[508]

Although the life of Francis appears as if detached from the larger
political and ecclesiastical movements of the time, it yields glimpses of
the ways and doings of the people of Assisi. We see their jealousies and
quarrels, their war with Perugia, also their rustic readiness to jeer at
the unusual and incomprehensible; or we are struck with instances of the
stupid obstinacy and intolerance often characterizing a small community.
Again, we see in some of those citizens an open and quick impulsiveness,
which, at the sight of love, may turn to love. It would seem as if the
harshest, most impossible man of all the town was Peter Bernardone, a
well-to-do merchant whose affairs took him often from Assisi, and not
infrequently to France.

Bernardone had a predilection for things French, and the child born to his
wife while he was absent in France, he called Francis upon his return,
although the mother had given it the name of John. The mother, whose name
was Pica, may have been of Provençal or French blood. Apparently such
education as Francis received in his boyhood was as much French as
Italian. Through all his life he never lost the habit of singing French
songs which he composed himself.[509]

The biographers assert that Francis was nourished in worldly vanity and
insolence. His temperament drew him to the former, but kept him from the
latter. For while he delighted in making merry with his friends, he was
always distinguished by a winning courtesy of manner toward poor and rich.
An innate generosity was also his, and he loved to spend money as he
roamed with his companions about Assisi singing jovial choruses and
himself the leader of the frolic. Bernardone did not object to his son’s
squandering some money in a way which led others to admire him and think
his parents rich; while Pica would keep saying that some day he would be
God’s son through grace. A vein of sprightly fantasy runs through these
gaieties of Francis’s, which we may be sure were unstained by any gross
dissipation. Francis’s life as a saint is peculiarly free from monkish
impudicity, free, that is, from morbid dwelling upon things sensual; which
shows that in him there was no reaction or need of reaction against any
youthful dissoluteness, and bears testimony to the purity of his
unconverted years.[510]

In those days Francis loved to be admired and praised. He was possessed
with a romantic and imaginative vanity. Costly clothes delighted him as he
dreamed of still more royal entertainment, and fancied great things to
come. His mind was filled with the figures of Romance; a knight would he
be at least; why not a paladin, whom all the world should wonder at? So he
dreamed, and so he acted out his whim as best he might on the little stage
of Assisi; for Francis was a poet, and a poet even more in deed than in
words. He was endowed with exquisite fancy, and he did its dictates never
doubting. His life was to prove an almost unexampled inspiration to art,
because it was itself a poem by reason of its unfailing realization of the
conceptions of a fervent and beautiful imagination.

There came war with Perugia, a very hard-hitting town; and the Assisi
cavaliers, Francis among them, found themselves in their neighbours’
dungeons. There some desponded; but not Francis. For in these careless
days he was always gleeful and jocular, even as afterwards his entire
saintly life was glad with an invincible gaiety of spirit. So Francis
laughed and joked in prison till his fellow-prisoners thought him crazy,
which no whit worried him, as he answered with the glad boast that some
day he would be adored by all the world. He showed another side of his
inborn nature when he was kind to a certain one of the captives whom the
rest detested, and tried to reconcile his fellows with him.

It was soon after his release from this twelvemonth captivity that the
sails of Francis’s spirit began to fill with still more topping hopes, and
then to waver strangely. He naturally fell sick after the privations of a
Perugia prison. As he recovered and went about with the aid of a staff,
the loveliness of field and vineyard failed to please him. He wondered at
himself, and suspected that his former pleasures were follies. But it was
not so easy to leave off his previous life, and Francis’s thoughts were
lured back again to this world’s glory; for a certain nobleman of Assisi
was about to set out on an expedition to Apulia to win gain and fame, and
Francis was inflamed to go with him. In the night he dreamed that his
father’s house with its heaps of cloth and other wares was filled instead
with swords and lances, with glittering shields, helmets and breastplates.
He awoke in an ecstasy of joy at the great glory portended by this dream.
Then he fitted himself out sumptuously, with splendid garb, bright
weapons, new armour, and accoutrements, and in due time set forth with his
fellow-adventurers.

Once more he wavered. Before reaching Spoleto he stopped, left the
company, turned back on his steps, this time impelled more strongly to
seek those things which he was to love through life. He was about
twenty-three years old. It was his nature to love everything, fame and
applause, power perhaps, and joy; but he had not yet loved worthily. Now
his Lord was calling him, the voice at first not very certain, and yet
becoming stronger. Francis seems to have seen a vision, in which the
vanity of his attachments was made clear, and he learned that he was
following a servant instead of the Lord. So his heart replied, “Lord, what
wouldst thou have me to do?” and then the vision showed him that he should
return, for he had misunderstood his former dream of arms. When Francis
awoke he thought diligently on these matters.

Such spiritual experiences are incommunicable, even though the man should
try to tell them. But we know that as Francis had set out joyfully
expecting worldly glory, he now returned with exultation, to await the
will of the Lord, as it might be shown him. The facts and also their
sequence are somewhat confused in the biographies.

On his return to Assisi, his comrades seem to have chosen him as lord of
their revels; again he ordained a merry feast; but as they set forth
singing gleefully, Francis walked behind them, holding his marshal’s
staff, in silence. Thoughts of the Lord had come again, and withdrawn his
attention: he was thinking sweetly of the Lord, and vilely of himself.
Soon after he is found providing destitute chapels with the requisites for
a decent service; already--in his father’s absence--he is filling his
table with beggars; and already he has overcome his fastidious temper, has
forced himself to exchange the kiss of peace with lepers, and has kissed
the livid hands in which he presses alms.[511] He appears to have made a
trip to St. Peter’s at Rome, where, standing before the altar, it struck
him that the Prince of the Apostles was being honoured with mean
offerings. So in his own princely way he flung down the contents of his
purse, to the wonder of all. Then going without the church, he put on the
clothes of a beggar and asked alms.

In such conduct Francis showed himself a poet and a saint. Imagination was
required to conceive these extreme, these perfect acts, acts perfect in
their carrying out of a lovely thought to its fulfilment, and suffering
nothing to impede its perfect realization. So Francis flings down all he
has, and not a measure of his goods; he puts on beggars’ clothes, and
begs; he kisses lepers’ hands, eats from the same bowl with them--acts
which were perfect in the singleness of their fulfilment of a saintly
motive, acts which were likewise beautiful. They are instances of
obsession with a saintly idea of great spiritual beauty, obsession so
complete that the ridiculous or hideous concomitants of the realization
serve only to enhance the beauty of the holy thought perfectly fulfilled.

One day at Assisi, passing by the church of St. Damian, Francis was moved
to enter for prayer. As he prayed before the Crucifix, the image seemed to
say, “Francis, dost thou not see my house in ruins? Rebuild it for me.”
And he answered, “Gladly, Lord,” thinking that the little chapel of St.
Damian was intended. Filled with joy, having felt the Crucified in his
soul, he sought the priest and gave him money to buy oil for the lamp
before the Crucifix. This day was ever memorable in Francis’s walk with
God. His way had lost its turnings; he saw his life before him clear,
glad, and full of tears of love. “From that hour his heart was so wounded
and melted at the memory of his Lord’s passion that henceforth while he
lived he carried in his heart the marks of the Lord Jesus. Again he was
seen walking near the Portiuncula, wailing aloud. And in response to the
inquiries of a priest, he answered: ‘I bewail the passion of my Lord Jesus
Christ, which it should not shame me to go weeping through the world!’
Often as he rose from prayer his eyes were full of blood, because he had
wept so bitterly.”[512]

It appears to have been after this vision in St. Damian’s Church that
Francis went on horseback to Foligno, carrying pieces of cloth, which he
sold there, and his horse as well. He travelled back on foot, and seeking
out St. Damian’s astonished little priest, he kissed his hands devoutly
and offered him the money. When, for fear of Bernardone, the priest would
not receive it, Francis threw it into a box. He prevailed on the priest,
however, to let him stay there.

What Bernardone thought of this son of his is better only guessing. The
St. Damian episode brought matters to a crisis between the two. He came
looking for his son, and Francis escaped to a cave, where he spent a month
in tears and prayer to the Lord, that he might be freed from his father’s
pursuit, so that he might fulfil his vows. Gradually courage and joy
returned, and he issued from his cave and took his way to the town. Former
acquaintances of his pursued him with jeers and stones, as one demented,
so wretched was he to look upon after his sojourn in the cave. He made no
reply, save to give thanks to God. The hubbub reached the father, who
rushed out and seized his son, beat him, and locked him up in the house.
From this captivity he was released by his mother, in her husband’s
absence, and again betook himself to St. Damian’s.

Shortly afterward Bernardone returned, and would have haled Francis before
the magistrates of the town for squandering his patrimony; but his son
repudiated their jurisdiction, as being the servant of God. They were glad
enough to turn the matter over to the bishop, who counselled Francis to
give back the money which was his father’s. The scene which followed has
been made famous by the brush of Giotto. The _Three Companions_ narrate it
thus:

    “Then arose the man of God glad and comforted by the bishop’s words,
    and fetching the money said, ‘My lord, not only the money which is his
    I wish to return to him, but my clothes as well, and gladly.’ Then
    entering the bishop’s chamber, he took off his clothes, and placing
    the money upon them, went out again naked before them, and said: ‘Hear
    ye all and know. Until now I have called Pietro Bernardone my father;
    but because I have determined to serve God, I return him the money
    about which he was disturbed, and these clothes which I had from him,
    wishing only to say, “Our Father who art in heaven” and not “Father
    Pietro Bernardone.”’ The man of God was found even then to have worn
    haircloth beneath his gay garments. His father rising, incensed, took
    the money and the clothes. As he carried them away to his house, those
    who had seen the sight were indignant that he had left not a single
    garment for his son, and they shed tears of pity over Francis. The
    bishop was moved to admiration at the constancy of the man of God, and
    embraced him and covered him with his cloak.”[513]

Thus Francis was indeed made naked of the world. With joy he hastened back
to St. Damian’s; and there prepared himself a hermit garb, in which he
again set forth through the streets of the city, praising God and
soliciting stones to rebuild the Church. As he went he cried that whoever
gave one stone should have one reward, and he who gave two, two rewards,
and he who gave more as many rewards as he gave stones. Many laughed at
him, thinking him crazy; but others were moved to tears at the sight of
one who from such frivolity and vanity had so quickly become drunken with
divine love.

Francis became a beggar for the love of Christ, seeking to imitate Him
who, born poor, lived poor, and had no place to lay His head. Not only did
he beg stones to rebuild St. Damian’s, but he began to go from house to
house with a bowl to beg his food. Naked before them all, he had chosen
“holy poverty,” “lady poverty”[514] for his bride. He was filled with the
desire to copy Christ and obey His words to the letter. According to the
_Three Companions_, when the blessed Francis completed the church of St.
Damian, his wont was to wear a hermit garb and carry a staff; he wore
shoes on his feet and a girdle about him. But listening one day to Jesus’
words to His disciples, as He sent them out to preach, not to take with
them gold, or silver, or a wallet, or bread, or a staff, or shoes, nor
have two cloaks, Francis said with joy: “This is what I desire to fulfil
with my whole strength.”[515]

The literal imitation of certain particular Gospel instances, and the
unconditional carrying out of certain of Christ’s specially intended
precepts, mark Francis’s understanding of his Lord. It is exemplified in
the account of the conversion of Francis’s first disciple, as told by the
_Three Companions_:

    “As the truth of the blessed Francis’s simple life and doctrine became
    manifest to many, two years after his own conversion, certain men were
    moved to penitence by his example, and were drawn to give up
    everything and join with him in life and garb. Of these the first was
    Bernard of saintly memory, who reflecting upon the constancy and
    fervour of the blessed Francis in serving God, and with what labour he
    was repairing ruined churches and leading a hard life, although
    delicately nurtured, he determined to distribute his property among
    the poor and cling to Francis. Accordingly one day in secret he
    approached the man of God and disclosed his purpose, at the same time
    requesting that on such an evening he would come to him. Having no
    companion hitherto, the blessed Francis gave thanks to God, and
    rejoiced greatly, especially as Messer (_dominus_) Bernard was a man
    of exemplary life.

    “So with exulting heart the blessed Francis went to his house on the
    appointed evening and stayed all night with him. Messer Bernard said
    among other things: ‘If a person should have much or a little from his
    lord, and have held it many years, how could he do with the same what
    would be the best?’ The blessed Francis replied that he should return
    it to his lord from whom he had received it.

    “And Messer Bernard said: ‘Therefore, brother, I wish to distribute,
    in the way that may seem best to thee, all my worldly goods for love
    of my Lord, who conferred them on me.’

    “To whom the saint said: ‘In the morning we will go to the Church, and
    will learn from the copy (_codex_) of the Gospels there how the Lord
    taught His disciples.’

    “So rising in the morning, with a certain other named Peter, who also
    desired to become a brother, they went to the church of St. Nicholas
    close to the piazza of the city Assisi. And commencing to pray
    (because they were simple men and did not know where to find the
    Gospel text relating to the renouncing of the world) they asked the
    Lord devoutly, that He would deign to show them His will at the first
    opening of the Book.

    “When they had prayed, the blessed Francis taking in his hands the
    closed book, kneeling before the altar opened it, and his eye fell
    first upon this precept of the Lord: ‘If thou wouldst be perfect, go,
    sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have
    treasure in heaven.’ At which the blessed Francis was very glad and
    gave thanks to God. But because this true observer of the Trinity
    wished to be assured with threefold witness, he opened the Book for
    the second and third time. The second time he read, ‘Carry nothing for
    the journey,’ and the third time, ‘Who wishes to come after me, let
    him deny himself.’

    “At each opening of the Book, the blessed Francis gave thanks to God
    for the divine confirmation of his purpose and long-conceived desire,
    and then said to Bernard and Peter: ‘Brothers, this is our life and
    this is our rule, and the life and rule of all who shall wish to join
    our society. Go, then, and as you have heard, so do.’

    “Messer Bernard went away (he was very rich) and, having sold his
    possessions and got together much money, he distributed it to the poor
    of the town. Peter also complied with the divine admonition as best he
    could. They both assumed the habit which Francis had adopted, and from
    that hour lived with him after the model (_formam_) of the holy Gospel
    shown them by the Lord. Therefore the blessed Francis has said in his
    Testament: ‘The Lord himself revealed to me that I should live
    according to the model (_formam_) of the holy Gospel.’”[516]

The words which met the eyes of Francis on first opening this Gospel-book,
had nearly a thousand years before his time driven the holy Anthony to the
desert of the Thebaid. Still one need not think the later tale a fruit of
imitative legend. The accounts of Francis afford other instances of his
literal acceptance of the Gospels.[517]

After the step taken by Bernard and Peter, others quickly joined
themselves to Francis, and in short time the small company took up its
abode in an abandoned cabin at Rivo-torto, near Assisi. In a twelvemonth
or more they removed to the little church of Santa Maria de Portiuncula
(Saint Mary of the little portion).[518] In the meanwhile Francis had been
to Rome and gained papal authorization from the great Innocent III. for
his lowly way of life. It would be hard to describe the joyfulness of
these first Gospel days of the brethren: they come and go, and pray and
labour; all are filled with joy; _gaudium_, _jucunditas_, _laetabantur_,
such words crowd each other in accounts of the early days. Their love was
complete; they would gladly give their bodies to pain or death not only
for the love of Christ, but for the love of each other; they were founded
and rooted in humility and love; Francis’s own life was a song of joy, as
he went singing (always _gallice_) and abounding in love and its joyful
prayers and tears. What joy indeed could be greater than his; he had
given himself to his Lord, and had been accepted. One day he had retired
for contemplation, and as he prayed, “God be merciful to me a sinner,” an
ineffable joy and sweetness was shed in his heart. He began to fall away
from himself; the anxieties and fears which a sense of sin had set in his
heart were dispelled, and a certitude of the remission of his sins took
possession of him. His mind dilated and a joyful vision made him seem
another man when he returned and said in gladness to the brethren: “Be
comforted, my best beloved, and rejoice in the Lord. Do not feel sad
because you are so few. Let neither my simplicity nor yours abash you, for
it has been shown me of the Lord that God will make of you a great
multitude, and multiply you to the confines of the earth. I saw a great
multitude of men coming to us, desiring to assume the habit and rule of
our blessed religion; and the sound of them is in my ears as they come and
go according to the command of holy obedience; and I saw the ways filled
with them from every nation. Frenchmen come, and Spaniards hurry, Germans
and English run, and a multitude speaking other tongues.”[519]

Thus far the life of Francis was a poem, even as it was to be unto the
end; for, although the saint’s plans might be thwarted by the wisdom and
frailty of men, his words and actions did not cease to realize the
exquisite conceptions of his soul. But the volume of his life, from this
time on, becomes too large for us to follow, embracing as it does the far
from simple history of the first decades of his Order. Our object is still
to observe his personality, and his love of God and man and creature-kind.

Francis’s mind was as simple as his heart was single. He had no distinctly
intellectual interests, as nothing appealed to his mentality alone.[520]
In his consciousness, everything related itself to his way of life, its
yearnings and aversions. Whatever was unsuited to enter into this catholic
relationship repelled rather than interested him. Hence he was averse to
studies which had nothing to do with the man’s closer walk with God, and
love of fellow. “My brothers who are led by the curiosity of knowledge
will find their hands empty in the day of tribulation. I would wish them
rather to be strengthened by virtues, that when the time of tribulation
comes they may have the Lord with them in their straits--for such a time
will come when they will throw their good-for-nothing books into holes and
corners.”[521]

The moral temper of Francis was childlike in its simple truth. He could
not endure in the smallest matter to seem other than as he was before God:
“As much as a man is before God so much is he, and no more.”[522] Once in
Lent he ate of cakes cooked in lard, because everything cooked in oil
violently disagreed with him. When Lent was over, he thus began his first
sermon to a concourse of people: “You have come to me with great devotion,
believing me to be a holy man, but I confess to God and to you that in
this Lent I have eaten cakes cooked in lard.”[523] At another time, when
in severe sickness he had somewhat exceeded the pittance of food which he
allowed himself, he rose, still shaking with fever, and went and preached
to the people. When the sermon was over, he retired a moment, and having
first exacted a promise of obedience from the monks accompanying him, he
threw off his cloak, tied a rope around his waist, and commanded them to
drag him naked before the people, and there cast ashes in his face; all
which was done by the weeping monks. And then he confessed his fault to
all.[524]

Francis took joy in obedience and humility. One of his motives in
resigning the headship of the Order was that he might have a superior to
obey.[525] However pained by the shortcomings and corruptions of the
Church, he was always obedient and reverent. He had no thought of
revolution, but the hope of purifying all. One day certain brothers said
to him: “Father, do you not see that the bishops do not let us preach, and
keep us for days standing idle, before we are able to declare the word of
God? Would it not be better to obtain the privilege from the Pope, that
there might be a salvation of souls?”

“You, brothers Minorites,” answered Francis, “know not the will of God,
and do not permit me to convert the whole world, which is God’s will; for
I wish first through holy obedience and reverence to convert the prelates,
who when they see our holy life and humble reverence for them, will beg
you to preach and convert the people, and will call the people to hear you
far better than your privileges, which draw you to pride. For me, I desire
this privilege from the Lord that I may never have any privilege from man
except to do reverence to all, and through obedience to our holy rule of
life convert mankind more by example than by word.”[526]

And again he said to the brothers: “We are sent to aid the clergy in the
salvation of souls, and what is found lacking in them should be supplied
by us. Know, brothers, that the gain of souls is most pleasing to God, and
this we may win better by peace with the clergy, than by discord. If they
hinder the salvation of the people, vengeance is God’s and He will repay
in time. So be ye subject to the prelates and take heed on your part that
no jealousy arise. If ye are sons of peace ye shall gain both clergy and
people, and this will be more acceptable to God than to gain the people
alone by scandalizing the clergy. Cover their slips, and supply their
deficiencies; and when ye shall have done this be ye the more
humble.”[527]

So Francis loved _sancta obedientia_ as he called it. As a wise builder he
set himself upon a rock, to wit, the perfect humility and poverty of the
Son of God; and because of his own humility he called his company the
Minorites (the “lesser” brethren).[528] For himself, he deemed that he
should most rejoice when men should revile him and cast him forth in
shame, and not when they revered and honoured him.[529]

Above all he loved his “lady poverty” and could not say enough to impress
his followers with her high worth and beauty, and with the dignity and
nobility of begging alms for the love of the Lord.[530] As a high-born
lady, poor and beautiful, he had seen her in a vision, in the midst of a
desert, and worthy to be wooed by the King.[531] In the early days when
the brothers were a little band, Francis had gone about and begged for
all. He loved them so that he dreaded to require what might shame them.
But when the labour was too great for one man, so delicate and weak, he
said to them: “Best beloved brothers and my children, do not be ashamed to
go for alms, because the Lord made Himself poor for us in this world after
whose example we have chosen the truest poverty. For this is our heritage,
which our Lord Jesus Christ achieved and left to us and to all who, after
His example, wish to live in holy poverty. I tell you of a truth that many
wise and noble of this world shall join that congregation and hold it for
an honour and a grace to go out for alms. Therefore boldly and with glad
heart seek alms with God’s blessing; and more freely and gladly should you
seek alms than he who offers a hundred pieces of money for one coin, since
to those from whom you ask alms you offer the love of God, saying, ‘Do us
an alms for the love of the Lord God,’ in comparison with which heaven and
earth are nothing.”[532]

With Francis all virtues were holy (_sancta obedientia_, _sancta
paupertas_). Righteousness, goodness, piety, lay in imitating and obeying
his Lord. What joy was there in loving Christ, and being loved by Him! and
what an eternity of bliss awaited the Christian soul! To do right, to
imitate Christ and obey and love Him, is a privilege. Can it be other than
a joy? Indeed, this following of Christ is so blessed, that not to rejoice
continually in it, betokens some failure in obedience and love. Many have
approved this Christian logic; but to realize it in one’s heart and
manifest it in one’s life, was the more singular grace of Francis of
Assisi. His heart sang always unto the Lord; his love flowed out in
gladness to his fellows; his enchanted spirit rejoiced in every creature.
The gospel of this new evangelist awoke the hearts of men to love and joy.
Nothing rejoiced him more than to see his sons rejoice in the Lord; and
nothing was more certain to draw forth his tender reproof than a sad
countenance.

    “Once while the blessed Francis was at the Portiuncula, a certain good
    beggar came along the way, returning from alms-begging in Assisi, and
    he went along praising God with a high voice and great jocundity. As
    he approached, Francis heard him, and ran out and met him in the way,
    and joyfully kissed his shoulder where he bore the wallet containing
    the gifts. Then he lifted the wallet, and set it on his own shoulder,
    and so carried it within, and said to the brothers: ‘Thus I wish to
    have my brothers go and return with alms, joyful and glad and praising
    God.’”[533]

    “Aside from prayer and the divine service, the blessed Francis was
    most zealous in preserving continually an inward and outward spiritual
    gladness. And this he especially cherished in the brothers, and would
    reprove them for sadness and depression. For he said that if the
    servant of God would study to preserve, inwardly and outwardly, the
    spiritual joy which rises from purity of heart, and is acquired
    through the devotion of prayer, the devils could not harm him, for
    they say: So long as the servant of God is joyful in tribulation and
    prosperity, we cannot enter into him or harm him.... To our enemy and
    his members it pertains to be sad, but to us always to rejoice and be
    glad in the Lord.”[534]

Thus the glad temper of his young unconverted days passed into his saintly
life, of which Christ was the primal source of rapture.

    “Drunken with the love and pity of Christ, the blessed Francis would
    sometimes do such acts, when the sweetest melody of spirit within him
    boiling outward gave sound in French, and the strain of the divine
    whisper which his ear had taken secretly, broke forth in a glad French
    song. He would pick up a stick and, holding it over his left arm,
    would with another stick in his right hand make as if drawing a bow
    across a violin (_viellam_), and with fitting gestures would sing in
    French of the Lord Jesus Christ. At last this dancing would end in
    tears, and the jubilee turn to pity for the Passion of Christ. And in
    that he would continue, drawing sighs and groans, as, oblivious to
    what he held in his hands, he was suspended from heaven.”[535]

Francis had been a lover from his youth; naturally and always he had loved
his kind. But from the time when Christ held his heart and mind, his love
of fellow-man was moulded by his thought and love of Christ. Henceforth
the loving acts of Francis moving among his fellows become a loving
following of Christ. He sees in every man the character and person of his
Lord, soliciting his love, commanding what he should do. He never refused,
or permitted his followers to refuse, what was asked in Christ’s name; but
it displeased him when he heard the brothers ask lightly for the love of
God, and he would reprove them, saying: “So high and precious is God’s
love that it never should be invoked save with great reverence and under
pressing need.”[536]

Such a man felt strong personal affection. Pure and wise was his love for
Santa Clara;[537] and a deep affection for one of his earliest and closest
followers touches us in his letter to brother Leo. Not all of the writings
ascribed to Francis breathe his spirit; but we hear his voice in this
letter as it closes: “And if it is needful for thy soul or for thy
consolation, and thou dost wish, my Leo, to come to me, come. Farewell in
Christ.”

Francis’s love was unfailing in compassionate word and deed. Although cold
and sick, he would give his cloak away at the first demand, till his own
appointed minister-general commanded him on his obedience not to do so
without permission; and he saw that the brothers did not injure themselves
with fasting, though he took slight care of himself. On one occasion he
had them all partake of a meal, in order that one delicate brother, who
needed food, might not be put to shame eating while the rest fasted. And
once, early in the morning, he led an old and feeble brother secretly to a
certain vineyard, and there ate grapes before him, that he might not be
ashamed to do likewise, for his health.[538]

The effect of his sweet example melted the hearts of angry men,
reconciling such as had been wronged to those who had wronged them, and
leading ruffians back to ways of gentleness. His conduct on learning of
certain dissensions in Assisi illustrates his method of restoring peace
and amity.

    “After the blessed Francis had composed the Lauds of the creatures,
    which he called the Canticle of Brother Sun, it happened that great
    dissension arose between the bishop and the podestà of the City of
    Assisi, so that the bishop excommunicated the podestà, and the podestà
    made proclamation that no person should sell anything to the bishop or
    buy from him or make any contract with him.

    “When the blessed Francis (who was now so very sick) heard this, he
    was greatly moved with pity, since no one interposed between them to
    make peace. And he said to his companions: ‘It is a great shame for us
    servants of God that the bishop and the podestà hate each other so,
    and none interposes to make peace.’

    “And so for this occasion he at once made a verse in the Lauds above
    mentioned and said:

      ‘Praised be thou, O my Lord, for those who forgive from love of thee,
       And endure sickness and tribulation.
       Blessed are those who shall endure in peace,
       For by thee, Most High, shall they be crowned.’

    “Then he called one of his companions and said to him: ‘Go to the
    podestà, and on my behalf tell him to come to the bishop’s palace with
    the magnates of the city and others that he may bring with him.’

    “And as that brother went, he said to two other of his companions: ‘Go
    before the bishop and podestà and the others who may be with them, and
    sing the Canticle of Brother Sun, and I trust in the Lord that He will
    straightway humble their hearts, and they will return to their former
    affection and friendship.’

    “When all were assembled in the piazza of the episcopate, the two
    brothers arose, and one of them said: ‘The blessed Francis in his
    sickness made a Lauds of the Lord from His creatures in praise of the
    Lord and for the edification of our neighbour. Wherefore he begs that
    you would listen to it with great devoutness.’ And then they began to
    say and sing them.

    “At once the podestà rose, and with folded hands listened intently, as
    if it were the Lord’s gospel; this he did with the greatest devoutness
    and with many tears, for he had great trust and devotion toward the
    blessed Francis.

    “When the Lauds of the Lord were finished, the podestà said before
    them all: ‘Truly I say to you that not only my lord-bishop, whom I
    wish and ought to hold as my lord, but if any one had slain my brother
    or son I would forgive him.’ And so saying, he threw himself at the
    bishop’s feet, and said to him: ‘Look, I am ready in all things to
    make satisfaction to you as shall please you, for the love of our Lord
    Jesus Christ and His servant the blessed Francis.’

    “The bishop accepting him, raised him with his hands and said:
    ‘Because of my office it became me to be humble, and since I am
    naturally quick-tempered you ought to pardon me.’ And so with great
    kindness and love they embraced and kissed each other.

    “The brothers were astounded and made glad when they saw fulfilled to
    the letter the concord predicted by the blessed Francis. And all
    others present ascribed it as a great miracle to the merits of the
    blessed Francis, that the Lord suddenly had visited them, and out of
    such dissension and scandal had brought such concord.”[539]

It would be mistaken to refer to any single pious sentiment, the saint’s
blithe love of animals and birds and flowers, and his regard even for
senseless things. It is right, however, for Thomas of Celano, as a proper
monkish biographer, to say:

    “While hastening through this world of pilgrimage and exile that
    traveller (Francis) rejoiced in those things which are in the world,
    and not a little. As toward the princes of darkness he used the world
    as a field for battle, but as toward the Lord he treated it as the
    brightest mirror of goodness; in the fabric he commended the
    Artificer, and what he found in created things, he referred to the
    Maker; he exulted over all the works of the hands of the Lord, and in
    the pleasing spectacle beheld the life-giving reason and the cause. In
    beautiful things he perceived that which was most beautiful, as all
    good things acclaim, He who made us is best. Through vestiges
    impressed on things he followed his chosen, and made of all a ladder
    by which to reach the throne. He embraced all things in a feeling of
    unheard of devotion, speaking to them concerning the Lord and
    exhorting them in His praise.”[540]

This was true, even if it was not all the truth. Living creatures spoke to
Francis of their Maker, while things insensible aroused his reverence
through their suggestiveness, their scriptural associations, or their
symbolism. But beyond these motives there was in this poet Francis a happy
love of nature. If nature always spoke to him of God, its loveliness
needed no stimulation of devotion in order to be loved by him. His feeling
for it found everywhere sensibility and responsiveness. He was as if
possessed by an imaginative animism, wherein every object had a soul. His
acts and words may appear fantastic; they never lack loveliness and
beauty.[541]

    “Wrapped in the love of God, the blessed Francis perfectly discerned
    the goodness of God not only in his own soul but in every creature.
    Wherefore he was affected with a singular and yearning (_viscerosa_)
    love toward creatures, and especially toward those in which was
    figured something of God or something pertaining to religion.

    “Whence above all birds he loved a little bird called the lark (the
    _lodola capellata_ of the vulgar tongue) and would say of her: ‘Sister
    lark has a hood like a Religious and is a humble bird, because she
    goes willingly along the road to find for herself some grains of corn.
    Even if she find them in dung she picks them out and eats them. In
    flying she praises the Lord very sweetly, as the good Religious look
    down upon earthly things, whose conversation is always in the heavens
    and whose intent is always upon the praise of God. Her garments are
    like earth, that is, her feathers, and set an example to the Religious
    that they should not have delicate and gaudy garments, but such as are
    vile in price and colour, as earth is viler than other
    elements.’”[542]

The unquestionably true story of Francis preaching to the birds is known
to all, especially to readers of the _Fioretti_. Thus Thomas of Celano
tells it: As the blessed Father Francis was journeying through the Spoleto
Valley, he reached a place near Mevanium, where there was a multitude of
birds--doves, crows, and other kinds. When he saw them, for the love and
sweet affection which he bore toward the lower creatures, he quickly ran
to them, leaving his companions. As he came near and saw that they were
waiting for him, he saluted them in his accustomed way. Then wondering
that they did not take flight, he was very glad, and humbly begged them to
listen to the word of God; among other things he said to them: “My
brothers who fly, verily you should praise the Lord your Maker and love
Him always, who gave you feathers to clothe you and wings to fly with and
whatever was necessary to you. God made you noble among creatures,
prepared your mansion in the purity of air; and though you neither sow nor
reap, nevertheless without any solicitude on your part, He protects and
guides you.”

At this, those little birds as he was speaking, marvellously exulting,
began to stretch out their necks and spread their wings and open their
beaks, looking at him. He passed through their midst, sweeping their heads
and bodies with his mantle. At length he blessed them, and with the sign
of the cross gave them leave to fly away. Then returning gladdened to his
companions, he yet blamed himself for his neglect to preach to the birds
before, since they so reverently heard the word of God. And from that day
he ceased not to exhort all flying and creeping things, and even things
insensible, to the praise and love of their Creator.[543]

Thomas also says that above all animals Francis loved the lambs, because
so frequently in Scripture the humility of our Lord is likened unto a
lamb. One day, as Francis was making his way through the March of Ancona
he met a goat-herd pasturing his flock of goats. Among them, humbly and
quietly, a little lamb was feeding. Francis stopped as he saw it, and,
deeply touched, said to the brother accompanying him: “Dost thou see this
sheep walking so gently among the goats? I tell you, thus our Lord Jesus
Christ used to walk mild and humble among Pharisees and chief priests. For
love of Him, then, I beg thee, my son, to buy this little sheep with me
and lead it out from among these goats.”

The brother was also moved with pity. They had nothing with them save
their wretched cloaks, but a merchant chancing to come along the way, the
money was obtained from him. Giving thanks to God and leading the sheep
they had bought, they reached the town of Osimo whither they were going;
and entering the house of the bishop, were honourably received by him. Yet
my lord bishop wondered at the sheep which Francis was leading with such
tender love. But when Francis had set forth the parable of his sermon, the
bishop too was touched and gave thanks to God.

The following day they considered what to do with the sheep, and it was
given over to the nuns of the cloister of St. Severinus, who received it
as a great boon given them from God. Long while they cared for it, and in
the course of time wove a cloak from its wool, which they sent to the
blessed Francis at the Portiuncula at the time of a Chapter meeting. The
saint accepted it with joy, and kissed it, and begged all the brothers to
be glad with him.[544]

Celano also tells how Francis loved the grass and vines and stones and
woods, and all comely things in the fields, also the streams, and earth
and fire and air, and called every creature “brother”;[545] also how he
would not put out the flame of a lamp or candle, how he walked reverently
upon stones, and was careful to injure no living thing.[546]

There are two documents which are both (the one with much reason and the
other with certainty) ascribed to Francis. Utterly different as they are,
each still remains a clear expression of his spirit. The one is the Lauds,
commonly called the Canticle of the Brother Sun, and the other is the
saint’s last Testament. One may think of the Canticle as the closing
stanza of a life which was an enacted poem:

    Most High, omnipotent, good Lord, thine is the praise, the glory, the
    honour and every benediction;

    To thee alone, Most High, these do belong, and no man is worthy to
    name thee.

    Praised be thou, my Lord, with all thy creatures, especially milord
    Brother Sun that dawns and lightens us;

    And he, beautiful and radiant with great splendour, signifies thee,
    Most High.

    Be praised, my Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars that thou hast made
    bright and precious and beautiful.

    Be praised, my Lord, for Brother Wind, and for the air and cloud and
    the clear sky and for all weathers through which thou givest
    sustenance to thy creatures.

    Be praised, my Lord, for Sister Water, that is very useful and humble
    and precious and chaste.

    Be praised, my Lord, for Brother Fire, through whom thou dost illumine
    the night, and comely is he and glad and bold and strong.

    Be praised, my Lord, for Sister, Our Mother Earth, that doth cherish
    and keep us, and produces various fruits with coloured flowers and the
    grass.

    Be praised, my Lord, for those who forgive for love of thee, and
    endure sickness and tribulation; blessed are they who endure in peace;
    for by thee, Most High, shall they be crowned.

    Be praised, my Lord, for our bodily death, from which no living man
    can escape; woe unto those who die in mortal sin.

    Blessed are they that have found thy most holy will, for the second
    death shall do them no hurt.

    Praise and bless my Lord, and render thanks, and serve Him with great
    humility.[547]

The self-expression of the more personal parts of the Testament supplement
these utterances:

    “Thus the Lord gave to me, Brother Francis, to begin to do penance:
    because while I was in sins, it seemed too bitter to me to see lepers;
    and the Lord himself led me among them, and I did mercy with them. And
    departing from them, that which seemed to me bitter, was turned for me
    into sweetness of soul and body. And a little afterwards I went out of
    the world.

    “And the Lord gave me such faith in churches, that thus simply I
    should pray and say: ‘We adore thee, Lord Jesus Christ, and in all thy
    churches which are in the whole world, and we bless thee, because
    through thy holy cross thou hast redeemed the world.’

    “Afterwards the Lord gave and gives me so great faith in priests who
    live after the model of the holy Roman Church according to their
    order, that if they should persecute me I will still turn to them. And
    if I should have as great wisdom as Solomon had, and should have found
    the lowliest secular priests in the parishes where they dwell, I do
    not wish to preach contrary to their wish. And them and all others I
    wish to fear and honour as my lords; and I do not wish to consider sin
    in them, because I see the Son of God in them and they are my lords.

    “And the reason I do this is because corporeally I see nothing in this
    world of that most high Son of God except His most holy body and most
    holy blood, which they receive and which they alone administer. And I
    wish these most holy mysteries to be honoured above all and revered,
    and to be placed together in precious places. Wherever I shall find
    His most holy names and His written words in unfit places, I wish to
    collect them, and I ask that they be collected and placed in a proper
    place; and all theologians and those who administer the most holy
    divine words, we ought to honour and venerate, as those who administer
    to us spirit and life.

    “And after the Lord gave me brothers, no one showed me what I ought to
    do, but the Most High himself revealed to me that I ought to live
    according to the model of the holy Gospel. And I in a few words and
    simply had this written, and the lord Pope confirmed it to me. And
    they who were coming to receive life, all that they were able to have
    they gave to the poor; and they were content with one patched cloak,
    with the cord and breeches; and we did not wish to have more. We who
    were of the clergy said our office as other clergy; the lay members
    said ‘Our Father.’ And willingly we remained in churches; and we were
    simple (_idiotae_) and subject to all. And I laboured with my hands,
    and I wish to labour; and I wish all other brothers to labour. Who do
    not know how, let them learn, not from the cupidity of receiving the
    price of labour, but on account of the example, and to repel
    slothfulness. And when the price of labour is not given to us, we
    resort to the table of the Lord by seeking alms from door to door.

    “The Lord revealed to me a salutation that we should say: The Lord
    give thee peace.”

    Francis’s precepts for the brothers follow here. The last paragraph of
    the Will is: “And whoever shall have observed these principles, in
    heaven may he be filled with the benediction of the most high Father,
    and on earth may he be filled with the benediction of His beloved Son,
    with the most holy spirit Paraclete, and with all the virtues of the
    heavens and with everything holy. And I, Brother Francis, your very
    little servant, so far as I am able, confirm to you within and without
    that most holy benediction.”




CHAPTER XIX

MYSTIC VISIONS OF ASCETIC WOMEN

    ELIZABETH OF SCHÖNAU; HILDEGARD OF BINGEN; MARY OF OGNIES; LIUTGARD OF
    TONGERN; MECHTHILD OF MAGDEBURG


We pass to matters of a different complexion from anything presented in
the last few chapters. Thus far, besides Bernard and Francis, matchless
examples of monastic ideals, there have been instances of contemplation
and piety, with much emotion, and a sufficiency of experience having small
part in reason; also hallucinations and fantastic conduct, as in the case
of Romuald. The last class of phenomena, however, have not been prominent.
Now for a while we shall be wrapt in visions, rational, imitative,
fashioned with intent and plan; or, again, directly experienced,
passionate, hallucinative. They will range from those climaxes of the
constructive or intuitive imagination,[548] which are of the whole man, to
passionate or morbid delusions representing but a partial and passing
phase of the subject’s personality. Moreover, we have been occupied with
hermits and monks, that is to say, with men. The present chapter has to do
with nuns; who are more prone to visions, and are occasionally subject to
those passionate hallucinations which are prompted by the circumstance
that the Christian God was incarnate in the likeness of a man.

Besides the conclusions which the mind draws from the data of sense, or
reaches through reflection, there are other modes of conviction whose
distinguishing mark is their apparent immediacy and spontaneity. They are
not elicited from antecedent processes of thought, as inferences or
deductions; rather they loom upon the consciousness, and are experienced.
Yet they are far from simple, and may contain a multiplicity of submerged
reasonings, and bear relation to countless previous inferences. They are
usually connected with emotion or neural excitement, and may even take the
guise of sense-manifestations. Through such convictions, religious minds
are assured of God and the soul’s communion with Him.[549] While not
issuing from argument, this assurance may be informed with reason and
involve the total sum of conclusions which the reasoner has drawn from
life.

In devout mediaeval circles, the consciousness of communion with God, with
the Virgin, with angels and saints, and with the devil, often took on the
semblance of sense-perception. The senses seemed to be experiencing:
stenches of hell, odours of heaven, might be smelled, or a taste infect
the mouth; the divine or angelic touch was felt, or the pain of blows;
most frequently voices were heard, and forms were seen in a vision. In
these apparent testimonies of sight and hearing, the entire spiritual
nature of the man or woman might set the vision, dramatize it with his or
her desires and aversions, and complete it from the store of knowledge at
command.

The visions of an eleventh-century monk named Othloh have been observed at
some length.[550] Intimate and trying, they were also, so to speak, in and
of the whole man: his tastes, his solicitudes, his acquired knowledge and
ways of reasoning, joined in these vivid experiences of God’s truth and
the devil’s onslaughts. One may be mindful of Othloh in turning to the
more impersonal visions of certain German nuns, which likewise issued
from the entire nature and intellectual equipment of these women.[551]

On the Rhine, fifteen miles north-east of Bingen, lies the village of
Schönau, where in the twelfth century flourished a Benedictine monastery,
and near it a cloister for nuns. At the latter a girl of twelve named
Elizabeth was received in the year 1141. She lived there as nun, and
finally as abbess, till her death in 1165. Like many other lofty souls
dwelling in the ideal, she was a stern censor of the evils in the world
and in the Church. The bodily infirmities from which she was never free,
were aggravated by austerities, and usually became most painful just
before the trances that brought her visions. Masses and penances, prayer
and meditation, made her manner of approach to these direct disclosures of
eternity, wherein the whole contents of her faith and her reflection were
unrolled. Frequently she beheld the Saints in the nights following their
festivals; her larger visions were moulded by the Apocalypse. These
experiences were usually beatific, though sometimes she suffered insult
from malignant shapes. What humility bade her conceal, the importunities
of admirers compelled her to disclose: and so her visions have been
preserved, and may be read in the _Vita_ written by her brother Eckbert,
Abbot of Schönau.[552] Here is an example of how the saint and seeress
spoke:

    “On the Sunday night following the festival of St. James (in the year
    1153), drawn from the body, I was borne into an ecstasy (_avocata a
    corpore rapta sum in exstasim_). And a great flaming wheel flared in
    the heaven. Then it disappeared, and I saw a light more splendid than
    I was accustomed to see; and thousands of saints stood in it, forming
    an immense circle; in front were some glorious men, having palms and
    shining crowns and the titles of their martyrdoms inscribed upon their
    foreheads. From these titles, as well as from their pre-eminent
    splendour, I knew them to be the Apostles. At their right was a great
    company having the same shining titles; and behind these were others,
    who lacked the signs of martyrdom. At the left of the Apostles shone
    the holy order of virgins, also adorned with the signs of martyrdom,
    and behind them another splendid band of maidens, some crowned, but
    without these signs. Still back of these, a company of venerable women
    in white completed the circle. Below it was another circle of great
    brilliancy, which I knew to be of the holy angels.”

    “In the midst of all was a Glory of Supreme Majesty, and its throne
    was encircled by a rainbow. At the right of that Majesty I saw one
    like unto the Son of Man, seated in glory; at the left was a radiant
    sign of the Cross.... At the right of the Son of Man sat the Queen of
    Kings and Angels on a starry throne circumfused with immense light. At
    the left of the Cross four-and-twenty honourable men sat facing it.
    And not far from them I saw two rams sustaining on their shoulders a
    great shining wheel. The morning after this, at terse, one of the
    brothers came to the window of my cell, and I asked that the mass for
    the Holy Trinity might be celebrated.

    “The next Sunday I saw the same vision, and more: for I saw the Lamb
    of God standing before the throne, very lovable, and with a gold
    cross, as if implanted in its back. And I saw the four Evangelists in
    those forms which Holy Scripture ascribes to them. They were at the
    right of the Blessed Virgin, and their faces were turned toward her.”

And Elizabeth saw the Virgin arise and advance from out the great light
into the lower ether, followed by a multitude of women saints, and then
return amid great praise.

In another vision she saw the events of the Saviour’s last days on earth:
saw Him riding into Jerusalem, and the multitude throwing down branches;
saw Him washing the disciples’ feet, then the agony in the garden, the
betrayal, the crowning with thorns, the spitting, the Lord upon the Cross,
and the Mother of God full of grief; she saw the piercing of His side, the
dreadful darkness,--all as in Scripture, and then the Scriptural incidents
following the Resurrection. Upon this, her vision took another turn, and
words were put in her mouth to chastise the people for their sins.

Apparently more original was Elizabeth’s vision of the _Paths of God_ (the
_Viae Dei_). In it three paths went straight up a mountain from opposite
sides, the first having the hyacinthine hue of the deep heaven; the second
green, the third purple. At the top of the mountain was a man, clad with a
hyacinthine tunic, his reins bound with a white girdle; his face was
splendid as the sun, his eyes shone as stars, and his hair was white; from
his mouth issued a two-edged sword; in his right hand he held a key and
in his left a sceptre. Elizabeth interprets: the man is Christ; and the
mountain represents the loftiness of celestial beatitude; the light at the
top is the brightness of eternal life; the three paths are the diverse
ways in which the elect ascend. The hyacinthine path is that of the _vita
contemplativa_; the green path is that of the religious _vita activa_; and
the purple path is the way of the blessed martyrs.

There were also other paths up the mountain, one beset with brambles until
half way up, where they gave place to flowers. This is the way of married
folk, who pass from brambles to flowers when they abandon the pleasures of
the flesh; for the flowers are the virtues which adorn a life of
continence. Still other ways there were, for prelates, for widows, and for
solitaries. And Elizabeth turns her visions into texts, and preaches
vigorous sermons, denouncing the vices of the clergy as well as laity. In
other visions she had seen prelates and monks and nuns in hell.

The visions of this nun appear to have been the fruit of the constructive
imagination working upon data of the mind. Yet she is said to have seen
them in trances, a statement explicitly made in the account of those last
days when life had almost left her body. Praying devoutly in the middle of
the night before she died, she seemed much troubled; then she passed into
a trance (_exstasim_). Returning to herself, she murmured to the sister
who held her in her arms: “I know not how it is with me; that light which
I have been wont to see in the heavens is dividing.” Again she passed into
a trance, and afterwards, when the sisters begged her to disclose what she
had seen, she said her end was at hand, for she had seen holy visions
which, many years before, God’s angel had told her she should not see
again until she came to die. On being asked whether the Lord had comforted
her, she answered, “Oh! what excellent comfort have I received!”

       *       *       *       *       *

A more imposing personality than Elizabeth was Hildegard of Bingen,[553]
whose career extends through nearly the whole of the twelfth century; for
she was born in 1099 and died in 1179. Her parents were of the lesser
nobility, holding lands in the diocese of Mainz. A certain holy woman, one
Jutta, daughter of the Count of Spanheim, had secluded herself in a
solitary cell at Disenberg--the mount of St. Disibodus--near a monastery
of Benedictine monks. Drawn by her reputation, Hildegard’s parents brought
their daughter to Jutta, who received her to a life like her own. The
ceremony, which took place in the presence of a number of persons, was
that of the last rites of the dead, performed with funeral torches.
Hildegard was buried to the world. She was eight years old. At the same
time a niece of Jutta also became a recluse, and afterwards others joined
them.

On the death of Jutta in 1136, Hildegard was compelled to take the office
of Prioress. But when the fame of the dead Jutta began to draw many people
to her shrine, and cause a concourse of pilgrims, Hildegard decided to
seek greater quiet, and possibly more complete independence; for the
authority of the new abbot at the monastery may not have been to her
liking. She was ever a masterful woman, better fitted to command than to
obey. So in 1147 she and her nuns moved to Bingen, and established
themselves permanently near the tomb of St. Rupert. From this centre the
energies and influence of Hildegard, and rumours of her visions, soon
began to radiate. Her advice was widely sought, and often given unasked.
She corresponded with the great and influential, admonishing dukes and
kings and emperors, monks, abbots, and popes. Her epistolary manner
sometimes reminds one of Bernard, who was himself among her
correspondents. The following letter to Frederick Barbarossa would match
some of his:

    “O King, it is very needful that thou be foreseeing in thy affairs.
    For, in mystic vision, I see thee living, small and insensate, beneath
    the Living Eyes (of God). Thou hast still some time to reign over
    earthly matters. Therefore beware lest the Supreme King cast thee down
    for the blindness of thine eyes, which do not rightly see how thou
    holdest the rod of right government in thy hand. See also to it that
    thou art such that the grace of God may not be lacking in thee.”[554]

This is the whole letter. Hildegard’s communications were not wont to
stammer. They were frequently announced as from God, and began with the
words “Lux vivens dicit.”

Hildegard was a woman of intellectual power. She was also learned in
theology, and versed in the medicine and scanty natural science of an
epoch which preceded the reopening of the great volume of Aristotelian
knowledge in the thirteenth century. Yet she asserts her illiteracy, and
seems always to have employed learned monks to help her express, in
awkward Latin, the thoughts and flashing words which, as she says, were
given her in visions. Her many gifts of grace, if not her learning,
impressed contemporaries, who wrote to her for enlightenment upon points
of doctrine and biblical interpretation; they would wait patiently until
she should be enabled to answer, since her answers were not in the power
of her own reflection, but had to be seen or heard. For instance, a monk
named Guibert, who afterwards became the saint’s amanuensis and
biographer, propounded thirty-eight questions of biblical interpretation
on behalf of the monks of the monastery of Villars. In the course of time
Hildegard replies: “In visione animae meae, haec verba vidi et audivi,”
and thereupon she gives a text from Canticles with an exposition of it,
which neither she nor the monks regarded quite as hers, but as divinely
revealed. At the end of the letter she says that she, insignificant and
untaught creature, has looked to the “true light,” and through the grace
of God has laboured upon their questions and has completed the solutions
of fourteen of them.[555]

In some of Hildegard’s voluminous writings, visions were apparently a form
of composition; again, more veritable visions, deemed by her and by her
friends to have been divinely given, made the nucleus of the work at
length produced by the labour of her mind. Guibert recognized both
elements, the God-given visions of the seeress and her contributory
labour. In letters which had elicited the answers above mentioned, he
calls her _speculativa anima_, and urges her to direct her talents
(_ingenium_) to the solution of the questions. But he also addresses her
in words just varied from Gabriel’s and Elizabeth’s to the Virgin:

    “Hail--after Mary--full of grace; the Lord is with thee; blessed art
    thou among women, and blessed is the word of thy mouth.... In the
    character of thy visions, the logic of thy expositions, the orthodoxy
    of thy opinions, the Holy Spirit has marvellously illuminated thee,
    and revealed to babes divers secrets of His wisdom.”[556]

In answer to more personal inquiries from the deeply-interested Guibert,
Hildegard (who at the time was venerable in years and in repute for
sanctity) explains how she saw her visions, and how her knowledge of
Scripture came to her:

    “From infancy, even to the present time when I am more than seventy
    years old, my soul has always beheld this _visio_,[557] and in it my
    soul, as God may will, soars to the summit of the firmament and into a
    different air, and diffuses itself among divers peoples, however
    remote they may be. Therefore I perceive these matters in my soul, as
    if I saw them through dissolving views of clouds and other objects. I
    do not hear them with my outer ears, nor do I perceive them by the
    cogitations of my heart, or by any collaboration of my five senses;
    but only in my soul, my eyes open, and not sightless as in a trance;
    wide awake, whether by day or night, I see these things. And I am
    perpetually bound by my infirmities and with pains so severe as to
    threaten death, but hitherto God has raised me up.

    “The brightness which I see is not limited in space, and is more
    brilliant than the luminous air around the sun, nor can I estimate its
    height or length or breadth. Its name, which has been given me, is
    Shade of the living light (_umbra viventis luminis_). Just as sun,
    moon, or stars appear reflected in the water, I see Scripture,
    discourses, virtues and human actions shining in it.

    “Whatever I see or learn in this vision, I retain in my memory; and as
    I may have seen or heard it, I recall it to mind, and at once see,
    hear, know; in an instant I learn whatever I know. On the other hand,
    what I do not see, that I do not know, because I am unlearned; but I
    have had some simple instruction in letters. I write whatever I see
    and hear in the vision, nor do I set down any other words, but tell my
    message in the rude Latin words which I read in the vision. For I am
    not instructed in the vision to write as the learned write; and the
    words in the vision are not as words sounding from a human mouth, but
    as flashing flame and as a cloud moving in clear air.

    “Nor have I been able to perceive the form of this brightness, just as
    I cannot perfectly see the disk of the Sun. In that brightness I
    sometimes see another light, for which the name _Lux vivens_ has been
    given me. When and how I see it I cannot tell; but sometimes when I
    see it, all sadness and pain is lifted from me, and then I have the
    ways of a simple girl and not those of an old woman.”[558]

The obscure Latin of this letter gives the impression of one trying to put
in words what was unintelligible to the writer. And the same sense of
struggle with the inadequacies of speech comes from the prologue of a work
written many years before:

    “Lo, in the forty-third year of my temporal course, while I, in fear
    and trembling, was intent upon the celestial vision, I saw a great
    splendour in which was a voice speaking to me from heaven: Frail
    creature, dust of the dust, speak and write what thou seest and
    hearest. But because that thou art timid of speech and unskilled in
    writing, speak and write these things not according to human utterance
    nor human understanding of composition; but as thou seest and hearest
    in the heavens above, in the marvels of God, so declare, as a hearer
    sets forth the words of his preceptor, preserving the fashion of his
    speech, under his will, his guidance and his command. Thus thou, O man
    (_homo_), tell those things which thou seest and hearest, and write,
    not according to thyself or other human being, but according to the
    will of Him who knows and sees and disposes all things in the secrets
    of His mysteries.

    “And again, I heard a voice saying to me from heaven: Tell these
    marvels and write them, taught in this way, and say: It happened in
    the year one thousand one hundred and forty-one of the incarnation of
    Jesus Christ the Son of God, when I was forty-two years old, that a
    flashing fire of light from the clear sky transfused my brain, my
    heart, and my whole breast as with flame; yet it did not burn but only
    warmed me, as the sun warms an object upon which it sheds its rays.
    And suddenly I had intelligence of the full meaning of the Psalter,
    the Gospels, and the other books of the Old and New Testaments,
    although I did not have the exact interpretation of the words of their
    text, nor the division of syllables nor knowledge of cases and moods.”

The writer continues with the statement:

    “The visions which I saw, I did not perceive in dreams or sleeping,
    nor in delirium, nor with the corporeal ears and eyes of the outer
    man; but watchful and intent in mind I received them according to the
    will of God.”[559]

Hildegard spoke as truthfully as she could about her visions and the
source of her knowledge, matters hard for her to put in words, and by no
means easy for others to classify in categories of seeming explanation.
Guibert may have read the work in question. At all events, his interesting
correspondence with her, and her great repute, led him to come to see for
himself and investigate her visions; for he realized that deceptions were
common, and wished to follow the advice of Scripture to prove all things.
So he made the journey to Bingen, and stayed four days with Hildegard.
This was in 1178, about a year before her death. “So far as was possible
in this short space of time, I observed her attentively; and I could not
perceive in her any invention or untruth or hypocrisy, or indeed anything
that could offend either us or other men who follow reason.”[560]

Springing from her rapt faith, the visions of this seeress and _anima
speculativa_ disclose the range of her knowledge and the power of her
mind. The visions all were allegories; but while some appear as sheer
spontaneous visions, in others the mind of Hildegard, aware of the
intended allegorical significance, constructs the vision, and fashions its
details to suit the spiritual meaning. This woman, fit sister to her
contemporaries Hugo of St. Victor and Bernard of Clairvaux, was ancestress
of him who saw his _Commedia_ both as fact and allegory, and with intended
mind laboured upon that inspiration which kept him lean for twenty years.

Let us now follow these visions for ourselves, and begin with the _Book of
the Rewards of Life_ revealed by the Living Light through a simple
person.[561]

    “When I was sixty years old, I saw the strong and wonderful vision
    wherein I toiled for five years. And I saw a Man of such size that he
    reached from the summit of the clouds of heaven even to the Abyss.
    From his shoulders upward he was above the clouds in the serenest
    ether. From his shoulders down to his hips he was in a white cloud;
    from his hips to his knees he was in the air of earth; from the knees
    to the calves he was in the earth; and from his calves to the soles of
    his feet he was in the waters of the Abyss, so that he stood upon the
    Abyss. And he turned to the East. The brightness of his countenance
    dazzled me. At his mouth was a white cloud like a trumpet, which was
    full of all sounds sounding quickly. When he blew in it, it sent forth
    three winds, of which one sustained above itself a fiery cloud, and
    one a storm-cloud, and one a cloud of light. But the wind with the
    fiery cloud above it hovered before the Man’s face, while the two
    others descended to his breast and blew there.

    “And in the fiery cloud there was a living fiery multitude all one in
    will and life. Before them was spread a tablet covered with quills
    (_pennae_) which flew in the precepts of God. And when the precepts of
    God lifted up that tablet where God’s knowledge had written certain of
    its secrets, this multitude with one impulse gazed on it. And as they
    saw the writing, God’s virtue was so bestowed upon them that as a
    mighty trumpet they gave forth in one note a music manifold.

    “The wind having the storm-cloud over it, spread, with that cloud,
    from the south to the west. In it was a multitude of the blessed, who
    possessed the spirit of life; and their voice was as the noise of many
    waters as they cried: We have our habitations from Him who made this
    wind, and when shall we receive them? But the multitude that was in
    the fiery cloud chanted responding: When God shall grasp His trumpet,
    lightning and thunder and burning fire shall He send upon the earth,
    and then in that trumpet shall ye have your habitation.

    “And the wind which had over it the cloud of light spread with that
    cloud from the east to the north. But masses of darkness and thick
    horror coming from the west, extended themselves to the light cloud,
    yet could not pass beyond it. In that darkness was a countless crowd
    of lost souls; and these swerved in their course whenever they heard
    the song of those singing in the storm-cloud, as if they shunned their
    company.

    “Then I saw coming from the north, a cloud barren of delight,
    untouched by the Sun’s rays. It reached towards the darkness
    aforesaid, and was full of malignant spirits, who go about devising
    snares for men. And I heard the old serpent saying, ‘I will prepare my
    men of might and will make war upon mine enemies.’ And he spat forth
    among men a spume of things impure, and inflated them with derision.
    Then he blew up a foul mist which filled the whole earth as with black
    smoke, out of which was heard a groaning; and in that mist I saw the
    images of every sin.”[562]

These images now speak in their own defence, and are answered by the
virtues, speaking from the storm-cloud, Heavenly Love replying to Love of
this World, Discipline answering Petulance, Shame answering Ribaldry (the
vice of the _jongleours_) after the fashion of such mediaeval allegorical
debates. The virtues are simply voices; but the monstrous or bestial image
of each sin is described:

    “Ignavia (cowardly sloth) had a human head, but its left ear was like
    the ear of a hare, and so large as to cover the head. Its body and
    limbs were worm-like, apparently without bones; and it spoke
    trembling.”[563]

Hildegard explains the general features of her vision: God with secret
inquisition, reviewing the profound disposal of His will, made three ways
of righteousness, which should advance in the three orders of the blessed.
These are the three winds with the three clouds above them. The first wind
bears over it the fiery cloud, which is the glory of angels burning with
love of God, willing only what He wills; the wind bearing over it the
storm-cloud represents the works of men, stormy and various, done in
straits and tribulations; the third way of righteousness, through the
Incarnation of our Lord, bears above it a white and untouched virginity,
as a cloud of light.[564]

Then Hildegard sees the punishments of those who die in their sins
impenitent. They were in a pit having a bottom of burning pitch, out of
which crawled fiery worms; and sharp nails were driven about in that pit
as by a wind.

    “I saw a well deep and broad, full of boiling pitch and sulphur, and
    around it were wasps and scorpions, who scared but did not injure the
    souls of those therein; which were the souls of those who had slain in
    order not to be slain.

    “Near a pond of clear water I saw a great fire. In this some souls
    were burned and others were girdled with snakes, and others drew in
    and again exhaled the fire like a breath, while malignant spirits cast
    lighted stones at them. And all of them beheld their punishments
    reflected in the water, and thereat were the more afflicted. These
    were the souls of those who had extinguished the substance of the
    human form within them, or had slain their infants.

    “And I saw a great swamp, over which hung a black cloud of smoke,
    which was issuing from it. And in the swamp there swarmed a mass of
    little worms. Here were the souls of those who in the world had
    delighted in foolish merriment (_inepta laetitia_).[565]

    “And I saw a great fire, black, red, and white, and in it horrible
    fiery vipers spitting flame; and there the vipers tortured the souls
    of those who had been slaves of the sin of uncharitableness
    (_acerbitas_).

    “And I saw a fire burning in a blackness, in which were dragons, who
    blew up the fire with their breath. And near was an icy river; and the
    dragons passed into it from time to time and disturbed it. And a fiery
    air was over both river and fire. Here were punished the souls of
    liars; and for relief from the heat, they pass into the river, and
    again, for the cold, they return to the fire, and the dragons torment
    them. But the fiery air afflicts only those who have sworn
    falsely.[566]

    “I saw a hollow mountain full of fire and vipers, with a little
    opening; and near it a horrible cold place crawling with scorpions.
    The souls of those guilty of envy and malice suffer here, passing for
    relief from one place of torment to the other.

    “And I saw a thickest darkness, in which the souls of the disobedient
    lay on a fiery pavement and were bitten by sharp-toothed worms. For
    blind were they in life, and the fiery pavement is for their wilful
    disobedience, and the worms because they disobeyed their prelates.

    “And I beheld at great height in the air a hail of ice and fire
    descending. And from that height, the souls of those who had broken
    their vows of chastity were falling, and then as by a wind were
    whirled aloft again wrapped in a ligature of darkness, so that they
    could not move; and the hail of cold and fire fell upon them.

    “And I saw demons with fiery scourges beating hither and thither,
    through fires shaped like thorns and sharpened flails, the souls of
    those who on earth had been guilty bestially.”[567]

After the vision of the punishment, Hildegard states the penance which
would have averted it, and usually follows with pious discourse and
quotations from Scripture. Apparently she would have the punishments seen
by her to be taken not as allegories, but literally as those actually in
store for the wicked.

It is different with her visions of Paradise. In Hildegard, as in Dante,
descriptions of heaven’s blessedness are pale in comparison with the
highly-coloured happenings in hell. And naturally, since Paradise is won
by those in whom spirit has triumphed over carnality. But flesh triumphed
in the wicked on earth, and hell is of the flesh, though the spirit also
be agonized. Hildegard sees many blessed folk in Paradise, but all is much
the same with them: they are clad in splendid clothes, they breathe an air
fragrant with sweetest flowers, they are adorned with jewels, and many of
them wear crowns. For example, she sees the blessed virgins standing in
purest light and limpid splendour, surpassing that of the sun. They are
clad “quasi candidissima veste velut auro intexta, et quasi pretiosissimis
lapidibus a pectore usque ad pedes, in modum dependentis zonae, ornata
induebantur, quae etiam maximum odorem velut aromatum de se emittebat. Sed
et cingulis, quasi auro et gemmis ac margaritis supra humanum intellectum
ornatis, circumcingebantur.”

This seems a description of heavenly millinery. Are these virgins rewarded
in the life to come with what they spurned in this? What would the saint
have thought of virgins had she seen them in the flesh clad in the whitest
vestment ornamented with interwoven gold and gems, falling in alluring
folds from their breasts to their feet, giving out aromatic odours, and
belted with girdles of pearls beyond human conception? Could it be
possible that the woman surviving in the nun took delight in contemplating
the blissful things forbidden here below? However this may be, the quasi-s
and velut-s suggest the symbolical character of these marvels. This
indication becomes stronger as Hildegard, in language wavering between the
literal and the symbolical, explains the appropriateness of ornaments and
perfumes as rewards for the virtues shown by saints on earth. At last all
is made clear: the _Lux vivens_ declares that these ornaments are
spiritual and eternal; gold and gems, which are of the dust, are not for
the eternal life of celestial beings; but the elect are spiritually
adorned by their righteous works as people are bodily adorned with costly
ornaments. So one gains the lesson that the bliss of heaven can only be
shown in allegories, since it surpasses the understanding of men while
held in mortal flesh.[568]

These visions from Hildegard’s _Book of the Rewards of Life_ may be
supplemented by one or two selected from the curious and lengthy work
which she named _Scivias_, signifying _Scito vias domini_ (know the ways
of the Lord). In this work, on which she laboured for nine years, the
seeress shows forth the Church, in images seen in visions, and the whole
dogmatic scheme of Christian polity. The allegories form the texts of
expository sermons. For example, the first vision in the first Book is of
an iron-coloured mountain, which is at once explained as an image of the
stability of God’s eternal kingdom. The third vision is of a fiery,
egg-shaped object, very complicated in construction, and devised to
illustrate the truth that things visible and temporal shadow forth the
invisible and eternal, in the polity of God.[569] In the fourth vision,
globes of fire are seen to enter the human form at birth, and are then
attacked by many whirlwinds rushing in upon them. This is an allegory of
human souls and their temptations, and forms the text for a long discourse
on the nature of the soul.

The fifth vision is of the Synagogue, the _Mater incarnationis Filii Dei_:

    “Then I saw as it were the image of a woman, pale from the top to the
    navel, and black from the navel to the feet, and its feet were
    blood-colour, and had about them a very white cloud. This image lacked
    eyes, and kept its hands under its arm-pits. It stood by the Altar
    that is before the eyes of God, but did not touch it.”

The pale upper part of this image represents the prescience of the
patriarchs and prophets, who had not the strong light of the Gospel; the
black lower portion represents Israel’s later backslidings; and the bloody
feet surrounded by a white cloud, the slaying of Christ, and the Church
arising from that consummation. The image is sightless--blind to
Christ--and stands before His altar, but will have none of it; and its
slothful hands keep from the work of righteousness.[570]

The sixth vision is of the orders of celestial spirits, and harks back to
the _Celestial Hierarchy_ of Dionysius the Areopagite. In the height of
the celestial secrets Hildegard sees a shining company of supernal spirits
having as it were wings (_pennas_) across their breasts, and bearing
before them a face like the human countenance, in which the look of man
was mirrored. These are angels spreading as wings the desires of their
profound intelligence; not that they have wings, like birds; but they
quickly do the will of God in their desires, as a man flees quickly in his
thoughts.[571] They manifest the beauty of rationality through their
faces, wherein God scrutinizes the works of men. For these angels see to
the accomplishment of the will of God in men; and then in themselves they
show the actions of men.

Another celestial company was seen, also having as it were wings over
their breasts, and bearing before them a face like the human countenance
in which the image of the Son of Man shone as in a mirror. These are
archangels contemplating the will of God in the desires of their own
intelligences, and displaying the grace of rationality; they glorify the
incarnate Word by figuring in their attributes the mysteries of the
Incarnation. This vision, symbolizing the angelic intelligence, is
consciously and rationally constructed.

Perhaps the same may be said of the second vision of the second Book:[572]

    “Then I saw a most glorious light and in it a human form of sapphire
    hue, all aflame with a most gentle glowing fire; and that glorious
    light was infused in the glowing fire, and the fire was infused in the
    glorious light; and both light and fire transfused that human
    form--all inter-existent as one light, one virtue, and one power.”

This vision of the Trinity, in which the glorious light is the Father, the
human form is the Son, and the fire is the Holy Spirit, may remind the
reader of the closing “vision” of the thirty-third canto of Dante’s
_Paradiso_.

The third Book contains manifold visions of a four-sided edifice set upon
a mountain, and built with a double (_biformis_) wall. Here an infinitude
of symbolic detail illustrates the entire Christian Faith. Observe a part
of the symbolism of the twofold wall: the wall is double (_in duabus
formis_). One of its formae[573] is speculative knowledge, which man
possesses through careful and penetrating investigation of the speculation
of his mind; so that he may be circumspect in all his ways. The other
forma of the wall represents the _homo operans_.

    “This speculative knowledge shines in the brightness of the light of
    day, that through it men may see and consider their acts. This
    brightness is of the human mind carefully looking about itself; and
    this glorious knowledge appears as a white mist permeating the minds
    of the peoples, as quickly as mist is scattered through the air; it is
    light as the light of day, after the brightness of that most glorious
    work which God benignly works in men, to wit, that they shun evil and
    do the good which shines in them as the light of day.... This
    knowledge is speculative, for it is like a mirror (_speculum_) in
    which a man sees whether his face be fair or blotched; thus this
    knowledge views the good and evil in the deed done.”[574]

The _Scivias_ closes with visions of the Last Judgment, splendid, ordered,
tremendous, and rendered audible in hymns rising to the Virgin and to
Christ. Apostles, martyrs, saints chant the refrains of victory which echo
the past militancy of this faithful choir.

       *       *       *       *       *

The visions of Elizabeth of Schönau and Hildegard of Bingen set forth
universal dogmas and convictions. They show the action of the imaginative
and rational faculties and the full use of the acquired knowledge
possessed by the women to whom they came. Such visions spring from the
mind--quite different are those born of love. Emotion dominates the
latter; their motives are subjective; they are personal experiences having
no clear pertinency to the lives of others. If the visions of Hildegard
were object lessons, the blissful ecstasies of Mary of Ognies and Liutgard
of Tongern were specifically their own, very nearly as the intimate
consolation of a wife from a husband, or a lady from her faithful knight,
would be that woman’s and none other’s.

One cannot say that there was no love of God before Jesus was born; still
less that men had not conceived of God as loving them. Nevertheless in
Jesus’ words God became lovable as never before, and God’s love of man was
shown anew, and was anew set forth as the perfect pattern of human love.
In Christ, God offered the sacrifice which afore He had demanded of
Abraham: for “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son.”
That Son carried out the Father’s act: “Greater love hath no man than
this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.” So men learned the
final teaching: “God is love.”

A new love also was aroused by the personality of Jesus. Was this the love
of God or love of man? Rather, it was such as to reveal the two as one. In
Jesus’ teachings, love of God and love of man might not be severed: “As ye
have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it
unto me.” And the love which He inspired for himself was at once a love of
man and love of God.[575] Think of that love, new in the world, with
which, more than with her ointment or her tears, the woman who had been a
sinner bathed the Master’s feet.

This woman saw the Master in the flesh; but the love which was hers was
born again in those who never looked upon His face. Through the Middle
Ages the love of Christ with which saintly women were possessed was as
impulsive as this sinner’s, and also held much resembling human passion.
Their burning faith tended to liquefy to ecstatic experiences. They had
renounced the passionate love of man in order to devote themselves to the
love of Christ; and as their thoughts leapt toward the Bridegroom, the
Church’s Spouse and Lord, their visions sometimes kept at least the colour
of the love for knight or husband which they had abjured.[576]

At the height of the horrors of the Albigensian Crusade, in the year 1212,
Fulco, Bishop of Toulouse, was driven from his diocese by the incensed but
heretical populace. He travelled northward through France, seeking aid
against these foes of Christ, and came to the diocese of Liége. There he
observed with joy the faith and humility of those who were leading a
religious life, and was struck by the devotion of certain saintly women
whose ardour knew no bounds. It was all very different from Toulouse.
“Indeed I have heard you declare that you had gone out of Egypt--your own
diocese--and having passed through the desert, had reached the promised
land--in Liége.”

Jacques de Vitry is speaking. His friend the bishop had asked him to write
of these holy women, who brought such glory to the Church in troubled
times. Jacques was himself a clever Churchman, zealous for the Church’s
interests and his own. He afterwards became Bishop and Cardinal of
Tusculum; and as papal legate consecrated the holy bones of her whom the
Church had decided to canonize, the blessed Mary of Ognies, the paragon of
all these other women who rejoiced the ecclesiastical hearts of himself
and Fulco. Jacques had known her and had been present at her pious death;
and also had witnessed many of the matters of which he is speaking at the
commencement of his _Vita_ of this saint.[577]

Many of these women, continues Jacques, had for Christ spurned carnal
joys, and for Him had despised the riches of this world, in poverty and
humility clinging to their heavenly Spouse.

    “You saw,” says Jacques, again addressing Fulco, “some of these women
    dissolved with such a particular and marvellous love toward God (_tam
    speciali et mirabili in Deum amoris affectione resolutas_) that they
    languished with desire, and for years had rarely been able to rise
    from their cots. They had no other infirmity, save that their souls
    were melted with desire of Him, and, sweetly resting with the Lord, as
    they were comforted in spirit they were weakened in body. They cried
    in their hearts, though from modesty their lips dissimulated:
    “Fulcite me floribus, stipate me malis, quia amore langueo.”[578] The
    cheeks of one were seen to waste away, while her soul was melted with
    the greatness of her love. Another’s flow of tears had made visible
    furrows down her face. Others were drawn with such intoxication of
    spirit that in sacred silence they would remain quiet a whole day,
    ‘while the King was on His couch’ (_i.e._ at meat),[579] with no sense
    or feeling for things without them, so that they could not be roused
    by clamour or feel a blow. I saw another whom for thirty years her
    Spouse had so zealously guarded in her cell, that she could not leave
    it herself, nor could the hands of others drag her out. I saw another
    who sometimes was seized with ecstasy five-and-twenty times a day, in
    which state she was motionless, and on returning to herself was so
    enraptured that she could not keep from displaying her inner joy with
    movements of the body, like David leaping before the Ark. And I saw
    still another who after she had lain for some time dead, before burial
    was permitted by the Lord to return to the flesh, that she might on
    earth do purgatorial penance; and long was she thus afflicted of the
    Lord, sometimes rolling herself in the fire, and in the winter
    standing in frozen water.”[580]

But what need to say more of these, as all their graces are found in one
precious and pre-excellent pearl--and Jacques proceeds to tell the life of
Mary of Ognies. She was born in a village near Namur in Belgium, about the
year 1177. She never took part in games or foolishness with other girls;
but kept her soul free from vanity. Married at fourteen to a young man,
she burned the more to afflict her body, passing the nights in austerities
and prayer. Her husband soon was willing to dwell with her in continence,
himself sustaining her in her holy life, and giving his goods to the poor
for Christ’s sake.

