CHAPTER IX

THE BRINGING OF CHRISTIANITY AND ANTIQUE KNOWLEDGE TO THE NORTHERN PEOPLES

I. IRISH ACTIVITIES; COLUMBANUS OF LUXEUIL.

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

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

The northern peoples, Celts and Teutons for the most part as they are

called, came into contact with Roman civilization as the great Republic

brought Gaul and Britain under its rule. Since Rome was still pagan when

these lands were made provinces, an unchristianized Latinity was grafted

upon their predominantly Celtic populations. The second stage, as it were,

of this contact between Rome and the north, is represented by that influx

of barbarians, mostly Teutonic, which, in both senses of the word,

_quickened_ the disruption of the Empire in the fourth and following

centuries. The religion called after the name of Christ had then been

accepted; and invading Goths, Franks, Burgundians, Lombards, and the rest,

were introduced to a somewhat Christianized Latindom. Indeed, in the

Latin-Christian combination, the latter was becoming dominant, and was

soon to be the active influence in extending even the antique culture. For

Christianity, with Latinity in its train, was to project itself outward to

subjugate heathen Anglo-Saxons in England, Frisians in the Low Countries,

and the unkempt Teutondom which roved east of the Rhine, and was ever

pressing southward over the boundaries of former provinces, now reverting

to unrest. In past times the assimilating energy of Roman civilization had

united western Europe in a common social order. Henceforth Christianity

was to be the prime amalgamator, while the survivals of Roman

institutions and the remnants of antique culture were to assist in

secondary rôles. With Charles Martell, with Pippin, and with Charlemagne,

Latin Christianity is the symbol of civilized order, while heathendom and

savagery are identical.

I

The conversion of the northern peoples, and their incidental introduction

to profane knowledge, wrought upon them deeply; while their own qualities

and the conditions of their lives affected their understanding of what

they received and their attitude toward the new religion. Obviously the

dissemination of Christianity among rude peoples would be unlike that

first spreading of the Gospel through the Empire, in the course of which

it had been transformed to Greek and Latin Christianity. Italy, Spain, and

Gaul made the western region of this primary diffusion of the Faith. Of a

distinctly missionary character were the further labours which resulted in

the conversion of the fresh masses of Teutons who were breaking into the

Roman pale, or were still moving restlessly beyond it. Moreover, between

the time of the first diffusion of Christianity within the Empire and that

of its missionary extension beyond those now decayed and fallen

boundaries, it had been formulated dogmatically, and given ecclesiastical

embodiment in a Catholic church into which had passed the conquering and

organizing genius of Rome. This finished system was presented to simple

peoples, sanctioned by the authority and dowered with the surviving

culture of the civilized world. It offered them mightier supernatural aid,

nobler knowledge, and a better ordering of life than they had known. The

manner and authority of its presentation hastened its acceptance, and also

determined the attitude toward it of the new converts and their children

for generations. Theirs was to be the attitude of ignorance before

recognized wisdom, and that of a docility which revered the manner and

form as well as the substance of its lesson. The development of mediaeval

Europe was affected by the mode and circumstances of this secondary

propagation of Christianity. For centuries the northern peoples were to

be held in tutelage to the form and constitution of that which they had

received: they continued to revere the patristic sources of Christian

doctrines, and to look with awe upon the profane culture accompanying

them.

Thus, as under authority, Christianity came to the Teutonic peoples, even

to those who, like the Goths, were converted to the Arian creed. Likewise

the orthodox belief was brought to the Celtic Britons and Irish as a

superior religion associated with superior culture. But the qualities or

circumstances of these western Celts reacted more freely upon their form

of faith, because Ireland and Britain were the fringe of the world, and

Christianity was hardly fixed in dogma and ritual when the conversion at

least of Britain began.

Certain phrases of Tertullian indicate that Christianity had made some

progress among the Britons by the beginning of the third century. For the

next hundred years nothing is known of the British Church, save that it

did not suffer from the persecution under Diocletian in 304, and ten years

afterwards was represented by three bishops at the Council of Arles. It

was orthodox, accepting the creed of Nicaea (A.D. 325) and the date of

Easter there fixed. The fourth century seems to have been the period of

its prosperity. It was affiliated with the Church of Gaul; nor did these

relations cease at once when the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain

in 410. But not many decades later the Saxon invasion began to cut off

Britain from the Christian world. After a while certain divergences appear

in rite and custom, though not in doctrine. They seem not to have been

serious when Gildas wrote in 550. Yet when Augustine came, fifty years

later, the Britons celebrated Easter at a different date from that

observed by the Roman Catholic Church; for they followed the old

computation which Rome had used before adopting the better method of

Alexandria. Also the mode of baptism and the tonsure differed from the

Roman.

At the close of the sixth century the British Church existed chiefly in

Wales, whither the Britons had retreated before the Saxons. Formerly there

had been no unwillingness to follow the Church of Rome. But now a long

period had elapsed, during which Britain had been left to its misfortunes.

The Britons had been raided and harassed; their country invaded; and at

last they had been driven from the greater portion of their land. How they

hated those Saxon conquerors! And forsooth a Roman mission appears to

convert those damned and hateful heathen, and a somewhat haughty summons

issues to the expelled or downtrodden people to abandon their own

Christian usages for those of the Roman communion, and then join this

Roman mission in its saving work among those Saxons whom the Britons had

met only at the spear’s point. Love of ancient and familiar customs soured

to obstinacy in the face of such demands; a sweeping rejection was

returned. Yet to conform to Roman usages and join with Augustine in his

mission to the Saxons, was the only way in which the dwindling British

Church could link itself to the Christian world, and save its people from

exterminating wars. By refusing, it committed suicide.

A refusal to conform, although no refusal to undertake missions to the

Saxons, came from the Irish-Scottish Church. As Ireland had never been

drawn within the Roman world, its conversion was later than that of

Britain. Yet there would seem to have been Christians in Ireland before

431; for in that year, according to an older record quoted by Bede,

Palladius, the first bishop (_primus episcopus_), was sent by Celestine

the Roman pontiff “ad Scottos in Christum credentes.”[201] The mission of

Palladius does not appear to have been acceptable to the Irish. Some

accounts have confused his story with that of Patrick, the “Apostle of

Ireland,” whose apostolic glory has not been overthrown by criticism. The

more authentic accounts, and above all his own _Confession_, go far to

explain Patrick’s success. His early manhood, passed as a slave in Antrim,

gave him understanding of the Irish; and doubtless his was a great

missionary capacity and zeal. The natural approach to such a people was

through their tribal kings, and Patrick appears to have made his prime

onslaught upon Druidical heathendom at Tara, the abode of the high king of

Ireland. The earliest accounts do not refer to any authority from Rome.

Patrick seems to have acted from spontaneous inspiration; and a like

independence characterizes the monastic Christianity which sprang up in

Ireland and overleapt the water to Iona, to Christianize Scotland as well

as northern Anglo-Saxon heathendom.

Irish monasticism was an ascetically ordered continuance of Irish society.

If, like other early western monasticism, it derived suggestions from

Syria or Egypt, it was far more the product of Irish temperament, customs,

and conditions. One may also find a potent source in the monastic

communities alleged to have existed in Ireland in the days of the Druids.

Doubtless many members of that caste became Christian monks.

The noblest passion of Irish monastic Christianity was to _peregrinare_

for the sake of Christ, and spread the Faith among the heathen; the most

interesting episodes of its history are the wanderings and missionary

labours and foundations of its leaders. The careers of Columba and

Columbanus afford grandiose examples. Something has been said of the

former. The monastery which he founded on the Island of Iona was the

Faith’s fountainhead for Scotland and the Saxon north of England in the

sixth and seventh centuries. About the time of Columba’s birth, men from

Dalriada on the north coast of Ireland crossed the water to found another

Dalriada in the present Argyleshire, and transfer the name of Scotia

(Ireland) to Scotland. When Columba landed at Iona, these settlers were

hard pressed by the heathen Picts under King Brude or Bridius. Accompanied

by two Pictish Christians, he penetrated to Brude’s dwelling, near the

modern Inverness, converted that monarch in 565, and averted the overthrow

of Dalriada. For the next thirty years Columba and his monks did not cease

from their labours; numbers of monasteries were founded, daughters of

Iona; and great parts of Scotland became Christian at least in name. The

supreme authority was the Abbot of Iona with his council of monks;

“bishops” performed their functions under him. Early in the seventh

century, St. Aidan was ordained bishop in Iona and sent to convert the

Anglo-Saxons of Northumberland. The story of the Irish Church in the north

is one of effective mission work, but unsuccessful organization, wherein

it was inferior to the Roman Church. Its representatives suffered defeat

at the Synod of Whitby in 664. Fifty years afterward Iona gave up its

separate usages and accepted the Roman Easter.[202]

The missionary labours of the Irish were not confined to Great Britain,

but extended far and wide through the west of Europe. In the sixth and

seventh centuries, Irish monasteries were founded in Austrasia and

Burgundy, Italy, Switzerland, Bavaria; they were established among

Frisians, Saxons, Alemanni. And as centres of Latin education as well as

Christianity, the names of Bobbio and St. Gall will occur to every one. Of

these, the first directly and the second through a disciple were due to

Columbanus. With him we enter the larger avenues of Irish missions to the

heathen, the semi-heathen, and the lax, and upon the question of their

efficacy in the preservation of Latin education throughout the rent and

driven fragments of the western Roman Empire. The story of Columban’s life

is illuminating and amusing.[203]

He was born in Leinster. While yet a boy he felt the conflict between

fleshly lusts and that counter-ascetic passion which throughout the

Christian world was drawing thousands into monasteries. Asceticism, with

desire for knowledge, won the victory, and the youth entered the monastery

of Bangor, in the extreme north-east of Ireland. There he passed years of

labour, study, and self-mortification. At length the pilgrim

mission-passion came upon him (_coepit peregrinationem desiderare_) and

his importunity overcame the abbot’s reluctance to let him depart. Twelve

disciples are said to have followed him across the water to the shores of

Britain. There they hesitated in anxious doubt, till it was decided to

cross to Gaul.

This was about the year 590. Columban’s austere and commanding form, his

fearlessness, his quick and fiery tongue, impressed the people among whom

he came. Reports of his holiness spread; multitudes sought his blessing.

He traversed the country, preaching and setting his own stern example,

until he reached the land of the Burgundians, where Gontran, a grandson of

Clovis, reigned. Well received by this ruler, Columban established himself

in an old castle. His disciples grew in numbers, and after a while Gontran

granted him an extensive Roman structure called Luxovium (Luxeuil)

situated at the confines of the Burgundian and Austrasian kingdoms.

Columban converted this into a monastery, and it soon included many noble

Franks and Burgundians among its monks. For them he composed a monastic

_regula_, stern and cruel in its penalties of many stripes imposed for

trivial faults. “Whoever may wish to know his strenuousness

(_strenuitatem_) will find it in his precepts,” writes the monk Jonas, who

had lived under him.

The strenuousness of this masterful and overbearing man was displayed in

his controversy with the Gallican clergy, upon whom he tried to impose the

Easter day observed by the Celtic Church in the British Isles. In his

letter to the Gallican synod, he points out their errors, and lectures

them on their Christian duties, asking pardon at the end for his loquacity

and presumption. Years afterwards, entering upon another controversy, he

wrote an extraordinary letter to Pope Boniface IV. The superscription is

Hibernian: “To the most beautiful head of all the churches of entire

Europe, the most sweet pope, the most high president, the most reverent

investigator: O marvellous! mirum dictu! nova res! rara avis!--that the

lowest to the loftiest, the clown to the polite, the stammerer to the

prince of eloquence, the stranger to the son of the house, the last to the

first, that the Wood-pigeon (Palumbus) should dare to write to Father

Boniface!” Whereupon this Wood-pigeon writes a long letter in which

belligerent expostulation alternates with self-debasement. He dubs himself

“garrulus, presumptuosus, homunculus vilissimae qualitatis,” who caps his

impudence by writing unrequested. He implores pardon for his harsh and too

biting speech, while he deplores--to him who sat thereon--the _infamia_ of

Peter’s Seat, and shrills to the Pope to watch: “Vigila itaque, quaeso,

papa, vigila; et iterum dico: vigila”; and he marvels at the Pope’s lethal

sleep.

