LATIN TRANSMITTERS OF ANTIQUE AND PATRISTIC THOUGHT
For the Latin West the creative patristic epoch closes with the death of
Augustine. There follows a period marked by the cessation of intellectual
originality. Men are engaged upon translations from the Greek; they are
busy commenting upon older writings, or are expounding with a change of
emphasis the systematic constructions of their predecessors. Epitomes and
compendia appear, simplified and mechanical abstracts of the bare elements
of inherited knowledge and current education. Compilations are made, put
together of excerpts taken unshriven and unshorn into the compiler’s
writing. Knowledge is brought down to a more barbaric level. Yet
temperament lingers for a while, and still appears in the results.
The representatives of this post-patristic period of translation, comment,
and compendium, and of re-expression with temperamental change of
emphasis, are the two contemporaries, Boëthius and Cassiodorus; then
Gregory the Great, who became pope soon after Cassiodorus closed his eyes
at the age of ninety or more; and, lastly, Isidore, Archbishop of Seville,
who died in 636, twenty-two years after Gregory. All these were Latin
bred, and belonged to the Roman world rather than to those new peoples
whose barbarism was hastening the disruption of a decadent order, but
whose recently converted zeal was soon to help on the further diffusion of
Latin Christianity. They appear as transmitters of antique and patristic
thought; because, originating little, they put together matter congenial
to their own lowering intellectual predilections, and therefore suitable
mental pabulum for times of mingled decadence and barbarism, and also for
the following periods of mediaeval re-emergence which continued to hark
back to the obvious and the easy.
Instead of _transmitters_, a word indicating function, one might call
these men _intermediaries_, and so indicate their position as well as
rôle. Both words, however, should be taken relatively. For all the Fathers
heretofore considered were in some sense transmitters or intermediaries,
even though creative in their work of systematizing, adding to, or
otherwise transforming their matter. Yet one would not dub Augustine a
transmitter, because he was far more of a remaker or creator. But a dark
refashioner indeed will Gregory the Great appear; while Boëthius,
Cassiodorus, Isidore are rather sheer transmitters, or intermediaries, the
last-named worthy destined to be the most popular of them all, through his
unerring faculty of selecting for his compilations the foolish and the
flat.
Among them, Boëthius alone was attached to the antique by affinity of
sentiment and temper. Although doubtless a professing Christian, his
sentiments were those of pagan philosophy. The _De consolatione
philosophiae_, which comes to us as his very self, is a work of eclectic
pagan moralizing, fused to a personal unity by the author’s artistic and
emotional nature, then deeply stirred by his imprisonment and peril. He
had enjoyed the favour of the great Ostrogoth, Theodoric, ruler of Italy,
but now was fallen under suspicion, and had been put in prison, where he
was executed in the year 525 at the age of forty-three. His book moves all
readers by its controlled and noble pathos, rendered more appealing
through the romantic interest surrounding its composition. It became _par
excellence_ the mediaeval source of such ethical precept and consolation
as might be drawn from rational self-control and acquiescence in the ways
of Providence. But at present we are concerned with the range of
Boëthius’s intellectual interests and his labours for the transmission of
learning. He was an antique-minded man, whose love of knowledge did not
revolve around “salvation,” the patristic focus of intellectual effort.
Rather he was moved by an ardent wish to place before his Latin
contemporaries what was best in the classic education and philosophy. He
is first of all a translator from Greek to Latin, and, secondly, a helpful
commentator on the works which he translates.
He was little over twenty years of age when he wrote his first work, the
_De arithmetica_.[94] It was a free translation of the _Arithmetic_ of
Nichomachus, a Neo-Pythagorean who flourished about the year 100.