There was nothing more marvellous with Mary than her gift of tears, as
her soul dwelt in the passion of her Lord. Her tears--so says her
biographer--wetted the pavement of the Church or the cloth of the altar.
Her life was one of body-destroying austerities: she went barefoot in the
ice of the winter; often she took no food through the day, and then
watched out the night in prayer. Her body was afflicted and wasted; her
soul was comforted. She had frequent visions, the gift of second sight,
and great power over devils. Once for thirty-five days in silent trance
she rested sweetly with the Lord, only occasionally uttering these words:
“I desire the body of our Lord Jesus Christ” (_i.e._ the Eucharist); and
when she had received it, she turned again to silence.[581] Always she
sought after her Lord: He was her meditation, and example in speech and
deed. She died in the year 1213, at the age of thirty-six. She was called
Mary of Ognies, from the name of the town where a church was dedicated to
her, and where her relics were laid to rest.

       *       *       *       *       *

Emotionally, another very interesting personality was the blessed virgin,
Liutgard of Tongern, a younger contemporary of Mary of Ognies. In
accordance with her heart’s desire, she was providentially protected from
the forceful importunities of her wooers, and became a Benedictine nun.
After some years, however, seeking a more strenuous rule of life, she
entered the Cistercian convent at Aquiria, near Cambray.[582]

Liutgard’s experiences were sense-realizations of her faith, but chiefly
of her love of Christ. Sometimes her senses realized the imagery of the
Apocalypse; as when singing in Church she had a vision of Christ as a
white lamb. The lamb rests a foot on each of her shoulders, sets his mouth
to hers, and draws out sweetest song. Far more frequently she realized
within her heart the burning words of Canticles. Her whole being yearned
continually for the Lord, and sought no other comfort. For five years she
received almost daily visits from the Mother of Christ, as well as from
the Apostles and other saints; the angels were continually with her. Yet
in all these she did not find perfect rest for her spirit, till she found
the Saint of saints, who is ineffably sweeter than them all, even as He is
their sanctifier. Smitten as the bride in Canticles, she is wounded, she
languishes, she pants, she arises; “in the streets” she seeks the Saints
of the New Dispensation, and through “the broad places” the Patriarchs of
the Old Testament. Little by little she passes by them “because He is not
far from every one of us”; she finds Him whom her soul cherishes. She
finds, she holds Him, because He does not send her away; she holds Him by
faith, happy in the seeking, more happy in the holding fast.[583]

There are three couches in Canticles:[584] the first signifies the soul’s
state of penitence; the second its state of warfare; the third the state
of those made perfect in the _vita contemplativa_. On the first couch the
soul is wounded, on the second it is wearied, on the third it is made
glad. The saintly Liutgard sought her Beloved perfectly on the couch of
penitence, and watered it with her tears, although she never had been
stung by mortal sin. On the second couch she sought her Beloved, battling
against the flesh with fasting and endeavour; with poverty and humility
she overcame the world, and cast down the devil with prayer and remedial
tears. On the third couch, which is the couch of quiet, she perfectly
sought her Beloved, since she did not lean upon the angels or saints, but
through contemplation rested sweetly only upon the couch of the Spouse.
This couch is called flowery (_floridus_) from the vernal quality of its
virtues; and it is called “ours” because common to husband and wife: in it
she may say, “My Beloved is mine and I am His,” and, “I am my Beloved’s,
and His desire is towards me.” Why not say that? exclaims the biographer,
quoting the lines:

  “Nescit amor Dominum; non novit amor dominari,
   Quamlibet altus amet, non amat absque pari.”

Thenceforth her spirit was absorbed in God, as drops of water in a jar of
wine. When asked how she was wont to see the visage of Christ in
contemplation, she answered: “In a moment there appears to me a splendour
inconceivable, and as lightning I see the ineffable beauty of His
glorification; the sight of which I could not endure in this present life,
did it not instantly pass from my view. A mental splendour remains, and
when I seek in that what I saw for an instant, I do not find it.”

A little more than a year before her death the Lord Jesus Christ appeared
to her, with the look as of one who applauds, and said: “The end of thy
labour is at hand: I do not wish thee longer to be separated from me. This
year I require three things of thee: first, that thou shouldst render
thanks for all thy benefits received; secondly, that thou pour thyself out
in prayer to the Father for my sinners; and thirdly, that, without any
other solicitude, thou burn to come to me, panting with desire.”[585]

The religious yearning which with Liutgard touches sense-realization,
seems transformed completely into the latter in the extraordinary German
book of one Sister Mechthild, called of Magdeburg.[586] The authoress
probably was born not far from that town about the year 1212. To judge
from her work, she belonged to a good family and was acquainted with the
courtly literature of the time. She speaks of her loving parents, from
whom she tore herself away at the age of twenty-three, and entered the
town of Magdeburg, there to begin a life of rapt religious mendicancy, for
which Francis had set the resistless example. Sustained by love for her
Lord, she led a despised and homeless life of hardship and austerity for
thirty years. At length bodily infirmities brought her to rest in a
Cistercian cloister for nuns at Helfta, near Eisleben, where ruled a wise
and holy abbess, the noble Gertrude of Hackeborn. Here Mechthild remained
until her death in 1277. For many years it had been her custom to write
down her experiences of the divine love in a book which she called _The
Flowing Light of God_, in which she also wrote the prophetic
denunciations, revealed to her to be pronounced before men, especially in
the presence of those who were great in what should be God’s holy
Church.[587]

“Frau Minne (Lady Love) you have taken from me the world’s riches and
honour,” cries Mechthild.[588] Love’s ecstasy came upon her when she
abandoned the world and cast herself upon God alone. Then first her soul’s
eyes beheld the beautiful manhood of her Lord Jesus Christ, also the Holy
Trinity, her own guardian angel, and the devil who tempted her through the
vainglory of her visions and through unchaste desire. She defended herself
with the agony of our Lord. For Mechthild, hell is the “city whose name is
eternal hate.” With her all blessedness is love, as her book will now
disclose.

Cries the Soul to Love (_Minne_) her guardian: “Thou hast hunted and
taken, bound and wounded me; never shall I be healed.”

Love answers: “It was my pleasure to hunt thee; to take thee captive was
my desire; to bind thee was my joy. I drove Almighty God from His throne
in heaven, and took His human life from Him, and then with honour gave
Him back to His Father; how couldst thou, poor worm, save thyself from
me!”[589]

What then will love’s omnipotence exact from this poor Soul? Merely all.
Drawn by yearning, the Soul comes flying, like an eagle toward the sun.
“See, how she mounts to us, she who wounded me”--it is the Lord that is
speaking. “She has thrown away the ashes of the world, overcome lust, and
trodden the lion of pride beneath her feet--thou eager huntress of love,
what bringest thou to me?”

“Lord, I bring thee my treasure, which is greater than mountains, wider
than the world, deeper than the sea, higher than the clouds, more
beautiful than the sun, more manifold than the stars, and outweighs the
riches of the earth.”

“Image of my Divinity, ennobled by my manhood, adorned by my Holy Spirit,
how is thy treasure called?”

“Lord, it is called my heart’s desire: I have withdrawn it from the world,
withheld it from myself, forbidden it all creatures. I can carry it no
farther; Lord, where shall I lay it?”

“Thou shalt lay thy heart’s desire nowhere else than in my divine heart
and on my human breast. There only wilt thou be comforted and kissed with
my spirit.”

Love casts out fear and difference, and lifts the Soul to equality with
the divine Lover. Through the passion of love the Soul may pass into the
Beloved’s being, and become one with Him: “He, thy life, died from love
for thy sake; now love Him so that thou mayest long to die for His sake.
Then shalt thou burn for evermore unquenched, like a shining spark in the
great fire of the Living Majesty.”

These are passion’s vision-flights. But God himself points out the way by
which the Soul that loves shall come to Him: she--the Soul--shall come,
surmounting the need of penitence and penance, surmounting love of the
world, conflicts with the devil, carnal appetite, and the promptings of
her own will. Thereupon, exhausted, she shall yearn resistlessly for that
beautiful Youth (Christ). He will be moved to come to meet her. Now her
guardians (the Senses) bid her attire herself. “Love, whither shall I
hence?” she cries. The Senses make answer: “We hear the murmur; the Prince
will come to meet you in the dew and the sweet-bird song. Courage, Lady,
He will not tarry.”

The Soul clothes herself in a garment of humility, and over it draws the
white robe of chastity, and goes into the wood. There nightingales sing of
union with God, and strains of divine knowledge meet her ears. She then
strives to follow in festal dance (_i.e._ to imitate) the example of the
prophets, the chaste humility of the Virgin, the virtues of Jesus, and the
piety of His saints. Then comes the Youth and says: “Maiden, thou hast
danced holily, even as my saints.”

The Soul answers: “I cannot dance unless thou leadest. If thou wouldst
have me spring aloft, sing thou: and I will spring--into love, and from
love to knowledge, and from knowledge to ecstasy, above all human sense.”

The Youth speaks: “Maiden, thy dance of praise is well performed. Since
now thou art tired, thou shalt have thy will with the Virgin’s Son. Come
to the brown shades at midday, to the couch of love, and there shalt thou
cool thyself with Him.”

Then the Soul speaks to her guardians, the Senses: “I am tired with the
dance; leave me, for I must go where I may cool myself.” The Senses bid
her cool herself in the tears of love shed by St. Mary Magdalen.

“Hush, good sirs: ye know not what I mean. Unhindered, for a little I
would drink the unmixed wine.”

“Lady, in the Virgin’s chastity the great love is reached.”

“That may be--with me it is not the highest.”

“You, Lady, might cool yourself in martyr-blood.”

“I have been martyred many a day.”

“In the counsel of Father Confessors, the pure live gladly.”

“Good is their counsel, but it helps not here.”

“Great safety would you find in the Apostles’ wisdom.”

“Wisdom I have myself--to choose the best.”

“Lady, bright are the angels, and lovely in love’s hue; to cool yourself,
be lifted up with them.”

“The bliss of angels brings me love’s woe, unless I see their lord, my
Bridegroom.”

“Then cool you in the hard, holy life that John the Baptist showed.”

“I have tried that painful toil; my love passes beyond that.”

“Lady, would you with love cool yourself, approach the Child in the
Virgin’s lap.”

“That is a childish love, to quiet children with. I am a full-grown bride
and will have my Bridegroom.”

“Lady, there we should be smitten blind. The Godhead is so fiery hot.
Heaven’s glow and all the holy lights flow from His divine breath and
human mouth by the counsel of the Holy Spirit.”

But the Soul feeling its nature and its affinity with God, through love,
makes answer boldly: “The fish cannot drown in the water, nor the bird
sink in the air, nor gold perish in the flame, where it gains its bright
clarity and colour. God has granted to all creatures to follow their
natures; how can I withstand mine? To God will I go, who is my Father by
nature, my Brother through His humility, my Bridegroom through love, and I
am His forever.”[590] Not long after this the Soul’s rapture bursts forth
in song:

  “Ich sturbe gern von minnen, moehte es mir geschehen,
   Denn jenen den ich minnen, den han ich gesehen
   Mit minen liehten ougen in miner sele stehen.”[591]

Mechthild’s book is heavy with passion--with God’s passionate love for the
Soul, and the Soul’s passionate response. No speech between lovers could
outdo the converse between them. God calls the Soul, sweet dove, dear
heart, my queen; and with like phrase the quivering Soul responds upward,
as it were, to the great countenance glowing above it. Throughout, there
is passion and impatient yearning--or satisfaction. The pain of the Soul
severed, not yet a bride, is deeper than the abyss, bitterer than the
world; but her joy shall exceed that of seraphs, she, Bride of the
Trinity.[592]

The Soul must surrender herself, and become sheer desire for God.[593]
God’s own yearning has begotten this desire. As glorious prince, as
knight, as emperor, God comes; also in other forms:

  “I come to my Beloved
   As dew upon the flowers.”[594]

For each other are these lovers wounded, for each other these lovers
bleed, and each to the other is joy unspeakable and unforgettable. From
the wafer of the holy Eucharist, the Lamb looks out upon me “with such
sweet eyes that I never can forget.”

  “His eyes in my eyes; His heart in my heart,
   His soul in my soul,
   Embraced and untroubled.”[595]

No need to say that in the end love draws the Soul to heaven’s gate, which
the Lord opens to her. All is marvellous; but, far more, all is love: the
Lord kisses her--what else than love can the soul thereafter know or
feel.[596]

Mechthild, of course, is what is called a “mystic,” and a forerunner
indeed of many another--Eckhart, Suso, Tauler--of German blood. With
direct and utter passion she realizes God’s love; also she feels and
thinks in symbols, which, with her, never cease to be the things they
literally are. They remain flesh and blood, while also signifying the
mysteries of God. Jesus was a man, Mechthild a woman. Her love not only
uses lovers’ speech, but actually holds affinity with a maid’s love for
her betrothed. If it is the Soul’s love of God, it is also the woman’s
love of Him who overhung her from the Cross.




CHAPTER XX

THE SPOTTED ACTUALITY

    THE TESTIMONY OF INVECTIVE AND SATIRE; ARCHBISHOP RIGAUD’S _REGISTER_;
    ENGELBERT OF COLOGNE; POPULAR CREDENCES


The preceding sketches of monastic qualities and personalities illustrate
the ideals of monasticism. That monastic practices should fall away,
corruptions enter, and when expelled inevitably return, was to be
expected. The cause lay in those qualities of human nature which may be
either power or frailty. The acquisitive, self-seeking, lusting qualities
of men lie at the base of life, and may be essential to achievement and
advance. Yet a higher interpretation of values will set the spiritual
above the earthly, and beatify the self-denial through which man
ultimately attains his highest self, under the prompting of his vision of
the divine. The sight of this far goal is given to few men steadily, and
the multitude, whether cowled or clad in fashions of the world, pursue
more immediate desires.

So human nature saw to it that monasticism should constantly exhibit
frivolity instead of earnestness, gluttony instead of fasting, avarice
instead of alms-giving, anger and malice instead of charity and love,
lustfulness instead of chastity, and, instead of meekness, pride and
vain-glory. The particular forms assumed by these corruptions depended on
the conditions of mediaeval life and the position in it occupied by monks.

It has already been said that the standard of conduct for the secular
clergy was the same in principle as that for monks, though with allowance
made for the stress of a life of service in the cure of souls.[597] But
always the cloister and the hermitage were looked upon as the
abiding-places where one stood the best chance to save one’s soul: the
life of the layman--merchant, usurer, knight--was fraught with instant
peril; that of the secular clergy was also perilous, especially when they
held high office. Dread of ecclesiastical preferment might be well
founded; the reluctance to be a bishop was often real. This sentiment,
like all feelings in the Middle Ages, took the form of a story, with the
usual vision to certify the moral of the tale:

    “It is told of a certain prior of Clairvaux, Geoffrey by name, that
    when he had been elected Bishop of Tournai, and Pope Eugene as well as
    the blessed Bernard, his own abbot, was urging him to take the office,
    he cast himself down at the feet of the blessed Bernard and his
    clergy, and lay prone in the form of a cross, and said: ‘An expelled
    monk I may be, if you drive me out; but I will never be a bishop.’ At
    a later time, as this same prior lay breathing his last, a monk who
    loved him well adjured him in the name of God to bring him news of his
    state beyond the grave, if God would permit it. Some time after, as
    the monk was praying prostrate before the altar, his friend appeared
    and said that it was he. When the monk asked him how he was faring,
    ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘by the grace of God. Yet verily it has been
    revealed to me by the blessed Trinity, that had I been in the number
    of bishops I should have been in the number of the reprobate and
    damned.’”[598]

Through the Middle Ages, Church dignities everywhere were secularized
through the vast possessions, and corresponding responsibilities,
attaching to them. The clerical situation varied in different lands, yet
with a like result. The Italian clergy were secularized through
participation in civic and papal business, the German through their
estates and principalities. In France clerical secularization was most
typically mediaeval, because there the functions and fortunes of the
higher clergy were most inextricably involved in feudalism. Monasteries
and bishoprics were as feudal fiefs: abbots as well as bishops commonly
held lands from an over-lord, and were themselves lords of their
sub-vassals who held lands from them. To the former they owed rent, or
aid, or service; to the latter they owed protection. In either case they
might have to go or send their men to war. They also managed and guarded
their own lands, like feudal nobles, _vi et armis_. When the estates of a
monastery, for example, lay in different places, the abbot might exercise
authority over them through a local potentate, and might also have such a
protector (_vîdame_, _avoué_, _advocatus_) for the home abbey. There was
always a general feeling, often embodied in law or custom, that a Church
dignitary should fight by another’s sword and spear. But this did not
prevent bishop and abbot in countless instances in France, England,
Germany, and Spain, from riding mail-clad under their seignorial banner at
the head of their forces.[599]

Episcopal lands and offices were not inherited:[600] yet with rare
exceptions the bishops came from the noble, fighting, hunting class. They
were noblemen first and ecclesiastics afterwards. The same was true of the
abbots. Noble-born, they became dignitaries of the world through
investiture with the broad lands of the monastery, and then administrators
by reason of the temporal functions involved. As with the episcopal or
monastic heads, so with canons and monks. They, too, for the most part
were well-born. They also were good, bad, or indifferent, warlike or
clerkly, devoted to study, abandoned to pleasure, or following the one and
the other sparingly. Many a holy meditative monk there was; and many a
saintly parish priest, the stay of piety and justice in his village. The
rude times, the ceaseless murder and harrying, uncertainty and danger
everywhere, seemed to beget such holy lives.

Invectives, satires, histories, and records, bear witness to the state of
the clergy. All diatribes are to be taken with allowance. Whoever, for
example, reads Peter Damiani’s _Liber Gomorrhianus_ against the foulness
of the clergy, must bear in mind the writer’s fiercely ascetic temper, the
warfare which the stricter element in the Church was then waging against
simony and priestly concubinage, and the monkish phraseology so common to
ecclesiastical indictment of frivolity and vice.

One cannot quote comfortably from the _Gomorrhianus_. St. Bernard
furnishes more decorous denunciation:

    “Woe unto this generation, for its leaven of the Pharisees which is
    hypocrisy!--if that should be called hypocrisy which cannot be hidden
    because of its abundance, and through impudence does not seek to hide!
    To-day, foul rottenness crawls through the whole body of the Church.
    If a heretic foe should arise openly, he would be cast out and
    withered; or if the enemy raged madly, the Church might hide herself
    from him. But now whom shall she cast out, or from whom hide herself?
    All are friends and all are foes; all necessary and all adverse; all
    of her own household and none pacific; all are her neighbours and all
    seek their own interest. Ministers of Christ, they serve Antichrist.
    They go clothed in the good things of the Lord and render Him no
    honour. Hence that _éclat_ of the courtesan which you daily see, that
    theatric garb, that regal state. Hence the gold-trapped reins and
    saddles and spurs--for the spurs shine brighter than the altars. Hence
    the splendid tables laden with food and goblets; hence the feastings
    and drunkenness, the guitars, the lyres and the flutes; hence the
    swollen wine-presses and the storehouses heaped and running over from
    this one into that, and the jars of perfumes, and the stuffed purses.
    ’Tis for such matters that they wish to be and are the over-seers of
    churches, deacons, archdeacons, bishops, and archbishops. For neither
    do these offices come by merit, but through that sort of business
    which walketh in darkness!”[601]

Such rhetoric gives glimpses of the times, but also springs from that
temper which is always crying _hora novissima, tempora pessima_.
Invectives of this nature have their deepest source in the religious
sense of the ineradicable opposition between this world and the kingdom of
heaven. Yet luxury did in fact pervade the Church of Bernard’s time, and
simony was as wide as western Europe. This crime was the offspring of the
entire social state; it was part and parcel of the feudal system and the
whole matter of lay investitures. One sees that simony was no extraneous
stain to be washed off from the body ecclesiastic, but rather an element
of its actual constitution. The eradication had to come through social and
ecclesiastical evolution, rather than spasmodic reformation.

One may turn from the invectives of the great saint to forms of satire
more frankly literary. The Latin poems “commonly attributed to Walter
Mapes”[602] satirize with biting ridicule, through the mouth of “Bishop
Golias,” the avarice and venality, the gluttony and lubricity of the
Church, secular and monastic. In a quite different kind of poem the satire
directs itself against the rapacity of Rome. She, head of the Church and
Caput Mundi, is shown to be like Scylla and Charybdis and the Sirens.[603]
These powerful verses anticipate the denunciation of the Roman papacy by
the good Germans Walther von der Vogelweide and Freidank,[604] and, a
century later, in the _Vision of Piers Ploughman_.

In this outcry against papal rapacity France was not silent. Most extreme
is the “Bible” of Guiot de Provens: it satirizes the entire age, “siècle
puant et orrible.” As it turns toward the papacy it cries:

  “Ha! Rome, Rome,
   Encor ociras tu maint home!”

The cardinals are stuffed with avarice and simony and evil living; without
faith or religion, they sell God and His Mother, and betray us and their
fathers. Rome sucks and devours us; Rome kills and destroys all. Guiot’s
voice is raised against the entire Church; neither the monks nor the
seculars escape--bishops, priests, canons, the black monks and the white,
Templars and Hospitallers, nuns and abbesses, all bad.[605]

One might extend indefinitely the list of these invectives, which, like
the corruptions denounced by them, were common to all mediaeval centuries.
From the testimony of more definite accounts one perceives the rudeness
and cruelty of mediaeval life, in which the Church likewise was involved.
In order to rise, it had to lift the social fabric. To this end many of
its children struggled nobly, devoting themselves and sometimes yielding
up their lives for the betterment of the society in which their lots were
cast.

One of these capable children of the Church who did his duty in the high
ecclesiastical station to which he was called was Eude Rigaud, or Odo
Rigaldus, Archbishop of Rouen from 1248 to 1275, the year of his death. He
was a scion of a noble house whose fiefs lay in the neighbourhood of
Brie-Comte-Robert (Seine-et-Marne). In 1236 he joined the Franciscans, and
then studied at Paris under Alexander of Hales, one of the Order’s great
theologians. His first fame came from his preaching. As archbishop, he was
a reformer, and abetted the endeavours of Pope Gregory IX. He was also a
counsellor of Saint Louis, and followed him upon that last crusade from
which the king did not return alive.[606]

The good archbishop was a man of method, and kept a record of his official
acts. This monumental document exists, the _Register_ of Rigaud’s
visitations among the monks and secular clergy within his wide
jurisdiction, between the years 1248 and 1269.[607] Consisting of entries
made at the time, it is a mirror of actual conditions, presumably similar
to those existing in other parts of France. Rigaud visited many
monasteries and parishes where he found nothing to reform, and merely made
a memorandum of having been there; wherever abuses were found, the entry
expands to a statement of them and the measures taken for their remedy.
Consequently one may not infer that the blameworthy or abominable
conditions recorded in the particular instance obtained universally in
Normandy. Occasionally Rigaud records in more detail the good condition of
some monastery. A few instructive extracts may be given.

    “Calends of October (1248). We were again at Ouville (Ovilla). We
    found that the prior wanders about when he ought to stay in the
    cloister; he is not in the cloister one day in five. Item, he is a
    drunkard, and of such vile drunkenness that he sometimes lies out in
    the fields because of it. Item, he frequents feasts and drinking-bouts
    with laymen. Item, he is incontinent, and is accused in respect to a
    certain woman of Grainville, and also with the wife of Robertot, and
    also with a woman of Rouen named Agnes. Item, brother Geoffrey was
    publicly accused with respect to the wife of Walter of Esquaquelon who
    recently had a child from him. Item, they do not keep proper accounts
    of their revenues. We ordered that they should keep better
    accounts.”[608]

Such an entry needs no comment. But it is illuminating to observe the
strictness or leniency with which Rigaud treats offences. Doubtless he was
guided by what he thought he could enforce.

Apparently near the Ouville priory, the archbishop was scandalized by the
priest of St. Vedasti de Depedale, who was convicted of taking part in the
rough ball-play, common in Normandy, in which game, as might easily
happen, he had injured some one. “He took oath before us that if again
convicted he would hold himself to have resigned from his church.”[609]
Rigaud did not approve of these somewhat too merry games for his parish
priests, who were not angels. The archbishop finds of the priest of
Lortiey “that he but rarely wears his capa, that he does not confess to
the _penitentiarius_, that he is gravely accused concerning two women, by
whom he has had many children, and he is drunken.”[610]

Rigaud enters the cases of other parish priests as follows:

    “We found that the priest of Nigella was accused as to a woman, and of
    being engaged in trade and of treating his father despitefully, who is
    patron of the church which he holds, and that with drawn sword he
    fought with a certain knight, with a riotous following of relatives
    and friends. Item, the priest of Basinval is accused as to a woman
    whom he takes about with him to the market-places and taverns.
    Likewise the priest of Vieux-Rouen is accused of incontinency, and
    goes about wearing a sword in shameless garb. Likewise the priest of
    Cotigines is a dicer and plays at quoits and frequents taverns, and is
    incontinent, and although corrected as to these matters,
    perseveres.”[611]

Sometimes accusations were brought to the archbishop by the suffering
parishioners:

    “Calends of August (1255). Passing through the village of Brai, the
    parishioners of the church there accused the rector of the church in
    our presence. They said that he went about in the night through the
    village with arms, that he was quarrelsome and scurrilous and abusive
    to his parishioners, and was incontinent.”

Summoning this priest before his ecclesiastical tribunal, the archbishop
says, “We admonished him to abstain from such ill-conduct; or that
otherwise we should proceed against him.”[612]

Either this priest or another of “Brayo subtus Baudemont,” named Walter,
was subsequently deprived of his priesthood on his own confession as
follows:

    “He confessed that the accusation against him concerning a woman of
    his parish, which he had denied under oath, was supported by truth;
    item, he confessed in regard to a waxen image made to be used in
    divining; he confessed (various other incontinencies and his
    fatherhood of various children); item, he confessed his ill-repute for
    usury and base gain; he admitted that he had led the dances at the
    nuptials of a certain prostitute whom he had married.”[613]

Rigaud continually records accusations against parish priests, commonly
for incontinency and drunkenness and generally unbecoming conduct, and
sometimes for homicide.[614] But his own examinations kept out many a
turbulent and ignorant clerk, presented by the lay patron for the
benefice; and so he prevented improper inductions as he might. The
_Register_ gives a number of instances of crass illiteracy in these
candidates, a matter to cause no surprise, for the feudal patrons of the
living naturally presented their relatives. Some of these candidates
appealed to Rome from the archbishop’s refusal, probably without
success.[615]

A monk might be as bad as any parish priest:

    “Brother Thomas ... wore gold rings. He went about in armour, by
    night, and without any monastic habit, and kept bad company. He
    wounded many clergy and laity at night, and was himself wounded,
    losing a thumb. We commanded the abbot to expel him; or that otherwise
    we should seize the place and expel the monks.”[616]

Life in a nunnery was the feminine counterpart of life in a monastery.
There were good and bad nunneries, and nuns good and bad, serious and
frivolous. Many had the foibles, and were addicted to the diversions,
comforts, or fancies of their sex: they were always wanting to keep dogs
and birds, and have locks to their chests!

    “Nones of May (1250). We visited the Benedictine convent of nuns of
    St. Sauveur at Evreux. There were sixty-one nuns there. Sometimes they
    drank, not in the refectory or infirmary, but in their chambers. They
    kept little dogs, squirrels, and birds. We ordered that all such
    things be removed. They do not observe the _regula_. They eat flesh
    needlessly. They have locked chests. We directed the abbess to inspect
    their chests often and unexpectedly, or to take off the locks. We
    directed the abbess to take away their girdles ornamented with
    ironwork and their fancy pouches, and the silk cushions they were
    working.”[617]

Again, the picture is more terrible:

    “Nones of July (1249). We visited the priory of Villa Arcelli.
    Thirty-three nuns are there and three lay sisters. They confess and
    communicate six times a year. Only four of the nuns have taken the
    vows according to the _regula_. Many of them had cloaks of rabbit-fur,
    or made from the fur of hares and foxes. In the infirmary they eat
    flesh needlessly. Silence is not observed; nor do they keep within the
    cloister. Johanna of Aululari once went out and lived with some one,
    by whom she had a child; and sometimes she goes out to see that child:
    she is also suspected with a certain man named Gaillard. Isabella la
    Treiche (?) is a fault-finder, murmuring against the prioress and
    others. The stewardess is suspected with a man named Philip de
    Vilarceau. The prioress is too remiss; she does not reprove. Johanna
    de Alto Villari kept going out alone with a man named Gayllard, and
    within a year had a child by him. The subprioress is suspected with
    Thomas the carter; Idonia, her sister, with Crispinatus; and the Prior
    of Gisorcium is always coming to the house for Idonia. Philippa of
    Rouen is suspected with a priest of Suentre, of the diocese of
    Chartres; Marguarita, the treasuress, with Richard de Genville, a
    clerk. Agnes de Fontenei, with a priest of Guerrevile, diocese of
    Chartres. The Tooliere (?) with Sir Andrew de Monciac, a knight. All
    wear their hair improperly and perfume their veils. Jacqueline came
    back pregnant from visiting a certain chaplain, who was expelled from
    his house on account of this. Agnes de Monsec was suspected with the
    same. Emengarde and Johanna of Alto Villari beat each other. The
    prioress is drunk almost any night; she does not rise for matins, nor
    eat in the refectory or correct excesses.”

The archbishop thereupon issues an order, regulating this extraordinary
convent, and prescribing a better way of living. He threatens to lay a
heavier hand on them if they do not obey.[618] This was what a loosely
regulated nunnery might come to. We close with the sketch of a good
monastery which had an evil abbot:

    “Nones of August (1258). Through God’s grace we visited the monastery
    of Jumiéges. Forty-three monks were there, and twenty-one outside. All
    of these who dwelt there, except eleven, were priests (_sacerdotes_).
    We found, by God’s grace, the convent well-ordered in its services and
    observances, yet greatly troubled by what was said of the abbot within
    and without its walls. For opinion was sinister regarding him, and
    there, in full chapter, brother Peter of Neubourg, a monk of the
    monastery, leaping up, made shameful charges against him. And he read
    the following schedule: I, brother Peter of Neubourg, a monk of
    Jumiéges, in my name and in the name of the monastery and for the
    benefit of the monastery, bring before you, Reverend Father,
    Archbishop of Rouen, for an accusation against Richard, Abbot of
    Jumiéges, that he is a forger (_falsarius_) because he wrote or caused
    to be written certain letters in the name of our convent, falsely
    alleging our approval of them although we were absent and ignorant;
    and secretly by night he sealed them with the convent’s seal....”

The letters related to an important controversy in which the monastery was
involved. Monk Peter offers to prove his case. A day is set for the
hearing. But, instead, the very next day, in order to avoid scandal, the
archbishop called the abbot before him and his counsellors; and

    “We admonished him specially regarding the following matters: To wit:
    that he should not keep dogs and birds of chase; that he should send
    strolling players away from his premises; that he should abstain from
    extravagant expenses; that he should not eat in his own chambers; that
    he should keep from consorting with women altogether; that he should
    order his household decently; that he should lease out the farms as
    well as might be; that he should not burden the monks unduly; that he
    should be more in the convent with them, and bear himself more
    soberly. He made promises as to all these matters and took oath upon
    holy relics that if he failed to obey our admonition he should be held
    to do whatever we should decree in the premises.”[619]

Rigaud seems to have been lenient here, but may have known the wisest
course to take.

A peaceful death terminated Rigaud’s long career. We may leave his diocese
of Rouen, and travel north-easterly to the German archiepiscopal dukedom
of Cologne for a very different example of a brave prelate who brought
death upon himself.

The man who was chosen Archbishop of Cologne in 1216 was of the highest
birth. It was Engelbert, son of Count Engelbert of Berg. A young nobleman,
related by blood to the local powers, lay and ecclesiastic, and destined
for Church dignities, would be quickly given benefices. Engelbert received
such, and also was appointed Provost of the Cathedral. Strong of body,
rich, he led a boisterous martial life, and took a truculent part in the
political dissensions which were undoing the German realm. With his
cousin, the Archbishop Adolph, he went over to the side of Philip of
Suavia. For this the archbishop and his provost were deposed and
excommunicated by Pope Innocent III. There ensued years of turbulence and
fighting, during which Engelbert’s hand followed his passions. But with
the turning of events in 1208 he was reconciled to the Pope, restored to
his offices, and went crusading against the Albigenses in atonement for
his sins. He stood by the young Frederick, then favoured by Innocent, and
after some intervening years of proof, was, with general approval, elected
Archbishop of Cologne. He was about thirty-one years old.

There had been power and bravery in the man from the beginning; and his
faculties gained poise and gathered purpose through the stormy springtime
of his life. Now he stood forth prince-bishop, feudal duke; a man strong
of arm and clear of vision, steadfast against the violence of his brother
nobles who oppressed the churches and cloisters within their lordships.
The weak found him a rock of defence. Says his biographer, Caesar of
Heisterbach:

    “He was a defender of the afflicted and a hammer of tyrants,
    magnanimous and meek, lofty and affable, stern and gentle, dissembling
    for a time, and when least expected girding himself for vengeance.
    With the bishopric he had received the spiritual sword, and the
    material sword with the dukedom. He used either weapon against the
    rebellious, excommunicating some and crushing some by war.”

Under him archbishopric and dukedom prospered, their well-managed revenues
increased, palaces and churches rose. No mightier prince of the Church, no
stronger, juster ruler could be found. Said Pope Honorius after
Engelbert’s death: “All men in Germany feared me from fear of him.” From
the lay and German side is heard the hearty voice of Walther von der
Vogelweide, no friend of priests! “Worthy Bishop of Cologne, happy should
you be! You have well served the realm, and served it so that your praise
rises and waves on high. Master of princes! if your might weighs hard on
evil cowards, deem that as nothing! King’s guardian, high is your state,
unequalled Chancellor!”[620]

Archbishop of Cologne, duke of its double dukedom, and Regent of the
German realm, Engelbert was well-nigh Germany’s greatest figure during
these years. If his arm was strong, his also was the spirit of counsel and
wisdom. And although bearing himself as prince and ruler, he had within
him the devotion and humility of a true bishop. Said one of Engelbert’s
chaplains, speaking to the Abbot of Heisterbach: “Although my lord seems
as of the world, within he is not as he appears outwardly. Know that he
has many secret comfortings from God.”

The iron course of Engelbert’s life brought queryings to the monkish mind
of his biographer. Caesar felt that it was not easy for any bishop to be
saved; how much harder was it for a statesman-warrior-prelate so to
conduct himself in the warfare of this world as to attain at last “the
peace of divine contemplation.” Not thither did such a career seem to
lead! But there was a way, or at least an exit, which surely opened upon
heaven’s gate. This was the purple steep, the _purpureum ascensum_, of
martyrdom. Caesar was not alone in thinking thus, as to the saving close
of Engelbert’s career; for a devout and learned priest, who in earlier
years had been co-canon with Engelbert, said to Caesar after the
archbishop’s murder: “I do not think there was another way through which a
man so placed (_in statu tali positus_) could have entered the door of the
kingdom of heaven, which is narrow.”

Caesar tells the story of this martyrdom in all its causes and details of
plot. That plot succeeded because it was the envenomed culmination of the
hatred for the archbishop felt by the nobles--bishops among them too--whom
he restrained with his authority and unhesitating hand. Frederic, Count of
Isenburg, a kinsman of Engelbert as well as of the former archbishop, was
the feudal warden of the nunnery of Essen, which he greedily oppressed.
The abbess turned to Engelbert, as she had to his predecessor. The
archbishop hesitated to proceed against a relative. So the abbess appealed
to Rome. Papal letters came back causing Engelbert to take the matter up.
He acted with forbearance and generosity; for he even offered to make up
from his own revenues any loss the count might sustain from acting justly
toward the nunnery. In vain. Frederic, so we read, would have none of his
interference. The devil hardened his heart; and he began to incite his
friends and kinsmen (who were also the kin of Engelbert) to a treacherous
attack upon the man they could not openly withstand.

Rumours of the plot were in the air. Said a monk of Heisterbach to his
abbot: “Lord, if you have any business with the archbishop, do it quickly,
for his death is near.” Engelbert himself was not unwarned. A letter came
to him revealing the matter. Upon reading it, he threw it in the fire. Yet
he told its contents to his friend the Bishop of Minden, who was present.
Said the latter: “Have a care for thyself, my lord, for God’s sake, and
not for thyself alone, but for the welfare of your church and the safety
of the whole land.”

The archbishop answered: “Dangers are all about me, and what I should do
the Lord knows and not I. Woe is me, if I keep quiet! Yet if I should
accuse them of this matter, they would complain to every one that I was
fastening the crime of parricide on them. From this hour I commit my body
and soul to the divine care.”

    “Then taking the bishop alone into his chapel, he began to confess all
    his sins from his very youth, with a shower of tears that wetted all
    his breast, and, as we hope, washed the stains from his heart. And
    when the Lord of Minden said: ‘I fear there is still something on thy
    conscience which thou hast not told me,’ he answered: ‘The Lord knows
    that I have concealed nothing consciously.’ But thinking over his sins
    more fully, the next morning he took his confessor again into the same
    chapel and with meek and contrite soul and floods of tears confessed
    everything that had recurred to his mind. Then his conscience being
    clear, he said fearlessly: ‘Now let God’s will regarding me be done.’

    “In the meanwhile some one was knocking at the door of the chapel. The
    archbishop would not let it be opened because his eyes were wet with
    tears. But the knocking continued, and it was announced that the
    bishops of Osnabrück and Münster (brothers of Count Frederic) were
    there. After he had dried his eyes and wiped his face, he allowed them
    to be shown in, and said when they had entered: ‘You lords both are
    kin of mine, and I have injured you in nothing, as you know well, but
    have advanced your interests, as I might, and your brother’s also. And
    look you, from all sides by word and letter I hear that your brother
    Count Frederic, whom I have loved heartily and never harmed, is
    devising ill to me and seeks to kill me.’

    “They protested, trembling in their deceit: ‘Lord, may this never,
    never, be! You need have no fear; such a thought has never entered his
    heart. We all have been honoured and enriched and lifted up by you.’
    Which last was true.”

This was after the festival of All Saints in the first days of November
1225; and Count Frederic, the better to conceal his purpose, came and
accepted the archbishop’s terms. Together they set out from Cologne, the
count knowing that the now unsuspecting Engelbert would stop the next day
to dedicate a church at Swelm. So it turned out, and the count took that
opportunity to excuse himself and rode off to set his men in ambush. Just
then a widow rose up from the roadside, and demanded judgment as to a fief
withheld from her. At once the archbishop dismounted, and took his seat as
duke to hear the cause. It went against the widow, and in favour of him
who sat as judge. But he said: “Lady, this fief which you demand is taken
from you by decree and adjudged to me. But for the sake of God, pitying
your distress, I relinquish it to you.”

The archbishop rode on. About midday Frederic came up again to see which
way he was taking. Engelbert invited the count to pass the night with him.
But he declined on some pretext, and rode away. The archbishop and his
company proceeded on their road until the hour of vespers. Vespers were
said, and again the count appeared. Observing him, a nobleman in
Engelbert’s train said: “My lord, this coming and going of the count looks
suspicious. For the third time he is approaching, and now not as before on
his palfrey but on his war-horse. I advise you to mount your war-horse
too.”

But the archbishop said that would be too noticeable, and there was
nothing to fear. As the count drew near, they saw that the colour had left
his face. The archbishop spoke to him: “Now, kinsman, I am sure you will
stay with me.” He answered nothing, and they went on together. Suspicious
and alarmed, some of the clergy and some of the knights withdrew, so that
but a small company remained; for a good part of the episcopal household
with the cooks had gone ahead to prepare the night’s lodgings.

It was dusk as they drew near the place of ambush. The count grew
agitated, and was blaming himself to his followers for planning to kill
his lord and kinsman, but they egged him on. Now the foot of the Gevelberg
was reached, and the count said as they began to ascend, “My lord, this is
our path.” “May the Lord protect us,” replied Engelbert, for he was not
without suspicion.

The company was entering the hollow way leading over the summit of the
mountain, when suddenly the followers of Frederic, who were ahead, turned
on them, and others leaped from hiding, while a shrill whistle sounded,
startling the horses. “My lord, mount your war-horse; death is at the
door,” cried a knight. It was indeed. The archbishop’s company made no
resistance, except the faithful noble who first had scented danger. The
rest fled while the murderers rushed upon Engelbert, unable to turn in the
narrow way, and struck at him with swords and daggers. One seized him by
the cloak and the two rolled together on the ground; but the strong and
active prelate dragged himself and his antagonist out of the roadway into
a thicket. There he was again set upon by the mad crew, urged on by the
count, and was hacked and stabbed to death. He breathed his last beneath
an oak ten paces from the roadway.

There is no need to recount the finding of the gashed and stripped body,
its solemn interment in the Cathedral Church of St. Peter’s at Cologne,
the canonization of Engelbert, and the building of a chapel, succeeded by
a cloister, to mark the place of his martyrdom. Nor need one follow with
Caesar the banning of the murderers, and the unhappy ways in which their
deaths made part atonement for the injury which their wicked deed had done
the German realm.[621]

       *       *       *       *       *

The ideals and shortcomings of monasticism were closely connected with
popular beliefs. The monastic ideal had its inception in the thought of
sin as entailing either purgatorial or everlasting punishment, and in the
thought of holiness as ensuring eternal bliss. Whatever other motives
participated, the knot of the monastic purpose was held in the jaws of
this antithesis, which for itself drew form, colour, picturesqueness, from
popular beliefs, and was made tangible in countless stories telling of
purity and love and meekness impaired by lust and cruelty and pride, and
of retribution avoided by some shifty supernatural adjustment of the sin.
Such stories might be accepted as well by the learned as by the
illiterate. The brooding soul of the Middle Ages, with its knowledge of
humanity and its reaches of spiritual insight, was undisturbed by the
crass superstitions so queerly at odds with its deeper inspiration--a
remark specifically applicable to thoughtful or spiritually-minded
individuals in the mediaeval centuries.

As we descend the spiritual scale, the crude superstitious elements become
more prominent or apparently the whole matter. Likewise as we descend the
moral scale; for the more vicious the individual, the more utterly will he
omit the spiritual from his working faith, and the more mechanical will be
his methods of squaring his conduct with his fears of the supernatural.
Nevertheless, in estimating the ethical shortcomings of mediaeval
superstitions, one must remember how easily in a simple mind all sorts of
superstition may co-exist with a sweet religious and moral tone.

Sins unatoned for and uncondoned bring purgatorial or perpetual torment
after death, even as holiness brings eternal bliss. But how were sins
thought to come to men and women in the Middle Ages, and especially to
those who were earnestly striving to escape them? Rather than fruit of the
naughtiness of the human heart, they came through the malicious
suggestions, the temptations, of a Tempter. They were in fine the
machinations of the devil. This was the popular view, and also the
authoritative doctrine, expressed, re-expressed, and enforced in myriad
examples, by all the saints and magnates of the Church who had lived since
the time when Athanasius wrote the life of Anthony in devil-fighting
heroics.

Against the devil, every man had staunch allies; the readiest were the
Virgin Mary and the saints, for Christ was very high above the conflict,
and at the Judgment Day must be its final umpire. The object of the
cunning enemy was to trip man into hell, an object hostile alike to God
and man. Saintly aid enabled man to overcome the devil, or if he succumbed
to temptation and committed mortal sin, there was still a chance to
frustrate the devil’s plot, and save the soul by wiles or force. The
sinner may use every stratagem to defeat the devil and escape the results
of sins committed by himself, but prompted by his enemy. This was war and
the ethics of war, in which man was the central struggling figure,
attacked by the devil and defended by the saints. The latter also help
man’s earthly fortunes, and devotion to them may ensure one’s welfare in
this very palpable and pressing life of earth.

This popular and yet authoritative view of mortal peril and saintly aid is
illustrated in the tales from sermons and other pious writings. In them
any uncanny or untoward experience was ascribed to the devil. So it was in
monkish Chronicles, _Vitae sanctorum_, _Dialogi miraculorum_, or indeed in
any edifying writing couched in narrative form or containing illustrative
tales. Throughout this literature the devil inspires evil thoughts,
instigates crimes, and causes any unhappy or immoral happening. It is just
as much a matter of course as if one should say to-day, I have a cold, or
John stole a ring, or James misbehaved with So-and-so.[622] Any man might
meet the devil, and if sinful, suffer physical violence from him. If any
one disappeared the devil might be supposed to have carried him off.
Details of the abduction might be given, or the whole matter take place
before witnesses.

    “A rich usurer, with little fear of God in him, had dined well one
    evening, and was in bed with his wife, when he suddenly leaped up. She
    asked what ailed him. He replied: ‘I was just snatched away to God’s
    judgment seat, where I heard so many accusations that I did not know
    what to answer. And while I waited for something to happen, I heard
    the final sentence given against me, that I should be handed over to
    demons, who were to come and get me to-day.’ Saying this, he flung on
    a coat, and ran out of the house, for all his wife could do to stop
    him. His servants, following, discovered him almost crazed in a church
    where monks were saying their matins. There they kept him in custody
    for some hours. But he made no sign of willingness to confess or make
    restitution or repent. So after mass they led him back toward his
    house, and as they came by a river, a boat was seen coming rapidly up
    against the current, manned apparently by no one. But the usurer said
    that it was full of demons, who had come to take him. The words were
    no sooner uttered, than he was seized by them, and put in the boat,
    which suddenly turned on its course and disappeared with its
    prey.”[623]

One observes that this usurer had received sentence at God’s tribunal, and
the devils carried it out: the sentence gave them power. Any man may be
tempted; but falls into his enemy’s power only by sinning. His yielding is
an act of acquiescence in the devil’s will, and may be the commencement of
a state of permanent consent. With this we reach the notion of a formal
pact with the devil, of which there were many instances. But still the
pact is with the Enemy; the man is not bound beyond the letter, and may
escape by any trick. It is still the ethics of war; we are very close to
the principle that a man by stratagem or narrow observance of the letter
may escape the eternal retribution which God decrees conditionally and the
devil delights in.

The sacraments prescribed by the Church were the common means of escaping
future punishment. Confession is an example. The correct doctrine was that
without penitence it was ineffective. But popularly the confession
represented the whole fact. It was efficacious of itself, and kept the
soul from hell. It might even prevent retribution in this life. Caesar of
Heisterbach has a number of illustrative stories, rather immoral as they
seem to us. There was, for instance, a person possessed (_obsessus_) of a
devil who dwelt in him, and through his lips would make known the
_unconfessed_ sins of any one brought before him; but the devil could not
remember sins which had been confessed. A certain knight suspected (quite
correctly) a priest of sinning with his wife. So he haled him before this
_obsessus_. On the way the priest managed to elude his persecutor for an
instant, and, darting into a barn, confessed his sin to a layman he found
there. Returning, he went along with the knight, and, behold, the sin was
obliterated from the memory of the devil in the _obsessus_, and the priest
remained undetected.[624]

Men and women sometimes escaped the wages of sin by the aid of a saint,
but more often through the incarnate pity of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin
and the saints were ready to take up any cause, however desperate, against
the devil; which means that they were ready to intervene between the
sinner and the impending punishment. People took kindly to these thoughts
of irregular intervention, since everlasting torment for transient sin was
so extreme; but a surer source of their approval lay in the incomplete
spiritualization of the popular religion and its ethics.

To thwart the devil was the office of the Virgin and the saints. Their aid
was given when it was besought. Sometimes they intervened voluntarily to
protect a votary whose devotions had won their favour. The stories of the
pitying intervention of the Virgin to save the sinner from the wages of
his sin, and frustrate the devil, are among the fragrant flowers of the
mediaeval spirit. Ethically some of them leave much to ask for; but others
are tales of sweet forgiveness upon heart-felt repentance.

Jacques of Vitry has a story (scarcely fit to repeat) of a certain very
religious Roman widow-lady, who had an only son, with whom she sinned at
the devil’s instigation. She was a devoted worshipper of the Virgin; and
the devil, fearing that she would repent, plotted to bring her to trial
and immediate condemnation before the emperor’s tribunal, for her incest.
When the widow knew of her impending ruin, she went with tears to the
confessional, and then day and night besought the Virgin to deliver her
from infamy and death. The day of trial came. Suddenly the accuser, who
was the devil in disguise, began to quake and groan, and could not answer
when the emperor asked what ailed him. But as the woman drew near the
judgment seat, he uttered a horrid howl, exclaiming: “See! Mary is coming
with the woman, holding her hand.” And in a fetid whirlwind he
disappeared. “And thus,” says Jacques of Vitry, “the widow was set free
through confession and the Virgin’s aid, and afterwards persevered in the
service of God more cautiously.”[625]

Such a tale sounds immoral; yet there is some good in saving any soul from
hell; and here there was repentance. Caesar of Heisterbach has another, of
the Virgin taking the place of a sinning nun in the convent until she
repented and returned. Again repentance and forgiveness make the sinner
whole.[626]

The _Miracles de Nostre Dame_[627] are an interesting repertory of the
Virgin’s interventions. These “Mysteries” or miracle plays in Old French
verse are naïve enough in their kindly stratagems, by which the votary is
saved from punishment in this life and his soul from torment in the next.
The first “Miracle” in this collection runs thus: A pious dame and her
knightly husband, from devotion to the Virgin Mary took the not unusual
vow of married continence. But under diabolic incitement, the knight
over-persuaded his lady, who in her chagrin at the broken vow devoted the
offspring to the devil. A son was born, and in due time the devil came to
claim it. Thereupon a huge machinery, of pope and cardinals, hermits and
archangels, is set in motion. At last the case is brought before God,
where the devils show cause on one side, and “Nostre Dame” pleads on the
other. Our Lady wins on the ground that the mother could not devote her
offspring to the devil without the father’s consent, which was not shown.

There is surely no harm in this pleasant drama; for the devil ought not to
have had the boy. But there follow quite different “Miracles” of Our Lady.
The next one is typical. An abbess sins with her clerk. Her condition is
observed by the nuns, and the bishop is informed. The abbess casts herself
on the mercy of Mary, who miraculously delivers her of the child and gives
it into the care of a holy hermit. An examination of the abbess takes
place, after which she is declared innocent by the bishop. But she is at
once moved to repentance, and confesses all to him. In the bishop’s mind,
however, the Virgin’s intervention is sufficient proof of the abbess’s
holiness. He absolves her, and goes to the hermitage and takes charge of
the child.[628]

Such is an example of the kindly but peculiar miracles, in which the
Virgin saves her friends who turn to her and repent. Many other tales,
quite lovely and unobjectionable, are told of her: how she keeps her
tempted votaries from sinning, or helps them to repent:[629] or blesses
and leads on to joy those who need no forgiveness. Such a one was the
monk-scribe who illuminated Mary’s blessed name in three lovely colours
whenever it occurred in the works he copied, and then kissed it devoutly.
As he lay very ill, having received the sacraments, another brother saw in
vision the Virgin hover above his couch and heard her say: “Fear not, son,
thou shalt rejoice with the dwellers in heaven, because thou didst honour
my name with such care. Thine own name is written in the book of life.
Arise and come with me.” Running to the infirmary the brother found his
brother dying blissfully.[630]

There are lovely stories too of passionate repentance, coming
unmiraculously to those devoutly thinking on the Virgin and her infant
Son. “For there was once a nun who forsook her convent and became a
prostitute, but returned after many years. As she thought of God’s
judgment and the pains of hell, she despaired of ever gaining pardon; as
she thought of Paradise, she deemed that she, impure, could never enter
there; and when she thought upon the Passion, and how great ills Christ
had borne for her and how great sins she had committed, she still was
without hope. But on the Day of the Nativity she began to think that unto
us a Child is born, and that children are appeased easily. Before the
image of the Virgin she began to think of the Saviour’s infancy, and, with
floods of passionate tears, besought the Child through the benignity of
His childhood to have mercy upon her. She heard a voice saying to her that
through the benignity of that childhood which she had invoked, her sins
were forgiven.”[631]

But enough of these stories. Nor is there need to enlarge upon the
relic-worship and other superstitions of the Middle Ages. One sees such
matters on every side. It was all a matter of course, and disapprovals
were rare. Such conceptions of sin and the devil’s part in it affected the
morality of clergy as well as laity. The morals of the latter could not
rise above those of their instructors; and the layman’s religion of
masses, veneration of relics, pilgrimages, almsgiving and endowment of
monasteries, scarcely interfered with the cruelty and rapine to which he
might be addicted.




CHAPTER XXI

THE WORLD OF SALIMBENE


At the close of this long survey of the saintly ideals and actualities of
the Middle Ages, it will be illuminating to look abroad over mediaeval
life through the half mystic but most observant eyes of a certain Italian
Franciscan. The Middle Ages were not characterized by the open eye.
Mediaeval Chronicles and _Vitae_ rarely afford a broad and variegated
picture of the world. As they were so largely the work of monks, obviously
they would set forth only what would strike the monastic eye, an eye often
intense with its inner vision, but not wide open to the occurrences of
life. The monk was not a good observer, commonly from lack of sympathy and
understanding. Of course there were exceptions; one of them was the
Franciscan Salimbene, an undeniable if not too loving son of an alert
north Italian city, Parma.

Humanism springs from cities; and it began in Italy long before Petrarch.
North of the Alps there was nothing like the city life of Italy, so quick
and voluble, so unreticent and unrestrained, open and
neighbourly--neighbours hate as well as love! From Cicero’s time, from
Numa’s if one will, Italian life was what it never ceased to be, urban.
The city was the centre and the bound of human intercourse, almost of
human sympathy. This was always true; as true in those devastated seventh,
eighth, and ninth centuries as before or after; certainly true of the
tenth and eleventh centuries when the Lombards and other Teuton children
of the waste and forest had become good urban Italians. It was still more
abundantly true of the following centuries when life was burgeoning with
power. Whatever other cause or source of parentage it had, humanism was a
city child. And as city life never ceased in Italy, that land had no
unhumanistic period. There humanism always existed, whether we take it in
the narrower sense of love of humanistic, that is, antique literature, or
take it broadly as in the words of old Menander-Terence: “homo sum, humani
nil a me alienum.”

Now turn to the close of the twelfth century, and look at Francis of
Assisi. It is his humanism and his naturalism, his interest in men and
women, and in bird and beast as well, that fills this sweet lover of
Christ with tender sympathy for them all. Through him human interest and
love of man drew monasticism from its cloister, and sent it forth upon an
unhampered ministry of love. Francis (God bless him!) had not been
Francis, had he not been Francis _of Assisi_.

A certain gifted well-born city child was five years old when Francis
died. It was to be his lot to paint for posterity a picture of his world
such as no man had painted before; and in all his work no line suggests so
many reasons for the differences between Italy and the lands north of the
Alps, and also so many why Salimbene happened to be what he was, as this
remark, relating to his French tour: “In France _only the townspeople_
dwell in the towns; the knights and noble ladies stay in their villas and
on their own domains.”

Only the townspeople live in the towns, merchants, craftsmen,
artisans--the unleavened bourgeoisie! In Lombardy how different! There
knights and nobles, and their lovely ladies, have their strong dwellings
in the towns; jostle with the townspeople, converse with them, intermarry
sometimes, lord it over them when they can, hate them, murder them. But
there they are, and what variety and colour and picturesqueness and
illumination do they not add to city life? If a Lombardy town thronged
with merchants and craftsmen, it was also gay and voluptuous with knights
and ladies. How rich and fascinating its life compared with the grey towns
beyond the Alps. In France the townspeople made an audience for the
Fabliaux! The Italian town had also its courtly audience of knight and
dame for the love lyrics of the troubadour, and for the romances of
chivalry. In fact, the whole world was there, and not just workaday,
sorry, parts of it.

Had it not been for the full and varied city life in which he was born and
bred, the quick-eyed youth would not have had that fund of human interest
and intuition which makes him so pleasant and so different from any one
north of the Alps in the thirteenth century. A city boy indeed, and what a
full personality! He was to be a man of human curiosity, a tireless
sight-seer. His interest is universal; his human love quick enough--for
those he loved; for he was no saint, although a Minorite. His detestation
is vivid, illuminating; it brings the hated man before us. And Salimbene’s
wide-open eyes are his own. He sees with a fresh vision; he is himself; a
man of temperament, which lends its colours to the panorama. His own
interest or curiosity is paramount with him; so his narrative will naïvely
follow his sweet will and whim, and pass from topic to topic in chase of
the suggestions of his thoughts.

The result is for us a unique treasure-trove. The story presents the world
and something more; two worlds, if you will, very co-related:
_macrocosmos_ and _microcosmos_, the world without and the very eager ego,
Salimbene. There he is unfailingly, the writer in his world. Scarcely
another mediaeval penman so naïvely shows the world he moves about in and
himself. Let us follow, for a little, his autobiographic chronicle, taking
the liberty which he always took, of selecting as we choose.[632]

In the year 1221 Salimbene was born at Parma, into the very centre of the
world of strife between popes and emperors--a world wherein also the
renewed Gospel was being preached by Francis of Assisi, who did not die
till five years later. But St. Dominic died the year of Salimbene’s birth.
Innocent III., most powerful of popes, had breathed his last five years
before, leaving surviving him that viper-nursling of the papacy, Frederick
II., an able, much-experienced youth of twenty-two. Frederick was
afterwards crowned emperor by Honorius III., and soon showed himself the
most resourceful of his Hohenstaufen line of arch-enemies to the papacy.
This Emperor Frederick, whom Innocent III., says Salimbene, had exalted
and named “Son of the Church” ... “was a man pestiferous and accursed, a
schismatic, heretic, and epicurean, who corrupted the whole earth.”[633]

Salimbene’s family was in high regard at Parma, and the boy naturally saw
and perhaps met the interesting strangers coming to the town. He tells us
that when he was baptized the lord Balianus of Sydon, a great baron of
France, a retainer of the Emperor Frederick’s, “lifted me from the sacred
font.” The mother was a pious dame, whom Salimbene loved none too well,
because once she snatched up his infant sisters to flee from the danger of
the Baptistery toppling over upon their house during an earthquake, and
left Salimbene himself lying in his cradle! The father had been a
crusader, and was a man of wealth and influence.

So the youth was born into a stirring swirl of life. These vigorous
northern Italian cities hated each other shrewdly in the thirteenth
century. When the boy was eight years old a great fight took place between
the folk of Parma, Modena, and Cremona on the one side, and that big
blustering Bologna. Hot was the battle. On the _Carrocio_ of Parma only
one man remained; for it was stripped of its defenders by the stones from
those novel war-engines of the Bolognese, called _manganellae_.
Nevertheless the three towns won the battle, and the Bolognese turned
their backs and abandoned their own _Carrocio_. The Cremona people wanted
to drag it within their walls; but the prudent Parma leaders prevented it,
because such action would have been an insult forever, and a lasting cause
of war with a strong enemy. But Salimbene saw the captured _manganellae_
brought as trophies into his city.

Other scenes of more peaceful rejoicing came before his eyes; as in the
year 1233, he being twelve years old. That was a year of alleluia, as it
was afterwards called,

    “to wit a time of peace and quiet, of joy, jollity and merry-making,
    of praise and jubilee; because wars were over. Horse and foot,
    townsfolk and rustics, youths and virgins, old and young, sang songs
    and hymns. There was such devotion in all the cities of Italy. And I
    saw that each quarter of the city would have its banner in the
    procession, a banner on which was painted the figure of its
    martyr-saint. And men and women, boys and girls, thronged from the
    villages to the city with their flags, to hear the preaching, and
    praise God. They had branches of trees and lighted candles. There was
    preaching morning, noon, and evening, and _stationes_ arranged in
    churches and squares; and they lifted their hands to God to praise and
    bless Him forever. Nor could they cease, so drunk were they with love
    divine. There was no wrath among them, or disquiet or rancour.
    Everything was peaceful and benign; I saw it with my eyes.”[634]

And then Salimbene tells of all the famous preachers, and the lovely
hymns, and Ave Marias; Frater So-and-so, from Bologna; Frater So-and-so
from somewhere else; Minorite and Preaching friar.

One might almost fancy himself in the Florence of Savonarola. Like enough
this season of soul outpour and tears and songs of joy first stirred the
religious temper of this quickly moved youth. These were also the great
days of dawning for the Friars. Dominic was not yet sainted; yet his Order
of the Preaching Friars was growing. The blessed Francis had been
canonized;--sainted had he been indeed before his death! And the world was
turning to these novel, open, sympathetic brethren who were pouring
themselves through Europe. Love’s mendicancy, envied but not yet
discredited, was before men’s eyes and in men’s thoughts; and what
opportunity it offered of helping people, of saving one’s own soul, and of
seeing the world! We can guess how Salimbene’s temper was drawn by it. We
know at least that one of these friars, Brother Girard of Modena, who
preached at this jubilee in Parma, was the man who made petition five
years later for Salimbene, so that the Minister-General of the Minorites,
Brother Elias, being then at Parma, received the seventeen-year-old boy
into the Order, in the year 1238.

Salimbene’s father was frantic at the loss of his heir. Never while he
lived did he cease to lament it. He at once began strenuous appeals to
have his son returned to him. Salimbene’s account of this, exhibits
himself, his father, and the situation.

    “He complained to the emperor (Frederick II.), who had come to Parma,
    that the brothers Minorites had taken his son from him. The emperor
    wrote to Brother Elias that if he held his favour dear, he should
    listen to him and return me to my father. Then my father went to
    Assisi, where Brother Elias was, and placed in his hands the emperor’s
    letter, which began: ‘In order to mitigate the sighs of our faithful
    Guido de Adam,’ and so forth. Brother Illuminatus, Brother Elias’s
    scribe, showed me this letter long afterwards, when I was with him in
    the convent at Siena.

    “When the imperial letter had been read, Brother Elias wrote at once
    to the brethren of the convent at Fano, where I dwelt, that if I
    wished it, they should return me to my father without delay; but that
    if I did not wish to go with my father, they should guard and keep me
    as the pupil of his eye.

    “A number of knights came with my father to Fano, to see the end of my
    affair. There was I and my salvation made the centre of the spectacle.
    The brethren were assembled, with them of the world; and there was
    much talk. My father produced the letter of the minister-general, and
    showed it to the brothers. When it was read, Brother Jeremiah, who was
    in charge of me, answered my father in the hearing of all: ‘Lord
    Guido, we sympathize with your distress, and are prepared to obey the
    letter of our father. Behold, here is your son; he is old enough; let
    him speak for himself. Ask him; if he wishes to go with you, let him
    in God’s name; if not, we cannot force him.’

    “My father asked me whether I wished to go with him or not. I replied,
    No; because the Lord says, ‘No one putting his hand to the plow and
    looking back is fit for the kingdom of God.’

    “And father said to me: ‘Thou carest not for thy father and mother,
    who are afflicted with many griefs for thee.’

    “I replied: ‘Truly I do not care, because the Lord says, Who loveth
    father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. But of thee He also
    says: Who loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
    Thou oughtest to care, father, for Him who hung on the cross for us,
    that He might give us eternal life. For it is himself who says: I am
    come to set a man against his father, and the daughter against her
    mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s
    foes are they of his household.’

    “The brethren wondered and rejoiced that I said such things to my
    father. And then my father said: ‘You have bewitched and deceived my
    son, so that he will not mind me. I will complain again of you to the
    emperor and to the minister-general. Now let me speak with my son
    apart from you; and you will see him follow me without delay.’

    “So the brothers allowed me to talk with him alone; for they began to
    have a little confidence in me, because of my words. Yet they listened
    behind the wall to what we should say. For they trembled as a reed in
    water, lest my father should alter my mind with his blandishments. And
    not for me alone they feared, but lest my return should hinder others
    from entering the Order.

    “Then my father said to me: ‘Dear son, don’t believe those nasty
    tunics[635] who have deceived you; but come with me, and I will give
    you all I have.’

    “And I replied: ‘Go away, father. As the Wise Man says in Proverbs,
    Thou shall not hinder him to do right, who is able.’

    “And my father answered with tears, and said to me: ‘What then, son,
    shall I say to thy mother, who is afflicted because of thee?’

    “And I say to him: ‘Thou shalt tell her from me; thus says thy son: My
    father and mother have forsaken me, and the Lord hath taken me up;
    also (Jer. iii.): Thou shalt call me Father, and walk after me in my
    steps.... It is good for a man when he has borne the yoke from his
    youth.’

    “Hearing all these things my father, despairing of my coming out,
    threw himself down in the presence of the brethren and the secular
    folk who had come with him, and said: ‘I give thee to a thousand
    devils, cursed son, thee and thy brother here who has deceived thee.
    My curse be on you forever, and may it commend you to the spirits of
    hell.’ And he went away excited beyond measure; while we remained
    greatly comforted and giving thanks to our God, and saying to each
    other, ‘They shall curse, and thou shalt bless.’ Likewise the seculars
    retired edified at my constancy. The brethren also rejoiced seeing
    what the Lord had wrought through me, His little boy.”

This whole scene presents such a conflict as the thirteenth century
witnessed daily, and the twelfth, and other mediaeval centuries as well.
The letters of St. Bernard set forth situations quite as extreme or
outrageous, from modern points of view. And Bernard can apply (or shall we
say, distort?) Scripture in the same drastic fashion. But these monks
meant it deeply; and from their standpoint they were in the right with
their quotations. The attitude goes back to Jerome; that a man’s father
and mother, and they of his own household, may be his worst enemies, if
they seek to hinder his feet set toward God. Of course we can see the
sensible, worldly, martial father of the youth leap in the air and roll on
the ground in rage; flesh and blood could not stand such turn of
Scripture: Tell my weeping mother (who so longs for me) that I say my
father and mother have forsaken me, and the Lord hath taken me up! This
came to the Lord Guido as a maddening gibe; but Salimbene meant simply
that his parents did not care for his highest welfare, and the Lord had
received him into the path of salvation. It is all a scene, which should
evoke our serious reflections--after which it may be permitted us to enjoy
it as we will.

In his conscience Salimbene felt justified; for a dream set the seal of
divine approval on his conduct.

    “The Blessed Virgin rewarded me that very night. For it seemed to me
    that I was lying prostrate in prayer before her altar, as the brothers
    are wont when they rise for matins. And I heard the voice of the
    Blessed Virgin calling me. Lifting my face, I saw her sitting above
    the altar in that place where is set the host and the calix. She had
    her little boy in her lap, and she held him out to me, saying:
    ‘Approach without fear and kiss my son, whom yesterday thou didst
    confess before men.’ And when I was afraid, I saw that the little boy
    gladly stretched out his arms. Trusting his innocence and the
    graciousness of his mother, I drew near, embraced and kissed him; and
    the benign mother gave him to me for a long while. And when I could
    not have enough of it, the Blessed Virgin blessed me and said: ‘Go,
    beloved son, and lie down, lest the brothers rising from matins find
    thee here with us.’ I obeyed, and the vision disappeared; but
    unspeakable sweetness remained in my heart. Never in the world have I
    had such bliss.”

From this we see that Salimbene had sufficient mystic ardour to keep him a
happy Franciscan. It made the otherworldly part of one who also was a
merry gossip among his fellows. An inner power of spiritual enthusiasm
and fantasy accompanied him through his life, giving him a double point of
view: he looks at things as they are, with curiosity and interest, and
ever and anon loses himself in transcendental dreams of Paradise and all
at last made perfect.[636]

Although the father had devoted his son to a thousand devils, he did not
cease from attempts, by persuasion and even violence, to draw him back
into his own civic and martial world. So the young man got permission from
the minister-general to go and live in Tuscany, where he might be beyond
the reach of parental activities. “Thereupon I went and lived in Tuscany
for eight years, two of them at Lucca, two at Siena, and four at Pisa.” He
gained great comfort from converse and gossip of an edifying kind, as he
fell in with those loving enthusiasts who had received their cloaks from
the hand of the blessed Francis himself. At Siena he saw much of Brother
Bernard of Quintavalle who had been the very first to receive the dress of
the Order from the hand of its founder. Salimbene gladly listened to his
recollections of Francis, who in this venerable disciple’s words might
seem once more to walk the earth.

Yet Salimbene, still young in heart and years, could readily take up with
the companionship of the ne’er-do-well vagabonds who frequently attached
themselves, as lay brothers, to the Franciscan Order. He tells of a day’s
outing with one of whose character he is outspoken but without personal
repugnance:

    “I was a young man when I dwelt at Pisa. One day I went out begging
    with a certain lay brother, a good-for-nothing. He was a Pisan, and
    the same who afterwards went and lived with the brothers at Fixulus,
    where they had to drag him out of a well which he had jumped into from
    some foolishness or desperation. Then he disappeared, and could not be
    found. The brothers thought the devil had carried him off. However
    that may have been, this day at Pisa he and I went with our baskets to
    beg bread, and chanced to enter a courtyard. Above, all about, hung a
    thick, leafy vine, its freshness lovely to see and its shade sweet for
    resting in. There were leopards there and other beasts from over the
    sea, at which we gazed long, transfixed with delight, as one will at
    the sight of the novel and beautiful. Girls were there also and boys
    at their sweetest age, handsome and lovely, and ten times as alluring
    for their beautiful clothes. The boys and girls held violas and
    cytharas and other musical instruments in their hands, on which they
    made sweet melodies, accompanied with gestures. There was no hub-bub,
    nor did any one talk; but all listened in silence. And the song which
    they chanted was so new and lovely in words and melody as to gladden
    the heart exceedingly. None spoke to us, nor did we say a word to any
    one. They did not stop singing and playing so long as we were
    there--and long indeed we lingered and could scarcely take ourselves
    away. God knows, I do not, who set this joyful entertainment; for we
    had never seen anything like it before nor could we ever find its like
    again.”

From the witchery of this cloud-dropped entertainment Salimbene was rudely
roused as he went out upon the public way.

    “A man met me, whom I did not know, and said he was from Parma. He
    seized upon me, and began to chide and revile: ‘Away scamp, away,’ he
    cried. ‘A crowd of servants in your father’s house have bread enough
    and meat; and you go from door to door begging bread from those
    without it, when you have enough to give to any number of beggars! You
    ought to be riding on a war-horse through Parma, and delighting people
    with your skill with the lance, so that there might be a sight for the
    ladies, and comfort for the players. Now your father is worn with
    grief and your mother from love of you, so she despairs of God.’”

Salimbene fended off this attack of carnal wisdom with many texts of
Scripture. Yet the other’s words set him to thinking that perhaps it would
be hard to lead a beggar’s life year after year until old age. And he lay
awake that night, until God comforted him as before with a reassuring
dream.

Pretty dreamer as he was, Salimbene can often tell a ribald tale. There
was rivalry, as may be imagined, between the Dominicans (_solemnes
praedicatores_) and the Minorites. The former seem occasionally to have
concerted together so as to have knowledge of what their friends in other
places were about. Then, when preaching, they would exhibit marvels of
second sight, which on investigation proved true! A certain Brother John
of Vicenza was a Dominican famed for preaching and miracles perhaps, and
with such overtopping sense of himself that he went at least a little mad.
Bologna was his tarrying-place. There a certain Florentine grammarian,
Boncompagnus, tired of the foolery, made gibing rhymes about him and his
admirers, and said he would do a miracle himself, and at a certain hour
would fly with wings from the pinnacle of Sta. Maria in Monte. All came
together at that hour to see. There he stood aloft, with his wings, ready,
and the folk expectant, for a long time--and then he bade them disperse
with God’s blessing, for it was enough for them to have seen him. They
then knew that they had been fooled!

None the less the _dementia_ of Brother John increased, so that one day at
the Dominican convent in Bologna he fell in a rage because when his beard
was cut the brothers did not preserve the hairs as relics. There came
along a Minorite, Brother God-save-you, a Florentine like Boncompagnus,
and like him a great buffoon and joker. To this convent he came, but
refused all invitation to stay and eat unless a piece of the cloak of
Brother John were given him, which was kept to hold relics. So they gave
him a piece of the cloak, and after dinner he went off and befouled it,
folded it up, and called for all to come and see the precious relics of
the sainted John, which he had lost in the latrina. So they flocked to
see, and were somewhat more than satisfied.[637]

No need to say that this Salimbene had a quick eye for beauty in both men
and women; he is always speaking of so-and-so as a handsome man, and such
and such a lady as “pulcherrima domina,” of pleasing ways and moderate
stature, neither too tall nor too short. But one may win a more amusing
side-light on the “eternal womanly” in his Chronicle, from the following:
“Like other popes, Nicholas III. made cardinals of many of his relatives.
He made a cardinal of one, Lord Latinus, of the Order of Preachers (which
we note with a smile, and expect something funny). He appointed him legate
to Lombardy and Tuscany and Romagnola.” Note the enactments of this
cardinal-legate:

    “He disturbed all the women with a ‘Constitution’ which he
    promulgated, to wit, that the women should wear short dresses
    reaching to the ground, and only so much more as a palm’s breadth.
    Formerly they wore trains, sweeping the earth for several feet (_per
    brachium et dimidium_). A rhymer dubs them:

      ‘Et drappi longhi, ke la polver menna.’

      (‘The long cloaks that gather up the dust.’)