One who thus berated pope and clergy might be censorious of princes.

Gontran died. After various dynastic troubles, the Burgundian land came

under the rule nominally of young Theuderic, but actually of his imperious

grandmother, the famous Brunhilde. In order that no queen-wife’s power

should supplant her own, she encouraged her grandson to content himself

with mistresses. The youth stood in awe of the stern old figure ruling at

Luxeuil, who more than once reproved him for not wedding a lawful queen.

It happened one day when Columban was at Brunhilde’s residence that she

brought out Theuderic’s various sons for him to bless. “Never shall

sceptre be held by this brothel-brood,” said he.

Henceforth it was war between these two: Theuderic was the pivot of the

storm; the one worked upon his fears, the other played upon his lusts.

Brunhilde prevailed. She incited the king to insist that Luxeuil be made

open to all, and with his retinue to push his way into the monastery. The

saint withstood him fiercely, and prophesied his ruin. The king drew back;

the saint followed, heaping reproaches on him, till the young king said

with some self-restraint: “You hope to win the crown of martyrdom through

me. But I am not a lunatic, to commit such a crime. I have a better plan:

since you won’t fall in with the ways of men of the world, you shall go

back by the road you came.”

So the king sent his retainers to seize the stubborn saint. They took him

as a prisoner to Besançon. He escaped, and hurried back to Luxeuil. Again

the king sent, this time a count with soldiers, to drive him from the

land. They feared the sacrilege of laying hands on the old man. In the

church, surrounded by his monks praying and singing psalms, he awaited

them. “O man of God,” cried the count, “we beseech thee to obey the royal

command, and take thy way to the place from which thou earnest.” “Nay, I

will rather please my Creator, by abiding here,” returned the saint. The

count retired, leaving a few rough soldiers to carry out the king’s will.

These, still fearing to use violence, begged the saint to take pity on

them, unjustly burdened with this evil task--to disobey their orders meant

their death. The saint reiterates his determination to abide, till they

fall on their knees, cling to his robe, and with groans implore his pardon

for the crime they must execute.

From pity the saint yields at last, and a company of the king’s men make

ready and escort him from the kingdom westward toward Brittany. Many

miracles mark the journey. They reach the Loire, and embark on it.

Proceeding down the river they come to Tours, where the saint asks to be

allowed to land and worship at St. Martin’s shrine. The leader bids the

rowers keep the middle of the stream and row on. But the boat resistlessly

made its way to the landing-place. Columban passed the night at the

shrine, and the next day was hospitably entertained by the bishop, who

inquired why he was returning to his native land. “The dog Theuderic has

driven me from my brethren,” answered the saint. At last Nantes was

reached near the mouth of the Loire, where the vessel was waiting to carry

the exile back to Ireland. Columban wrote a letter to his monks, in which

he poured forth his love to them with much advice as to their future

conduct. The letter is filled with grief--suppressed lest it unman his

beloved children. “While I write, the messenger comes to say that the ship

is ready to bear me, unwilling, to my country. But there is no guard to

prevent my escape, and these people even seem to wish it.”

The letter ends, but not the story. Columban did not sail for Ireland.

Jonas says that the vessel was miraculously impeded, and that then

Columban was permitted to go whither he would. So the dauntless old man

travelled back from the sea, and went to the Neustrian Court, the people

along the way bringing him their children to bless. He did not rest in

Neustria, for the desire was upon him to preach to the heathen. Making his

way to the Rhine, he embarked near Mainz, ascended the river, and at last

established himself, with his disciples, upon the lake of Constance. There

they preached to the heathen, and threw their idols into the lake. He had

the thought to preach to the Wends, but this was not to be.

The time soon came when all Austrasia fell into the hands of Brunhilde and

Theuderic, and Columbanus decided to cross over into northern Italy,

breaking out in anger at his disciple Gall, who was too sick to go with

him. With other disciples he made the arduous journey, and reached the

land of the Lombards. King Agilulf made him a gift of Bobbio, lying in a

gorge of the Apennines near Genoa, and there he founded the monastery

which long was to be a stronghold of letters. For himself, his career was

well-nigh run; he retired to a solitary spot on the banks of the river

Trebbia, where he passed away, being, apparently, some seventy years of

age.

It may seem surprising that this strenuous ascetic should occasionally

have occupied a leisure hour writing Latin poems in imitation of the

antique. There still exists such an effusion to a friend:

“Accipe, quaeso,

Nunc bipedali

Condita versu

Carminulorum

Munera parva.”

The verses consist mainly of classic allusions and advice of an antique

rather than a Christian flavour: the wise will cease to add coin to coin,

and will despise wealth, but not the pastime of such verse as the

“Inclyta Vates

Nomine Sappho”

was wont to make. “Now, dear Fedolius, quit learned numbers and accept our

squibs--_frivola nostra_. I have dictated them oppressed with pain and old

age: ‘Vive, vale, laetus, tristisque memento senectae.’” The last is a

pagan reminiscence, which the saint’s Christian soul may not have deeply

felt. But the poem shows the saint’s classic training, which probably was

exceptional. For there is no evidence of like knowledge in any Irishman

before him; and after his time, in the seventh century, or the eighth,

Latin education in Ireland was confined to a few monastic centres. A small

minority studied the profanities, sometimes because they liked them, but

oftener as the means of proficiency in sacred learning.

The Irish had cleverness, facility, ardour, and energy. They did much for

the dissemination of Christianity and letters. Their deficiency was lack

of organization; and they had but little capacity for ordered discipline

humbly and obediently accepted from others. Consequently, when the period

of evangelization was past in western Europe, and organization was needed,

with united and persistent effort for order, the Irish ceased to lead or

even to keep pace with those to whom once they had brought the Gospel. In

Anglo-Saxon England and on the Carolingian continent they became strains

of influence handed on. This was the fortune which overtook them as

illuminators of manuscripts and preservers of knowledge. Their emotional

traits, moreover, entered the larger currents of mediaeval feeling and

imagination. Strains of the Irish, or of a kindred Celtic temperament

passed on into such “Breton” matters as the Tristan story, wherein love is

passion unrestrained, and is more distinctly out of relationship with

ethical considerations than, for example, the equally adulterous tale of

Lancelot and Guinevere.[204]

II

The Saxon invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries drove Christianity

and letters from the land where the semi-Romanized Britons and their

church had flourished. To reconvert and instruct anew a relapsed heathen

country was the task which Gregory the Great laid on the willing

Augustine. The story of that famous mission (A.D. 597) need not be

told;[205] but we may note the manner of the presentation of Christianity

to the heathen Saxons, and the temper of its reception. Most impressive

was this bringing of the Faith. Augustine and his band of monks came as a

stately embassy from Rome, the traditionary centre of imperial and

spiritual power. Their coming was a solemn call to the English to

associate themselves with all that was most august and authoritative in

heaven and earth. According to Bede, Augustine sent a messenger to

Ethelbert, the Kentish king, to announce that he had come from Rome

bearing the best of messages, and would assure to such as hearkened,

eternal joys in heaven and dominion without end with the living and true

God. To Ethelbert, whose kingdom lay at the edge of the great world, the

message came from this world’s sovereign pontiff, who in some awful way

represented its almighty God, and had authority to admit to His kingdom.

He was not ignorant of what lay within the hand of Rome to give. His wife

was a Catholic Christian, daughter of a Frankish king, and had her own

ministering bishop. Doubtless the queen had spoken with her lord. Still

Ethelbert feared the spell-craft of this awe-inspiring embassy, and would

meet Augustine only under the open sky. Augustine came to the meeting, a

silver cross borne before him as a banner, and the pictured image of

Christ, his monks singing litanies and loudly supplicating their Lord for

the king’s and their own salvation. Knowledge, authority, supernatural

power, were represented here. And how could the king fail to be struck by

the nobility of Augustine’s Gospel message, by its clear assurance, its

love and terror,[206] so overwhelming and convincing, so far outsoaring

Ethelbert’s heathen religion? To be sure, in Christian love and

forgiveness lay some reversal of Saxon morality, for instance of the duty

of revenge. But this was not prominent in the Christianity of the day; and

experience was to show that only in isolated instances did this teaching

impede the acceptance of the Gospel.[207]

Ethelbert spoke these missionaries fair; accorded them a habitation in

Canterbury with the privilege of celebrating their Christian rites and

preaching to his people. There they abode, zealous in vigils and fastings,

and preaching the word of life. Certain heathen men were converted, then

the king, and then his folk in multitudes--the usual way. Under the

direction of Gregory, Augustine proceeded with that combination of

insistence, dignity, and tolerance, so well understood in the Roman

Church. There was insistence upon the main doctrines and requirements of

the Faith--upon the Roman Easter day and baptism, as against the practices

of the British Church. Tolerance was shown respecting heathen fanes and

sacrificial feastings; the fanes should be reconsecrated as Christian

churches; the feasts should be continued in honour of the true God.[208]

Besides zeal and knowledge and authority, miracles advanced Augustine’s

enterprise. To eliminate by any sweeping negation the miraculous element

from the causes of success of such a mission is to close the eyes to the

situation. All men expected miracles; Gregory who sent Augustine was

infatuated with them. Augustine performed them, or believed he did, and

others believed it too. Throughout these centuries, and indeed late into

the mediaeval period, the power and habit of working miracles constituted

sainthood in the hermit or the monk, thereby singled out as the special

instrument of God’s will or the Virgin’s kindness. Of course miracles were

ascribed to the great missionary apostles like Augustine or Boniface; and

this conviction brought many conversions.

Among the heathen English about to be converted, there was diversity of

view and mood as to the Faith. They stood in awe of these newcomers from

Rome, fearing their spell-craft. From their old religion they had sought

earthly victory and prosperity; and some had found it of uncertain aid.