Boëthius’s work opens with a dedicatory _Praefatio_ to his father-in-law
Symmachus. In that and in the first chapter he evinces a broad conception
of education, and shows that lovers of wisdom should not despise
arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, the fourfold path or
_quadrivium_, a word which he may have been the first to use in this
sense.[95] With him arithmetic treats of quantity in and by itself; music,
of quantity related to measure; geometry, of moveless, and astronomy, of
moving, quantity. He was a better Greek scholar than mathematician; and
his free translation ignores some of the finer points of Nichomachus’s
work, which would have impressed one better versed in mathematics.[96]
The young scholar followed up his maiden work with a treatise on Music,
showing a knowledge of Greek harmonics. Then came a _De geometria_, in
which the writer draws from Euclid as well as from the practical knowledge
of Roman surveyors.[97] He composed or translated other works on
elementary branches of education, as appears from a royal letter written
by Cassiodorus in the name of Theodoric: “In your translations Pythagoras
the musician, Ptolemy the astronomer, Nichomachus the arithmetician,
Euclid the geometer are read by Italians, while Plato the theologian and
Aristotle the logician dispute in Roman voice; and you have given back the
mechanician Archimedes in Latin to the Sicilians.”[98] Making all
allowance for politeness, this letter indicates the large accomplishment
of Boëthius, who was but twenty-five years old when it was written. We
turn to the commentated Aristotelian translations which he now
undertook.[99] “Although the duties of the consular office[100] prevent
the bestowal of our time upon these studies, it still seems a proper part
of our care for the Republic to instruct its citizens in the learning
which is gained by the labours of the lamp. Since the valour of a bygone
time brought dominion over other cities to this one Republic, I shall not
merit ill of my countrymen if I shall have instructed the manners of our
State with the arts of Greek wisdom.”[101] These sentences open the second
book of Boëthius’s translation of the _Categories_ of Aristotle. His plan
of work enlarged, apparently, and grew more definite, as the years passed,
each adding its quota of accomplishment. At all events, some time
afterwards, when he may have been not far from thirty-five, he speaks in
the flush of an intellectual anticipation which the many years of labour
still to be counted on seemed to justify:
“Labour ennobles the human race and completes it with the fruits of
genius; but idleness deadens the mind. Not experience, but ignorance,
of labour turns us from it. For what man who has made trial of labour
has ever forsaken it? And the power of the mind lies in keeping the
mind tense; to unstring it is to ruin it. My fixed intention, if the
potent favour of the deity will so grant, is (although others have
laboured in this field, yet not with satisfactory method) to translate
into Latin every work of Aristotle that comes to my hand, and furnish
it with a Latin commentary. Thus I may present, well ordered and
illustrated with the light of comment, whatever subtilty of logic’s
art, whatever weight of moral experience, and whatever insight into
natural truth, may be gathered from Aristotle. And I mean to translate
all the dialogues of Plato, or reduce them in my commentary to a Latin
form. Having accomplished this, I shall not have despised the opinions
of Aristotle and Plato if I evoke a certain concord between them and
show in how many things of importance for philosophy they agree--if
only life and leisure last. But now let us return to our
subject.”[102]
One sees a veritable love of intellectual labour and a love of the
resulting mental increment. It is distinctly the antique, not the
patristic, attitude towards interests of the mind. In spite of his unhappy
sixth century way of writing, and the mental fallings away indicated by
it, Boëthius possessed the old pagan spirit, and shows indeed how tastes
might differ in the sixth century. He never translated the whole of
Aristotle and Plato; and his idea of reconciling the two evinces the
shallow eclectic spirit of the closing pagan times. Nevertheless, he
carried out his purpose to the extent of rendering into Latin, with
abundant comment, the entire _Organon_, that is, all the logical writings
of Aristotle. First of all, and with elaborate explanation, he rendered
Porphyry’s famous Introduction to the _Categories_ of the Master. Then the
_Categories_ themselves, likewise with abundant explanation. Then
Aristotle’s _De interpretatione_, in two editions, the first with simple
comment suited to beginners, the second with the best elaboration of
formal logic that he could devise or compile.[103] These elementary
portions of the _Organon_, as transmitted in the Boëthian translations,
made the logical discipline of the mediaeval schools until the latter part
of the twelfth century. He translated also Aristotle’s _Prior_ and
_Posterior Analytics_, the _Topics_, and the _Sophistical Elenchi_. But
such advanced treatises were beyond the requirements of the early
mediaeval centuries. With the lessening of intellectual energy they passed
into oblivion, to re-emerge only when called for by the livelier mental
activities of a later time.
The list of Boëthius’s works is not yet exhausted, for he wrote some minor
logical treatises, and a voluminous commentary on Cicero’s _Topica_. He
was probably the author of certain Christian theological tracts,
themselves less famous than the controversy which long has raged as to
their authorship.[104] If he wrote them, he did but make polite obeisance
to the ruling intellectual preoccupations of the time.
Boëthius’s commentaries reproduced the comments of other
commentators,[105] and he presents merely the logical processes of
thought. But these, analyzed and tabulated, were just the parts of
philosophy to be seized by a period whose lack of mental originality was
rapidly lowering to a barbaric frame of mind. The logical works of
Boëthius were formal, pedantic, even mechanical. They necessarily
presented the method rather than the substance of philosophic truth. But
their study would exercise the mind, and they were peculiarly adapted to
serve as discipline for the coming centuries, which could not become
progressive until they had mastered their antique inheritance, including
this chief method of presenting the elemental forms of truth.
