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]