“See, king, how this matter stands,” says Coifi, at the Northumbrian

Witenagemot held by Edwin to decide as to the new religion: “I have

learned of a certainty that there is no virtue or utility whatever in that

religion which we have been following. None of your thanes has slaved in

the worship of our gods more zealously than I. Yet many have had greater

rewards and dignities from you, and in every way have prospered more. Were

the gods worth anything, they would wish rather to aid me, who have been

so zealous in serving them. So if these new teachings are better and

stronger, let us accept them at once.”[209] Coifi expressed the common

motives of converts of all nations from the time of Constantine. No better

thought of Christian expediency had inspired Gregory of Tours’s story of

Clovis’s career; and Bede in no way condemns Coifi’s _verba prudentiae_,

as he terms them. Naturally in times of adversity such converts were quick

to abandon their new religion, proved ineffectual.[210]

Among these Angles of Northumberland, however, finer souls were looking

for light and certitude. Such a one was that thane who followed Coifi with

the wonderful illustration of man’s mortal need of enlightenment, the

thane for whom life was as the swallow flying through the warmed and

lighted hall, from the dark cold into the dark cold: “So this life of men

comes into sight for a little; we are ignorant of what shall follow or

what may have preceded. If this new doctrine offers anything more certain,

I think we should follow it.” The heathen poetry had given varied voice to

this contemplative melancholy so wont to dwell on life’s untoward changes;

and there was ghostly evidence of the other world before the coming of the

Roman monks. Now, as those monks came with authority from the traditionary

home of ghostly lore, why question their knowledge of the life beyond the

grave? Many Anglo-Saxons were prepared to fix their gaze upon a life to

come and to let their fancies fill with visions of the great last

severance unto heaven and hell. When once impressed by the monastic

Christianity[211] of the Roman, or the Irish, mission, they were quick to

throw themselves into the ascetic life which most surely opened heaven’s

doors. So many a noble thane became an anchorite or a monk, many a noble

dame became a nun; and Saxon kings forsook their kingdoms for the

cloister: “Cenred, who for some time had reigned most nobly in Mercia,

still more nobly abandoned his sceptre. For he came to Rome, and there was

tonsured and made a monk at the church of the Apostles, and continued in

prayers and fastings and almsgiving until his last day.”[212]

As might be expected, the re-expression of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon

writings was martial and emotional. A martial tone pervades the epic

paraphrases of Scripture, the Anglo-Saxon _Genesis_ for example. On the

other hand, adaptations of devotional Latin compositions[213] evince a

realization of Christian feeling and prevalent ascetic sentiments. The

“elegiac” Anglo-Saxon feeling seems to reach its height in a more original

composition, the _Christ_ of Cynewulf, while the emotional fervour coming

with Christianity is disclosed in Bede’s account of the inspiration which

fell upon the cowherd Cædmon, in St. Hilda’s monastery of Whitby, to sing

the story of creation.[214] A pervasive monastic atmosphere also surrounds

the visions of hell and purgatory, which were to continue so typically

characteristic of monastic Christianity.[215]

What knowledge, sacred and profane, came to the Anglo-Saxons with

Christianity? Quite properly learned were Augustine and the other

organizers of the English Church. Two generations after him, the Greek

monk Theodore was sent by the Pope to become Archbishop of Canterbury,

complete Augustine’s work, and instruct the English monks and clergy.

Theodore was accompanied by his friend Hadrian, as learned as himself.

Their labours finally established Roman Christianity in England. The two

drew about them a band of students, and formed at Canterbury a school of

sacred learning, where liberal studies were conducted by these foreigners

with a knowledge and intelligence novel in Great Britain. In the north,

Benedict Biscop, a Northumbrian, promoted the ends of Roman Catholicism

and learning by establishing the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow under

the monastic _regula_ of St. Benedict of Nursia, as modified by the

practices of continental monasteries in the seventh century. He had been

in Italy, and brought thence many books. It was among these books that

Bede grew up at Jarrow.

Thus strong currents of Roman ecclesiasticism and liberal knowledge

reached England. On the other hand, Irish monastic Christianity had

already made its entry in the south-western part of Great Britain, and

with greater strength established itself in the north, converting

multitudes to the Faith and instructing such as would learn. The Irish

teaching had been eagerly received by those groups of Anglo-Saxons who

henceforth were to prosecute their studies with the aid of the further

knowledge and discipline brought from the Continent by Theodore. Some of

them had even journeyed to Ireland to study.

From this dual source was drawn the education of Aldhelm. He was born in

Wessex about the year 650, and was nephew of the powerful King Ini. He

became abbot of Malmesbury in 675. An Irish monk was his first teacher;

his second, the learned Hadrian. From the two he received a broader

education than any Anglo-Saxon had possessed before him. Always holding in

view the perfecting of his sacred knowledge, he studied grammar and

kindred topics, produced treatises himself, and as a Catholic student and

teacher was a true forerunner of the greatest scholar among his younger

contemporaries, Bede.[216]

Bede the Venerable, and we may add the still beloved, was Aldhelm’s junior

by some twenty-five years. He was born in 673 and died in 735. He passed

his whole life reading, teaching, and writing in the Cloister of Jarrow

near where he was born, and not far from where, beneath the “Galilee” of

Durham Cathedral, his bones have long reposed. Back of him was the double

tradition of learning, the Irish and the Graeco-Roman. Through a long life

of pious study, Bede drew into his mind, and incorporated in his writings,

practically the total sum of knowledge then accessible in western Europe.

He stands between the great Latin transmitters (Boëthius, Cassiodorus,

Gregory and Isidore) and the epoch known as the Carolingian. He was

himself a transmitter of knowledge to that later time. If in spirit, race,

epoch and circumstances, Aldhelm was Bede’s direct forerunner, Bede had

also a notable predecessor in Isidore. The writings of the Spanish bishop

contributed substance and suggestions of plan and method to the

Anglo-Saxon monk, whose works embrace practically the same series of

topics as Isidore’s, whose intellectual interests also, and attitude

toward the Church Fathers, appear the same. But Bede was the more genial

personality, and could not help imbuing his compositions with something

from his own temperament. Even in his Commentaries upon the books of

Scripture, which were made up principally of borrowed allegorical

interpretations, there is common sense and some endeavour to present the

actual meaning and situation.[217] But he disclaimed originality, as he

says in the preface to his Commentary on the Hexaemeron, addressed to

Bishop Acca of Hexham:

“Concerning the beginning of Genesis where the creation of the world

is described, many have said much, and have left to posterity

monuments of their talents. Among these, as far as our feebleness can

learn, we may distinguish Basil of Caesarea (whom Eustathius

translated from Greek to Latin), Ambrose of Milan, and Augustine,

Bishop of Hippo. Of whom the first-named in nine books, the second

following his footprints in six books, the third in twelve books and

also in two others directed against the Manichaeans, shed floods of

salutary doctrine for their readers; and in them the promise of the

Truth was fulfilled: ‘Whoso believeth in me, as the Scripture saith,

out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water....’ But since

these works are so great that only the rich may own them, and so

profound that they may be fathomed only by the learned, your holiness

has seen fit to lay on us the task of plucking from them all, as from

the sweetest wide-flowering fields of paradise, what might seem to

meet the needs of weaklings.”[218]

Bede was also a lovely story-teller. His literary charm and power appear

in his Life of St. Cuthbert, and still more in his ever-famous

_Ecclesiastical History of the English People_, so warm with love of

mankind, and presenting so wonderful a series of dramatic stories animate

with vital motive and the colour of incident and circumstance. Midway

between the spontaneous genius of this work and the copied Scripture

Commentary, stand Bede’s grammatical, metrical, and scientific

compositions, compiled with studious zeal. They evince a broad interest in

scholarship and in nature. Still, neither material nor method was

original. For instance, his _De rerum natura_ took its plan and much of

its substance from Isidore’s work of the same name. Bede has, however, put

in further matter and made his work less of a mere shell of words than

Isidore’s. For he is interested in connecting natural occurrences with

their causes, stating, for example, that the tides depend on the

moon.[219] In this work as in his other _opera didascalica_, like the _De

temporum ratione_ and his learned _De arte metrica_,[220] he shows himself

a more intelligent student than his Spanish predecessor. Yet he drew

everything from some written source.

One need not wonder at the voluminousness of Bede’s literary

productions.[221] Many of the writings emanating from monasteries are

transcriptions rather than compositions. The circumstance that books,

_i.e._ manuscripts, were rare and costly was an impelling motive. Isidore

and Bede made systematic compilations for general use. They and their

congeners would also make extracts from manuscripts, of which they might

have but the loan, or from unique codices in order to preserve the

contents. Such notes or excerpts might have the value of a treatise, and

might be preserved and in turn transcribed as a distinct work. Yet whether

made by a Bede or by a lesser man, they represent mainly the labour of a

copyist.

Bede’s writings were all in Latin, and were intended for the instruction

of monks. They played a most important rôle in the transmission of

learning, sacred and profane, in Latin form. For its still more popular

diffusion, translations into the vernacular might be demanded. Such at all

events were made of Scripture; and perhaps a century and a half after

Bede’s death, the translation of edifying Latin books was undertaken by

the best of Saxon kings. King Alfred was born in 849 and closed his eyes

in 901. In the midst of other royal labours he set himself the task of

placing before his people, or at least his clergy, Anglo-Saxon versions of

some of the then most highly regarded volumes of instruction. The wise

_Pastoral Care_ of Gregory the Great; his _Dialogues_, less wise according

to our views; the _Histories_ of Orosius[222] and Bede; and that

philosophic vade-mecum of the Middle Ages, the _De consolatione

philosophiae_ of Boëthius. Of these, Alfred translated the _Pastoral Care_

and the _De consolatione_, also Orosius; the other works appear to have

been translated at his direction.[223] Alfred’s translations contain his

own reflections and other matter not in the originals. In rendering

Orosius, he rewrote the geographical introduction, inserted a description

of Germany and accounts of northern Europe given by two of his Norse

liegemen, Ohthere and Wulfstan. The alertness of his mind is shown by this

insertion of the latest geographical knowledge. Other and more personal

passages will disclose his purpose, and illustrate the manner in which his

Christianized intelligence worked upon trains of thought suggested perhaps

by the Latin writing before him.

Alfred’s often-quoted preface to Gregory’s _Pastoral Care_ tells his

reasons for undertaking its translation, and sets forth the condition of

England. He speaks of the “wise men there formerly were throughout

England, both of sacred and secular orders,” and of their zeal in learning

and teaching and serving God; and how foreigners came to the land in

search of wisdom and instruction. But “when I came to the throne,” so

general was the decay of learning in England “that there were very few on

this side of the Humber who could understand their rituals in English, or

translate a letter from Latin into English; and I believe there were not

many beyond the Humber.... Thanks be to God Almighty that we have any

teachers among us now.” Alfred therefore commands the bishop, to whom he

is now sending the copy, to disengage himself as often as possible from

worldly matters, and apply the Christian wisdom God has given him. “I

remembered also how I saw, before it had been all ravaged and burnt, how

the churches throughout the whole of England stood filled with treasures

and books, and there was also a great multitude of God’s servants, but

they had very little knowledge of books, for they could not understand

anything of them because they were not written in their own language.” It

therefore seemed wise to me “to translate some books which are most

needful for all men to know, into the language which we can all

understand, and ... that all the youth now in England of free men, who are

rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, be set to learn so long

as they are not fit for any other occupation, until that they are well

able to read English writing: and let those be afterwards taught more in

the Latin language who are to continue learning and be promoted to a

higher rank.”

In the _De consolatione_ of Boëthius, the antique pagan thought, softened

with human sympathy, and in need of such comfort and assurance as was

offered by the Faith, is found occupied with questions (like that of

free-will) prominent in Christianity. The book presented meditations which

were so consonant with Christian views that its Christian readers from

Alfred to Dante mistook them for Christian sentiments, and added further

meanings naturally occurring to the Christian soul. Alfred’s reflections

in his version of the _De consolatione_ are very personal to Saxon Alfred

and show how he took his life and kingly office:

“O Philosophy, thou knowest that I never greatly delighted in

covetousness and the possession of earthly power, nor longed for this

authority”--so far Boëthius,[224] and now Alfred himself: “but I

desired instruments and materials to carry out the work I was set to

do, which was that I should virtuously and fittingly administer the

authority committed unto me. Now no man, as thou knowest, can get full

play for his natural gifts, nor conduct and administer government,

unless he hath fit tools, and the raw material to work upon. By

material I mean that which is necessary to the exercise of natural

powers; thus a king’s raw material and instruments of rule are a

well-peopled land, and he must have men of prayer, men of war, and men

of work. As thou knowest, without these tools no king may display his

special talent. Further, for his materials he must have means of

support for the three classes above spoken of, which are his

instruments; and these means are land to dwell in, gifts, weapons,

meat, ale, clothing, and what else soever the three classes need.

Without these means he cannot keep his tools in order, and without

these tools he cannot perform any of the tasks entrusted to him. [I

have desired material for the exercise of government that my talents

and my power might not be forgotten and hidden away[225]] for every

good gift and every power soon groweth old and is no more heard of, if

Wisdom be not in them. Without Wisdom no faculty can be fully brought

out, for whatsoever is done unwisely can never be accounted as skill.