The “life and leisure” of Boëthius were cut off by his untimely death.
Cassiodorus, although a year or two older, outlived him by half a century.
He was born at Squillace, a Calabrian town which looks out south-easterly
over the little gulf bearing the same name. His father, grandfather, and
great-grandfather had been generals and high officials. He himself served
for forty years under Theodoric and his successors, and at last became
praetorian praefect, the chief office in the Gothic Roman kingdom.[106]
Through his birth, his education, his long official career, and perhaps
his pliancy, he belonged to both Goths and Romans, and like the great king
whom he first served, stood for a policy of reconcilement and assimilation
of the two peoples, and also for tolerance as between Arian and Catholic.
Some years after Theodoric’s death, when the Gothic kingdom had passed
through internecine struggles and seemed at last to have fallen before the
skill of Belisarius, Cassiodorus forsook the troubles of the world. He
retired to his birthplace Squillace, and there in propitious situations
founded a pleasant cloister for coenobites and an austerer hermitage for
those who would lead lives of arduous seclusion. For himself, he chose the
former. It was the year of grace 540, three years before the death of
Benedict of Nursia. Cassiodorus was past sixty. In retiring from the world
he followed the instinct of his time, yet temperately and with an
increment of wisdom. For he was the first influential man to recognize the
fitness of the cloister for the labours of the pious student and copyist.
It is not too much to regard him as the inaugurator of the learned,
compiling, commenting and transcribing functions of monasticism. Not only
as a patron, but through his own works, he was here a leader. His writings
composed after his retirement represent the intellectual interests of
western monasticism in the last half of the sixth century. They indicate
the round of study proper for monks; just the grammar, the orthography,
and other elementary branches which they might know; just the history with
which it behoved them to be acquainted; and then, outbulking all the rest,
those Scriptural studies to which they might well devote their lives for
the sake of their own and others’ souls.
In passing these writings in review, it is unnecessary to pause over the
interesting collection of letters--_Variae epistolae_--which were the
fruit of Cassiodorus’s official life, before he shut the convent’s outer
door against the toils of office. He “edited” them near the close of his
public career. Before that ended he had made a wretched _Chronicon_,
carelessly and none too honestly compiled. He had also written his Gothic
History, a far better work. It survives only in the compend of the
ignorant Jordanes, a fact the like of which will be found repeatedly
recurring in the sixth and following centuries, when a barbaric mentality
continually prefers the compend to the larger and better original, which
demands greater effort from the reader. A little later Cassiodorus
composed his _De anima_, a treatise on the nature, qualities, and
destinies of the Soul. Although made at the request of friends, it
indicated the turning of the statesman’s interest to the matters occupying
his latter years, during which his literary labours were guided by a
paternal purpose. One may place it with the works coming from his pen in
those thirty years of retirement, when study and composition were rather
stimulated than disturbed by care of his convent and estates, the modicum
of active occupation needed by an old man whose life had been passed in
the management of State affairs. Its preface sets out the topical
arrangement in a manner prophetic of scholastic methods:
“Let us first learn why it is called Anima; secondly, its definition;
thirdly, its substantial quality; fourthly, whether any form should be
ascribed to it; fifthly, what are its moral virtues; sixthly, its
natural powers (_virtutes naturales_) by which it holds the body
together; seventhly, as to its origin; eighthly, where is its especial
seat; ninthly, as to the body’s form; tenthly, as to the properties of
the souls of sinners; eleventhly, as to those of the souls of the
just; and twelfthly, as to the resurrection.”[107]
The short treatise which follows is neither original nor penetrating. It
closes with an encomium on the number twelve, with praise of Christ and
with a prayer.
Soon after Cassiodorus had installed himself in Vivaria, as he called his
convent, from the fishponds and gardens surrounding it, he set himself to
work to transcribe the Scriptures, and commenced a huge Commentary on the
Psalms. But he interrupted these undertakings in 543 in order to write for
his monks a syllabus of their sacred and secular education. The title of
the work was _Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum_.[108] In
opening he refers to his failure to found a school of Christian teaching
at Rome, on account of the wars. Partially to repair this want, he will
compose an introduction to the study of Scripture and letters. It will not
set out his own opinions, but those of former men. Through the expositions
of the Fathers we ascend to divine Scripture, as by a ladder. The proper
order is for the “tiros of Christ” first to learn the Psalms, and then
proceed to study the rest of Scripture in carefully corrected codices.
