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.