To be brief, I may say that it has ever been my desire to live

honourably while I was alive, and after my death to leave to them that

should come after me my memory in good works.”

The last sentence needs no comment. But those preceding it will be

illuminated by another passage inserted by Alfred:

“Therefore it is that a man never by his authority attains to virtue

and excellence, but by reason of his virtue and excellence he attains

to authority and power. No man is better for his power, but for his

skill he is good, if he is good, and for his skill he is worthy of

power, if he is worthy of it. Study Wisdom then, and, when ye have

learned it, contemn it not, for I tell you that by its means ye may

without fail attain to power, yea, even though not desiring it.”

Perhaps from the teaching of his own life Alfred knew, as well as

Boëthius, the toil and sadness of power: “Though their false hope and

imagination lead fools to believe that power and wealth are the highest

good, yet it is quite otherwise.” And again, speaking of friendship, he

says that Nature unites friends in love, “but by means of these worldly

goods and the wealth of this life we oftener make foes than friends,”

which doubtless Alfred had discovered, as well as Marcus Aurelius. Perhaps

the Saxon king knew wherein lay peace, as he makes Wisdom say: “When I

rise aloft with these my servants, we look down upon the storms of this

world, even as the eagle does when he soars in stormy weather above the

clouds, where no storm can harm him.” The king was thinking of man’s peace

with God.[226]

III

Christianity came to the cities of Provincia and the chief Roman colonies

of Gaul (Lyons, Trèves, Cologne) in the course of the original

dissemination of the Faith. There were Roman, Greek, or Syrian Christians

in these towns before the end of the second century. Early Gallic

Christianity spoke Greek and Latin, and its rather slow advance was due

partly to the tenacity of Celtic speech even in the cities; while outside

of them heathen speech and practices were scarcely touched. Through Gaul

and along the Rhine, the country in the main continued heathen in religion

and Celtic or Germanic in speech during the fifth century.[227] The

complete Latinizing of Gaul and the conversion of its rural population

proceeded from the urban churches, and from the labours and miracles of

anchorites and monks. In contrast with the decay of the municipal

governments, the urban churches continued living institutions. Their

bishops usually were men of energy. The episcopal office was elective, yet

likely to remain in the same influential family, and the bishop, the

leading man in the town, might be its virtual ruler. He represented

Christianity and Latin culture, and when Roman officials yielded to

Teutonic conquerors, the bishop was left as the spokesman of the

Gallo-Roman population. Thus the Gallic churches, far from succumbing

before the barbarian invasions, rescued and appropriated the derelict

functions of government, and emerged aggrandized from the political and

racial revolution. In the year 400 the city of Trèves was Latin in speech

and Roman in government; in the year 500 the Roman government had been

overthrown, and a German-speaking population predominated in what was left

of the city, but the church went on unchanged in constitution and in

language.

There was constant intercourse between Teutons and Romans along the

northern boundaries of the Empire. In the Danube regions many of the

former were converted. The Goths, through the labours of Ulfilas and

others in the fourth century, became Arian Christians; their conversion

was of moment to themselves and others, but destiny severed the continuity

of its import for history. In the provinces of Rhaetia, Vindelicia, and

Noricum there were Christians, some of them Teutons, as early as the time

of Constantine. For the next century, when disruption of the Empire was in

full progress, the Life of St. Severinus by Eugippius, his disciple, gives

the picture.[228] Bits and fragments of Roman government endured; letters

were not quite quenched; but Alemanni and Rugii moved as they would,

marauding, besieging, and destroying. Everywhere there was uncertainty and

confusion, and yet civilized Roman provincials still clung to a driven

life. Through this mountain land, the monk Severinus went here and there,

barefoot even in ice and snow, austere, commanding. He encouraged the

townspeople to maintain decency and courage; he turned the barbarians from

ruthlessness. Clear-seeing, capable, his energies shielded the land. He

was an ascetic who took nothing for himself, and won men to the Faith by

this guarantee of disinterestedness. So he shepherded his harrowed flocks,

and more than once averted their destruction. But his arm was too feeble;

after his death even his cell was plundered, while the confusion swept on.

Such were fifth-century conditions on the northern boundary of what had

been the Empire, conditions amid which the culture and doctrine germane to

Christianity went down, although the Faith still glimmered here and there.

Farther to the west, the Burgundians had gained a domicile in a land

sparsely tenanted by Roman and Catholic provincials. Here on the left bank

of the Rhine, in the neighbourhood of Worms, this people accepted the

Christianity which they found. Afterwards, in the year 430, their heathen

kin on the right bank were baptized as a people; for they hoped, through

aid from fellow-Christians, to ward off the destruction threatening from

the Huns. Yet five years later they were overthrown by those savage

riders--an overthrow out of which was to rise the _Nibelungenlied_. The

Burgundian remnants found a new home by the Rhone.

The Christianity of Burgundians and Goths was subject to the vicissitudes

of their fortunes. The permanent conversion to Catholicism of the great

masses of the Germans commenced somewhat later, when the turmoil of

fifth-century migration was settling into contests for homes destined to

prove more lasting. Its beginning may be dated from the baptism of Clovis

as a Catholic on Christmas Day in the year 496. His retainers followed him

into the consecrated water. By reason of the king’s genius for war and

politics, this event was the beginning of the final triumph of

Catholicism.[229]

The baptism of Clovis and his followers was typical of early Teutonic

conversions. King and tribal following acted as a unit. Christ gave

victory; He was the mightier God: such was the crude form of the motive.

Its larger scope was grasped by the far-seeing king. Believing in

supernatural aid, he desired it from the mightiest source, which, he was

persuaded, was the Christian God. It was to be obtained by such homage to

Christ as heretofore the king had paid to Wuotan. Any doubt as to the

sincerity of his belief presupposes a point of view impossible for a

fifth-century barbarian. But to this sincere expectation of Christ’s aid,

to be gained through baptism, Clovis joined careful consideration of the

political situation. Catholic Christianity was the religion of the

Gallo-Roman population forming the greater part of the Frankish king’s

subjects. He knew of Arian peoples; probably attempts had been made to

draw him to their side. They constituted the great Teutonic powers at the

time; for Theodoric was the monarch of Italy, and Arian Teutons ruled in

southern France, in Spain, and Africa. Nevertheless, it was of paramount

importance for the establishment of his kingdom that there should be no

schism between the Franks and the Gallo-Roman people who exceeded them in

number and in wealth and culture. Catholic influences surrounded Clovis;

Catholic interests represented the wealth and prosperity of his dominions,

and when he decided to be baptized he did not waver between the Catholic

and the Arian belief. Thus the king attached to himself the civilized

population of his realm. A common Catholic faith quickly obliterated

racial antagonism within its boundaries and gained him the support of

Catholic church and people in the kingdoms of his Arian rivals.

So under Clovis and his successors the Gallic Church became the Frankish

Church, and flourished exceedingly. Tithes were paid it, and gifts were

made by princes and nobles. Its lands increased, carrying their dependent

population, until the Church became the largest landholder in the

Merovingian realm. It was governed by Roman law, but the clergy were

subject to the penal jurisdiction of the king.[230] It was he that

summoned councils, although he did not vote, and left ecclesiastical

matters to the bishops, who were his liegemen and appointees.[231] They

recognized the king’s virtually unlimited authority, which they patterned

on the absolute power of the Roman Emperors and the prerogatives of David

and Solomon. In fine, the Merovingian Church was a national church,

subject to the king. Until the seventh century it was quite independent of

the Bishop of Rome.[232]

It is common knowledge--especially vivid with readers of the famous

_Historia Francorum_ of Gregory of Tours--that ethically viewed, the

conduct of the Merovingian house was cruel, treacherous, and abominable;

and likewise the conduct of their vassals. Frankish kings and nobles

appear as men no longer bound by the ethics of the heathenism which they

had foresworn, and as yet untouched by the moral precepts of the Christian

code. Not Christianity, however, but contact with decadent civilization,

and rapid increase of power and wealth, had loosened their heathen

standards. Merovingian history leaves a unique impression of a line of

rulers and dependents among whom mercy and truth and chastity were

unknown. The elements of sixth-century Christianity which the Franks made

their own were its rites, its magic, and its miracles, and its expectation

of the aid of a God and His saints duly solicited. Here the customs of

heathenism were a preparation, or themselves passed into Frankish

Christianity. Nevertheless, the general character of Christian

observances--baptism, the mass, prayer, the sign of the cross, the rites

at marriage, sickness, and death--could not fail to impress a certain tone

and demeanour upon the people, and impart some sense of human sinfulness.

The general conviction that patent and outrageous crime would bring divine

vengeance gained point and power from the terrific doctrine of the Day of

Wrath, and the system of penances imposed by the clergy proved an

excellent discipline with these rough Christians. Many bishops and priests

were little better than the nobles, yet the Church preserved Christian

belief and did something to improve morality. Everywhere the monk was the

most striking object-lesson, with his austerities, his terror-stricken

sense of sinfulness, and conviction of the peril of the world. No martial,

grasping bishop, no dissolute and treacherous priest denied that the

monk’s was the ideal Christian life; and the laity stood in awe, or

expectation, of the wonder-working power of his asceticism. Indeed

monasticism was becoming popular, and the Merovingian period witnessed the

foundation of numberless cloisters.

In the fifth and through part of the sixth century the Gallic monastery of

Lerins, on an island in the Mediterranean, near Fréjus, was a chief source

of ascetic and Christian influence for Gaul. Its monks took their

precepts from Syria and Egypt, and some of the zeal of St. Martin of Tours

had fallen on their shoulders. As the energy of this community declined,

Columban’s monastery at Luxeuil succeeded to the work. The example of

Columbanus, his precepts and severe monastic discipline, proved a source

of ascetic and missionary zeal. With him or following in his steps came

other Irishmen; and heathen German lands soon looked upon the walls of

many an Irish monastery. But Columbanus failed, and all the Irish failed,

in obedience, order, and effective organization. His own monastic

_regula_, with all its rigour, contained no provisions for the government

of the monasteries. Without due ordering, bands of monks dwelling in

heathen communities would waver in their practices and even show a lack of

doctrinal stability. Sooner or later they were certain to become confused

in habit and contaminated with the manners of the surrounding people.

These Irish monasteries omitted to educate a native priesthood to

perpetuate their Christian teaching. The best of them, St. Gall (founded

by Columbanus’s disciple Gallus), might be a citadel of culture, and

convert the people about it, through the talents and character of its

founder and his successors. But other monasteries, farther to the east,

were tainted with heathen practices. In fine, it was not for the Irish to

convert the great heathen German land, or effect a lasting reform of

existing churches there or in Gaul.

The labours of Anglo-Saxons were fraught with more enduring results.

Through their abilities and zeal, their faculty of organization and

capacity of submitting to authority, through their consequent harmony with

Rome and the support given them by the Frankish monarchy, these

Anglo-Saxons converted many German tribes, established permanent churches

among them, reorganized the heterogeneous Christianity which they found in

certain German lands, and were a moving factor in the reform of the

Frankish Church. The most striking features of their work on the Continent

were diocesan organization, the training of a native clergy, the

establishment of monasteries under the Benedictine constitution, union

with Rome, obedience to her commands, strenuous conformity to her law, and

insistence on like conformity in others. Their presentation of

Christianity was orthodox, regular, and authoritative.

Some of these features appear in the work of the Saxon Willibrord among

the Frisians, but are more largely illustrated in the career of St.