When the “soldiers of Christ” have completed the reading of Scripture, and
fixed it in their minds by constant meditation, they will begin to
recognize passages when cited, and be able to find them. They should also
know the Latin commentators, and even the Greek, who have expounded the
various books.
The first book of these _Institutiones_ is strictly a guide to Scripture
study, and in no way a commentary. For example, beginning with the
“Octateuch,” as making up the first “codex” of Scripture, Cassiodorus
tells what Latin and what Greek Fathers have expounded it. He proceeds,
briefly, in the same way with the rest of the Old and New Testaments. He
mentions the Ecumenical Councils, which had passed upon Christian
doctrine, and then refers to the division of Scripture by Jerome, by
Augustine, and in the Septuagint. He states rules for preserving the
purity of the text, exclaims over its ineffable value, and mentions famous
doctrinal works, like Augustine’s _De Trinitate_ and the _De officiis_ of
Ambrose. He then recommends the study of Church historians and names the
great ones, who while incidentally telling of secular events have shown
that such hung not on chance nor on the power of the feeble gods, but
solely on the Creator’s will. Then he shortly characterizes the great
Latin Doctors, Cyprian, Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, and
mentions a convenient collection of excerpts from the works of the
last-named saint, made by a certain priest. Next he admonishes the student
as to the careful reading of Scripture, and suggests convenient
abbreviations for noting citations. He speaks of the desirability of
knowing enough cosmography to understand when Scripture speaks of
countries, towns, mountains, or rivers, and then reverts to the need of an
acquaintance with the Seven Arts; this secular wisdom, having been
originally pilfered from Scripture, should now be called back to its true
service. Those monks who lack intelligence for such studies may properly
work in the fields and gardens which surround Vivaria (Columella and other
writers on agriculture are to be found in the convent library), and to all
the care of the sick is recommended. The second book of the
_Institutiones_ is a brief and unequal compend of the Seven Arts, in which
Dialectic is treated at greatest length.
The remaining works of Cassiodorus appear as special aids to the student
in carrying out the programme of the first book of the _Institutiones_.
Such an aid was the bulky Commentary on the Psalms; another such was the
famous _Historia tripartita_, made of the Church histories of Socrates,
Sozomen, and Theodoret, translated by a friend of Cassiodorus, and crudely
thrown together by himself into one narrative. Finally, such another work
was the compilation upon Latin orthography which the good old man made for
his monks in his ninety-third year.
This long and useful life does not display the zeal for knowledge for its
own sake which marks the labours of Boëthius. It is the Christian
utilitarian view of knowledge that Cassiodorus represents, and yet not
narrowly, nor with a trace of that intolerance of whatever did not bear
directly on salvation, which is to be found in Gregory. From Boëthius’s
love of philosophy, and from the practical interest of Cassiodorus in
education, it is indeed a change to the spiritual anxiousness and fear of
hell besetting this great pope.[109]
In appreciating a man’s opinions and his mental clarity or murkiness, one
should consider his temperament and the temper of his time. Gregory was
constrained as well as driven by temperamental yearnings and aversions,
aggravated by the humour of the century that produced Benedict of Nursia
and was contemplating gloomily the Empire’s ruin and decay, now more
acutely borne in upon the consciousness of thoughtful people than in the
age of Augustine. His temper drew from prevailing moods, and in turn
impressed its spiritual incisiveness upon the influences which it
absorbed; and his writings, so expressive of his own temperament and all
that fed it, were to work mightily upon the minds and moods of men to
come.
Born of a distinguished Roman family about the year 540, he was some
thirty-five years old when Cassiodorus died. His education was the best
that Rome could give. In spite of disclaimer on his part, rhetorical
training shows in the antithetic power of his style; for example, in that
resounding sentence in the dedicatory letter prefixed to his _Moralia_,
wherein he would seem to be casting grammar to the winds. Although quoted
until threadbare, it is so illustrative as to justify citation: “Nam sicut
hujus quoque epistolae tenor enunciat, non metacismi collisionem fugio,
non barbarismi confusionem devito, situs motusque et praepositionum casus
servare contemno, quia indignum vehementer existimo, ut verba coelestis
oraculi restringam sub regulis Donati.”[110] By no means will he flee the
concussion of the oft-repeated M, or avoid the confusing barbarism; he
will despise the laws of place and case, because he deems it utterly unfit
to confine the words of the heavenly oracle beneath the rules of Donatus.