    “And he had this to be proclaimed in the churches, and imposed it on
    the women by command; and ordered that no priest should absolve them
    unless they complied. The which was bitterer to the women than any
    kind of death! For as a woman said to me familiarly, that train was
    dearer to her than all the other clothes she wore. And further,
    Cardinal Latinus decreed that all women, girls and young ladies,
    matrons and widows, should wear veils. Which was again a horror for
    them. But they found a remedy for that tribulation, as they could not
    for their trains. For they made veils of linen and silk inwoven with
    gold, with which they looked ten times as well, and drew the eyes of
    men to lust all the more.”

Thus did the cardinal-legate, the Pope’s relative. And plenty of gossip
has Salimbene to tell of such creatures of nepotism. “Flesh and blood
_had_ revealed” to the Pope that he should make cardinals of them; says he
with a sort of giant sneer; “for he built up Zion _in sanguinibus_,” that
is, through his blood-relatives! “There are a thousand brothers Minorites,
more fit, on the score of knowledge and holiness, to be cardinals than
they.” Had not another pope, Urban IV., made chief among the cardinals a
relation whose only use as a student had been to fetch the other students’
meat from market?

It was a few years after this that Salimbene returned to his native town
of Parma, near the time when that city passed from the side of the Emperor
to that of the Pope. This was a fatal defection for Frederick, which he
set about to repair, by laying siege to the turn-coat city. And the war
went on with great devastation, and the wolves and other wild beasts
increased and grew bold. Salimbene throws Eccelino da Romano on the scene,
that regent of the emperor, and monster of cruelty, “who was feared more
than the devil,” and had once burned to death “eleven thousand Paduans in
Verona. The building holding them was set on fire; and while they burned,
Eccelino and his knights held a tournament about them (_circa eos_).... I
verily believe that as the Son of God desired to have one special friend,
whom He made like to himself, to wit the blessed Francis, so the devil
fashioned Eccelino in his likeness.”[638]

Salimbene tells of the siege of Parma at much length, and of the final
defeat of the emperor, with the destruction of the stronghold which he had
built to menace the city, and of all his curious treasures, with the
imperial crown itself taken by the men of Parma and their allies. But
before this, while the turmoil of the siege was at its height, in 1247, he
received orders to leave Parma and set out for Lyons, where Innocent IV.
at that time held his papal court, having fled from Italy, from the
emperor, three years before. Setting out, he reached Lyons on All Saints
Day.

    “At once the Pope sent for me, and talked with me familiarly in his
    chamber. For since my leaving Parma he had received neither messenger
    nor letters. And he thanked me warmly and listened to my prayers, for
    he was a courtly and liberal man; ... and he absolved me from my sins
    and appointed me preacher!”

Our autobiographic chronicler was at this time twenty-six years old; his
personality bespoke a kind reception everywhere. He soon left Lyons, and
went on through the towns of Champagne to Troyes, where he found plenty of
merchants from Lombardy and Tuscany, for there were markets there, lasting
two months. So was it also in Provins, the next halting-place; from which
Salimbene went on to Paris. There he stayed eight days and saw much which
pleased him; and then, going back upon his tracks, he took up his journey
to Sens, where he dwelt in the Franciscan convent, “and the French
brethren entertained me gladly, because I was a friendly, cheerful youth,
and spoke them fair.” From Sens he went south to Auxerre, the place which
had been named as his destination when he left Parma. It was in the year
1248, and as he writes (how many years after?) there comes back to him the
memory of the grand wines of Auxerre:

    “I remember when at Cremona (in 1245) Brother Gabriel of that place, a
    Minorite, a great teacher and a man of holy life, told me that Auxerre
    had more vines and wine than Cremona and Parma and Reggio and Modena
    together. I wouldn’t believe him. But when I came to live at Auxerre,
    I saw that he spoke the truth. It is a large district, or bishopric,
    and the mountains, hills, and plains are covered with vines. There
    they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; but they send their
    wine by river to Paris, where they sell it nobly; and live and clothe
    themselves from the proceeds. Three times I went all about the
    district with one or another of the brothers: once with one who was
    preaching and affixing crosses for the Crusade of the French king (St.
    Louis); then with another who preached to the Cistercians in a most
    beautiful monastery; and the third time we spent Easter with a
    countess, who set before the whole company twelve courses of food, all
    different. And had the count been at home, there would have been a
    still greater abundance and variety. Now in four parts of France they
    drink beer, and in four, wine. And the three lands where the wine is
    most abundant are La Rochelle, Beaune, and Auxerre. In Auxerre the red
    wine is least regarded and is not as good as the Italian. But Auxerre
    has its white or golden wines, which are fragrant and comforting and
    good, and make every one drinking them feel happy. Some of the Auxerre
    wine is so strong that when put in a jug, drops appear on the outside
    (_lacrymantur exterius_). The French laugh and say that three b’s and
    seven f’s go with the best wine:

      ‘Le vin bon et bel et blanc,
       Fort et fer et fin et franc,
       Freit et fres et fourmijant.’

    “The French delight in good wine--no wonder! since it ‘gladdens God
    and men.’ Both French and English are very diligent with their
    drinking-cups. Indeed the French have blear eyes from drinking
    overmuch; and in the morning after a bout, they go to the priest who
    has celebrated mass and ask him to drop a little of the water in which
    he has washed his hands into their eyes. But Brother Bartholomew at
    Provins has a way of saying it would be better for them if they would
    put their water in their wine instead of in their eyes. As for the
    English, they take a measure of wine, drink it out, and say: ‘I have
    drunk; now you’--meaning that you should drink as much. And this is
    their idea of politeness; and any one will take it very ill if the
    other does not follow his precept and example.”[639]

While Salimbene was living at Auxerre, in the year 1248, a provincial
Chapter of the Franciscan Order was held at Sens, with the
Minister-General, John of Parma, presiding. Thither went Salimbene.

    “The King of France, St. Louis, was expected. And the brothers all
    went out from the house to receive him. And Brother Rigaud,[640] of
    the Order, Archbishop of Rouen, having put on his pontifical
    trappings, left the house and hurried toward the king, asking all the
    time, ‘Where is the king? where is the king?’ And I followed him; for
    he went alone and frantically, his mitre on his head and pastoral
    staff in hand. He had been tardy in dressing himself, so that the
    other brothers had gone ahead, and now lined the street, with faces
    turned from the town, straining to see the king coming. And I
    wondered, saying to myself, that I had read that these Senonian Gauls
    once, under Brennus, captured Rome; now their women seemed a lot of
    servant girls. If the King of France had made a progress through Pisa
    or Bologna, the whole _élite_ of the ladies of the city would have met
    him. Then I remembered the Gallic way, for the mere townsfolk to dwell
    in the towns, while the knights and noble ladies live in their castles
    and possessions.

    “The king was slender and graceful, rather lean, of fair height, with
    an angelic look and gracious face. And he came to the church of the
    brothers Minorites not in regal pomp, but on foot in the habit of a
    pilgrim, with wallet and staff, which well adorned his royal shoulder.
    His own brothers, who were counts, followed in like humility and garb.
    Nor did the king care as much for the society of nobles as for the
    prayers and suffrages of the poor. Indeed he was one to be held a
    monarch, both on the score of devotion and for his knightly deeds of
    arms.

    “Thus he entered the church of the brethren, with most devout
    genuflections, and prayed before the altar. And when he left the
    church and paused at the threshold, I was next to him. And there, on
    behalf of the church at Sens, the warden presented him with a huge
    live pike swimming in water in a tub made of firwood, such as they
    bathe babies in. The pike is dear and highly prized in France. The
    king returned thanks to the sender as well as to the presenter of the
    gift. Then he requested audibly that no one, unless he were a knight,
    should enter the Chapter House, except the brethren, with whom he
    wished to speak. When we were met in Chapter, the king began to speak
    of his actions and, devoutly kneeling, begged the prayers and
    suffrages of the brethren for himself, his brothers, his lady mother
    the queen, and all his companions. And certain French brothers, next
    to me, from devotion and piety wept as if unconsolable. After the
    king, Lord Oddo, a Roman cardinal, who once was chancellor at Paris,
    and now was to cross the sea with the king, arose and said a few
    words. Then on behalf of the Order, John of Parma, the
    Minister-General, spoke fittingly, promising the prayers of the
    brethren, and ordaining masses for the king; which, thereupon, at the
    king’s request he confirmed by a letter under his seal.

    “Afterwards, on that day, the king distributed alms and dined with the
    brethren in the refectory. There were at table his three brothers, a
    cardinal of the Roman curia, the minister-general, and Brother Rigaud,
    Archbishop of Rouen, and many brethren. The minister-general, knowing
    what a noble company was with the king, had no mind to thrust himself
    forward, although he was asked to sit next the king. So to set an
    example of courtliness and humility, he sat among the lowest. On that
    day first we had cherries and then the very whitest bread; there was
    wine in abundance and of the best, as befitted the regal magnificence.
    And after the Gallic custom many reluctant ones were invited and
    forced to drink. After that we had fresh beans cooked in milk, fish
    and crabs, eel-pies, rice with milk of almonds and powdered cinnamon,
    broiled eels with excellent sauce; and plenty of cakes and herbs, and
    fruit. Everything was well served, and the service at table excellent.

    “The following day the king resumed his journey, and I followed him,
    as the Chapter was over; for I had permission to go and stay in
    Provincia. It was easy for me to find him, as he frequently turned
    aside to go to the hermitages of the brothers Minorites or some other
    religious Order, to gain their prayers. And he kept this up
    continually until he reached the sea and took ship for the Holy Land.

    “I remember that one day I went to a noble castle in Burgundy, where
    the body of the Magdalene was then believed to be. The next day was
    Sunday; and early in the morning came the king to ask the suffrages of
    the brethren. He dismissed his retinue in the castle, from which the
    house of the brothers was but a little way. The king took his own
    three brothers, as was his wont, and some servants to take care of the
    horses. And when genuflections and reverences were duly made, the
    brothers sought benches to sit on. But the king sat on the earth in
    the dust, as I saw with my eyes. For that church had no pavement. And
    he called us, saying: ‘Come to me, my sweetest brothers, and hear my
    words.’ And we made a circle about him, sitting with him on the earth;
    and his own brothers likewise. And he asked our prayers, as I have
    been saying. And when promise had been given him, he rose and went his
    way.”[641]

Is not this a picture of St. Louis, pilgrimaging from convent to convent,
to make sure of the divine aid, and trusting, so far as concerned the
business of the Holy Land, quite as much in the prayers of monks as in
the deeds of knights? We have hardly such a vivid sight of him in
Joinville or Geoffrey of Beaulieu.[642]

After this scene, the king proceeded on his way, to make ready for his
voyage, and Salimbene went to Lyons, then down the Rhone to Arles, then
around by sea to Marseilles, and thence to Areae, the present Hyères,
which lies near the coast. Here to his joy he met with Brother Hugo of
Montpellier whom he was seeking, the great “Joachite,” the great clerk,
the mighty preacher and resistless disputer, whom he had not forgotten
since the days, long before, when he had been in Hugo’s company and
listened to his preaching at Siena. Even then, Minorites, Dominicans, and
all men, had flocked to hear this small dark man, who seemed another Paul,
as he descanted on the marvels of Paradise and the contempt one should
feel for this world; but especially those Franciscans delighted in his
preaching who were of the “spiritual” party, which sought to follow
strictly the injunctions of the blessed Francis, and also cherished the
prophesies of the enigmatical Joachim of Flora. To this Joachim was
ascribed that long since vanished but much-bespoken _Evangelium eternum_,
which appears to have been written years after his death under the
auspices of John of Parma, Minister-General of the Franciscan Order.[643]

There was heresy in this book, with its doctrine of a still unrevealed,
but everlasting Gospel of the Holy Ghost. Until its appearance the genuine
utterances of Joachim were not prescribed, consisting as they did of
prophecies, for example, as to the life of that monster Frederick II., and
of denunciations of the pride and worldliness of ecclesiastics. Thus they
fell in with the enthusiasms of the “spiritual” Franciscans, who still
lived in an ecstasy of love and anticipation;--in the coming time some of
them were to be dubbed Fratricelli, and under that name be held as
heretics.

John of Parma was, of course, a “Joachite”; and “I was intimate with him,”
says Salimbene, “from love and because I seemed to believe the writings of
Abbot Joachim of the Order of the Flower.” John was likewise a friend (so
strong a bond was the belief in the holy but over-prophetic Joachim) of
Hugo of Montpellier, of whose manner and arguments we shall now let
Salimbene speak.

    “Once Hugo came from Pisa to Lucca, where the brothers had invited him
    to come and preach. He arrived at the hour for setting out for the
    cathedral service. And there the whole convent was assembled to
    accompany him and do him honour, and from desire to hear him too. And
    he wondered, seeing the brothers assembled outside of the convent
    door, and said: ‘Ah God! what are they going to do?’ The reply was,
    that they were there to do him honour, and to hear him. But he said:
    ‘I do not need such honour, for I am not pope. If they wish to hear,
    let them come after we have got there. I will go ahead with one
    companion, and I will not go with that band.’”

Hugo was worshipped by his admirers, and hated by those whom he disagreed
with or denounced. Aside from his disputations in defence of Joachim, a
sample of which will be given shortly, one can see what hate must have
sprung from such invective as Salimbene reports him once to have addressed
to a consistory of cardinals at Lyons, where the Pope then held court.
Here is the story, quite too harsh for the respectable editors of the
Parma edition of the _Chronaca_:

    “The cardinals inquired of Brother Hugo for news (_rumores_). So he
    reviled them, as asses, saying: ‘I have no news, but a plenitude of
    peace in my conscience and before my God, who surpasses sense and
    keeps my heart and mind in Christ Jesus my Lord. I know that ye seek
    after news, and wait idle the live-long day. For ye are Athenians and
    not disciples of Christ. Of whom Luke says in the Acts: For all the
    Athenians and the strangers which were there had time for nothing else
    but to tell or hear some new thing. The disciples of Christ were
    fishers and weak men according to the world, but they converted the
    whole earth because the hand of the Lord was with them. They set forth
    and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them. But ye are those
    who build up Zion in blood (_i.e._ consanguinity) and Jerusalem in
    iniquity. For you choose your little nephews and relations for the
    benefices and dignities of the Church, and you exalt and make rich
    your clan, and shut out men good and fit who would be useful to the
    Church, and you prebendate children in their cradles. As a certain
    mountebank well has said: If with an accusative you would go to the
    Curia, you’ll take nothing if you don’t start with the dative! And
    another says, the Roman Curia cares not for a sheep without wool.’”

And with such like, Hugo continues a considerable space.

    “Hearing these things the cardinals were cut to the heart and gnashed
    their teeth at him. But they had not the hardihood to reply; for the
    fear of the Lord came over them and the hand of the Lord was with him.
    Yet they wondered that he spoke to them so boldly; and finally it
    seemed best to them to slip out and leave him, nor did they question
    him, saying, as the Athenians to Paul: ‘We will hear thee again of
    this matter.’”[644]

Hugo’s invective is outdone by Salimbene’s closing scorn.

And now (to return to Salimbene’s journey) here at Hyères in the year 1248
many notaries and judges, and physicians and other men of learning, were
assembled to hear Brother Hugo speak of the Abbot Joachim’s doctrines, and
expound Holy Scripture, and predict the future. “And I was there to hear
him; for long before I had been instructed in these teachings.” But there
came two Preaching friars, and abode at the Franciscan house, since the
Dominicans had no convent at Hyères. One was Brother Peter of Apulia, a
learned man and a great speaker. After dinner a brother asked him what he
thought of Abbot Joachim. He answered: “I care as much for Joachim as for
the fifth wheel of a coach.”

Thereupon this brother hurried to Hugo’s chamber, and exclaimed in the
presence of all the notables there: “Here is a brother Preacher who does
not believe that doctrine at all.”

To whom Brother Hugo: “And what is it to me if he does not believe? Be it
laid at his door; he will see it when trouble shall enlighten him. Yet
call him to debate; let us hear of what he doubts.”

So, called, he came, very unwillingly, because he held Joachim so cheaply,
and besides thought there was no one in that house fit to dispute with
him. When Brother Hugo saw him he said: “Art thou he who doubts the
doctrine of Joachim?”

Brother Peter replied: “Indeed I am.”

Then said Brother Hugo: “Hast thou ever read Joachim?”

Replied Brother Peter: “I have read and well read.”

To whom Hugo: “I believe thou hast read as a woman reads the Psalter, who
does not remember at the end what she read at the beginning. Thus many
read and do not understand, either because they despise what they read, or
because their foolish heart is darkened. Now, therefore, tell me what thou
wouldst hear as to Joachim, so that we may better know thy doubts.”

Thereupon there is question back and forth regarding the Scripture proofs
of Joachim’s prophecies, for instance, those relating to Frederick’s
reign. Brother Hugo dilates on Joachim’s holiness; explains the dark
Scripture references, and brings in the prophecies of Merlin, _anglicus
vates_, and talks of the allegorical, anagogical, tropological, moral and
mystical, senses of Scripture. The discussion waxes hot. Peter begins to
beat about the bush (_discurrere per ambages_), and declares it to be
heretical to quote an infidel like Merlin. At which Hugo answers: “Thou
liest, as I will prove _multipliciter_; for the writings of Balaam,
Caiaphas, Merlin, and the Sybil are not spurned by the Church: ‘The rose
gives forth no thorn, although the thorn’s daughter.’”[645]

Peter then turns to the sayings of the saints and the philosophers. But as
Hugo was _doctissimus_ in these, he at once twists him up and finishes him
(_statim involvit eum et conclusit ei_). Hereupon Peter’s brother
Preacher, an old priest and a good, sought to come to his aid. But Peter
said, “Peace, be still.” For Peter knew himself vanquished, and began to
praise Brother Hugo for his manifold wisdom.

    “At this moment came a messenger from the ship’s captain, bidding the
    brothers Preachers hurry, and go aboard. When they had left, Brother
    Hugo said to the learned men remaining, who had heard the debate:
    ‘Take it not for evil, if we have said some things which ought not to
    have been said; for disputants often roam the fields of licence. Those
    good men glory in their knowledge, and speak what is found in their
    Order’s fount of wisdom, which is the Word of God. They also say that
    they travel among simple folk when they pass through the places of the
    brothers Minorites, where they are ministered to with loving charity.
    But by the grace of God these two shall no longer be able to say they
    have walked among the simple.’

    “His auditors dispersed, edified and comforted, saying, We have heard
    wonderful things to-day. Later, that same day, the brothers Preachers
    returned, to our delight, for the weather proved unfit for sailing.
    After dinner, Brother Hugo conversed with them familiarly, and Brother
    Peter sat himself on the earth at Brother Hugo’s feet; nor was any one
    able to make him rise and sit on the bench on the same level with him,
    not even when Brother Hugo himself besought him. So Brother Peter, no
    longer disputing or contradicting, but meekly listening, heard honied
    words spoken by Brother Hugo, and worthy to be set down, but omitted
    here for brevity’s sake, as I hasten to record other things.”[646]

So Salimbene passes on, both in his Chronicle and in his journey, but
though his steps lead deviously through the cities of Provence, they bring
him back once more to Hyères and Hugo, at whose feet he sits and listens
for a season in rapt admiration.

After this happy season, Salimbene returned to Genoa, and from that time
on spent his life among the Franciscan brotherhoods of Italy. Henceforth
his Chronicle is chiefly occupied with those wretched unceasing wars of
northern Italy, Imperialists against Papists, and city against city--and
with the affairs of the Franciscan Order. The story is now less varied,
yet not lacking in picturesque qualities; and through it all we still see
the man himself, although the man, as life goes on, seems to become more
of a Franciscan monk, and less of an observer of human life. But he
continues naïve. Thus he tells that one time, with some companions, he
came to Bobbio, that famous book-lovers’ foundation of St. Columban, in
the mountains north of Genoa: “and there we saw one of those water-pots of
the Lord, in which the Lord made wine from water at the marriage at Cana,
for it is said to be one of those: whether it is, God knows, to whom all
things are known and open and naked.”

And again, some one brings him news of the state of France in the year
1251, when King Louis was a captive in Africa;[647] and thus he tells it:

    “In this year a countless crowd of shepherds came together in France,
    saying that they would cross the sea to kill the Saracens and free the
    King of France. Many followed from divers cities of France, and no one
    dared stop them. For their leader said it was revealed to him of God
    that he must lead that multitude across the sea to avenge the King of
    France. The common folk believed him, and were enraged against the
    religious, especially the Preachers, because they had preached the
    Crusade and had ‘crossed’ men who were sailing with the king. And the
    people were angry at Christ, so that they dared blaspheme His blessed
    name. And when the Minorites and Preachers came seeking alms in His
    name, they gnashed their teeth at them and in their sight turned and
    gave the sou to some other beggar, saying, ‘Take this in Mahomet’s
    name, who is stronger than Christ.’”[648]

Of those Italian wars--rather feuds, vengeances, and monstrosities of
hate--Salimbene can tell enough. He gives a ghastly picture of the fate of
Alberic da Romano, brother of Eccelino, and tyrant indeed of Treviso.

    “There he lorded it for many years; and cruel and hard was his rule,
    as those know who experienced it. He was a limb of the devil and a son
    of iniquity, but he perished by an evil death with his wife and sons
    and daughters. For those who slew them tore off the legs and arms from
    their living bodies, in their parents’ sight, and with them struck the
    parents’ faces. Then they bound the wife and daughters to stakes, and
    burned them; they were noble, beautiful virgins, nor in any way in
    fault. But their innocence and beauty did not save them, because of
    the hatred for the father and mother. Terribly had these afflicted the
    people of Treviso. So they came upon Alberic with tongs and  ----”--

the sentence is too horrid for translation. But the chronicler goes on to
tell that they destroyed his body amid gibes and insults and torments.

    “For he had killed a blood-relative of this one, and that one’s
    father, son or daughter. And he had laid such taxes and exactions on
    them, that they had to destroy their houses. The very walls and beams
    and chests and cupboards and wine-vats they put in boats and sent to
    Ferrara to sell them and redeem themselves. I saw those with my eyes.
    Alberic pretended to be at war with his brother Eccelino, so as to do
    his evil deeds more safely; and he did not hold his hand from the
    slaughter of citizens and subjects. One day he hanged twenty-five
    prominent men of Treviso, who had done him no ill; because he feared
    they would! And thirty noble women, mothers, wives and daughters of
    these, were brought there to see them hanging; and he had these women
    stripped half naked, that those who were hanging might see them so.
    The men were hanged quite close to the ground; and he forced these
    women to go so close that their faces were struck by the legs and feet
    of those who were dying in anguish.”[649]

Such was the kind of devil-madness that might walk abroad in Italy in the
Middle Ages. Let us relieve our minds by a story our friend tells of a
certain boy placed in a Franciscan convent in Bologna, to become a monk.

    “When asleep he snored so mightily, that no one could have peace in
    the same house with him, so horribly did he disturb those who slept as
    well as those who were at their vigils. And they made him sleep in the
    shed where wood and staves were stored, but even then the brothers
    could not escape, so did that voice of malediction resound through the
    whole place. And all the priests and wiseacres among the brothers met
    in the director’s chamber, to eject him from the Order because of his
    insupportable offence: I was there. It was decided to return him to
    his mother, who had deceived the Order, since she had known his defect
    before letting him go. But he was not returned to his mother, for the
    Lord performed a miracle through Brother Nicolas [a holy brother
    through whom God had worked other miracles as well]. This brother
    seeing that the boy was to be expelled for no fault, but for a natural
    defect, called him at daybreak to assist at mass. When the mass was
    finished, the boy as commanded knelt before him, back of the altar,
    hoping to receive some grace. Brother Nicolas touched his face and
    nose with his hands, in the wish to confer health upon him, if the
    Lord would grant it, and commanded him to keep this secret. What more?
    The boy at once was cured, and after that slept as quietly as a
    dormouse without annoying any brother.”[650]

Thus we have this Chronicle, rambling, incoherent, picturesque, with its
glimpses of all this pretty world, for which our Salimbene, despite his
cowl, has an uncloistered eye--its keenness for incident and circumstance
undeflected by the inner sight with which it could also look on the
invisible world. When Brother Salimbene was young and an enthusiastic
Joachite, a strong motive of his wish to live on in the flesh was to see
whether those prophecies regarding Frederick came true. Alas! for this
purpose he lived too long: Frederick died before the prophecies were
fulfilled, and with his death honest Salimbene had to put from him his
darling trust in the words of Abbot Joachim of the Order of the Flower.




BOOK IV

THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL: SOCIETY




CHAPTER XXII

FEUDALISM AND KNIGHTHOOD

    FEUDAL AND CHRISTIAN ORIGIN OF KNIGHTLY VIRTUE; THE ORDER OF THE
    TEMPLE; GODFREY OF BOUILLON; ST. LOUIS; FROISSART’S _CHRONICLES_


The world is evil! the clergy corrupt, the laity depraved! none denounces
them! Awake! arise! be mindful! Such ceaseless cry rises more shrilly in
times of reform and progress. It was the cry of the preacher in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when preaching was reviving with the
general advance of life.[651]

Satire and pious invective struck at all classes: kings, counts and
knights, merchants, tradesmen, artisans, even villain-serfs, came under
its lash.[652] And properly, since every class is touched with universal
human vices, besides those which are more peculiar to its special way of
life. All men fall below the standards of the time; and each class fails
with respect to its own ideals. The special shortcomings are most apparent
with those classes whose ideals are most definitely formulated.

Among the laity the gap between the ideal and the actual may best be
observed in the warrior class whose ideals accorded with the feudal
situation and tended to express themselves in chivalry. Not that knights
and ladies were better or worse than other mediaeval men and women. But
literature contains clearer statements of their ideals. The knightly
virtues range before us as distinctly as the monastic; and harsh is the
contrast between the character they outline and the feudal actuality of
cruelty and greed and lust. Feudalism itself presents everywhere a state
of contrast between its principles of mutual fidelity and protection, and
its actuality of oppression, revolt, and private war.

The feudal system was a sprawling conglomerate fact. The actual usages of
chivalry (the term is loose and must be allowed gradually to define
itself) were one expression of it, and varied with the period and country.
But chivalry had its home also in the imagination, and its most
interesting media are legend and romantic fiction. Still, much that was
romantic in it sprang from the aggregate of law, custom, and sentiment,
which held feudal society together. Chivalry was the fine flower of honour
growing from this soil, embosomed in an abundant leafage of imagination.

The feudal system was founded on relations and sentiments arising from a
state of turbulence where every man needed the protection of a lord: it
could not fail to foster sentiments of fealty. The fief itself, the feudal
unit of land held on condition of homage and service, symbolized the
principle of mutual troth between lord and vassal. The land was part of
mother earth; the troth, the elemental personal tie, existed from of yore.
In this instance it came from the German forests. But the feudal system of
land tenure also stretched its roots back into the rural institutions of
the disintegrating Roman Empire. In the fifth century, for example, when
what was left of the imperial rule could no longer enforce order, and
provincial governments were decaying with the decay of the central power
from which they drew their life, men had to look about them for
protection. It became customary for men to hand over land and liberty to
some near lord, and enter into a relationship akin to serfage in return
for protection. Thus the Gallo-Roman population were becoming accustomed
to personal dependence even while the Merovingians were establishing their
kingdom.

On their side the Franks and other Teutons had inherited the institution
of the _comitatus_, which bound the young warrior to his chief. They were
familiar with exacting modes of personal retainership, which merged the
follower’s freedom in his lord’s will. If during the reigns of Pepin and
his prodigious son the development of local dominion and dependence was
held in some abeyance, on the death of Charlemagne it would proceed apace.
All the factors which tend to make institutions out of abuses and the
infractions of earlier custom, sprang at once into activity in the renewed
confusion. Everything served to increase the lesser man’s need of defence,
weld his dependence on his lord, and augment the latter’s power. Moreover,
long before Charlemagne’s time, not only for protection in this life, but
for the sake of their souls, men had been granting their lands to
monasteries and receiving back the use thereof--such usufruct being known
as a _beneficium_. This custom lent the force of its example and manifest
utility to the relations between lay lords and tenants. And finally one
notes the frequent grant to monasteries and individuals of immunity from
governmental visitation, a grant preventing the king’s officers from
entering lands in order to exercise the king’s justice, or exact fines and
requisitions.[653]

From out of such conditions the feudal system gradually took form. Its
central feature was the tenure of a fief by a vassal from his lord on
condition of rendering faithful military and other not ignoble service. As
the tenth century passed, fiefs tended to become hereditary. So long as
the vassal fulfilled his duty to his lord, the rights of the lord over the
land were nominal; more substantial was the mutual obligation--on the part
of the lord to protect his vassal against the violence of others, and on
the vassal’s part to make good the homage pledged by him when he knelt and
placed his hands within his lord’s hands and vowed himself his lord’s man
for the fief he held. His duty was to aid his lord against enemies, yield
him counsel and assistance in the judgment of causes, and pay money to
ransom him from captivity, knight his eldest son, or portion his daughter.
The ramifications of these feudal tenures and obligations extended, with
all manner of complications, from king and duke down to such as held the
meagre fief that barely kept man and war-horse from degrading labour. All
these made up the feudal class whose members might expect to become
knights on reaching manhood.

Neither this system of land tenure, nor the sentiments and relations
sustaining it, drew their origin from Christianity. But the Church was
mighty in its influence over the secular relationships of those who came
under its spiritual guidance. Feudal troth was to become Christianized.
The old regard for war-chief and war-comrade was to be broadened through
the Faith’s solicitude for all believers; then it was raised above the
human sphere to fealty toward God and His Church; and thereupon it was
gentled through Christian meekness and mercy.

This Christianized spirit of fealty, broadening to courtesy and pity, was
to take visible form in a universal Order into which members of the feudal
class were admitted when their valour had been proved, and into which
brave deeds might bring even a low-born man. Gradually, as the Order’s
_regula_, a code of knighthood’s honour was developed, valid in its
fundamentals throughout western Christendom; but varying details and
changing fancies from time to time intruded, just as subsequent phases of
monastic development were grafted on the common Benedictine rule.

Investing a young warrior with the arms of manhood has always in fighting
communities been the normal ceremony of the youth’s coming of age and his
recognition as a member of the clan. The binding on of the young Teuton’s
sword in the assembly of his people was an historical antecedent of the
making of a knight. In all the lands of western Europe--France, Germany,
Anglo-Saxon England, Lombard Italy, and Visigothic Spain--this ceremony
appears to have remained a simple one through the ninth and tenth
centuries. As for the eleventh, one may note the following passages:
William of Malmesbury (d. 1142 cir.) speaks of William of Normandy
receiving the insignia of knighthood (_militiae insignia_) from the King
of France as soon as his years permitted.[654] Henry of Huntington (d.
1155) says that this same William the Conqueror, in the nineteenth year of
his reign, invested his younger son Henry with the arms of manhood
(_virilibus induit armis_); while another chronicler says that Prince
Henry: “sumpsit arma in Pentecostem”--a festival at which it was customary
to make knights. And again, Ordericus Vitalis says of the armour-bearer of
Duke William that after five years’ service he was by that same duke
regularly invested with his arms and made a knight (_decenter est armis
adornatus et miles effectus_).

These short references[655] do not indicate the nature of the ceremony.
But one notes the use of the Latin words _miles_ and _militia_ as meaning
knight and knighthood. Like so many other classical words, _miles_ took
various meanings in the Middle Ages. But it came commonly to signify
knight, chevalier, or ritter.[656] And whatever other meanings _militia_
and _militare_ retained or acquired, they signified knighthood and the
performance of its duties. Frequently they suggested the relationship of
vassal to a lord: and in this sense _miles_ meant one who held a fief
under the obligation to do knightly service in return.

But how did this word _miles_ (which in classical Latin meant a soldier
and sometimes specifically a foot-soldier as contrasted with an _eques_)
come to mean a knight? It was first applied to the warriors of the various
Teutonic peoples, who for the most part fought on foot. But the wars with
the Saracens in the eighth century appear to have made clear the need of a
large and efficient corps of horse. From the time of Charles Martel the
warrior class began to fight regularly on horseback;[657] and thus,
apparently, the term _miles_ began to signify primarily one of these tried
and well-armed riders.[658] Such were the very ones who would regularly be
invested with their arms on reaching manhood. Many of them had inherited
the sentiments of fealty to a chief, and probably were vassals of some
lord from whom they had received lands to be held on military tenure. They
were not all noble (an utterly loose term with reference to these early
confused centuries) nor were they necessarily free (another inappropriate
term with respect to these incipiently mediaeval social conditions).[659]
But their mainly military duties would naturally develop into a retainer’s
relationship of fealty.

The ninth century passes into the tenth, the tenth into the eleventh, the
eleventh into the twelfth. Classes and orders of society become more
distinct. The old warrior groups have become lords and vassals, and
compose the feudal class whose members upon maturity are formally girt
with the arms of manhood, and thereupon become knights. The ceremony of
their investiture has been gradually made more impressive; it has also
been imbued with religious sentiment and elaborated with religious rite.
It now constitutes the initiation to a universally recognized fighting
Order which has its knightly code of honour, if not its knightly duties.
In a word, along with the clearer determination of its membership, and the
elaboration of the ceremonies of entry or “adoubement,” knighthood has
become a distinct conception and has attained existence as an Order. And
an Order it remains, into which one is admitted, but into which no one is
born, though he be hereditary king or duke or count. Moreover, although
the candidates normally would be of the feudal class, the Order is not
closed against knightly merit in whomsoever found.[660] Of course there
was no written _regula_ or charter, except of certain special Orders. Yet
there was no uncertainty as to who was or was not a knight.

A knight could be “made” or “dubbed” at any time, for example, on the
field of battle or before the fight. But certain festivals of the Church,
Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, came to be regarded as peculiarly
appropriate for the ceremony. Any knight, but no unknighted person however
high his rank, could “dub” another knight.[661] This appears to have been
the universal rule, and yet it suffered infringements. For example, at a
late period a king might claim the right to _confirm_ the bestowal of
knighthood, which in fact commonly was bestowed by a great lord or
sovereign prince. On its negative side, the general rule may be said to
have been infringed when Church dignitaries, no longer content with
blessing the arms of the young warrior, usurped the secular privilege of
investing him with them and dubbing him a knight.[662]

The ceremony itself probably originated in the girding on of the sword. As
these warriors in time changed to mounted riders with elaborate arms and
armour, it became more of an affair to invest them fully with their
equipment. There would be the putting on of helm and coat of mail, and
there would be the binding on of spurs; and at some time it became
customary for the youth to prepare himself by a bath. But girding on the
sword was still the important point, although perhaps the somewhat
enigmatical blow, given by him who conferred the dignity, and not to be
returned (_non repercutiendus_), became the finish to the ceremony. That
blow existed (we find it in the _Chansons de geste_) in the twelfth
century as a thwack with the fist on the young man’s bare neck; then in
course of years it refined itself into a gentle sword-tap on the mailed
shoulder.[663]

At an early period the Church sought to sanctify the ceremony through
religious rites; for it could not remain unconcerned with the consecration
of the warriors of Christendom, whose services were needed and whose souls
were to be saved. What time so apt for inculcating obedience and other
Christian virtues as this solemn hour when the young warrior’s nature was
stirred with the pride and hopes of knighthood? And the young knight
needed the Church’s blessing. Heathen peoples sought in every enterprise
the protection of their gods, usually obtained through priestly magic. And
when converted to the faith of Christ, should they not call on Him who was
mightier than Odin? Should not His power be invoked to shield the
Christian knight? Will not the sword which the priest has blessed and has
laid upon Christ’s miracle-working altar, more surely guard the wearer’s
life? Better still if there be blessed relics in its hilt. The dying
Roland speaks to his great sword:

  “O Durendel cum ies bele et seintisme!”

“O Durendel how art thou fair and holy! In thy hilt what store of relics:
tooth of St. Peter, blood of St. Basil, hairs of my lord St. Denis, cloth
worn by the Holy Mary.”[664] These relics made the “holiness” of that
sword, not in the way of sentiment, but through their magic power. And we
shall not be thinking in mediaeval categories if we lose sight of the
magic-religious effect of the priest’s blessing on the novice’s sword: it
is a protection for the future knight.

Doubtless the religious features of the “adoubement” revert to various
epochs. The ancient watch-nights preceding Easter and Pentecost, followed
at daybreak by the baptism of white-robed catechumens, may have been the
original of the novice’s night vigil over his arms laid by the altar. His
bath had become a symbol of purification from sin. He heard Mass in the
early morning, and then came the blessing of the sword, the _benedictio
ensis_, of which the oldest extant formula is found in a Roman manuscript
of the early eleventh century: “Exaudi, quaeso, Domine, preces nostras, et
hunc ensem quo hic famulus N. se circumcingi desiderat, majestatis tuae
dextera benedicere dignare.”[665]

Through the Middle Ages the fashions of feudalism did not remain
unchanged; likewise its quintessential spirit, chivalry, was modified, and
one may say, between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries, passed from
barbarism to preciosity. Nevertheless the main ideals of chivalry endured,
springing as they did from the fundamental and but slowly-changing
conditions of feudal society. Since that society was constantly at
war,[666] the first virtue of the knight was valour. Next, since life and
property hung on mutual aid and troth, and a larger safety was ensured if
one lord could rely upon his neighbour’s word, the virtues of
truth-speaking and troth-keeping took their places in the chivalric ideal.
Another useful quality, and means of winning men, was generosity
(_largesse_). When coin is scarce, and stipulations for fixed pay unusual,
he who serves looks for liberality, which, in accordance with feudal
conditions, made the third of the chief knightly virtues.

Valour, troth, largesse, had no necessary connection with Christianity.
It was otherwise with certain of the remaining qualities of a knight.
According to Christian teaching, pride was the deadliest of sins. So
haughtiness, boasting, and vain-glory were to be held vices by the
Christian knight. He should show a humble demeanour, save toward the
mortal enemies of God; and far from boasting, he should rather depreciate
himself and his exploits, though never lowering the standard of his
purpose to achieve. Humility entered knighthood’s ideal from Christianity;
and so perhaps did courtesy, its kin, a virtue which was not among the
earliest to enter knighthood’s ideal, and yet reached universal
recognition.

Christianity also meant active charity, beneficence, and love of
neighbour. These are virtues hard to import into a state of war. Fighting
means harm-doing to an enemy; and only indirectly makes for some one’s
good. Let there be some vindication of good in the fighting of a Christian
knight: he shall be quick to right the wrong, succour distress, and
quickest to bear help where no reward can come. Since knighthood’s ideals
took form in crusading times, the slaughter of the Paynim became the
supreme act of knightly warfare.

If such elements of the knightly ideal were of Christian origin, others
still were even more closely part of mediaeval Christianity. First of
these was faith, orthodox faith, heresy-uprooting, infidel-destroying,
_fides_ in the full Church sense. Without faith’s sacramental
credentials--baptism, participation in the mass--no one could be a knight:
and heresy degrades the recreant even before the scullion’s cleaver hacks
off his spurs.

From faith knighthood advances to obedience to the Church, a vow expressly
made by every knight on taking the Cross, and also incorporated in the
Constitutions of the crusading Orders of Templars and Hospitallers. But
does the knight pass on from obedience to chastity? This virtue might or
might not enter knighthood’s ideal. It scarcely could exist with courtly
or chivalric love;[667] and, in fact, knights commonly were either lovers
or married men--or both. Yet even in the Arthurian literature there is the
monkish Galahad, and many a sinful knight becomes a hermit in the end; and
among real and living knights, the Templars and Hospitallers were vowed to
celibacy. In these crusading orders the orbits of knighthood and
monasticism cross; and it will not be altogether a digression to review
the foundation and constitution of one of them.

The Order of the Temple was founded in the year 1118 by Hugh of Payns
(Champagne) and other French knights; who placed their hands within those
of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and vowed to devote themselves to the
protection of pilgrims in the Holy Land. Probably they also bestowed their
lands for the support of the nascent Order. Ten years afterwards Hugh
passed through France and England, winning new recruits and appearing at
the Council of Troyes. With the authority of that Council and of Pope
Honorius II. the _Regula pauperum commilitonum Christi Templique
Salomonici_ was promulgated. St. Bernard, to whom it is ascribed, was in
large part its inspiration and its author. It still exists in some
seventy-two chapters; but one cannot distinguish between those belonging
to the original document of 1128 and those added somewhat later.[668]

This _regula_ with its amendments and additions was translated from Latin
into Old French (_par excellence_ the tongue of the Crusades), and became
apparently the earliest form of the _Regle dou Temple_, upon which was
grafted a mass of ordinances (_retrais et establissemens_). Apparently the
whole of the extant Latin regula was prior to everything contained in the
French _regle_; and accordingly we shall simply regard the Latin as
containing the earliest regulations of the Temple, and the French as
exhibiting the modifications of tone and interest which came in the course
of years.

The hand of St. Bernard ensured the dominance of the monastic temper in
the original _regula_; and Hugo, the first Master of the Temple, could
not have been the Saint’s close friend without sharing his enthusiasms. So
the prologue opens with a true monastic note:

    “Our word is directed primarily to all who despise their own wills,
    and with purity of mind desire to serve under the supreme and
    veritable King; and with minds intent choose the noble warfare of
    obedience, and persevere therein. We therefore exhort you who until
    now have embraced secular knighthood (_miliciam secularem_) where
    Christ was not the cause, and whom God in His mercy has chosen out of
    the mass of perdition for the defence of the holy Church, to hasten to
    associate yourselves perpetually.”

This phraseology would suit the constitution of a sheer monastic order.
And the first chapter exhorts these _venerabiles fratres_ who renounce
their own wills and serve the King (Christ) with horses and arms,
zealously to observe all the religious services regularly prescribed for
monks. The _regula_ contains the usual monastic commands. For example,
obedience to the Master of the Order is enjoined _sine mora_ as if God
were commanding, which recalls the language of St. Benedict.[669] Clothes
are regulated, and diet; habitual silence is recommended; the brethren are
not to go alone, nor at their own will, but as directed by the Master, so
as to imitate Him who said, I came not to do mine own will, but His who
sent me.[670] Again, chests with locks are forbidden the brothers, except
under special permission; nor may any brother, without like permission,
receive letters from parents or friends; and then they should be read in
the Master’s presence.[671] Let the brethren shun idle speech, and above
all let no brother talk with another of military exploits, “follies
rather,” achieved by him while “in the world,” or of his doings with
miserable women.[672] Let no brother hunt with hawks; such mundane
delectations do not befit the religious, who should be rather hearing
God’s precepts, and at prayer, or confessing their sins with tears. Yet
the lion may always be hunted; for he goes seeking whom he may
devour.[673]

The _religio_ professed by the Templars is called, in the Latin rule,
_religio militaris_, which the French translates “religion de
chevalerie,” not incorrectly, but with somewhat different flavour.[674]

    “This new _genus religionis_, as we believe, by divine providence
    began with you in the Holy Land, a _religio_ in which you mingle
    chivalry (_milicia_). Thus this armed religion may advance through
    chivalry, and smite the enemy without incurring sin. Rightfully then
    we decree that you shall be called knights of the Temple (_milites
    Templi_) and may hold houses, lands and men, and possess serfs and
    justly rule them.”[675]

The pomp of the last sentence seems to remove from the tone of the earlier
chapters, and suggests a later date. Another, possibly late, chapter (66)
permits the knights to receive tithes, since they have abandoned their
riches for _spontaneae paupertati_. Still another accords to married men a
qualified admission to the brotherhood, but they may not wear the white
robe and mantle (55). The next forbids the admission of _sorores_; and the
last chapter of all (72) warns against the sight of women, and forbids the
brethren to kiss one, be she widow, virgin, mother, sister or friend.

Thus the Latin _regula_ formulates an order of monasticism with only the
modifications imperatively demanded by the exigencies of holy warfare. The
French _regle_ elaborates the military organization and enhances the
chivalric element. This begins to appear in the portions which are a
translation (usually quite close) of the Latin rule. But even that
translation makes changes, for example, omitting the period of probation
required in the Latin text, before admitting a brother to the Order.[676]
A striking change was made by the later French ordinances in the
interrogations and proceedings for admission. The Latin formula begins in
Cistercian phrase:

    “Vis abrenunciare seculo?

    “Volo.

    “Vis profiteri obedientiam secundum canonicam institutionem et
    secundum preceptum domini papae?

    “Volo.

    “Vis assumere tibi conversationem (the monastic mode and change of
    life) fratrum nostrorum?

    “Volo.”[677]

And so forth.

The substance of these and other questions was retained in the far longer
French formula, which exacted specific promises of compliance with all the
Order’s ordinances. But far removed from the original are such questions
as the following: “Biau dous amis” (the ordinary phrase of the chivalric
romance) have you, or has any one for you, made any promise to any one in
return for his aid in procuring your admission, which would be simony?
“Estes vos chevalier et fis de chevalier?”

Is the candidate a knight, and son of knight and lady, and are his “peres
... de lignage de chevaliers”? This means chivalry and gentle blood; and
if the candidate answers in the negative, he cannot be admitted as a
knight of the Temple, although he may be as “sergent,” or in some other
character. Most noble and courtly is the phrasing of these statutes. Their
frequent “Beaus seignors freres” is the address proper for knights rather
than monks.[678]

Usually wherever the translation of the Latin _regula_ ends, the _Regle
dou Temple_ passes on to provisions meeting the requirements of a
military, rather than a monastic order. We enter upon such in the chapters
governing the powers and privileges of the (Grand) Master, of the
Seneschal, of the Marshal, of the “Comandeor de la terre de Jerusalem.”
Many sections have to do with military discipline, with the ordering of
the knights and their followers on the march and in the battle; they
forbid the knights to joust or leave the squadron without orders.[679]
Horses, armour, and accoutrements are regulated, and, in short, full
provision is made for everything conducing to make the army efficient in
war. There is also a long list of faults and crimes for which a knight may
be disciplined or expelled; the latter shall be his punishment if he flee
before the Saracens and forsake his standard in battle.[680]

The history of the Templars, significantly epitomized in the amendments to
their _regula_, shows the necessary as well as inevitable secularization
of a military monastic order; an order which for the purposes of this
chapter may be placed among the chief historical examples of chivalry. For
in this chapter we are not straying through the pleasant mazes of romantic
literature, but are keeping close to history, with the intention of
drawing from it illustrations of chivalry’s ideals. We shall not, however,
enter further upon the story of the Order of the Temple, with its valorous
and rapacious achievements and most tragic end; but will rather look to
the careers of historic individuals for the illumination of our theme.

Reaching form and consciousness in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
chivalry became part of the crusading ardour of those times. All true
knights were or might be Crusaders; and of a truth there was no purer
incarnation of the crusading spirit than Godfrey of Bouillon, that figure
of veritable if somewhat slender historicity, upon whom in time chronicler
and trouvère alike were to fasten as the true hero of the enterprise that
won Jerusalem. And so he was. Not that Godfrey was commander of the host.
He was not even its most energetic or most capable leader. Boemund of
Tarentum and Raymond of Toulouse were his superiors in power and military
energy. But neither Boemund, nor Tancred, nor Raymond, nor any other of
those princes of Christendom, was what Godfrey appears to us, the type and
symbol of the perfect, single-hearted, crusading knight, fighting solely
for the Faith, with Christian devotion and humility, and, like them all,
with more than Christian wrath. The First Crusade (1096-1099) was stamped
with hatred and slaughter: on the dreadful march, at the more dreadful
siege and final sack of Antioch, and finally when the holy sepulchre’s
defilement was washed out in Saracen blood. And there was no slaughterer
more eager than Godfrey.

The cruelty and religious fervour of the Crusade are rendered in the
words of Raymond of Agiles, one of the clergy in the train of Count
Raymond of Toulouse, and an eye-witness of the capture of Jerusalem. After
days of despairing struggle to effect a breach, success came as by the
mercy of God:

    “Among the first to enter was Tancred and the Duke of Lothringia
    (Godfrey), who on that day shed quantities of blood almost beyond
    belief. After them, the host mounted the walls, and now the Saracens
    suffered. Yet although the city was all but in the hands of the
    Franks, the Saracens resisted the party of Count Raymond as if they
    were never going to be taken. But when our men had mastered the walls
    of the city and the towers, then wonderful things were to be seen.
    Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded--which was the easiest for them;
    others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from the towers;
    others were slowly tortured and were burned in flames. In the streets
    and open places of the town were seen piles of heads and hands and
    feet. One rode about everywhere amid the corpses of men and horses.
    But these were small matters! Let us go to Solomon’s temple, where
    they were wont to chant their rites and solemnities. What had been
    done there? If we speak the truth we exceed belief: let this suffice.
    In the temple and porch of Solomon one rode in blood up to the knees
    and even to the horses’ bridles by the just and marvellous Judgment of
    God, in order that the same place which so long had endured their
    blasphemies against Him should receive their blood.”

So the Crusaders wrought; and what joy did they feel! Raymond continues:

    “When the city was taken it was worth the whole long labour to witness
    the devotion of the pilgrims to the sepulchre of the Lord, how they
    clapped their hands, exulted, and sang a new song unto the Lord. For
    their hearts presented to God, victor and triumphant, vows of praise
    which they were unable to explain. A new day, new joy and exultation,
    new and perpetual gladness, the consummation of toil and devotion drew
    forth from all new words, new songs. This day, I say, glorious in
    every age to come, turned all our griefs and toils into joy and
    exultation.”[681]

So new songs of gladness burst from the hearts of the soldiers of the
Cross. In a few days the princes made an election, and offered the kingdom
to Count Raymond: he declined. Then Godfrey was made king; though he
would not be crowned, nor would he ever wear a crown where his Lord had
worn a crown of thorns. As a servant of Christ and of His Church he fought
and ruled some short months till his death. His fame has grown because his
heart was pure, and because, among the knights, he represented most
perfectly the religious impulse of this crusade which fought its way
through blood, until it poured out its new song of joy over the
blood-drenched city. He errs who thinks to find the source and power of
the First Crusade elsewhere than in the flaming zeal of feudal
Christianity. There was doubtless much divergence of motive, secular and
religious; but over-mastering and unifying all was the passion to wrest
the sepulchre of Christ from paynim defilement, and thus win salvation for
the Crusader. Greed went with the host, but it did not inspire the
enterprise.

Doubtless the stories of returning knights awakened a spirit of romantic
adventure, which stirred in later crusading generations. It was not so in
the eleventh century when the First Crusade was gathering. The romantic
imagination was then scarcely quickened; adventure was still inarticulate,
and the literature of adventure for the venture’s sake was yet to be
created. So the First Crusade, with its motive of religious zeal, is in
some degree distinguishable from those which followed when knighthood was
in different flower. If not the Crusades themselves, at least the
_Chansons_ of the trouvères who sang of them, follow a change
corresponding with the changing taste of chivalry: they begin with serious
matters, and are occupied with the great enterprise; then they become
adventurous in theme, romantic, till at last even romantic love is
infelicitously grafted upon the religious rage that won Jerusalem.

This process of change may be traced in the growth of the legends of the
First Crusade and Godfrey of Bouillon. Something was added to his career
even by the Latin Chronicles of fifty years later. But his most
venturesome development is to be found in those French _Chansons de geste_
which have been made into the “Cycle” of the First Crusade. Two of these,
the _Chansons_ of _Antioche_ and _Jerusalem_, were originally composed by
a contemporary, if not a participant in the expedition. They were
refashioned perhaps seventy-five or a hundred years later, in the reign of
Philip Augustus, by another trouvère, who still kept their old tone and
substance. They remained poetic narratives of the holy war. In them the
knights are fierce and bloody, cruel and sometimes greedy; but their whole
emprise makes onward to the end in view, the winning of the holy city.
These poems are epic and not romantic: they may even be called historical.
The character of Godfrey is developed with legendary or epic propriety,
through a heightening of his historic qualities. He equals or excels the
other barons in fierce valour, and yet a touch of courtesy tempers his
wrath. In Christian meekness and in modesty he surpasses all, and he
refuses the throne of Jerusalem until he has been commanded from on high.
At that he accepts the kingdom as a sacred charge in defence of which he
is to die.

It is otherwise with a number of other _chansons_ composed in the latter
part of the twelfth and through the thirteenth century. Some of them (the
_Chanson des chétifs_, for example) had probably to do with the First
Crusade. Others, like the various poems which tell of the Chevalier au
Cygne, were inaptly forced into connection with the family of Godfrey.
They have become adventurous, and are studded with irrelevant marvels,
rather than assisted to their denouements by serious supernatural
intervention. Monsters appear, and incongruous romantic episodes;
Godfrey’s ancestor has become the Swan-knight, and he himself duplicates
the exploits previously ascribed to that half-fairy person. Knightly
manners, from brutal have become courteous. Women throng these poems, and
the romantic love of women enters, although not in the finished guise in
which it plays so dominant a role in the Arthurian Cycle. Such themes,
unknown to the earlier crusading _chansons_, would have fitted ill with a
martial theme driving on through war and carnage (not through
“adventures”) to the holy end in view.[682]

The Crusades open with the form of Godfrey of Bouillon. A century and a
half elapses and they deaden to a close beneath the futile radiance of a
saintlike and perfect knightly personality. St. Louis of France is as
clear a figure as any in the Middle Ages. From all sides his life is
known. We see him as a painstaking sovereign meting out even justice, and
maintaining his royal rights against feudal turbulence and also against
ecclesiastical encroachment. During his reign the monarchy of France
continues to advance in power and repute. And yet there was no jot of
worldly wisdom, and scant consideration of a realm sorely needing its
ruler, in the Quixotic religious devotion which drew him twice across the
sea on crusades unparalleled in their foolishness. For the world was
growing wiser politically; and what was glorious feudal enthusiasm in the
year 1099, was deliberate disregard of experience in the years 1248 and
1270.

Yet who would have had St. Louis wiser in his generation? The loss to
France was mankind’s gain, from the example of saintly king and perfect
knight, kept bright in the narratives of men equal to the task. Louis was
happy in his biographers. Two among them knew him intimately and in ways
affording special opportunities to observe the sides of his character
congenial to their respective tempers. One was his confessor for twenty
years, the Dominican Geoffrey of Beaulieu; the other was the Sire de
Joinville. Geoffrey’s _Vita_ records Louis’ devotions; Joinville’s
_Histoire_ notes the king’s piety; but the qualities which it illuminates
are those of a French gentleman and knight and grand seigneur, like
Joinville himself.

The book of the Dominican[683] is not picturesque. It opens with an
edifying comparison between King Josiah and King Louis. Then it praises
the king’s mother, Queen Blanche of pious memory. As for Louis, the
confessor has been unable to discover that he ever committed a mortal sin:
he sought faithful and wise counsellors; he was careful and gracious in
speech, never using an oath or any scurrilous expression. In earlier
years, when under the necessity of taking oath, he would say, “In nomine
mei”; but afterwards, hearing that some religious man had objected to
this, he restricted his asseverations to the “est, est” and “non, non” of
the Gospel.

From the time he first crossed the sea, he wore no scarlet raiment, but
clothed himself in sober garments. And as such were of less value to give
to the poor than those which he had formerly worn, he added sixty pounds a
year to his almsgiving; for he did not wish the poor to suffer because of
his humble dress. Geoffrey gives the long tale of his charities to the
poor and to the mendicant Orders. On the Sabbaths it was the king’s secret
custom to wash the feet of three beggars, dry them, and kiss them humbly.
He commanded in his will that no stately monument should be erected over
his grave. He treated his confessors with great respect, and, while
confessing, if perchance a window was to be closed or opened, he quickly
rose and shut or opened it, and would not hear of his confessor doing it.
In Advent season and Lent he abstained from marital intercourse. Some
years before his death, if he had had his will, he would have resigned his
kingdom to his son, and entered the Order of the Franciscans or
Dominicans. He brought up his children most religiously, and wished some
of them to take the vows.[684]

He confessed every Friday and also between times, if something occurred to
him; and if he thought of anything in the night, he would send for his
confessor and confess before matins.[685] After confession he always took
his discipline from his confessor, whom he furnished with a scourge of
five little braided iron chains, attached to an ivory handle. This he
would afterwards put back into a little case, which he carried hanging to
his belt, but out of sight. Such little cases he sometimes presented to
his children or friends in secret, that they might have a convenient
instrument of discipline. He wore haircloth next his flesh in the holy
seasons, a habit distressing to his tender skin, until his confessor
persuaded him to abandon this form of penance as ill comporting with his
station. He replaced it by increasing his charities. His fasts were
regular and frequent, till he lessened them upon prudent advice; for he
was not strong. He would have liked to hear all the canonical hours
chanted; and twice a day he heard Mass, and daily the Office for the Dead.
Sometimes, soon after midnight, he would rise to hear matins, and then
would take a quiet time for prayer by his bed. Likewise he loved to hear
sermons. On returning over the sea, when the ships suffered a long delay,
he had preaching three times a week, with the sermon specially adapted to
the sailors, a class of men who rarely hear the Word of God. He prevailed
on many of them to confess, and declared himself ready at any time to put
his hand to a rope, if necessary, so that a sailor while confessing might
not be called away by any exigency of the sea.

While beyond the sea, this good king, hearing that a Saracen Sultan had
collected the books of their philosophy at his own expense for his
subjects’ use, determined not to be outdone whenever he should return to
Paris, a purpose which he amply carried out, diligently and generously
supplying money for copying and renewing the writings of the Doctors. At
enormous expense he obtained the Saviour’s crown of thorns and a good part
of the true cross, from the emperor at Constantinople, with many other
precious relics; all of which the king barefooted helped to carry in holy
procession when they were received by the clergy of Paris.

The king was very careful in the distribution of ecclesiastical patronage,
always seeing to it that the candidate was not already enjoying another
benefice. His heart exulted when it came to him to bestow a benefice upon
some especially holy man. He was most zealous in the suppression of
swearing and blasphemy, and with the advice of the papal legate then in
France issued an edict, providing that the lips of those guilty of this
sin should be seared with hot irons; and when certain ones murmured, he
declared that he would willingly suffer his own lips to be branded if that
would purge his realm of this vice.

Such were the acts and qualities of Louis which impressed his Dominican
confessor. They were the qualities of a saint, and would have brought
their possessor to a monastery, had not his royal station held him in the
world. The Dominican could not know the knightly nature of his royal
penitent, and still less reflect it in his Latin of the confessional. For
this there was needed the pen of a great gentleman, whose nature enabled
him to picture his lord in a book of such high breeding that it were hard
to find its fellow. This book is stately with the Sire de Joinville’s
consciousness of his position and blood, and stately through the respect
he bore his lord--a book with which no one would take a liberty. Yet it is
simple in thought and phrase, as written by one who lived through what he
tells, and closely knew and dearly loved the king. From it one learns that
he who was a saint in his confessor’s eyes was also a monarch from his
soul out to his royal manners and occasional royal insistence upon acts
which others thought unwise. We also learn to know him as a knightly,
hapless soldier of the Cross, who would not waver from his word plighted
even to an infidel.

That St. Louis was a veritable knight is the first thing one learns from
Joinville. The first part of my book, says that gentleman, tells how the
king conducted his life after the way of God and the Church, and to the
profit of his realm; the second tells of his “granz chevaleries et de ses
granz faiz d’armes.” “The first deed (_faiz_) whereby ‘il mist son cors en
avanture de mort’ was at our arrival before Damietta, where his council
was of the opinion, as I have understood, that he ought to remain in his
ship until he saw what his knights (_sa chevalerie_) should do, who made a
landing. The reason why they so counselled him was that if he disembarked,
and his people should be killed and he with them, the whole affair was
lost; while if he remained in his ship he could in his own person renew
the attempt to conquer Egypt. And he would credit no one, but leaped into
the sea, all armed, his shield hanging from his neck, his lance in hand,
and was one of the first upon the beach.”

This is from Joinville’s Introduction. He recommences formally:

    “In the name of God the all powerful, I, John, Sire of Joinville,
    Seneschal of Champagne, cause to be written the life of our sainted
    king Louis, as I saw and heard of it for the space of six years while
    I was in his company on the pilgrimage beyond the sea, and since we
    returned. And before I tell you his great deeds and prowess
    (_chevalerie_), I will recount what I saw and heard of his holy words
    and good precepts, so that they may be found one after the other for
    the improvement of those who hear.

    “This holy man loved God with all his heart, and imitated His works:
    which was evident in this, that as God died for the love which He bore
    His people, so he (Louis) put his body in peril several times for the
    love which he bore his people. The great love which he had for his
    people appeared in what he said to his eldest son, Louis, when very
    sick at Fontainebleau: ‘Fair son,’ said he, ‘I beg thee to make
    thyself loved by the people of thy kingdom; for indeed I should prefer
    that a Scot from Scotland came and ruled the people of the kingdom
    well and faithfully, rather than that thou shouldst rule them ill in
    the sight of all.’”

Joinville continues relating the virtues of the king, and recording his
conversations with himself:

    “He called me once and said, ‘Seneschal, what is God?’ And I said to
    him, ‘Sire, it is a being so good that there can be no better.’

    “‘Now I ask you,’ said he, ‘which would you choose, to be a leper, or
    to have committed a mortal sin?’ And I who never lied to him replied
    that I had rather have committed thirty than be a leper. Afterwards he
    called me apart and made me sit at his feet and said: ‘Why did you say
    that to me yesterday?’ And I told him that I would say it again. And
    he: ‘You speak like a thoughtless trifler; for you should know there
    is no leprosy so ugly as to be in mortal sin, because the soul in
    mortal sin is like the devil. This is why there can be no leprosy so
    ugly. And then, of a truth, when a man dies, he is cured of the
    leprosy of the body; but when the man who has committed a mortal sin
    dies, he does not know, nor is it certain, that he has so repented
    while living, that God has pardoned him; this is why he should have
    great fear that this leprosy will last as long as God shall be in
    paradise. So I pray you earnestly that you will train your heart, for
    the love of God and of me, to wish rather for leprosy or any other
    bodily evil, rather than that mortal sin should come into your soul.’
    He asked me whether I washed the feet of the poor on Holy Tuesday.
    ‘Sire,’ said I, ‘_quel malheur_! I will not wash those villains’
    feet.’ ‘Truly that was ill said,’ said he; ‘for you should not hold
    in contempt what God did for our instruction. So I pray you, for the
    love of God first, and for the love of me, to accustom yourself to
    wash them.’”

Joinville was some years younger than his king, who loved him well and
wished to help him. The king also esteemed Master Robert de Sorbon[686]
for the high respect as a _preudom_ in which he was held, and had him eat
at his table. One day Master Robert was seated next to Joinville.

    “‘Seneschal,’ said the king, smiling, ‘tell me the reasons why a man
    of wisdom and valour (_preudom_, _prud’homme_) is accounted better
    than a fool.’ Then began the argument between me and Master Robert;
    and when we had disputed for a time, the king rendered his decision,
    saying: ‘Master Robert, I should like to have the name of _preudom_,
    so be it that I was one, and all the rest I would leave to you; for
    _preudom_ is such a grand and good thing that it fills the mouth just
    to pronounce it.’”

Master Robert plays a not altogether happy part in another scene,
varicoloured and delightful:

    “The holy king was at Corbeil one Pentecost, and twenty-four knights
    with him. The king went down after dinner into the courtyard back of
    the chapel, and was talking at the entrance with the Count of
    Brittany, the father of the present duke, whom God preserve. Master
    Robert de Sorbon came to seek me there, and took me by the cloak, and
    led me to the king, and all the other gentlemen came after us. Then I
    asked Master Robert: ‘Master Robert, what would you?’ And he said to
    me: ‘If the king should sit down here, and you should seat yourself
    above him, I ask you whether you would not be to blame?’ And I said,
    Yes.

    “And he said to me: ‘Yet you lay yourself open to blame, since you are
    more nobly clad than the king: for you wear squirrel’s fur and cloth
    of green, which the king does not.’

    “And I said to him: ‘Master Robert, saving your grace, I do nothing
    worthy of blame when I wear squirrel’s fur and cloth of green; for it
    is the clothing which my father and mother left me. But you do what is
    to blame; for you are the son of a _vilain_ and _vilaine_, and have
    abandoned the clothes of your father and your mother, and are clad in
    richer cloth than the king.’ And then I took the lappet of his surcoat
    and that of the king’s, and said to him: ‘See whether I do not speak
    truly.’ And the king set himself to defend Master Robert with all his
    might.”

    “Afterwards Messire the king called to him Monseigneur Philippe his
    son, the father of the present king, and the king Thibaut (of
    Navarre), and laid his hand on the earth and said: ‘Sit close to me,
    so that they may not hear.’

    “‘Ah Sire,’ say they, ‘we dare not sit so close to you.’

    “And he said to me, ‘Seneschal, sit down here.’ And so I did, so close
    that our clothes touched. And he made them sit down by me, and said to
    them: ‘You have done ill, you who are my sons, who have not obeyed at
    once all that I bade you: and see to it that this does not happen with
    you again.’ And they promised. And then he said to me, that he had
    called us in order to confess to me that he was in the wrong in
    defending Master Robert against me. ‘But,’ said he, ‘I saw him so
    dumbfounded that there was good need I should defend him. And do none
    of you attach any importance to all I said defending Master Robert;
    for, as the seneschal said to him, you ought to dress well and
    becomingly, so that your wives may love you better, and your people
    hold you in higher esteem. For the sage says that one should appear in
    such clothes and arms that the wise of this world may not say you have
    done too much, nor the young people say you have done too little.’”

The hopelessly worthy _parvenu_ was quite outside this charmed circle of
blood and manners.

Another story of Joinville opens our eyes to Louis’ views on Jews and
infidels. The king was telling him of a grand argument between Jews and
Christian clergy which was to have been held at Cluny. And a certain
poverty-stricken knight was there, who obtained leave to speak the first
word; and he asked the head Jew whether he believed that Mary was the
mother of God and still a virgin. And the Jew answered that he did not
believe it at all. The knight replied that in that case the Jew had acted
like a fool to enter her monastery, and should pay for it; and with that
he knocked him down with his staff, and all the other Jews ran off. When
the abbot reproached him for his folly, he replied that the abbot’s folly
was greater in having the argument at all. “So I tell you,” said the king
on finishing his story, “that only a skilled clerk should dispute with
misbelievers; but a layman, when he hears any one speak ill of the
Christian law, should defend that law with nothing but his sword, which he
should plunge into the defamer’s belly, to the hilt if possible.”

Well known is the hapless outcome of St. Louis’ Crusades: the first one
leading to defeat and captivity in Egypt, the second ending in the king’s
death by disease at Tunis. Yet in what he sought to do in his Lord’s
cause, St. Louis was a true knight and soldier of the Cross. The spirit
was willing; but the flesh accomplished little. Let us take from
Joinville’s story of that first crusade a wonderfully illustrative
chapter, giving the confused scenes occurring after the capture of
Damietta, when the French king and his feudal host had advanced southerly
through the Delta, along the eastern branch of the Nile. Joinville was
making a reconnaissance with his own knights, when they came suddenly upon
a large body of Saracens. The Christians were hard pressed; here and there
a knight falls in the melée, among them

    “Monseigneur Hugues de Trichatel, the lord of Conflans, who carried my
    banner. I and my knights spurred to deliver Monseigneur Raoul de
    Wanou, who was thrown to the ground. As I was making my way back, the
    Turks struck at me with their lances; my horse fell on his knees under
    the blows, and I went over his head. I recovered myself as I might,
    shield on neck and sword in hand; and Monseigneur Erard de Siverey
    (whom God absolve!), who was of my people, came to my aid, and said
    that we had better retreat to a ruined house, and there wait for the
    king who was approaching.”

One notes the high-born courtesy with which the Sire de Joinville speaks
of the gentlemen who had the honour of serving him. The fight goes on.

    “Monseigneur Erard de Siverey was struck by a sword-blow in his face,
    so that his nose hung down over his lips. And then I was minded of
    Monseigneur Saint Jacques, whom I thus invoked: ‘Beau Sire Saint
    Jacques help and succour me in this need.’

    “When I had made my prayer, Monseigneur Erard de Siverey said to me:
    ‘Sire, if you think that neither I nor my heirs would suffer reproof,
    I would go for aid to the Count of Anjou, whom I see over there in the
    fields.’ And I said to him: ‘Messire Erard, I think you would do
    yourself great honour, if you now went for aid to save our lives; for
    your own is in jeopardy.’ And indeed I spoke truly, for he died of
    that wound. He asked the advice of all our knights who were there, and
    all approved as I had approved. And when he heard that, he requested
    me to let him have his horse, which I was holding by the bridle with
    the rest. And so I did.”

The knightliness of this scene is perfect, with its liege fealty and its
carefulness as to the point of honour, its carefulness also that the
vassal knight shall fail in no duty to his lord whereby the descent of his
fief may be jeopardized. Monseigneur Erard (whom God absolve, we say with
Joinville!) is very careful to have his lord’s assent and the approval of
his fellows, before he will leave his lord in peril, and undergo still
greater risk to bring him succour.

Well, the Count of Anjou brought such aid as created a diversion, and the
Saracens turned to the new foe. But now the king arrives on the scene:

    “There where I was on foot with my knights, wounded as already said,
    comes the king with his whole array, and a great sound of trumpets and
    drums. And he halted on the road on the dyke. Never saw I one so
    bravely armed: for he showed above all his people from his shoulders
    up, a gilded casque upon his head and a German sword in his hand.”

Then the king’s good knights charge into the battle, and fine feats of
arms are done. The fighting is fierce and general. At length the king is
counselled to bear back along the river, keeping close to it on his right
hand, so as to reunite with the Duke of Burgundy who had been left to
guard the camp. The knights are recalled from the melée, and with a great
noise of trumpets and drums, and Saracen horns, the army is set in motion.

    “And now up comes the constable, Messire Imbert de Beaujeu, and tells
    the king that the Count of Artois, his brother, was defending himself
    in a house in Mansourah, and needed aid. And the king said to him:
    ‘Constable go before and I will follow you.’ And I said to the
    constable that I would be his knight, at which he thanked me greatly.”

Again one feels the feudal chivalry. Now the affair becomes rather
distraught. They set out to succour the Count of Artois, but are checked,
and it is rumoured that the king is taken; and in fact six Saracens had
rushed upon him and seized his horse by the bridle; but he had freed
himself with such great strokes that all his people took courage. Yet the
host is driven back upon the river, and is in desperate straits. Joinville
and his knights defend a bridge over a tributary, which helps to check the
Saracen advance, and affords an uncertain means of safety to the French.
But there is no cessation of the Saracen attack with bows and spears. The
knights seemed full of arrows. Joinville saved his life with an
arrow-proof Saracen vest, “so that I was wounded by their arrows only in
five places”! One of Joinville’s own stout burgesses, bearing his lord’s
banner on a lance, helped in the charges upon the enemy. In the melée up
speaks the good Count of Soissons, whose cousin Joinville had married. “He
joked with me and said: ‘Seneschal, let us whoop after this canaille; for
by God’s coif (his favourite oath) we shall be talking, you and I, about
this day in the chambers of the ladies.’”

At last, the arbalests were brought out from the camp, and the Saracens
drew off--fled, says the Sire de Joinville. And the king was there, and

    “I took off his casque, and gave him my iron cap, so that he might get
    some air. And then comes brother Henry de Ronnay, Prevost of the
    Hospital, to the king when he had passed the river, and kisses his
    mailed hand. And the king asked him whether he had news of the Count
    of Artois, his brother; and he said that he had indeed news of him,
    for he was sure that his brother the Count of Artois was in Paradise.
    ‘Ha! sire,’ said the Prevost, ‘be of good cheer; for no such honour
    ever came to a king of France as is come to you. For to fight your
    enemies you have crossed a river by swimming, have discomfited your
    enemies and driven them from the field, and taken their engines and
    tents, where you will sleep this night.’ And the king replied that God
    be adored for all that He gave; and then the great tears fell from his
    eyes.”

One need not follow on to the ill ending of the campaign, when king and
knights all had to yield themselves prisoners, in most uncertain
captivity. The Saracen Emirs conspired and slew their Sultan; the
prisoners’ lives hung on a thread; and when the terms were arranging for
the delivery and ransom of the king, his own scruples nearly proved fatal.
For the Emirs, after they had made their oath, wished the king to swear,
and put his seal to a parchment,

    “that if he the king did not hold to his agreements, might he be as
    shamed as the Christian who denied God and His Mother, and was cut off
    from the company of the twelve Companions (apostles) and of all the
    saints, male and female. To this the king consented. The last point of
    the oath was this: That if the king did not keep his agreements, might
    he be as shamed as the Christian who denied God and His law, and in
    contempt of God spat on the Cross and trod on it. When the king heard
    that, he said, please God, he would not make that oath.”

Then the trouble began, and the Emirs tortured the venerable patriarch of
Jerusalem till he besought the king to swear. How the oath was arranged I
do not know, says Joinville, but finally the Emirs professed themselves
satisfied. And after that, when the ransom was paid, the Saracens by a
mistake accepted a sum ten thousand livres short, and Louis, in spite of
the protest of his counsellors, refused to permit advantage to be taken
and insisted on full payment.

Many years afterwards, when Louis was dead and canonized, a dream came to
his faithful Joinville who was then an old man.

    “It seemed to me in my dream that I saw the king in front of my chapel
    at Joinville; and he was, so he seemed to me, wonderfully happy and
    glad at heart; and I also was glad at heart, because I saw him in my
    chateau. And I said to him: ‘Sire, when you go hence, I will prepare
    lodging for you at my house in my village of Chevillon.’ And he
    replied, smiling, and said to me: ‘Sire de Joinville, by the troth I
    owe you, I do not wish so soon to go from here.’ When I awoke I
    bethought me; and it seemed to me that it would please God and the
    king that I should provide a lodging for him in my chapel. So I have
    placed an altar in honour of God and of him there, where there shall
    be always chanting in his honour. And I have established a fund in
    perpetuity to do this.”