Boniface-Winfried. Willibrord moved under the authority of Rome; the

varying fortunes of his labours were connected with the enterprises of

Pippin of Heristal, the father of Charles Martel. They advanced with the

power of that Frankish potentate. But after his death, during the strife

between Neustria and Austrasia, the heathen Frisian king Radbod drove back

Christianity as he enlarged his dominion at the expense of the divided

Franks. Later, Charles Martel conquered him, and the Frankish power

reached (718) to the Zuyder Zee. Under its protection Willibrord at last

founded the bishopric of Utrecht (734). He succeeded in educating a native

clergy; and his labours had lasting result among the Frisians who were

subject to the Franks, but not among the free Frisians and the Danes.

Evidently there was no sharp geographical boundary between Christianity

and heathendom. Throughout broad territories, Christian and heathen

practices mingled. This was true of the Frisian land. It was true in

greater range and complexity of the still wider fields of Boniface’s

career. This able man surrendered his high station in his native Wessex in

order to serve Christ more perfectly as a missionary monk among the

heathen. He went first to Frisia and worked with Willibrord, yet refused

to be his bishop-coadjutor and successor, because planning to carry

Christianity into Germany.

Strikingly his life exemplifies Anglo-Saxon faculties working under the

directing power of Rome among heathen and partly Christian peoples. On his

first visit to Rome he became imbued with the principles, and learned the

ritual, of the Roman Church. He returned to enter into relations with

Charles Martell, and to labour in Hesse and Thuringia, and again with

Willibrord in Frisia. Not long afterwards, at his own solicitation,

Gregory II. called him back to Rome (722), where he fed his passion for

punctilious conformity by binding himself formally to obey the Pope,

follow the practices of the Roman Church, and have no fellowship with

bishops whose ways conflicted with them. Gregory made him bishop over

Thuringia and Hesse, and sent him back there to reform Christian and

heathen communities. Thus Gregory created a bishop within the bounds of

the Frankish kingdom--an unprecedented act. Nevertheless, Charles, to whom

Boniface came with a letter from Gregory, received him favourably and

furnished him with a safe conduct, only exacting a recognition of his own

authority.

Boniface set forth upon his mission. In Hesse he cut down the ancient

heathen oak, and made a chapel of its timber; he preached and he

organized--the land was not altogether heathen. Then he proceeded to

Thuringia. That also was a partly Christian land; many Irish-Scottish

preachers were labouring or dwelling there. Boniface set his face against

their irregularities as firmly as against heathenism. Again he dominated

and reorganized, yet continued unfailing in energetic preaching to the

heathen. Gregory watched closely and zealously co-operated.

On the death of the second Gregory in 731, the third Gregory succeeded to

the papacy and continued his predecessor’s support of the Anglo-Saxon

apostle, making him archbishop with authority to ordain bishops. Many

Anglo-Saxons, both men and holy women, came to aid their countryman, and

brought their education and their nobler views of life to form centres of

Christian culture in the German lands. Cloisters for nuns, cloisters for

monks were founded. The year 744 witnessed the foundation of Fulda by

Sturm under the direction of Boniface, and destined to be the very apple

of his eye and the monastic model for Germany. It was placed under the

authority of Rome, with the consent of Pippin, who then ruled. The

reorganization rather than the conversion of Bavaria was Boniface’s next

achievement. The land long before had been partially Romanized, and now

was nominally Christian. Here again Boniface acted as representative of

the Pope, and not of Charles, although Bavaria was part of the Frankish

empire.

The year 738 brought Boniface to Rome for the third time. He was now

yearning to leave the fields already tilled, and go as missionary to the

heathen Saxons. But Gregory sent him back to complete the reorganization

of the Bavarian Church, and to this large field of action he added also

Alemannia with its diocesan centre at Speyer. Here he came in conflict

with Frankish bishops, firm in their secular irregularities. Yet again he

prevailed, reorganized the churches, and placed them under the authority

of Rome. Evidently the two Gregories had in large measure turned the

energies of Boniface from the mission-field to the labours of reform.

On the death of Charles in 741 (and in the same year died Gregory, to be

succeeded by the lukewarm Zacharias) his sons Carloman and Pippin

succeeded to his power. The following year Carloman in German-speaking

Austrasia called a council of his church (_Concilium Germanicum primum_)

under the primacy of Boniface. Its decrees confirmed the reforms for which

the latter had struggled:

“We Carloman, Duke and Prince of the Franks, in the year 742 of the

Incarnation, on the 21st of April, upon the advice of the servants of

God, the bishops and priests of our realm, have assembled them to take

counsel how God’s law and the Church’s discipline (fallen to ruin

under former princes) may be restored, and the Christian folk led to

salvation, instead of perishing deceived by false priests. We have set

up bishops in the cities, and have set over them as archbishop

Bonifatius, the legate of St. Peter.”

The council decreed that yearly synods should be held, that the

possessions taken from the Church should be restored, and the false

priests deprived of their emoluments and forced to do penance. The clergy

were forbidden to bear arms, go to war, or hunt. Every priest should give

yearly account of his stewardship to his bishop. Bishops, supported by the

count in the diocese, should suppress heathen practices. Punishments were

set for the fleshly sins of monks and nuns and clergy, and for the

priestly offences of wearing secular garb or harbouring women. The

Benedictine rule was appointed for monasteries. It was easier to make

these decrees than carry them out against the opposition of such martial

bishops as those of Mainz and Trèves, whose support was necessary to

Carloman’s government; and military conditions rendered the restoration of

Church lands impracticable. Yet the word was spoken, and something was

done.

The next year in Neustria Pippin instituted like reforms. He was aided by

Boniface, although the latter held no ecclesiastical office there. In 747

Carloman abdicated and retired to a monastery;[233] and Pippin became sole

ruler, and at last formally king, anointed by Boniface under the direction

of the Pope in 752. After this, Boniface, withdrawing from the direction

of the Church, turned once more to satisfy his heart’s desire by going on

a mission among the heathen Frisians, where he crowned a great life with a

martyr’s death.

Thus authoritatively, supported by Rome and the Frankish monarchy,

Christianity was presented to the Germans. It carried suggestions of a

better order and some knowledge of Latin letters. The extension of Roman

Catholic Christianity was the aim of Boniface first and last and always.

But a Latin education was needed by the clergy to enable them to

understand and set forth this some-what elaborated and learned scheme of

salvation. Boniface and his coadjutors had no aversion to the literary

means by which a serviceable Latin knowledge was to be obtained, and

their missionary and reorganizing labours necessarily worked some

diffusion of Latinity.

The Frankish secular power which had supported Boniface, advanced to

violent action when Charlemagne’s sword bloodily constrained the Saxons to

accept his rule and Christianity, the two inseverable objects which he

tirelessly pursued. Nor could this ruler stay his mighty hand from the

government of the Church within his realm. With his power to appoint

bishops, he might, if he chose, control its councils. But apparently he

chose to rule the Church directly; and his, and his predecessors’ and

successors’ Capitularies (rather than Conciliar decrees) contain the chief

ecclesiastical legislation for the Frankish realm.

In its temporalities and secular action the Church was the greatest and

richest of all subjects; it possessed the rights of lay vassals and was

affected with like duties.[234] But in ritual, doctrine, language and

affiliation, the Frankish Church made part of the Roman Catholic Church.

It used the Roman liturgy and the Latin tongue. The ordering of the clergy

was Roman, and the regulation of the monasteries was Romanized by the

adoption of the Benedictine _regula_. Within the Church Rome had

triumphed. Prelates were vassals of the king who had now become Emperor;

and the great corporate Church was subject to him. Nevertheless, this

great corporate institution was Roman rather than Gallic or Frankish or

German. It was Teuton only in those elements which represented

ecclesiastical abuses, for example, the remaining irregularities of

various kinds, the lay and martial habits of prelates, and even their

appointment by the monarch. These were the elements which the Church in

its logical Roman evolution was to eliminate. Charlemagne himself, as well

as his lesser successors, strove just as zealously to bring the people

into obedience to the Church as into obedience to the lay rulers. While

the Carolingian rule was strong, its power was exerted on behalf of

ecclesiastical authority and discipline; and when the royal administration

weakened after Charlemagne’s death, the Church was not slow to revolt

against its temporal subjection to the royal power.

But the Church, in spite of Latin and Roman affinities, strove also to

come near the German peoples and speak to them in their own tongues. This

is borne witness to by the many translations from Latin into Frankish,

Saxon, or Alemannish dialects, made by the clergy. Christianity deeply

affected the German language. Many of its words received German form, and

the new thoughts forced old terms to take on novel and more spiritual

meanings. To be sure these German dialects were there before Christianity

came, and the capacities of the Germans acquired in heathen times are

attested by the sufficiency of their language to express Christian

thought. Likewise the German character was there, and proved its range and

quality by the very transformation of which it showed itself capable under

Christianity. And just as Christianity was given expression in the German

language, which retained many of its former qualities, so many fundamental

traits of German character remained in the converted people. Yet so

earnestly did the Germans turn to Christianity, and such draughts of its

spirit did they draw into their nature, that the early Germanic

re-expression of it is sincere, heartfelt, and moving, and illumined with

understanding of the Faith.

These qualities may be observed in the series of Christian documents in

the German tongues commencing in the first years of Charlemagne’s reign.

They consist of baptismal confessions of belief, the first of which (cir.

769) was composed for heathen Saxons just converted by the sword, and of

catechisms presenting the elements of Christian precept and dogma. The

earliest of the latter (cir. 789), coming from the monastery at

Weissenburg in Alsace, contains the Lord’s Prayer, with explanations, an

enumeration of the deadly sins according to the fifth chapter of the

Epistle to the Galatians, the Apostles’ Creed and the Athanasian. Further,

one finds among these documents a translation of the _De fide Catholica_

of Isidore of Seville, and of the Benedictine _regula_; also

Charlemagne’s _Exhortatio ad plebem Christianam_, which was an admonition

to the people to learn the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. There are likewise

general confessions of sins. Less dependent on a Latin original is the

so-called _Muspilli_, a spirited description in alliterative verse of the

last times and the Day of Judgment.

German qualities, however, express themselves more fully in two Gospel

versions, the first the famous Saxon _Heliand_ (cir. 835), (which follows

Tatian’s “Harmony”); the second the somewhat later _Evangelienbuch_ of

Otfrid the Frank. They were both composed in alliterative verse, though

Otfrid also made use of rhyme.[235] The martial, Teutonic ring of the

former is well known. Christ is the king, the disciples are His thanes

whose duty is to stand by their lord to the death; He rewards them with

the promised riches of heaven, excelling the earthly goods bestowed by

other kings. In the “betrayal” they close around their Lord, saying: “Were

it thy will, mighty Lord of ours, that we should set upon them with the

spear, gladly would we strike and die for our Lord.” Out broke the wrath

of the “ready swordsman” (_snel suerdthegan_)[236] Simon Peter; he could

not speak for anguish to think that his lord should be bound. Angrily

strode the bold knight before his lord, drew his weapon, the sword by his

side, and smote the nearest foe with might of hands. Before his fury and

the spurting blood the people fled fearing the sword’s bite.

The _Heliand_ has also gentler qualities, as when it calls the infant

Christ the _fridubarn_ (peace-child), and pictures Mary watching over her

“little man.” But German love of wife and child and home speak more

clearly in Otfrid’s book. Although a learned monk, his pride of Frankish

race rings in his oft-quoted reasons for writing _theotisce_, _i.e._ in

German: Why shall not the Franks sing God’s praise in Frankish tongue?

Forcible and logical it is, although not bound by grammar’s rules. Yes,

why should the Franks be incapable? they are brave as Romans or Greeks;

they are as good in field and wood; wide power is theirs, and ready are

they with the sword. They are rich, and possess a good land, with honour.