By all of which Gregory means that he proposes to write freely, according
to the needs of his subject, and to disregard the artificial rules of the
somewhat emptied rhetoric, let us say, of Cassiodorus’s epistles.
In his early manhood naturally he was called to take part in affairs, and
was made _Praetor urbanus_. But soon the prevalent feeling of the
difficulty of serving God in the world drove him to retirement. His
father’s palace on the Coelian hill he changed to a convent, upon the site
of which now stands the Church of San Gregorio Magno; and there he became
a monk. Passionately he loved the monk’s life, for which he was to long in
vain through most of the years to come. Soon he was dragged forth from the
companionship of “Mary” to serve with “Martha.” The toiling papacy could
not allow a man of his abilities to remain hidden. He was harnessed to its
active service, and sent as the papal representative to the Imperial Court
at Constantinople; whence he returned, after several years, in 585.
Re-entering his monastery on the Coelian, he became its abbot; but was
drawn out again, and made pope by acclamation and insistency in the year
590. There is no need to speak of the efficient and ceaseless activity of
this pontiff, whose body was never free from pain, nor his soul released
from longing for seclusion which only the grave was to bring.
Gregory’s mind was less antique, and more barbarous and mediaeval than
Augustine’s, whose doctrine he reproduced with garbling changes of tone
and emphasis. In the century and a half between the two, the Roman
institutions had broken down, decadence had advanced, and the patristic
mind had passed from indifference to the laws of physical phenomena to
something like sheer barbaric ignorance of the same. Whatever in Ambrose,
Jerome, or Augustine represented conviction or opinion, has in Gregory
become mental habit, spontaneity of acceptance, matter of course. The
miraculous is with him a frame of mind; and the allegorical method of
understanding Scripture is no longer intended, not to say wilful, as with
Augustine, but has become persistent unconscious habit. Augustine desired
to know God and the Soul, and the true Christian doctrine with whatever
made for its substantiation. He is conscious of closing his mind to
everything irrelevant to this. Gregory’s nature has settled itself within
this scheme of Christian knowledge which Augustine framed. He has no
intellectual inclinations reaching out beyond. He is not conscious of
closing his mind to extraneous knowledge. His mental habits and
temperament are so perfectly adjusted to the confines of this circle, that
all beyond has ceased to exist for him.
So with Gregory the patristic limitation of intellectual interest,
indifference to physical phenomena, and acceptance of the miraculous are
no longer merely thoughts and opinions consciously entertained; they make
part of his nature. There was nothing novel in his views regarding
knowledge, sacred and profane. But there is a turbid force of temperament
in his expressions. In consequence, his vehement words to Bishop
Desiderius of Vienne[111] have been so taken as to make the great pope a
barbarizing idiot. He exclaims with horror at the report that the bishop
is occupying himself teaching grammar; he is shocked that an episcopal
mouth should be singing praises of Jove, which are unfit for a lay brother
to utter. But Gregory is not decrying here, any more than in the sentence
quoted from the letter prefixed to his _Moralia_, a decent command of
Latin. He is merely declaring with temperamental vehemence that to teach
grammar and poetry is not the proper function of a bishop--the bishop in
this case of a most important see. Gregory had no more taste for secular
studies than Tertullian four centuries before him. For both, however,
letters had their handmaidenly function, which they performed effectively
in the instances of these two great rhetoricians.[112]
It is needless to say that the entire literary labour of Gregory was
religious. His works, as in time, so in quality, are midway between those
of Ambrose and Augustine and those of the Carolingian rearrangers of
patristic opinion. Gregory, who laboured chiefly as a commentator upon
Scripture, was not highly original in his thoughts, yet was no mere
excerpter of patristic interpretations, like Rabanus Maurus or Walafrid
Strabo, who belong to the ninth century.[113] In studying Scripture, he
thought and interpreted in allegories. But he was also a man experienced
in life’s exigencies, and his religious admonishings were wise and
searching. His prodigious Commentary upon Job has with reason been called
Gregory’s _Moralia_.[114] And as the moral advice and exhortation sprang
from Gregory the bishop, so the allegorical interpretations largely were
his own, or at least not borrowed and applied mechanically.
Gregory represents the patristic mind passing into a more barbarous stage.