Godfrey of Bouillon and St. Louis of France show knighthood as inspired by
serious and religious motives. We pass on a hundred years after St. Louis,
to a famous Chronicle concerning men whose knightly lives exhibit no such
religious, and possibly no such serious, purpose, so far at least as they
are set forth by this delightful chronicler. His name of course is Sir
John Froissart, and his chief work goes under the name of _The Chronicles
of England, France, Spain, and the adjoining Countries_. It covers the
period from the reign of Edward II. to the coronation of Henry IV. of
England. Have we not all known his book as one to delight youth and age?

Let us, however, open it seriously, and first of all notice the Preface,
with its initial sentence giving the note of the entire work: “That the
_grans merveilles_ and the _biau fait d’armes_ achieved in the great wars
between England and France, and the neighbouring realms may be worthily
recorded, and known in the present and in the time to come, I purpose to
order and put the same in prose, according to the true information which I
have obtained from valiant knights, squires, and marshals at arms, who are
and rightly should be the investigators and reporters of such
matters.”[687]

“Marvels” and “deeds of arms”--soon he will use the equivalent phrase
_belles aventures_. With delicious garrulity, but never wavering from his
point of view, the good Sir John repeats and enlarges as he enters on his
work in which “to encourage all valorous hearts, and to show them
honourable examples” he proposes to “point out and speak of each adventure
from the nativity of the noble King Edward (III.) of England, who so
potently reigned, and who was engaged in so many battles and perilous
adventures and other feats of arms and great prowess, from the year of
grace 1326, when he was crowned in England.”

Of course Froissart says that the occasion of these wars was King Edward’s
enterprise to recover his inheritance of France, which the twelve peers
and barons of that realm had awarded to Lord Philip of Valois, from whom
it had passed on to his son, King Charles. This enterprise was the woof
whereon should hang an hundred years of knightly and romantic feats of
arms, which incidentally wrought desolation to the fair realm of France.
Yet the full opening of these matters was not yet; and Froissart begins
with the story of the troubles brought on Queen Isabella and the nobles
of England through the overbearing insolence of Sir Hugh Spencer, the
favourite of her husband Edward II.

The Queen left England secretly, to seek aid at Paris from her brother
King Charles, that she might regain her rights against the upstart and her
own weak estranged husband. King Charles received her graciously, as a
great lord should receive a great dame; and richly provided for her and
her young son Edward. Then he took counsel of the “great lords and barons
of his kingdom”; and their advice was that he should permit her to enlist
assistance in his realm, and yet himself appear ignorant of the matter. Of
this, Sir Hugh hears, and his gold is busy with these counsellors; so that
the Court becomes a cold place for the self-exiled queen. On she fares in
her distress, and, as advised, seeks the aid of the great Earl of
Hainault, then at Valenciennes. But before the queen can reach that city,
the earl’s young brother, Sir John, Lord of Beaumont, rides to meet her,
ardent to succour a great lady in distress, “being at that time very
young, and panting for glory like a knight-errant.” In the evening he
reached the house of Sir Eustace d’Ambreticourt, where the queen was
lodged. She made her lamentable complaint, at which Sir John was affected
even to tears, and said, “Lady, see here your knight, who will not fail to
die for you, though every one else should desert you; therefore will I do
everything in my power to conduct you and your son, and to restore you to
your rank in England, by the grace of God, and the assistance of your
friends in those parts; and I, and all those whom I can influence, will
risk our lives on the adventure for your sake.”

Is not this a chivalric beginning? And so the Chronicle goes on. King
Edward III. is crowned, marries the Lady Philippa, daughter of the Earl of
Hainault, and afterwards sends his defiance to Philip, King of France, for
not yielding up to him his rightful inheritance, and this after the same
King Edward had, as Duke of Aquitaine, done homage to King Philip for that
great duchy.

So the challenge of King Edward, and of sundry other lords, was delivered
to the King of France; and thereupon the first bold raid is made by the
knightliest figure of the first generation of the war, Sir Walter Manny,
a young Hainaulter who had remained in the train of Queen Philippa. The
war is carried on by incursions and deeds of derring-do, the larger armies
of the kings of England and France circumspectly refraining from battle,
which might have checked the martial jollity of the affair. It is all
beautifully pointless and adventurous, and carried out in the spirit of a
knighthood that loves fighting and seeks honour and adventure, while
steadying itself with a hope of plunder and reward. There are likewise
ladies to be succoured and defended.

One of these was the lion-hearted Countess of Montfort, who with her
husband had become possessed of the disputed dukedom of Brittany. The Earl
of Montfort did homage to the King of England; the rival claimant, Charles
of Blois, sought the aid of France. He came with an army, and Montfort was
taken and died in prison; the duchess was left to carry on the war. She
was at last shut up and besieged in Hennebon on the coast; the burghers
were falling away, the knights discouraged; emissaries from Lord Charles
were working among them. His ally, Lord Lewis of Spain, and Sir Hervé de
Leon were the leaders of the besiegers. Sir Hervé had an uncle, a bishop,
Sir Guy de Leon, who was on the side of the Countess of Montfort. The
nephew won the uncle over in a conference without the walls; and the
latter assumed the task of persuading the Lords of Brittany who were with
the countess to abandon the apparently hopeless struggle. Re-entering the
town, the bishop was eloquent against the countess’s cause, and promised
free pardon to the lords if they would give up the town. Now listen to
Froissart, how he tells the story:

    “The countess had strong suspicions of what was going forward, and
    begged of the lords of Brittany, for the love of God, that they would
    not doubt but she should receive succours before three days were over.
    But the bishop spoke so eloquently, and made use of such good
    arguments, that these lords were in much suspense all that night. On
    the morrow he continued the subject, and succeeded so far as to gain
    them over, or very nearly so, to his opinion; insomuch that Sir Hervé
    de Leon had advanced close to the town to take possession of it, with
    their free consent, when the countess looking out from a window of the
    castle toward the sea, cried out most joyfully, ‘I see the succours I
    have so long expected and wished for coming.’ She repeated this twice;
    and the town’s people ran to the ramparts and to the windows of the
    castle, and saw a numerous fleet of great and small vessels, well
    trimmed, making all the sail they could toward Hennebon. They rightly
    imagined it must be the fleet from England, so long detained at sea by
    tempests and contrary winds.

    “When the governor of Guingamp, Sir Yves de Tresiquidi, Sir Galeran de
    Landreman, and the other knights, perceived this succour coming to
    them, they told the bishop that he might break up his conference, for
    they were not now inclined to follow his advice. The bishop, Sir Guy
    de Leon, replied, ‘My lords, then our company shall separate; for I
    will go to him who seems to me to have the clearest right.’ Upon which
    he sent his defiance to the lady, and to all her party, and left the
    town to inform Sir Hervé de Leon how matters stood. Sir Hervé was much
    vexed at it, and immediately ordered the largest machine that was with
    the army to be placed as near the castle as possible, strictly
    commanding that it should never cease working day nor night. He then
    presented his uncle to the Lord Lewis of Spain, and to the Lord
    Charles of Blois, who both received him most courteously. The
    countess, in the meantime, prepared and hung with tapestry halls and
    chambers to lodge handsomely the lords and barons of England, whom she
    saw coming, and sent out a noble company to meet them. When they were
    landed, she went herself to give them welcome, respectfully thanking
    each knight and squire, and led them into the town and castle that
    they might have convenient lodging: on the morrow, she gave them a
    magnificent entertainment. All that night, and the following day, the
    large machine never ceased from casting stones into the town.

    “After the entertainment, Sir Walter Manny, who was captain of the
    English, inquired of the countess the state of the town and the
    enemy’s army. Upon looking out of the window, he said, he had a great
    inclination to destroy that large machine which was placed so near,
    and much annoyed them, if any would help him. Sir Yves de Tresiquidi
    replied, that he would not fail him in this his first expedition; as
    did also the lord of Landreman. They went to arm themselves, and then
    sallied quietly out of one of the gates, taking with them three
    hundred archers, who shot so well, that those who guarded the machine
    fled, and the men at arms, who followed the archers, falling upon
    them, slew the greater part, and broke down and cut in pieces this
    large machine. They then dashed in among the tents and huts, set fire
    to them, and killed and wounded many of their enemies before the army
    was in motion. After this they made a handsome retreat. When the enemy
    were mounted and armed they galloped after them like madmen.

    “Sir Walter Manny, seeing this, exclaimed, ‘May I never be embraced by
    my mistress and dear friend, if I enter castle or fortress before I
    have unhorsed one of these gallopers.’ He then turned round, and
    pointed his spear toward the enemy, as did the two brothers of
    Lande-Halle, le Haze de Brabant, Sir Yves de Tresiquidi, Sir Galeran
    de Landreman, and many others, and spitted the first coursers. Many
    legs were made to kick the air. Some of their own party were also
    unhorsed. The conflict became very serious, for reinforcements were
    perpetually coming from the camp; and the English were obliged to
    retreat towards the castle, which they did in good order until they
    came to the castle ditch; there the knights made a stand, until all
    their men were safely returned. Many brilliant actions, captures, and
    rescues might have been seen. Those of the town who had not been of
    the party to destroy the large machine now issued forth, and, ranging
    themselves upon the banks of the ditch, made such good use of their
    bows, that they forced the enemy to withdraw, killing many men and
    horses. The chiefs of the army, perceiving they had the worst of it,
    and that they were losing men to no purpose, sounded a retreat, and
    made their men retire to the camp. As soon as they were gone, the
    townsmen re-entered, and went each to his quarters. The Countess of
    Montfort came down from the castle to meet them, and with a most
    cheerful countenance, kissed Sir Walter Manny, and all his companions,
    one after the other like a noble and valiant dame.”

In this manner the genial chronicler goes on through his long delightful
ramble. After a while the chief combatants close. Cressy is fought and
Poictiers. The Black Prince, that extremest bit of knightly royalty, fills
the page. The place of Sir Walter Manny is taken by the larger figure of
Sir John Chandos, and, on the other side, the usually unfortunate but
unconquerable Bertrand du Guesclin. Froissart is at his best when he tells
of the great expedition of the Black Prince to restore the cruel Don Pedro
of Castille to the throne from which he had been expelled by that
picturesque bastard brother Henry, who had a poorer title but a better
right, by virtue of being fit to rule.

This whole expedition was--as we see it in Froissart--neither politics nor
war, but chivalry. What interest had England, or Edward III., or the
Prince of Wales in Don Pedro? None. He was a cruel tyrant, rightfully
expelled. The Prince of Wales would set him back upon his throne in the
interest of royal legitimacy, and because there offered a brilliant
opportunity for fame and plunder: the Black Prince thought less of the
latter than the Free Companies enlisted under his banner, and less than
his own rapacious knights.

So in three divisions, headed by the most famous knights and in a way
generalled by Sir John Chandos, the host passes through the kingdom of
Navarre, and crosses the Pyrenees. Then begin a series of exploits. Sir
Thomas Felton and a company set out just to dare and beard the Castillian
army, and after entrancing feats of knight-errantry, are all captured or
slain. Much is the prince annoyed at this; but bears on, gladdened with
the thought, often expressed, that the bastard Henry is a bold and hardy
knight, and is advancing to give battle.

And true it was. One of Henry’s counsellors explains to him how easy it is
to hem in the Black Prince in the defiles, and starve him into a
disastrous retreat. Perish the thought! “By the soul of my father,”
answers King Henry, “I have such a desire to see this prince, and to try
my strength with him, that we will never part without a battle.”

So the unnecessary and resultless battle of Navaretta took place. Don
Pedro, the cruel rightful king, was knighted, with others, by the Prince
of Wales before the fight. The tried unflinching chivalry of England and
Aquitaine conquered, although one division of King Henry’s host had du
Guesclin at its head. That knight was captured; somehow his star had a way
of sinking before the steadier fortune of Sir John Chandos, who was here
du Guesclin’s captor for a second time. King Henry, after valiant
fighting, escaped. Don Pedro was re-set upon his throne; and played false
with the Black Prince and his army, in the matter of pay. The whole
expedition turned back across the Pyrenees. And not so long after, Henry
bestirred himself, and the tardily freed du Guesclin hurried again to aid
him. This time there was no Black Prince and Sir John Chandos; and Don
Pedro was conquered and slain, and Henry was at last firm upon his throne.

Could anything have been more chivalric, more objectless, and more
absolutely lacking in result? It is a beautiful story; every one should
refresh his childhood’s memory of it by reading Froissart’s delightful
pages. And then let him also read at least the subsequent story of the
death of Sir John Chandos in a knightly brush at arms; he, the really wise
and great leader, perishes through his personal rash knighthood! It is a
fine tale of the ending of an old and mighty knight, the very flower of
chivalry, as he was called.

So matters fare on through these Chronicles. All is charming and
interesting and picturesque; charming also for the knights: great fame is
won and fat ransoms paid to recoup knightly fortunes. Now and then--all
too frequently, alas! and the only pity of it all!--some brave knight has
the mishap to lose his life! That is to say, the only pity of it from the
point of view of good Sir John. But we can see further horrors in this
picture of chivalry’s actualities: we see King Edward pillage, devastate,
destroy France;[688] we see the awful outcome of the general ruin in the
rising of the vile, unhappy peasants, the Jacquerie; then in the
indiscriminate slaughter and pillaging by the Free Companies, no longer
well employed by royalties; and then we see the cruel treachery of many an
incident wrought out by such a flower of chivalry even as du
Guesclin.[689] Indeed all the horrors of ceaseless interminable war are
everywhere, and no more dreadful horror through the whole story than the
bloody sack of Limoges commanded by that perfect knight, the Black Prince,
himself stricken with disease, and carried in a litter through the breach
of the walls into the town, and there reposing, assuaging his cruel soul,
while his men run hither and thither “slaying men, women and children
according to their orders.”[690]

But when King Edward was old, and the Prince of Wales dying with disease,
the French and their partisans gathered heart, and pressed back the
English party with successful captures and reprisals. Du Guesclin was made
Constable of France; and there remained no English leader who was his
match. From this second period onwards, the wars and slaughters and
pillagings become more embittered, more horrid and less relieved. The tone
of everything is brutalized, and the good chronicler himself frequently
animadverts on the wanton destruction wrought, and the frightful ruin.
All is not as in the opening of the story, which was so fascinating, so
knightly and almost as purely adventurous as the Arthurian romances--only
that there was less love of ladies and a disturbing dearth of forests
perilous, and enchanted castles. It was then that the reader had ever and
anon to remind himself that Froissart is not romance or legend, but a
contemporary chronicle; and that in spite of heightened colours and
expanded (if not invented) dialogues, his narrative does not belong to the
imaginative or fictitious side of chivalry, but to its actualities.[691]

Froissart’s pictures of the depravity and devastation caused by the wars
of England and France, disclose the unhappy actuality in which chivalry
might move and have its being. And the knights were part of the cruelty,
treachery, and lust. One may remark besides in Froissart a certain
shallowness, a certain emptying, of the spirit of chivalry. One phase of
this lay in the expansion of form and ceremony, while life was
departing;--as, for example, in the hypertrophe of heraldry, and in the
pageantry of the later tournaments, where such care was taken to prevent
injury to the combatants. A subtler phase of chivalry’s emptying lay in
its preciosity and in the excessive growth of fantasy and utter
romance--of which enough will be said in the next chapter.




CHAPTER XXIII

ROMANTIC CHIVALRY AND COURTLY LOVE

    FROM ROLAND TO TRISTAN AND LANCELOT


The instance of Godfrey of Bouillon showed how easy was the passage from
knighthood in history to knighthood in legend and romance: legend
springing from fact, out of which it makes a story framed in a picture of
the time; romance unhistorical in origin, borrowing, devising, imagining
according to the taste of an audience and the faculty of the trouvère. A
boundless mediaeval literature of poetic legend and romantic fiction sets
forth the ways of chivalry. Our attention may be confined to the Old
French, the source from which German, English, and Italian literatures
never ceased to draw. Three branches may be selected: the _chansons de
geste_; the _romans d’aventure_; and the Arthurian romances. The subjects
of the three are distinct, and likewise the tone and manner of treatment.
Yet they were not unaffected by each other; for instance, the hard feudal
spirit of the _chansons de geste_ became touched with the tastes which
moulded the two other groups, and there was even a borrowing of topic.
This was natural, as the periods of their composition over-lapped, and
doubtless their audiences were in part the same.

The _chansons de geste_ (_gesta_ == deeds) were epic narratives with
historical facts for subjects, and commonly were composed in ten-syllable
assonanced or (later) rhyming couplets, _laisses_ so called, the same
final assonance or rhyme extending through a dozen or so lines. They told
the deeds of Charlemagne and his barons, or the feuds of the barons among
themselves, especially those of the time following the emperor’s death. So
the subject might be national, for instance the war against the Saracens
in Spain; or it might be more provincially feudal in every sense of the
latter word.[692] It is not to our purpose to discuss how these poems grew
through successive generations, nor how much of Teutonic spirit they put
in Romance forms of verse. They were composed by trouvères or _jongleurs_.
The _Roland_ is the earliest of them, and in its extant form belongs to
the last part of the eleventh century. One or two others are nearly as
early; but the vast majority, as we have them, are the creations, or
rather the _remaniements_, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

These _chansons_ present the feudal system in epic action. They blazon
forth its virtues and its horrors. The heroes are called barons (_ber_)
and also chevaliers;[693] _vassalage_ and prowess (_proecce_) are closely
joined; the _Roland_ speaks of the _vassalage_ of Charles _le ber_
(Charlemagne). The usages of chivalry are found:[694] a baron begins as
_enfant_, and does his youthful feats (_enfances_); then he is girt with
manhood’s sword and given the thwack which dubs him _chevalier_.
Naturally, the chivalry of the _chansons_ is feudal rather than romantic.
It is chivalry, sometimes crusading against “felun paien,” sometimes
making war against emperors or rivals; always truculent, yet fighting for
an object and not for pure adventure’s sake or the love of ladies. The
motives of action are quite tangible, and the tales reflect actual
situations and conditions. They tell what knights (the chevaliers and
barons) really did, though, of course, the particular incidents related
may not be historical. Naturally they speak from the time of their
composition. The _Roland_, for example, throbs with the crusading wrath
of the eleventh century--a new fervour, and no passionate memory of the
old obscure disaster of Roncesvalles. It does not speak from the time of
the great emperor. For when Charlemagne lived there was neither a “dulce
France” nor the sentiment which enshrined it; nor was there a sharply
deliminated feudal Christianity set over against a world of “felun
paien”--those false paynim, who should be trusted by no Christian baron.
The whole poem revolves around a treason plotted by a renegade among vile
infidels.

In this rude poem which carries the noblest spirit of the _chansons de
geste_, the soul of feudal chivalry climbs to its height of loyal
expiation for overweening bravery. The battle-note is given in Roland’s
words, as Oliver descries the masses of paynim closing in around that
valiant rear-guard.

Said Oliver: “Sir comrade, I think we shall have battle with these
Saracens.”

Replied Roland: “God grant it! Here must we hold for our king. A man
should suffer for his lord, endure heat and cold, though he lose hair and
hide. Let each one strike his best, that no evil song be sung of us. The
paynim are in the wrong, Christians in the right!”[695]

Then follows Oliver’s prudent solicitation, and Roland’s fatal refusal to
sound his horn and recall Charles and his host: “Please God and His holy
angels, France shall not be so shamed through me; better death than such
dishonour. The harder we strike the more the emperor will love us.” Oliver
can be stubborn too; for when the fight is close to its fell end, he
swears that Roland shall never wed his sister Aude, if, beaten, he sound
that horn.[696]

The paynim host is shattered and riven; but nearly all the Franks have
fallen. Roland looks upon the mountains and the plain. Of those of France
he sees so many lying dead, and he laments them like a high-born knight
(_chevaliers gentilz_). “_Seigneurs barons_, may God have pity on you and
grant Paradise to your souls, and give them to repose on holy flowers!
Better vassals shall I never see; long are the years that you have served
me, and conquered wide countries for Charles--the emperor has nurtured you
for an ill end! Land of France, sweet land, to-day bereft of barons of
high prize! Barons of France! for me I see you dying. I cannot save or
defend you! God be your aid, who never lies! Oliver, brother, you I must
not fail. I shall die of grief, if no one slay me! Sir comrade, let us
strike again.”[697]

Roland and Oliver are almost alone, and Oliver receives a death-stroke.
With his last strength he slays his slayer, shouts his defiance, and calls
Roland to his aid. He strikes on blindly as Roland comes and looks into
his face;--and then might you have seen Roland swoon on his horse, and
Oliver wounded to death. “He had bled so much, that his eyes were
troubled, and he could not see to recognize any mortal man. As he met his
comrade, he struck him on his helmet a blow that cut it shear in twain,
though the sword did not touch the head. At this Roland looked at him, and
asked him soft and low: ‘Sir comrade, did you mean that? It is Roland, who
loves you well. You have not defied me.’

“Says Oliver, ‘Now I hear you speak; I did not see you; may the Lord God
see you! I have struck you; for which pardon me.’”

Roland replied: “I was not hurt. I pardon you here and before God.”

“At this word they bent over each other, and in such love they parted.”
Oliver feels his death-anguish at hand; sight and hearing fail him: he
sinks from his horse and lies on the earth; he confesses his sins, with
his two hands joined toward heaven. He prays God to grant him Paradise,
and blesses Charles and sweet France, and his comrade Roland above all
men. Stretched on the ground the count lies dead.[698]

A little after, when Roland and Turpin the stout archbishop have made
their last charge, and the paynim have withdrawn, and the archbishop too
lies on the ground, just breathing; then it is that Roland gathers the
bodies of the peers and carries them one by one to lay them before the
archbishop for his absolution. He finds Oliver’s body, and tightly
straining it to his heart, lays it with the rest before the archbishop,
whose dying breath is blessing and absolving his companions. And with
tears Roland’s voice breaks “Sweet comrade, Oliver, son of the good count
Renier, who held the March of Geneva; to break spear and pierce shield,
and counsel loyally the good, and discomfit and vanquish villains, in no
land was there better knight.”[699] Knowing his own death near, Roland
tries to shatter his great sword, and then lies down upon it with his face
toward Spain; he holds up his glove toward God in token of fealty; Gabriel
accepts his glove and the angels receive his soul.

This was the best of knighthood in the best of the _chansons_: and we see
how close it was to what was best in life. As the fight moves on to
Oliver’s blow and Roland’s pardon, to Roland’s last deeds of Christian
comradeship, and to his death, the eyes are critical indeed that do not
swell with tears. The heroic pathos of this rough poem is great because
the qualities which perished at Roncesvalles were so noble and so
knightly.

The poem passes on to the vengeance taken by the emperor upon the
Saracens, then to his return to Aix, and the short great scene between him
and Aude, Roland’s betrothed:

“Where is Roland, the chief, who vowed to take me for his wife?”

Charles weeps, and tears his white beard as he answers: “Sister, dear
friend, you are asking about a dead man. But I will make it good to
thee--there is Louis my son, who holds the Marches....”

Aude replies: “Strange words! God forbid, and His saints and angels, that
I should live after Roland.” And she falls dead at the emperor’s feet.

As was fitting, the poem closes with the trial of the traitor Ganelon, by
combat. His defence is feudal: he had defied Roland and all his
companions; his treachery was proper vengeance and not treason. But his
champion is defeated, and Ganelon himself is torn in pieces by horses,
while his relatives, pledged as hostages, are hanged. All of which is
feudalism, and can be matched for savagery in many a scene from the
Arthurian romances of chivalry--not always reproduced in modern versions.

So the _chansons de geste_ are a mirror of the ways and customs of feudal
society in the twelfth century. The feudal virtues are there, troth to
one’s liege, orthodox crusading ardour, limitless valour, truth-speaking.
There is also enormous brutality; and the recognized feudal vices,
cruelty, impiousness, and treason. In the _Raoul de Cambrai_, for example,
the nominal hero is a paroxysm of ferocity and impiety. All crimes rejoice
him as he rages along his ruthless way to establish his seignorial rights
over a fief unjustly awarded him by Louis, the weak son of Charlemagne.
His foil is Bernier, the natural son of one of the rightful heirs against
whom Raoul carries on raging feudal war. But Bernier is also Raoul’s
squire and vassal, who had received knighthood from him, and so is bound
to the monster by the strongest feudal tie. He is a pattern of knighthood
and of every feudal virtue. On the day of his knighting he implored his
lord not to enter on that fell war against his (Bernier’s) family. In
vain. The war is begun with fire and sword. Bernier must support his lord;
says he: “Raoul, my lord, is worse (_plu fel_) than Judas; he is my lord;
he has given me horse and clothes, my arms and cloth of gold. I would not
fail him for the riches of Damascus”: and all cried, “Bernier, thou art
right.”[700]

But there is a limit. Raoul is ferociously wasting the land, and
committing every impiety. He would desecrate the abbey of Origni, and set
his tent in the middle of the church, stabling his horse in its porch and
making his bed before the altar. Bernier’s mother is there as a nun; Raoul
pauses at her entreaties and those of his uncle. Then his rage breaks out
afresh at the death of two of his men; he burns the town and abbey, and
Bernier’s mother perishes with the other nuns in the flames.

Now the monster is feasting on the scene of desolation--and it is Lent
besides! After dining, he plays chess: enter Bernier. Raoul asks for wine.
Bernier takes the cup and, kneeling, hands it to him. Raoul is surprised
to see him, but at once renews his oath to disinherit all of Bernier’s
family--his father and uncles. Bernier speaks and reproaches Raoul with
his mother’s death: “I cannot bring her back to life, but I can aid my
father whom you unjustly follow up with war. I am your man no longer. Your
cruelty has released me from my duties; and you will find me on the side
of my father and uncles when you attack them.” For reply, Raoul breaks his
head open with the butt of his spear; but then at once asks pardon and
humiliates himself strangely. Bernier answers that there shall be no peace
between them till the blood which flowed from his head returns back whence
it came. Yet in the final battle he still seeks to turn Raoul back before
attacking him who had been his liege lord. Again in vain; and Raoul falls
beneath Bernier’s sword. Here are the two sides of the picture, the
monster of a lord, the vassal vainly seeking to be true: a situation
utterly tragic from the standpoint of feudal chivalry.

It is not to be supposed that a huge body of poetic narrative could remain
utterly truculent. Other motives had to enter;--the love of women, of
which the _Roland_ has its one great flash. The ladies of the _chansons_
are not coy, and often make the first advances. Such natural lusty love is
not romantic; it is not _l’amour courtois_; and marriage is its obvious
end. The _chansons_ also tend to become adventurous and to fill with
romantic episode. An interesting example of this is the _Renaud de
Montaubon_ where Renaud and his three brothers are aided by the enchanter,
Maugis, against the pursuing hate of Charlemagne and where the marvellous
horse, Bayard, is a fascinating personality. This diversified and romantic
tale long held its own in many tongues. In the somewhat later _Huon de
Bordeaux_ we are at last in fairyland--verily at the Court of Oberon--his
first known entry into literature.[701] Thus the _chansons_ tend toward
the tone and temper of the _romans d’aventure_.

The latter have the courtly love and the purely adventurous motives of the
Arthurian romances, with which the men who fashioned them probably were
acquainted, as were the _jongleurs_ who recast certain of the _chansons de
geste_ to suit a more courtly taste. Of the _romans d’aventure_,
so-called, the _Blancandrin_ or the _Amadas_ or the _Flamenca_ may be
taken as the type; or, if one will, _Flore et Blanchefleur_ and _Aucassin
et Nicolette_, those two enduring lovers’ tales.[702] Courtly love and
knightly ventures are the themes of these _romans_ so illustrative of
noble French society in the thirteenth century. They differ from the
Arthurian romances in having other than a Breton origin; and their heroes
and heroines are sometimes of more easily imagined historicity than the
knights and ladies of the Round Table. But they never approached the
universal vogue of the Arthurian Cycle.

It goes without saying that tastes in reading (or rather listening)
diverged in the twelfth century, just as in the twentieth. One cannot read
the old _chansons de geste_ in which fighting, and not love, is the
absorbing topic, without feeling that the audience before whom they were
chanted was predominantly male. One cannot but feel the contrary to have
been the fact with the romances in verse and prose which constitute that
immense mass of literature vaguely termed Arthurian. These two huge
groups, the _chansons de geste_ and the Arthurian romances, overlap
chronologically and geographically. Although the development of the
_chansons_ was somewhat earlier, the Arthurian stories were flourishing
before the _chansons_ were past their prime; and both were in vogue
through central and northern France. But the Arthurian stories won
adoptive homes in England, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. Indeed their
earlier stages scarcely seem attached to real localities: nor were their
manners and interests rooted in the special traditions of any definite
place.

The tone and topics of these romances suggest an audience chiefly of
women, and possibly feminine authorship. Doubtless, with a few exceptions,
men composed and recited them. But the male authors were influenced by the
taste, the favour and patronage, and the sympathetic suggestive interest
of the ladies. Prominent among the first known composers of these
“Breton” lays was a woman, Marie de France as she is called, who lived in
England in the reign of Henry II. (1154-1189). Her younger contemporary
was the facile trouvère Chrétien de Troies, of whose life little is
actually known. But we know that the subject of his famous Lancelot
romance, called the _Conte de la charrette_, was suggested to him (about
1170) by the Countess Marie de Champagne, daughter of Louis VII. Surely
then he wrote to please the taste of that royal dame, whose queenly
mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was also a patroness of this courtly poetry.

These are instances proving the feminine influence upon the composition of
these romances. And the growth of this great Arthurian Cycle represents,
_par excellence_, the entry of womanhood into the literature of chivalry.
Men love, as well as women; but the topic engrosses them less, and they
talk less about it. Likewise men appreciate courtesy; but in fact it is
woman’s influence that softens manners. And while the masculine fancy may
be drawn by what is fanciful and romantic, women abandon themselves to its
charm.

Of course the origin or _provenance_ of these romances was different from
that of the _chansons de geste_. It was Breton--it was Welsh, it was
_walhisch_ (the Old-German word for the same) which means that it was
_foreign_. In fact, the beginnings of these stories floated beautifully in
from a _weiss-nicht-wo_ which in the twelfth century was already hidden in
the clouds. When the names of known localities are mentioned, they have
misty import. Arthurian geography is more elusive than Homeric.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries these stories took form in the
verse and prose compositions in which they still exist. Sometimes the
poet’s name is known, Chrétien de Troies, for instance; but the source
from which he drew is doubtful. It probably was Breton, and Artus once in
Great Britain fought the Saxons like as not. But the growth, the
development, the further composition, of the _matière de Bretagne_ is
predominantly French. In France it grows; from France it passes on across
the Rhine, across the Alps, then back to what may have been its old home
across the British Channel. With equal ease on the wings of universal
human interest it surmounts the Pyrenees. It would have crossed the ocean,
had the New World been discovered.

Far be it from our purpose to enter the bottomless swamp of critical
discussion of the source and history of the Arthurian romances. Two or
three statements--general and probably rather incorrect--may be made.
Marie de France, soon after the middle of the twelfth century, wrote a
number of shortish narrative poems of chivalric manners and romantic love,
which, as it were, touch the hem of Arthur’s cloak. Chrétien de Troies
between 1160 and 1175 composed his _Tristan_ (a story originally having
nothing to do with Arthur), and then his _Erec_ (Geraint), then _Cligés_;
then his (unfinished) _Lancelot_ or the _Conte de la charrette_; then
_Ivain_ or the _Chevalier au lion_, and at last _Perceval_ or the _Conte
du Graal_. How much of the matter of these poems came from Brittany--or
indirectly from Great Britain? This is a large unsolved question! Another
is the relation of Chrétien’s poems to the subsequent Arthurian romances
in verse and prose. And perhaps most disputed of all is the authorship
(Beroul? Robert de Boron? Walter Mapes?) of this mass of Arthurian Old
French literature which was not the work of Chrétien. Without lengthy
_prolegomena_ it would be fruitless to attempt to order and name these
compositions. The Arthurian matters were taken up by German poets of
excellence--Heinrich von Veldeke, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von
Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach,--and sometimes the best existing
versions are the work of the latter; for instance, Wolfram’s _Parzival_
and Gottfried’s _Tristan_. And again the relation of these German versions
to their French originals becomes still another problem.

For the chivalry of these romances, one may look to the poems of Chrétien
and to passages in the Old French prose (presumably of the early
thirteenth century), to which the name of Robert de Boron or Walter Mapes
is attached. Chrétien enumerates knightly excellences in his _Cligés_,
and, speaking from the natural point of view of the _jongleur_, he puts
_largesce_ (generosity) at their head. This, says he, makes one a
_prodome_ more than _hautesce_ (high station) or _corteisie_ or _savoirs_
or _jantillesce_ (noble birth) or _chevalerie_, or _hardemanz_ (hardihood)
or _seignorie_, or _biautez_ (beauty).[703]

Such are the knightly virtues, which, however, reach their full worth only
through the aid of that which makes perfect the Arthurian knight, the high
love of ladies, shortly to be spoken of. In the meanwhile let us turn from
Chrétien to the broader tableau of the Old French prose, and note the
beginning of _Artus_, as he is there called. The lineage of the royal boy
remains romantically undiscovered, till the time when he is declared to be
the king. It is then that he receives all kinds of riches from the lords
of his realm. He keeps nothing for himself; but makes inquiry as to the
character and circumstances of his future knights, and distributes all
among them according to their worth. This is the virtue of _largesce_.

Now comes the ceremony of making him a knight, and then of investing him
with, as it were, the supreme knighthood of kingship. The archbishop, it
is told, “fist (made) Artu chevalier, et celle nuit veilla Artus a la
mestre Eglise (the cathedral) jusques au jour.” Then follows the ceremony
of swearing allegiance to him; but Arthur has not yet finally taken his
great sword. When he is arrayed for the mass, the archbishop says to him:
“Allez querre (seek) l’espee et la jostise dont vos devez defendre Saincte
Eglise et la crestiante sauver.”

    “Lors alla la procession au perron, et la demanda li arcevesques a
    Artu, se il est tiels que il osast jurer et creanter Dieu et madame
    Sainte Marie et a tous Sains et toutes Saintes, Sainte Eglise a sauver
    et a maintenir, et a tous povres homes et toutes povres femmes pais et
    loiaute tenir, et conseiller tous desconseillies, et avoier (guide)
    tous desvoies (erring), et maintenir toutes droitures et droite
    justice a tenir, si alast avant et preist l’espee dont nostre sire
    avoit fait de lui election. Et Artus plora et dist: ‘Ensi voirement
    com Dieus est sire de toutes les choses, me donit-il force et povoir
    de ce maintenir que vous avez dit.’

    “Il fu a genols et prit l’espee a jointes mains et la leva de
    l’enclume (anvil) ausi voirement come se ele ne tenist a riens; et
    lors, l’espee toute droite, l’enmenerent a l’autel et la mist sus; et
    lors il le pristrent et sacrerent et l’enoindrent, et li firent
    toutes iceles choses que l’en doit faire a roi.”[704]

All this is good chivalry as well as proper feudalism. And there are other
instances of genuine feudalism in these Romances. Such is the scene
between the good knight Pharien and the bad king Claudas, where the former
renounces his allegiance to the latter (_je declare renoncer a vostre
fief_) and then declares himself to be Claudas’s enemy, and claims the
right to fight or slay him; since Claudas has not kept troth with
him.[705]

There is perhaps nothing lovelier in all these Romances than the story of
the young Lancelot, reared by the tender care of the Lady of the Lake. His
training supplements the genial instincts of his nature, and the result is
the mirror of all knighthood’s qualities. He is noble, he is true, he is
perfect in bravery, in courtesy, in modesty, the Lady imparting the
precepts of these virtues to his ready spirit.[706] There is no knightly
virtue that is not perfect in this peerless youth, as he sets forth to
Arthur’s Court, there to receive knighthood and prove himself the peerless
knight and perfect lover. In this Old French prose his career is set forth
most completely, and most correctly, so to speak. One or two points may be
adverted to.

Lancelot is not strictly Arthur’s knight. Originally he owed no fealty to
him; and he avoided receiving his sword from the king, in order that he
might receive it from Guinever, as he did. And so, from the first,
Lancelot was Guinever’s knight, as he was afterwards her accepted lover.
Consequently his relations to her broke no fealty of his to Arthur.

Again, one notices that the absolute character of Lancelot’s love and
troth to Guinever is paralleled by the friendship of the high prince
Galahaut to him. That has the same _précieuse_ logic; it is absolute. No
act or thought of Galahaut infringes friendship’s least conceived
requirement; while conversely that marvellous high prince leaves undone no
act, however extreme, which can carry out the logic of this absolute
single-souled devotion. At last he dies on thinking that Lancelot is dead;
just as the latter could not have survived the death of Guinever. In spite
of the beauty of Galahaut’s devotion, its logic and preciosity scarcely
throb with manhood’s blood. It will not cause our eyes to swell with human
tears, as did the blind blow and the true words which passed between
Oliver and Roland at Roncesvalles.[707]

Chivalry--the institution and the whole knightly character--began in the
rough and veritable, and progressed to courtlier idealizations. Likewise
that knightly virtue, love of woman, displays a parallel evolution, being
part of the chivalric whole. Beginning in natural qualities, its progress
is romantic, logical, fantastic, even mystical.

Feudal life in the earlier mediaeval centuries did not foster tender
sentiments between betrothed or wedded couples. The chief object of every
landholder was by force or policy to secure his own safety and increase
his retainers and possessions. A ready means was for him to marry lands
and serfs in the robust person of the daughter, or widow, of some other
baron. The marriage was prefaced by scant courtship; and little love was
likely to ensue between the rough-handed husband and high-tempered wife.
Such conditions, whether in Languedoc, Aquitaine, or Champagne, made it
likely that high-blooded men and women would satisfy their amorous
cravings outside the bonds of matrimony. For these reasons, among others,
the Provençal and Old French literature, which was the medium of
development for the sentiment of love, did not commonly concern itself
with bringing lovers to the altar.

In literature, as in life, marriage is usually the goal of bliss and
silence for love-song and love-story: attainment quells the fictile
elements of fear and hope. Entire classes of mediaeval poetry like the
_aube_ (dawn) and the _pastorelle_ had no thought of marriage. The former
_genre_ of Provençal and Old French, as well as Old German, poetry, is a
lyric dialogue wherein the sentiments of lover and mistress become more
tender with the approach of the envious dawn.[708] The latter is the song
of the merry encounter of some clerk or cavalier with a mocking or
complaisant shepherdess. Yet one must beware of speaking too
categorically. For in mediaeval love-literature, marriage is looked
forward to or excluded according to circumstances; and there are instances
of romantic love where the lovers are blessed securely by the priest at
the beginning of their adventures. But whether the lover look to wed his
lady, or whether he have wedded her, or whether she be but his paramour,
is all a thing of incident, dependent on the traditional or devised plot
of the story.[709]

Like all other periods that have been articulate in literature--and those
that have not been, so far as one may guess--the Middle Ages experienced
and expressed the usual ways of love. These need not detain us. For they
were included as elements within those interesting forms of romantic love,
which were presented in the lyrics of the Troubadours and their more or
less conscious imitators, and in the romantic narratives of chivalry. This
literature elaborately expresses mediaeval sentiments and also love’s
passion. Its ideals drew inspiration from Christianity and many a
suggestion from the antique. More especially, in its growth, at last two
currents seem to meet. The one sprang from the fashions of Languedoc and
the courtly centres of the north; the other was the strain of fantasy and
passion constituting the _matière de Bretagne_.

Languedoc had been Romanized before the Christian era, and thereafter did
not cease to be the home of the surviving Latin culture. By the eleventh
century, castles and towns held a gay and aristocratic society, on which
Christianity, honeycombed with heresy, sat lightly, or at least joyfully.
This society was inclined to luxury, and the gentle relationships between
men and women interested it exceedingly. Out of it as the eleventh century
closes, songs of the Troubadours begin to rise and give utterance to
thoughts and feelings of chivalric love. These songs flourished during the
whole of the twelfth century, and then their notes were crushed by the
Albigensian Crusade, which destroyed the pretty life from which they
sprang.

She whom such songs were meant to adulate or win, frequently was the wife
of the Troubadour’s lord. The song might intend nothing beyond such
worship as the lady’s spouse would sanction; or it might give subtle voice
to a real passion, which offered and sought all. To separate the sincere
and passionate from the fanciful in such songs is neither easy nor apt,
since fancy may enhance the expression of passion, or present a pleasing
substitute. At all events, in this very personal poetry, passion and
imaginative enhancings blended in verses that might move a lady’s heart or
vanity.

Love, with the Troubadours and their ladies, was a source of joy. Its
commands and exigencies made life’s supreme law. Love was knighthood’s
service; it was loyalty and devotion; it was the noblest human giving. It
was also the spring of excellence, the inspiration of high deeds. This
love was courteous, delicately ceremonial, precise, and on the lady’s part
exacting and whimsical. A moderate knowledge of the poems and lives of the
Troubadours and their ladies will show that love with its joys and pains,
its passion, its fancies and subtle conclusions, made the life and
business of these men and dames.[710]

In culture and the love of pleasure the great feudal courts of Aquitaine,
Champagne, and even Flanders, were scarcely behind the society of
Languedoc. And at these courts, rather than in Languedoc, courtly love
encountered a new passionate current, and found the tales which were to
form its chief vehicle. These were the lays and stories, as of Tristan and
of Arthur and his knights, which from Great Britain had come to Brittany
and Normandy. They were now attracting many listeners who had no part with
Arthur or Tristan, save the love of love and adventure. Marie de France
had put certain Breton lays into Old French verse. And one or two decades
later, a request from the great Countess Marie de Champagne led Chrétien
de Troies, as we have seen, to recast other Breton tales in a manner
somewhat transformed with thoughts of courtly love. These northern poems
of love and chivalry were written to please the taste of high-born dames,
just as the Troubadours had sung and still were singing to please their
sisters in the south. The southern poems may have influenced the
northern.[711]

In the courtly society of Champagne and Aquitaine diverse racial elements
had long been blending, and acquirements, once foreign, had turned into
personal qualities. Views of life had been evolved, along with faculties
to express them. Likewise modes of feeling had developed. This society
had become what it was within the influence of Christianity and the
antique educational tradition. It knew the Song of Songs, as well as
Ovid’s stories, and likewise his _Ars amatoria_, which Chrétien was the
first to translate into Old French. Possibly its Christianity had learned
of a boundless love of God, and its mortal nature might feel mortal loves
equally resistless. And now, in the early twelfth century, there came from
lands which were or had been Breton, an abundance of moving and catching
stories of adventure and of passion which broke through restraint, or knew
none. Dames and knights and their rhymers would eagerly receive such
tales, and not as barren vessels; for they refashioned and reinspired them
with their own thoughts of the joy of life and love, and with thoughts of
love’s high service and its uplifting virtue for the lover, and again of
its ways and the laws which should direct and guide, but never stem, it.

Thus it came that French trouvères enlarged the matter of these Breton
lays. Their romances reflected the loftiest thoughts and the most eloquent
emotion pertaining to the earthly side of mediaeval life. In these rhyming
and prose compositions, love was resistless in power; it absorbed the
lover’s nature; it became his sole source of joy and pain. So it sought
nothing but its own fulfilment; it knew no honour save its own demands. It
was unimpeachable, for in ecstasy and grief it was accountable to no law
except that of its being. This resistless love was also life’s highest
worth, and the spring of inspiration and strength for doing valorously and
living nobly. The trouvère of the twelfth century created new conceptions
of love’s service, and therewith the impassioned thought that beyond what
men might do in the hope of love’s fruition or at the dictates of its
affection, love was itself a power strengthening and ennobling him who
loved. Thought and feeling joined in this conviction, each helping the
other on, in interchanging rôles of inspirer and inspired. And finally the
two are one:

  “Oltre la spera, che più larga gira,
     Passa il sospiro ch’esce del mio core:
   Intelligenza nuova, che l’Amore
     Piangendo mette in lui, pur su lo tira.”

No one can separate the thought and feeling in this verse. But they were
not always fused. The mediaeval fancy sported with this love; the
mediaeval mind delighted in it as a theme of argument. And the fancy might
be as fantastic as the reasoning was finely spun.

The literature of this love draws no sharp lines between love as
resistless passion and love as enabling virtue; yet these two aspects are
distinguishable. The first was less an original creation of the Middle
Ages than the second. Antiquity had known the passion which overwhelmed
the stricken mortal, and had treated it as something put upon the man and
woman, a convulsive joy, also a bane. Antiquity had analyzed it too, and
had shown its effects, especially its physical symptoms. Much had been
written of its fatal nature; songs had sung how it overthrew the strong
and brought men and women to their death. Looking upon this love as
something put on man and woman, antiquity pictured it mainly as an
insanity cast like a spell upon some one who otherwise would have been
sane. But the Middle Ages saw love transformed into the man and woman, saw
it constitute their will as well as passion, and perceived that it was
their being. If the lover could not avoid or resist it, the reason was
because it was his mightiest self, and not because it was a compulsion
from without; it was his nature, not his disease.

The nature, ways, and laws of this high and ennobling love were much
pondered on and talked of. They were expounded in pedantic treatises, as
well as set forth in tales which sometimes have the breath of universal
life. Ovid’s _Ars amatoria_ furnished the idea that love was an art to be
learned and practised. Mediaeval clerks and rhymers took his light art
seriously, and certain of them made manuals of the rules and precepts of
love, devised by themselves and others interested in such fancies. An
example is the _Flos amoris_ or _Ars amatoria_ of Andrew the Chaplain, who
compiled his book not far from the year 1200.[712] He wrote with his
obsequious head filled with a sense of the authority in love matters of
Marie de Champagne, and other great ladies. His book contains a number of
curious questions which had been laid before one or the other of those
reigning dames, and which they solved boldly in love’s favour. Thus on
solicitation Countess Marie decided that there could be no true love
between a husband and wife; and that the possession of an honoured husband
or beautiful wife did not bar the proffer or acceptance of love from
another. The living literature of love was never constrained by the
foolishness of the first proposition, but was freely to exemplify the
further conclusion which others besides the countess drew.

Andrew gives a code of love’s rules. He would have no one think that he
composed them; but that he saw them written on a parchment attached to the
hawk’s perch, and won at Arthur’s Court by the valour of a certain Breton
knight. They read like proverbs, and undoubtedly represent the ideas of
courtly society upon courtly love. There are thirty-one of them--for
example:

    (1) Marriage is not a good excuse for rejecting love.

    (2) Who does not conceal, cannot love.

    (3) None can love two at once. There is no reason why a woman should
    not be loved by two men, or a man by two women.

    (4) It is love’s way always to increase or lessen.

    (9) None can love except one who is moved by love’s suasion.

    (12) The true lover has no desire to embrace any one except his (or
    her) co-lover (_co-amans_).

    (13) Love when published rarely endures.

    (14) Easy winning makes love despicable; the difficult is held dear.

    (15) Every lover turns pale in the sight of the co-lover.

    (16) The lover’s heart trembles at the sudden sight of the co-lover.

    (18) Prowess (_probitas_) alone makes one worthy of love.

    (20) The lover is always fearful.

    (23) The one whom the thought of love disturbs, eats and sleeps
    little.

    (25) The true lover finds happiness only in what he deems will please
    his co-lover.

    (28) A slight fault in the lover awakens the co-lover’s suspicion.

    (30) The true lover constantly, without intermission, is engrossed
    with the image of the co-lover.

These rules were exemplified in the imaginative literature of courtly
love. Such love and the feats inspired by it made the chief matter of the
Arthurian romances, which became the literary property of western Europe;
and the supreme examples of their darling theme are the careers and
fortunes of the two most famous pairs of lovers in all this gallant cycle,
Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere. In the former story love is
resistless passion; in the latter its virtue- and valour-bestowing
qualities appear. In both, the laws forbidding its fruition are shattered:
in the Tristan story blindly, madly, without further thought; while in the
tale of Lancelot this conflict sometimes rises to consciousness even in
the lovers’ hearts. How chivalric love may reach accord with Christian
precept will be shown hereafter in the progress of the white and scarlet
soul of Parzival, the brave man proving himself slowly wise.

Probably there never was a better version of the story of Tristan and
Iseult than that of Gottfried of Strassburg, who transformed French
originals into his Middle High German poem about the year 1210.[713] The
poet-adapter sets forth his ideas of love in an elaborate prologue. Very
antithetically he shows its bitter sweet, its dear sorrow, its yearning
need; indeed to love is to yearn--an idea not strange to Plato--and
Gottfried uses the words _sene_, _senelîch_, _senedaere_ (all of which are
related to _sehnsucht_, which is yearning) to signify love, a lover, and
his pain. His poem shall be of two noble lovers:

  “Ein senedaere, eine senedaerin.”

The more love’s fire burns the heart, the more one loves; this pain is
full of love, an ill so good for the heart that no noble nature once
roused by it would wish to lose part therein. Who never felt love’s pain
has never felt love:

  “Liep unde leit diu waren ie
   An minnen ungescheiden.”

It is good for men to hear a tale of noble love, yes, a deep good. It
sweetens love and raises the hearer’s mood; it strengthens troth, enriches
life. Love, troth, a constant spirit, honour, and whatever else is good,
are never so precious as when set in a tale of love’s joy and pain. Love
is such a blessed thing, such a blessed striving, that no one without its
teaching has worth or honour. These lovers died long ago; yet their love
and troth, their life, their death, will still give troth and honour to
seekers after these. Their death lives and is ever new, as we listen to
the tale. Evidently, in Gottfried’s mind the Tristan tale of love’s
almighty passion carried the thought of love as the inspiration of a noble
life. Yet that thought was not native to the legend, and finds scant
exemplification in Gottfried’s poem.

The tragic passion of the main narrative is presaged by the story of
Tristan’s parents. His mother was Blancheflur, King Mark’s sister, and his
father Prince Riwalin. She saw him in the May-Court tourney held near
Tintajoel. She took him into her thoughts; he entered her heart, and there
wore crown and sceptre.

She greeted him; he her. She bashfully began: “My lord, may God enrich
your heart and courage; but I harbour something against you.”

“Sweet one, what have I done?”

“You have done violence to my best friend”--it was her heart, she meant.

“Beauty, bear me no hate for that; command, and I will do your bidding.”

“Then I will not hate you bitterly. I will see what atonement you will
make.”

He bowed, and carried with him her image. Love’s will mastered his heart,
as he thought of Blancheflur, of her hair, her brow, her cheek, her mouth,
her chin, and the glad Easter day that smiling lay in her eyes. Love the
heartburner set his heart aflame, and lo! he entered upon another life;
purpose and habit changed, he was another man.

Sad is the short tale of these lovers. Riwalin is killed in battle, and at
the news of his death Blancheflur expires, giving birth to a son. Rual the
Faithful names the child Tristan, to symbolize the sorrow of its birth.

The story of Tristan’s early years draws the reader to the accomplished,
happy youth. He is the delight of all; for his young manhood is
courtliness itself, and valour and generosity. He is loved, and
afterwards recognized and knighted, by his uncle Mark. Then he sets out
and avenges his father’s death; after which he returns to Mark’s Court,
and vanquishes the Irish champion Morold. A fragment of Tristan’s sword
remained in Morold’s head; Tristan himself received a poisoned wound,
which could be healed, as the dying Morold told him, only by Ireland’s
queen, Iseult. Very charming is the story of Tristan’s first visit to
Ireland, disguised as a harper, under the name of Tantris. The queen
hearing of his skill, has him brought to the palace, where she heals him,
and he in return becomes the teacher of her daughter, the younger Iseult,
whom he instructs in letters, music and singing, French and Latin, ethics,
courtly arts and manners, till the girl became as accomplished as she was
beautiful, and could write and read, and compose and sing _pastorelles_
and _rondeaux_ and other songs.

On his return to Cornwall he told Mark of the young Iseult, and then, at
Mark’s request, set forth again to woo her for him. The Irish king has
promised his daughter to whoever shall slay the dragon. Tristan does the
deed, cuts out the dragon’s tongue as proof, and then falls overcome and
fainting. The king’s cupbearer comes by, breaks his lance on the dead
dragon, and, riding on, announces that he has slain the monster; he has
the great head brought to the Court upon a wagon. Iseult is in despair at
the thought of marrying the cupbearer; her mother doubts his story, and
bids Iseult ride out and search for the real slayer. The ladies discover
Tristan, with him the dragon’s tongue. They carry him to the palace to
heal him, and the young Iseult recognizes him as the harper Tantris, and
redoubles her kind care. But after a while she noticed the notch in his
sword, and saw that it fitted the fragment found in Morold’s head--and is
not Tantris just Tristan reversed? This is the man who slew Morold, her
mother’s brother! She seizes the sword and rushes in to kill him in his
bath. Her mother checks her, and at last she is appeased, Tristan letting
them see that an important mission has brought him to Ireland. There is
truce between them, and Tristan goes to the king with Mark’s demand for
Iseult’s hand. Then the cupbearer is discomfited, peace is made between
the Irish king and Mark, and the young Iseult, with Brangaene her cousin,
makes ready to sail with Tristan. The queen secretly gave a love-drink
into Brangaene’s care, which Iseult and Mark should drink together. The
people followed down to the haven, and all wept and lamented that with
fair Iseult the sunshine had left Ireland.

Iseult is sad. She cannot forget that it is Tristan who slew her uncle and
is now taking her from her home. Tristan fails to comfort her. They see
land. Tristan calls for wine to pledge Iseult. A little maid brings--the
love-drink! They drink together, not wine but that endless heart’s pain
which shall be their common death. Too late, Brangaene with a cry throws
the goblet into the sea. Love stole into both their hearts; gone was
Iseult’s hate. They were no longer two, but one; the sinner, love, had
done it. They were each other’s joy and pain; doubt and shame seized them.
Tristan bethought him of his loyalty and honour, struggling against love
vainly. Iseult was like a bird caught with the fowler’s lime; shame drove
her eyes away from him; but love drew her heart. She gave over the contest
as she looked on him, and he also began to yield. They thought each other
fairer than before; love was conquering.

The ship sails on. Love’s need conquered. They talk together of the past,
how he had once come in a little boat, and of the lessons: “Fair Iseult,
what is troubling you?”

“What I know, that troubles me; what I see, the heaven and sea, that
weighs on me; body and life are heavy.”

They leaned toward each other; bright eyes began to fill from the heart’s
spring; her head sank, his arm sustained her;--“Ah! sweet, tell me, what
is it?”

Answered love’s feather-play, Iseult: “Love is my need, love is my pain.”

He answered painfully: “Fair Iseult, it is the rude wind and sea.”

“No, no, it is not wind or sea; love is my pain.”

“Beauty, so with me! Love and you make my need. Heart’s lady, dear Iseult,
you and the love of you have seized me. I am dazed. I cannot find myself.
All the world has become naught, save thee alone.”

“Sir, so is it with me.”

They loved, and in each other saw one mind, one heart, one will. Their
silent kiss was long. In the night, love the physician brought their only
balm. Sweet had the voyage become; alas! that it must end.

With their landing begins the trickery and falsehood compelled by the
situation. The fearful Iseult plotted to murder the true Brangaene, who
alone knew. After a while Mark’s suspicion is aroused, to be lulled by
guile. Plot and counterplot go on; the lovers win and win again; truth and
honour, everything save love’s joy and fear and all-sufficiency, are cast
to the winds. Even the “Judgment of God” is tricked; the hot iron does not
burn Iseult swearing her false oath, literally true. Many a time Mark’s
jealousy has been fiercely stirred, only to be tricked to sleep again. Yet
he knows that Tristan and Iseult are lovers. He calls them to him; he
tells them he will not avenge himself, they are too dear to him. But let
them take each other by the hand and leave him. So, together, they
disappear in the forest.

Then comes the wonderful, beautiful story of the love-grotto and the
lovers’ forest-life; they had the forest and they had themselves, and
needed no more. One morning they arose to the sweet birds’ song of
greeting; but they heard a horn; Mark must be hunting near. So they were
very careful, and again prepared deception. Mark has been told of the
love-grotto in the wood. In the night he came and found it, looked through
its little rustic window as the day began to dawn. There lay the lovers,
apart, a naked sword between them. A sunbeam, stealing through the window,
touches Iseult’s cheek, touches her sweet mouth. Mark loves her anew. Then
fearful lest the sunlight should disturb her, he covered the window with
grass and leaves and flowers, blessed her, and went away in tears. The
lovers waken. They had no need to fear. The lie of the naked sword again
had won. Mark sends and invites them to return.

Insatiable love knew no surcease or pause. The German poet is driven to a
few reflections on the deceits of Eve’s daughters, the anxieties of
forbidden love, and the crown of worth and joy that a true woman’s love
may be. At last the lovers are betrayed--in each other’s arms. They know
that Mark has seen them.

“Heart’s lady, fair Iseult, now we must part. Let me not pass from your
heart. Iseult must ever be in Tristan’s heart. Forget me not.”

Says Iseult: “Our hearts have been too long one ever to know forgetting.
Whether you are near or far, nothing but Tristan enters mine. See to it
that no other woman parts us. Take this ring and think of me. Iseult with
Tristan has been ever one heart, one troth, one body, one life. Think of
me as your life--Iseult.”

The fateful turning of the story is not far off: Tristan has met the other
Iseult, her of the white hands. The poet Gottfried did not complete his
work. He died, leaving Tristan’s heart struggling between the old love and
the new--the new and weaker love, but the more present offering to pain.
The story was variously concluded by different rhymers, in Gottfried’s
time and after. The best ending is the extant fragment of the _Tristan_ by
Thomas of Brittany, the master whom Gottfried followed. In it, the wounded
Tristan dies at the false news of the black sails--the treachery of Iseult
of the white hands. The true Iseult finds him dead; kisses him, takes him
in her arms, and dies.

From the time when on the ship Tristan and Iseult cast shame and honour to
the winds, the story tells of a love which knows no law except itself, a
love which is not hindered or made to hesitate and doubt by any command of
righteousness or honour. Love is the theme; the tale has no sympathy or
understanding for anything else. It is therefore free from the consciously
realized inconsistencies present at least in some versions of the story of
Lancelot and Guinevere. In them two laws of life seem on the verge of
conflict. On the one--the feebler--side, honour, troth to marriage vows,
some sense of right and wrong; on the other, passionate love, which is law
and right unto itself, having its own commands and prohibitions; a love
which is also an inspiration and uplifting power unto the lover; a love
holy in itself and yet because of its high nature the more fatally
impeached by truth and honour trampled on. In the conflict between the two
laws of life in the Lancelot story, the rights and needs and power of love
maintain themselves; yet the end must come, and the lovers live out love’s
palinode in separate convents. For this love to be made perfect, must be
crowned with repentance.

Who first created Lancelot, and who first made the peerless knight love
Arthur’s queen? This question has not yet been answered.[714] Chrétien de
Troies’ poem, _Le Conte de la charrette_, has for its subject an episode
in Lancelot’s long love of Guinevere.[715] Here, as in his other poems,
Chrétien is a facile narrator, with little sense of the significance that
might be given to the stories which he received and cleverly remade. But
their significance is shown in the Old French prose _Lancelot_, probably
composed two or three decades after Chrétien wrote. It contains the lovely
story of Lancelot’s rearing, by the Lady of the Lake, and of his glorious
youth. It brings him to the Court of Arthur, and tells how he was made a
knight--it was the queen and not the king from whom he received his sword.
And he loves her--loves her and her only from the first until his death.
He has no thought of serving any other mistress. And he is aided in his
love by the “haute prince Galehaut,” the most high-hearted friend that
ever gave himself to his friend’s weal.

From the beginning Lancelot’s love is worship, it is holy; and almost from
the beginning it is unholy. From the beginning, too, it is the man’s
inspiration, it is his strength; it makes him the peerless knight,
peerless in courtesy, peerless in emprise; this love gives him the single
eye, the unswerving heart, the resistless valour to accomplish those
adventures wherein all other knights had found their shame--they were not
perfect lovers! Only through his perfect love could Lancelot have
accomplished that greatest adventure of the _Val des faux amants_;--_Val
sans retour_ for all other knights.[716] Lancelot alone had always been,
and to his death remained, a lover absolutely true in act and word and
thought; incomparably more chastely loyal to Guinevere than her kingly
spouse. Against the singleness of this perfect love enchantments fail, and
swords and lances break. Yet this love, fraught with untruth and
dishonour, must conceal itself from that king who, while breaking his own
marriage vows as passion led him, trusted and honoured above all men the
peerless knight whose peerlessness was rooted in his unholy holy love for
Arthur’s queen.

The first full sin between Lancelot and Guinevere was committed when
Arthur was absent on a love-adventure, which brought him to a shameful
prison. He was delivered by Lancelot, and recognizing his deliverer, he
said in royal gratitude: “I yield you my land, my honour, and myself.”
Lancelot blushes! Thereafter, as towards Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere
are forced into stratagems almost as ignoble as those by which King Mark
was tricked. And Guinevere--she too is peerless among women; perfect in
beauty, perfect in courtliness, perfect in dutifulness to her
husband--saving her love for Lancelot! Guinevere’s dutifulness to Arthur
is not shaken by his outrageous treatment of her because of the “false
Guinevere,” when he cast off and sought to burn his queen. She will
continue to obey him though he has dishonoured her--and all the time,
unknown to her outrageous, unjustly accusing lord, how had she cast her
and his honour down with Lancelot! Only while she is put away from her
lord, and under Lancelot’s guard, for that time she will be true to
marriage vows; and Lancelot assents.[717]

The latter part of the story, when asceticism enters with Galahad,[718]
suggests that the peerless knight of “les temps adventureux” was sinful.
But the main body of the tale put no reproach on Lancelot for his great
love. It told of a love as perfect and as absolute as the author or
compiler could conceive; and the conduct of Lancelot was intended to be
that of a perfect lover, whose sentiments and actions should accord with
the idea of courtly love and exemplify its rules. Their underlying
principle was that love should always be absolute, and that the lover’s
every thought and act should on all occasions correspond with the most
extreme feelings or sentiments or fancies possible for a lover. In the
prose narrative, for example, Lancelot goes mad three times because of his
mistress’s cruelty, a cruelty which may seem to us absurd, but which
represents the adored lady’s insistence, under all circumstances, upon the
most unhesitating and utter devotion from her lover.

Chrétien’s _Conte de la charrette_ is a clear rendering of the idea that
love shall be absolute, and hesitate at nothing; it is an example of
courtly love carried to its furthest imagined conclusions. It displays all
the rules of Andrew the Chaplain in operation. In it Lancelot will do
anything for Guinevere, will show himself a coward knight at her command,
or perform feats of arms; he will desire the least little bit of her--a
tress of hair--more than all else which is not she; he will throw himself
from the window to be near her; engaged in deadly combat, the sight of her
makes him forget his enemy; at the news of her death he seeks at once to
die. Of course his heart loathes the thought of infringing this great love
by the slightest fancy for another woman. On the other hand, when by
marvels of valour Lancelot rescues Guinevere from captivity, she will not
speak to him because for a single instant he had hesitated to mount a
_charrette_, in which no knight was carried save one who was felon and
condemned to death. This was logical on Guinevere’s part; Lancelot’s love
should always have been so absolute as never for one instant to hesitate.
Much of this is extreme, and yet hardly unreal. Heloïse’s love for
Abaelard never hesitated.

Such love, imperious and absolute, shuts out all laws and exigencies save
its own;[719] it must be virtue and honour unto itself; it is careless of
what ill it may do so long as that ill does not infringe love’s laws.
Evidently before it the bonds of marriage break, or pale to
insignificance. It is its own sanction, nor needs the faint blessing of
the priest. The poet--as the actual lover likewise--may even deem that
love can best show itself to be the principle of its own honour when
unsustained by wedlock; thus unsustained and unobscured it stands alone,
fairer, clearer, more interesting and romantic. Again, since mediaeval
marriage in high life was more often a joining of fiefs than a union of
hearts, there would be high-born dames and courtly poets to declare that
love could only exist between knight and mistress, and not between husband
and wife. Marriage shuts out love’s doubts and fears; there is no need of
further knightly services; and husband and wife by law are bound to render
to each other what between lovers is gracious favour; this was the opinion
of Marie de Champagne, it also was the opinion of Heloïse. In chivalric
poetry the lovers, when at last duly married, may continue to call each
other _ami et amie_ rather than wife and lord;[720] or a knight may shun
marriage lest he settle down and lose worship, doing no more adventurous
feats of arms, like Chrétien’s Erec, till his wife Enide stung him by her
speech.[721] Some centuries later Malory has Lancelot utter a like
sentiment: “But to be a wedded man I think never to be, for if I were,
then should I be bound to tarry with my wife, and leave arms and
tournaments, battles and adventures.”

If allowance be made for the difference in topic and treatment between the
Arthurian romances and Guillaume de Lorris’s portion of the _Roman de la
rose_, the latter will be seen to illustrate similar love principles. De
Lorris’s poem is fancy playing with thoughts of love which had inspired
these tales of chivalry. Every one knows its gentle idyllic
character;--how charming, for instance, is the conflict between the
Lover-to-be and Love, who quickly overcomes the ready yielder. So he
surrenders unconditionally, gives himself over; Love may slay him or
gladden him--“le cuers est vostre, non pas miens,” says the lover to Love,
and you shall do with it as you will. Then Love sweetly takes his little
golden key, and locks the lover’s heart, after which he safely may impart
his rules and counsels: the lover must abjure _vilanie_, and foul and
slanderous speech--the opposite of courtesy. Pride also (_orgoil_) must be
abandoned. He should attire himself seemingly, and show cheerfulness; he
must be niggardly in nothing; his heart must be given utterly to one; he
shall undergo toils and endure griefs without complaint; in absence he
will always think of the beloved, sighing for her, keeping his love
aflame; he will be shameful, confused and changing colour in her presence;
at night he will toss and weep for love of her, and dream dreams of
passionate delight; then wakeful, he will rise and wander near her
dwelling, but will not be seen--nor will he forget to be generous to her
waiting-maid. All of this will make the lover pale and lean. To aid him to
endure these agonies, will come Hope with her gentle healings, and
Fond-thought, and Sweet-speech of the beloved with a wise confidant, and
Sweet-sight of her dwelling, maybe of herself. The _Roman de la rose_ is
fancy, and the Arthurian romances are fiction. In the one or the other,
imagination may take the place of passion, and the contents of the poem or
romance afford a type and presentation of the theory of love.




CHAPTER XXIV

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, Chrétien de Troies, about the year 1170,
in his retelling, first brought into the story the conception of that
_thing_, that magic dish, which in the course of _its_ retellings became
the Holy Grail. Chrétien 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 Trouvère, yet surpassed him and all others
in thoughtfulness 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
Thüringen, 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 Chrétien’s version of the _Perceval_; and
said the story had been far better told by a certain Kyot, a singer of
Provence.[722] 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 Provençal. In large measure the best German mediaeval poetry was
an adaptation of the French; a fact which did not prevent the German
adaptations 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 great renderings of
these tales.

As our author was a thoughtful German, his style is difficult and
involved. Yet he had imagination, and his 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.[723] 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. Likewise 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 conquering 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 Gahmuret, her husband. The broken-hearted,
foolish 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 will
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 all 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, 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 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 armour. Courteously received, the youth enjoyed a bath, a
repast, and a long night’s sleep. Fortunately his mother had bade him
follow 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 yields, 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.”

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 Parzival’s 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 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 Gurnemanz.”

“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 kindness 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 fall--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 yield 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 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.[724] 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
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
bedchamber, 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 life, 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 will 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 halls, 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 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 second, breaks; a word is needed that the sword may
make its bearer peerless. Do you know 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 foolish 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 calling 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 Knight--came riding from the
opposite direction. As he drew near the encampment of the king, his eye
lighted 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 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 happiness 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, mount 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 lineage 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 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.[725] 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, 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. 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 unhelmeted, 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 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 his 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 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 our 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 joyful 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.”

“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 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 him 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 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, misfortune’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 do penance 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, and unwitting
was his neglect to ask the question. His guilt was thoughtlessness and
stupid ignorance. It is impossible 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; here 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, tells 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. 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 joyful 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.

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 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
Grail’s 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 with
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.


END OF VOL. I


_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.