They can guard their own; what people is their equal in battle? Diligent

are they also in the Word of God. Otfrid is quite moving in his

sympathetic sense of the sorrow of the Last Judgment, when the mother from

child shall be parted, the father from son, the lord from his faithful

thane, friend from friend--all human kind. Deep is the mystic love and

yearning with which he realizes Heaven as one’s own land: there is life

without death, light without darkness, the angels and eternal bliss. We

have left it--that must we bewail always, banished to a strange land, poor

misled orphans. The antithesis between the _fremidemo lant_ (_fremdes

land_) of earth, and the _heimat_, the _eigan lant_ of Heaven, which is

home, real home, is the keynote strongly felt and movingly expressed.

BOOK II

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

CHAPTER X

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

AND ANTIQUE

With the conversion of Teuton peoples and their introduction to the Latin

culture accompanying the new religion, the factors of mediaeval

development came at last into conjunction. The mediaeval development was

to issue from their combined action, rather than from the singular nature

of any one of them.[237] Taking up the introductory theme concerning the

meeting of these forces, we followed the Latinizing of the West resulting

from the expansion of the Roman Republic, which represents the political

and social preparation of the field. Then we considered the antique pagan

gospel of philosophy and letters, which had quickened this Latin

civilization and was to form the spiritual environment of patristic

Christianity. Next in order we observed the intellectual interests of the

Latin Fathers, and then turned to the great Latin transmitters of the

somewhat amalgamated antique and patristic material--Boëthius,

Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great, and Isidore of Seville--who gathered what

they might, and did much to reduce the same to decadent forms, suited to

the barbaric understanding. Then the course of the barbaric disruption of

the Empire was reviewed; and this led to a consideration of the qualities

and circumstances of the Celts and Teutons, both those who to all

appearances had been Latinized, and those who took active part in the

barbarization and disruption of the Roman order. And finally we closed

these introductory, though essential, chapters by tracing the ways in

which Christianity, with the now humbled and degraded antique culture, was

presented to this renewed and largely Teutonic barbarism.

Having now reached the epoch of conjunction of the various elements of the

mediaeval evolution, it lies before us to consider the first stage in the

action of true mediaeval conditions upon the two chief spiritual forces,

the first stage, in other words, of the mediaeval appropriation of the

patristic and antique material. The period is what is called Carlovingian

or Carolingian, after the great ruler Charlemagne. Intellectually

considered, it may be said to have begun when Charles palpably evinced his

interest in sacred and liberal studies by calling Alcuin and other

scholars to his Court about the year 781. Let us note the political and

social situation.

The Merovingian kingdom created by Clovis and his house has been spoken

of.[238] One may properly refer to it in the singular, although

frequently, instead of one, there were several kingdoms, since upon the

death of a Merovingian monarch his realm was divided among his sons. But

no true son of the house could leave the others unconquered or unmurdered;

and therefore if the Merovingian kingdom constantly was divided, it also

tended to coalesce again, coerced to unity. Constituted both of Roman and

Teutonic elements, it operated as a mediating power between Latin

Christendom and barbaric heathendom. Its energies were great, and were not

waning when its royal house was passing into insignificance before the

power of the nobles and the chief personage among them who had become the

_major domus_ (“Mayor of the palace”) and virtual ruler. Moreover,

experience, contact with Latin civilization, membership in the Roman

Catholic Church, were informing the Merovingian energies. They were

becoming just a little less barbarous and a little more instructed; in

fine, were changing from Merovingian to Carolingian.

In the latter part of the seventh century, Pippin, called “of Heristal,”

ruled as _major domus_ (as one or more of his ancestors before him) in

Austrasia, the eastern Frankish kingdom. Many were his wars, especially

with the Neustrian or western Frankish kingdom, under its _major domus_,

Ebroin. This somewhat unconquerable man at last was murdered, and one of

the two Merovingian kings being murdered likewise, Pippin about the year

688 became _princeps regiminis ac major domus_ for the now united realm.

From this date the Merovingians are but shadow kings, whose names are not

worth recording. Pippin’s rule marks the advent of his house to virtual

sovereignty, and also the passing of the preponderance of power from

Neustria to Austrasia. These two facts became clear after Pippin’s death

(714), when his redoubtable son Charles in a five years’ struggle against

great odds made himself sole _major domus_, and with his Austrasians

overwhelmed the Neustrian army. Thenceforth this Charles, called Martell

the Hammer, mightily prevailed, smiting Saxons, Bavarians, and Alemanni,

and, after much warfare in the south with Saracens, at last vindicated the

Cross against the Crescent at Tours in 732. Nine years longer he was to

reign, increasing his power to the end, and supporting the establishment

of Catholicism in Frisia, by the Anglo-Saxon Willibrord, and in heathen

German lands by St. Boniface.[239] He died in 741, dividing what virtually

was his realm between his sons Carloman and Pippin: the former receiving

Austrasia, Alemannia, Thuringia; the latter, Neustria, Burgundy, Provence.

These two sons valiantly took up their task, reforming the Church under

the inspiration of Boniface, and ruling their domains without conflict

with each other until 747, when Carloman retired and became a monk,

leaving the entire realm to Pippin. The latter in 751 at Soissons, with

universal approval and the consent of the Pope, was crowned king, and

anointed by the hand of Boniface. This able and energetic sovereign

pursued the course of his father and grandfather, but on still larger

scale; aiding the popes and reducing the Lombard power in Italy, carrying

on wars around the borders of his realm, bringing Aquitania to full

submission, and expelling the Saracens from Narbonne and other fortress

towns. In 768 he died, again dividing his vast realm between his two sons

Carloman and Charles.

These bore each other little love; but fortunately the former died (771)

before an open breach occurred. So Charles was left to rule alone, and

prove himself, all things considered, the greatest of mediaeval

sovereigns. Having fought his many wars of conquest and subjugation

against Saracens, Saxons, Avars, Bavarians, Slavs, Danes, Lombards; having

conquered much of Italy and freed the Pope from neighbouring domination;

having been crowned and anointed emperor in the year 800; having restored

letters, uplifted the Church, issued much wise legislation, and

Christianized with iron hand the stubborn heathen; and above all, having

administered his vast realm with never-failing energy, he died in

814--just one hundred years after the time when his grandfather Charles

was left to fight so doughtily for life and power.

Poetry and history have conspired to raise the fame of Charlemagne. In

more than one _chanson de geste_, the old French _épopée_ has put his name

where that of Pippin, Charles Martell, or perhaps that of some Merovingian

should have been.[240] Sober history has not thus falsified its matter,

and yet has over-dramatized the incidents of its hero’s reign. For

example, every schoolboy has been told of the embassy to Charlemagne from

Harun al Raschid, Caliph of Bagdad. But not so many schoolboys know that

Pippin had sent an embassy to a previous caliph, which was courteously

entertained for three years in Bagdad;[241] and Pippin, like his son,

received embassies from the Greek emperor. The careers of Charles Martell

and Pippin have not been ignored; and yet historical convention has

focused its attention and its phrases upon “the age of Charlemagne.” One

should not forget that this exceedingly great man stood upon the shoulders

of the great men to whose achievement he succeeded.

Neither politically, socially, intellectually, nor geographically[242] was

there discontinuity or break or sudden change between the Merovingian and

the Carolingian periods.[243] The character of the monarchy was scarcely

affected by the substitution of the house of Pippin of Heristal for the

house of Clovis. The baleful custom of dividing the realm upon a monarch’s

death survived; but Fortune rendered it innocuous through one strong

century, during which (719-814) the realm was free from internecine war,

while the tossing streams of humanity were driven onward by three great

successive rulers.

The Carolingian, like the Merovingian, realm included many different

peoples who were destined never to become one nation; and the whole

Carolingian system of government virtually had existed in the Merovingian

period. Before, as well as after, the dynastic change, the government

throughout the realm was administered by _Counts_. Likewise the famous

_missi dominici_, or royal legates, are found in Merovingian times; but

they were employed more effectively by Charles Martell, Pippin, and,

finally, by Charlemagne, who enlarged their sphere of action. He

elaborately defined their functions in a famous Capitulary of the year

802. It was set forth that the emperor had chosen these legates from among

his best and greatest (_ex optimatibus suis_), and had authorized them to

receive the new oaths of allegiance, and supervise the observance of the

laws, the execution of justice, the maintenance of the military and fiscal

rights of the emperor. They were given power to see that the permanent

functionaries (the counts and their subordinates) duly administered the

law as written or recognized. The _missi_ had jurisdiction over

ecclesiastical as well as lay officials; and many of them were entrusted

with special powers and duties in the particular instance.

Thus Charlemagne developed the functions of these ancient officers.

Likewise his Court and royal council, the synods and assemblies of his

reign, the military service, modes of holding land, methods of collecting

revenue, were not greatly changed from Merovingian prototypes. Yet the old

institutions had been renewed and bettered. A vast misjoined and unrelated

realm was galvanized into temporary unity. And, most impressive and

portentous thing of all, an _Empire_--the _Holy_ Roman Empire--was

resurrected for a time in fact and verity: the same was destined to endure

in endeavour and contemplation.

So there was no break politically or socially between the Carolingian

Empire and its antecedents, which had made it possible. Likewise there was

no discontinuity spiritually and intellectually between the earlier time

and that epoch which begins with Charlemagne’s first endeavours to restore

knowledge, and extends through the ninth and, if one will, even the tenth

century.[244] Western Europe (except Scandinavia) had become nominally

Christian, and had been made acquainted with Latin education to the extent

indicated in the preceding chapter, the purpose of which was to tell how

Christianity and the antique culture were brought to the northern peoples.

The present chapter, on the other hand, seeks to describe how the eighth

and ninth centuries proceeded to learn and consider and react upon this

newly introduced Christianity and antique culture, out of which the

spiritual destinies of the Middle Ages were to be forged. The task of

Carolingian scholars was to learn what had been brought to them. They

scarcely excelled even the later intermediaries through whom this

knowledge had been transmitted. One need not look among them for better

scholarship than was possessed by Bede, who died in 735, the birth year of

Alcuin who drew so much from him, and was to be the chief luminary of the

palace school of Charlemagne. Undoubtedly, Charlemagne’s exertions caused

a revival of sacred and profane studies through the region of the present

France and Rhenish Germany. His primary motive was the purification and

extension of Catholic Christianity. Here Charles Martell and Pippin (with

his brother Carloman) had done much, as their support of Boniface bears

witness to. But Charlemagne’s efforts went beyond those of his

predecessors. More clearly than they he understood the need of education,

and he was himself intensely interested in knowledge. Hence his

endeavours, primarily to uplift the Faith, brought a revival of learning

and a literary productivity, consisting mostly in reproduction or

rearrangement of old material, doctrinal or profane.[245]

Another preliminary consideration may help us to appreciate the

intellectual qualities of the period before us. Charlemagne was primarily

a ruler in the largest sense, conqueror, statesman, law-giver, one who

realized the needs of the time, and met or forestalled them. His monarchy,

with its powers inherited, as well as radiating from his own personality,

provided an imperial government for western Europe. The chief activities

of this ruler and his epoch were practical, to wit, political and

military. In laws, in institutions, and in deeds, he and his Empire

represent creativeness and progress; although, to be sure, that

conglomerate empire of his had itself to fall in pieces before there could

take place a more lasting and national evolution of States. And, of

course, Carolingian political creativeness included the conservation of

existing social, political, and, above all, ecclesiastical, institutions.

In fine, this period was creative and progressive in its practical

energies. The factors were the pressing needs and palpable opportunities,

which were met or availed of. And to the same effective treatment of

problems ecclesiastical and doctrinal was due the modicum of originality

in the Carolingian literature. Aside from this, the period’s intellectual

accomplishment, in religious as well as secular studies, shows merely a

diligent learning and imitation of pagan letters, and a rehandling and

arrangement of the work of the Church Fathers and their immediate

successors. Its efforts were exhausted in rearranging the heritage of

Christian teaching coming from the Church Fathers, or in endeavours to

acquire the transmitted antique culture and imitate the antique in phrase

and metre. The combined task, or occupation, absorbed the minds of men.