He delighted in miracles, and wrote his famous _Dialogues on the Lives and
Miracles of the Italian Saints_[115] to solace the cares of his
pontificate. The work exhibits a naïve acceptance of every kind of
miracle, and presents the supple mediaeval devil in all his deceitful
metamorphoses.[116]
Quite in accord with Gregory’s interest in these stories is his
elaboration of certain points of doctrine, for example, the worship of the
saints, whose intercession and supererogatory righteousness may be turned
by prayer and worship to the devotee’s benefit. Thus he comments upon the
eighth verse of the twenty-fourth chapter of Job:
“They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rocks
as a shelter. The showers of the mountains are the words of the
doctors. Concerning which mountains it is said with the voice of the
Church: ‘I will lift up my eyes unto the hills.’ The showers of the
mountains water these, for the streams of the holy fathers saturate.
We receive the ‘shelter’ as a covering of good works, by which one is
covered so that before the eyes of omnipotent God the filthiness of
his perversity is concealed. Wherefore it is written, ‘Blessed are
those whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered’ (Ps.
xxxii. 1). And under the name of stones whom do we understand except
the strong men of the Church? To whom it is said through the first
shepherd: ‘Ye also as living stones are built up a spiritual house’ (1
Peter ii. 5). So those who confide in no work of their own, run to the
protection of the holy martyrs, and press with tears to their sacred
bodies, pleading to obtain pardon through their intercession.”[117]
Another point of Gregorian emphasis: no delict is remitted without
punishment.[118] To complement which principle, Gregory develops the
doctrine of penance in its three elements, _contritio_, _conversio
mentis_, _satisfactio_. Our whole life should be one long penitence and
penance, and baptism of tears; for our first baptism cannot wash out later
sins, and cannot be repeated. In the fourth book of the _Dialogi_ he
develops his cognate doctrine of Purgatory,[119] and amplifies upon the
situation and character of hell. These things are implicit in Augustine
and existed before him: with Gregory they have become explicit,
elaborated, and insisted on with recurrent emphasis. Thus Augustinianism
is altered in form and barbarized.[120]
Gregory is throughout prefigurative of the Middle Ages, which he likewise
prefigures in his greatness as a sovereign bishop and a man of
ecclesiastical affairs. He is energetic and wise and temperate. The
practical wisdom of the Catholic Church is in him and in his rightly famed
book of _Pastoral Rule_. The temperance and wisdom of his letters of
instructions to Augustine of Canterbury are admirable. The practical
exigency seemed always to have the effect of tempering any extreme opinion
which apart from it he might have expressed; as one sees, for example, in
those letters to this apostle to the English, or in his letter to Serenus,
Bishop of Marseilles, who had been too violent as to paintings and images.
Gregory’s stand is moderate and reasonable. Likewise he opposes the use of
force to convert the Jews, although insisting firmly that no Jew may hold
a Christian slave.[121]
There has been occasion to remark that decadence tends to join hands with
barbarism on a common intellectual level. Had Boëthius lived in a greater
epoch, he might not have been an adapter of an elementary arithmetic and
geometry, and his best years would not have been devoted to the
translation and illustration of logical treatises. Undoubtedly his labours
were needed by the times in which he lived and by the centuries which
followed them in spirit as well as chronologically. He was the principal
purveyor of the strictly speaking intellectual grist of the early Middle
Ages; and it was most apt that the great scholastic controversy as to
universals should have drawn its initial text from his translation of
Porphyry’s Introduction to the _Categories_ of Aristotle.[122] Gregory, on
the other hand, was a purveyor of theology, the subject to which logic
chiefly was to be applied. He purveyed matter very much to the mediaeval
taste; for example, his wise practical admonishments; his elaboration of
such a doctrine as that of penance, so tangible that it could be handled,
and felt with one’s very fingers; and, finally, his supreme intellectual
endeavour, the allegorical trellising of Scripture, to which the Middle
Ages were to devote their thoughts, and were to make warm and living with
the love and yearning of their souls. The converging currents--decadence
and barbarism--meet and join in Gregory’s powerful personality. He
embodies the intellectual decadence which has lost all independent wish
for knowledge and has dropped the whole round of the mind’s mortal
interests; which has seized upon the near, the tangible, and the ominous
in theology till it has rooted religion in the fear of hell. All this may
be viewed as a decadent abandonment of the more intellectual and spiritual
complement to the brute facts of sin, penance, and hell barely escaped.
But, on the other hand, it was also barbarization, and held the strength
of barbaric narrowing of motives and the resistlessness of barbaric fear.