INDEX

_NOTE.--Of several references to the same matter the more important are
shown by heavy type._


  Abaelard, Peter, career of, ii. 342-5;
    at Paris, ii. 343, 344, 383;
      popularity there, ii. 119;
    love for Heloïse, ii. 4-=5=, 344;
    love-songs, ii. =13=, 207;
    Heloïse’s love for, i. 585; ii. =3=, =5=, 8, 9, =15-16=;
    early relations with Heloïse, ii. 4-5;
    suggestion of marriage opposed by her, ii. 6-9;
    marriage, ii. 9;
    suffers vengeance of Fulbert, ii. 9;
    becomes a monk at St. Denis, ii. 10;
      at the Paraclete, ii. 10, 344;
      at Breton monastery, ii. 10;
    St. Bernard’s denunciations of, i. 229, 401; ii. =344-5=, =355=;
    letters to, from Heloïse quoted, ii. 11-15, 17-20, 23, 24;
    letters from, to Heloïse quoted, ii. 16-17, 21-3, 24-5;
    closing years at Cluny, ii. 25, =26=, 345;
    death of, ii. =27=, 345;
    estimate of, ii. 4, 342;
    rationalizing temper, i. 229; ii. =298-9=;
    skill in dialectic, ii. 303, =345-6=, 353;
    not an Aristotelian, ii. 369;
    works on theology, ii. 352-5;
      _De Unitate et Trinitate divina_, ii. 10, =298-9=, 352 _and_ _n. 3_;
      _Theologia_, ii. =303-4=, 395;
      _Scito te ipsum_, ii. 350-1;
      _Sic et non_, i. 17; ii. =304-6=, =352=, 357;
      _Dialectica_, ii. 346 _and_ _nn._, 349-50;
      _Dialogue_ between Philosopher, Jew, and Christian, ii. 350, =351=;
      _Historia calamitatum_, ii. =4-11=, 298-9, =343=;
      _Carmen ad Astralabium filium_, ii. 192;
      hymns, ii. 207-9;
      otherwise mentioned, ii. 134, 283 _and_ _n._

  Abbo, Abbot, i. =294 and n.=, 324

  Abbots:
    Armed forces, with, i. 473
    Cistercian, position of, i. 362-3 _and_ _n._
    Investiture of, lay, i. 244
    Social class of, i. 473

  Accursius, _Glossa ordinaria_ of, ii. 262, =263=

  Adalberon, Abp. of Rheims, i. 240, =282-3=, 287

  Adam of Marsh, ii. 389, 400, 487

  Adam of St. Victor, editions of hymns of, ii. 87 _n. 1_;
    examples of the hymns, ii. 87 _seqq._;
    Latin originals, ii. 206, 209-15

  Adamnan cited, i. 134 _n. 2_, 137

  Adelard of Bath, ii. 370

  Aedh, i. 132

  Agobard, Abp. of Lyons, i. 215, =232-3=;
    cited, ii. 247

  Aidan, St., i. 174

  Aimoin, _Vita Abbonis_ by, i. 294 _and_ _n._

  Aix, Synod of, i. 359

  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. 92-4;
    estimate of, ii. 375-6;
    works of, ii. 48 _n. 1_, =94=, 375 _n. 5_, 376;
      _Anticlaudianus_, ii. =94-103=, 192, 377, 539;
      _De planctu naturae_, ii. =192-3 and n. 1=, 376

  Alaric, i. 112

  Alaric II., i. =117=; ii. 243

  Alberic, Card., i. 252 _n. 2_

  Alberic, Markgrave of Camerino, i. 242

  Alberic, son of Marozia, i. 242-3

  Albertus Magnus, career of, ii. 421;
    estimate of, ii. 298, 301, =421=;
    estimate of work of, ii. 393, 395;
    attitude toward Gilbert de la Porrée, ii. 372;
    compared with Bacon, ii. 422;
      with Aquinas, ii. 433, =438=;
    relations with Aquinas, ii. 434;
    on logic, ii. 314-15;
      method of, ii. 315 _n._;
    edition of works, ii. 424 _n. 1_;
    _De praedicabilibus_, ii. 314 and _n._, 315, 424-5;
    work on the rest of Aristotle, ii. 420-1;
    analysis of this work, ii. 424 _seqq._;
    attitude toward the original, ii. 422;
    _Summa theologiae_, ii. 430, 431;
    _Summa de creaturis_, ii. 430-1;
    _De adhaerendo Deo_, ii. 432;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 17; ii. 82 _n. 2_, 283, 312, 402, 541 _n. 2_

  Albigenses, i. 49;
    persecution of, i. 366-7, 461, 481, 572; ii. 168

  Alboin the Lombard, i. 115

  Alchemy, ii. 496-7

  Alcuin of York, career of, i. 214;
    works of, i. 216-21 _and_ _n. 2_;
    extracts from letters of, ii. 159;
    stylelessness of, ii. =159=, 174;
    verses by, quoted, ii. 136-7;
    on _urbanitas_, ii. 136;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 212, 240, 343; ii. 112, 312, 332

  Aldhelm, i. 185

  Alemanni, i. 9, 121, 122, 145 _n. 2_, 174, 192

  Alemannia, Boniface’s work in, i. 199

  Alexander the Great, Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Life of, ii. 224, 225,
        =229-230=;
    Walter of Lille’s work on, ii. 230 _n. 1_

  Alexander II., Pope, i. 262 _n._, 263 _and_ _n. 1_

  Alexander de Villa-Dei, _Doctrinale_ of, ii. =125-7=, 163

  Alexander of Hales--at Paris, i. 476; ii. =399=;
    Bacon’s attack on, ii. 494, 497;
    estimate of work of, ii. 393, 395, 399;
    Augustinianism of, ii. 403-4

  Alfred, King of England, i. 144 _and_ _n. 2_, =187-90=

  Allegory (_See also_ Symbolism):
    Dictionaries of, ii. 47-8 _and_ _n. 1_, 49
    Greek examples of, ii. 42, 364
    Metaphor distinguished from, ii. 41 _n._
    Politics, in, ii. 60-1, 275-=6=, =280=
    _Roman de la rose_ as exemplifying, ii. 103
    Scripture, _see under_ Scriptures
    Two uses of, ii. 365

  Almsgiving, i. 268

  Alphanus, i. 253-4

  _Amadas_, i. 565

  Ambrose, St., Abp. of Milan, on miracles, i. 85-6;
    attitude toward secular studies, i. 300; ii. 288;
    _Hexaëmeron_ of, i. 72-4;
    _De officiis_, i. 96;
    hymns, i. 347-8;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 70, 75, 76, 104, 186, 354; ii. 45 _n._, 272

  Anacletus II., Pope, i. 394

  Anchorites, _see_ Hermits

  Andrew the Chaplain, _Flos amoris_ of, i. 575-6

  Angels:
    Aquinas’ discussion of, ii. 324-5, 435, =457 seqq.=, =469=, =473-5=
    Dante’s views on, ii. 551
    Emotionalizing of conception of, i. 348 _n. 4_
    Hugo of St. Victor on, ii. 68, 69
    Symbols, regarded as, ii. 457
    Vincent’s _Speculum_ as concerning, ii. 319
    Writings regarding, summary of, ii. 457

  Angilbert, i. 234-5

  Angles, i. 140

  Anglo-Saxons:
    Britain conquered by, i. 141
    Characteristics of, i. 142, =196=
    Christian missions by, i. 196, 197
    Christian missions to, i. 172, 174, =180 seqq.=
    Customs of, i. 141
    Poetry of, i. 142-4
    Roman influence slight on, i. 32

  Aniane monastery, i. 358-9

  Annals, i. 234 and _n. 1_

  Anselm (at Laon), ii. 343-4

  Anselm, St., Abp. of Canterbury, dream of, i. 269-70;
    early career, i. 270;
    at Bec, i. 271-2;
    relations with Rufus, i. 273, 275;
    journey to Italy, i. 275;
    estimate of, i. 274, =276-7=; ii. =303=, 330, =338=;
    style of, i. 276; ii. =166-7=;
    influence of, on Duns Scotus, ii. 511;
    works of, i. 275 _seqq._;
    _Cur Deus homo_, i. 275, 277 _n. 1_, =279=; ii. 395;
    _Monologion_, i. 275-7;
    _Proslogion_, i. 276-8; ii. =166=, 395;
    _Meditationes_, i. 276, =279=;
    _De grammatico_, i. 277 _n. 2_;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 16, 19, 301-2; ii. 139, 283, 297, 340

  Anselm of Besate, i. 259

  Anthony, St., i. 365-6;
    Life of, by Athanasius, i. 47, =52 and n.=

  Antique literature, _see_ Greek thought _and_ Latin classics

  Antique stories, themes of, in vernacular poetry, ii. 223 _seqq._

  Apollinaris Sidonius, ii. 107

  Apollonius of Tyana, i. 44

  _Apollonius of Tyre_, ii. 224 _and_ _n._

  Aquinas, Thomas, family of, ii. 433-4;
    career, ii. 434-5;
    relations with Albertus Magnus, ii. 434;
    translations of Aristotle obtained by, ii. 391;
    _Vita_ of, by Guilielmus de Thoco, ii. 435 _n._;
    works of, ii. 435;
    estimate of, and of his work, i. 17, 18; ii. 301, =436-8=, 484;
    completeness of his philosophy, ii. 393-5;
    pivot of his attitude, ii. 440;
    present position of, ii. 501;
    style, ii. 180;
    mastery of dialectic, ii. 352;
    compared with Eriugena, i. 231 _n. 1_;
    with Albertus Magnus, ii. 433, =438=;
    with Bonaventura, ii. 437;
    with Duns, ii. 517;
    Dante compared with and influenced by, ii. 541 _n. 2_, =547=, 549,
        551, 555;
    on monarchy, ii. 277;
    on faith, ii. 288;
    on difference between philosophy and theology, ii. 290;
    on logic, ii. 313;
    _Summa theologiae_, i. 17, 18; ii. =290 seqq.=;
    style of the work, ii. 180-1;
    Bacon’s charge against it, ii. 300;
    Peter Lombard’s work contrasted with it, ii. 307-10;
    its method, ii. 307;
    its classification scheme, ii. 324-9;
    analysis of the work, ii. 438 _seqq._, 447 _seqq._;
    _Summa philosophica contra Gentiles_, ii. 290, 438, =445-6=;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 69 _n. 2_; ii. 283, 298, 300, 312, 402

  Aquitaine, i. 29, 240, =573=

  Arabian philosophy, ii. =389-90=, 400-1

  Arabs, Spanish conquest by, i. 9, 118

  Archimedes, i. 40

  Architecture, Gothic:
    Evolution of, i. 305; ii. =539=
    Great period of, i. 346

  Argenteuil convent, ii. 9, 10

  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. 118, 119;
    philosophy as classified by, ii. 312;
    attitude of, to discussions of final cause, ii. 336;
    the _Organon_, i. =37=, 71;
    progressive character of its treatises, ii. 333-4;
    Boëthius’ translation of the work, i. 71, =91-2=;
    advanced treatises “lost” till 12th cent., ii. 248 _n._, 334;
    Porphyry’s _Introduction_ to the _Categories_, i. 45, 92, 102; ii.
        312, =314 n.=, 333, =339=;
    Arabian translations of works, ii. 389-90;
    introduction of complete works, i. 17;
    Latin translations made in 13th cent., ii. 391;
    three stages in scholastic appropriation of the Natural Philosophy and
        Metaphysics, ii. 393;
    Paris University study of, ii. 391-2 _and_ _n._;
    Albertus Magnus’ work on, ii. 420-1, 424 _seqq._;
    Aquinas’ mastery of, i. 17, 18;
    Dominican acceptance of system of, ii. 404;
    Dante’s reverence for, ii. 542

  Arithmetic:
    Abacus, the, i. 299
    Boëthius’ work on, i. 72, =90=
    Music in relation to, ii. 291
    Patristic treatment of, i. 72
    Scholastic classification of, ii. 313

  Arnold of Brescia, i. 401; ii. 171

  Arnulf, Abp. of Rheims, i. 283-4

  Art, Christian (_For particular arts, see their names_):
    Demons as depicted in, ii. 540 _n. 2_
    Early, i. 345 _n._
    Emotionalizing of, i. 345-7
    Evolution of, i. 19-20
    Germany, in (11th cent.), i. 312
    Symbolism the inspiration of, i. 21; ii. 82-6

  Arthur, King, story of youth of, i. 568-569;
    relations with Lancelot and Guinevere, i. 584;
    with Parzival, i. 592, 599-600, 612

  Arthurian romances:
    Comparison of, with _Chansons de geste_, i. 564-5
    German culture influenced by, ii. 28
    Origin and authorship of, question as to, i. 565-7
    Universal vogue of, i. =565=, 573, 577
    otherwise mentioned, i. 531, 538

  Arts, the (_See also_ Latin classics):
    Classifications of, ii. 312 _seqq._
    Course of, shortening of, ii. =132=, 384
    _Dictamen_, ii. =121=, =129=, 381
    Grammar, _see that heading_
    Masters in, at Paris and Oxford, ii. 384-5;
      course for, ii. 388
    Seven Liberal, _see that heading_

  Asceticism:
    Christian:
      Carthusian, i. 384
      Early growth of, i. 333-5
      Manichean, i. 49
      Women’s practice of, i. 444, 462-3
    Neo-Platonic, i. 43, 44, 46, 50, =331=, 334

  Astralabius, ii. 6, 9, 27;
    Abaelard’s poem to, ii. 191-2 _and_ _n. 1_

  Astrology, i. =44 and n.=; ii. 374:
    Bacon’s views on, ii. 499-500

  Astronomy:
    Chartres study of, i. 299
    Gerbert’s teaching of, i. 288-9
    Patristic attitude toward, i. 72

  Ataulf, i. 112, 116

  Athanasius, St., estimate of work of, i. =54=, 68;
    Life of St. Anthony by, i. 47, =52 and n.=, 84;
    _Orationes_, i. 68

  Atlantis, i. 36

  Attila the Hun, i. 112-13;
    in legend, i. 145-7

  Augustine, Abp. of Canterbury, i. 6, 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. 279;
    with Guigo, i. 385, 390;
    overwhelming influence of, in Middle Ages, ii. 403;
    on numbers, i. 72 _and_ _n. 2_, 105;
    attitude toward physical science, i. 300;
    on love of God, i. 342, 344;
    allegorizing of Scripture by, ii. 44-5;
    modification by, of classical Latin, ii. 152;
    _Confessions_, i. =63=; ii. 531;
    _De Trinitate_, i. =64=, =68=, 74, 96;
    _Civitas Dei_, i. 64-65, 69 _n. 2_, =81-82=;
    _De moribus Ecclesiae_, i. 65, 67-8;
    _De doctrina Christiana_, i. 66-7;
    classification scheme based on the _Doctrina_, ii. 322;
    _De spiritu et littera_, i. 69;
    _De cura pro mortuis_, i. 86;
    _De genesi ad litteram_, ii. 324;
    Alcuin’s compends of works of, i. 220;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 5, 53, 71, 75, 82, 87, 89, 104, 186, 225, 340,
        354, 366, 370; ii. 107, 269, 297, 312

  Augustus, Emp., i. 26, 29

  Aurillac monastery, i. 281

  Ausonius, i. 126 _n. 2_; ii. 107

  Austrasia:
    Church organization in, i. 199
    Feudal disintegration of, i. 240
    Irish monasteries founded in, i. 174
    Rise of, under Pippin, i. 209

  Authority _v._ reason, _see_ Reason

  Auxerre, i. 506-7

  Averroes, ii. 390

  Averroism, ii. 400-1

  Averroists, ii. =284 n.=, 296 _n. 1_

  Avicenna, ii. 390

  Avitus, Bp. of Vienne, i. 126 _n. 2_

  Azo, ii. 262-3


  Bacon, Roger, career of, ii. 486-7
    tragedy of career, ii. 486;
    relations with Franciscan Order, ii. 299, 486, =488=, 490-1;
    encouragement to, from Clement IV., ii. 489-90 _and_ _n. 1_;
    estimate of, ii. 484-6;
    estimate of work of, ii. 402;
    style of, ii. 179-80;
    attitude toward the classics, ii. 120;
    predilection for physical science, ii. 289, 486-7;
    Albertus Magnus compared with, ii. 422;
    on four causes of ignorance, ii. 494-5;
    on seven errors in theological study, ii. 495-8;
    on experimental science, ii. 502-8;
    on logic, ii. 505;
    on faith, ii. 507;
    editions of works of, ii. 484 _n._;
    Greek Grammar by, ii. =128= _and_ _n. 5_, 484 _n._, 487, 498;
    _Multiplicatio specierum_, ii. 484 _n._, 500;
    _Opus tertium_, ii. =488=, 490 _and_ _nn._, 491, 492, 498, 499;
    _Opus majus_, ii. 490-1, 492, =494-5=, 498, =499-500=, =506-8=;
    _Optics_, ii. 500;
    _Opus minus_, ii. 490-1, =495-8=;
    _Vatican fragment_, ii. 490 _and_ _n. 2_, =505 n. 1=;
    _Compendium studii philosophiae_, ii. 491, 493-4, 507-8;
    _Compendium theologiae_, ii. 491;
    otherwise mentioned, ii. 284 _n._, 335 _n._, =389=, 531-2

  Bartolomaeus, _De proprietatibus rerum_ of, ii. 316 _n. 2_

  Bartolus, ii. 264

  Baudri, Abbot of Bourgueil, ii. 192 _n. 1_

  Bavaria:
    Irish monasteries founded in, i. 174
    Merovingian rule in, i. 121
    Otto’s relations with, i. 241
    Reorganization of Church in, 198-9

  Bavarians, i. 145 _n. 2_, 209, 210

  Beauty, love of, i. 340

  Bec monastery, i. 262 _n._, 270-2

  Bede, estimate of, i. 185-6;
    allegorizing of Scripture by, ii. 47 _n. 1_;
    _Church History of the English People_, i. 172, =186=, 234 _n. 2_;
    _De arte metrica_, i. 187, =298=;
    _Liber de temporibus_, 300;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 184, 212

  Beghards of Liége, i. 365

  Belgae, i. 126

  Belgica, i. 29, 32

  Benedict, Prior, i. 258

  Benedict, St., of Nursia, i. =85 and n. 2=, 94, 100 _n. 4_;
    _Regula_ of, _see under_ Monasticism

  Benedictus, _Chronicon_ of, ii. 160-1

  Benedictus Levita, Deacon, ii. 270

  Benoit de St. More, _Roman de Troie_ by, ii. 225, =227-9=

  Beowulf, i. 141, =143-4= _and_ _n. 1_

  Berengar, King, i. 256

  Berengar of Tours, i. 297, 299, =302-3=; ii. 137

  Bernard, Bro., of Quintavalle, i. 502

  Bernard, disciple of St. Francis, i. 425-6

  Bernard of Chartres, ii. 130-2, 370

  Bernard, St., Abbot of Clairvaux, at Citeaux, i. 360, 393;
    inspires Templars’ _regula_, i. 531;
    denounces and crushes Abaelard, i. 229, 401; ii. =344-5=, =355=;
    denounces Arnold of Brescia, i. 401; ii. 171;
    relations with Gilbert de la Porrée, ii. 372;
    Lives of, i. 392 _n._, 393 _n. 1_;
    appearance and characteristics of, i. 392-3;
    estimate of, i. 394; ii. 367-8;
    love and tenderness of, i. 344, 345, =394 seqq.=; ii. 365;
    severity of, i. 400-1;
    his love of Clairvaux, i. 401-2;
    of his brother, i. 402-4;
    Latin style of, ii. 169-71;
    on church corruption, i. 474;
    on faith, ii. 298;
    unconcerned with physics, ii. 356;
    St. Francis compared with, i. 415-16;
    extracts from letters of, i. 395 _seqq._; ii. 170-1;
    _Sermons on Canticles_--cited, 337 _n._;
    quoted, i. =409-13=; ii. =169=, 368-9;
    _De consideratione_, ii. 368;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 17, 20, 279, 302, 472, 501; ii. 34, 168

  Bernard Morlanensis, _De contemptu mundi_ by, ii. 199 _n. 3_

  Bernard Silvestris, _Commentum ..._ of, ii. 116-17 _and_ _n. 2_;
    _De mundi universitate_, ii. 119, =371 and n.=

  Bernardone, Peter, i. 419, 423-4

  Bernward, Bp. of Hildesheim, i. 312 _and_ _n. 1_

  Bible, _see_ Scriptures

  Biscop, Benedict, i. 184

  Bishops:
    Armed forces, with, i. 473
    Francis of Assisi’s attitude toward, i. 430
    Gallo-Roman and Frankish, position of, i. 191-2, 194 _and_ _nn._, 198,
        =201 n.=
    Investiture of, lay, i. 244-5 _and_ _n. 4_; ii. 140
    Jurisdiction and privileges of, ii. 266
    Papacy’s ascendancy over, i. 304
    Reluctance to be consecrated, i. 472
    Social class of, i. 473
    Vestments of, symbolism of, ii. 77 _n. 2_

  _Blancandrin_, i. 565

  Bobbio monastery, i. 178, =282-3=

  Boëthius, death of, i. =89=, 93;
    estimate of, i. 89, 92, =102=;
    Albertus Magnus compared with, ii. 420;
    works of, i. 90-3;
    Gerbert’s familiarity with works of, i. 289;
    works of, studied at Chartres, i. 298-9;
      their importance, i. 298;
    _De arithmetica_, i. 72, =90=;
    _De geometria_, i. 90;
    commentary on Porphyry’s _Isagoge_, i. =92=; ii. 312;
    translation of the _Organon_, i. 71, =91-2=;
    “loss” of advanced works, ii. 248 _n._, 334;
    _De consolatione philosophiae_, i. =89=, 188, =189-90=, 299;
      mediaeval study of the work, i. 89; ii. 135-6

  Bologna:
    Clubs and guilds in, ii. 382
    Fight of, against Parma, i. 497
    Law school at, ii. =121=, 251, =259-62=, 378
    Medical school at, ii. 121, 383 _n._
    University, Law, inception and character of, ii. 121, =381-3=;
      affiliated universities, ii. 383 _n._

  Bonaventura, St. (John of Fidanza), career of, ii. 403;
    at Paris, ii. 399, 403;
    estimate of, ii. 301;
    style of, ii. 181-2;
    contrasted with Albertus, ii. 405;
    compared with Aquinas, ii. 405, 437;
    with Dante, ii. 547;
    on faith, ii. 298;
    on Minorites and Preachers, ii. 396;
    attitude toward Plato and Aristotle, ii. 404-5;
    toward Scriptures, ii. 405 _seqq._;
    _De reductione artium ad theologiam_, ii. 406-8;
    _Breviloquium_, ii. 408-13;
    _Itinerarium mentis in Deum_, ii. 413-18;
    otherwise mentioned, ii. 283, 288

  Boniface, _see_ Winifried-Boniface

  Boniface VIII., Pope, _Sextus_ of, ii. 272;
    _Unam sanctam_ bull of, ii. 509

  _Books of Sentences_, method of, ii. 307
    (_See also under_ Lombard)

  Botany, ii. 427-8

  Bretons, i. 113

  _Breviarium_, i. 117, 239, =243-4=

  Britain:
    Anglo-Saxon conquest of, i. 141
    Antique culture in relation to, before Middle Ages, i. 10-11
    Celts in, i. 127 _n._
    Christianity of, i. 171-2
    Romanization of, i. 32

  Brude (Bridius), King of Picts, i. 173

  Brunhilde, i. 176, 178

  Bruno, Abp. of Cologne, i. 309-10, 383-4;
    Ruotger’s Life of, i. 310; ii. 162 _and_ _n. 1_

  Burgundians:
    Christianizing of, i. 193
    Church’s attitude toward, i. 120
    Roman law code promulgated by (_Papianus_), ii. 239, =242=
    Roman subjects of, i. 121
    otherwise mentioned, i. 9-10, 113, 145

  Burgundy, i. =175=, 243 _n. 1_

  Byzantine architecture, 212 _n._

  Byzantine Empire, _see_ Eastern Empire


  Cædmon, i. 183, 343

  Caesar, C. Julius, cited, i. =27-9=, 138, 296

  Caesar of Heisterbach, Life of Engelbert by, i. 482-6 _and_ _n._;
    _Dialogi miraculorum_, cited, i. 488 _n._, 491.

  Canon law:
    Authority of, ii. 274
    Basis of, ii. 267-9
    Bulk of, ii. 269
    Conciliar decrees, collections of, ii. =269=
    Decretals:
      Collections of, ii. 269, =271-2=, =275= =n.=
      False, ii. 270, 273
    Gratian’s _Decretum_, ii. 268-9, =270-1=, 306
    _Jus naturale_ in, ii. 268-9
    _Lex romana canonice compta_, ii. 252
    Scope of, ii. 267
    Sources of, ii. 269
    Supremacy of, ii. 277

  Canossa, i. 244

  Cantafables, i. 157 _n. 1_

  Canticles, i. 350;
    Origen’s interpretation of, 333;
    St. Bernard’s Sermons on, i. 337 _n._, =409-13=; ii. =169=, 368-9

  Capella, Martianus, _De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii_ of, i. =71 and
        n. 3=; ii. 553

  _Caritas_, ii. 476-8;
    in relation to faith, ii. 479-81;
    to wisdom, ii. 481

  Carloman, King of Austrasia, i. =199-200 and n.=, 209

  Carloman (son of Pippin), i. 209-10

  Carnuti, i. 296

  Carolingian period:
    _Breviarium_ epitomes current during, ii. 244, =249=
    Continuity of, with Merovingian, i. 210-12
    Criticism of records non-existent in, i. 234
    Definiteness of statement a characteristic of, i. 225, =227=
    Educational revival in, 218-19, 222, =236=; ii. 122, =158=;
      palace school, i. =214=, 218, 229, 235
    First stage of mediaeval learning represented by, ii. 330, 332
    History as compiled in, i. 234-5
    King’s law in, ii. 247
    Latin poetry of, ii. 188, 194, 197
    Latin prose of, ii. 158
    Originality in, circumstances evoking, i. 232-3
    Restatement of antique and patristic matter in, i. =237=, 342-3

  Carthaginians, i. 25

  Carthusian Order, origin of, i. 383-4

  Cassian’s _Institutes_ and _Conlocations_, i. 335

  Cassiodorus, life and works of, i. 93-7;
    _Chronicon_, i. 94;
    _Variae epistolae_, i. 94;
    _De anima_, 94-5;
    _Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum_, i. =95-6=; ii.
        357 _n. 2_;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 6, 88-9, 115; ii. 312

  Cathari, i. 49; ii. 283 _n._

  Catullus, i. 25

  Cavallini, i. 347

  Celsus cited, ii. 235, 237

  Celtic language, date of disuse of, i. 31 _and_ _n._

  Celts:
    Gaul, in, i. =125 and n.=, =126-7=, 129 _n. 1_
    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. 240, =573=

  Chandos, Sir John, i. 554-5

  _Chanson de Roland_, i. 12 _n._, 528 _and_ _n. 2_, =559-62=

  _Chansons de geste_, i. =558 seqq.=; ii. 222

  Charlemagne, age of, _see_ Carolingian period;
    estimate of, i. 213;
    relations of, with the Church, i. =201=, 239; ii. 273;
    relations with Angilbert, i. 234-5;
    educational revival by, i. =213-14=; ii. 110, 122, =158=, 332;
    book of Germanic poems compiled by order of, ii. 220;
    Capitularies of, ii. 110, =248=;
    open letters of, i. 213 _n._;
    Einhard’s Life of, ii. 158-9;
    poetic fame of, i. 210;
    false Capitularies ascribed to, ii. 270;
    empire of, non-enduring, i. 238;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 9, 115, 153, 562; ii. 8

  Charles Martel, i. 197, =198=, =209=; ii. 273

  Charles II. (the Bald), King of France, i. 228, 235

  Charles III. (the Simple), King of France, i. 239-40

  Charles IV., King of France, i. 551

  Chartres Cathedral, sculpture of, i. =20=, 297; ii. =82-5=

  Chartres Schools:
    Classics the study of, i. 298; ii. 119
    Fulbert’s work at, i. 296-7, 299
    Grammar as studied at, ii. 129-30
    Medicine studied at, ii. 372
    Orleans the rival of, ii. 119 _n. 2_
    Trivium and quadrivium at, i. =298-9=; ii. 163
    mentioned, i. 287, 293

  Chartreuse, La Grande, founding of, i. 384 (_See also_ Carthusian)

  Chaucer, ii. 95

  Childeric, King, i. 119, 122

  Chivalry:
    Literature of:
      Arthurian romances, _see that heading_
      Aube (alba) poetry, i. =571=; ii. 30
      _Chansons de geste_, i. 558 _seqq._
      Nature of, i. 20
      _Pastorelle_, i. 571
      Pietistic ideal recognized in, ii. 288, 533
      Poems of various nations cited, i. 570 =n.=
      Religious phraseology in love poems, i. 350 _n. 2_
      _Romans d’aventure_, i. =564-5=, 571 _n. 2_
      Three branches of, i. 558
    Nature of, i. 522, =570 n.=
    Order of, evolution of, i. 524 _seqq._
      (_See also_ Knighthood)

  Chrétien de Troies, romances by, i. 566-=7=;
    _Tristan_, i. 567;
    _Perceval_, i. 567, =588-9=;
    _Erec_ (Geraint), i. 567, 586; ii. 29 _n._;
    _Lancelot_ or _Le Conte de la charrette_, i. 567, 569-70, =582-5=;
    _Cligés_, i. 567, =586 n. 2=;
    _Ivain_, i. =571 n. 2=, 586 _n. 3_; ii. 29 _n._;
    translation of Ovid’s _Ars amatoria_, i. 574

  Christianity:
    Appropriation of, by mediaeval peoples, stages in, i. 17-18
    Aquinas’ _Summa_ as concerning, ii. 324
    Art, in, _see_ Art
    Atonement doctrine, Anselm’s views on, i. 279
    Basis of, ii. 268
    Britain, in, i. 171-2
    Buddhism contrasted with, i. 390
    Catholic Church, _see_ Church
    Completeness of scheme of, ii. 394-5
    Dualistic element in, i. 59
    Eleventh century, position in, i. 16
    Emotional elements in:
      Fear, i. 103, 339, 342, 383
      Hate, i. 332, 339
      Love, i. 331, =345=
      Synthetic treatment of, i. 333
    Emotionalizing of, angels as regarded in, i. 348 _n. 4_
    Eternal punishment doctrine of, i. =65=, =339=, 486
    Faith of, _see_ Faith
    Feudalism in relation to, i. 524, 527-=9 and n. 2=, =530=
    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
    Hell-fear in, i. 103, =339=, 342, =383=
    Hymns, _see that heading_
    Ideal _v._ actual, i. 354-5
    Incarnation doctrine of, ii. 369
    Irish missionaries of, _see under_ Irish
    Latin as modified for expression of, ii. 152, =154=, 156, 164, 171
    Marriage as regarded by, ii. 8, 529
    Martyrs for, _see_ Martyrs
    Mediaeval development in relation to, i. 11, 170
    Mediation doctrine of, i. 54, 59-60
    Militant character of, in early centuries, 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. =296-7=, 300, 311
      Standard of discrimination, as, ii. =530=, =533=, 559
    Scriptures, _see that heading_
    Teutonic acceptance of, _see under_ Teutons
    Trinity doctrine of:
      Abaelard’s works on, ii. 10, =298-9=, 352-3, 355
      Aquinas on, ii. 449-50, 456
      Bonaventura on, ii. 416-17
      Dante’s vision, ii. 551
      Peter Lombard’s Book on, ii. 323
      Roscellin on, ii. 340
    Vernacular presentation of, ii. 221
    Visions, _see that heading_

  Chronicles, mediaeval, ii. 175

  Chrysostom, i. 53

  Church, Roman Catholic:
    Authority of, Duns’ views on, ii. 516
    Bishops, _see that heading_
    British Church’s divergencies from, 171-2
    Canon Law, _see that heading_
    Charlemagne’s relations with, i. =201=, 239; ii. 273
    Classical study as regarded by, i. 260; ii. =110 seqq.=, 396-7
    Clergy, _see that heading_
    Confession doctrine of, i. 489
    Constantine’s relations with, ii. 266
    Creation of, i. 11, 68, =86-7=
    Decretals, etc., _see under_ Canon Law
    Denunciations of, i. 474-5; ii. 34-5
    Diocesan organization of, among Germans, i. 196
    Doctrinal literature of, i. 68-70
    Duns’ attitude towards, ii. 513
    East and West, solidarity of development of, i. 55
    Empire’s relations with, _see under_ Papacy
    Eternal punishment doctrine of, i. =65=, =339=, 486; ii. 550
    Eucharistic controversy, _see that heading_
    Fathers of the, _see_ Greek thought, patristic; Latin Fathers; _and
        chiefly_ Patristic thought
    Feudalism as affected by, i. 524, 527-=9 and n. 2=, =530=
    Feudalism as affecting, i. 244, 473
    Frankish, _see under_ Franks
    Gallo-Roman, i. 191-2, 194
    Hildegard’s visions regarding, i. 457
    Intolerance of, _see subheading_ Persecutions
    Investiture controversy, _see under_ Bishops
    Irish Church’s relations with, i. 172-4 _and_ =n. 1=
    Isidore’s treatise on liturgical practices of, i. 106
    Knights’ vow of obedience to, i. 530
    Mass, the:
      Alleluia chant and Sequence-hymn, ii. 196, =201 seqq.=
      Symbolism of, ii. 77-8
    Nicene Creed, i. 69
    Papacy, Popes, _see those headings_
    Paschal controversy, _see_ Eucharistic
    Penance doctrine of, i. =101=, 195
    Persecutions by, i. 339;
      of Albigenses, i. 366-7, 461, 481, 572; ii. 168;
      of Jews, i. 118, 332;
      of Montanists, i. 332
    Popes, _see that heading_
    Predestination, attitude toward, i. 228
    Property of, enactments regarding, ii. 266
    Rationalists in, i. 305
    Reforms in (11th cent.), i. 304
    Roman law for, ii. 265 _and_ _n. 2_
    Sacraments:
      Definition of the word, ii. 72 _and_ _n. 1_
      Hugo of St. Victor on, ii. 64, 66, 68-9, 71, =72-4=, 90 _n. 2_
      Origin of, Bonaventura on, ii. 411-13
      Pagan analogy with, i. 53, 59-60
    Secularization of dignities of, i. 472
    Simony in, i. =244=, 475
    Spain, in, _see under_ Spain
    Standards set by, ii. 528-9
    Suspects to, estimate of, ii. 532
    Synod of Aix (817), i. 359
    Theodosian Code as concerning, ii. 266-7 _and_ _n. 1_
    Transubstantiation doctrine of, i. 226-227
    “Truce of God” promulgated by, i. 529 _n. 2_

  Churches:
    Building of, symbolism in, ii. 78-82
    Dedication of, sequence designed for, ii. 210-11

  Cicero, i. 26 _n. 3_, 39, 78, =219=

  Cino, ii. 264

  Cistercian Order:
    _Charta charitatis_, i. 361-3
    Clairvaux founded, i. 393
    Cluniac controversies with, i. 360

  Citeaux monastery:
    Bernard at, i. 360, 393
    Foundation and rise of, i. 360-3

  Cities and towns:
    Growth of, in 12th cent., i. 305; ii. =379-80=
    Italian, _see under_ Italy

  Cities (_civitates_) of Roman provinces, i. 29-30

  Clairvaux (Clara Vallis):
    Founding of, i. 360, 393
    Position of, i. 362
    St. Bernard’s love of, i. 401-2

  Classics, _see_ Latin classics

  Claudius, Bp. of Turin, i. 215, 231-2 _and_ _n. 1_

  Claudius, Emp., i. 30

  Clement II., Pope, i. 243

  Clement IV., Pope, ii. 489-91

  Clement V., Pope, _Decretales Clementinae_ of, ii. 272

  Clement of Alexandria, ii. 64

  Clergy:
    Accusations against, false, penalty for, ii. 266
    Legal status of, ii. 382
    Regular, _see_ Monasticism
    Secular:
      Concubinage of, i. 244
      Francis of Assisi’s attitude toward, i. 430, 440
      Marriage of, i. 472 _n. 1_
      Reforms of, i. 359
      Standard of conduct for, i. 471; ii. 529
    Term, scope of, i. 356

  Clerval, Abbé, cited, i. 300 _n. 1_

  Clopinel, Jean, _see_ De Meun

  Clovis (Chlodoweg), i. 114, 117, =119-21=, 122, 138, =193-4=; ii. 245

  Cluny monastery:
    Abaelard at, ii. 25, =26=, 345
    Characteristics of, i. 359-60
    Monastic reforms accomplished by, i. =293=, 304

  Cologne, i. 29, 31

  Columba, St., of Iona, i. =133-7=, 173

  Columbanus, St., of Luxeuil and Bobbio, i. 6, 133, =174-9=, 196;
    Life and works of, 174 _n. 2_

  Combat, trial by, i. 232

  Commentaries, mediaeval:
    Boëthius’, i. 93
    Excerpts as characteristic of, i. 104
    General addiction to, ii. 390, 553 _n. 4_
    Originals supplanted by, ii. 390
    Raban’s, i. 222-3

  Compends:
    Fourteenth century use of, ii. 523
    Mediaeval preference for, i. 94
    Medical, in Italy, i. 251
    Saints’ lives, of (_Legenda aurea_), ii. 184

  Conrad, Duke of Franconia, i. 241

  Conrad II., Emp., i. 243

  Constantine, Emp., ii. 266;
    “Donation” of, ii. =35=, 265, 270

  Constantinus Africanus, i. =251= _and_ _n._; ii. 372

  Cordova, i. 25

  Cornelius Nepos, i. 25

  _Cornificiani_, ii. =132=, 373

  Cosmogony:
    Aquinas’ theory of, ii. 456
    Mediaeval allegorizing of, ii. 65 _seqq._
    Patristic attitude toward, i. 72-4

  Cosmology, Alan’s, in _Anticlaudianus_, ii. 377

  Cremona, i. 24

  Cross, Christian:
    Magic safeguard, as, i. 294-5
    Mediaeval feeling for, ii. 197

  Crusades:
    Constantinople, capture of, as affecting Western learning, ii. 391
    First:
      _Chansons_ concerning, i. 537-8
      Character of, i. 535-7
      Guibert’s account of, ii. 175
    Hymn concerning, quoted, i. 349 _and_ _n._
    Italians little concerned in, ii. 189
    Joinville’s account of, quoted, i. 546-9
    Language of, i. 531
    Results of, i. 305
    Second, i. 394
    Spirit of, i. 535-7

  Cuchulain, i. 129 _and_ _nn. 2, 3_

  Cynewulf’s _Christ_, i. 183

  Cyprian quoted, i. 337 _n._

  Cyril of Alexandria, i. 227

  Cyril of Jerusalem, i. 53


  Da Romano, Alberic, i. 515-16

  Da Romano, Eccelino, i. =505-6=, 516

  Dacia, Visigoths in, i. 112

  Damiani, St. Peter, Card. Bp. of Ostia, career of, i. 262-4;
    attitude of, to the classics, i. 260; ii. 112, 165;
    on the hermit life, i. 369-70;
    on tears, i. 371 _and_ _n._;
    extract illustrating Latin style of, ii. 165 _and_ _n. 3_;
    works of, i. 263 _n. 1_;
    writings quoted, i. 263-7;
    _Liber Gomorrhianus_, i. 265, 474;
    _Vita Romualdi_, i. 372 _seqq._;
    biography of Dominicus Loricatus, i. 381-2;
    _De parentelae gradibus_, ii. 252;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 17, 19, 20, 260, 343, 345, 391; ii. 34

  Damianus, i. 262, 265

  Danes, i. 142, =153=

  Dante, estimate of, ii. 534-5;
    scholarship of, ii. 541 _n. 2_;
    possessed by spirit of allegory, ii. 552-5;
    compared with Aquinas and influenced by him, ii. 541 _n. 2_, 547, 549,
        551, 555;
    compared with Bonaventura, ii. 547;
    attitude to Beatrice, ii. 555-8;
    on love, ii. 555-6;
    on monarchy, ii. 278;
    _De monarchia_, ii. 535;
    _De vulgari eloquentia_, ii. 219, =536=;
    _Vita nuova_, ii. =556=, 559;
    _Convito_, ii. =537-8=, 553;
    _Divina Commedia_, i. 12 _n._; ii. 86, 99 _n. 1_, =103=, 219;
      commentaries on this work, ii. 553-4;
      estimate of it, ii. 538, 540-1, 544, 553-4;
    _Inferno_ cited, ii. 42, 541-3, =545-7=;
    _Purgatorio_ cited, ii. 535, 542-3, =548-9=, 554, 558;
    _Paradiso_ cited, i. 395; ii. 542-3, =549-51=, 558

  Dares the Phrygian, ii. 116 _and_ _n. 3_, 224-=5 and nn.=, 226-7

  _De bello et excidio urbis Comensis_, ii. 189-90

  De Boron, Robert, i. 567

  _De casu Diaboli_, i. 279

  _De consolatione philosophiae_, _see under_ Boëthius

  De Lorris, Guillaume, _Roman de la rose_ by, i. =586-7=; ii. 103 _and_
        _n. 1_, 104

  De Meun, Jean (Clopinel), _Roman de la rose_ by, ii. 103 _and_ _n. 1_,
        104, =223=

  Denis, St., i. 230

  Dermot (Diarmaid, Diarmuid), High-King of Ireland, i. =132=-3, 135, =136=

  Desiderius, Bp. of Vienne, i. 99

  Desiderius, Pope, i. =253=, 263

  Devil, the:
    Mediaeval beliefs and stories as to, i. 487 _seqq._
    Romuald’s conflicts with, i. =374=, 379-80

  Dialectic (_See also_ Logic):
    Abaelard’s skill in, ii. 118, 119, =345-6=, 353;
      his subjection of dogma to, ii. 304;
      his _Dialectica_, ii. 346 _and_ _nn._, 349-50
    Chartres study of, i. 298
    Duns Scotus’ mastery of, ii. 510, 514
    Grammar penetrated by, ii. 127 _seqq._
    Hugo of St. Victor on, ii. 67
    Raban’s view of, i. 222
    Thirteenth century study of, ii. 118-20

  Diarmaid (Diarmuid), _see_ Dermot

  _Dictamen_, ii. =121=, =129=, 381

  Dictys the Cretan, ii. 224, 225 _and_ _n. 1_

  _Dies irae_, i. 348

  Dionysius the Areopagite, ii. 10, 102, =344=

  _Divina Commedia_, _see under_ Dante

  Divination, ii. 374

  Dominic, St., i. =366-7=, 497; ii. 396

  Dominican Order:
    Aristotelianism of, ii. 404
    Founding of, i. =366=; ii. 396
    Growth of, i. 498; ii. =398=
    Object of, ii. 396
    Oxford University, at, ii. 387
    Papacy, relations with, ii. =398=, 509
    Paris University, position in, ii. =386=, 399

  Dominicus Loricatus, i. 263, =381-3=

  Donatus, i. 71, 297;
    _Ars minor_ and _Barbarismus_ of, ii. 123-=4=

  Donizo of Canossa, ii. 189 _and_ _n. 2_

  Druids:
    Gallic, i. =28=, 296
    Irish, i. 133

  Du Guesclin, Bertrand, Constable of France, i. 554-6, 557 _n._

  Duns Scotus, education of, ii. 511;
    career of, ii. 513;
    estimate of, ii. 513;
    intricacy of style of, ii. 510, 514, =516 n. 2=;
    on logic, ii. 504 _n. 2_;
    Occam’s attitude toward, ii. 518 _seqq._;
    editions of works of, ii. 511 _n. 1_;
    estimate of his work, ii. 509-10, 514

  Dunstan, St., Abp. of Canterbury, i. 323-4

  Durandus, Guilelmus, _Rationale divinorum officiorum_ of, ii. 76 _seqq._


  Eadmer, i. 269, 273, 277

  Eastern Empire:
    Frankish relations with, i. 123
    Huns’ relations with, i. 112-13
    Norse mercenaries of, i. 153
    Ostrogoths’ relations with, i. 114
    Roman restoration by, i. 115

  Ebroin, i. 209

  Eckbert, Abbot of Schönau, i. 444

  Ecstasy:
    Bernard’s views on, ii. 368
    Examples of, i. 444, 446

  Eddas, ii. 220

  Education:
    Carolingian period, in, i. =213-14=, 218-19, 222, =236=; ii. 110, 122,
        =158=, 332
    Chartres method of, ii. 130-1
    Grammar a chief study in, ii. 122 _seqq._, 331-2
    Italy, in, _see under_ Italy
    Latin culture the means and method of, i. 12; ii. =109=
    Schools, clerical and monastic, i. =250 n. 2=, 293
    Schools, lay, i. 249-51
    Seven Liberal Arts, _see that heading_
    Shortening of academic course, advocates of, ii. =132=, 373

  Edward II., King of England, i. 551

  Edward III., King of England, i. 550-1

  Edward the Black Prince, i. 554-6

  Einhard the Frank, i. 234 _n. 1_;
    _Life of Charlemagne_ by, i. 215; ii. 158-9

  Ekkehart family, i. 309

  Ekkehart of St. Gall, _Waltarius_ (_Waltharilied_) by, ii. 188

  El-Farabi, ii. 390

  Eleventh century:
    Characteristics of, i. 301;
      in France, i. 301, 304, 328;
      in Germany, i. 307-9;
      in England, i. 324;
      in Italy, i. 327
    Christianity in, position of, i. 16

  Elias, Minister-General of the Minorites, i. 499

  Elizabeth, St., of Hungary, i. 391, =465 n. 1=

  Elizabeth, St., of Schönau, visions of, i. 444-6

  Emotional development, secular, i. 349-50 _and_ _n. 2_

  Empire, the, _see_ Holy Roman Empire

  Encyclopaedias, mediaeval, ii. 316 _n. 2_;
    Vincent’s _Speculum majus_, ii. 315-22

  _Eneas_, ii. 225, =226=

  Engelbert, Abp. of Cologne, i. 481-6;
    estimate of, i. 482

  England (_See also_ Britain):
    Danish Viking invasion of, i. 153
    Eleventh century conditions in, i. 324
    Law in, principles of, i. 141-2;
      Roman law almost non-existent in Middle Ages, ii. 248
    Norman conquest of, linguistic result of, i. 324

  English language, character of, i. 324

  Epicureanism, i. =41=, 70; ii. 296, 312

  Eriugena, John Scotus, estimate of, i. 215, =228-9=, =231=; ii. 330;
    on reason _v._ authority, ii. 298, 302;
    works of, studied at Chartres, i. 299;
    _De divisione naturae_, i. =230-1=; ii. 302;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 16; ii. 282 _n._, 312

  Essenes, i. 334

  Ethelbert, King of Kent, i. 180-1

  _Etymologies_ of Isidore, i. 33, 105 _and_ _n. 1_, =107-9=; ii. 318;
    law codes glossed from, ii. 250

  Eucharistic (Paschal) controversy:
    Berengar’s contribution to, i. 302-3
    Paschasius’ contribution to, i. 225-7

  Eucherius, Bp. of Lyons, ii. 48 _n. 1_

  Euclid, i. 40

  Eudemus of Rhodes, i. 38

  Eunapius, i. 47, 52

  Euric, King of the Visigoths, i. 117 _and_ _n. 1_

  Eusebius, i. 81 _n. 2_

  Evil or sin:
    Abaelard’s views concerning, ii. 350
    Eriugena’s views concerning, i. 228
    Original sin, realism in relation to, ii. 340 _n._
    Peter Lombard and Aquinas contrasted as to, ii. 308-10

  Experimental science, Bacon on, ii. 502-8


  _Fabliaux_, i. =521 n. 2=; ii. 222

  Facts, unlimited actuality of, i. 79-80

  Faith:
    Abaelard’s definition of, ii. 354
    Bacon’s views on, ii. 507
    Bernard of Clairvaux’s attitude toward, ii. 355
    _Caritas_ in relation to, ii. 479-81
    Cognition through, Aquinas’ views on, ii. 446
    Occam’s views on, ii. 519
    Proof of matters of, Aquinas on, ii. 450
    Will as functioning in, ii. 479

  _False Decretals_, i. 104 _n._, =118 n. 1=

  Fathers of the Church (_See also_ Patristic thought):
    Greek, _see_ Greek thought, patristic
    Latin, _see_ Latin Fathers

  Faustus, ii. 44

  Felix, St., i. 86

  Feudalism (_See also_ Knighthood):
    Anarchy of, modification of, i. 304
    Austrasian disintegration by, i. 240
    _Chansons_ regarding, i. 559 _seqq._, 569
    Christianity in relation to, i. 524, 527-=9 and n. 2=, =530=
    Church affected by, i. 244, 473
    Italy not greatly under, i. 241
    Marriage as affected by, i. 571, 586
    Obligations of, i. 533-4
    Origin of, 522-3
    Principle and practice of, at variance, i. 522

  Fibonacci, Leonardo, ii. 501

  Finnian, i. 136

  _Flamenca_, i. 565

  _Flore et Blanchefleur_, i. 565

  Florus, Deacon, of Lyons, i. 229 _and_ _n._

  Fonte Avellana hermitage, i. =262-3=, 381

  Forms, new, creation of, _see_ Mediaeval thought--Restatement

  Fortunatus, Hymns by, ii. 196-7

  Fourteenth century:
    Academic decadence in, ii. 523
    Papal position in, ii. 509-10

  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. 566
    Cathedrals of, ii. 539, 554-5
    Church in, secularization of, i. 472-3
    Eleventh century conditions in, i. 301, 304, 328
    History of, in 11th century, i. 300
    Hundred Years’ War, i. 550 _seqq._
    Jacquerie in (1358), i. 556
    Language modifications in, ii. 155
    Literary celebrities in (12th cent.), ii. 168
    Monarchy of, advance of, i. 305
    North and South, characteristics of, i. 328
    Rise of, in 14th century, ii. 509
    Town-dwellers of, i. =495=, 508

  Francis, St., of Assisi, birth of, i. 415;
    parentage, i. 419;
    youth, i. 420-3;
    breach with his father, i. 423-4;
    monastic career, i. 427 _seqq._;
    French songs sung by, i. =419 and n. 2=, 427, 432;
    _Lives_ of, i. 415 _n._;
    style of Thomas of Celano’s _Life_, ii. 182-3;
    _Speculum perfectionis_, i. 415 _n._, 416 _n._, =438 n. 3=; ii. =183=;
    literal acceptance of Scripture by, i. 365, 406-=7=;
    on Scripture interpretation, i. 427 _n. 1_; ii. 183;
    universality of outlook, i. 417;
    mediaevalism, i. 417;
    Christ-influence, i. 417, =418=, =432=-3;
    inspiration, i. =419 n. 1=, 441;
    gaiety of spirit, i. 421, 427-8, 431-2;
    poetic temperament, i. 422, 435;
    love of God, man, and nature, i. 366, 428, =432-3=, =435=-7;
    simplicity, i. 429;
    obedience and humility, i. 365 _n._, =429-30=;
    humanism, i. 495;
    St. Bernard compared with, i. 415-16;
    St. Dominic contrasted with, ii. 396;
    _Fioretti_, ii. 184;
    Canticle of Brother Sun, i. 433-4, =439-40=;
    last testament of, i. 440-1;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 20, 21, 279, 344, 345, 355-6; ii. 302

  Franciscan Order:
    Attractiveness of, i. 498
    Augustinianism of, ii. 404
    Bacon’s relations with, ii. 486, =488=, 490-=1=
    Characteristics of, i. 366
    Founding of, i. =427=; ii. 396
    Grosseteste’s relations, ii. =487=, 511
    Object of, ii. 396
    Oxford University, at, ii. 387, 400
    Papacy, relations with, ii. =398=, 509
    Paris University, in, ii. 386, 399
    Rise of, ii. 398

  Franconia, i. 241

  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=, 239; ii. 273
      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. 273
      Roman character of, i. 201
    Division of the kingdom a custom of, i. 238-9
    Gallo-Roman relations with, i. 123
    Language of, i. 145 _n. 2_
    Law of, ii. 245-6
    _Missi dominici_, i. 211
    Ripuarian, i. 119, 121; ii. 246
    Romanizing of, partial, i. 9-10
    Salian, i. 113, =119=; Code, ii. 245-6
    Saracens defeated by, i. 209-10 _n. 1_
    Trojan origin of, belief as to, ii. 225 _and_ _n. 1_

  Frederic, Count of Isenburg, i. 483-6

  Frederick I. (Barbarossa), Emp., i. 448

  Frederick II., Emp., under Innocent’s guardianship, ii. 32-3;
    crowned, ii. 33;
    estimate of, i. 497;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 250 _n. 4_, 417, 481, 505, 510, 517

  Free, meaning of term, i. 526 _n. 3_

  Free Companies, i. 556

  Free will:
    Angelic, ii. 473
    Duns Scotus on, ii. 515
    Human, ii. 475
    Richard of Middleton on, ii. 512

  Freidank, i. 475; ii. =35=

  Frescoes, i. 346-7

  Friendship, chivalric, i. 561-2, 569-70, 583

  Frisians, i. 169, 174;
    missionary work among, i. =197=, 200, 209

  Froissart, Sir John, _Chronicles_ of, i. 549 _seqq._;
    estimate of the work, i. 557

  Froumund of Tegernsee, i. =312-13=; ii. 110

  Fulbert, Bp. of Chartres, i. 287, =296-7=, 299

  Fulbert, Canon, ii. 4-6, 9

  Fulco, Bp. of Toulouse, i. 461

  Fulda monastery, i. =198=, 221 _n. 2_

  Fulk of Anjou, ii. 138


  Gaius, _Institutes_ of, ii. 241, 243

  Galahad, i. 569-70, 583, 584 _and_ _n. 2_

  Galen of Pergamos, i. =40=, 251

  Gall, St., i. 6, 178, =196=

  Gallo-Romans:
    Feudal system among, i. 523
    Frankish rule over, i. 120, 123
    Literature of, i. 126 _n. 2_

  Gandersheim cloister, i. 311

  Gaul (_For particular districts, towns, etc., see their names_):
    Celtic inhabitants of, i. =125 and n.=, =126=-7, 129 _n. 1_
    Druidism in, i. =28=, 296
    Ethnology of, i. 126
    Heathenism in, late survival of, i. 191 _n. 1_
    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. 539-42

  Gepidae, i. 113, 115

  Geraldus, St., i. 281

  Gerard, brother of St. Bernard, i. 402-4

  Gerbert of Aurillac, _see_ Sylvester II.

  German language:
    Christianity as affecting, i. 202
    High and Low, separation of, i. 145 _n. 2_
    Middle High German literature, ii. 168, 221
    Old High German poetry, ii. =194=, 220

  Germans (Saxons) (_See also_ Franks):
    Characteristics of, i. 138-40, 147, 151-2
    Language of, _see_ German language
    Latin as studied by, i. =307-9=; ii. =123=, 155
    Literature of, ii. 220-1 (_See also subheading_ Poetry)
    Marriage as regarded by, ii. 30
    Nationalism of, in 13th cent., ii. 28
    Poetry of:
      _Hildebrandslied_, i. 145-7
      _Kudrun_ (_Gudrun_), i. 148, =149=-52; ii. 220
      _Nibelungenlied_, i. 145-6, =148-9=, 152, 193, 203 _n. 2_; ii. 220
      _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. 10-11
    Art in (11th cent.), i. 312
    Church in, secularization of, i. 472
    Italy contrasted with, as to culture, i. 249-50
    Merovingian supremacy in, i. 121
    Papacy as regarded by, ii. 28, 33, =34-5=
    Sequence-composition in, ii. 215

  Gertrude of Hackeborn, Abbess, i. 466

  Gilbert de la Porrée, Bp. of Poictiers, ii. 132, =372=

  Gilduin, Abbot of St. Victor, ii. =62= _and_ _n. 2_

  Giraldus Cambrensis, ii. 135 _and_ _n._

  Girard, Bro., of Modena, i. 498

  Glaber, Radulphus, _Histories_ of, i. 488 _n._

  Glass-painting, ii. 82-6

  Gnosticism, i. 51 _n. 1_

  Gnostics, Eriugena compared with, i. 231 _and_ _n. 1_

  Godehard, Bp. of Hildesheim, i. 312

  Godfrey of Bouillon, i. 535-8

  Godfrey of Viterbo, ii. 190 _and_ _n. 4_

  Gondebaud, King of the Burgundians, ii. 242

  Good and the true compared, ii. 441, 512

  Goths (_See also_ Visigoths):
    Christianity of, i. 192, 194
    Roman Empire invaded by, i. 111 _seqq._

  Gottfried von Strassburg, i. 567; ii. 223;
    _Tristan_ of, i. 577-82

  Gottschalk, i. 215, 221 _n. 2_, 224-5, 227-=8=;
    verses by, ii. 197-9

  Government:
    Church _v._ State controversy, ii. 276-7
      (_See also_ Papacy--Empire)
    Ecclesiastical, _see_ Canon Law
    Monarchical, ii. 277-8
    Natural law in relation to, ii. 278-=9=
    Representative assemblies, ii. 278

  Grace, Aquinas’ definition of, ii. 478-9

  Grail, the, i. 589, =596-7=, =607=, 608, 613

  Grammar:
    Chartres studies in, i. =298=; ii. 129-30
    Current usage followed by, ii. 163 _and_ _n. 1_
    Hugo of St. Victor on, ii. 67
    Importance and predominance of, in Middle Ages, i. 109 _and_ _n._,
        =292=; ii. =331-2=
    Italian study of, ii. =129=, 381
    Language continuity preserved by, ii. =122-3=, 151, 155
    Law studies in relation to, ii. 121
    Logic in relation to, ii. 127 _seqq._, 333-4;
      in Abaelard’s work, ii. 346
    Raban’s view of, i. 222
    Scholastic classification of, ii. 313
    Syntax, connotation of term, ii. 125
    Works on--Donatus, Priscian, Alexander, ii. 123 =seqq.=

  Grammarian, meaning of term, i. 250

  Gratianus, _Decretum_ of, ii. 268-9, =270-1=, 306, 380-2;
    _dicta_, ii. 271

  Greek classics, _see_ Greek thought, pagan

  Greek language:
    Oxford studies in, ii. 120, 391, =487=
    Translations from, direct, in 13th cent., ii. 391

  Greek legends, mediaeval allegorizing of, ii. 52, 56-9

  Greek novels, ii. 224 _and_ _n._

  Greek thought, pagan:
    Bacon’s attitude toward, ii. 492-3
    Breadth of interest of, ii. 109
    Christian standpoint contrasted with, i. 390; ii. 295-6
    Church Fathers permeated by, i. 33-4
    Completeness of schemes presented by, ii. 394
    Limitless, the, abhorrent to, i. 353-4
    Love as regarded by, i. 575
    Metaphysics in, ii. 335-7
    Scholasticism contrasted with, ii. 296
    _Summa moralium philosophorum_, ii. 373
    Symbolism in, ii. 42, =56=
    Transmutation of, through Latin medium, i. 4

  Greek thought, patristic (_See also_ Patristic thought):
    Comparison of, with Latin, i. 68
    Pagan philosophic thought contrasted with, ii. 295-6
    Symbolism in, ii. 43
    Transmutation of, through Latin medium, i. 5, 34 _and_ _n._

  Gregorianus, ii. =240=, 243

  Gregory, Bp. of Tours, i. 121;
    _Historia Francorum_ by, i. 234 _n. 2_; ii. 155

  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. 1=;
    estimate of, i. =56=, 89, =102-3=, =342=;
    estimate of his writings, i. 354;
    on miracles, i. 100, 182;
    on secular studies, ii. 288;
    letter to Theoctista cited, i. 102 _n. 1_;
    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_, i. 85 and
        _n. 2_, 100;
    _Moralia_, i. =97=, 100; ii. 57;
    Odo’s epitome of this work, ii. 161;
    _Commentary on Kings_, i. 100 _n. 1_;
    _Pastoral Rule_, i. =102=, 187-8;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 16 _and_ _n. 4_, 65, 87, 104, 116

  Gregory II., Pope, i. 197-8; ii. 273

  Gregory III., Pope, i. 198; ii. 273

  Gregory VII., Pope (Hildebrand), claims of, i. =244-5=; ii. 274;
    relations with Damiani, i. 263;
    exile of, i. 244, 253;
    estimate of, i. 261;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 17, 174 _n. 1_, 243, 304

  Gregory IX., Pope, codification by, of Canon law, ii. 272;
    efforts of, to improve education of the Church, ii. 398;
    mentioned, i. 476; ii. 33

  Gregory of Nyssa, i. 53, 80, 87, 340

  Grosseteste, Robert, Chancellor of Oxford University and Bp. of Lincoln,
        Greek studies promoted by, ii. =120=, =391=, 487;
    estimate of, ii. 511-12;
    Augustinianism of, ii. 403-4;
    attitude toward the classics, ii. 120, 389;
    relations with Franciscan Order, ii. =487=, 511;
    Bacon’s relations with, ii. 487

  _Gudrun_ (_Kudrun_), i. 148, =149=-52; ii. 220

  Guigo, Prior, estimate of, i. 390-1;
    relations with St. Bernard, i. 405;
    _Consuetudines Carthusiae_ by, i. 384;
    _Meditationes_ of, i. 385-90

  Guinevere, i. 569, =584= _and_ _n. 1_, 585

  Guiot de Provens, “Bible” of, i. 475-6 _and_ _n. 1_

  Guiscard, Robert, ii. 189 _n. 2_

  Gumpoldus, Bp. of Mantua, _Life of Wenceslaus_ by, ii. 162 _n. 1_

  Gundissalinus, Archdeacon of Segovia, ii. 312 _and_ _n. 4_, 313

  Gunther, _Ligurinus_ of, ii. 192 _and_ _n. 4_

  Gunzo of Novara, i. 257-8


  Harding, Stephen, Abbot of Citeaux, i. =360=, =361=, 393

  Harold Fairhair, i. 153

  _Hartmann von Aue_, i. =348-9 and n.=, 567; ii. 29 _n._

  Harun al Raschid, Caliph, i. 210

  Heinrich von Veldeke, i. 567; ii. 29 _n._

  _Heliand_, i. =203 and nn.=, 308

  Helias, Count of Maine, ii. 138

  Hell:
    Dante’s descriptions of, ii. 546-7
    Fear of, i. 103, =339=, 342, =383=
    Visions of, i. 454-5, 456 _n._

  Heloïse, Abaelard’s love for, ii. 4-5, 344;
    his love-songs to, ii. =13=, 207;
    love of, for Abaelard, i. 585; ii. =3=, =5=, 8, 9, =15-16=;
    birth of Astralabius, ii. 6;
    opposes marriage with Abaelard, ii. 6-9;
    marriage, ii. 9;
    at Argenteuil, ii. 9, 10;
    takes the veil, ii. 10;
    at the Paraclete, ii. 10 _seqq._;
    letters of, to Abaelard quoted, ii. 11-15, 17-20, 23, 24;
    Abaelard’s letters to, quoted, ii. 16-17, 21-3, 24-5;
    Peter the Venerable’s letter, ii. 25-7;
    letter of, to Peter the Venerable, ii. 27;
    death of, ii. 27;
    intellectual capacity of, ii. 3

  Henry the Fowler, i. 241

  Henry II., Emp., i. 243;
    dirge on death of, ii. 216

  Henry IV., Emp., i. 244; ii. =167=

  Henry VI., Emp., ii. 32, 190

  Henry I., King of England, ii. 139, 146, 176-8

  Henry II., King of England, ii. 133, 135, 372

  Henry of Brabant, ii. 391

  Henry of Ghent, ii. 512

  Henry of Huntington cited, i. 525

  Henry of Septimella, ii. 190 _and_ _n. 3_

  Heretics (_For particular sects, see their names_):
    Abaelard’s views on coercion of, ii. 350, 354
    Insignificance of, in relation to mediaeval thought, ii. 283 _and_ _n._
    Theodosian enactments against, ii. 266
    Twelfth century, in, i. 305

  Herluin, Abbot of Bec, i. 271

  Hermann, Landgraf of Thüringen, i. 589; ii. 29

  Hermann Contractus, i. 314-15 _and_ _n. 1_

  Hermits:
    Irish, i. 133
    Motives of, i. 335, 363
    Temper of, i. 368 _seqq._

  Hermogenianus, ii. 240, 243

  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.
        137-40;
    love of the classics, ii. =141-2=, =146=, 531;
    letters of, quoted, ii. 140, 143, 144-5, 146-7;
    Latin text of letter, ii. 172;
    Latin elegy by, ii. 191;
    otherwise mentioned, ii. 61, 134, 373 _n. 2_

  Hildebrand, _see_ Gregory VII.

  _Hildebrandslied_, ii. 220

  Hildegard, St., Abbess of Bingen, dedication of, i. 447;
    visions of, i. 267, =449-59=;
    affinity of, with Dante, ii. 539;
    correspondence of, i. 448;
    works of, i. 446 _n._;
    _Book of the Rewards of Life_, i. 452-6;
    _Scivias_, i. 457-9;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 20, 345, 443; ii. 302, 365

  Hildesheim, bishops of (11th cent.), i. 312

  Hilduin, Abbot, i. 230

  Hincmar, i. 215, 230, =233 n. 1=

  Hipparchus, i. 40

  Hippocrates, i. 40

  History:
    Carolingian treatment of, i. 234-5
    Classical attitude toward, i. 77-8
    Eleventh century treatment of, i. 300
    _Historia tripartita_ of Cassiodorus, i. 96-7
    Patristic attitude toward, i. 80-4
    _Seven Books of Histories adversum paganos_ by Orosius, i. 82-3

  Holy Roman Empire:
    Burgundy added to, i. 243 _n. 1_
    German character of, ii. 32
    Papacy, relations with, _see under_ Papacy
    Refounding of, by Otto, i. 243
    Rise of, under Charlemagne, i. 212

  Honorius II., Pope, i. 531

  Honorius III., Pope, i. 366, 482, 497; ii. 33, 385 _n._, =398=

  Honorius of Autun--on classical study, ii. 110, =112-13=;
    _Speculum ecclesiae_ of, ii. 50 _seqq._;
    _Gemma animae_, ii. 77 _n. 1_

  Hosius, Bp. of Cordova, i. 118 _n. 1_

  Hospitallers, i. 531

  Hrotsvitha, i. 311 _and_ _n. 2_, ii. 215 _n. 2_

  Huesca (Osca), i. 25

  Hugh, Abbot of Cluny, ii. 137

  Hugh Capet, i. 239-=40= _and_ _n._

  Hugh the Great, Count of Paris, i. 241

  Hugh of Payns, i. 531

  Hugo, Archdeacon of Halberstadt, ii. 62

  Hugo, Bro., of Montpellier, i. 510-14

  Hugo, King, i. 242

  Hugo of St. Victor, estimate of, ii. =63=, =111=, 118, 301, =356=;
    allegorizing by, ii. 367;
    on classical study, ii. 110-11;
    on logic, ii. 333;
    pupils of, ii. 87;
    works of, ii. 61 _n. 2_;
    _Didascalicon_, ii. 48 _n. 2_, =63=, =111=, 312, =357 and nn. 2-5=;
    _De sacramentis Christianae fidei_, ii. 48 _n. 2_, =64 seqq.=, 365,
        =395=, 540;
    _Expositio in regulam beati Augustini_, ii. 62 _n. 2_;
    _De arca Noë morali_, ii. 75 _n._, =365-7=;
    _De arca Noë mystica_, ii. 367;
    _De vanitate mundi_, ii. 75 _n._, =111-12=;
    _Summa sententiarum_, ii. 356;
    _Sermons on Ecclesiastes_, ii. 358-9;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 17, 20, 457; ii. 404

  Humanists, ii. 126

  _Humiliati_ of Lombardy, i. 365

  Hungarians, i. 241-=2=

  Huns, i. 112, 119, 193

  _Huon de Bordeaux_, i. 564

  Hy (Iona) Island, i. 136, =173=

  Hymns, Christian:
    Abaelard, by, ii. 25, =207-9=
    Estimate of, i. 21
    Evolution of, i. 347-9 _and_ _n._; ii. 196, =200 seqq.=
    Hildegard’s visions regarding, i. 459
    Hugo of St. Victor, by, ii. 86 _seqq._
    Sequences, development of, ii. 196, =201-6=;
      Adam of St. Victor’s, ii. 209-15


  Iamblicus, i. 42, =47=, 51, 56-7; ii. 295

  Iceland, Norse settlement in, i. 153

  Icelanders, characteristics and customs of, i. 154

  Icelandic Sagas, _see_ Sagas

  Ideal _v._ actual, i. 353 _seqq._

  Innocent II., Pope, i. =394=; ii. 10

  Innocent III., Pope, i. 417, 481, 497; ii. =32=, =274=, 384, =398=

  Innocent IV., Pope, i. 506

  _Intellectus agens_, ii. 464, =507 n. 2=

  Iona (Hy) Island, i. 136, =173=

  Ireland:
    Celts in, _see_ Irish
    Church of, missionary zeal of, i. 133, 136, 172 _seqq._
    Danish settlements in, i. 153
    Monasteries in, i. =153 n. 1=, 173
    Norse invasion of, i. 134
    Scholarship in, i. =180 n.=, 184-5

  Irenaeus, Bp. of Lyons, i. 225

  Irish:
    Art of, i. 128 _n. 1_
    Characteristics of, i. =128=, 130, 133, 179
    History of, i. 127 _and_ _n._
    Influence of, on mediaeval feeling, i. 179 _and_ _n._
    Literature of, i. =128 and n. 2=, =129 seqq.=, 134;
      poetry, ii. 194
    Missionary labours of, i. 133, 136, 172 _seqq._;
      defect of, i. 179, 196
    Norse harryings of, i. 133-4;
      intercourse with, i. 152 _n. 3_
    Oxford University, at, ii. 387

  Irnerius, ii. 121, =260=, 380-1;
    _Summa codicis_ of, ii. 255-9

  Irrationality (_See also_ Miracles):
    Neo-Platonic teaching as to, i. 42-4, 48, 52
    Patristic doctrine as to, i. 51-3

  Isabella, Queen, wife of Edward II., i. 550-1

  Isidore, Abp. of Seville, estimate of, i. 89, 103, 118 _n. 1_;
    Bede compared with, i. 185-7;
    _False Decretals_ attributed to, i. 118 _n. 1_; ii. =270=, 273;
    works of, i. 104-9;
    _Etymologiae_, _see_ Etymologies of Isidore;
    _Origines_, i. 236, 300;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 6, 88; ii. 46, 312

  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, secularization of, i. 472
    Cities in:
      Continuity of, through dark ages, i. 248, =494-5=; ii. 381
      Fighting amongst, i. 497-8
      Importance of, i. 241, 326, =494-5=
    Continuity of culture and character in, i. =326=, 495; ii. =120-2=
    Dante as influenced by, ii. 534-5
    Education in--lay, persistence of, i. 249-51;
      clerical and monastic, i. 250 _n. 2_
    Eleventh-century conditions in, i. 327
    Feudalism not widely fixed in, i. 241
    Feuds in, i. 515-16
    Grammar as studied in, i. 250 _and_ _n. 2_; ii. 129
    Irish monasteries founded in, i. 174
    Literature of, mediaeval, lack of originality in, ii. 189;
      eleventh-century verse, i. 251 _seqq._; ii. 165 _n. 1_, 186
    Lombard kingdom of (6th cent.), i. 115-16
    Medicine studied in, i. 250 _and_ _n. 4_, =251=; ii. 121
    Unification of, under Rome, i. 23


  Jacobus à Voragine, _Legenda aurea_ by, ii. 184

  Jacques de Vitry, Bp. and Card. of Tusculum, i. 461 and n.;
    Exempla of, i. 488 _n._, 490

  Jerome, St., estimate of, i. 344, 354;
    letter of, on asceticism, i. 335 _and_ =n. 1=;
    love of the classics, ii. 107, 112, 531;
    modification by, of classical Latin, ii. 152, 171;
    two styles of, ii. 171 _and_ _n. 4_;
    Life of Paulus by, i. 84, 86;
    Life of Hilarion, i. 86;
    _Contra Vigilantium_, i. 86;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 56, 75, 76, 104

  Jerome of Ascoli (Pope Nicholas IV.), ii. 491

  Jews:
    Agobard’s tracts against, i. 232-=3=
    Gregory the Great’s attitude toward, i. 102
    Louis IX.’s attitude toward, i. 545
    Persecution of, i. 118, 332

  Joachim, Abbot of Flora, _Evangelicum eternum_ of, 502 _n._, =510=,
        =512-13=, 517

  John, Bro., of Vicenza, i. 503-4

  John X., Pope, i. 242

  John XI., Pope, i. 242

  John XII., Pope, i. 243; ii. =160-1=

  John XIII., Pope, i. 282

  John XXII., Pope, _Decretales extravaganes_ of, ii. 272

  John of Damascus, ii. 439 _n. 1_

  John of Fidanza, _see_ Bonaventura

  John of Parma, Minister-General of Franciscans, i. 507, 508, =510-11=

  John of Salisbury, estimate of, ii. 118, 373-4;
    Chartres studies described by, ii. 130-2;
    attitude of, to the classics, ii. 114, 164, =173=, 531;
    Latin style of, ii. 173-4;
    _Polycraticus_, ii. 114-15, 174-5;
    _Metalogicus_, ii. 173-4;
    _Entheticus_, ii. 192;
    _De septem septenis_, ii. 375

  John the Deacon, _Chronicon Venetum_ by, i. 325-6

  Joinville, Sire de, _Histories_ of St. Louis by, i. 539, =542-9=

  Jordanes, compend of Gothic history by, i. 94

  Jordanes of Osnabrück cited, ii. 276 _n. 2_

  Joseph of Exeter, ii. 225 _n. 2_

  Jotsaldus, Life of Odilo by, i. 295-6

  Judaism, emotional elements in, i. 331-2

  Julianus, _Epitome_ of, ii. 242, =249=, 254

  Jumièges cloister, ii. 201

  Jurisprudence (_See also_ Roman law):
    Irnerius an exponent of, ii. 256, 259
    Mediaeval renaissance of, ii. 265
    Roman law, in, beginnings of, ii. 232

  Justinian, _Codex_, _Institutes_, _Novellae_ of, _see under_ Roman law;
    _Digest of_, _see_ Roman law--Pandects

  Jutes, i. 140

  Jutta, i. 447


  Keating quoted, i. 136

  Kilwardby, Richard, Abp. of Canterbury, _De ortu et divisione
        philosophiae_ of, ii. 313

  Kilwardby, Robert, ii. 128

  Knighthood, order of:
    Admission to, persons eligible for, i. 527
    Code of, i. 524
    Hospitallers, i. 531
    Investiture ceremony, i. 525-8
    Love the service of, i. 568, =573=
    Templars, i. 531-5
    Virtues and ideals of, i. 529-31, 567-8

  Knowledge:
    Cogitation, meditation, contemplation (Hugo’s scheme), ii. 358 _seqq._
    Forms and modes of, Aquinas on--divine, ii. 451-5;
      angelic, ii. 459-62;
      human, ii. 463 _seqq._
    Grades of, Aquinas on, ii. 461, 467
    Primacy of, over will maintained by Aquinas, ii. 440-1


  La Ferté Monastery, i. 362

  Lambert of Hersfeld, _Annals_ of, i. 313; ii. 167

  Lambertus Audomarensis, _Liber Floridus_ of, ii. 316 _n. 2_

  _Lancelot of the Lake_, i. 567, 569-70, =582-5=;
    Old French prose version of, i. 583 _seqq._

  Land tenure, feudal, i. 523-4

  Lanfranc, Primate of England, i. 174 _n. 1_, =261 n.=, 273

  _Langue d’oc_, ii. 222, 248

  _Langue d’oil_, ii. 222, 248

  Languedoc, chivalric society of (11th and 12th centuries), i. 572

  Latin classics:
    Abaelard’s reference to, ii. 353
    Alexandrian antecedents of the verse, ii. 152 _n. 1_
    Artificial character of the prose, ii. 151 _n._
    Breadth of interest of, ii. 109
    Characteristics of, ii. 153
    Chartres a home of, i. 298; ii. 119
    Common elements in, ii. 149, 157
    Dante’s attitude toward, ii. 541, 544;
      his quotations from, ii. 543 _n. 1_
    Ecclesiastical attitude toward, i. 260; ii. 110 _seqq._, 396-7
    Familiarity with, of Damiani, i. 260; ii. 165;
      Gerbert, i. 287-8; ii. 110;
      John of Salisbury, ii. 114, 164, =173=, 531;
      Bernard of Chartres, ii. 132-3;
      Peter of Blois, ii. 133-4;
      Hildebert, ii. =141-2=, =146=, 531
    Knowledge-storehouses for the Middle Ages, as, ii. 108
    Mastery of, complete, as affecting mediaeval writings, ii. 164
    Reverential attitude of mediaevals toward, ii. 107-9
    Scripture study as aided by study of, ii. 110, 112, 120
    Suggestions of new ideas from, for Northern peoples, ii. 136
    Themes of, in vernacular poetry, ii. 223 _seqq._
    Twelfth-century study of, ii. 117-18

  Latin Fathers (_See also their names and_ Patristic thought):
    Comparison of, with Greek, i. 68
    Style and diction of, ii. 150, 152 _seqq._
    Symbolism in, ii. 43-6
    Transmutation by, of Greek thought, i. 5, 34 _and_ _n._

  Latin language:
    Britain, position in, i. 10, 32
    Children’s letters in, ii. 123 _n._
    Christianity as modifying, ii. 152, =154=, 156, 164, 171
    Continuity of, preserved by universal study of grammar, ii. =122-3=,
        151, 155
    “Cornificiani” in regard to, ii. =132=, 373
    Educational medium as, ii. 109
    Genius of, susceptible of change, ii. 149
    German acquisition of, i. 10, 32, =307-8=, =313=; ii. =123=, 155
    Grammar of, _see_ Grammar
    Mediaeval modifications in, ii. 125, 164
    Patristic modifications of, ii. 150, 152 _seqq._;
      Jerome’s, ii. 152, 171
    Spelling of, mediaeval, i. 219
    Sphere of, ii. 219-20
    Supremacy of (during Roman conquest period), i. 4, =23-4 and n. 1=,
        25, =30-1=
    Translations from, scanty nature of, ii. 331 _n. 2_
    Translations into, difficulties of, ii. 498
    Universality of, as language of scholars, ii. 219, 331 _n. 2_
    Vernacular, developments of, ii. 151
    Vitality of, in relation to vernacular tongues, ii. 219

  Latin prose, mediaeval:
    Antecedents of, ii. 151 _seqq._
    Best period of, ii. 167-8
    Bulk of, ii. 157 _n._
    Carolingian, ii. 158-60
    Characteristics of, ii. 156
    Estimation of, difficulties of, ii. 157 _and_ _n._
    Influences upon, summary of, ii. 156
    Prolixity and inconsequence of, ii. 154
    Range of, ii. 154
    Simplicity of word-order in, ii. 163 _n. 1_
    Stages of development of, ii. 157 _seqq._
    Style in, beginnings of, ii. 164
    Stylelessness of, in Carolingian period, ii. 158-60
    Thirteenth-century styles, ii. 179
    Value of, as expressing the mediaeval mind, ii. 156, 164

  Latin verse, mediaeval:
    Accentual and rhyming compositions, ii. 194;
      two kinds of, ii. 196
    Antecedents of, ii. 187 _n. 1_
    Carmina Burana (Goliardic poetry), ii. 203, =217-19 and n.=
    Development of, stages in, ii. 187
    Leonine hexameters, ii. 199 _and_ _n. 3_
    Metrical composition, ii. 187 _seqq._;
      elegiac verse, ii. 190-2 _and_ _n. 1_;
      hexameters, ii. 192;
      Sapphics, ii. 192-3 _and_ _n. 1_
    Modi, ii. 215-16
    Rhyme, development of, ii. 195, =206=