The whole period was at school, where it needed to be: at school to the

Church Fathers, at school to the transmitters of antique culture. Its task

was one of adjustment of its materials to itself, and of itself to its

materials.

The reinvigoration of studies marking the life-time of Charlemagne did not

extend to Italy, where letters, although decayed, had never ceased, nor to

Anglo-Saxon England, where Bede had taught and whence Alcuin had come. The

revival radiated, one may say, from the palace school attached to the

Court, which had its least intermittent domicile at Aix-la-Chapelle. It

extended to the chief monastic centres of Gaul and Germany, and to

cathedral schools where such existed. From many lands scholars were drawn

by that great hand so generous in giving, so mighty to protect. Some came

on invitation more or less compelling, and many of their own free will.

The first and most famous of them all was the Anglo-Saxon, Alcuin of York.

Charles first saw him at Parma in the year 781, and ever after kept him in

his service as his most trusted teacher and director of studies. Love of

home drew Alcuin back, once at least, to England. In 796 Charles permitted

him to leave the Court, and entrusted him with the re-establishment of the

Abbey of St. Martin at Tours and its schools. There he lived and laboured

till his death in 804.

Another scholar was Peter of Pisa, a grammarian, who seems to have shared

with Alcuin the honourable task of instructing the king. Of greater note

was Paulus Diaconus, who, like Alcuin himself, was to sigh for the pious

or scholarly quiet which the seething, half-barbarous, and loose-mannered

Court did not afford. Paulus at last gained Charles’s consent to retire

to Monte Cassino. He was of the Lombard race, like another favourite of

Charles, Paulinus of Aquileia. From Spain, apparently, came Theodulphus,

by descent a Goth, and reputed the most elegant Latin versifier of his

time. Charles made him Bishop of Orleans. A little later, Einhart the

Frank appears, who was to be the emperor’s secretary and biographer.

Likewise came certain sons of Erin, among them such a problematic poet as

he who styled himself “Hibernicus Exul”--not the first or last of his

line!

These belonged to the generation about the emperor. Belonging to the next

generation, and for the most part pupils of the older men, were Abbot

Smaragdus, grammarian and didactic writer; the German, Rabanus Maurus,

Abbot of Fulda and, against his will, Archbishop of Mainz, an

encyclopaedic excerpter and educator, _primus praeceptor Germaniae_; his

pupil was Walafrid Strabo, the cleverest putter-together of the excerpt

commentary, and a pleasing poet. In Lorraine at the same time flourished

the Irishman, Sedulius Scotus, and in the West that ardent classical

scholar, Servatus Lupus, Abbot of Ferrières, and Agobard, Bishop of Lyons,

a man practical and hard-headed, with whom one may couple Claudius, Bishop

of Turin, the opponent of relic-worship. One might also mention those

theological controversialists, Radbertus Paschasius and Ratramnus,

Hincmar, the great Archbishop of Rheims, and Gottschalk, the unhappy monk,

ever recalcitrant; at the end John Scotus Eriugena should stand, the

somewhat too intellectual Neo-Platonic Irishman, translator of

Pseudo-Dionysius, and announcer of various rationalizing propositions for

which men were to look on him askance.

There will be occasion to speak more particularly of a number of these

men. They were all scholars, and interested in the maintenance of

elementary Latin education as well as in theology. They wished to write

good Latin, and sometimes tried for a classical standard, as Einhart did

in his _Vita Caroli_. Few of them refrained from verse, for they were

addicted to metrical compositions made of borrowed classic phrase and

often of reflected classic sentiment, sometimes prettily composed, but

usually insipid, and in the mass, which was great, exceptionally

uninspired. Such metrical effort, quite as much as Einhart’s consciously

classicizing Latin prose, represents a survival of the antique excited to

recrudescence in forms which, if they were not classical, at least had not

become anything else. Stylistically, and perhaps temperamentally, it

represented the ending of what had nearly passed away, rather than the

beginning of the more organic development which was to come.[246]

Among these men, Alcuin and Rabanus broadly represent at once the

intellectual interests of the period and the first stage in the process of

the mediaeval appropriation of the patristic and antique material. The

affectionate and sympathetic personality of the former[247] appears

throughout his voluminous correspondence with Charles and others, which

shows, among other matters, the interest of the time in elementary points

of Latinity, and the alertness of the mind of the great king, who put so

many questions to his genial instructor upon grammar, astronomy, and such

like knowledge. An examination of the works of Alcuin will indicate the

range and character of the educational and more usual intellectual

interests of the epoch. In fact, they are outlined in a simple fashion

suited to youthful minds in his treatise upon Grammar.[248] Its opening

colloquy presents a sort of programme and justification of elementary

secular studies.

“We have heard you saying,” begins Discipulus, “that philosophy is the

teacher (_magistra_) of all virtues, and that she alone of secular riches

has never left the possessor miserable. Lend a hand, good Master,”--and

the pupil becomes self-deprecatory. “Flint has fire within, which comes

out only when struck; so the light of knowledge exists by nature in human

minds, but a teacher is needed to knock it out.”

“It is easy,” responds the Master, “to show you wisdom’s path, if only you

will pursue it for the sake of God, for the sake of the soul’s purity and

to learn the truth, and also for its own sake, and not for human praise

and honour.”

We confess, answers little Discipulus, that we love happiness, but know

not whether it can exist in this world. And the dialogue rambles on in

discursive comment upon the superiority of the lasting over the

transitory, with some feeble echoing of notes from Boëthius’s _De

consolatione_. There is talk to show that man, a rational animal, the

image of his Creator, and immortal in his better part, should seek what is

truly of himself, and not what is alien, the abiding and not the fugitive.

In fine, one should adorn the soul, which is eternal, with wisdom, the

soul’s true lasting dignity. There is some coy demurring over the

steepness of the way; but the pupil is ardent, and the Master confident

that with the aid of Divine Grace they will ascend the seven grades of

philosophy, by which philosophers have gained honour brighter than that of

kings, and the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith have

triumphed over all heresiarchs. “Through these paths, dearest son, let

your youth run its daily course, until its completed years and

strengthened mind shall attain to the heights of the Holy Scriptures upon

which you and your like shall become armed defenders of the Faith and

invincible assertors of its truth.” This means, of course, that the

Liberal Arts are the proper preparation for the study of Scripture, that

is, theology. But Alcuin’s discourse seems to tarry with those studies as

if detained by some love of them for their own sake.

The body of this treatise is in form a disputation between two youthful

pupils, a Frank and a Saxon. A _Magister_ makes a third interlocutor, and

sets the subject of the argument. These _personae_ discuss letters and

syllables in definitions taken from Donatus, Priscian, or Isidore; and

whenever Alcuin permits any one of them to stray from the words of those

authorities, the language shows at once his own confused ideas regarding

the parts of speech. He uses terms without adequately comprehending them,

and thus affords one of the myriad examples of how, under decadent or

barbarized conditions, phrases may outlive an intelligent understanding of

their meaning. “Grammar,” says the _Magister_, when solicited to define

it, “is the science of letters, and the guardian of correct speech and

writing. It rests on nature, reason, authority, and custom.” “In how many

species is it divided?” “In twenty-six: words, letters, syllables,

clauses, dictions, speeches, definitions, feet, accent, punctuation,

signs, spelling, analogies, etymologies, glosses, differences, barbarism,

solecism, faults, metaplasm, schemata, tropes, prose, metre, fables and

histories.”[249] The actual treatise does not cover these twenty-six

topics, but confines itself to the division of grammar commonly called

Etymology.

Though the mental processes of an individual preserve a working harmony,

some of them appear more rational than others. Such disparities may be

glaring in men who enter upon the learning of a higher civilization

without proper pilotage. How are they to discriminate between the valuable

and the foolish? The common sense, which they apply to familiar matters,

contrasts with their childlike lucubrations upon novel topics of education

or philosophy. And if that higher culture to which such pupils are

introduced be in part decadent, it will itself contain disparities between

the stronger thinking held in the surviving writings of a prior time and

the later degeneracies which are declining to the level, it may be, of

these new learners.

There would naturally be disparities in the mental processes of an

Anglo-Saxon like Alcuin introduced to the debris of Latin education and

the writings of the Fathers; and his state would typify the character of

the studies at the palace school of Charlemagne and at monastic schools

through his northern realm. This newly stimulated scholarship held the

same disparities that appear in the writings of Alcuin. He may seem to be

adapting his teaching to barbaric needs, but it is evident that his matter

accords with his own intellectual tastes, as, for example, when he

introduces into his educational writings the habit of riddling in

metaphors, so dear to the Anglo-Saxon.[250] The sound but very elementary

portions of his teaching were needed by the ignorance of his scholars. For

instance, no information regarding Latin orthography could come amiss in

the eighth century. And Alcuin in his treatise on that subject[251] took

many words commonly misspelled and contrasted them with those which

sounded like them, but were quite different in meaning and derivation. One

should not, for example, confuse _habeo_ with _abeo_; or _bibo_ and

_vivo_. Such warnings were valuable. The use of the vulgar Romance-forms

of Latin spoken through a large part of Charles’s dominions implied no

knowledge of correct Latinity. Even among the clergy, there was almost

universal ignorance of Latin orthography and grammar.

As a companion to his _Grammar_ and _Orthography_, Alcuin composed a _De

rhetorica et virtutibus_,[252] in the form of a dialogue between Charles

and himself. The king desired such instruction to equip him for the civil

disputes (_civiles quaestiones_) which were brought before him from all

parts of his realm. And Alcuin proceeded to furnish him with a compend of

the _scientia bene dicendi_, which is Rhetoric. This crude epitome was

based chiefly on Cicero’s _De inventione_, but indicates a use of other of

his oratorical writings, and has bits here and there which apparently have

filtered through from the _Rhetoric_ of Aristotle. Some illustrations are

taken from Scripture. The work is most successful in showing the

difference between Cicero and Alcuin. The genius, the spirit, the art of

the great orator’s treatises are lost; a naked skeleton of statement

remains. We have words, terms, definitions, even rules; and Alcuin is not

conscious that beyond them there is the living spirit of discourse.

A more complete descent from substance to a clatter of words and

definitions is exhibited by Alcuin’s _De dialectica_.[253] In logical

studies _facilis descensus_! Others had illustrated this before him. His

treatise is again a dialogue, with Charlemagne for questioner. Opening

with the stock definitions and divisions of philosophy, it arrives at

logic, which is composed (as Isidore and Cassiodorus said) of dialectic

and rhetoric, “the shut and open fist,” a simile which had come down from

Varro. Says Charles: “What are the _species_ of dialectic?” Answers

Alcuin: “Five principal ones: Isagogae, categories, forms of syllogisms

and definitions, topics, periermeniae.” What a classification!

Introductions, categories, syllogisms, topics, _De interpretatione_-s! It

is not a classification but in reality an enumeration of the treatises

which had served as sources for those men from whom Alcuin drew! Evidently

this excerpter is not really thinking in the terms and categories of his

subject. His work shows no intelligence beyond Isidore’s, from whose

_Etymologies_ it is largely taken. And the genius of our author for

metaphysics may be perceived from the definition which he offers Charles

of substance--_substantia_ or _usia_ (_i.e._ οὐσία): it is that which is

discerned by corporeal sense; while _accidens_ is that which changes

frequently and is apprehended by the mind. _Substantia_ is the underlying,

the _subjacens_, in which the _accidentia_ are said to be.[254] One

observes the crassness and inconsistency of these statements.