Such were the rôles of Boëthius and Gregory in the transmission of antique
and patristic intellectual interests into the mediaeval time. Quite
different was that of Gregory’s younger contemporary, Isidore, the
princely and vastly influential Bishop of Seville, the primary see in that
land of Spain, which, however it might change dynasties, was destined
never to be free from some kind of sacerdotal bondage. In Isidore’s time,
the kingdom of the Visigoths had recently turned from Arianism to
Catholicism, and wore its new priestly yoke with ardour. Boëthius had
provided a formal discipline and Gregory much substance already
mediaevalized. But the whole ground-plan of Isidore’s mind corresponded
with the aptitudes and methods of the Carolingian period, which was to be
the schoolday of the Middle Ages. By reason of his own habits of study, by
reason of the quality of his mind, which led him to select the palpable,
the foolish, and the mechanically correlated, by reason, in fine, of _his_
mental faculties and interests, Isidore gathered and arranged in his
treatises a conglomerate of knowledge, secular and sacred, exactly suited
to the coming centuries.
In drawing from its spiritual heritage, an age takes what it cares for;
and if comparatively decadent or barbarized or childlike in its
intellectual affinities, it will still manage to draw what is like itself.
In that case, probably it will not draw directly from the great sources,
but from intermediaries who have partially debased them. From these turbid
compositions the still duller age will continue to select the obvious and
the worse. This indicates the character of Isidore’s work. His writings
speak for themselves through their titles, and are so flat, so
transparent, so palpably taken from the nearest authorities, that there is
no call to analyze them. But their titles with some slight indication of
their contents will show the excerpt character of Isidore’s mental
processes, and illustrate by anticipation the like qualities reappearing
with the Carolingian doctors.
Isidore’s _Quaestiones in vetus Testamentum_[123] is his chief work in the
nature of a Scripture commentary. It is confined to those passages of the
Old Testament which were deemed most pregnant with allegorical meaning.
His Preface discloses his usual method of procedure: “We have taken
certain of those incidents of the sacred history which were told or done
figuratively, and are filled with mystic sacraments, and have woven them
together in sequence in this little work; and, collecting the opinions of
the old churchmen, we have made a choice of flowers as from divers
meadows; and briefly presenting a few matters from so many, with some
changes or additions, we offer them not only to studious but fastidious
readers who detest prolixity.” Every one may feel assured that he will be
reading the interpretations of the Fathers, and not those of Isidore--“my
voice is but their tongue.” He states that his sources are Origen,
Victorinus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Fulgentius, Cassian, and “Gregory
so distinguished for his eloquence in our own time.” The spirit of the
mediaeval commentary is in this Preface. The phrase about “culling the
opinions of the Fathers like flowers from divers meadows,” will be
repeated hundreds of times. Such a commentary is a thing of excerpts; so
it rests upon authority. The writer thus comforts both his reader and
himself; neither runs the peril of originality, and together they repose
on the broad bosom of the Fathers.
Throughout his writings, Isidore commonly proceeds in this way, whether he
says so or not. We may name first the casual works which represent
separate parcels of his encyclopaedic gleanings, and then glance at his
putting together of them, in his _Etymologiae_.[124] The muster opens with
two books of Distinctions (_Differentiarum_). The first is concerned with
the distinctions of like-sounding and like-meaning words. It is
alphabetically arranged. The second is concerned with the distinctions of
_things_: it begins with God and the Creation, and passes to the physical
parts and spiritual traits of man. No need to say that it contains nothing
that is Isidore’s own. Now come the _Allegoriae quaedam sacrae
Scripturae_, which give in chronological order the allegorical
signification of all the important persons mentioned in the Old Testament
and the New. It was one of the earliest hand-books of Scriptural
allegories, and is a sheer bit of the Middle Ages in spirit and method.
The substance, of course, is taken from the Fathers. Next, a little work,
_De ortu et obitu Patrum_, states in short paragraphs the birthplace, span
of life, place of sepulture, and noticeable traits of Scriptural
personages.
There follows a collection of brief Isidorean prefaces to the books of
Scripture. Then comes a curious book, which may have been suggested to the
writer by the words of Augustine himself. This is the _Liber numerorum_,
the book of the _numbers_ occurring in the Scriptures. It tells the
qualities and mystical significance of every number from one to sixteen,
and of the chief ones between sixteen and sixty. These numbers were “most
holy and most full of mysteries” to Augustine,[125] and Augustine is the
man whom Isidore chiefly draws on in this treatise--Augustine at his very
worst. One might search far for an apter instance of an ecclesiastical
writer elaborately exploiting the most foolish statements that could
possibly be found in the writings of a great predecessor.