  Law:
    Barbarian, Latin codes of, ii. 244 _seqq._
    Barbaric conception of, ii. 245, 248-9
    _Breviarium_, _see under_ Roman law
    Canon, _see_ Canon law
    English, principles of, i. 141-2
    Grammar in relation to, ii. 121
    Lombard codes, i. =115=; ii. 242, =246=, 248, 253;
      _Concordia_, ii. 259
    Natural:
      Gratian on, ii. 268-9
      _Jus gentium_ in relation to, ii. =234 and n.=, 268
      Occam on, ii. 519
      Sacraments of, ii. 74 _and_ _n. 1_
      Supremacy of, ii. 269, 279
      Roman, _see_ Roman law
      Salic, ii. 245-6
      Territorial basis of, i. 123; ii. 247
      Tribal basis of, i. 123; ii. =245-7=
      Visigothic codification of, in Spain, i. 118

  Leander, Bp. of Seville, i. 118 _n. 1_

  Légonais, Chrétien, ii. 230 _and_ _n. 2_

  Leo, Brother, _Speculum perfectionis_ by, ii. 183-4

  Leo I. (the Great), Pope, i. 113, 116

  Leo IX., Pope, i. 243

  Leon, Sir Guy de, i. 552-3

  Leon, Sir Hervé de, i. 552-3

  Leowigild, i. 117 _n. 2_, 118 _n. 1_

  Lerins monastery, i. 195

  Lewis, Lord, of Spain, i. 552-3

  Liberal arts, _see_ Seven Liberal Arts

  Liutgard of Tongern, i. 463-5

  Liutprand, Bp. of Cremona i. =256-7=; ii. 161 _n. 1_

  Liutprand, King of Lombards, i. 115-16

  Logic (_See also_ Dialectic):
    Albertus Magnus on, ii. =313-15=, 504, 506
    Aristotelian, mediaeval apprehension of, ii. 329 (_See also_
        Aristotle--_Organon_)
    Bacon’s attitude toward, ii. 505
    Gerbert’s preoccupation with, i. 282, 289, =292=
    Grammar in relation to, ii. 127 _seqq._, 333-4;
      in Abaelard’s work, ii. 346
    Importance of, in Middle Ages, i. 236; ii. 297
    Nature of, ii. 333;
      schoolmen’s views on, ii. 313-15, 333
    Occam’s views on, ii. 522
    Patristic attitude toward, i. 71
    Raban’s view of, i. 222
    Scholastic classification of, ii. 313 _seqq._
    Scholastic decay in relation to, ii. 523
    Second stage of mediaeval development represented by, ii. 332-4
    Specialisation of, in 12th cent., ii. 119
    Theology in relation to, ii. =340 n.=, 346
    Twofold interpretation of, ii. 333
    Universals, problem of, ii. 339 _seqq._;
      Abaelard’s treatment of, ii. 342, =348=

  Lombard, Peter, estimate of, ii. 370;
      Gratian compared with, ii. 270;
      Bacon’s attitude toward, ii. 497;
      _Books of Sentences_ by, i. 17, 18; ii. 134, 370;
        method of the work, ii. 306;
        Aquinas’ _Summa_ contrasted with it, ii. 307-10;
        its classification scheme, ii. 322-4;
        Bonaventura’s commentary on it, ii. 408

  Lombards:
    Italian kingdom of (6th cent.), i. 115-16
    Italian influence on, i. 7, 249
    Law codes of, _see under_ Law

  Louis of Bavaria, Emp., ii. 518

  Louis I. (the Pious), King of France, i. 233, 239, =359=;
    false capitularies ascribed to, ii. 270

  Louis VI. (the Fat), King of France, i. 304-5, 394, 400; ii. 62;
    Hildebert’s letter on encroachments of, ii. 140, 172

  Louis IX. (the Saint), King of France, Geoffrey’s _Vita_ of, i. 539-42;
    Joinville’s _Histoire of_, i. 542-9;
    Testament of, i. 540 _n. 1_;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 476, 507-=9=, 515

  Love, Aquinas on distinguishing definitions of, ii. 475-6

  Love, chivalric:
    Antique conception of love contrasted with, i. 575
    _Chansons de geste_ as concerned with, i. 564
    Code of, by Andrew the Chaplain, i. 575-6
    Dante’s exposition of, ii. 555-6
    Estimate of, mediaeval, i. 568, 570
    Literature of, _see_ Chivalry--Literature
    Marriage in relation to, i. 571 _and_ _n. 2_
    _Minnelieder_ as depicting, ii. 30
    Nature of, i. 572-5, 582-7
    Stories exemplifying--_Tristan_, i. 577 _seqq._;
      _Lancelot_, 582 _seqq._

  Love, spiritual:
    Aquinas’ discussion of, ii. 472-3, 476
    Bernard of Clairvaux as exemplifying, i. 394 _seqq._

  Lupus, Servatus, Abbot of Ferrières, i. 215;
    ii. 113

  Luxeuil, i. 175-7

  Lyons:
    Diet of the “Three Gauls” at, i. 30
    Law studies at, ii. 250


  Macrobius, _Saturnalia_ of, ii. 116 _and_ _n. 4_

  Magic, i. =46-8=; ii. 500 _and_ _n. 1_

  Majolus, Abbot of Cluny, i. 359

  Manichaeism, i. =49=; ii. =44=, 283

  Manny, Sir Walter, i. 552-4

  Mapes (Map), Walter, i. =475=, 567; ii. 219 _n._

  Marie, Countess, de Champagne, i. 566, 573, =576=

  Marie de France, i. =566=, 567, 573;
    _Eliduc_ by, i. 571 _n. 2_

  Marinus (hermit), i. 373

  Marozia, i. 242

  Marriage:
    Christian attitude toward, ii. 8;
      ecclesiastical view, ii. 529
    Feudalism as affecting, i. 571, 586
    German view of, ii. 30

  Marsilius of Padua, ii. 277 _n. 2_

  Martin, St., of Tours, i. 334;
    Life of, i. 52 and _n._, 84, 85 _n. 2_, =86=

  Martyrs:
    Mediaeval view of, i. 483
    Patristic attitude toward, i. 86

  Mary, St., of Ognies, i. =462-3=;
    nature of visions of, i. 459

  Massilia, i. 26

  Mathematics:
    Bacon’s views on, ii. 499-500
    Gerbert’s proficiency in, i. 282, =288=

  Mathew Paris cited, ii. 487

  Matthew of Vendome, _Ars versificatoria_ by, ii. 190 _and_ _n. 5_

  Maurus, Rabanus, _see_ Rabanus

  Mayors of the palace, i. 240

  Mechthild of Magdeburg, i. 20, 345; ii. 365;
    Book of, i. 465 _and_ _n. 2_-70

  Mediaeval thought:
    Abstractions, genius for, ii. 280
    Characteristics of, i. 13
    Commentaries characteristic of, ii. 390, 553 _n. 4_
    Conflict inherent in, i. 22; ii. =293-4=
    Deference of, toward the past, i. 13; ii. 534
    Emotionalizing by, of patristic Christianity, i. 345
    Metalogics rather than metaphysics the final stage of, ii. 337
    Moulding forces of, i. 3, 5, 12; ii. =293-4=
    Orthodox character of, ii. 283 _and_ _n._
    Political theorizing, ii. 275 _seqq._
    Problems of, origins of, ii. 294-5
    Restatement and rearrangement of antique matter the work of, i.
        13-15, =224=, 237, =292=, 342; ii. 297, 329, 341:
      Culmination of third stage in, ii. 394
      Emotional transformations of the antique, i. 18 _seqq._
      Intellectual transformations of the antique, i. 14 _seqq._
    Salvation the main interest of, i. =58-9=, 334; ii. =296-7=, 300
    Scholasticism, _see that heading_
    Superstitions accepted by, i. 487
    Symbolism the great influence in, ii. 43, 102, 365
    Three stages of, ii. 329 _seqq._
    Ultimate intellectual interests of, ii. 287 _seqq._

  Medicine:
    Relics used in, i. 299
    Smattering of, included in Arts course, ii. 250
    Study of--in Italy, i. 250 _and_ _n. 4_, =251=; ii. 383 _n._
      at Chartres, i. 299; ii. 372

  Mendicant Orders, _see_ Dominican _and_ Franciscan

  Merovingian Kingdom:
    Character of, i. 208
    Church under, i. 194
    Extent of, i. 210 _n. 3_
    German conquests of, i. 121, 138

  Merovingian period:
    Barbarism of, i. 9
    Continuity of, with Carolingian, i. 210-12
    King’s law in, ii. 247

  Merovingians, estimate of, i. 195

  Metaphor distinguished from allegory, ii. 41 _n._ (_See also_ Symbolism)

  Metaphysics:
    Final stage of mediaeval development represented by, ii. 335-7
    Logic, mediaeval, in relation to, ii. 334
    Theology dissociated from, by Duns, ii. 510, 516, =517=

  Michelangelo quoted, ii. 113

  Middle Ages (_See also_ Mediaeval thought):
    Beginning of, i. 6
    Extremes characteristic of, i. 355

  Milan, lawyers in, ii. 251 _n. 2_

  _Miles_, signification of word, i. 525-6 _and_ _n. 2_

  _Minnelieder_, ii. 28-31

  Minorites, i. 430 (_See also_ Franciscan Order)

  Miracles (_See also_ Irrationality):
    Devil, concerned with, i. 488 _seqq._
    _Nostre Dame, Miracles de_, i. 491-2
    Patristic attitude toward, i. =85-6=, =100=, 182
    Roman Empire aided by, belief as to, ii. 536
    Salimbene’s instance of, i. 516
    Universal acceptance of, i. =74=, 182
    _Vitae sanctorum_ in regard to, i. 85 _and_ _n. 2_

  Mithraism, i. 49

  Modena (Mutina), i. 24

  Modi, ii. 215-16

  Monasteries:
    Immunities granted to, i. 523 _and_ _n._
    _Regula_ of, meaning of, ii. 62

  Monasticism (_For particular Monasteries, Orders, etc., see their
        names_):
    Abuses of, i. 357-8; Rigaud’s _Register_ quoted, i. 477-481
    Benedictine rule:
      Adoption of--in England, i. 184;
        among the Franks, i. 199, 201;
        generally, i. 358
      Papal approval of, i. 335
    Cassiodorus a pioneer in literary functions of, i. 94
    General mediaeval view regarding, i. =472=; ii. 529
    Ideal _v._ actual, i. 355
    Ireland, in, i. 135 _n. 1_
    Lament over deprivations of, ii. 218-19
    Modifications of, by St. Francis, i. 366
    Motives of, i. 357
    Nature of, i. 336-7
    Nuns, _see_ Women--monastic life
    Origin of, i. 335
    Pagan literature condemned by, i. 260
    Popularity of, in 5th and 6th centuries, i. 195-6
    Poverty--of monks, i. 365;
      of Orders, i. 366, =425=, =430=
    Reforms of, i. 358 _seqq._
    Schools, monastic, in Italy, i. 250 _n. 2_
    Sex-relations as regarded by, i. 338
    Studies of, in 6th cent., i. 94, 95
    Subordinate monasteries, supervision of, i. 361
    Uncloistered, _see_ Dominican _and_ Franciscan
    _Vita activa_ accepted by, i. 363-6
    _Vita contemplativa_, _see that title_
    Women vilified by devotees of, i. =354 n.=, 521 _n. 2_, 532, =533=;
        ii. 58

  Montanists, 332

  Monte Cassino, i. 250 _n. 2_, 252-3

  Montfort, Countess of, i. 552-4

  Moorish conquest of Spain, i. 9, 118

  Morimond monastery, i. 362

  Mosaics, i. 345-7

  Music:
    Arithmetic in relation to, ii. 291
    Chartres studies in, i. 299
    Poetry and, interaction of, ii. 195-=6=, =201-2=
    Scholastic classification of, ii. 313

  Mysticism:
    Hugo’s strain of, ii. 361-3
    Nature of, i. 443 _n. 1_; ii. =363 and n. 4=
    Symbolism as expressing, _see_ Symbolism


  Narbo, i. 26

  Narbonensis, _see_ Provincia

  Narbonne, law studies at, ii. 250

  Natural history and science, _see_ Physical science

  Nemorarius, Jordanus, ii. 501

  Neo-Platonism:
    Arabian versions of Aristotle touched with, ii. 389
    Augustinian, i. =55=; ii. 403
    Christianity compared with, i. 51;
      Patristic habit of mind compared, ii. 295
    Ecstasy as regarded by, i. 331
    Metaphysics so named by, ii. 336
    Pseudo-Dionysian, i. 54 _and_ _n. 1_
    Tenets and nature of, i. 41-9;
      a mediatorial system, i. 50, 54, 57-8, 70
    Trinity of, ii. 355

  Neustria, i. 200, =209=, 239

  _Nibelungenlied_, i. 145-6, =148-9=, 152, 193, 203 _n. 2_; ii. 220

  Nicholas II., Pope, i. 243 _n. 2_

  Nicholas III., Pope, i. 504

  Nicholas IV., Pope (Jerome of Ascoli), ii. 491

  Nicholas, St., sequence for festival of, ii. 213-15

  Nicolas of Damascus, ii. 427

  Nilus, St., Abbot of Crypta-Ferrata, i. 374 _n._

  Nithard, Count, i. 234-5

  Nominalism, i. 303

  Norbert, ii. 344

  Normandy, Norse occupation of, i. 153

  Norsemen (Scandinavians, Vikings):
    Characteristics of, i. 138, =154-5=
    Continental and insular holdings of, i. 153
    Eddic poems of, i. 154-5 _and_ _n. 3_
    Irish harassed by, i. 133-4;
      later relations, i. 152 _n. 3_
    Jumièges cloister sacked by, ii. 201
    Metal-working among, i. 152 _n. 3_
    Ravages by, in 8th and 9th centuries, i. 152-3
    _Sagas_ of, i. 155 _seqq._
    Settling down of, i. 240

  Notker, i. 308-9 _and_ _n. 1_; sequences of, ii. 201-2

  Numbers, symbolic phantasies regarding, i. 72 _and_ _nn. 1, 2_; ii. 49
        _n. 3_


  Oberon, fairy king, i. 564 _and_ _n._

  Occam, William of, career of, ii. 518;
    estimate of his work, ii. 522-3;
    attitude toward Duns, ii. 518 _seqq._;
    on faith and reason, ii. 519;
    on Universals, ii. 520-1

  Odilo, Abbot of Cluny, i. =294-5=, 359;
    Jotsaldus’ biography of, quoted, i. 295-6

  Odo, Abbot of Cluny, i. 343 _and_ _n. 3_, 359;
    Epitome by, of Gregory’s _Moralia_, i. 16 _n. 4_; ii. 161 _and_ _n. 2_;
    Latin style of _Collationes_, ii. 161-2

  Odo of Tournai, ii. 340 _n._

  Odoacer, i. =114=, 145

  Olaf, St., i. 156, =160-1=

  Olaf Tryggvason, King, i. 156, =161-2=

  Old French:
    Formation of, ii. 155
    Latin as studied by speakers of, ii. 123
    Poetry, ii. 222, =225 seqq.=

  Ontology, _see_ Metaphysics

  Ordeal, trial by, i. 232-3 _and_ _n. 1_

  Ordericus Vitalis, i. 525;
    _Historia ecclesiastica_ by, ii. 176-8

  _Organon_, _see under_ Aristotle

  Origen, estimate of, i. 51, 62-3;
    on Canticles, i. =333=; ii. 369;
    _De principiis_, i. 68;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 53, 76, 80, 87, 104, 411; ii. 64

  Orleans School:
    Classical studies at, ii. 119 _n. 2_, 127
    Law studies at, ii. 250
    Rivalry of, with Chartres, ii. 119 _n. 2_

  Orosius, i. =82= _and_ _n. 1_, 188

  Ostrogoths, i. 7, 113, =114-15=, 120

  Otfrid the Frank, i. =203-4=, 308

  Other world:
    Irish beliefs as to, i. 131 _and_ _n. 2_
    Voyages to, mediaeval narratives of, i. 444 _n. 1_

  Othloh, i. 315;
    visions of, i. 443;
    _Book concerning the Temptations of a certain Monk_, i. 316-23

  Otric, i. 289-91

  Otto I. (the Great), Emp., i. =241-3=, 256-7, 309

  Otto II., Emp., i. 243, =282-3=, =289=

  Otto III., Emp., i. =243=, 283, 284;
    _Modus Ottinc_ in honour of, ii. 215-216

  Otto IV. (of Brunswick), Emp., i. 417; ii. =32-3=

  Otwin, Bp. of Hildesheim, i. 312

  Ovid, _Ars amatoria_ of, i. 574-5;
    mediaeval allegorizing of, and of _Metamorphoses_, ii. 230

  Oxford University:
    Characteristics of, ii. 388-9
    Curriculum at, ii. 387-8
    Foundation of, ii. 380, =386-7=
    Franciscan fame at, ii. 400
    Greek studies at, ii. 120, 391, 487


  Palladius, Bp., i. 172

  Pandects, _see under_ Roman law

  Papacy (_See also_ Church _and_ Popes):
    Ascendancy of, over prelacy, i. 304
    Character of, ii. 32
    Denunciations against, i. 475; ii. 34-5, 218
    Empire’s relations with:
      Concordat of Worms, i. 245 _n. 4_
      Conflict (11th cent.), i. 244;
        (12th cent.), i. 245 _n. 4_; ii. 273;
        (13th cent.), ii. 33, =34-5=;
        (14th cent.), ii. 518;
        allegory as a weapon in, ii. 60
      Recognition of ecclesiastical authority, ii. 265-7, 272-3
      Reforms by Otto I., i. 243
    Gregory VII.’s claims for, i. 245; ii. 274
    Mendicant Orders’ relations with, ii. =398=, 509
    Nepotism of, i. =504-5=, 511
    Schisms of popes and anti-popes, i. 264
    Temporal power of, rise of, i. 116;
      claims advanced, i. 245;
      realized, ii. 274, 276-7

  Papinian cited, ii. 235

  Paraclete oratory:
    Abaelard at, ii. 10, 344
    Heloïse at, ii. 10 _seqq._

  Paradise:
    Dante’s _Paradiso_, _see under_ Dante
    Hildegard’s visions of, i. 455-6

  Paris:
    Schools:
      Growth of, ii. 380
      Notre Dame and St. Geneviève, ii. 383
      St. Victor, ii. =61-3=, 143, 383
    University:
      Aristotle prohibited at, ii. 391-2
      Authorities on, ii. 381 _n._
      Bacon at, ii. 488
      Bonaventura at, ii. 403
      Curriculum at, ii. 387-8
      Dominicans and Franciscans at, ii. 399
      Prominence of, in philosophy and theology, ii. 283, =378-9=
      Rise, constitution, and struggles of, ii. 119-20, 383-6
    Viking sieges of, i. 153

  Parma, i. 497, 505-6

  _Parsival_:
    Chrétien’s version of, i. 567, =588-9=
    Wolfram’s version of, i. 12 _n._, 571 _n. 2_, =589-613=; ii. =29=

  Paschal controversy, _see_ Eucharistic

  Paschasius, Radbertus, Abbot of Corbie i. 215, =225-7=

  Patrick, St., i. 172-3

  Patristic thought and doctrine (_See also_ Greek thought, patristic,
        _and_ Latin Fathers):
    Abaelard’s attitude toward, ii. 305
    Achievement of exponents of, i. 86-7
    Bacon’s attitude toward, ii. 492
    Completeness of schemes presented by, ii. 394
    Emotion as synthesized by, i. 340-2
    Intellectual rather than emotional, i. 343-4;
      emotionalizing of, by mediaeval thinkers, i. 345
    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 seqq.=, =72-3=, =76-7=, 99;
        ii. 393
    Pagan philosophy permeating exponents of, i. =33-4=, =58=, 61
    Philosophy as classified by, ii. 312
    Rearrangement of, undertaken in Carolingian period, i. =224=, 237
    Symbolism of, _see under_ Symbolism

  Paulinus of Aquileia, i. 215

  Paulinus, St., of Nola, i. =86=, 126 _n. 2_

  Paulus--on _jus_, ii. 237:
    _Sententiae_ of, ii. 243

  Paulus, St., i. 84, 86

  Paulus Diaconus, i. 214-15, 252

  Pavia, law school at, ii. 251, =259=

  Pedro, Don, of Castille, i. 554-5

  Pelagians, i. 225

  Pelagius, i. 172 _n._

  Peripatetic School, i. 38-9
    (_See also_ Aristotle)

  Peter, Bro., of Apulia, i. 512-14

  Peter, disciple of St. Francis, i. 426

  Peter Damiani, _see_ Damiani

  Peter of Blois, ii. 133-4

  Peter of Ebulo, ii. 190

  Peter of Maharncuria, ii. 502-4

  Peter of Pisa, i. 214

  Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, i. 360;
    letter of, to Heloïse, ii. 25-7

  Petrarch, ii. 188, =219=

  Petrus Riga, _Aurora_ of, ii. 127

  Philip VI., King of France, i. 551

  Philip Augustus, King of France, ii. 33

  Philip Hohenstauffen, Duke of Suabia, i. 481; ii. =32=, 33

  Philo, i. 37, =231=;
    allegorizing of, ii. =42=, 364

  Philosophy:
    Division of, schemes of, ii. 312 _seqq._
    End of:
      Abaelard’s and Hugo’s views on, ii. 352, 361
      John of Salisbury on, ii. 375

  Philosophy, antique:
    Divine source of, Bacon’s view as to, ii. 507 _n. 2_
    “First” (Aristotelian), ii. 335
    Position of, in Roman Empire (3rd-6th cent.), i. 34 (_See also_
        Greek thought)

  Philosophy, Arabian, ii. =389-90=, 400-1

  Philosophy, scholastic:
    Completeness of, in Aquinas, ii. 395
    Divisions of, ii. 312 _seqq._
    Importance of, as intellectual interest, ii. 287-8
    Physical sciences included in, _see_ Physical science
    Theology as the end of (Abaelard’s and Hugo’s view), ii. 352, 361
    Theology distinguished from, ii. 284, 288;
    by Aquinas, ii. =290=, 311;
    by Bonaventura, ii. 410 _and_ _n._;
    considered as superior to, by Aquinas, ii. 289-=90=, =292=;
    dominated by (Bacon’s contention), ii. 496;
    dissociated from, by Duns and Occam, ii. 510, =517=, 519

  Physical science:
    Albertus Magnus’ attitude toward, ii. 423;
      his works on, ii. 425-9
    Bacon’s predilection for, ii. 486-7
    Classifications of, ii. 312 _seqq._
    Experimental science or method, ii. 502-8
    Mediaeval attitude toward, i. 300
    Oxford school of, ii. 389
    Patristic attitude toward, i. 63, 66-7, =72-3=, =76-7=, 99; ii. 393
    Theology as subserved by, ii. =67=, 111, =289=, =486=, =492=, =496=,
        500, 530;
      denial of the theory--by Duns, ii. 510;
        by Occam, ii. 519-20

  _Physiologus_, i. =76-7 and n.=, 300; ii. 83

  Pippin of Heristal, i. =208-9=; ii. 197

  Pippin of Neustria, i. 115, =200=, =209=, 210 and _n. 1_; ii. 273

  Pippin, son of Charlemagne, ii. 197

  Placentia (Piacenza), i. 24

  Placentinus, ii. 261-2

  Plato, supra-rationalism of, i. 42;
    allegorizing by, i. 36; ii. 364;
    doctrine of ideas, i. =35=; ii. 339-340;
    Aquinas on this doctrine, ii. 455, 465;
    Augustine of Hippo as influenced by, ii. 403;
    “salvation” suggestion in, ii. 296 _n. 2_;
    _Republic_, i. 36;
    _Timaeus_, i. =35-6=, 291; ii. 64, 69, =118=, 348, 370, 372, =377=

  Platonism:
    Alanus’ _Anticlaudianus_, in, ii. 100 _n. 2_
    Augustinian, i. 55
    Nature of, i. =35-6=, 57, 59
    Philosophy as classified by, ii. 312

  Pliny the Elder, _Historia naturalis_ 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;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 50, 51; ii. 64

  Plutarch, i. 44

  Poetry, mediaeval:
    Carmina Burana (Goliardic poetry), ii. 203, =217-19 and n.=
    Chivalric, _see_ Chivalry--Literature
    Hymns, _see that heading_
    Italian, of 11th cent., i. =251 seqq.=; ii. 186
    Latin, _see_ Latin verse
    Modi, ii. 215-16
    Music and, interaction of, ii. 195-=6=, =201-2=
    Old High German, ii. 194
    Popular verse, _see sub-headings_ Carmina _and_ Modi; _also_ Vernacular
    Prosody, Alexander de Villa-Dei on, ii. 126
    Vernacular:
      Germanic, Norse, and Anglo-Saxon, ii. 220-1
      Romance, ii. 221-3, 225 _seqq._

  Pontigny monastery, i. 362

  Poor of Lyons (Waldenses), i. 364, =365 n.=; ii. 34

  Popes (_See also_ Papacy; _and for particular popes see their names_):
    Avignon, at, ii. 510
    Decretals of, _see under_ Canon law
    Degradation of (10th cent.), i. 242
    Election of, freed from lay control, i. 243 _n. 2_

  Popular rights, growth of, in 12th cent., i. 305

  Porphyry, i. 42, =44-7=, 50, 51, 56; ii. 295;
    _Isagoge_ (Introduction to the _Categories_ of Aristotle), i. 45, 92,
        102; ii. 312, =314 n.=, 333, =339=

  Preaching Friars, _see_ Dominican Order

  Predestination, Gottschalk’s controversy as to, i. 224-5, 227-=8=

  Priscianus, i. 71; ii. 119 _n. 2_;
    _Institutiones grammaticae_ of (_Priscianus major_ and _minor_), ii.
        124-5

  Prosper of Aquitaine, i. 106 _n. 1_

  Provençal literature, i. 571; ii. 168;
    Alba (aube) poetry, i. 20, =571=; ii. 30

  Provincia (Narbonensis):
    Antique, the, in relation to, before Middle Ages, i. 9
    Latinization of, i. 26-7 _and_ _n. 1_
    Ligurian inhabitants of, i. 126
    Teutonic invasion of, i. 125

  Prudentius, ii. 63;
    _Psychomachia_ of, ii. 102-4

  Pseudo-Callisthenes, _Life and Deeds of Alexander_ by, ii. 224, 225,
        =229-230=

  Pseudo-Dionysius, ii. 302;
    _Celestial Hierarchy_ by, i. 54 _and_ _n. 1_

  Pseudo-Turpin, ii. 319

  Ptolemy of Alexandria, i. 40

  Purgatory:
    Dante’s _Purgatorio_, _see under_ Dante
    Hildegard’s visions as to, i. 456 _n._
    Popular belief as to, i. 486


  _Quadrivium_, _see under_ Seven Liberal Arts


  Rabanus Maurus, Abp. of Mainz, allegorizing of Scripture by, ii. 46-7;
    interest in the vernacular, i. 308;
    works of, i. 222-41;
    _De universo_, i. 300; ii. 316 _n. 2_;
    _Allegoriae in universam sacram scripturam_, ii. 48-9;
    _De laudibus sanctae crucis_, ii. 49 _n. 3_;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 16, 100, 215; ii. 302-303, 312, 332

  Race, tests for determining, i. 124 _n._

  Radbertus, _see_ Paschasius

  _Raoul de Cambrai_, i. 563-4

  Ratherius, i. 309 and =n. 2=

  Ratramnus of Corbie, i. 215, 227; ii. 199

  Ravenna:
    Gerbert’s disputation in, i. 289-91
    Grammar and rhetoric studies at, ii. 121
    Law studies at, ii. 251, 252
    S. Apollinaris in Classe, i. 373, 377

  Raymond of Agiles quoted, i. 536

  Realism, Duns’ exposition of, ii. 514 _and_ _n._

  Reason _v._ authority controversy:
    Berengar’s position in, i. 302-3
    Eriugena’s contribution to, i. 229-=30=

  Reccared, i. 118 _nn._

  Reinhard, Bp. of Halberstadt, ii. 62

  Relics of saints and martyrs:
    Arms enshrining, i. 528
    Curative use of, i. 299
    Patristic attitude toward, i. 86, 101 _n._

  Renaissance, misleading nature of term, i. 211 _n._

  _Renaud de Montaubon_, i. 564

  Rheims cathedral school, i. 293

  Rhetoric:
    Chartres study of, i. 298
    Hugo of St. Victor on, ii. 67
    Predominance of, i. 109 _and_ _n._

  Richard, Abbot of Jumièges, i. 480-1

  Richard of Middleton, ii. 512

  Richard of St. Victor, ii. 80, =87= _and_ _n. 2_, =367 n. 2=, 540

  Richer, Abbot of Monte Cassino, i. 252, 300 _n. 2_;
    history of Gerbert by, quoted, i. 287-91

  Ricimer, Count, i. 113

  Riddles, didactic, i. 218-19 _and_ _n. 1_

  Rigaud, Eude (Oddo Rigaldus), Abp. of Rouen, i. =476=, =508=, 509;
    _Register_ of, quoted, i. 476-81

  Robert, cousin of St. Bernard, i. 395-7

  Robert of Normandy, ii. 139

  Rollo, Duke, of Normandy, i. 153, 239-40

  _Roman de la rose_, i. =586-7=; ii. 103 _and_ _nn._, 104, 223

  _Roman de Thebes_, ii. 227, =229 n.=

  Roman Empire:
    Barbarization of, i. 5, 7, =111 seqq.=
    Billeting of soldiers, custom as to, i. 114 _n._, 117
    Christianity accepted by, i. 345
    Church, relations with, ii. 265-7, 272-3
    Cities enjoying citizenship of--in Spain, i. 26 _and_ _n. 2_;
      in Gaul, i. 30
    City life of, i. 27, 326
    Clientage system under, i. 117 _n. 2_
    Dante’s views on, ii. 536
    Decadence of, i. =84=, 97, =111=
    Eastern, _see_ Eastern Empire
    Enduring nature of, conditions of, i. 238 _n._
    Greek thought diffused by, i. 4
    Italian people under, i. 7
    Jurisconsults of, authority and capacity of, ii. 232-3 _and_ _n._, 236
    Latinization of Western Europe due to, i. 23 _seqq._, 110
    Mediaeval attitude toward, i. 11
    Scandinavians under influence of, i. 152 _n. 3_

  Roman law:
    Auditory, Imperial or Praetorian, ii. 233 _n._, 235 _n. 1_
    Bologna famed for study of, ii. =121=, 251, =259-62=, 378
    _Brachylogus_, ii. 254-5
    _Breviarium_ and its _Interpretatio_, i. =117=; ii. 243-4;
      Epitomes of, ii. 244, =249-50=;
      _Brachylogus_ influenced by, ii. 254
    Burgundian tolerance of, i. 121;
      code (_Papianus_), ii. 239, =242=
    Church under, ii. 265 _and_ _n. 2_
    Codes of:
      Barbaric, nature of, ii. 244
        (_See also sub-headings_ Breviarium _and_ Burgundian)
      Gregorianus’, ii. 240, 243
      Hermogenianus’, ii. 240, 243
      Nature of, ii. 239-40
      Theodosian, ii. 240 _and_ _n. 2_, 241 _n. 2_, 242-3, =249=, =266-7
        and n. 1=
    _Codex_ of Justinian, ii. =240=, =242=, 253:
      Azo’s and Accursius’ work on, ii. 263-4
      Glosses to, ii. 249-50
      Placentinus’ _Summa_ of, ii. 262
      _Summa Perusina_ an epitome of, ii. =249=, 252
    _Constitutiones_ and _rescripta principum_, ii. =235 and n. 1=, 239,
        =240=
    Custom recognized by, ii. 236
    Digest of, by Justinian, _see subheading_ Pandects
    Elementary education including smattering of, ii. 250
    Epitomes of, various, ii. 249-50;
      _Epitome of Julianus_, ii. 242, =249=, 254
    Glosses:
      Accursius’ _Glossa ordinaria_, ii. 263-4
      Irnerius’, ii. 261 _and_ _n. 1_
      Justinian’s _Codex_, to, ii. 249-50
    Gothic adoption of, i. 114
    _Institutes_ of Gaius, ii. 241, 243
    _Institutes_ of Justinian, ii. =241=, 243, =254=:
      Azo’s _Summa_ of, ii. 263
      Placentinus’ _Summa_ of, ii. 262
    Jurisprudential element in early stages of, ii. 232
    _Jus_ identified with _aequitas_, ii. 235
    _Jus civile_, ii. 237, 257
    _Jus gentium_:
      _Jus naturale_ in relation to, ii. 234 _and_ _n._
      Origin of, ii. 233-4
      Popular rights as regarded by, ii. 278
    _Jus praetorium_, ii. 235
    _Lex romana canonice compta_, ii. 252
    Lombard attitude toward, i. 115
    _Novellae_ of Justinian, ii. 240, =242=
    Pandects (Justinian’s _Digest_), ii. 235 _and_ _n. 2_, =236-8=,
        =241=-2, 248, 253, 255:
      Accursius’ _Glossa_ on, ii. 264
      Glossators’ interpretation of, ii. 265
    Permanence of, ii. 236
    _Petrus_ (_Petri exceptiones_), ii. 252-4
    Placentinus’ work in, ii. 261-2
    Principles of, examples of, ii. 237-8;
      possession and its rights, ii. 256-8
    Principles of interpretation of, ii. 256
    Provincia, in, i. 27 _n. 1_
    _Responsa_ or _auctoritas jurisprudentium_, ii. 235-6
    Sources of, multifarious, ii. 235
    Sphere of, ii. 248
    Study of, centres for--in France, ii. 250;
      in Italy, ii. =121=, 251 _and_ _n. 2_, =259-62=, 378
    _Summa codicis Irnerii_, ii. 255
    Theodosian Code, _see under subheading_ Codes
    Treatises on, mediaeval, ii. 252 _seqq._
    Twelve Tables, ii. 232, 236
    Visigothic code of, _see subheading_ _Breviarium_

  Romance, spirit of, i. 418

  Romance languages (_See also_ Old French):
    Characteristics of, ii. 152
    Dante’s attitude toward, ii. 537
    Latin as modified by, ii. 155
    Literature of, ii. 221-3
      (_See also_ Provençal literature)
    Strength of, i. 9

  Romance nations, mediatorial rôle of, i. =110-11=, 124

  _Romans d’aventure_, i. =564-5=, 571 _n. 2_

  Rome:
    Bishops of, _see_ Popes
    Factions in (10th cent.), i. 242
    Law School in, ii. 251, 255
    Mosaics in, i. 347
    Verses to, i. 348; ii. =200=

  Romualdus, St., youth of, i. 373;
    austerities of, i. 374, =379=, 381;
    relations with his father, i. 374-5;
    harshness and egotism of, i. 375-7;
    at Vallis de Castro, i. 376-7, 380;
    at Sytrio, i. 378-9;
    death of, i. 372 _n. 3_, =380=;
    Commentary of, on the Psalter, i. 379

  Romulus Augustulus, Emp., i. 114

  Roncesvalles, battle of, i. 559 _n. 2_-62

  Roscellinus, i. 303-4; ii. 339-=40=

  Rothari, King of Lombards, i. 115; ii. 251

  Ruadhan, St., i. 132-3

  Ruotger, Life of Abp. Bruno by, i. 310; ii. 162 _and_ _n. 1_


  _Sacra doctrina_, _see_ Theology

  Sacraments, _see under_ Church

  _Sagas_, Norse:
    Character of, i. 12 _n._, 155 _seqq._
    _Egil_, i. 162-4
    _Gisli_, i. 158
    _Heimskringla_, i. 160-2 _and_ _n. 2_
    _Njala_, i. 157 _and_ =n.=, =159=, =164-7=
    Oral tradition of, ii. 220

  St. Denis monastery, ii. 10, =344=

  St. Emmeram convent (Ratisbon), i. 315, =316=

  St. Gall monastery, i. 257-8;
    Notker’s work at, ii. 201-2

  St. Victor monastery and school, ii. =61-3=, 143, 383

  Saints:
    Austerities of, i. 374 _and_ _n._, 375
    Interventions of, mediaeval beliefs as to, i. 487-8, 490
    Irish clergy so called, i. 135 _n. 2_
    Lives of:
      Compend. of (_Legenda Aurea_), ii. 184
      Conventionalized descriptions in, i. 393 _n. 1_
      Defects of, i. 494
      Estimate of, i. =84-5 and nn.=
      otherwise mentioned, i. 298, 300
    Relics of, _see_ Relics
    Visions of, i. 444-5
    Worship of, i. 101

  Salerno medical school, i. =250 n. 4=, =251=; ii. 121

  Salian Franks, _see under_ Franks

  Salimbene, i. 496-7, 499-500;
    _Chronica_ of, quoted and cited, i. 498 _seqq._;
    editions and translations of the work, i. 496 _n._

  Salvation, _see under_ Christianity

  Salvian, _De gubernatione Dei_ by, i. 84

  Saracens:
    Crusades against, _see_ Crusades
    Frankish victories against, i. 209-10 _n. 1_
    Wars with, necessitating mounted warriors, i. 525
    otherwise mentioned, i. 239, 252, 274, 332

  Saxons, _see_ Anglo-Saxons _and_ Germans

  Scandinavians, _see_ Norsemen

  Scholasticism:
    Arab analogy with, ii. 390 _and_ _n. 2_
    Aristotle’s advanced works, stages of appropriation of, ii. 393-5
    Bacon’s attack on, ii. 484, =493-4=, =496=, 509
    Classification of topics by:
      Schemes of, various, ii. 312 _seqq._
      Twofold principle of, ii. 311
    Conceptualism, ii. 520-1
    Content of, i. 301
    Deference to authority a characteristic of, ii. 297, 300
    Disintegration of--through Duns, ii. 510, 516;
      through Occam, ii. 522-3
    Elementary nature of discussions of, ii. 347
    Evil, problem of, _see_ Evil
    Exponents of, ii. 283 _and_ _n._
    Final exposition of, by Aquinas, ii. 484
    Greek thought contrasted with, ii. 296
    Humour non-existent in, ii. 459
    Method of, ii. =302=, =306-7=, 315 _n._;
      prototype of, i. 95
    Nominalism, ii. 340
    Philosophy of, _see_ Philosophy, scholastic
    Phraseology of, untranslatable, ii. 348, 483
    _Praedicables_, ii. 314 _n._
    Present interest of, ii. 285
    Realism, ii. 340;
      Pantheism in relation to, ii. 370
    Salvation a main interest of, ii. =296-7=, 300, 311
    Scriptural authority, position of, ii. 289, =291-2=
    Secular studies as regarded by, ii. 349, 357
    Stages of development of, ii. 333 _seqq._
    Sympathetic study of, the key to contradictions, ii. 371
    Theology of, _see_ Theology
    Universals, problem of:
      Aquinas’ treatment of, ii. 462
      Duns’ treatment of, ii. 515
      Occam’s contribution toward, ii. 520-1
      Roscellin’s views on, i. 303-4

  Sciences, classifications of, ii. 312 _seqq._
    (_See also_ Physical science)

  Scotland, Christianizing of, i. 173

  Scriptures, Christian:
    Allegorizing of:
      Examples of:
        David and Bathsheba episode, ii. 44-6
        Exodus, Book of, ii. 47
        Good Samaritan parable, ii. =53-6=, 84, 90
        Hannah, story of, ii. 47 _n. 1_
        Pharisee and Publican parable, ii. 51-2
      Hugo of St. Victor’s view of, ii. 65 _n._
      Writers exemplifying--Philo, ii. 42-43;
        the Fathers, ii. =43 seqq.=, 68-9 _and_ _n. 2_;
        Rabanus, ii. 46-50;
        Bede, ii. 47 _n. 1_;
        Honorius of Autun, ii. 51 _seqq._;
        Hugo of St. Victor, ii. 67 _seqq._
    Anglo-Saxon version of, i. =142 n. 2=, 183
    Authority of--in patristic doctrine, ii. 295;
      acknowledged by Eriugena, i. 231;
        by Berengar, i. 303;
      in scholasticism, ii. 280, 291-2
    Bacon’s attitude toward, ii. =491-2=, 497
    Bonaventura’s attitude toward, and writings on, ii. 405 _seqq._
    Canon law based on, ii. 267-9
    Classical studies in relation to, _see subheading_ Secular
    Classification of topics based on, ii. 317, 324
    Commentaries on--Alcuin’s, i. 220-1;
      Raban’s, i. 222-3
    Duns’ attitude toward, ii. 516
    Francis of Assisi’s literal acceptance of, i. 365, 426-=7=;
      his realization of spirit of, i. 427 _n. 1_; ii. 183
    Gothic version of, i. 143 _n._
    _Heliand_, i. =203 and nn.=, 308
    Hymns based on, ii. 88 _seqq._
    Interpretation of--by the Fathers, i. =43 seqq.=, 68-9 _and_ _n. 2_;
      by Eriugena, i. 231;
      by Berengar, i. 303
    Isidore’s writings on, i. 104-5
    Love, human, as treated in Old Testament, i. 332-3
    Scenes from, in Gothic art, ii. 82 _seqq._
    Secular knowledge in relation to, i. 63, =66=; ii. =110=, =112=,
        120, 499
    Song of Songs, _see_ Canticles
    Study of, by monks, i. 94;
      Cassiodorus’ _Institutiones_, i. 95-6
    Theology identified with, ii. 406, 408
    Vulgate, the:
      Corruption in Paris copy of, ii. 497
      Language of, ii. 171

  Sculpture, Gothic:
    Cathedrals, evolution of, ii. 538-=9=
    Symbolism of, i. 457 _n. 2_; ii. =82-6=

  Sedulius Scotus, i. 215

  Seneca, i. 26, 41

  _Sentences, Books of_:
    Isidore’s, i. 106 _and_ _n. 1_
    Paulus’ _Sententiae_, ii. 243
    Peter Lombard’s, _see under_ Lombard
    Prosper’s, i. 106 _n. 1_

  Sequence-hymns, development of, ii. 196, =201-6=;
    Adam of St. Victor’s, ii. 209-215

  Serenus, Bp. of Marseilles, i. 102

  Sermons, allegorizing:
    Bernard of Clairvaux, by, i. 337 _n._, =409-13=; ii. =169=, 368-9
    Honorius of Autun, by, ii. 50 _seqq._

  Seven Liberal Arts (_See also separate headings_ Grammar, Logic, _etc._):
    Alanus de Insulis on functions of, ii. 98 _n. 1_
    Carolingian study of, i. 236
    Clerical education in, i. 221-2
    Compend of, by Cassiodorus, i. 96
    _De nuptiis_ as concerned with, i. 71 _n. 3_
    Hugo of St. Victor on function of, ii. 67, 111
    Latin the medium for, ii. 109
    Law smattering included with, ii. 250
    Quadrivium:
      Boëthius on, i. 90 _and_ _n. 2_
      Chartres, at, i. 299
    Thierry’s encyclopaedia of, ii. 130
    Trivium:
      Chartres, at, i. =298-9=; ii. 163
      Courses of, as representing stages of mediaeval development, ii.
        331 _seqq._
    otherwise mentioned, i. 217; ii. 553

  Severinus, St., i. 192

  Severus, Sulpicius, i. 126 _n. 2_;
    Life of St. Martin by, i. 52, 84, 85 _n. 2_, =86=

  Sidonius, Apollinaris, i. 126 _n. 2_;
    cited, i. 117 _n. 1_, 140

  Siger de Brabant, ii. 401 _and_ _n._

  _Sippe_, i. 122

  Smaragdus, Abbot, i. 215

  Socrates, i. 34-5; ii. 7

  Songs, _see_ Poetry

  Sophists, Greek, i. 35

  Sorbon, Robert de, i. 544-5

  Sorcery, i. 46

  Spain:
    Antique, the, in relation to, before Middle Ages, i. 9
    Arabian philosophy in, ii. 390
    Church in, i. 9, 103, =118 and n.=
    Latinization of, i. 25-6 _and_ _n. 2_
    Moorish conquest of, i. 9, 118
    Visigoths in, i. 113, 116-=17 and n. 2=, 118

  _Stabat Mater_, i. 348

  Statius, ii. 229 _n._

  Statius Caecilius, i. 25

  Stephen IX., Pope, i. 263

  Stephen, St., sequence for festival of, ii. 211-13

  Stephen of Bourbon quoted, i. 365 _n._

  Stilicho, i. 112

  Stoicism:
    Emotion as regarded by, i. 330
    Nature of, i. =41=, 57, 59
    Neo-Platonism contrasted with, ii. 296
    Philosophy as classified by, ii. 312
    Roman law as affected by, ii. 232
    otherwise mentioned, i. 40, 70

  Strabo, Walafrid, _see_ Walafrid

  Suevi, i. 116-17 _and_ _n. 2_, =139=

  _Summae_, method of, ii. 306-7
    (_See also under_ Theology)

  _Summum bonum_, Aquinas’ discussion of, ii. 438 _seqq._, 456

  Switzerland, Irish monasteries founded in, i. 174

  Sylvester II., Pope (Gerbert of Aurillac), career of, i. 281-4;
    disputation with Otric, i. 289-91;
    estimate of, i. 281, =285-7=;
    love of the classics, i. =287-8=; ii. 110;
    Latin style of, ii. 160;
    logical studies of, ii. 332, 338, 339, 345;
    letters of, quoted, i. 283-7;
    estimated, i. 284-5;
    editions of works of, i. 280 _n._;
    _Libellus de rationali et ratione uti_, i. =292 n.=, 299;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 249; ii. 35

  Symbolism:
    Alanus’ _Anticlaudianus_ as exemplifying, ii. 94-103
    Angels as symbols, ii. 457
    Art, mediaeval, inspired by, i. 21
    Augustine and Gregory compared as to, i. 56-7
    Carolingian, nature and examples of, ii. 46-50
    Church edifices, of, ii. 78-82
    Dante permeated with, ii. 534, =552-5=
    Greek, nature of, ii. 56-7
    Hildegard’s visions, in, i. 456 _seqq._
    Marriage relationship, in, i. 413-14
    Mass, of the, ii. 77-8
    Mediaeval thought deeply impressed by, ii. =43=, 50 _n. 1_, =102=,
        =365=
    Mysticism in relation to, ii. 364
    Neo-Platonic, i. 52
    Ovid’s works interpreted by, ii. 230
    Patristic, i. =37=, =43-6=, 52, 53, 58, =80=
    Platonic, i. 36
    Raban’s addiction to, i. 223 _and_ _n. 2_
    _Signum et res_ classification, ii. 322-3
    Twelfth century--in Honorius of Autun, ii. 51 _seqq._;
      in Hugo of St. Victor, ii. 64 _seqq._
    Universal in mental processes, ii. 41, 552 _n._
    Universe explained by, ii. 64, 66 _seqq._
    otherwise mentioned, i. 15, 22

  Sytrio, Romualdus at, i. 378-9


  Tacitus, i. 78; ii. 134

  Tears, grace of, i. 370-1 _and_ _n._, 462, 463

  Templars, i. 531-5

  Tenth century, _see_ Carolingian period

  Tertullian, i. 5, 58, 87, 99, 171, 332, 344, 354 _n._; ii 152;
    paradox of, i. 51; ii. 297;
    _Adversus Marcionem_, 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;
        results of, i. 5, =170=-1
      Motives of converts, i. 193
    Customs of, i. 122, 139, 141, 523
    Law of, early, tribal nature of, ii. 245-7
    Rôle of, in mediaeval evolution, i. 125
    Roman Empire permeated by, i. 111 _seqq._

  Theodora, i. 242

  Theodore, Abp. of Canterbury, i. 184

  Theodoric of Freiburg, ii. 501 _n._

  Theodoric the Ostrogoth, i. 89, 91 _n. 2_, 93, =114-15=, 120-1, 138, 249;
    in legend, i. 145-6;
    Edict of, ii. 244 _n._

  Theodosius the Great, Emp., i. 112; ii. 272;
    Code of, ii. 240 _and_ _n. 2_, 241 _n. 2_, 242, =249=, =266-7 and n. 1=

  Theodulphus, Bp. of Orleans, i. =9=, 215;
    Latin diction of, ii. 160

  Theology, scholastic:
    Abaelard’s treatises on, _see under_ Abaelard
    Aquinas’ _Summa_ of, _see under_ Aquinas
    Argumentative nature of, ii. 292-3
    Augustinian character of, ii. 403
    Course of study in, ii. 388
    Importance of, as intellectual interest, ii. 287-8
    Logic in relation to, ii. =340 n.=, 346
    Mysticism of, ii. 363-4
    Natural sciences, etc., as handmaids to, ii. =67=, 111, 289, =486=,
        =492=, =496=, 500, 530;
      denial of the theory--by Duns, ii. 510;
      by Occam, ii. 519-520
      (_See also_ Physical science--Patristic attitude toward)
    Paris the centre for, ii. 283, =379=
    Philosophy in relation to, _see under_ Philosophy
    Practical, not speculative, regarded as, ii. 512, =515=, 519
    Scientific nature of, as regarded by Albertus, ii. 291, 430
    Scripture identified with, ii. 406, 408
    _Summae_ of--by Alexander of Hales, ii. 399;
      by Bonaventura, ii. 408;
      by Albertus Magnus, ii. 430-1;
      by Aquinas, _see under_ Aquinas
    Thirteenth-century study of, ii. 118-=120=

  Theophrastus, i. 38

  Theresa, St., i. 443 _n. 1_

  Theurgic practice, i. 46-8

  Thierry, Chancellor of Chartres, ii. 119, =370-1=;
    _Eptateuchon_ of, ii. 130 _and_ _n._

  Thirteenth century:
    Intellectual interests of, ultimate, ii. 287
    Latin prose styles of, ii. 179
    Papal position in, ii. 509
    Personalities of writers emergent in, ii. 436
    Theology and dialectic the chief studies of, ii. 118-=20=
    Three phenomena marking, ii. 378

  Thomas à Kempis, _De imitatione Christi_ by, ii. 185

  Thomas Aquinas, _see_ Aquinas

  Thomas of Brittany, _Tristan_ fragment by, i. 582

  Thomas of Cantimpré, ii. 428-9

  Thomas of Celano, Life of St. Francis by, quoted, i. 435, 436-8;
    style of the work, ii. 182-3

  Thucydides, _History of the Peloponnesian War_ by, i. 77-8

  Thuringia:
    Boniface’s work in, i. 197-8
    Merovingian rule in, i. 121

  Thuringians, language of, i. 145 _n. 2_

  Torriti, i. 347

  Trance, _see_ Ecstasy

  Trèves, i. =30=, 31, 192

  _Tristan_:
    Chrétien’s version of, i. 567
    Gottfried von Strassburg’s version of, i. 577-82

  Trivium, _see under_ Seven Liberal Arts

  Troubadours (trouvères), i. 572-3 _and_ _nn._

  Troy, tales of, in mediaeval literature, ii. 200, =224-5 and n. 2=,
        =227-9=

  True and the good compared, ii. 441, 512

  Truth, Guigo’s _Meditationes_ as concerning, i. 385-6

  Twelfth century:
    Classical studies at zenith in, ii. 117-118
    Growth in, various, i. 305-6
    Intellectual interests of, ultimate, ii. 287
    Literary zenith in, ii. 168, 205-6
    Mobility increased during, ii. 379


  Ulfilas, i. 192; ii. 221

  Ulpian--on _jus naturale_ and _jus gentium_, ii. 234 _and_ _n._;
    on _justitia_, _jus_ and _jurisprudentia_, ii. 237

  Ulster Cycle, Sagas of, i. 128 _and_ _n. 2_, 129 _seqq._

  Universals, _see under_ Scholasticism

  Universities, mediaeval (_For particular universities see their names_):
    Increase in (14th cent.), ii. 523
    Rise of, ii. 379, 381 _seqq._
    Studies at, ii. 388 _and_ _n._

  Urban II., Pope, ii. 175

  Urban IV., Pope, ii. 391-2, 434

  Utrecht, bishopric of, i. 197


  Vallombrosa, i. 377

  Vandals, i. 112, =113=, 120

  Varro, Terentius, i. 39, 71, 78

  Vercingetorix, i. 28

  Vernacular poetry, _see under_ Poetry

  Verse, _see_ Poetry

  Vikings, _see_ Danes _and_ Norsemen

  Vilgard, i. 259-60

  Vincent of Beauvais, _Speculum majus_ of, ii. 82 _and_ _n. 2_, 315-22

  Virgil, Bernard Silvestris’ _Commentum_ on, ii. 116-17 _and_ _n. 2_;
    Dante in relation to, ii. 535, 536, 539, 543

  Virgin Mary:
    Dante’s _Paradiso_ as concerning, ii. 551
    Hymns to, by Hugo of St. Victor, ii. 86-7, 92
    Interventions of, against the devil, i. 487, =490-2=
    Mediaeval attitude toward, i. 53, 54 _and_ =n. 2=; ii. =431=, =551=,
        558

  Virtues:
    Aquinas’ classification of, ii. 326-8
    Odilo’s _Cardinales disciplinae_, i. 295

  Virtues and vices, poetic treatment of--by Alanus, ii. 102 _n._;
    by De Lorris and De Meun, ii. 103

  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. 2=, 118

  Visions:
    Examples of, i. 444-6, 451, 452-9
    Monastic atmosphere in, i. 184 _and_ _n. 2_
    Nature of, i. 443, 449 and _n. 3_, =450=, 451 _and_ _n._

  _Vita contemplativa_:
    Aquinas’ views on, ii. 443, =481-2=
    Hildebert on, ii. 144-5

  _Vitae sanctorum_, _see_ Saints--Lives of


  Walafrid Strabo, i. 100, =215=; ii. =332=;
    _Glossa ordinaria_ of, i. 16, =221 n. 2=; ii. =46=;
    _De cultura hortorum_, ii. 188 _n. 2_

  Waldenses, i. =365 n.=; ii. 34

  Walter of Lille (of Chatillon), _Alexandreis_ of, ii. 192 _and_ _n. 3_,
        230 _n. 1_

  Walther von der Vogelweide, political views of, ii. 33;
    attitude of, toward Papacy, ii. 34-6;
    piety and crusading zeal of, ii. 36;
    melancholy, ii. 36-7;
    _Minnelieder_ of, ii. 29-31;
    _Sprüche_, ii. 29, =32=, 36;
    _Tagelied_, ii. 30;
    _Unter der Linde_, ii. 30;
    otherwise mentioned, i. 475, =482=, 589; ii. 223

  _Wergeld_, i. =122=, 139; ii. =246=

  Will, primacy of, over intellect, ii. 512, 515

  William, Abbot of Hirschau, i. 315

  William II. (Rufus), King of England, i. 273, 275; ii. =138-9=

  William of Apulia, ii. 189 _and_ _n. 3_

  William of Champeaux--worsted by Abaelard, ii. 342-3;
    founds St. Victor, ii. 61, 143;
    Hildebert’s letter to, quoted, ii. 143

  William of Conches, ii. 132;
    studies and works of, ii. 372-3;
    _Summa moralium philosophorum_, ii. 134-5, 373 _and_ _n. 2_

  William of Malmsbury cited, i. 525

  William of Moerbeke, ii. 391

  William of Occam, _see_ Occam

  William of St. Thierry, ii. 300, 344

  Willibrord, St., i. 197

  Winifried-Boniface, St., i. 6, =197-200=, 308; ii. 273

  Wisdom, Aquinas on, ii. 481

  Witelo, _Perspectiva_ by, ii. 501 _n._

  Witiza of Aquitaine, i. 358-9

  Wolfram von Eschenbach, ii. 223;
    _Parzival_ by, i. 12 _n._, 149 _n. 1_, 152, 567, 571 _n. 2_,
        =589-613=; ii. =36=;
      estimate of the work, i. 588; ii. 29

  Women:
    Emotion regarding, i. 349-50
    Emotional Christ-love experienced by, i. 442, =459 seqq.=
    Fabliaux’ tone toward, i. 521 _n. 2_
    German prae-mediaeval attitude toward, i. 139, 150;
      mediaeval, ii. 31
    Monastic life, in:
      Abuses among, i. 491-2;
        Rigaud’s _Register_ as concerning, i. 479-480
      Consecration of, i. 337 _and_ _n._
      Gandersheim nuns, i. 311
      Visions of, i. 442 _seqq._, 463 _seqq._
    Monkish vilification of, i. =354 n.=, 521 _n. 2_, 532, =533=; ii. 58
    Romantic literature as concerned with, i. 564
    Romantic poems for audiences of, i. 565
    Walther von der Vogelweide on, ii. 31

  Worms, Concordat of (1122), i. 245 _n. 4_


  Xenophon’s _Cyropaedia_, i. 78


  Year-books (_Annales_), i. 234 _and_ =n. 1=

  Yves, Bp. of Chartres, i. 262 _n._; ii. =139=


  Zacharias, Pope, i. 199

  Zoology:
    Albertus Magnus’ works on, ii. 429
    Aristotle’s work in, i. 38
    _Physiologus_, i. =76-7 and n.=, 300; ii. 83




FOOTNOTES:

[1] The present work is not occupied with the brutalities of mediaeval
life, nor with all the lower grades of ignorance and superstition
abounding in the Middle Ages, and still existing, in a less degree,
through parts of Spain and southern France and Italy. Consequently I have
not such things very actively in mind when speaking of the mediaeval
genius. That phrase, and the like, in this book, will signify the more
informed and constructive spirit of the mediaeval time.

[2] There will be much to say of all these men in later chapters.

[3] _Post_, Chapter XI.

[4] See _post_, Chapter IX., as to the manner of the coming of Augustine
to England.

[5] The Icelandic Sagas, for example, were then brought into written form.
They have a genius of their own; they are realistic and without a trace of
symbolism. They are wonderful expressions of the people among whom they
were composed. _Post_, Chapter VIII. But, products of a remote island,
they were unaffected by the moulding forces of mediaeval development, nor
did they exert any influence in turn. The native traits of the mediaeval
peoples were the great complementary factor in mediaeval
progress--complementary, that is to say, to Latin Christianity and antique
culture. Mediaeval characteristics sprang from the interaction of these
elements; they certainly did not spring from any such independent and
severed growth of native Teuton quality as is evinced by the Sagas. One
will look far, however, for another instance of such spiritual aloofness.
For clear as are the different racial or national traits throughout the
mediaeval period, they constantly appear in conjunction with other
elements. They are discerned working beneath, possibly reacting against,
and always affected by, the genius of the Middle Ages, to wit, the genius
of the mutual interaction of the whole. Wolfram’s very German _Parzival_,
the old French _Chanson de Roland_, and above them all the _Divina
Commedia_, are mediaeval. In these compositions in the vernacular, racial
traits manifest themselves distinctly, and yet are affected by the
mediaeval spirit.

[6] See _post_, Chapter V.

[7] The Predestination and Eucharistic controversies are examples; _post_,
Chapter X.

[8] See _post_, Chapter X.

[9] The lack of originality in the first half of the tenth century is
illustrated by the Epitome of Gregory’s _Moralia_, made by such an
energetic person as Odo of Cluny. It occupies four hundred columns in
Migne’s _Patrologia Latina_, 133. See _post_, Chapter XII.

[10] See _post_, Chapter XIII.

[11] See _post_, Chapter XI.

[12] See _post_, Chapter XVI.

[13] These men will be fully considered later, Chapters XXXIV.-XL.

[14] See _post_, Chapter XXXI.

[15] See _post_, Chapter XXXII.

[16] _Post_, Chapter XXIII.

[17] The term “spiritual” is here intended to signify the activities of
the mind which are emotionalized with yearning or aversion, and therefore
may be said to belong to the entire nature of man.

[18] The history of the spread of Latin through Italy and the provinces is
from the nature of the subject obscure. Budinsky’s _Die Ausbreitung der
lateinischer Sprache_ (Berlin, 1881) is somewhat unsatisfactory. See also
Meyer-Lübke, _Die lateinische Sprache in den romanischen Ländern_
(Gröber’s _Grundriss_, 1{2}, 451 _sqq._; F. G. Mohl, _Introduction à la
chronologie du latin vulgaire_ (1899). The statements in the text are very
general, and ignore intentionally the many difficult questions as to what
sort of Latin--dialectal, popular, or literary--was spread through the
peninsula. See Mohl, _o.c._ § 33 _sqq._

[19] Tradition says from Gaul, but the sifted evidence points to the
Danube north of the later province of Noricum. See Bertrand and Reinach,
_Les Celtes dans les vallées du Pô et du Danube_ (Paris, 1894).

[20] See Beloch, _Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt_, p. 507
(Leipzig, 1886).

[21] Mommsen says that in Augustus’s time fifty Spanish cities had the
full privileges of Roman citizenship and fifty others the rights of
Italian towns (_Roman Provinces_, i. 75, Eng. trans.). But this seems a
mistake; as the enumeration of Beloch, _Bevölkerung_, etc., p. 330, gives
fifty in all, following the account of Pliny.

[22] Cicero, _Pro Archia_, 10, speaks slightingly of poets born at
Cordova, but, later, Latro of Cordova was Ovid’s teacher.

[23] The Roman law was used throughout Provincia. In this respect a line
is to be drawn between Provincia and the North. See _post_, Chapter
XXXIII.

[24] _Bellum Gallicum_, iii. 10.

[25] _Bellum Gallicum_, v. 6.

[26] Porcius Cato, in his _Origines_, written a hundred years before
Caesar crossed the mountains, says that Gallia was devoted to the art of
war and to eloquence (_argute loqui_). Presumably the Gallia that Cato
thus characterized as clever or acute of speech, was Cisalpine Gaul, to
wit, the north of Italy; yet Caesar’s transalpine Gauls were both clever
of speech and often the fools of their own arguments. Lucian, in his
_Hercules_ (No. 55, Dindorf’s edition) has his “Celt” argue that Hercules
accomplished his deeds by the power of words.

[27] See, generally, Fustel de Coulanges, _Institutions politiques de
l’ancienne France_, vol. i. (_La Gaule romaine_).

[28] _Bellum Gallicum_, vi. 11, 12.

[29] Cf. Julian, _Vercingetorix_ (2nd ed., Paris, 1902).

[30] _Bellum Gallicum_, iv. 5; vi. 20.

[31] There are a number of texts from the second to the fifth century
which bear on the matter. Taken altogether they are unsatisfying, if not
blind. They have been frequently discussed. See Gröber, _Grundriss der
romanischen Philologie_, i. 451 _sqq._ (2nd edition, 1904); Brunot,
_Origines de la langue française_, which is the Introduction to Petit de
Julleville’s _Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française_
(Paris, 1896); Bonnet, _Le Latin de Grégoire de Tours_, pp. 22-30 (Paris,
1890); Mommsen’s _Provinces of the Roman Empire_, p. 108 _sqq._ of English
translation; Fustel de Coulanges, _Institutions politiques_, vol. i. (_La
Gaule romaine_), pp. 125-135 (Paris, 1891); Roger, _L’Enseignement des
lettres classiques d’ Ausone à Alcuin_, p. 24 _sqq._ (Paris, 1905).

[32] Such words are, _e.g._, wine, street, wall. See Toller, _History of
the English Language_ (Macmillan & Co., 1900), pp. 41, 42.

[33] See Paul, _Grundriss der germanischen Philologie_, Band i. pp.
305-315, (Strassburg, 1891).

[34] A prime illustration is afforded by the Latin juristic word _persona_
used in the Creed. The Latins had to render the three ὑποστάσεις of the
Greeks; and “three somethings,” _tria quaedam_, was too loose, as
Augustine says (_De Trinitate_, vii. 7-12). The true and literal
translation of ὑπόστασις would have been _substantia_; but that word had
been taken to render οὐσία. So the legal word _persona_ was employed in
spite of its recognized unfitness. Cf. Taylor, _Classical Heritage, etc._,
p. 116 _sqq._

[35] On these Peripatetics see Zeller, _Philosophie der Griechen_, 3rd ed.
vol. ii. pp. 806-946.

[36] See Boissier, _Étude sur M. T. Varron_ (Paris, 1861).

[37] _Hist. naturalis_, ii. 41.

[38] From the reign of Augustus onward, Astrology flourished as never
before. See Habler, _Astrologie im Alterthum_, p. 23 _sqq._ (Zwickau,
1879).

[39] _De abstinentia_, ii. 34.

[40] _De abstinentia_, iii. 4.

[41] Porphyry before him had spoken of angels and archangels which he had
found in Jewish writings.

[42] For authorities cited, see Zeller, _Ges. der Phil._, iii.{2} p. 686.

[43] _De mysteriis_, i. 3.

[44] _Ibid._ ii. 3, 9.

[45] Cf. Döllinger, _Sektengeschichte_.

[46] All my Christian examples are taken from among the representatives of
Catholic Christianity, because it was that which triumphed, and set the
lines of mediaeval thought. Consequently, I have not referred to the
Gnostics, not wishing to complicate an already complex spiritual
situation. Gnosticism was a mixture of Hellenic, oriental, and Christian
elements. Its votaries represented one (most distorting) way in which the
Gospel was taken. But Gnosticism neither triumphed nor deserved to. It
flourished somewhat before the time of Plotinus.

[47] See Origen, _De principiis_, iii. 2.

[48] The Athanasian _Vita Antonii_ is in Migne, _Patr. Graec._ 26, and
trans. in _Nicene Fathers_, second series, iv. The _Vita S. Martini_ is in
Halm’s ed. of Sulp. Severus (Vienna, 1866), and in Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 20,
and trans. in _Nicene Fathers_, second series, xi.

[49] See Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, ii. 413 _sqq._, especially 432 sqq.
Also Taylor, _Classical Heritage_, pp. 94-97.

[50] In cap. iii. § 2 of the _Celestial Hierarchy_, Pseudo-Dionysius says
that the goal of his system is the becoming like to God and oneness with
Him (ἡ πρὸς θεὸν ἀφομοίωσίς τε καὶ ἕνωσις). He classifies his “celestial
intelligences” even more systematically than the _De mysteriis_ of
Iamblicus’s school. His work is full of Neo-Platonism. Cf. Vacherot,
_Histoire de l’école d’Alexandrie_, iii. 24 _sqq._

[51] The cult of the Virgin and the saints was of very early growth. See
Lucius, _Die Anfänge des Heiligen Kults in der christlichen Kirche_ (ed.
by Anrich, Tübingen, 1904).

[52] See, _e.g._, Grandgeorge, _St. Augustin et le Néoplatonisme_ (Paris,
1896).

[53] On Gregory, see _post_, Chapter V.

[54] _Epistola ad Gregorium Thaumaturgum._

[55] Cf. Boissier, _Fin du paganisme_.

[56] _Civ. Dei_, xix. caps. 49, 20, 27, 28.

[57] _De moribus Ecclesiae_, 14, 15; cf. _Epist._ 155, §§ 12, 13.

[58] _Civ. Dei_, xix. 25.

[59] See Clement of Rome, _Ep. to the Corinthians_ (A.D. cir. 92), opening
passage, and notes in Lightfoot’s edition.

[60] _De doc. Chris._ i. 4, 5.

[61] _De doc. Chris._ ii. 16.

[62] _De doc. Chris._ iii. cap. 10 _sqq._

[63] _Post_, Chapter V.

[64] _De moribus Ecclesiae_, 21; _Confessions_, v. 7; x. 54-57.

[65] See Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, iii. 14 _sqq._; Taylor, _Classical
Heritage_, p. 117 _sqq._

[66] _Civ. Dei_, ix. 21, 22; cf. _Civ. Dei_, xvi. 6-9.

[67] _Civ. Dei_, book xii., affords a discussion of such questions, _e.g._
why was man created when he was, and not before or afterwards. All these
matters entered into the discussions of the mediaeval philosophers, Thomas
Aquinas, for example.

Besides these dogmatic treatises, in which Scriptural texts were called
upon at least for confirmation, the Fathers, Greek and Latin, composed an
enormous mass of Biblical commentary, chiefly allegorical, following the
chapter and verse of the canonical writings.

[68] See _ante_, Chapter III.

[69] See _post_, Chapter V.

[70] The substance of Capella’s book is framed in an allegorical narrative
of the Marriage of Philology and Mercury. For a nuptial gift, the groom
presents the bride with seven maid-servants, symbolizing the Seven Liberal
Arts--Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy,
Music. Cf. Taylor, _Classical Heritage, etc._, p. 49 _sqq._

[71] In Eyssenhardt’s edition.

[72] On the symbolism of Numbers see Cantor, _Vorlesungen über Ges. der
Mathematik_, 2nd ed. pp. 95, 96, 146, 156, 529, 531.

[73] See an extraordinary example taken from the treatise against Faustus,
_post_, Chapter XXVII. Also _De doc. Chris._ ii. 16; _De Trinitate_, iv.
4-6.

[74] Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 14, col. 123-273. Written cir. 389.

[75] _Hex._ i. cap. 6.

[76] _Hex._ ii. caps. 2, 3.

[77] Aug. _De Trinitate_, iii. 5-9.

[78] _Ante_, Chapter III.

[79] _Civ. Dei_, xvi. 9.

[80] For the sources of these accounts see Lauchert, _Ges. des
Physiologus_ (Strassburg, 1889), p. 4 _sqq._ The wide use of this work is
well known. It was soon translated into Ethiopian, Armenian, and Syrian;
into Latin not later than the beginning of the fifth century; and
subsequently, of course with many accretions, into the various languages
of western mediaeval Europe. See Lauchert, _o.c._ p. 79 _sqq._

[81] Cf. Boissier, _Tacite_ (Paris, 1903).

[82] For example, what different truths can one speak afterwards of a
social dinner of men and women at which he has sat. In the first place,
there is the hostess, to whom he may say something pleasant and yet true.
Then there is his congenial friend among the ladies present, to whom he
will impart some intimate observations, also true. Thirdly, a club friend
was at the dinner, and his ear shall be the receptacle of remarks on
feminine traits illustrated by what was said and done there. Finally,
there is himself, to whom in the watches of the night the dinner will
present itself in its permanent values as an incident in human
intercourse, which is so fascinating, so transitory, and so suggestive of
topics of reflection. Here are four presentations; and if there was a
company of twelve, we may multiply four by that number and imagine
forty-eight true, although inexhaustive, accounts of that dinner which has
now joined the fading circle of events that are no more.

[83] On Gregory of Nyssa, see Taylor, _Classical Heritage_, p. 125 _sqq._

[84] Chiefly in Books III. and XV.-XVIII.

[85] Like the _Civitas Dei_, the patristic writings devoted exclusively to
history were all frankly apologetic, yet following different manners
according to the temper and circumstances of the writer. In the East, at
the epoch of the formal Christian triumph and the climax of the Arian
dispute, lived Eusebius of Caesarea, the most famous of the early Church
historians. He was learned, careful, capable of weighing testimony, and
possessed the faculty of presenting salient points. He does not dwell
overmuch on miracles. His apologetic tendencies appear in his method of
seeing and stating facts so as to uphold the truth of Christianity. If
just then Christianity seemed no longer to demand an advocate, there was
place for a eulogist, and such was Eusebius in his Church History and
fulsome _Life of Constantine_. His Church History is translated by A. C.
McGiffert, _Library of Nicene Fathers_, second series, vol. i. (New York,
1890). It was translated into Latin by Rufinus, friend and then enemy of
St. Jerome.

[86] The best edition is Zangemeister’s in the Vienna _Corpus scriptorum
eccles._ (1882). Orosius ignores the classic Greek historians, of whom he
knew little or nothing. Cf. Taylor, _Classical Heritage_, pp. 219-221.

[87] _Hist._ ii. 3.

[88] Best edition that of Pauly, in Vienna _Corpus scrip. eccles._ (1883).

[89] An excellent statement of the nature and classes of the mediaeval
_Vitae sanctorum_ is “Les Légendes hagiographiques,” by Hipp. Delehaye,
S.J., in _Revue des questions historiques_, t. 74 (1903), pp. 56-122. An
English translation of this article has appeared as an independent volume.

[90] At Gregory’s statement of the marvellous deeds of Benedict, his
interlocutor, the Deacon Peter, answers and exclaims: “Wonderful and
astonishing is what you relate. For in the water brought forth from the
rock (_i.e._ by Benedict) I see Moses, in the iron which returned from the
bottom of the lake I see Elisha (2 Kings vi. 6), in the running upon the
water I see Peter, in the obedience of the raven I see Elijah (1 Kings
xvii. 6), and in his grief for his dead enemy I see David (2 Sam. i. 11).
That man, as I consider him, was full of the spirit of all the just”
(Gregorius Magnus, _Dialogi_, ii. 8. Quoted and expanded by Odo of Cluny,
Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 133, col. 724). The rest of the second book contains
other miracles like those told in the Bible. The Life of a later saint may
also follow earlier monastic types. Francis kisses the wounds of lepers,
as Martin of Tours had done. See Sulpicius Severus, _Vita S. Martini_. But
often the writer of a _vita_ deliberately inserts miracles to make his
story edifying, or enhance the fame of his hero, perhaps in order to
benefit the church where he is interred.

[91] Ambrose, _Ep._ 22, _ad Marcellinam_.

[92] On Paulinus of Nola, see Taylor, _Classical Heritage_, pp. 272-276.

[93] As this chapter has been devoted to the intellectual interests of the
Fathers, it should be supplemented by a consideration of the emotions and
passions approved or rejected by them. But this matter may be considered
more conveniently in connection with the development of mediaeval emotion,
_post_, Chapter XIV.

[94] Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 63, col. 1079-1167. Also edited by Friedlein
(Leipsic, 1867).