Isidore composed a polemic treatise on the Catholic Faith against the
Jews--_De fide Catholica contra Judaeos_. The good bishop had nothing to
add to the patristic discussion of this weighty controversy. His book is
filled with quotations from Scripture. It put the matter together in a way
suited to his epoch and the coming centuries, and at an early time was
translated into the German and other vernacular tongues. Three books of
_Sententiae_ follow, upon the contents of Christian doctrine--as to God,
the world, evil, the angels, man, Christ and the Church. They consist of
excerpts from the writings of Gregory the Great and earlier Church
Fathers.[126] A more original work is the _De ecclesiasticis officiis_,
upon the services of the Church and the orders of clergy and laity. It
presents the liturgical practices and ecclesiastical regulations of
Isidore’s epoch.
Isidore seems to have put most pious feeling into a work called by him
_Synonyma_, to which name was added the supplementary designation: _De
lamentatione animae_. First the Soul pours out its lament in excruciating
iteration, repeating the same commonplace of Christian piety in synonymous
phrases. When its lengthy plaint is ended, Reason replies with admonitions
synonymously reiterated in the same fashion.[127] This work combined a
grammatical with a pious purpose, and became very popular through its
doubly edifying nature, and because it strung together so many easy
commonplaces of Christian piety. Isidore also drew up a _Regula_ for
monks, and a book on the Order of Creation has been ascribed to him. This
completes the sum of his extant works upon religious topics, from which we
pass to those of a secular character.
The first of these is the _De rerum natura_, written to enlighten his
king, Sisebut, “on the scheme (_ratio_) of the days and months, the bounds
of the year and the change of seasons, the nature of the elements, the
courses of the sun and moon and stars, and the signs of tempests and
winds, the position of the earth, and the ebb and flow of the sea.” Of all
of which, continues Isidore, “we have made brief note, from the writings
of the ancients (_veteribus viris_), and especially those who were of the
Catholic Faith. For it is not a vain knowledge (_superstitiosa scientia_)
to know the nature of these things, if we consider them according to sound
and sober teaching.”[128] So Isidore compiles a book of secular physical
knowledge, the substance of which is taken from the _Hexaemeron_ of
Ambrose and the works of other Fathers, and also from the lost _Prata_ of
pagan Suetonius.[129]
Of course Isidore busied himself also with history. He made a dismal
universal _Chronicon_, and perhaps a History of the Kings of the Goths,
through which stirs a breath of national pride; and after the model of
Jerome, he wrote a _De viris illustribus_, concerned with some fifty
worthies of the Church flourishing between Jerome’s time and his own.
Here we end the somewhat dry enumeration of the various works of Isidore
outside of his famous “twenty books of Etymologies.” This work has been
aptly styled a _Konversationslexikon_, to use the excellent German word.
It was named _Etymologiae_, because the author always gives the etymology
of everything which he describes or defines. Indeed the tenth book
contains only the etymological definitions of words alphabetically
arranged. These etymologies follow the haphazard similarities of the
words, and often are nonsensical. Sometimes they show a fantastic caprice
indicating a mind steeped in allegorical interpretations, as, for example,
when “_Amicus_ is said to be, by derivation, _animi custos_; also from
_hamus_, that is, chain of love, whence we say _hami_ or hooks because
they hold.”[130] This is not ignorance so much as fancy.
The _Etymologiae_ were meant to cover the current knowledge of the time,
doctrinal as well as secular. But the latter predominates, as it would in
a _Konversationslexikon_. The general arrangement of the treatise is not
alphabetical, but topical. To indicate the sources of its contents would
be difficult as well as tedious. Isidore drew on many previous authors and
compilers: to Cassiodorus and Boëthius he went for Rhetoric and Dialectic,
and made frequent trips to the _Prata_ of Suetonius for natural
knowledge--or ignorance. In matters of doctrine he draws on the Church
Fathers; and for his epitome of jurisprudence in the fifth book, upon the
Fathers from Tertullian on, and (probably) upon some elementary book of
legal Institutes.[131] Glancing at the handling of topics in the
_Etymologies_ one feels it to have been a huge collection of terms and
definitions. The actual information conveyed is very slight. Isidore is
under the spell of words. Were they fetishes to him? did they carry moral
potency? At all events the working of his mind reflects the age-long
dominance of grammar and rhetoric in Roman education, which treated other
topics almost as illustrations of these chief branches.[132]