[95] I know of no earlier employment of the word to designate these four
branches of study. But one might infer from Boëthius’s youth at this time
that he received it from a teacher.

[96] See Cantor, _Vorlesungen über die Ges. der Mathematik_, i. 537-540.

[97] See Cantor, _o.c._ i. 540-551.

[98] Cassiodorus, _Ep. variae_, i. 45

[99] Upon the dates of Boëthius’s writings, see S. Brandt,
“Entstehungszeit und zeitliche Folge der Werke des Boëtius,” _Philologus_,
Band 62 (N.S. Bd. 16), 1903, pp. 141 _sqq._ and 234 _sqq._

[100] Social position, his own abilities, and the favour of Theodoric,
obtained the consulship for Boëthius in 510, when he was twenty-eight or
-nine years old.

[101] Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 64, col. 201.

[102] _In librum de interpretatione_, editio secunda, beginning of Book
II., Migne 64, col. 433.

[103] See _De inter._ ed. prima, Book I. (Migne 64, col. 193); ed.
secunda, beginning of Book III. and of Book IV. (Migne 64, col. 487 and
517). The Boëthian translations are all in the 64th vol. of Migne’s _Pat.
Lat._

[104] See A. Hildebrand, _Boëthius und seine Stellung zum Christentum_
(Regensburg, 1885), and works therein referred to.

[105] See Prantl, _Ges. der Logik_, i. 679 _sqq._

[106] See his Life in Hodgkin’s _Letters of Cassiodorus_; also Roger,
_Enseignement des lettres classiques d’Ausone à Alcuin_, pp. 175-187
(Paris, 1905).

[107] Migne 70, col. 1281.

[108] Migne 70, col. 1105-1219.

[109] Gregory’s works are printed in Migne, _Patrologia Latina_, 75-79.
His epistles are also published in the _Monumenta Germaniae historica_. On
Gregory, his life and times, writings and doctrines, see F. H. Dudden,
_Gregory the Great_, etc., 2 vols. (Longmans, 1905).

[110] Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 75, col. 516.

[111] _Ep._ xi. 54 (Migne 77, col. 1171).

[112] This is the view expressed in the _Commentary on Kings_ ascribed to
Gregory, but perhaps the work of a later hand. Thus, in the allegorical
interpretation of 1 Kings (1 Sam.) xiii. 20, “But all the Israelites went
down to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter,
and his axe.” Says the commentator (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 79, col. 356): We
go down to the Philistines when we incline the mind to secular studies;
Christian simplicity is upon a height. Secular books are said to be in the
plane since they have no celestial truths. God put secular knowledge in a
plane before us that we should use it as a step to ascend to the heights
of Scripture. So Moses first learned the wisdom of the Egyptians that he
might be able to understand and expound the divine precepts; Isaiah, most
eloquent of the prophets, was _nobiliter instructus et urbanus_; and Paul
had sat at Gamaliel’s feet before he was lifted to the height of the third
heaven. One goes to the Philistines to sharpen his plow, because secular
learning is needed as a training for Christian preaching.

[113] See _post_, Chapter X.

[114] Migne 75, 76.

[115] Migne 77, col. 149-430. The second book is devoted to Benedict of
Nursia.

[116] For illustrations see Dudden, _o.c._ i. 321-366, and ii. 367-68.
Gregory’s interest in the miraculous shows also in his letters. The
Empress Constantine had written requesting him to send her the head of St.
Paul! He replies (_Ep._ iv. 30, _ad Constantinam Augustam_) in a wonderful
letter on the terrors of such holy relics and their death-striking as well
as healing powers, of which he gives instances. He says that sometimes he
has sent a bit of St. Peter’s chain or a few filings; and when people come
seeking those filings from the priest in attendance, sometimes they
readily come off, and again no effort of the file can detach anything.

[117] _Moralia_ xvi. 51 (Migne 75, col. 1151). Cf. Dudden, _o.c._ ii.
369-373.

[118] _Mor._ ix. 34, 54 (Migne 75, col. 889). Cf. Dudden, _o.c._ ii.
419-426.

[119] _Dialogi_, iv. caps. 39, 55.

[120] A better Augustinianism speaks in Gregory’s letter to Theoctista
(_Ep._ vii. 26), in which he says that there are two kinds of
“compunction, the one which fears eternal punishments, the other which
sighs for the heavenly rewards, as the soul thirsting after God is stung
first by fear and then by love.”

[121] _Ep._ iv. 21; vi. 32; ix. 6.

[122] See _post_, Chapter XXXVI., 1.

[123] Migne 83, col. 207-424. No reference need be made, of course, to the
_False Decretals_, pseudonymously connected with Isidore’s name; they are
later than his time.

[124] The _Etymologiae_ is to be found in vol. 82 of Migne, col. 73-728;
the other works fill vol. 83 of Migne.

[125] Aug. _Quaest. in Gen._ i. 152. See _ante_, Chapter IV.

[126] Isidore’s _Books of Sentences_ present a topical arrangement of
matters more or less closely pertinent to the Christian Faith, and thus
may be regarded as a precursor of the _Sentences_ of Peter Lombard
(_post_, Chapter XXXIV.). But Isidore’s work is the merest compilation,
and he does not marshal his extracts to prove or disprove a set
proposition, and show the consensus of authority, like the Lombard. His
chief source is Gregory’s _Moralia_. Prosper of Aquitaine, a younger
contemporary and disciple of Augustine, compiled from Augustine’s works a
book of Sentences, a still slighter affair than Isidore’s (Migne, _Pat.
Lat._ 51, col. 427-496).

[127] For example, Reason begins her reply thus: “Quaeso te, anima,
obsecro te, deprecor te, imploro te, ne quid ultra leviter agas, ne quid
inconsulte geras, ne temere aliquid facias,” etc. (Migne 83, col. 845).

[128] _De rerum natura_, Praefatio (Migne 83, col. 963).

[129] See Prolegomena to Becker’s edition.

[130] Migne 82, col. 367.

[131] See Kübler, “Isidorus-Studien,” _Hermes_ xxv. (1890), 497, 518, and
literature there cited.

An analysis of the _Etymologies_ would be out of the question. But the
captions of the twenty books into which it is divided will indicate the
range of Isidore’s intellectual interests and those of his time:

    I. _De grammatica._

    II. _De rhetorica et dialectica._

    III. _De quatuor disciplinis mathematicis._ (Thus the first three
    books contain the Trivium and Quadrivium.)

    IV. _De medicina._ (A brief hand-book of medical terms.)

    V. _De legibus et temporibus._ (The latter part describes the days,
    nights, weeks, months, years, solstices and equinoxes. It is hard to
    guess why this was put in the same book with Law.)

    VI. _De libris et officiis ecclesiasticis._ (An account of the books
    of the Bible and the services of the Church.)

    VII. _De Deo, angelis et fidelium ordinibus._

    VIII. _De ecclesia et sectis diversis._

    IX. _De linguis, gentibus, regnis, etc._ (Concerning the various
    peoples of the earth and their languages, and other matters.)

    X. _Vocum certarum alphabetum._ (An etymological vocabulary of many
    Latin words.)

    XI. _De homine et portentis._ (The names and definitions of the
    various parts of the human body, the ages of life, and prodigies and
    monsters.)

    XII. _De animalibus._

    XIII. _De mundo et partibus._ (The universe and its parts--atoms,
    elements, sky, thunder, winds, waters, etc.)

    XIV. _De terra et partibus._ (Geographical.)

    XV. _De aedificiis et agris._ (Cities, their public constructions,
    houses, temples, and the fields.)

    XVI. _De lapidibus et metallis._ (Stones, metals, and their qualities
    curious and otherwise.)

    XVII. _De rebus rusticis._ (Trees, herbs, etc.)

    XVIII. _De bello et ludis._ (On war, weapons, armour; on public games
    and the theatre.)

    XIX. _De navibus, aedificiis et vestibus._ (Ships, their parts and
    equipment, buildings and their decoration; garments and their
    ornament.)

    XX. _De penu et instrumentis domesticis et rusticis._ (On wines and
    provisions, and their stores and receptacles.)

[132] The exaggerated growth of grammatical and rhetorical studies is
curiously shown by the mass of words invented to indicate the various
kinds of tropes and figures. See the list in Bede, _De schematis_ (Migne
90, col. 175 _sqq._).

[133] Cf. Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_, 8 vols.; Villari, _The
Barbarian Invasions of Italy_, 2 vols.

[134] This demand was not so extraordinary in view of the common Roman
custom in the provinces of billeting soldiers upon the inhabitants, with
the right to one-third of the house and appurtenances.

[135] Cf. _post_, Chapter XXXIII., II.

[136] On the Codes see Hodgkin, _o.c._ vol. vi.

[137] The Lombard language was still spoken in the time of Paulus Diaconus
(eighth century).

[138] Apollinaris Sidonius, _Ep._ i. 2 (trans. by Hodgkin, _o.c._ vol. ii.
352-358), gives a sketch of a Visigothic king, Theodoric II., son of him
who fell in the battle against the Huns. He ascended the throne in 453,
having accomplished the murder of his brother Thorismund. In 466, he was
himself slain by his brother Euric. In the meanwhile he appears to have
been a good half-barbaric, half-civilized king.

[139] See _post_, Chapter XXXIII., II. For the Visigothic kingdom of Spain
the great reigns were those of Leowigild (568-586) and his son Reccared
(586-601). In Justinian’s time the “Roman Empire” had again made good its
rule over the south of Spain. Leowigild pushed the Empire back to a narrow
strip of southern coast, where there were still important cities. Save for
this, he conquered all Spain, finally mastering the Suevi in the
north-west. His capital was Toledo. Great as was his power, it hardly
sufficed to hold in check the overweening nobles and landowners. Under the
declining Empire there had sprung up a system of clientage and protection,
in which the Teutons found an obstacle to the establishment of monarchies.
In Spain this system hastened the downfall of the Visigothic kingdom.
Another source of trouble for Leowigild, who was still an Arian, was the
opposition of the powerful Catholic clergy. Reccared, his son, changed to
the Catholic or “Roman” creed, and ended the schism between the throne and
the bishops.

[140] The Spanish Roman Church, which controlled or thwarted the destinies
of the doomed Visigothic kingdom, was foremost among the western churches
in ability and learning. It had had its martyrs in the times of pagan
persecution; it had its universally venerated Hosius, Bishop of Cordova,
and prominent at the Council of Nicaea; it had its fiercely quelled
heresies and schisms; and it had an astounding number of councils, usually
held at Toledo. Its bishops were princes. Leander, Bishop of Seville, had
been a tribulation to the powerful, still Arian, King Leowigild, who was
compelled to banish him. That king’s son, Reccared, recalled him from
banishment, to preside at the Council of Toledo in 589, when the
Visigothic monarchy turned to Roman Catholicism. Leander was succeeded in
his more than episcopal see by his younger brother Isidore (Bishop of
Seville from 600 to 636). A princely prelate, Isidore was to have still
wider and more lasting fame for sanctity and learning. The last
encyclopaedic scholar belonging to the antique Christian world, he became
one of the great masters of the Middle Ages (see _ante_, Chapter V.). The
forger and compiler of the _False Decretals_ in selecting the name of
Isidore rather than another to clothe that collection with authority,
acted under the universal veneration felt for this great Spanish
Churchman.

[141] Marriages between Romans and Franks were legalized as early as 497.

[142] See Flach, _Les Origines de l’ancienne France_, vol. i. chap. i.
_sqq._ (Paris, 1886).

[143] See _post_, Chapter XXXIII., II.

[144] The physiological criterion of a race is consanguinity. But
unfortunately racial lineage soon loses itself in obscurity. Moreover,
during periods as to which we have some knowledge, no race has continued
pure from alien admixture; and every people that has taken part in the
world’s advance has been acted upon by foreign influences from its
prehistoric beginnings throughout the entire course of its history.
Indeed, foreign suggestions and contact with other peoples appear
essential to tribal or national progress. For the historian there exists
no pure and unmixed race, and even the conception of one becomes
self-contradictory. To him a race is a group of people, presumably related
in some way by blood, who appear to transmit from generation to generation
a common heritage of culture and like physical and spiritual traits. He
observes that the transmitted characteristics of such a group may weaken
or dissipate before foreign influence, and much more as the group scatters
among other people; or again he sees its distinguishing traits becoming
clearer as the members draw to a closer national unity under the action of
a common physical environment, common institutions, and a common speech.
The historian will not accept as conclusive any single kind of evidence
regarding race. He may attach weight to complexion, stature, and shape of
skull, and yet find their interpretation quite perplexing when compared
with other evidence, historical or linguistic. He will consider customs
and implements, and yet remember that customs may be borrowed, and
implements are often of foreign pattern. Language affords him the most
enticing criterion, but one of the most deceptive. It is a matter of
observation that when two peoples of different tongues meet together, they
may mingle their blood through marriage, combine their customs, and adopt
each other’s utensils and ornaments; but the two languages will not
structurally unite: one will supplant the other. The language may thus be
more single in source than the people speaking it; though, conversely,
people of the same race, by reason of special circumstances, may not speak
the same tongue. Hence linguistic unity is not conclusive evidence of
unity of race.

[145] As to the Celts in Gaul and elsewhere, and the early non-Celtic
population of Gaul, see A. Bertrand, _La Gaule avant les Gaulois_ (Paris,
1891); _La Religion des Gaulois_ (Paris, 1897); _Les Celtes dans les
vallées du Pô et du Danube_ (in conjunction with S. Reinach); D’Arbois de
Jubainville, _Les Premiers Habitants de l’Europe_ (second edition, Paris,
1894); Fustel de Coulanges, _Institutions politiques de l’ancienne France_
(Paris, 1891); Karl Müllenhoff, _Deutsche Altertumskunde_, Bde. I. and
II.; Zupitza, “Kelten und Gallier,” _Zeitschrift für keltische
Philologie_, 1902.

[146] See _ante_, Chapter II.

[147] The Latin literature produced by their descendants in the fourth
century is usually good in form, whatever other qualities it lack. This
statement applies to the works of the nominally Christian, but really
pagan, rhetorician and poet, Ausonius, born in 310, at Bordeaux, of
mingled Aquitanian and Aeduan blood; likewise to the poems of Paulinus of
Nola, born at the same town, in 353, and to the prose of Sulpicius
Severus, also born in Aquitaine a little after. In the fifth century,
Avitus, an Auvernian, Bishop of Vienne, and Apollinaris Sidonius continue
the Gallo-Latin strain in literature.

[148] Without hazarding a discussion of the origin of the Irish, of their
proportion of Celtic blood, or their exact relation to the Celts of the
Continent, it may in a general way be said, that Ireland and Great Britain
were inhabited by a prehistoric and pre-Celtic people. The Celts came from
the Continent, conquered them, and probably intermarried with them. The
Celtic inflow may have begun in the sixth century before Christ, and
perhaps continued until shortly before Caesar’s time. Evidences of
language point to a dual Celtic stock, Goidelic and Brythonic. It may be
surmised that the former was the first to arrive. The Celtic dialect
spoken by them is now represented by the Gaelic of Ireland, Man, and
Scotland. The Brythonic is still represented by the speech of Wales and
the Armoric dialects of Brittany. This was the language of the Britons who
fought with Caesar, and were subdued by later Roman generals. After the
Roman time they were either pressed back into Wales and Cornwall by
Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, or were absorbed among these conquering
Teutons. Probably Caesar was correct in asserting the close affinity of
the Britons with the Belgic tribes of the Continent. See the opening
chapters of Rhys and Brynmor-Jones’s _Welsh People_; also Rhys’s _Early
Britain_ (London, 1882); Zupitza, “Kelten und Gallier,” _Zeitschrift für
keltische Phil._, 1902; T. H. Huxley, “On some Fixed Points in British
Ethnology,” _Contemporary Review_ for 1871, reprinted in Essays
(Appleton’s, 1894); Ripley, _Races of Europe_, chap. xii. (New York,
1899).

[149] The Irish art of illumination presents analogies to the literature.
The finesse of design and execution in the _Book of Kells_ (seventh
century) is astonishing. Equally marvellous was the work of Irish
goldsmiths. Both arts doubtless made use of designs common upon the
Continent, and may even have drawn suggestions from Byzantine or late
Roman patterns. Nevertheless, illumination and the goldsmith’s art in
Ireland are characteristically Irish and the very climax of barbaric
fashions. Their forms pointed to nothing further. These astounding
spirals, meanders, and interlacings, combined with utterly fantastic and
impossible drawings of the human form, required essential modification
before they were suited to form part of that organic development of
mediaeval art which followed its earlier imitative periods.

Irish illumination was carried by Columba to Iona, and spread thence
through many monasteries in the northern part of Britain. It was imitated
in the Anglo-Saxon monasteries of Northumbria, and from them passed with
Alcuin to the Court of Charlemagne. Through these transplantings the Irish
art was changed, under the hands of men conversant with Byzantine and
later Roman art. The influence of the art also worked outward from Irish
monasteries upon the Continent, St. Gall, for example. The Irish
goldsmith’s art likewise passed into Saxon England, into Carolingian
France, and into Scandinavia. See J. H. Middleton, _Illuminated
Manuscripts_ (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1892), and the different view as to
the sources of Irish illuminating art in Muntz, _Études iconographiques_
(Paris, 1887); also Kraus, _Geschichte der christlichen Kunst_, i.
607-619; Margaret Stokes, _Early Christian Art in Ireland_ (South
Kensington Museum Art Hand-Books, 1894), vol. i. p. 32 _sqq._, and vol.
ii. pp. 73, 78; Sophus Müller, _Nordische Altertumskunde_, vol. ii. chap.
xiv. (Strassburg, 1898).

[150] The classification of ancient Irish literature is largely the work
of O’Curry, _Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish
History_ (Dublin, 1861, 2nd ed., 1878). See also D. Hyde, _A Literary
History of Ireland_, chaps. xxi.-xxix. (London, 1899); D’Arbois de
Jubainville, _Introduction à l’étude de la littérature celtique_, chap.
préliminaire (Paris, 1883). The tales of the Ulster Cycle, in the main,
antedate the coming of the Norsemen in the eighth century; but the later
redactions seem to reflect Norse customs; see Pflugk-Hartung, in _Revue
celtique_, t. xiii. (1892), p. 170 _sqq._

[151] This comparison with Homeric society might be extended so as to
include the Celts of Britain and Gaul. Close affinities appear between the
Gauls and the personages of the Ulster Cycle. Several of its Sagas have to
do with the “hero’s portion” awarded to the bravest warrior at the feast,
a source of much pleasant trouble. Posidonius, writing in the time of
Cicero, mentions the same custom among the Celts of Gaul (Didot-Müller,
_Fragmenta hist. Graec._ t. iii. p. 260, col. 1; D’Arbois de Jubainville,
_Introduction_, etc., pp. 297, 298).

[152] Probably first written down in the seventh century. Some of the
Cuchulain Sagas are rendered by D’Arbois de Jubainville, _Épopée
celtique_; they are given popularly in E. Hull’s Cuchulain Saga (D. Nutt,
London, 1898). Also to some extent in Hyde’s _Lit. Hist., etc._

[153] See the famous Battle of the Ford between Cuchulain and Ferdiad
(Hyde, _Lit. Hist. of Ireland_, pp. 328-334). A more burlesque hyperbole
is that of the three caldrons of cold water prepared for Cuchulain to cool
his battle-heat: when he was plunged in the first, it boiled; plunged into
the second, no one could hold his hand in it; but in the third, the water
became tepid (D’Arbois de Jubainville, _Épopée celtique_, p. 204).

[154] Certain interpolated Christian chapters at the end tell how Mældun
is led to forgive the murderers--an idea certainly foreign to the original
pagan story, which may perhaps have had its own ending. The tale is
translated in P. W. Joyce’s _Old Celtic Romances_ (London, 1894), and by
F. Lot in D’Arbois de Jubainville’s _Épopée celtique_, pp. 449-500.

[155] Perhaps no one of the Ulster Sagas exhibits these qualities more
amusingly than _The Feast of Bricriu_, a tale in which contention for the
“hero’s portion” is the leading motive. Its _personae_ are the men and
women who constantly appear and reappear throughout this cycle. In this
Saga they act and speak admirably in character, and some of the
descriptions bring the very man before our eyes. It is translated by
George Henderson, Vol. II. Irish Texts Society (London, 1899), and also by
D’Arbois de Jubainville in his _Épopée celtique_ (Paris, 1892).

[156] For example, in a historical Saga the great King Brian speaks,
fighting against the Norsemen: “O God ... retreat becomes us not, and I
myself know I shall not leave this place alive; and what would it profit
me if I did? For Aibhell of Grey Crag came to me last night, and told me
that I should be killed this day.”

[157] “Deirdre, or the Fate of the Sons of Usnach,” is rendered in E.
Hull’s Cuchulain Saga; Hyde, _Lit. Hist._, chap, xxv., and D’Arbois de
Jubainville, _Épopée celtique_, pp. 217-319. _The Pursuit of Diarmuid and
Grainne_ was edited by O’Duffy for the Society for the Preservation of the
Irish Language (Dublin, Gill and Son, 1895), and less completely in
Joyce’s _Old Celtic Romances_ (London, 1894).

[158] Cf. Hyde, _o.c._, chaps. xxi. xxxvi.

[159] _The Voyage of Bran_, edited and translated by Kuno Meyer, with
essays on the _Celtic Otherworld_, by Alfred Nutt (2 vols., David Nutt,
London, 1895). A Saga usually is prose interspersed with lyric verses at
critical points of the story.

[160] On Tara, see Index in O’Curry’s _Manners and Customs of the Ancient
Irish_; also Hyde, _Literary History_, pp. 126-130. For this story, see
O’Grady, _Silva Gaedelica_, pp. 77-88 (London, 1892); Hyde, pp. 226-232.

[161] See D’Arbois de Jubainville, _Introduction à la lit. celtique_, pp.
259-271 (Paris, 1883).

[162] See D’Arbois de Jubainville, _Introduction_, etc., p. 129 _sqq._;
Bertrand, _La Religion des Gaulois_, chap. xx. (Paris, 1897). Also
O’Curry, _o.c._ _passim_.

[163] For this whole story see H. Zimmer, “Über die frühesten Berührungen
der Iren mit den Nordgermanen,” _Sitzungsbericht der Preussischen Akad._,
1891 (1), pp. 279-317.

[164] For the life of Saint Columba the chief source is the _Vita_ by
Adamnan, his eighth successor as abbot of Iona. It contains well-drawn
sketches of the saint and much that is marvellous and incredible. It was
edited with elaborate notes by Dr. W. Reeves, for the Irish Archaeological
Society, in 1857. His work, rearranged and with a translation of the
_Vita_, was republished as Vol. VI. of _The Historians of Scotland_
(Edinburgh, 1874). The _Vita_ may also be found in Migne, _Patrologia
Latina_, 88, col. 725-776. Bede, _Ecc. Hist._ iii. 4, refers to Columba.
The Gaelic life from the _Book of Lismore_ is published, with a
translation by M. Stokes, _Anecdota Oxoniensia_ (Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1890). The Bodleian Eulogy, _i.e._ the _Amra Choluim chille_, was
published, with translation by M. Stokes, in _Revue celtique_, t. xx.
(1899); as to its date, see _Rev. celtique_, t. xvii. p. 41. Another
(later) Gaelic life has been published by R. Henebry in the _Zeitschrift
für celtische Philologie_, 1901, and later. There is an interesting
article on the hymns ascribed to Columba in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ for
September 1899. See also Cuissard, _Rev. celtique_, t. v. p. 207. The
hymns themselves are in Dr. Todd’s _Liber Hymnorum_. Montalembert’s _Monks
of the West_, book ix. (vol. iii. Eng. trans.), gives a long, readable,
and uncritical account of “St. Columba, the Apostle of Caledonia.”

[165] The Irish monastery was ordered as an Irish clan, and indeed might
be a clan monastically ordered. At the head was an abbot, not elected by
the monks, but usually appointed by the preceding abbot from his own
family; as an Irish king appointed his successor. The monks ordinarily
belonged to the abbot’s clan. They lived in an assemblage of huts. Some
devoted themselves to contemplation, prayer, and writing; more to manual
labour. There were recluses among them. Besides the monks, other members
of the clan living near the “monastery” owed it duties and were entitled
to its protection and spiritual ministration. The abbot might be an
ordained priest; he rarely was a bishop, though he had bishops under him
who at his bidding performed such episcopal functions as that of
ordination. But he was the ruler, lay as well as spiritual. Not
infrequently he also was a king. Although there was no common ordering of
Irish monasteries, a head monastery might bear rule over its daughter
foundations, as did Columba’s primal monastery of Iona over those in
Ireland or Northern Britain which owed their origin to him. Irish
monasteries might march with their clan on military expeditions, or carry
on a war of monastery against monastery. “A.D. 763. A battle was fought at
Argamoyn, between the fraternities of Clonmacnois and Durrow, where Dermod
Duff, son of Donnell, was killed with 200 men of the fraternity of Durrow.
Bresal, son of Murchadh, with the fraternity of Clonmacnois, was victor”
(_Ancient Annals_). This entry is not alone, for there is another one of
the year 816, in which a “fraternity of Colum-cille” seems to have been
worsted in battle, and then to have gone “to Tara to curse” the reigning
king. See Reeve’s _Adamnan’s Life of Columba_, p. 255. Of course Irish
armies felt no qualms at sacking the monasteries and slaying the monks of
another kingdom. The sanctuaries of Clonmacnois, Kildare, Clonard, Armagh
were plundered as readily by “Christian” Irishmen as by heathen Danes. In
the ninth century, Phelim, King of Munster, was an abbot and a bishop too;
but he sacked the sacred places of Ulster and killed their monks and
clergy. See G. T. Stokes, _Ireland and the Celtic Church_; Killen, _Eccl.
Hist. of Ireland_, vol. i. p. 145 _sqq._

[166] The title of saint is regularly given to the higher clergy of this
period in Ireland.

[167] _“The History of Ireland by Geoffrey Keating” in the original Gaelic
with an English translation, by Comyn and Dineen_ (Irish Texts Society.
David Nutt, London, 1902-1908).

[168] This means that he copied a manuscript belonging to Finnian.

[169] The Life of Colomb Cille from the _Book of Lismore_.

[170] Adamnan.

[171] _B.G._ iv. 1-3; vi. 21-28. For convenience I use the word _Teuton_
as the general term and _German_ as relating to the Teutons of the lands
still known as German. But with reference to the times of Caesar and
Tacitus the latter word must be taken generally.

[172] These views are set forth brilliantly, but with exaggeration, by
Fustel de Coulanges, in _L’Invasion germanique_, vol. ii. of his
_Institutions politiques_, etc. (revised edition, Paris, 1891).

[173] Apoll. Sid. _Epist._ viii. 6 (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 58, col. 697).

[174] See Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_; and Pollock,
_English Law before the Norman Conquest_, _Law Quarterly Review_.

[175] The ancient Anglo-Saxon version is Anglo-Saxon through and through.
The considerable store of Latin (or Greek) words retained by the
“authorized” English version (for example, Scripture, Testament, Genesis,
Exodus, etc., prophet, evangelist, religion, conversion, adoption,
temptation, redemption, salvation, and damnation) were all translated into
sheer Anglo-Saxon. See Toller, _Outlines of the History of the English
Language_ (Macmillan & Co., 1900), pp. 90-101. Some hundreds of years
before, Ulfilas’s fourth century Gothic translation had shown a Teutonic
tongue capable of rendering the thought of the Pauline epistles.

[176] See the “Beowulf” translated in Gummere’s _Oldest English Epic_
(Macmillan & Co., 1909).

[177] This is the closing sentence of Alfred’s _Blossoms_, culled from
divers sources. Hereafter (Chapter IX.) when speaking of the introduction
of antique and Christian culture there will be occasion to note more
specifically what Alfred accomplished in his attempt to increase knowledge
throughout his kingdom.

[178] See _e.g._ in Otfried’s _Evangelienbuch_, _post_, Chapter IX.

[179] For example: _skidunga_ (Scheidung), _saligheit_ (Seligkeit),
_fiantscaft_ (Feindschaft), _heidantuom_ (Heidentum). By the eighth
century the High German of the Bavarians and Alemanni began to separate
from the Low German of the lower Rhine, spoken by Saxons and certain of
the Franks. The greater part of the Frankish tribes, and the Thuringians,
occupied intermediate sections of country and spoke dialects midway
between Low German and High.

[180] Text in Piper’s _Die älteste Literatur_ (Deutsche National Lit.).

[181] On the Waltari poem, see Ebert, _Allgemeine Gesch. der Literatur des
Mittelalters_, Bd. iii. 264-276; also K. Strecker, “Probleme in der
Walthariusforschung,” _Neue Jahrbücher für klass. Altertumsgesch. und
Deutsche Literatur_, 2te Jahrgang (Leipzig, 1899), pp. 573-594, 629-645.
The author is called Ekkehart I. (d. 973), being the first of the
celebrated monks bearing that name at St. Gall. The poem is edited by
Peiper (Berlin, 1873), and by Scheffel and Holder (Stuttgart, 1874); it is
translated into German by the latter, by San Marte (Magdeburg, 1853), and
by Althof (Leipzig, 1902).

[182] The description of Siegfried’s love for Kriemhild is just touched by
the chivalric love, which exists in Wolfram’s _Parzival_, in Gottfried’s
_Tristan_, and of course in their French models. See _post_, Chapter
XXIII. For example, as he first sees her who was to be to him “beide lieb
und leit,” he becomes “bleich unde rôt”; and at her greeting, his spirit
is lifted up: “dô wart im von dem gruoze vil wol gehoehét der muot.” And
the scene is laid in May (_Nibelungenlied_, Aventiure V., stanzas 284,
285, 292, 295).

[183] A convenient edition of the _Kudrun_ is Pfeiffer’s in _Deutsche
Klassiker des Mittelalters_ (Leipzig, 1880). Under the name of _Gudrun_ it
is translated into modern German by Simrock, and into English by M. P.
Nichols (Boston, 1899).

[184] _Kudrun_, viii. 558. Whatever may have been the facts of German life
in the Middle Ages, the literature shows respect for marriage and woman’s
virtue. This remark applies not only to those works of the Middle High
German tongue which are occupied with themes of Teutonic origin, but also
to those--Wolfram’s _Parzival_, for example--whose foreign themes do not
force the poet to magnify adulterous love. When, however, that is the
theme of the story, the German writer, as in Gottfried’s _Tristan_, does
not fail to do it justice.

Willmans, in his _Leben und Dichtung Walthers von der Vogelweide_ (Bonn,
1882), note 1{a} on page 328, cites a number of passages from Middle High
German works on the serious regard for marriage held by the Germans. Even
the German minnesingers sometimes felt the contradiction between the
broken marriage vow and the ennobling nature of chivalric love. See
Willmans, _ibid._ p. 162 and note 7.

[185] _Kudrun_, xx. 1013.

[186] _Kudrun_, xxx. 1632 _sqq._

[187] As to the _Parzival_, and Walter’s poems, see _post_, Chapters XXIV.
XXVI.

[188] _Ante_, Chapter I.

[189] It is not known when Teutons first entered Denmark and the
Scandinavian peninsula. Although non-Teutonic populations may have
preceded them, the archaeological remains do not point clearly to a
succession of races, while they do indicate ages of stone, bronze, and
iron (Sophus Müller, _Nordische Altertumskunde_). The bronze ages began in
the Northlands a thousand years or more before Christ. In course of time,
beautiful bronze weapons show what skill the race acquired in working
metals not found in Scandinavia, but perhaps brought there in exchange for
the amber of the Baltic shores. The use of iron (native to Scandinavia)
begins about 500 B.C. A progressive facility in its treatment is evinced
down to the Christian Era. Then a foreign influence appears--Rome. For
Roman wares entered these countries where the legionaries never set foot,
and native handicraft copied Roman models until the fourth century, when
northern styles reassert themselves. The Scandinavians themselves were
unaffected by Roman wares; but after the fifth century they began to
profit from their intercourse with Anglo-Saxons and Irish.

[190] It is said that some twenty-five thousand Arabian coins, mostly of
the Viking periods, have been found in Sweden.

[191] See Vigfusson and Powell, _Corpus poeticum Boreale_, i. 238.

[192] There is much controversy as to the date (the Viking Age?) and place
of origin (Norway, the Western Isles, or Iceland?) of the older Eddic
poems; also as to the presence of Christian elements. The last are denied
by Müllenhoff (_Deutsche Altertumskunde_, Bd. v., 1891) and others; while
Bugge finds them throughout the whole Viking mythology (_Home of the Eddic
Poems_, London, D. Nutt, 1899), and Chr. Bang has endeavoured to prove
that the _Voluspa_, the chief Eddic mythological poem, was an imitation of
the Christian Sibyl’s oracles (_Christiania Videnskabsselskabs
Forhanlinger_, 1879, No. 9; Müllenhoff, _o.c._ Bd. v. p. 3 _sqq._).
Similar views are held in Vigfusson and Powell’s _Corpus poeticum Boreale_
(i. ci.-cvii. and 427). These scholars find Celtic influences in the Eddic
poems. The whole controversy is still far from settlement.

As for English translations of the _Edda_, that by B. Thorpe (_Edda
Samundar_) is difficult to obtain. Those of the _Corpus poeticum Boreale_
are literal; but the phraseology of the renderings of the mythological
poems is shaped to the theory of Christian influence. A recent translation
(1909) is that of Olive Bray (Viking Club), _The Elder or Poetic Edda_,
Part I. The Mythological Poems.

[193] The best account of the Sagas, in English, is the Prolegomena to
Vigfusson’s edition of the Sturlunga Saga (Clarendon Press, 1878).
Dasent’s Introduction to his translation of the Njáls Saga (Edinburgh,
1861) is instructive as to the conditions of life in Iceland in the early
times. W. P. Ker’s _Epic and Romance_ (Macmillan & Co., 1897) has
elaborate literary criticism upon the Sagas. The following is Vigfusson’s:
“The Saga proper is a kind of prose Epic. It has its fixed laws, its set
phrases, its regular epithets and terms of expression, and though there
is, as in all high literary form, an endless diversity of interest and
style, yet there are also bounds which are never over-stepped, confining
the Saga as closely as the employment and restrictions of verse could do.
It will be best to take as the type the smaller Icelandic Saga, from which
indeed all the later forms of composition have sprung. This is, in its
original form, the story of the life of an Icelandic gentleman, living
some time in the tenth or eleventh centuries. It will tell first of his
kin, going back to the settler from whom he sprung, then of his youth and
early promise before he left his father’s house to set forth on that
foreign career which was the fitting education of the young Northern
chief. These _wanderjahre_ passed in trading voyages and pirate cruises,
or in the service of one of the Scandinavian kings, as poet or henchman,
the hero returns to Iceland a proved man, and the main part of the story
thus preluded begins. It recounts in fuller detail and in order of time
his friendships and his enmities, his exploits and renown, and finally his
death; usually concluding with the revenge taken for him by his kinsmen,
which fitly winds up the whole. This tale is told in an earnest,
straightforward way, as by a man talking, in short simple sentences,
changing when the interest grows into the historic present, with here and
there an ‘aside’ of explanation put in.... The whole composition, grouped
around a single man and a single place, is so well balanced and so
naturally unfolded piece by piece, that the great art shown therein often
at first escapes the reader.”

[194] The Story of Burnt Njal (Njáls Saga or Njála), trans. by Dasent (2
vols. Edinburgh, 1861). A prose narrative interspersed with occasional
lyric verses is the form which the Icelandic Sagas have in common with the
Irish. In view of the mutual intercourse and undoubted mingling of Norse
and Celtic blood both in Ireland and Iceland, it is probable that the
Norse Saga-form was taken from the Irish. But, except in the Laxdæla Saga
(trans. by Mrs. Press in the Temple Classics, Dent, 1899), one seems to
find no Celtic strain. The Sagas are the prose complement of the poetic
_Edda_. Both are Norse absolutely: fruit of one spirit, part of one
literature, a possession of one people. As to racial purity of blood in
their authors and fashioners, or in the men of whom the tales are told,
that is another matter. Who shall say that Celtic blood and inherited
Celtic gifts of expression were not the leaven of this Norse literature?
But whatever entered into it and helped to create it, became Norse just as
vitally as, ages before, every foreign suggestion adopted by a certain
gifted Mediterranean race was Hellenized, and became Greek. In Iceland, in
the Orkneys and the Faroes, Viking conditions, the Viking spirit, and
Norse blood, dominated, assimilating, transforming and doubtless using
whatever talents and capacities came within the vortex of Viking life.

It may be added that there is merely an accidental likeness between the
Saga and the Cantafable. In the Saga the verses are the utterances of the
heroes when specially moved. One may make a verse as a short death-song
when his death is imminent, or as a gibe on an enemy, whom he is about to
attack. In the Cantafable--_Aucassin and Nicolette_, for example--the
verses are a lyric summary of the parts of the narrative following them,
and are not spoken by the _dramatis personae_. The Cantafable (but not the
Sagas) perhaps may be traced back to such a work as Boëthius’s _De
consolatione_, which at least is identical in form, or Capella’s _De
nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii_. The _De planctu naturae_ of Alanus de
Insulis (_post_, Chapter XXXII. 1) plainly shows such antecedents.

[195] Story of Gisli the outlaw, trans. by Dasent, chap. ix. (Edinburgh,
1866).

[196] The Story of Burnt Njal, chap. i., trans. by Dasent.

[197] The Story of Grettir the Strong (Grettis Saga), chaps. 32-35, trans.
by Magnusson and Morris (London, 1869). See also _ibid._ chaps. 65, 66.
These accounts are analogous to the story of Beowulf’s fights with Grendal
and his dam; but are more convincing.

[198] The stories of the Kings of Norway, called the _Round World_
(Heimskringla), by Snorri Sturluson, done into English by Magnusson and
Morris (London, 1893). Snorri Sturluson (b. 1178, d. 1241) composed or put
together the _Heimskringla_ from earlier writings, chiefly those of Ari
the Historian (b. 1067, d. 1148), “a man of truthfulness, wisdom, and good
memory,” who wrote largely from oral accounts.

[199] The Story of Egil Skallagrimson, trans. by W. C. Green (London,
1893).

[200] These poems are in the Saga, and will be found translated in Mr.
Green’s edition. They are also edited with prose translations in _C.P.B._,
vol. i. pp. 266-280. With Egil one may compare the still more truculent,
but very different Grettir, hero of the Grettis Saga. The Story of Grettir
the Strong, trans. by Magnusson and Morris (2nd ed., London, 1869).

[201] Bede, _Hist. Ecc._ i. 13. Moreover, the chief partisan of Pelagius
(a Briton) was Coelestinus, an Irishman whose restless activity falls in
the thirty years preceding the mission of Palladius.

[202] As for the Irish Church in Ireland, there were many differences in
usage between it and the Church of Rome. In the matters of Easter and the
tonsure the southern Irish were won over to the Roman customs before the
middle of the seventh century, and after that the Roman Easter made its
way to acceptance through the island. Yet still the Irish appear to have
used their own Liturgy, and to have shown little repugnance to the
marriage of priests. The organization of the churches remained monastic
rather than diocesan or episcopal, in spite of the fact that “bishops,”
apparently with parochial functions, existed in great numbers. Hereditary
customs governed the succession of the great abbots, as at Armagh, until
the time of St. Malachy, a contemporary of St. Bernard. See St. Bernard’s
_Life of Malachy_, chap. x.; Migne 182, col. 1086, cited by Killen, _o.c._
vol. i. p. 173. The exertions of Gregory VII. and Lanfranc, Archbishop of
Canterbury, did much to bring the Irish Church into obedience to Rome.
Various Irish synods in the twelfth century completed a proper diocesan
system; and in 1155 a bull of Adrian IV. delivered the island over to
Henry II. Plantagenet. Cf. Killen, _Eccl. Hist. of Ireland_, vol. i. pp.
162-222.

[203] The works of St. Columbanus or Columban, usually called of Luxeuil,
are printed in Migne’s _Patrologia Latina_, 80, col. 209-296. The chief
source of knowledge of his life is the _Vita_ by Jonas his disciple:
Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 87, col. 1009-1046. It has been translated by D. C.
Munro, in vol. ii. No. 7 (series of 1895) of _Translations, etc._,
published by University of Pennsylvania (Phila. 1897). See also
Montalembert, _Monks of the West_, book vii. (vol. ii. of English
translation).

[204] The article of H. Zimmer, “Über die Bedeutung des irischen Elements
für die mittelalterliche Cultur,” _Preussische Jahrbücher_, Bd. 59, 1887,
presents an interesting summary of the Irish influence. His views, and
still more those of Ozanam in _Civilisation chrétienne chez les Francs_,
chap, v., should be controlled by the detailed discussion in Roger’s
_L’Enseignement des lettres classiques d’Ausone à Alcuin_ (Paris, 1905),
chaps. vi. vii. and viii. See also G. T. Stokes, _Ireland and the Celtic
Church_, Lect. XI. (London, 1892, 3rd ed.); D’Arbois de Jubainville,
_Introduction à l’étude de la littérature celtique_, livre ii. chap. ix.;
F. J. H. Jenkinson, _The Hisperica Famina_ (Cambridge and New York, 1909).
Obviously it is unjustifiable (though it has been done) to regard the
scholarship of gifted Irishmen who lived on the Continent in the ninth
century (Sedulius Scotus, Eriugena, etc.) as evidence of scholarship in
Ireland in the sixth, seventh, or eighth century. We do not know where
these later men obtained their knowledge; there is little reason to
suppose that they got it in Ireland.

[205] See the narrative in Green’s _History of the English People_.

[206] There is no positive evidence that Augustine painted the terrors of
the Day of Judgment in his first preaching. But it was a chief part of the
mediaeval Gospel, and never absent from the soul of Augustine’s master,
Gregory. The latter set it forth vividly in his letter to Ethelbert after
his baptism (Bede, _Hist. Ecc._ i. 32).

[207] Bede, _Hist. Ecc._ iii. 22, tells how a certain noble gesith slew
his king from exasperation with the latter’s practice of forgiving his
enemies, instead of requiting them, according to the principles of heathen
morality.

[208] Bede, _Hist. Ecc._ i. 30. Well known are the picturesque scenes
surrounding the long controversy as to Easter between the Roman clergy and
the British and Irish. The matter bulks hugely in Bede’s book, as it did
in his mind.

[209] Bede ii. 13.

[210] _E.g._ as in Bede iii. 1.

[211] One may bear in mind that practically all active proselytizing
Christianity of the period was of a monastic type.

[212] A.D. 709. _Hist. Ecc._ v. 19, where another instance is also given;
and see _ibid._ v. 7.

[213] See the pieces in Thorpe’s _Codex Exoniensis_, _e.g._ the
“Supplication,” p. 452.

[214] _Ecc. Hist._ iv. 22.

[215] Bede, _Hist. Ecc._ iii. 19; v. 12, 13, 14. Of these the most famous
is the vision of Fursa, an Irishman; but others were had by Northumbrians.
Plummer, in his edition of Bede, vol. ii. p. 294, gives a list of such
visions in the Middle Ages.

[216] On Aldhelm see Ebert, _Allegemeine Ges. des Lit. des Mittelalters_;
and Roger, _L’Enseignement des lettres classiques_, etc., p. 288 _sqq._

[217] This is noticeable in his Commentary on the Gospel of John, Migne,
_Pat. Lat._ 92, col. 633 _sqq._

[218] Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 91, col. 9. In another prefatory epistle to the
same bishop Acca, Bede intimates that he has abridged the language of the
Fathers: he says it is inconvenient always to put their names in the text.
Instead he has inscribed the proper initials of each Father in the margin
opposite to whatever he may have taken from him (_in Lucae Evangelium
expositio_, Migne 92, col. 304).

[219] Migne 90, col. 258; _ibid._ col. 422. I have not observed this
statement in Isidore.

[220] All of these are in t. 90 of Migne.

[221] His writings fill about five volumes (90-95) in Migne’s _Patrol.
Latina_. A list may be found in the article “Bede” in the _Dictionary of
National Biography_. _Beda der Ehrwürdige_, by Karl Werner (Vienna, 1881),
is a good monograph.

[222] _Ante_, Chapter IV.

[223] _The Works of King Alfred the Great_ are translated from Anglo-Saxon
in the Jubilee edition of Giles (2 vols., London, 1858). The _Pastoral
Care_ and the _Orosius_ are translated by Henry Sweet in the publications
of the Early English Text Society. W. J. Sedgefield’s translation of
Alfred’s version of the _Consolations of Boëthius_ is very convenient from
the italicizing of the portions added by Alfred to Boëthius’s original.
The extracts given in the following pages have been taken from these
editions.

[224] Boëthius’s words, which Alfred here paraphrases and supplements are
as follows: “Tum ego, scis, inquam, ipsa minimum nobis ambitionem
mortalium rerum fuisse dominatam; sed materiam gerendis rebus optavimus,
quo ne virtus tacita consenesceret” (_De consol. phil._ ii. prosa 7).

[225] The substance of this bracketed clause is in Boëthius--the last
words quoted in the preceding note.

[226] Toward the close of his life Alfred gathered some thoughts from
Augustine’s _Soliloquies_ and from other writings, with which he mingled
reflections of his own. He called the book _Blossoms_. He says in his
preface: “I gathered me then staves and props, and bars, and helves for
each of my tools, and boughs; and for each of the works that I could work,
I took the fairest trees, so far as I might carry them away. Nor did I
ever bring any burden home without longing to bring home the whole wood,
if that might be; for in every tree I saw something of which I had need at
home. Wherefore I exhort every one who is strong, and has many wains, that
he direct his steps to the same wood where I cut the props. Let him there
get him others, and load his wains with fair twigs, that he may weave
thereof many a goodly wain, and set up many a noble house, and build many
a pleasant town, and dwell therein in mirth and ease, both winter and
summer, as I could never do hitherto. But He who taught me to love that
wood, He may cause me to dwell more easily, both in this transitory
dwelling ... and also in the eternal home which He has promised us”
(Translation borrowed from _The Life and Time of Alfred the Great_, by C.
Plummer, Clarendon Press, 1902). These metaphors represent Alfred’s way of
putting what Isidore or Bede or Alcuin meant when they spoke in their
prefaces of searching through the pantries of the Fathers or culling the
sweetest flowers from the patristic meadows. See _e.g._ _ante_, Chapter V.
and _post_, Chapter X.

[227] Far into the Frankish period there were many heathen in northern
Gaul and along the Rhine: Hauck, _Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands_, I. Kap.
i. (second edition, Leipzig, 1898). Cf. Vacandard, “L’Idolatrie en Gaule
au VI{e} et au VII{e} siècles,” _Rev. des questions historiques_, 65
(1899), 424-454.

[228] _Mon. Germ. hist. Auctores antiquissimi_, tom. i. Cf. Ebert, _Ges.
des Lit. des Mittelalters_, i. 452 _sqq._

[229] Cf. _ante_, Chapter VI.

[230] In those of its lands which were granted immunity from public
burdens, the Church gradually acquired a jurisdiction by reason of its
right to exact penalties, which elsewhere fell to the king.

[231] The synod of 549 declared (ineffectually) for the election of
bishops, to be followed by royal confirmation.

[232] Hauck, _Kirchenges. Deutschlands_, Bd. I. Buch ii. Kap. ii.; Möller,
_Kirchengeschichte_, Bd. II. p. 52 _sqq._ (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1893).

[233] Carloman went at first to Rome, and built a monastery, in which he
lived for a while. But here his _contemptum regni terreni_ brought him
more renown than his monk’s soul could endure. So, with a single
companion, he fled, and came unmarked and in abject guise to Monte
Cassino. He announced himself as a murderer seeking to do penance, and was
received on probation. At the end of a year he took the vows of a monk. It
happened that he was put to help in the kitchen, where he worked humbly
but none too dexterously, and was chidden and struck by the cook for his
clumsiness. At which he said with placid countenance, “May the Lord
forgive thee, brother, and Carloman.” This occurring for the third time,
his follower fell on the cook and beat him. When the uproar had subsided,
and an investigation was called before the brethren, the follower said in
explanation, that he could not hold back, seeing the vilest of the vile
strike the noblest of all. The brethren seemed contemptuous, till the
follower proclaimed that this monk was Carloman, once King of the Franks,
who had relinquished his kingdom for the love of Christ. At this the
terrified monks rose from their seats and flung themselves at Carloman’s
feet, imploring pardon, and pleading their ignorance. But Carloman,
rolling on the ground before them (_in terram provolutus_) denied it all
with tears, and said he was not Carloman, but a common murderer.
Nevertheless, thenceforth, recognized by all, he was treated with great
reverence (_Regino, Chronicon_, Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 132, col. 45).

[234] For example, immunity (from governmental taxation and visitation)
might attach to the lands of bishops and abbots, as it might to the lands
of a lay potentate. On the other hand, the lands of bishops and abbots
owed the Government such temporal aid in war and peace as would have
attached to them in the hands of laymen. Such dignitaries had high secular
rank. The king did not interfere with the appointment and control of the
lower clergy by their lords, the bishops and abbots, any more than he did
with the domestic or administrative appointments of great lay
functionaries within their households or jurisdictions.

[235] There are numerous editions of the _Heliand_: by Sievers (1878), by
Rückert (1876). Very complete is Heyne’s third edition (Paderborn, 1883).
Portions of it are given, with modern German interlinear translation, in
Piper’s _Die älteste Literatur_ (Deutsche Nat. Lit.), pp. 164-186.
Otfrid’s book is elaborately edited by Piper (2nd edition with notes and
glossary, Freiburg i. B., 1882). See also Piper’s _Die älteste Literatur_,
where portions of the work are given with modern German interlinear
translation. Compare Ebert, _Literatur des Mittelalters_, iii. 100-117.

[236] The _Heliand_ uses the epic phrases of popular poetry: they reappear
three centuries later in the _Nibelungenlied_.

[237] _Ante_, Chapter I.

[238] _Ante_, Chapter VI.

[239] _Ante_, Chapter IX.

[240] _E.g._ Charles Martell and Pippin drove the Saracens from
Narbonne--not Charlemagne, to whom these _chansons_ ascribe the deed.

[241] The dates are 801 and 765.

[242] Historical atlases usually devote a double map to the Empire of
Charlemagne, and little side-maps to the Merovingian realm, which included
vast German territories, and for a time extended into Italy.

[243] A part of the serious historian’s task is to get rid of “epochs” and
“renaissances”--Carolingian, Twelfth Century, or Italian. For such there
should be substituted a conception of historical continuity, with effect
properly growing out of cause. Of course, one must have convenient terms,
like “periods,” etc., and they are legitimate; for the Carolingian period
did differ in degree from the Merovingian, and the twelfth century from
the eleventh. But it would be well to eliminate “renaissance.” It seems to
have been applied to the culture of the _quattrocento_, etc., in Italy
sixty or seventy years ago (1845 is the earliest instance in Murray’s
_Dictionary_ of this use of the word), and carries more false notions than
can be contradicted in a summer’s day.

[244] The architecture, sculpture, and painting of the Carolingian time
continued the Christian antique or Byzantine styles. Church interiors were
commonly painted, a custom coming from early Christian mosaic and fresco
decoration. Charlemagne’s Capitularies provided for the renovation of the
churches, including their decorations. No large sculpture has survived;
but we see that there was little artistic originality either in the
illumination of manuscripts or in ivory carving. The royal chapel at Aix
was built on the model of St. Vitale at Ravenna, and its columns appear to
have been taken from existing structures and brought to Aix.

[245] Charlemagne’s famous open letters of general admonition, _de
litteris colendis_ and _de emendatione librorum_, and his _admonitio
generalis_ for the instruction of his legates (_missi_), show that the
fundamental purpose of his exhortations was to advance the true
understanding of Scripture: “ut facilius et rectius divinarum scripturarum
mysteria valeatis penetrare.” To this end he seeks to improve the Latin
education of monks and clergy; and to this end he would have the texts of
Scripture emended and a proper liturgy provided; and, as touching the
last, he refers to the efforts of his father Pippin before him. The best
edition of these documents is by Boretius in the _Monumenta Germaniac
historica_.

[246] As to the stylistic qualities of Carolingian prose and metre see
_post_, Chapters XXXI., XXXII.

[247] Alcuin’s works are printed conveniently in tomes 100 and 101 of
Migne’s _Patrologia Latina_. Extracts are given, _post_, Chapter XXXI., to
indicate the place of Carolingian prose in the development of mediaeval
Latin styles.

[248] Printed in Migne 101, col. 849-902. Alcuin adopted for his _Grammar_
the dialogue form frequent in Anglo-Saxon literature; and from his time
the question and answer of _Discipulus_ and _Magister_ will not cease
their cicada chime in didactic Latin writings.

[249] Migne 101, col. 857. See Mullinger, _Schools of Charles the Great_,
p. 76 (an excellent book), and West’s _Alcuin_, chap. v. (New York, 1892).

[250] As in his _Disputatio Pippini_ (the son of Charlemagne), Migne 101,
col. 975-980, which is just a series of didactic riddles: What is a
letter? The guardian of history. What is a word? The betrayer of the mind.
What generates language? The tongue. What is the tongue? The whip of the
air--and so forth.

[251] _De orthographia_, Migne 101, col. 902-919.

[252] Migne 101, col. 919-950. Mullinger, _o.c._ pp. 83-85.

[253] Migne 101, col. 951-976.

[254] Migne 101, col. 956.

[255] Migne 101, col. 11-56.

[256] Migne 101, col. 613-638.

[257] Migne 100, cols. 737, 744.

[258] An important person. He was born at Mainz about 776. Placed as a
child in the convent of Fulda, his talents and learning caused him to be
sent at the age of twenty-one to Alcuin at Tours for further instruction.
After Alcuin’s death in 804, Rabanus returned to Fulda and was made
Principal of the monastery school. In 822 he was elected Abbot. His
labours gained for him the title of Primus praeceptor Germaniae. Resigning
in 842, he withdrew to devote himself to literary labours; but he was soon
drawn from his retreat and made Archbishop of Mainz. He died in 856. While
archbishop, and also while abbot, Rabanus with spiteful zeal prosecuted
that rebellious monk, the high-born Saxon Gottschalk, who, among other
faults, held too harsh views upon Predestination. His works are published
in Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 107-112.

Rabanus has left huge Commentaries upon the books of the Old and New
Testaments, in which he and his pupils gathered the opinions of the
Fathers. He also added such needful comment of his own as his “exiguity”
of mind permitted (Praef. to _Com. in Lib. Judicum_, Migne 108, col.
1110). His Commentaries were superseded by the _Glossa ordinaria_ (Migne
113 and 114) of his own pupil, Walafrid Strabo, which was systematically
put together from Rabanus and those upon whom he drew. It was smoothly
done, and the writer knew how to eliminate obscurity and prolixity, and in
fact make his work such that it naturally became the Commentary in widest
use for centuries. The dominant interest of these commentators is in the
allegorical significance of Scripture, as we shall see (Chapter XXVII.).
On Rabanus and Walafrid, see Ebert, _Allge. Gesch. der Lit. des
Mittelalters_, ii. 120-166.

[259] _De cleric. inst._ iii. 26 (Migne 107, col. 404).

[260] _Ibid._ iii. 18.

[261] _Ibid._ iii. 20 (Migne 107, col. 397).

[262] Migne III, col. 9-614.

[263] Raban’s excruciating _De laudibus sanctae crucis_ shows what he
could do as a virtuoso in allegorical mystification (Migne 107, col.
137-294).

[264] _De cleric. inst._ iii. 16 (Migne 107, col. 392).

[265] _De cleric. inst._ iii. 25 (Migne 107, col. 403).

[266] Compare his _De magicis artibus_, Migne 110, col. 1095 _sqq._

[267] Migne 107, col. 419 _sqq._

[268] Migne 120, col. 1267-1350.

[269] Ratramnus, _De corpore, etc._ (Migne 121, col. 125-170).

[270] On the Carolingian controversies upon Predestination and the
Eucharist, see Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, vol. iii. chap. vi.

[271] Migne 119, col. 102. Florus called his tract “Libellus Flori
adversus cuiusdam vanissimi hominis, qui cognominatur Joannes, ineptias et
errores de praedestinatione,” etc. Florus was a contemporary of Eriugena.

[272] Migne 106.

[273] Hincmar, _Ep._ 23 (Migne 126, col. 153).

[274] Migne 122, col. 357.

[275] _De div. nat._ i. 69 (Migne 122, col. 513).

[276] One may say that the work of Eriugena in presenting Christianity
transformed in substance as well as form, stood to the work of such a one
as Thomas Aquinas as the work of the Gnostics in the second century had
stood toward the dogmatic formulation of Christianity by the Fathers of
the Church. With the Church Fathers as with Thomas, there was earnest
endeavour to preserve the substance of Christianity, though presenting it
in a changed form. This cannot be said of either the Gnostics or Eriugena.

[277] See Prantl, _Ges. der Logik_, ii. 20-36.

[278] Claudius died about 830. His works are in tome 104 of Migne.

[279] Migne 104, col. 147-158.

[280] Compare Agobard’s Ep. _ad Bartholomaeum_ (Migne 104, col. 179).

[281] _Liber contra judicium Dei_ (Migne 104, col. 250-268). Here the
powerful Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, is emphatically on the opposite
side, and argues lengthily in support of the _judicium aquae frigidae_, in
_Epist._ 26, Migne 126, col. 161. Hincmar (cir. 806-882) was a man of
imposing eminence. He was a great ecclesiastical statesman. The compass
and character of his writings is what might be expected from such an
archiepiscopal man of affairs. They include edifying tracts for the use of
the king, an authoritative Life of St Remi, and writings theological,
political, and controversial. As the writer was not a profound thinker,
his works have mainly that originality which was impressed upon them by
the nature of whatever exigency called them forth. They are contained in
Migne 125, 126.

[282] _Liber de imaginibus sanctorum_ (Migne 104, col. 199-226).

[283] These writings are also in vol. 104 of Migne.

[284] See Wattenbach, _Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen_, i. 130-142 (5th
ed.). Writings known as _Annales_ drew their origin from the notes made by
monks upon the margin of their calendars. These notes were put together
the following year, and subsequently might be revised, perhaps by some
person of larger view and literary skill. Thus the Annals found in the
cloister of Lorsch are supposed to have been rewritten in part by Einhart.

[285] There were two great earlier examples of such histories: one was the
_Historia Francorum_ of Gregory of Tours, the author of which was of
distinguished Roman descent, born in 540 and dying in 594; the other was
Bede’s _Church History of the English People_, which was completed shortly
before its author’s death in 735. In individuality and picturesqueness of
narrative, these two works surpass all the historical writings of the
Carolingian time.

[286] In _Mon. Germ. hist. scrip._ ii.; also Migne, vol. 116, col. 45-76;
trans, in German in _Geschichtsschreiber der deutschen Vorzeit_ (Leipzig).
See also Wattenbach, _Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen_, i., and Ebert,
_Ges. der Lit._ ii. 370 _sqq._

[287] In both these respects a contrary condition had made possible the
endurance of the Roman Empire. Its territories in the main were civilized,
and were traversed by the best of roads, while many of them lay about that
ancient common highway of peoples, the Mediterranean. Then the whole
Empire was leavened, and one part made capable of understanding another,
by the Graeco-Roman culture.

[288] Within his hereditary domain, Hugh had the powers of other feudal
lords; but this domain, instead of expanding, tended to shrink under the
reigns of the Capetians of the eleventh century.

[289] In Conrad’s reign “Burgundy,” comprising most of the eastern and
southern regions of France, and with Lyons and Marseilles, as well as
Basle and Geneva within its boundaries, was added to the Empire.

[290] Papal elections were freed from lay control, and a great step made
toward the emancipation of the entire Church, by the decree of Nicholas
II. in 1059, by which the election of the popes was committed to the
conclave of cardinals.

[291] For the matter of clerical celibacy, and the part played by
monasticism in these reforms, see _post_, Chapter XV.

[292] Gregory VII., _Ep._ iv. 2 (Migne 148, col. 455).

[293] _Ep._ viii. 21 (Migne 148, col. 594).

[294] Migne 148, col. 407, 408. Cf. _post_, Chapter XXXIII.

[295] As between the Empire and the Papacy the particular struggle over
investitures was adjusted by the Concordat of Worms (1122), by which the
Church should choose her bishops; but the elections were to be held in the
presence of the king, who conferred, by special investiture, the temporal
fiefs and privileges. For translations of Gregory’s Letters and other
matter, see J. H. Robinson’s _Readings in European History_, i. 274-293.

[296] See _post_, Chapter XII. The copying of manuscripts was a lucrative
profession in Italy.

[297] Tetralogus, Pertz, _Mon. Germ, scriptores_, xi. 251.

[298] The clerical schools were no less important than the lay, but less
distinctive because their fellows existed north of the Alps. Cathedral
schools may be obscurely traced back to the fifth century; and there were
schools under the direction of the parish priests. In them aspirants for
the priesthood were educated, receiving some Latin and some doctrinal
instruction. So the cathedral and parochial schools helped to preserve the
elements of antique education; but they present no such open cultivation
of letters for their own profane sake as may be found in the schools of
lay grammarians. The monastic schools are better known. From the ninth
century they usually consisted of an outer school (_schola exterior_) for
the laity and youths who wished to become secular priests, and an inner
school (_interior_) for those desiring to become monks. At different times
the monastery schools of Bobbio, Farfa, and other places rose to fame, but
Monte Cassino outshone them all.

As to the schools and culture of Italy during the early Middle Ages, see
Ozanam, _Les Écoles en Italie aux temps barbares_ (in his _Documents
inédits, etc._, and printed elsewhere); Giesebrecht, _De literarum studiis
apud Italos, etc._ (translated into Italian by C. Pascal, Florence, 1895,
under the title _L’ Istruzione in Italia nei primi secoli del Medio-Evo_);
G. Salvioli, _L’ Istruzione publica in Italia nei secoli VIII._, _IX._,
_X._ (Florence, 1898); Novati, _L’ Influsso del pensiero latino sopra la
civilità italiana del Medio-Evo_ (2nd ed., Milan, 1899).

[299] See _post_, Chapter XXXIII., III.

[300] At Salerno, according to the Constitution of Frederick II., three
years’ preliminary study of the _scientia logicalis_ was demanded, because
“numquam sciri potest scientia medicinae nisi de scientia logicali aliquid
praesciatur” (cited by Novati, _L’ Influsso del pensiero latino, etc._, p.
220). Just as Law and Medical Schools in the United States may require a
college diploma from applicants for admission.

[301] On Constantine see Wüstenfeld, “Übersetzungen arabischer Werke,”
etc. _Abhand. Göttingen Gesellschaft_, vol. 22 (1877), pp. 10-20, and p.
55 _sqq._ Also on the Salerno school, Daremberg, _Hist. des sciences
médicales_, vol. i. p. 254 _sqq._

[302] _Traube_, “O Roma nobilis,” _Abhand. philos.-philol. Classe Bayer.
Akad._ Bd. 19, p. 301. This poem probably belongs to the tenth century.
“Archos” is mediaeval Greek for “The Lord.”

[303] The _Rationes dictandi_, a much-used book on the art of composing
letters, comes from the hand of one Alberic, who was a monk at Monte
Cassino in the middle of the eleventh century. He died a cardinal in 1088.
The _ars dictaminis_ related either to drawing legal documents or
composing letters. See _post_, Chapter XXX., II.

[304] See E. Bertaux, _L’Art dans l’Italie méridionale_, i. 155 _sqq._
(Paris, 1904).

[305] The poems of Alphanus are in Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 147, col. 1219-1268.

[306] “Ad Romualdum causidicum,” printed in Ozanam, _Doc. inédits_, p.
259.

[307] Printed in Giesebrecht, _De lit. stud. etc._

[308] Printed by Dummler in _Anselm der Peripatetiker_, pp. 94-102. See
also the rhyming colloquy between Helen and Ganymede, of the twelfth
century, printed in Ozanam, _Documents inédits, etc._, p. 19.

[309] On Liutprand see Ebert, _Ges. der Lit._ iii. 414-427; Molinier,
_Sources de l’histoire de France_, i. 274. His works are in the _Monumenta
Ger._, also in 136 of Migne. The _Antapodosis_ and _Embassy to
Constantinople_ are translated into German in the _Geschichtsschreiber der
deutschen Vorzeit_.

[310] See _Antapod._ vi. 1 (Migne 136, col. 893).

[311] _Antapod._ i. 1 (Migne 136, col. 791).

[312] Migne 136, col. 837.

[313] _Legatio Constantinopolitana_ (Migne 136, col. 909-937).

[314] Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 136, col. 1283-1302.

[315] See Ebert, _Allgem. Ges._ iii. 370, etc.; Novati, _L’Influsso del
pensiero latino, etc._, p. 31 _sqq._; and Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 136.

[316] See Novati, _L’Influsso, etc._, pp. 188-191. The passage is from the
vituperative polemic of a certain Ademarus (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 141, col.
107-108).

[317] Dummler, “Gedichte aus Abdinghof,” in _Neues Archiv_, v. 1 (1876),
p. 181 (cited by Novati, p. 192).

[318] Dummler, _Anselm der Peripatetiker_, p. 36 _sqq._; cf. Hauréau,
_Singularités historiques_, p. 179 _sqq._

[319] The account is from Radolphus Glaber, _Historiarum libri_, ii. 12.

[320] On Damiani’s views of classical studies, see _Opusc._ xi., _Liber
qui dicitur Dominus vobiscum_, cap. i. (Migne 145, col. 232); _Opusc._
xlv., _De sancta simplicitate_ (_ibid._ col. 695); _Opusc._ lviii., _De
vera felicitate et sapientia_ (_ibid._ col. 831). For the life and works
of this interesting man see _post_, p. 262 _sqq._, and _post_, Chapter
XVI.

[321] _Vita Anselmi_, 1247 (cited by Ronca, p. 227).

[322] Another great politico-ecclesiastical Italian was Lanfranc (cir.
1005-1089), whose life was almost exactly contemporaneous with that of
Hildebrand. He was born in high station at Pavia, and educated in letters
and the law. Seized with the desire to be a monk, he left his home and
passed through France, sojourning on his way, until he came to the convent
of Bec in Normandy, in the year 1042. A man of practical ability and a
great teacher, it was he that made the monastery great. Men, lay and
clerical, noble and base, came thronging to hear him: Anselm came and Ives
of Chartres, both future saints, and one who afterwards as Pope Alexander
II. rose before Lanfranc, then Archbishop of Canterbury, and said: “Thus I
honour, not the Archbishop of Canterbury, but the master of the school of
Bec, at whose feet I sat with other pupils.” William the Conqueror made
Lanfranc Primate of England and prince-ruler of the land in the
Conqueror’s absence.

[323] _Petri Damiani Ep._ i. xvi. (Migne 144, col. 236). Damiani’s works
are contained in Migne 144 and 145. Alexander II. was pope from 1061 to
1073, when he was succeeded by Hildebrand.

[324] Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 145, col. 961, 967.

[325] _Opusculum_, xxxvi. (Migne 145, col. 595). It is also bad to be an
abbot, as Damiani shows in plaintive and almost humorous verses:

  “Nullus pene abbas modo
   Valet esse monachus,
   Dum diversum et nocivum
   Sustinet negotium:
   Et, quod velit sustinere,
   Velut iniquus patitur

    *       *       *

  “Spiritaliter abbatem
   Volunt fratres vivere,
   Et per causas saeculares
   Cogunt illum pergere;
   Per tam itaque diversa
   Quis valet incedere?”
                        _De abbatum miseria rhythmus_
                              (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 145, col. 972).

[326] Lib. v. Ep. iv.; cf. Jer. xiii.

[327] Ep. iv. 11 (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 144, col. 313).

[328] He died in 1072, a year before Hildebrand was made pope.

[329] _Opusc._ xvii., _De coelibatu_; _Opusc._ xviii., _Contra
intemperantes clericos_; _Opusc._ xxii., _Contra clericos aulicos_, etc.

[330] Lib. iv. Ep. 5 (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 144, col. 300).

[331] Lib. v. Ep. 3 (Migne 144, col. 343).

[332] Lib. v. Ep. 2 (Migne 144, col. 340). Damiani’s _Rhythmus poenitentis
monachi_ (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 145, col. 971) expresses the passionate
remorse of a sinful monk.

[333] _Post_, Chapter XIX.

[334] Lib. vii. Ep. 18 (Migne 144, col. 458).

[335] Much is contained in the eighth book of his letters. The third
letter of this book is addressed to a nobleman who did not treat his
mother as Peter would have had him. The whole family situation is given in
two sentences: “But you may say: ‘My mother exasperates me often, and with
her rasping words worries me and my wife. We cannot endure such
reproaches, nor tolerate the burden of her severity and interference.’ But
for this, your reward will be the richer, if you return gentleness for
contumely, and mollify her with humility when you are sprinkled with the
salt of her abuse” (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 144, col. 467). Some sentences from
this letter are given _post_, Chapter XXXI., as examples of Latin style.

The next letter is addressed to the same nobleman and his wife on the
death of their son. It gently points out to them that his migration to the
_coelestia regna_, where among the angels he has put on the garment of
immortality, is cause for joy.

[336] _Opusc._ ix., _De eleemosyna_ (Migne 145, col. 207 _sqq._).

[337] _Opusc._ ix., _De eleemosyna_, cap. i.

[338] Seneca, _De vita beata_, 20.

[339] Lib. viii. Ep. 8 (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 144, col. 476). Cf. _ante_, p.
260.

[340] Extracts will be given _post_, Chapter XVI., together with Damiani’s
remarkable Life of Romuald.

[341] Migne 158, col. 50 _sqq._

[342] Anselm was born in 1033 and died in 1109. His works are in Migne
158, 159. See also Domet de Vorges, _S. Anselme_ (Les grands Philosophes,
1901).

[343] “Districtio ordinis,” _Vita_, i. 6. This indicates that liberal
studies were not favoured in Cluny at this time, cir. 1060.

[344] In a convent where there is an abbot, the prior is the officer
directly under him.

[345] _Ante_, Chapter X.

[346] _Cur Deus homo_, i. 1 (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 158, col. 361).

[347] In the _Cur Deus homo_, i. 2, Anselm has his approved disciple state
the same point of view: “As the right order prescribes that we should
believe the profundities of the Christian Faith, before presuming to
discuss them by reason, so it seems to me neglect if after we are
confirmed in faith we do not study to understand what we believe.
Wherefore, since by the prevenient grace of God, I deem myself to hold the
faith of our redemption, so that even if I could by no reason comprehend
what I believe, there is nothing that could pluck me from it, I ask from
thee, as many ask, that thou wouldst set forth to me, as thou knowest it,
by what necessity and reason, God, being omnipotent, should have assumed
the humility and weakness of human nature for its restoration.”

[348] There is indeed an early treatise, _De grammatico_ (Migne 158, col.
561-581), in which Anselm seems to abandon himself to dialectic concerned
with an academic topic. The question is whether _grammaticus_, a
grammarian, is to be subsumed under the category of substance or quality;
dialectically is a grammarian a man or an incident?

[349] Cf. Kaulich, _Ges. der scholastischen Philosophie_, i. 293-332;
Hauréau, _Histoire de la philosophie scholastique_, i. 242-288; Stöckl,
_Philosophie des Mittelalters_, i. 151-208; De Wulf, _History of Medieval
Philosophy_, 3rd ed. (Longmans, 1909), p. 162 _sqq._, and authorities.

[350] The _locus classicus_ is _Proslogion_, cap. 2.

[351] _Cur Deus homo_, i. 12.

[352] _Ibid._ i. 5.

[353] _Ibid._ i. 7.

[354] Examples of Anselm’s prose are given _post_, Chapter XXXI.

[355] On Gerbert see _Lettres de Gerbert publiées avec une introduction,
etc._, par Julien Havet (Paris: Picard, 1889; I have cited them according
to this edition); _Œuvres de Gerbert_, ed. by Olleris (Clermont and Paris,
1867); also in Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 139; Richerus, _Historiarum libri IV._
(especially lib. iii. cap. 55 _sqq._); _Mon. Germ. script._ iii. 561
_sqq._; Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 138, col. 17 _sqq._ Also Picavet, _Gerbert, une
pape philosophe_ (Paris: Leroux, 1897); Cantor, _Ges. der Mathematik_, i.
728-751 (Leipzig, 1880); Prantl, _Ges. der Logik_, ii. 53-57 (Leipzig,
1861).

[356] _Ep._ 12.

[357] _Mon. Germ. scriptores_, iii. 686.

[358] _Ep._ 44.

[359] Presumably Gerbert’s German-speaking scholars are meant.

[360] _Ep._ 45, _Raimundo monacho_.

[361] _Ep._ 46, _ad Geraldum Abbatem_.

[362] _I.e._ on the affairs of the monastery of Bobbio.

[363] A Greek doctor of Augustus’s time, who wrote on the diseases of the
eye.

[364] _Ep._ 130.

[365] _Ep._ 167 (in Migne, _Ep._ 174).

[366] Richer, _Hist._ iii. 47, 48.

[367] Several of his compositions are extant.

[368] Richer, _Hist._ iii. 48-53.

[369] Richer, _Hist._ iii. cap. 55-65.

[370] See _post_, Chapter XXXV. If one should hesitate to find a phase of
the veritable Gerbert in Richer’s report of the disputation with Otric,
one may turn to Gerbert’s own philosophic or logical _Libellus--de
rationali et ratione uti_ (Migne 139, col. 159-168). It is addressed to
Otto II., and the opening paragraph recalls to the emperor the disputation
which we have been following. The _Libellus_ is naturally more coherent
than the disputation, in which Otric’s questions seem intended rather to
trip his adversary than to lead a topic on to its proper end. It is
devoted, however, to a problem exactly analogous to the point taken by
Otric, that the term rational was not as broad as the term mortal. For the
_Libellus_ discusses whether the use of reason (_ratione uti_) can be
predicated of the rational being (_rationale_). The concept of the
predicate should be the broader one, but here it might seem less broad,
since all reasonable beings do not exercise reason. The discussion closely
resembles the dispute in the character of the intellectual interests
disclosed, and its arguments are not more original than those employed
against Otric. Disputation and _Libellus_ alike represent necessary
endeavours of the mind, which has reached a certain stage of tuition and
development, to adjust itself with problems of logical order and method.

[371] _Post_, Chapter XV.

[372] Cf. Sackür, _Die Cluniacenser_, ii. 330 _sqq._; Pfister. _Études sur
le règne de Robert le Pieux_, p. 2 _sqq._ (the latter takes an extreme
view).

[373] Aimoin’s _Vita Abbonis_, cap. 7 (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 139, col. 393).
The same volume contains most of Abbo’s extant writings, and those of
Aimoin. On Abbo see Sackür, _Die Cluniacenser_, ii. 345 _sqq._

An incredibly large number of students are said to have attended Abbo’s
lectures. His studies and teaching lay mainly in astronomy, mathematics,
chronology, and grammar. The pupil Aimoin cultivated history and
biography, compiling a History of the Francs and a History of the miracles
of St. Benedict, the latter a theme worthy of the tenth century. One
leaves it with a sigh of relief, so barren was it save for its feat of
gestation in giving birth to Gerbert.

[374] Jotsaldus, _Vita Odilonis_ (Migne 142, col. 1037).

[375] Odilo, _Vita Maioli_ (Migne 142, col. 951).

[376] See Taylor, _Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_, p. 74 _sqq._
One may compare the influence of Cicero’s _De amicitia_ on the _De
amicitia Christiana_ of Peter of Blois (cir. 1200), Migne 207, col.
871-898.

[377] _Vita Odilonis_, chaps. vi.-xiii. (Migne 142, col. 909 _sqq._).

[378] _Bellum Gallicum_, vi. 13.

[379] Migne 143, col. 1290.

[380] For a description of these works, see _post_, Chapter XXX. II.

[381] The substance of this sketch of the school of Chartres is taken
chiefly from the Abbé Clerval’s exhaustive study, “Les Écoles de Chartres
au moyen âge,” _Mémoires de la Société archéologique d’Eure-et-Loir_, xi.,
1895. For the later fortunes of this school see _post_, Chapter XXX.

[382] The Histories of Gerbert’s pupil Richer are somewhat better, and
show an imitation of Sallust.

[383] Cf. Molinier, _Les Sources de l’histoire de France_, v., lxix.

[384] _Post_, Chapters XXXIV.-XLII.

[385] Born 1078; king from 1108-1137.

[386] _Ante_, Chapter X.

[387] _Ante_, Chapter IX.

[388] On Notker see Piper, _Die älteste Litteratur_ (Deutsche Nat. Lit.),
pp. 337-340.

[389] _Ante_, Chapter XI., where something was said of Liutprand also.
Ratherius was a restless intriguer and pamphleteer, a sort of stormy
petrel, who was born in 890 near Liège. In the course of his career he was
once bishop of that northern city, and three times bishop of Verona, where
he died, an old man of angry soul and bitter tongue. Two years and more
had he passed in a dungeon at Pavia--a sharpening experience for one
already given overmuch to hate. There he compiled his rather dreary six
books of _Praeloquia_ (Migne 136, col. 145-344), preparatory discourses,
perhaps precursive of another work, but at all events containing moral
instruction for all orders of society. It was in the nature of a
compilation, and yet touched with a strain of personal plaint, which
sometimes makes itself clearly audible in words that show this work to
have been its author’s prison _consolatio_: “Think what anguish impelled
me to it, what calamity, what necessity showed me these paths of
authorship. Dread of forgetting was my first reason for writing. Buried
under all sorts of the rubbish of wickedness, surrounded by the darkness
of evil, and distracted with the clamours of affairs, I feared that I
should forget, and was delighted to find how much I could remember. Books
were lacking, and friends to talk with, while sorrow gnawed the soul; so I
used this book of mine as a friend to chat with, and was comforted by it
as by a companion. Nor did I worry, asking who will read it; since I knew
me for its reader, and as its lover, if it had none other” (_Praeloq._ vi.
26; Migne 136, col. 342). On Ratherius see Ebert, _Ges. der Lit._, iii.
375 _sqq._

[390] _Vita Brunonis_, caps. 4, 6.

[391] _Vita Brunonis_, cap. 8.

[392] Cf. _post_, Chapter XXXII., III.

[393] Enough will be found regarding Hrotsvitha and her works in Ebert,
_Allgem. Ges. der Lit._, iii. 285-329.

[394] _Vita Bernwardi_, 6 (Migne 140, col. 397), by Thangmar, who was
Bernward’s teacher and outlived him to write his Life.

[395] Migne 141, col. 1229.

[396] See Froumundus, _Ep._ 9, 11, 13 (Migne 141, col. 1288 _sqq._). A
number of his poems are published by F. Seiler, _Zeitschrift für deutsche
Philologie_, Bd. 14, pp. 406-442.

[397] Migne 141, col. 1292. I am not sure that I have caught Froumund’s
meaning.

[398] _Mon. Ger. Scriptores_, v. 134 _sqq._ (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 146, col.
1027 _sqq._).

[399] _Vita Hermanni_ (Migne 143, col. 29).

[400] The writings of Hermannus Contractus are in Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 143.
The poem is reprinted from Du Meril’s _Poésies populaires_; a more
complete text is in Bd XI. of the _Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum_.

[401] _Ante_, Chapter XII., 1.

[402] Prantl, _Ges. Logik_, ii. 83.

[403] Cf. Endres, “Othloh’s von St. Emmeram Verhältnis zu den freien
Kunsten,” _Philos. Jahrbuch_, 1904.

[404] _Liber visionum._

[405] Othloh’s works are all in tome 146 of Migne’s _Patrologia Latina_.

[406] _Ante_, Chapter XII. 11.

[407] _Ante_, Chapters VIII., IX.

[408] Printed in Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 139, col. 871 _sqq._ and elsewhere.
For editions see Wattenbach, _Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen_, 6th ed. i.
485.

[409] _Post_, Chapter XVI.

[410] Cf. Taylor, _Ancient Ideals_, chaps. xv., xvi.; _Classical
Heritage_, chaps. ii., iii.

[411] Hosea i.-iii.

[412] Sulpicius Severus, _Epist._ iii.

[413] These words occur in Jerome’s famous letter (_Ep._ xiv.), in which
he exhorts the wavering Heliodoras to sever all ties and affections: “Do
not mind the entreaties of those dependent on you, come to the desert and
fight for Christ’s name. If they believe in Christ, they will encourage
you; if they do not,--let the dead bury their dead. A monk cannot be
perfect in his own land; not to wish to be perfect is a sin; leave all,
and come to the desert. The desert loves the naked. O desert, blooming
with the flowers of Christ! O solitude, whence are brought the stones of
the city of the Great King! O wilderness rejoicing close to God! What
would you, brother, in the world,--you that are greater than the world?
How long are the shades of roofs to oppress you? How long the dungeon of a
city’s smoke? Believe me, I see more of light! Do you fear poverty? Christ
called the poor “blessed.” Are you terrified at labour? No athlete without
sweat is crowned. Do you think of food? Faith fears not hunger. Do you
dread the naked ground for limbs consumed with fasts? The Lord lies with
you. Does the infinite vastness of the desert fright you? In the mind walk
abroad in Paradise. Does your skin roughen without baths? Who is once
washed in Christ needs not to wash again. And in a word, hear the apostle
answering: The sufferings of the present time are not to be compared with
the glory to come which shall be revealed in us!”

[414] In my _Classical Heritage_, pp. 136-197, I have given an account of
the origins of monasticism, and of its distinctive western features. There
I have also set out the Rule of Benedict, with sketches of the early
monastic character.

[415] Cyprian said in the third century, addressing himself to Christian
virgins: “Dominus vester et caput Christus est ad instar ad vicem masculi”
(_De habitu virginum_, 22). To realize how near to the full human
relationship was this wedded love of Christ, one should read the
commentaries and sermons upon Canticles. Those of a later time--St.
Bernard’s, for example--are the best, because they sum up so much that had
been gathering fervour through the centuries. One might look further to
those mediaeval instances that break through mysticism to a sensuousness
in which the man Christ becomes an almost too concrete husband for
ecstatic women. See _post_, Chapter XIX.

[416] The whole Christian love, first the love of God and then the love of
man, is felt and set forth by Augustine. “Thou hast made us toward thee,
and unquiet is our heart until it rests in thee.... That is the blessed
life to rejoice toward thee, concerning thee and because of thee.... Give
me thyself, my God.... All my plenty which is not my God is need.” With
his love of God his love for man accords. “This is true love, that
cleaving to truth we may live aright; and for that reason we contemn all
mortal things except the love of men, whereby we wish them to live aright.
Thus can we profitably be prepared even to die for our brethren, as the
Lord Jesus Christ taught us by His example.... It is love which unites
good angels and servants of God in the bond of holiness, joins us to them
and them to us, and subjoins all unto God.” These passages are from the
_Confessions_ and from the _De Trinitate_.

[417] Cf. _Classical Heritage_, p. 123 _sqq._

[418] Augustine, _Epp._ 155, c. 13.

[419] _Ante_, Chapter V.

[420] _Ante_, Chapter IX.

[421] Alcuin, _Ep._ 40 (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 100, col. 201).

[422] Cf. Odo’s _Collationes_, in Migne 133, and Chapter XII. II., _ante_.
Gregory was Odo’s favourite author.

[423] Before Constantine’s reign there had been few Christian basilicas;
Christian art was sepulchral, drawing upon the galleries of the Catacombs,
in meagre and monotonous designs, the symbols of the soul’s deliverance
from death. These designs were antique in style and poor in execution.

[424] See Taylor, _Classical Heritage_, chap. x. sec. 2.

[425] See _Classical Heritage_, p. 267, and cf. _ibid._ chap. ix. sec. 1.

[426] See _post_, Chapter XXXII. II.

[427] The account of the evolution of the hymn from the prose sequence is
given _post_, Chapter XXXII. III.

[428] Further illustrations of the mediaeval emotionalizing of Latin
Christianity could be made from the history of certain Christian
conceptions, angels for example:--the Old and New Testaments and the
Apocrypha contain the revelation of their functions; next, their natures
are defined in the works of the Fathers and the _Celestial Hierarchy_ of
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The matter is gone over at great length,
and their nature and functions logically perfected, by the schoolmen of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But, all the while, religious
feeling, popular credences, and the imagination of poet and artist went on
investing with beauty and loveliness these guardian spirits who carried
out God’s care of man. Thus angels became the realities they were felt to
be.

[429] Hartmann belongs to that great group of courtly German poets whose
lives surround the year 1200. He was the translator of Chrètien de Troye’s
_Erec_ and _Ivain_. See Bech’s _Hartmann von Aue_ (Deutsche klassiker).
The verses quoted can hardly be rendered; but the meaning is as follows:

“My joys were never free from care until the day which showed me the
flowers of Christ which I wear here (_i.e._ the Crusader’s cross). They
herald a summer-time leading to sweet pastures of delight. God help us
thither! The world has treated me so that my spirit yearns therefor;--well
for me! God has been good to me, so that I am released from cares which
tie the feet of many, chaining them here, while I in Christ’s band with
blissful joys fare on.”

These lines carry that same yearning of the simple soul for heaven, _its
home_, which was expressed, some centuries before, in Otfried’s
_Evangelienbuch_ (_ante_, Chapter IX.). The words and their connotations
(_augenweide_, _wünneclich_) are utterly German. Yet the author lived in a
literary atmosphere of translation from the French.

[430] _Post_, Chapter XXV.

[431] The makers of love poems borrowed expressions from poems to the
Virgin. Cf. Wilmanns, _Leben und Dichtung Walter’s Von der Vogelweide_, p.
179. Touches of mortal passion sometimes appear in the adoration of men
for the Blessed Virgin. See _Caesar of Heisterbach_, vii. 32 and 50, and
viii. 58. Of course, many suggestions were drawn also from the antique
literature. See _post_, Chapter XXXII. IV. The subject of courtly and
romantic love will come up properly for treatment in Chapter XXIII.

[432] One will bear in mind that much mediaeval phraseology goes back to
the Fathers. For example, in monkish vilification of woman there is no
phrase more common than _janua diaboli_, and it was Tertullian’s, who died
in the first part of the third century.

[433] For the different meanings of the term _clericus_ see Du Cange,
_Glossarium_, under that word.

[434] For the meanings of this term also see Du Cange, _Glossarium_, under
that word.

[435] Regular clergy are the monks, who live under a _regula_.

[436] _Dialogus miraculorum_, ed. J. Strange, iv. i. (Cologne, 1851). Of
course Caesar was a monk.

[437] _Ante_, Chapter XIV.

[438] See Sackur, _Die Cluniacenser, etc._, _passim_, and Bd. II. 464
(Halle, 1892).

[439] On the differences between Cluny and Citeaux see Vacandard, _Vie de
St Bernard_, chap. iv. (2nd ed., Paris, 1897), and Zöckler, _Askese und
Mönchtum_, 2nd ed. pp. 406-415 (Frankfurt a. M., 1897).

[440] Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 166, col. 1377-1384.

[441] In fact, paragraph 15 provides that at the Chapter accusations
against an abbot shall be brought only by an abbot.

[442] It is interesting to observe how much of Stephen of Bourbon’s
description of the Poor of Lyons applies to Franciscan beginnings, and how
much more of it would have applied had not St. Francis possessed the gift
of obedience among his other virtues. Stephen was a Dominican of the first
half of the thirteenth century, and himself an inquisitor. Thus he
describes these misled people: “The Waldenses are called after the author
of this heresy, whose name was Waldensis. They are also called the Poor of
Lyons, because there they first professed poverty. Likewise they call
themselves the Poor in Spirit, because the Lord says: ‘Blessed are the
poor in spirit....’ Waldensis, who lived in Lyons, was a man of wealth,
but of little education. Hearing the Gospels, and curious to understand
their meaning, he bargained with two priests that they should make a
translation in the vulgar tongue. This they did, with other books of the
Bible and many precepts from the writings of the saints. When this
townsman had read the Gospel till he knew it by heart, he set out to
follow apostolic perfection, just as the Apostles themselves. So, selling
all his goods, in contempt of the world, he tossed his money like dirt to
the poor. Then he presumed to usurp the office of the Apostles, and
preached the Gospels in the open streets. He led many men and women to do
the same, exercising them in the Gospels. He also sent them to preach in
the neighbouring villages. These ignorant men and women running through
villages, entering houses, and preaching in the open places as well as the
churches, drew others to the same ways.”

Up to this point we are close to the Franciscans. But now the Archbishop
of Lyons forbids these ignorant irregular evangelists to preach. Their
leader answers for them, that they must obey God rather than man, and
Scripture says to preach the Gospel to every creature. Thus they fell into
disobedience, contumacy, and incurred excommunication, says Stephen
(_Anecdotes, etc., d’Étienne de Bourbon_, edited by Lecoy de la Marche
(Soc. de l’Histoire de France, Paris, 1877), cap. 342).

[443] The rôle of Franciscans and Dominicans in the spread of philosophic
knowledge in the thirteenth century will be considered _post_, Chapter
XXXVII. Chapter XVIII., _post_, is devoted to the personal qualities of
Francis.

[444] Peter Damiani, _De contemptu saeculi_, cap. 32 (Migne 145, col.
287).

[445] On Damiani, see _ante_, Chapter XI. IV.

[446] Peter Damiani, _Opusc._ xi., _Dominus vobiscum_, cap. 19 (Migne 145,
col. 246).

[447] Peter Damiani, _De contemptu saeculi_, cap. 25 (Migne 145, col.
278).

[448] Peter Damiani, _De perfectione monachi_, caps. 2, 3 (Migne 145, col.
294).

[449] _De perfectione monachi_, cap. 8 (Migne 145, col. 303).

[450] _De perf. mon._ cap. 13 (Migne 145, col. 307).

[451] _De ins. ord. eremitarum_, cap. 26 (Migne 145, col. 358). On the
distraction from the _vita contemplativa_ involved in an abbot’s duties
see Damiani’s verses, _De abbatum miseria_, _ante_, Chapter XI. IV.

For such as have feeling for these matters, I give the following extracts
from Damiani’s _Opusc._ xiii., _De perfectione monachi_, caps. 12, 13:
“Let the brother love fasting and cherish privation, let him flee the
sight of men, withdraw from affairs, keep his mouth from vain
conversation, seek the hiding-place of his mind wherein with his whole
strength he burns to see the face of his Creator; and let him pant for
tears, and beset God for them with daily prayer. For the dew of tears
cleanses the soul from every stain and makes fruitful the meadows of our
hearts so that they bring forth the sprouts of virtue. For often as under
an icy frost the wretched soul sheds its foliage, and, grace departing, it
is left to itself barren and stripped of its shortlived blossoms. But anon
tears given by the Tester of hearts burst forth, and this same soul is
loosed from the cold of its slothful torpor, and becomes green again with
the renewed leafage of its virtues, as a tree in spring kindled by the
south wind.

“Tears, moreover, which are from God, with fidelity approach the tribunal
of divine hearing, and quickly obtaining what they ask, assure us of the
remission of our sins. Tears are intermediaries in concluding peace
between God and men; they are the truthful and the very wisest
(_doctissimae_) teachers in the dubiousness of human ignorance. For when
we are in doubt whether something may be pleasing to God, we can reach no
better certitude than through prayer, weeping truthfully. We need never
again hesitate as to what our mind has decided on under such conditions.

“Tears,” continues Damiani, “washed the noisomeness of her guilt from the
Magdalen, saved the Apostle who denied his Lord, restored King David after
deadly sin, added three years to Hezekiah’s life, preserved inviolate the
chastity of Judith, and won for her the head of Holophernes. Why mention
the centurion Cornelius, why mention Susanna? indeed were I to tell all
the deeds of tears, the day would close before my task were ended. For it
is they that purify the sinner’s soul, confirm his inconstant heart,
prepare joy out of grief, and, breaking forth from our eyes of flesh,
raise us to the hope of supernal beatitude. For their petition may not be
set aside, so mighty are their voices in the Creator’s ears. Before the
pious Judge they hesitate at nothing, but vindicate their claim to mercy
as a right, and exult confident of having obtained what they implore.

“O ye tears, joys of the spirit, sweeter than honey, sweeter than nectar!
which with a sweet and pleasant taste refresh minds lifted up to God, and
water consumed and arid hearts with a flood of penetrating grace from
heaven. Weeping eyes terrify the devil; he fears the onslaught of tears
bursting forth, as one would flee a tempest of hail driven by the fury of
all the winds. As the torrent’s rush cleanses the river-bed, the flowing
tears purge the weeper’s mind from the devil’s tares and every pest of
sin.”

[452] _De inst. ord. er._ cap. 1 (Migne 145, col. 337).

[453] The _Vita Romualdi_ is printed in Migne 144, col. 950-1008.

[454] Romuald died in 1027; _lustrum_ here may mean four years, which
would bring the time of writing to 1039.

[455] _Vita Romualdi_, caps. 8, 9. Damiani does not say this here, but
quite definitely suggests it in cap. 64. The lives of these eastern
hermits were known to Romuald; hermits in Italy had imitated them; and the
connection with the knowledge of the Orient was not severed. See Sackur,
_Die Cluniacenser, etc._, i. 324 _sqq._ Thus for their models these
Italian hermits go behind the _Regula Benedicti_ to the anchorite examples
of Cassian and the East. Cf. Taylor, _Classical Heritage_, p. 160. A good
example was St. Nilus, a Calabrian, perhaps of Greek stock. As Abbot of
Crypta-Ferrata in Agro-Tusculano, he did not cease from his austerities,
and still dwelt in a cave. He died in 1005 at the alleged age of
ninety-five. His days are thus described: from dawn to the third hour he
copied rapidly, filling a τετραδεῖον (quaternion) each day. From the third
to the sixth hour he stood before the Cross of the Lord, reciting psalms
and making genuflections; from the sixth to the ninth, he sat and read--no
profane book we may be sure. When the ninth hour was come, he addressed
his evening hymn to God and went out to walk and study Him in His works.
See his _Vita_, from the Greek, in _Acta sanctorum_, sept. t. vii. pp.
279-343, especially page 293.

[456] _Vita Romualdi_, cap. 13.

[457] _Ibid._ cap. 20.

[458] _Vita Romualdi_, cap. 51.

[459] _Vita Romualdi_, cap. 35.

[460] _Ibid._ cap. 40.

[461] _Ibid._ cap. 45.

[462] _Vita_, caps. 49, 50.

[463] The Syrian region famous for its early anchorites.

[464] _Vita Romualdi_, cap. 64.

[465] Cf. Sackur, _Die Cluniacenser_, i. 328 note.

[466] _Vita Romualdi_, 69.

[467] Peter Damiani, _Vitae SS. Rodulphi et Dominici loricati_, cap. 8
(Migne 144, col. 1015.)

[468] _Ibid._ cap. 10 (Migne 144, col. 1017).

[469] This story is told in all the early lives of Bruno, the _Vita
antiquior_, the _Vita altera_, and the _Vita tertia_ (Migne, _Pat. Lat._
152, col. 482, 493, and 525). These lives, especially the _Vita altera_,
are interesting illustrations of the ascetic spirit, which, as might be
expected, also moulds Bruno’s thoughts and his understanding of Scripture.
All of which appears in his long _Expositio in Psalmos_ (Migne, _Pat.
Lat._ 152). To us, for example, the note of the twenty-third (in the
Vulgate the twenty-second) psalm is love; to Bruno it is disciplinary
guidance: the Lord guides me in the place of pasture, that is, He is my
guide lest I go astray in the Scriptures, where the souls of the faithful
are fed; I shall not want, that is an understanding of them shall not fail
me. Thy rod, that is the lesser tribulation; thy staff, that is the
greater tribulation, correct and chastise me.

[470] Guigo was born in 1083 at St. Romain near Valence, of noble family
(like most monks of prominence). There was close sympathy between him and
St. Bernard, as their letters show. Cf. _post_, Chapter XVII.

[471] Migne 153, col. 601-631.

[472] A bibliography of what has been written on Bernard would make a
volume. His own writings and the _Vitae_ and _Acta_ (as edited by
Mabillon) are printed in Migne, tomes 182-185. The _Vie de Saint Bernard_,
by the abbé Vacandard, in two volumes, is to be recommended (2nd ed.,
Paris, 1897).

[473] _Vita prima_, iii. cap. 1 (Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 185). This _Vita_ was
written by contemporaries of the saint who knew him intimately. But one
must be on one’s guard as to these apparently close descriptions of the
saints in their _vitae_; for they are commonly conventionalized. This
description of Bernard, excepting perhaps the colour of his hair, would
have fitted Francis of Assisi.

[474] _Vita prima_, iii. 3. Bernard himself said that his aim in preaching
was not so much to expound the words (of Scripture) as to move his
hearers’ hearts (_Sermo xvi. in Cantica canticorum_). That his preaching
was resistless is universally attested.

[475] See, _e.g._, Vacandard, _o.c._ chap. i.

[476] _Post_, Chapter XLIII.

[477] _Vita prima_, i. cap. 11. This William became Abbot of St. Thierry
and one of Bernard’s biographers.

[478] _E.g._ _Ep._ 107.

[479] _Ep._ 2.

[480] _Ep._ 110 (this is the whole letter).

[481] _Ep._ 112 (the entire letter). The Latin of this letter is given
_post_, Chapter XXXI.

[482] _Ep._ 111.

[483] _Ep._ 152, _ad Innocentium papam_, A.D. 1135.

[484] _Ep._ 170, _ad Ludovicum_. Written in 1138.

[485] _Ep._ 191.

[486] Cf. _post_, Chapter XXXVI. I., regarding this instance of Bernard’s
zeal. His position is critically set out in Wilhelm Meyer’s “Die
Anklagesätze des h. Bernard gegen Abaelard,” _Göttingische gelehrte
Nachrichten, philol. hist. Klasse_, 1898, pp. 397-468.

[487] _Ep._ 196, _ad Guidonen_; cf. _Ep._ 195 (A.D. 1140). See for the
Latin of this letter _post_, Chapter XXXI.

[488] _Ep._ 147, to Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny (A.D. 1138).

[489] _Ep._ 101, _ad religiosos_; cf. also _Ep._ 136.

[490] _Ep._ 300.

[491] _Vita prima_, lib. vii. cap. 15.

[492] It was Bernard’s third absence in Italy.

[493] _Ep._ 144, _ad suos Clarae-Vallenses_.

[494] _Vita prima_, lib. iii. cap. 7.

[495] _Sermo xxvi. in Cantica._

[496] “Finem verborum indicunt lacrymae; tu illis, Domine, finem modumque
indixeris.”

[497] _Ante_, Chapter XVI.

[498] As Augustine before him. Cf. Taylor, _The Classical Heritage, etc._,
pp. 129-131.

[499] _Ep._ 11, _ad Guigonem_. Bernard adds that when Paul says that flesh
and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God, it is not to be understood
that the substance of flesh will not be there, but that every carnal
necessity will have ceased; the love of flesh will be absorbed in the love
of the spirit, and our weak human affections transformed into divine
energies.

[500] Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 182, col. 973-1000.

[501] Love, fear, joy, sorrow.

[502] Migne 183, col. 785-1198.

[503] _Sermo xx. in Cantica._

[504] _Sermo lxxix. in Cantica._

[505] _Sermo lxxxiii. in Cantica._ This is nearly the whole of this
sermon. Bernard’s sermons were not long. See _post_, Chapter XXXVI. II.,
as to Bernard’s use of the symbolism of the kiss.

[506] _Post_, Chapter XIX.

[507] The present chapter is intended as an appreciation of the
personality of Francis; incidents of his life are used for illustration. I
have endeavoured to confine myself to such as are generally accepted as
authentic, and to those parts of the sources which are confirmed by
corroborative testimony. The reader doubtless is aware that the sources of
Franciscan history are abundant, but that there is still much critical and
even polemic controversy touching their trustworthiness. Of the _Speculum
perfectionis_, edited by Sabatier, I would make this remark: many of its
narratives contain such wisdom and human truth as seem to me to bring them
very close to the acts and words of some great personality, _i.e._
Francis. This is no sure proof of their authenticity, and yet is a fair
reason for following their form of statement of some of the incidents in
Francis’s life, the human value of which perhaps appears narrowed and
deflected in other accounts.

The chief sources for the life of St. Francis of Assisi are first his own
compositions, edited conveniently under the title of _Opuscula sancti
patris Francisci Assisiensis_, by the Franciscans of Quarrachi (1904).
They have been translated by P. Robinson (Philadelphia, The Dolphin Press,
1906). Next in certainty of authenticity come the two Lives by Celano,
_i.e._ _Vita prima S. Francisci Assisiensis_, auctore B. Thoma de Celano,
ejus discipulo, Bollandi _Acta sanctorum_, tome 46 (Oct. tome 2), pp.
683-723; also edited by Canon Amoni (Rome, 1880); _Vita secunda seu
appendix ad Vitam primam_, ed. by Amoni (Rome, 1880). Better editions than
Amoni’s are those of Edouard d’Alençon (Rome, 1906), and H. G. Rosedale
(Dent, London, 1904). Of great importance also is the _Legenda trium
sociorum_ (_Leo, Rufinus, Angelus_), Bollandi _Acta sanctorum_, t. 46
(Oct. t. 2), pp. 723-742; also ed. by Amoni (Rome, 1880). (Amoni’s texts
differ somewhat from those of the Bollandist.) It is also edited by
Pulignani (Foligno, 1898), and edited and hypothetically completed from
the problematical Italian version, by Marcellino da Civezza and Teofilo
Domenichelli (Rome, 1899). Perhaps most vivid of all the early sources is
the so-called _Speculum perfectionis seu S. Francisci Assisiensis legenda
antiquissima auctore fratre Leone_, as edited by Paul Sabatier (Paris,
1898). It has been translated into English several times. Its date and
authenticity are still under violent discussion. One may conveniently
refer to the article “Franciscan Literature” in the _Edinburgh Review_ for
January 1904, and to P. Robinson’s _Short Introduction to Franciscan
Literature_ (New York, 1907) for further references, which the student
must supplement for himself from the mass of recent literature in books
and periodicals touching the life of Francis and its sources. See also
Fierens, _La Question franciscaine, etc._ (Louvain, 1909). Among modern
Lives, that of Sabatier is probably known to all readers of this note. The
Lives by Bonghi and Le Monnier may be referred to. Gebhard’s _Italie
mystique_ is interesting in connection with Francis.

[508] Consciousness of direct authority from God speaks in the saint’s
unquestionably authentic Testament: “And after the Lord gave me some
brothers, no one showed me what I ought to do, but the Most High himself
revealed to me that I ought to live according to the model of the holy
Gospel.” It is also rendered with picturesque vehemence in a scene
(_Speculum perfectionis_, ed. Sabatier, ch. 68) which may or may not be
authentic. At a general meeting of the Order, certain wise brethren had
persuaded the Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia to advise Francis to follow their
counsel, and had adduced certain examples from the monastic rule of
Benedict and others. “When the Cardinal had related these matters to the
blessed Francis, in the way of admonition, the blessed Francis answered
nothing, but took him by the hand and led him before the assembled
brothers, and spoke to the brothers in the fervour and power of the Holy
Spirit, thus: ‘My brothers, my brothers, the Lord called me in the way of
simplicity and humility, and showed me in truth this way for myself and
for those who wish to believe and imitate me. And therefore I desire that
you will not name any rule to me, neither the rule of St. Benedict, nor
that of St. Augustine or St. Bernard, or any other rule or model of living
except that which was mercifully shown and given me by the Lord. And the
Lord said that He wished me to be a new covenant (_pactum_) in the world,
and did not wish us to live by any other way save by that knowledge.’”

[509] These songs (none of which survive) were apparently in the _langue
d’oïl_ and not in the _langue d’oc_. The phrases used by the biographers
are _lingua francigena_ (1 Cel. i. 7) and _lingua gallica_ (_III. Soc._
iii.) or _gallice cantabat_ (_Spec. perf._ vii. 93).

[510] In fact this is vouched for in _III. Soc._ i.

[511] St. Martin of Tours had done the same.

[512] _III. Soc._ v. par. 13, 14.

[513] _III. Soc._ vi. par. 20.

[514] “Sancta paupertas,” “domina paupertas” are the phrases. The first is
used by St. Bernard.

[515] _III. Soc._ viii.; 1 Cel. ix.

[516] _III. Soc._ viii.; see 1 Cel. x. and 2 Cel. x.

[517] _Spec. per._ 3, 9, 19, 122. How truly he also felt their spirit is
seen in the story of his words, at a somewhat later period, to a certain
Dominican: “While he was staying at Siena, a certain doctor of theology,
of the order of the Preachers, himself an humble and spiritual man, came
to him. When they had spoken for a while about the words of the Lord, this
master interrogated him concerning this text of Ezekiel: ‘If thou dost not
declare to the wicked man his wickedness, I will require his soul of thy
hand’ (Ezek. iii. 18). And he added: ‘I know many indeed, good father, in
mortal sin, to whom I do not declare their wickedness. Will their souls be
required at my hand?’

“To whom the blessed Francis humbly said that it was fitting that an
ignorant person like himself should be taught by him rather than give
answer upon the meaning of Scripture. Then that humble master replied:
‘Brother, albeit I have heard the exposition of this text from a number of
the wise, still would I willingly make note of your understanding of it.’

“So the blessed Francis said: ‘If the text is to be understood generally,
I take it to mean that the servant of God ought by his life and holiness
so to burn and shine in himself, that the light of his example and the
tenor of his holy conversation would reprove all wicked men. Thus I say
will his splendour and the odour of his reputation declare their
iniquities to all,’” _Spec. perf._ 53; also 2 Cel. iii. 46.

[518] As to the acquisition of the Portiuncula see _Spec. perf._ 55, and
on Francis’s love of it see _Spec. perf._ 82-84, 124.

[519] 1 Cel. xi.

[520] This seems to be true of Francis’s great Exemplar.

[521] _Spec. perf._ 69; 2 Cel. iii. 124; _III. Soc._ 25.

[522] _Francisci admonitiones_, xx.

[523] _Spec. perf._ 62; 2 Cel. iii. 71.

[524] _Spec. perf._ 61; see 1 Cel. 19.

[525] 2 Cel. iii. 81; _Spec. perf._ 39.

[526] _Spec. perf._ 50.

[527] _Spec. perf._ 54; 2 Cel. iii. 84.

[528] _Spec. perf._ 44.

[529] _Spec. perf._ 64; _III. Soc._ 39; 2 Cel. iii. 83; cf. _Admon._ iii.

[530] Cf. _Spec. perf._ 22 and 23; 2 Cel. iii. 23.

[531] _III. Soc._ xii. 50, 51.

[532] _Spec. perf._ 18; cf. 2 Cel. iii. 20.

[533] _Spec. perf._ 25; 2 Cel. iii. 22.

[534] _Spec. perf._ 95; 2 Cel. iii. 65. But Francis condemned all vain and
foolish words which move to laughter (_Admon._ xxi.; _Spec. perf._ 96).

[535] _Spec. perf._ 93; 2 Cel. iii. 67.

[536] _Spec. perf._ 34.

[537] Cf. _Spec. perf._ 108; 2 Cel. 132.

[538] _Spec. perf._ 27, 28, 33; cf. 2 Cel. i. 15; _ibid._ iii. 30 and 36.

[539] _Spec. perf._ 101. This is one of the apparently unsupported stories
of the _Speculum_, that none would like to doubt.

[540] 2 Cel. iii. cap. 101.

[541] One is tempted to amuse oneself with paradox, and say: Not he of
Vaucluse, who ascended a mountain for the view and left a record of his
sentiments, but he of Assisi, who loved the sheep, the birds, the flowers,
the stones, and fire and water, was “the first modern man.” But such
statements are foolish; there was no “first modern man.”

[542] _Spec. perf._ 113.

[543] 1 Cel. xxi. 58.

[544] 1 Cel. cap. xxviii.

[545] 1 Cel. cap. xxix.

[546] 2 Cel. iii. 101. These matters are set forth more picturesquely in
the _Speculum perfectionis_; if authentic, they throw a vivid light on
this wonderful person. Here are examples:

“Francis had come to the hermitage of Fonte Palumbo, near Riete, to cure
the infirmity of his eyes, as he was ordered on his obedience by the
lord-cardinal of Ostia and by Brother Elias, minister-general. There the
doctor advised a cautery over the cheek as far as the eyebrow of the eye
that was in worse state. Francis wished to wait till brother Elias came,
but when he was kept from coming Francis prepared himself. And when the
iron was set in the fire to heat it, Francis, wishing to comfort his
spirit, lest he be afraid, spoke to the fire: ‘My Brother Fire, noble and
useful among other creatures, be courteous to me in this hour, since I
have loved and will love thee for the love of Him who made thee. I also
beseech our Creator, who made us both, that He may temper thy heat so that
I may bear it.’ And when his prayer was finished he made the sign of the
cross over the fire.

“We indeed who were with him then fled for pity and compassion, and the
doctor remained alone with him. When the cautery was finished, we
returned, and he said to us: ‘Fearful and of little faith, why did you
flee? I tell you truly I felt no pain, nor any heat of the fire. If it is
not well seared he may sear it better.’

“The astonished doctor assured them all that the cautery was so severe
that a strong man, let alone one so weak, could hardly have endured it,
while Francis showed no sign of pain” (_Spec. perf._ 115). “Thus fire
treated Francis courteously; for he had never failed to treat it
reverently and respect its rights. Once his clothes caught fire, and he
would not put it out, and forbade a brother, saying: ‘Nay, dearest
brother, do no harm to the fire.’ He would never put out fire, and did not
wish any brother to throw away a fire or push a smoking log away, but
wished that it should be just set on the ground, out of reverence to Him
whose creature it is” (_ibid._ 116).

“Next to fire he had a peculiar love for water, wherein is figured holy
penitence and the tribulation with which the soul’s uncleanness is washed
away, and because the first washing of the soul is through the water of
baptism. So when he washed his hands he would choose a place where the
water which fell would not be trodden on. Also when he walked over rocks,
he walked with trembling and reverence for the love of Him who is called
the ‘Rock’; and whenever he repeated that psalm, ‘Thou hast exalted me
upon a rock,’ he would say with great reverence and devotion: ‘Under the
foot of the rock thou hast exalted me.’”

“He directed the brother who cut and fetched the fire-wood never to cut a
whole tree, so that some part of it might remain untouched for the love of
Him who was willing to work out our salvation upon the wood of the cross.

“Likewise he told the brother who made the garden, not to devote all of it
to vegetables, but to have some part for flowering plants, which in their
seasons produce Brother Flowers for love of Him who is called the ‘Flower
of the field and the Lily of the valley.’ He said indeed that Brother
Gardener always ought to make a beautiful patch in some part of the
garden, and plant it with all sorts of sweet-smelling herbs and herbs that
produce beautiful flowers, so that in their season they may invite men
seeing them to praise the Lord. For every creature cries aloud, ‘God made
me for thy sake, O man.’ We that were with him saw that inwardly and
outwardly he did so greatly rejoice in all created things, that touching
or seeing them his spirit seemed not to be upon the earth, but in heaven”
(_ibid._ 113).

“Above all things lacking reason he loved the sun and fire most
affectionately, for he would say: ‘In the morning when the sun rises every
man ought to praise God who created it for our use, because by day our
eyes are illumined by it; in the evening, when night comes, every man
ought to give praise on account of Brother Fire, because by it our eyes
are illumined by night. For all of us are blind, and the Lord through
those two brothers lightens our eyes; and therefore for these, and for
other creatures which we daily use, we ought to praise the Creator.’ Which
indeed he did himself up to the day of his death” (_ibid._ 119).

[547] Translated from the text as given in E. Monaci’s _Crestomazia
italiana dei primi secoli_. Substantially the same text is given in _Spec.
perf._ 120.

[548] The mediaeval term _apex mentis_ is not inapt.

[549] Assurance of the soul’s communion, and even union, with God is the
chief element of what is termed mysticism, which will be discussed briefly
in connection with scholastic philosophy, _post_, Chapter XXXVI. II. In
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries those who experienced the divine
through visions, ecstasies, and rapt contemplation, were not as
analytically and autobiographically self-conscious as later mystics. Yet
St. Theresa’s (sixteenth century) mystical analysis of self and God (for
which see H. Delacroix, _Études d’histoire et de psychologie du
mysticisme_, Paris, 1908) might be applied to the experiences of St.
Elizabeth of Schönau or St. Hildegard of Bingen.

[550] _Ante_, Chapter XIII. II.

[551] Neither Othloh’s visions, nor those to be recounted, were narratives
of voyages to the other world. The name of these is legion. They begin in
_Bede’s Ecclesiastical History_, and continue through the Middle
Ages--until they reach their apotheosis in the _Divina Commedia_. See
_post_, Chapter XLIII.

[552] Migne, _Pat. Lat._ 195.

[553] The works of St. Hildegard of Bingen are published in vol. 197 of
Migne’s _Pat. Lat._ and in vol. viii. of Pitra’s _Analecta sacra_, under
the title _Analecta Sanctae Hildegardis opera Spicilegio Solesmensi
parata_ (1882). Certain supplementary passages to the latter volume are
published in _Analecta Bollandiana_, i. (Paris, 1882). These publications
are completed by F. W. E. Roth’s _Lieder und die unbekannte Sprache der h.
Hildegardis_ (Wiesbaden, 1880). The same author has a valuable article on
Hildegard in _Zeitschrift für kirchliche Wissenschaft, etc._, 1888, pp.
453-471. See also an article by Battandier, _Revue des questions
historiques_, 33 (1883), pp. 395-425. Other literature on Hildegard in
Chevalier’s _Répertoire des sources historiques du moyen âge_, under her
name.

Her two most interesting works, for our purposes at least, are the
_Scivias_ (meaning _Scito vias Domini_), completed in 1151 after ten years
of labour, and the _Liber vitae meritorum per simplicem hominem a vivente
luce revelatorum_ (Pitra, _o.c._ pp. 1-244), begun in 1159, and finished
some five years later. Extracts from these are given in the text. Other
works show her extraordinary intellectual range. Of these the _Liber
divinorum operum simplicis hominis_ (Migne 197, col. 741-1038) is a vision
of the mysteries of creation, followed by a voluminous commentary upon the
world and all therein, including natural phenomena, human affairs, the
nature of man, and the functions of his mind and body. It closes with a
discussion of Antichrist and the Last Times. The work was begun about
1164, when Hildegard finished the _Liber vitae meritorum_, and was
completed after seven years of labour. She also wrote a Commentary on the
Gospels, and sundry lives of saints, and there is ascribed to her quite a
prodigious work upon natural history and the virtues of plants, the whole
entitled: _Subtilitatum diversarum naturarum creaturarum libri IX._ (Migne
197, col. 1118-1351); and probably she composed another work on medicine,
_i.e._ the unpublished _Liber de causis et curis_ (see Pitra, _o.c._,
prooemium, p. xi.). Preger’s contention (_Geschichte der deutschen
Mystik_, i. pp. 13-27, 1874) that the works bearing Hildegard’s name are
forgeries, never obtained credence, and is not worth discussing since the
publication of Pitra’s volume.

[554] _Analecta Sanctae Hildegardis opera Spicilegio Solesmensi parata_,
p. 523; cf. _ibid._ p. 561; also _Ep._ 27 of Hildegard in Migne 197, col.
186.

[555] These questions and Hildegard’s solutions are given in Migne 197,
col. 1038-1054, and the letter in Pitra, _o.c._ 399-400.

[556] Pitra, _o.c._ 394, 395.

[557] By _visio_ as used here, Hildegard refers to the general undefined
light--the _umbra viventis lucis_, in which she saw her special visions.

[558] Pitra, _o.c._ 332.

[559] This is from the prologue to the _Scivias_, Pitra, _o.c._ 503, 504
(Migne 197, 483, 484). Guibert in his _Vita_ speaks of Hildegard as
_indocta_ and unable to penetrate the meaning of Scripture _nisi cum vis
internae aspirationis illuminans eam juvaret_, Pitra, _o.c._ 413. Compare
Hildegard’s prooemium to her _Life of St. Disibodus_ (Pitra, _o.c._ 357)
and the preface to her _Liber divinorum operum_ (Migne 197, 741, 742).

[560] Guibertus to Radilfus, a monk of Villars (Pitra, _o.c._ 577)
apparently written in 1180.

[561] Pitra, _o.c._ pp. 1-244.

[562] Pitra, _o.c._ pp. 8-10. The translation is condensed, but is kept
close to the original.

[563] _Ibid._ p. 13.

[564] Pitra, _o.c._ p. 24.

[565] _Ibid._ p. 51 _sqq._

[566] Pitra, _o.c._ p. 92 _sqq._

[567] _Ibid._ p. 131 _sqq._ Of course, one at once thinks of the
punishments in Dante’s _Inferno_, which in no instance are identical with
those of Hildegard, and yet offer common elements. Dante is not known to
have read the work of Hildegard.

[568] Pitra, _o.c._ pp. 230-240. I am not clear as to Hildegard’s ideas of
Purgatory, for which she seems to have no separate region. In the case of
sinners who have begun, but not completed, their penances on earth, the
punishments described work _purgationem_, and the souls are loosed
(_ibid._ p. 42). In Part III. of the work we are considering, the
paragraphs describing the punishments are entitled _De superbiae_,
_invidiae_, _inobedientiae_, _infidelitatis_, etc., _poenis purgatoriis_
(_ibid._ p. 130). But each paragraph is followed by one entitled _De
poenitentia superbiae_, etc., and the _poenitentia_ referred to is worked
out with penance in this life. Consequently it is not quite clear that the
word _purgatoriis_ attached to _poenis_ signifies temporary punishment to
be followed by release.

In a vision of the Last Times (_ibid._ p. 225) Hildegard sees “black
burning darkness,” in which was _gehenna_, containing every kind of
horrible punishment. She did not then see _gehenna_ itself, because of the
darkness surrounding it; but heard the frightful cries. Cf. _Aeneid_, vi.
548 _sqq._

[569] This is the view expounded so grandly by Hugo of St. Victor in his
_De sacramentis_, _post_, Chapter XXVIII.

[570] Migne 197, col. 433. All this is interesting in view of the many
figures of the Church and Synagogue carved on the cathedrals, most of them
later than Hildegard’s time. The “Synagogue” of sculpture has her eyes
bound, the sculpturesque expression of eyelessness. The rest of
Hildegard’s symbolism was not followed in sculpture.

[571] Migne 197, col. 437 _sqq._ Cf. St. Bernard, _Sermo xix. in Cantica_.

[572] Migne 197, col. 449.

[573] Notice the supra-terrestrial term, which can hardly be translated so
as to fit an actual wall.

[574] Migne 197, col. 583. Compare this vision with the symbolic
interpretation of the cathedral edifice, _post_, Chapter XXIX.

[575] Cf. St. Bernard’s treatment of this matter, _ante_, Chapter XVII.

[576] In a Middle High German Marienleben, by Bruder Phillips (13th
century) the young virgin is made herself to say to God:

  “Du bist min lieber priutegam (bridegroom),
   Dir gib ich minen magetuom (maidenhood),
   Du bist min vil schoener man.

  “Du bist min vriedel (lover) und min vriunt (ami);
   Ich bin von diner minne entzundt.”

Bobertag, _Erzählende Dichtungen des späteren Mittelalters_, p. 46
(Deutsche Nat. Litt.).

[577] _Vita B. Mariae Ogniacensis_, per Jacobum de Vitreaco, Bollandi,
_Acta sanctorum_ t. 21 (June t. iv. pp. 636-666). Jacques had good reason
to canonize her bones, since one of them, in his saddle-bags, had saved
his mule from drowning while crossing a river in Tuscany.

[578] Cant. ii. 5. The translation in the English Revised Version is:
“Stay me with cakes of raisins, comfort me with apples; for I am sick of
love.” The phrases of Canticles, always in the words of the Latin Vulgate,
come continually into the minds of these ecstatic women and their
biographers. The sonorous language of the Vulgate is not always close to
the meaning of the Hebrew. But it was the Vulgate and not the Hebrew that
formed the mediaeval Bible, and its language should be observed in
discussing mediaeval applications of Scripture.

[579] “Dum esset Rex in accubitu suo,” Cant. i. 11, in Vulgate; Cant. i.
12, in the English version, which renders it: “While the King sitteth at
His table.”

[580] _Vita B. Mariae, etc._, par. 2-8. Since we are seeing these
mediaeval religious phenomena as they impressed contemporaries, it would
be irrelevant to subject them to the analyses which pathological
psychology applies to not dissimilar phenomena.

[581] It is reported of St. Catharine of Siena that she would go for weeks
with no other food than the Eucharist.

[582] I am drawing from her _Vita_ by her contemporary, Thomas of
Cantimpré, _Acta SS._, Bollandi, t. 21 (t. 3 of June), p. 234 _sqq._

[583] Cf. Canticles iii. 2; _Vita_, lib. iii. par. 42.

[584] Cant. iii. 1, 7; i. 16.

[585] _Vita_, lib. iii. pars. 9, 11. It is well known how great a love of
her Lord possessed St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and how she sent her children
away from her, that she might not be distracted from loving Him alone. The
vision which came to her upon her expulsion from the Wartburg, after the
death of her husband, King Louis of Thuringia, is given as follows, in her
own words, according to the sworn statement of her waiting-women: “I saw
the heaven open, and that sweet Jesus, my Lord, bending toward me and
consoling me in my tribulation; and when I saw Him I was glad, and
laughed; but when He turned His face, as if to go away, I cried. Pitying
me, He turned His serene countenance to me a second time, saying: ‘If thou
wishest to be with me, I wish to be with thee.’ I responded: ‘Thou, Lord,
thou dost wish to be with me, and I wish to be with thee, and I wish never
to be separated from thee’” (_Libellus de dictis quatuor ancillarum_,
Mencken, _Scriptores Rerum Germ._ ii. 2020 A-C, Leipzig, 1728). The German
sermon of Hermann von Fritzlar (cir. 1340) tells this vision in nearly the
same words, putting, however, this phrase in Elizabeth’s mouth: “Our Lord
Jesus Christ appeared to me, and when He turned from me, I cried, and then
He turned to me, and I became red (blushed?), and before I was pale”
(Hildebrand, _Didaktik aus der Zeit der Kreuzzüge_, p. 36, Deutsche Nat.
Lit.).

[586] _Offenbarungen der Schwester Mechthild von Magdeburg oder das
fliessende Licht der Gottheit_, ed. by P. G. Morel, Regensburg, 1869. See
Preger, _Gesch. der deutschen Mystik_, i. 70, 91 _sqq._ Preger points out
that the High-German version of this work, which we possess, was made from
the Low-German original in the year 1344. Extracts from Mechthild’s book
are given by Vetter, _Lehrhafte Literatur des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts_,
pp. 192-199; and by Hildebrand, _Didaktik aus der Zeit der Kreuzzüge_, pp.
6-10 (Deutsche Nat. Lit.).

[587] We pass over these portions of Mechthild’s book which exemplify the
close connection between ecstatic contemplation and the denunciation of
evil in the world.

[588] Mechthild constantly uses phrases from the courtly love poetry of
her time.

[589] _Das fliessende Licht, etc._, i. cap. 3. Hildebrand, _o.c._ p. 6,
cites this apposite verse from the thoughtful and knightly Minnesinger,
Reimar von Zweter:

  “Got herre unuberwundenlich,
   Wie uberwant die Minne dich!
   Getorste ich, so spraech ich:
   Si wart an dir so sigerich.”

[590] _Das fliessende Licht, etc._, i. 38-44.

[591] “I would gladly die of love, might that be my lot; for Him whom I
love I have seen with my bright eyes standing in my soul” (_ibid._ ii.
cap. 2).

[592] Cf. ii. 22.

[593] See i. 10; ii. 23.

[594] i. 13.

[595] ii. 4.

[596] iii. 1, 10.

[597] It is quite true that in the earliest Christian times the marriage
of priests was recognized, and continued to be at least connived at until,
say, the time of Hildebrand. Yet the best thoughtfulness and piety from
the Patristic period onward had disapproved of priestly marriages, which
consequently tended to sink to the level of concubinage, until they were
absolutely condemned by the Church.

[598] _Anecdotes, etc., d’Étienne de Bourbon_, ed. by Lecoy de la Marche,
p. 249 (Soc. de l’Histoire de France, t. 185, Paris, 1877). This story
refers to the years 1166-1171.

[599] Many bishops and abbots held definite secular rank; the Archbishop
of Rheims was a duke, and so was the Bishop of Langres and Laon; while the
bishops of Beauvais and Noyon were counts. In Germany, the archiepiscopal
dukes of Cologne and Mainz were among the chief princes of the land.

[600] There were, however, some (naturally shocking) instances of
inheritance, as where the Bishop of Nantes in 1049 admitted that he had
been invested with the bishopric during the lifetime of his father, the
preceding bishop. See Luchaire, in vol. ii. (2), pp. 107-117 of Lavisse’s
_Hist. de France_, for this and other examples of episcopal feudalism.

[601] _Sermo in Cantica_, 33, par. 15 (Migne 183, col. 958-959). With this
passage from St. Bernard, one may compare the far more detailed picture of
the luxury and dissolute ways of the secular clergy in France given in the
_Apologia of Guido of Bazoches_ (latter part of the twelfth century). W.
Wattenbach. “Die Apologie des Guido von Bazoches,” _Sitzungsberichte
Preussichen Akad._, 1893, (1), pp. 395-420.

[602] Ed. by T. Wright (Camden Society, London, 1841).

[603] The poem called _De ruina Romae_. It begins, “Propter Syon non
tacebo.”

[604] _Post_, Chapter XXVI.

[605] The “Bible” of Guiot is published in Barbazan’s _Fabliaux_, t. ii.
(Paris, 1808). It is conveniently given with other satirical or moralizing
compositions in Ch. V. Langlois, _La Vie en France au moyen âge d’après
quelques moralistes du temps_ (Paris, 1908).

[606] Salimbene gives an amusing picture of our worthy Rigaud hurrying to
catch sight of the king at a Franciscan Chapter. _Post_, Chapter XXI.

[607] _Regestrum visilationum archiepiscopi Rothomagensis_, ed. Bonnin
(Rouen, 1852). It is analyzed by L. V. Delisle, in an article entitled “Le
Clergé normand” (_Bib. de l’École des Chartes_, 2nd ser. vol. iii.).

[608] _Reg. vis._ p. 9.

[609] _R. V._ p. 10.

[610] _R. V._ p. 18.

[611] _R. V._ pp. 19-20.

[612] _R. V._ p. 222.

[613] _R. V._ p. 379.

[614] _R. V._ p. 154.

[615] See _e.g._ _R. V._ pp. 159, 162, 395-396.

[616] _R. V._ p. 109.

[617] _R. V._ p. 73.

[618] _R. V._ pp. 43-45.

[619] _R. V._ p. 607.

[620] In Pfeiffer’s ed. No. 159. See also _ibid._ 162.

[621] The above is drawn from the “Vita Sancti Engelberti,” by Caesar of
Heisterbach, in Boehmer, _Fontes rerum Germanicarum_, ii. 294-329
(Stuttgart, 1845). E. Michael, _Culturzustände des deutschen Volkes
während des 13{n} Jahrhunderts_, ii. 30 _sqq._ (Freiburg im Breisgau,
1899), has an excellent account drawn mainly from the same source.

[622] The _Dialogi miraculorum_ of Caesar of Heisterbach, and the
_Exempla_ of Étienne de Bourbon (d. 1262) and Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240)
present a huge collection of such stories. For the early Middle Ages, the
decades just before and after the year one thousand, the mechanically
supernatural view of any occurrence is illustrated in the five books of
_Histories_ of Radulphus Glaber, an incontinent and wandering, but
observing monk, native of Burgundy. Best edition by M. Prou, in
_Collection des textes, etc._ (Paris, Picard, 1886); also in Migne, _Pat.
Lat._ 142. An interesting study of his work by Gebhart, entitled, “Un
Moine de l’an 1000,” is to be found in the _Revue des deux mondes_, for
October 1, 1891. Glaber’s fifth book opens with some excellent devil
stories. As there was a progressive enlightenment through the mediaeval
centuries, such tales gradually became less common and less crude.

[623] _Anecdotes historiques d’Étienne de Bourbon_, par. 422, ed. by Lecoy
de la Marche (vol. 185 of Société de l’Histoire de France), Paris, 1877;
cf. _ibid._ par. 383.

[624] _Dialogus miraculorum_, iii. 2. Similar stories are told in _ibid._
iii. 3, 15, 19.

[625] _Exempla_ of Jacques de Vitry, ed. by T. F. Crane, pp. 110-111, vol.
26 (Folk-lore Society, London, 1890).

[626] _Dialogus miraculorum_, vii. 34. Caesar’s seventh book has many
similar tales.

[627] Ed. in eight volumes by Gaston Paris and U. Robert for the Société
des Anciens Textes Français.

[628] Étienne de Bourbon tells this same story in his Latin; _Anecdotes
historiques etc._, p. 114.

[629] See Étienne de Bourbon, _o.c._ pp. 109-110, 120.

[630] Étienne de Bourbon, _o.c._ p. 119.

[631] Étienne de Bourbon, _o.c._ p. 83.

[632] The chief part of the “Chronica Fr. Salembenis Parmensis” was
printed in 1857 in the _Monumenta Historica ad provincias Parmensem, etc._
The manner of its truncated editing has ever since been a grief to
scholars. The portions omitted from the Parma edition, covering years
before Salimbene’s time, are printed by Clédat, as an appendix to his
Thesis, _De Fr. Salimbene, etc._ (Paris, 1878). Novati’s article, “La
Cronaca di Salimbene” in vol. i. (1883) of the _Giornale storico della
letteratura italiana_, pp. 383-423, will be found enlightening as to the
faults of the Parma editor. A good consideration of the man and his
chronicle is Emil Michael’s _Salimbene und seine Chronik_ (Innsbruck,
1889), with which should be read Alfred Dove’s _Die Doppel Chronik von
Reggio und die Quellen Salimbene’s_ (Leipzig, 1873). A short translation
of some of the more or less autobiographical parts of Salimbene’s
narrative, by T. L. K. Olyphant, may be found in vol. i. of the
_Translations of the Historical Society_, pp. 449-478 (London, 1872); and
much of Salimbene is translated in Coulton’s _From St. Francis to Dante_
(London, 1907).

[633] Parma edition, p. 3.

[634] P. 31.

[635] The Latin is a little strong: “Non credas istis pissintunicis, idest
qui in tunicis mingunt.”

[636] These qualities led Salimbene to accept the teachings of Joachim and
the _Evangelium eternum_ (_post_, pp. 510 _sqq._).

[637] Parma ed. pp. 37-41. This coarse story is given for illustration’s
sake; there are many worse than it in Salimbene. Novati prints some in his
article in the _Giornale Storico_ that are amusing, but altogether beyond
the pale of modern decency.

[638] This in fact became the later legend of Eccelino.

[639] Pp. 90-93.

[640] He whose _Regesta_ we have read, _ante_ Chapter XX.

[641] Parma ed. pp. 93-97.

[642] _Post_, Chapter XXII.

[643] Cf. Tocco, _L’Eresia nel medio evo_, pp. 449-483 (Florence, 1884).

[644] From Novati, _o.c._ pp. 415, 416. Cf. pp. 97 _sqq._ of the Parma ed.

[645] For further interesting allusions to the prophecies of Merlin, see
Salimbene, pp. 303, 309 _sqq._

[646] Pp. 104-109.

[647] Cf. Joinville’s account, _post_, Chapter XXII.

[648] P. 225.

[649] Pp. 179, 180.

[650] P. 324.

[651] See Bourgain, _La Chaire française au XII{e} siècle_; Lecoy de la
Marche, _La Chaire française au XIII{e} siècle_.

[652] Certain kinds of literature, in nature satirical or merely gross,
portray, doubtless with grotesque exaggeration, the ways and manners of
clerks and merchants, craftsmen and vile serfs, as well as those of monks
and bishops, lords and ladies. A notable example is offered by the old
French _fabliaux_, which with coarse and heartless laughter, rather than
with any definite satirical intent, display the harshness, brutality, the
degradation and hardship of the ways of living coming within their range
of interest. In them we see the brutal and deceived husband, the wily
clerk, the merchant with his tricks of trade, the _vilain_, raised above
the brute, not by a better way of life as much as by a certain native wit.
The women were reviled as coarsely as in monkish writings; but a
Rabelaisian quality takes the place of doctrinal prurience. In weighing
the evidence of these fabliaux their satirical nature should be allowed
for. Cf. Langlois, _La Vie en France au moyen âge d’après quelques
moralistes du temps_ (Paris, 1908); also the _Sermons_ of Jacques de
Vitry; Pitra, _Analecta novissima spicilegii Solesmensis_, t. ii., and
Haurèau upon the same in _Journal des savants_, 1888, p. 410 _sqq._

[653] Such immunities were common before Charlemagne. Cf. Brunner,
_Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte_, ii. 243-302.

[654] _Gesta regum Anglorum_, iii. (Migne 179, col. 1213).

[655] Taken from the note to p. 274 of Gautier’s _Chevalerie_.

[656] See Du Cange, _Glossarium_, under “Miles,” etc.; where much
information may be found uncritically put together.

[657] Cf. Brunner, _Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte_, ii. 202-216.

[658] The way that _miles_ came to mean knight, has its analogy in the
etymological history of the word “knight” itself. In German and French the
words “Ritter” and “chevalier” indicate one who fought on horseback. Not
so with the English word “knight,” which in its original Anglo-Saxon and
Old-German forms (see Murray’s _Dictionary_) as _cniht_ and _kneht_ might
mean any armed follower. It lost its servile sense slowly. “In 1086 we
read that the Conqueror _dubbade his sunu Henric to ridere_; this ... is
the next year Englished by _cniht_” (Kington-Oliphant, _Old and Middle
English_, p. 130; Macmillan, 1878).

[659] We naturally use the term “free” with reference to modern
conditions, where law and its sanctions emanate, in fact as well as
theory, from a stable government. But in these early feudal periods where
a man’s life and property were in fact and theory protected by the power
of his immediate lord, to whom he was bound by the strongest ties then
recognized, to be “free” might be very close to being an unprotected
outlaw.

[660] In these respects it exhibits analogies to monkhood, which likewise
was recruited commonly from the upper classes of society.

[661] See Gautier, _La Chevalerie_, p. 256 _sqq._; Du Cange, under the
word “Miles.”

[662] Cf. Gautier, _o.c._ 296-308. It must be remembered that an abbot or
a bishop might also be a knight and so could make knights. See Du Cange,
_Glossarium_, “Abbas” (_abbates miletes_).

[663] On this blow, called in Latin _alapa_, in French _accolée_, in
English _accolade_, see Du Cange under “Alapa,” and Gautier, _o.c._ pp.
246-247, and 270 _sqq._

[664] _Chanson de Roland_, 2344 sqq. Lines 2500-2510 speak of
Charlemagne’s sword, named _Joiuse_ because of the honour it had in having
in its hilt the iron of the lance which pierced the Saviour.

[665] Gautier, _Chevalerie_, pp. 290, 297. Examples of these ceremonies
may be found as follows: the actual one of the knighting of Geoffrey
Plantagenet of Anjou by Henry I. of England, at Rouen in 1129, in the
Chronicle of Johannis Turonensis, _Historiens de France_, xii. p. 520;
Gautier, _Chevalerie_, p. 275. Gautier gives many examples, and puts
together a typical ceremony, as of the twelfth century, in _Chev._ p. 309
_sqq._ Perhaps the most famous account of all is that of the poem entitled
_Ordene de Chevalerie_ (thirteenth century), published by Barbazan,
_Fabliaux, etc._, i. 59-82 (Paris, 1808). It relates how a captive
Christian knight bestowed the order of chivalry, _i.e._ knighthood, upon
Saladin. See other accounts cited in Du Cange under “Miles.”

[666] Not war as we understand it, where with some large purpose one great
cohesive state directs its total military power against another; but
neighbourhood war, never permanently ended. When not actually attacking or
defending, men were anticipating attack, or expecting to make a raid.
Perhaps nothing better suggests the local and neighbourly character of
these feudal hostilities than the most famous means devised by the Church
to mitigate them. This was the “Truce of God,” promulgated in the eleventh
century. It forbade hostilities from Thursday to Monday and in Lent.
Whether this ordinance was effective or not, it indicates the nature of
the wars that could stop from Thursday to Monday!

[667] Courtly, chivalric, or romantic, love as an element of knightly
excellence is so inseverably connected with its romantic literature that I
have kept it for the next chapter.

[668] The following remarks upon the _regula_ of the Templars, and the
extracts which are given, are based on the introduction and text of _La
Règle du Temple_, edited by Henri de Curzon for the Société de l’Histoire
de France (Paris, 1886).

[669] The phraseology of the Latin _regula_ often follows that of the
Benedictine rule.

[670] Chaps. 33, 35.

[671] Chaps. 40, 41.

[672] Chap. 42.

[673] Chaps. 46, 48.

[674] Chap. 62 Latin _regula_ and chap. 14 of French _regle_.

[675] Chap. 51.

[676] Chap. 58 of the Latin, chap. 11 of the French. The chapters of the
French translation do not follow the order of the Latin.

[677] Page 167 of de Curzon’s edition.

[678] See in de Curzon’s edition, sections 431, 436, 448, 454, and 657
_sqq._

[679] It would seem as if military discipline, as moderns understand it,
took its rise in these Templars and Hospitallers.

[680] See _e.g._ de Curzon’s edition, sections 419, 420, 574.

[681] Raimundus de Agiles, _Hist. Francorum qui ceperunt Jerusalem_, cap.
38-39. (Migne 155, col. 659).

[682] On these poems see Pigeonneau, _Le Cycle de la Croisade_ (St. Cloud,
1877); Paulin Paris, in _Histoire littéraire de la France_, vol. 22, pp.
350-402, and _ibid._ vol. 25, p. 507 _sqq._; Gaston Paris, “La Naissance
du chevalier au Cygne,” _Romania_, 19, p. 314 _sqq._ (1890).

[683] “Vita Ludovici noni auctore Gaufrido de Belloloco” (_Recueil des
historiens des Gaules et de la France_, t. xx. pp. 3-26).

[684] The Testament of St. Louis, written for his eldest son, is a
complete rule of conduct for a Christian prince, and indicates St. Louis’
mind on the education of one. It has been printed and translated many
times. Geoffrey of Beaulieu gives it in Latin (chap. xv.) and in French at
the end of the _Vita_. It is also in Joinville.

[685] One sees here the same religious anxiety which is so well brought
out by Salimbene’s account of St. Louis, _ante_, Chapter XXI.

[686] The founder of the College of the Sorbonne.

[687] _Chroniques de J. Froissart_, ed. S. Luce (Société de l’Histoire de
France). The opening of the Prologue. It seemed desirable to render this
sentence literally. The rest of my extracts are from Thomas Johnes’s
translation, for which I plead a boyhood’s affection. For a brief account
of Froissart’s chief source (Jean le Bel), with excellent criticism, see
W. P. Ker, “Froissart” (_Essays on Medieval Literature_, Macmillan and
Co., 1905).

[688] Froissart, i. 210.

[689] Froissart, i. 220.

[690] Froissart, i. 290.

[691] Yet the matter was fit for legend and romance; and a late impotent
_chanson de geste_ was formed out of the career of du Guesclin.

[692] On the _chansons de geste_ see Gaston Paris, _Littérature française
au moyen âge_; Leon Gautier in Petit de Julleville’s _Histoire de la
langue et de la littérature française_, vol. i.; more at length Gautier,
_Épopées nationales_, and Paulin Paris in vol. 22 of _L’Histoire
littéraire de France_; also Nyrop, _Storia dell’ epopea francese nel medio
evo_. Ample bibliographies will be found in these works.

[693] On the field of Roncesvalles, Roland folds the hands of the dead
Archbishop Turpin, and grieves over him, beginning:

  “E! gentilz hum chevaliers de bon aire, ...”
                      (_Roland_, line 2252).

[694] Leon Gautier, in his _Chevalerie_, makes the _chansons de geste_ his
chief source.

[695] 1006-1016.

[696] 1051 _sqq._ and 1700 _sqq._

[697] 1851-1868.

[698] 1940-2023.

[699] 2164 _sqq._

[700] _Raoul de Cambrai_, cited by Gautier, _Chevalerie_, p. 75.

[701] Unless indeed Oberon, the fairy king, be a romantic form of the
Alberich of the _Nibelungen_ (Gaston Paris).

[702] See Gaston Paris, _Lit. française, etc._, chaps. iii. and v.; and
Émile Littré in vol. 22 of the _Histoire littéraire de la France_. For
examples of these _romans_, see Langlois, _La Société française au XIII{e}
siècle d’après dix romans d’aventure_ (2nd ed., Paris, 1904).

[703] Chrétien, _Cligés_, line 201 _sqq._

[704] The Old French from vol. ii. of P. Paris, _Romans de la Table
Ronde_, p. 96. One sees that the coronation is a larger knighting, and
kingship a larger knighthood.

[705] _Romans de la Table Ronde_, iii. 96. This scene closely parallels
that between Bernier and Raoul de Cambrai, instanced above.

[706] See the first part of vol. iii. of _Romans de la Table Ronde_,
especially pp. 113-117.

[707] It would be easy to go on drawing illustrations of the actual and
imaginative elements in chivalry, until this chapter should grow into an
encyclopedia. They could so easily be taken from many kinds of mediaeval
literature in all the mediaeval tongues. The French has barely been
touched upon. It affords an exhaustless store. Then in the German we might
draw upon the courtly epics, Gottfried of Strassburg’s _Tristan_ or the
_Parzival_ of Wolfram von Eschenbach; or on the _Nibelungenlied_, wherein
Siegfried is a very knight. Or we might draw upon the knightly precepts
(the Ritterlehre) of the Winsbeke and the Winsbekin (printed in
Hildebrand’s _Didaktik aus der Zeit der Kreuzzüge_, Deutsche Nat. Litt.).
And we might delve in the great store of Latin Chronicles which relate the
mediaeval history of German kings and nobles. In Spanish, there would be
the _Cid_, and how much more besides. In Italian we should have latter-day
romantic chivalry; Pulci’s _Rotta di Roncisvalle_; Boiardo’s _Orlando
innamorato_; Ariosto’s _Orlando furioso_; still later, Tasso’s
_Gerusalemme liberata_, which takes us well out of the Middle Ages. And in
English there is much Arthurian romance; there is _Chevy Chace_; and we
may come down through Chaucer’s _Knight’s Tale_, to the sunset beauty of
Spenser’s _Fairie Queen_. This glorious poem should serve to fix in our
minds the principle that chivalry, knighthood, was not merely a material
fact, a ceremony and an institution; but that it also was that
ultra-reality, a spirit. And this spirit’s ideal creations--the ideal
creations of the many phases of this spirit--accorded with actual deeds
which may be read of in the old Chronicles. For final exemplification of
the actual and the ideally real in chivalry, the reader may look within
himself, and observe the inextricable mingling of the imaginative and the
real. He will recognize that what at one time seems part of his
imagination, at another will prove itself the veriest reality of his life.
Even such wavering verity of spirit was chivalry.

[708] See Gaston Paris in _Journal des savants_, 1892, pp. 161-163. Of
course the English reader cannot but think of the brief secret marriage
between Romeo and Juliet.

[709] Marriage or no marriage depends on the plot; but occasionally a
certain respect for marriage is shown, as in the _Eliduc_ of Marie de
France, and of course far more strongly in Wolfram’s _Parzival_. In
Chrétien’s _Ivain_ the hero marries early in the story; and thereafter his
wife acts towards him with the haughty caprice of an _amie_; Ivain, at her
displeasure, goes mad, like an _ami_. The _romans d’aventure_ afford other
instances of this courtly love, sometimes illicit, sometimes looking to
marriage. See Langlois, _La Société française au XIII{e} siècle d’après
dix romans d’aventure_.

[710] On Provençal poetry see Diez, _Poesie der Troubadours_ (2nd ed. by
Bartsch, Leipzig, 1883); _id._, _Leben und Werke der Troubadours_; Justin
H. Smith, _The Troubadours at Home_ (New York and London, 1899); Ida
Farnell, _Lives of the Troubadours_ (London).

[711] Cf. Gaston Paris, t. 30, pp. 1-18, _Hist. lit. de la France_; Paul
Meyer, _Romania_, v. 257-268; xix. 1-62. “Trouvère” is the Old French word
corresponding to Provençal “Troubadour.”

[712] On this work see Gaston Paris, _Romania_, xii. 524 _sqq._ (1883);
_id._ in _Journal des savants_, 1888, pp. 664 _sqq._ and 727 _sqq._; also
(for extracts) Raynouard, _Choix des poésies des Troubadours_, ii. lxxx.
sqq.

[713] On origins and sources see, generally, Gaston Paris, _Tristan and
Iseult_ (Paris, 1894), reprinted from _Revue de Paris_ of April 15, 1894;
W. Golther, _Die Sage von Tristan und Isolde_ (Munich, 1887).

[714] Cf. generally, J. L. Weston, _The Legend of Sir Lancelot du Lac_
(London, 1901, David Nutt).

[715] See Gaston Paris, _Romania_, xii. 459-534.

[716] Paulin Paris, _Romans de la Table Ronde_, iv. 280 _sqq._

[717] See Paulin Paris, _Romans de la Table Ronde_, iv. Guinevere’s
woman-mind is shown in the following scene. On an occasion the lovers’
sophisticated friend, the Dame de Malehaut, laughs tauntingly at Lancelot:

“‘Ah! Lancelot, Lancelot, dit-elle, je vois que le roi n’a plus d’autre
avantage sur vous que la couronne de Logres!’

“Et comme il ne trouvait rien à répondre de convenable, ‘Ma chère
Malehaut, dit la reine, si je suis fille de roi, il est fils de roi; si je
suis belle, il est beau; de plus, il est le plus preux des preux. Je n’ai
donc pas à rougir de l’avoir choisi pour mon chevalier’” (Paulin Paris,
_ibid._ iv. 58).

[718] Galahad’s mother was Helene, daughter of King Pelles (_roi
pêcheur_), the custodian of the Holy Grail. A love-philter makes Lancelot
mistake her for Guinevere; and so the knight’s loyalty to his mistress is
saved. The damsel herself was without passion, beyond the wish to bear a
son begotten by the best of knights (_Romans, etc._, v. 308 _sqq._).

[719] “For what is he that may yeve a lawe to lovers? Love is a gretter
lawe and a strengere to himself than any lawe that men may yeven”
(Chaucer, _Boece_, book iii. metre 12).

[720] As in Chrétien’s _Cligés_, 6751 _sqq._, when Cligés is crowned
emperor and Fenice becomes his queen, then: _De s’amie a feite sa
fame_--but he still calls her _amie et dame_, that he may not cease to
love her as one should an _amie_. Cf. also Chrétien’s _Erec_, 4689.

[721] See also Gawain’s words to _Ivain_ when the latter is married--in
Chrétien’s _Ivain_, 2484 _sqq._

[722] As a matter of fact, in those parts of Wolfram’s poem which are
covered by Chrétien’s unfinished _Perceval le Gallois_, the incidents are
nearly identical with Chrétien’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-Hirshfeld, _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 Zimmrock, and an
English translation by Jessie L. Weston (London, D. Nutt, 1894).

[723] 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.

[724] The Fisher King (_roi pêcheur_) was the regular title of the Grail
kings. See _e.g._ Pauline Paris, _Romans de la Table Ronde_, t. i. p. 306.

[725] _E.g._ the love-potion in the tale of Tristan.




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Transcriber’s Notes:

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