There are illustrations of the knowledge and methods shown in the

educational writings of the man who, next to Charles himself, was the

guiding spirit of the intellectual revival. No mention has been made of

those of his works that were representative of the chief intellectual

labour of the period--that of exploiting the Patristic material. Here

Alcuin contributed a compend of Augustine’s doctrines on the Trinity,[255]

and a book on the Vices and Virtues, drawn chiefly from Augustine’s

sermons.[256] Like most of his learned contemporaries, he also compiled

Commentaries upon Scripture, the method of which is prettily told in a

prefatory epistle placed by him before his Commentary on the Gospel of

John, and addressed to two pious women:

“Devoutly searching the pantries of the holy Fathers, I let you taste

whatever I have been able to find in them. Nor did I deem it fitting

to cull the blossoms from any meadow of my own, but with humble heart

and head bowed low, to search through the flowering fields of many

Fathers, and thus safely satisfy your pious pleasure. First of all I

seek the suffrage of Saint Augustine, who laboured with such zeal upon

this Gospel; then I draw something from the tracts of the most holy

doctor Saint Ambrose; nor have I neglected the homilies of Father

Gregory the pope, or those of the blessed Bede, nor, in fact, the

works of others of the holy Fathers. I have cited their

interpretations, as I found them, preferring to use their meanings and

their words, than trust to my own presumption.”[257]

In the next generation, a most industrious compiler of such Commentaries

was Alcuin’s pupil, Rabanus Maurus.[258] More deeply learned than his

master, his conception of the purposes of study has not changed

essentially. Like Alcuin, he sets forth a proper intellectual programme

for the instruction of the clergy: “The foundation, the state, and the

perfection, of wisdom is knowledge of the Holy Scriptures.” The Seven Arts

are the ancillary _disciplinae_; the first three constitute that

grammatical, rhetorical, and logical training which is needed for an

understanding of the holy texts and their interpretation. Likewise

arithmetic and the rest of the quadrivium have place in the cleric’s

education. A knowledge of pagan philosophy need not be avoided: “The

philosophers, especially the Platonists, if perchance they have spoken

truths accordant with our faith, are not to be shunned, but their truths

appropriated, as from unjust possessors.”[259] And Rabanus continues with

the never-failing metaphor of Moses despoiling the Egyptians.

Raban, however, had somewhat larger thoughts of education than his master.

For example, he takes a broader view of grammar, which he regards as the

_scientia_ of interpreting the poets and historians, and the _ratio_ of

correct speech and writing.[260] Likewise he treats _Dialectica_ more

seriously. With him it is the “_disciplina_ of rational investigation, of

defining and discussing, and distinguishing the true from the false. It is

therefore the _disciplina disciplinarum_. It teaches how to teach and how

to learn; in this same study, reason itself demonstrates what it is and

what it wills. This art alone knows how to know, and is willing and able

to make knowers. Reasoning in it, we learn what we are, and whence, and

also to know Creator and creature; through it we trace truth and detect

falsity, we argue and discover what is consequent and what inconsequent,

what is contrary to the nature of things, what is true, what is probable,

and what is intrinsically false in disputations. Wherefore the clergy

ought to know this noble art, and have its laws in constant meditation, so

that subtly they may discern the wiles of heretics, and confute their

poisoned sayings with the conclusions of the syllogism.”[261]

This somewhat extravagant but not novel view of logic’s function was

prophetic of the coming scholastic reliance upon it as the means and

instrument of truth. Rabanus had no hesitancy in commending this edged

tool to his pupils. But the operations of his mind were predominantly

Carolingian, which is to say that ninety-nine per cent of the contents of

his _opera_ consist of material extracted from prior writers. His

Commentaries upon Scripture outbulk all his other works taken together,

and are compiled in this manner. So is his encyclopaedic compilation, _De

universo libri XXII._,[262] two books more than those of Isidore’s

_Etymologies_, from which he chiefly drew; but he changed the arrangement,

and devoted a larger part of his parchment to religious topics; and he

added further matter gleaned from the Church Fathers, from whom he had

drawn his Commentaries. This further matter consisted of the mystical

interpretations of things, which he subjoined to their “natural”

explanations. He says, in his Praefatio, addressed to King Louis:

“Much is set forth in this work concerning the natures of things and

the meanings of words, and also as to the mystical signification of

things. Accordingly I have arranged my matter so that the reader may

find the historical and mystical explanations of each thing set

together--_continuatim positam_; and may be able to satisfy his desire

to know both significations.”

These allegorical elaborations accorded with the habits of this compiler

of allegorical comment upon Scripture.[263]

Rabanus was a full Teutonic personality, a massive scholar for his time,

untiring in labour and intrinsically honest. Except when involved in the

foolishness of the mystic qualities of numbers, or following the

will-o’-wisps of allegory, he evinces much sound wisdom. He abhors the

pretence of teaching what one has not first diligently learned; and his

good sense is shown in his admonition to teachers to use words which their

pupils or audience will understand. His views upon profane knowledge were

liberal: one should use the treasured experience and accumulated wisdom of

the ancients, for that is still the mainstay of human society; but one

should shun their vain as well as pernicious idolatries and

superstitions.[264] Let us by all means preserve their sound educational

learning and the elements of their philosophy which accord with the

verities of Christian doctrine. Raban also realized the sublimity of the

study of Astronomy, which he deemed “a worthy argument for the religious

and a torment for the curious. If pursued with chaste and sober mind, it

floods our thoughts with immense love. How admirable to mount the heavens

in spirit, and with inquiring reason consider that whole celestial fabric,

and from every side gather in the mind’s reflective heights what those

vast recesses veil.”[265] He then rebukes the folly of those who vainly

would draw auguries from the stars.[266]

Raban’s mental activities were commonly constrained by the need felt by

him and his pious contemporaries to master the works of the Latin Fathers.

Perhaps more than any other one man (though here his pupil Walafrid Strabo

made a skilful second) he contributed to what necessarily was the first

stage in this mediaeval achievement of appropriating patristic

Christianity, to wit, the preliminary task of rearranging the doctrinal

expositions of the Fathers conveniently, and for the most part in

Commentaries following verse and chapter of the canonical books of

Scripture. But, like many of his contemporaries, Raban, when compelled by

controversial exigencies, would think for himself if the situation could

not be met with matter taken from a Father. Accordingly, individual and

personal views are vigorously put in some of his writings, as in his

_Liber de oblatione puerorum_,[267] directed against the attempt of the

interesting Saxon, Gottschalk, to free himself from the vows made by those

who dedicated him in boyhood as an _oblatus_ at the monastery of Fulda, of

which Raban was abbot. Raban’s tract maintained that the monastic vows

made upon such dedication of children could not be broken by the latter on

reaching years of discretion.

This same Gottschalk was the centre of the storm, which he indeed blew up,

over Predestination; and again Raban was his fierce opponent. This

controversy, with that relating to the Eucharist, will serve to illustrate

the doctrinal interests of the time, and also to exemplify the

quasi-originality of its controversial productions.

Of course Predestination and the Eucharist had been exhaustively discussed

by the Latin Fathers. No man of the ninth century could really add

anything to the arguments touching the former set forth in the works of

Augustine and his Pelagian adversaries. And the substance of the

discussion as to the eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ had permeated

countless tomes, both Greek and Latin, from the time of Irenaeus, Bishop

of Lyons (d. 202); and yet neither as to the impossible topic of

Predestination, nor as to the distinctly Christian mystery of the

Eucharist, had the Latin Church authoritatively and finally fixed doctrine

in dogma or put together the arguments. The ninth century with its lack of

elastic thinking, and its greater need of tangible authority, was

compelled by its mental limitations to attempt in each of these matters to

drag a definite conclusion from out of its entourage of argument, and

strip it of its decently veiling obscurities. Thereupon, and with its

justifying and balanced foundation of reasons and considerations knocked

from under, the conclusion had to sustain itself in mid air, just at the

level of the common eye.

Such, obviously, was the result of the Eucharistic or Paschal controversy.

The symbol, all indecision brushed away, hardened into the tangible

miraculous reality. Radbertus, Abbot of Corbie, who was so rightly named

Paschasius, was the chief agent in the process. His method of procedure,

just as the result which he obtained, was what the time required. The

method was almost a bit of creation in itself: he put the matter in a

separate monograph, _De corpore et sanguine Domini_,[268] the first work

exclusively devoted to the subject. This was needed as a matter of

arrangement and presentation. Men could not endure to look here and

thither among many books on many subjects, for arguments one way and the

other. That was too distraught. There was call for a compendium, a manual

of the matter; and in providing it Paschasius was a master mechanic for

his time. Inevitably the discussion and the conclusion took on a new

definiteness. It is impossible to glean and gather arguments and matter

from all sides, and bring them together into a single composition, without

making the thesis more organic, tangible, definite. Thus Paschasius

presented the scattered, wavering discussion--the victorious side of

it--as a clear dogma reached at last. And whatever qualification of

counter-doctrine there was in his grouped arguments, there was none in the

conclusion; and the definite conclusion was what men wanted.

And practically for the whole western Church, clergy and laity, the

conclusion was but one, and accorded with what was already the current

acceptance of the matter. Radbert’s arguments embraced the spiritual

realism of Augustine, according to which the ultra reality of the

eucharistic elements consisted in the _virtus sacramenti_, that is in

their miraculous and real, but invisible, transformation into the

veritable substance of Christ’s veritable body. This took place through

priestly consecration, and existed only for believers. For the brute to

eat the elements was nothing more than to consume other similar natural

substances. For the misbeliever it was not so simple. He indeed ate not

Christ’s body, but his own _judicium_, his own deeper damnation. Here lay

the terror, which made more anxious, more poignant, the believer’s hope,

that he was faithful and humbled, and was eating the veritable Christ-body

to his sure salvation. For the Eucharist could not fail, though the

partaker might.

Out of all of this emerged the one clear thing, the point, the practical

conclusion, which was transubstantiation, though the word was not yet

made. Here it is in Paschasius; says he: “That body and blood veritably

come into existence (_fiat_) by the consecration of the Mystery, no one

doubts who believes the divine words; hence Truth says, ‘For my flesh

verily is food, and my blood verily is drink’ (John vi. 55). And that it

should be clearer to the disciples who did not rightly understand of what

flesh He spoke, or of what blood, He added, to make this plain, ‘Whoso

eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me and I in him’

(_ibid._ 56). Therefore, if it is veritably food, it is veritable flesh;

and if it is veritably drink, it also is veritable blood. Otherwise how

could He have said, ‘The bread which I will give is my flesh for the life

of the world’ (_ibid._ 52)?”

Could anything be more positive and simplified? At first sight it is a

marvel how Paschasius, even though treading in the steps of so many who

had gone before, could give a literal interpretation to words which

Christ seems to have used as figuratively as when He said, “I am the vine,

ye are the branches.” A marvel indeed, when we think that Paschasius and

all of his generation, as well as those who went before, had abandoned

themselves to the most wonderful and far-fetched allegorical

interpretations of every historical and literal statement in the

Scriptures. And this same Paschasius, and all the rest too, do not

hesitate to interpret and explain by allegory the significance of every

accompanying act and circumstance of the mass. This might seem the climax

of the marvel, but it is a step toward explaining it. For the literal

interpretation of the phrases which Paschasius quotes was followed for the

sake of the more absolute miracle, the deeper mystery, the fuller

florescence of encompassing allegorical meaning. Only thus could be

brought about the transformation of the palpable symbol into the

miraculous reality; and only _then_ could that bread and wine be what

Cyril of Alexandria and others, five hundred years before Paschasius, had

called it: “the drug of immortality.” Only through the miraculous and real

identity of the elements of the Eucharist with the body and blood of

Christ could they save the souls of the partakers.

In partial disagreement with these hard and fast conclusions, Ratramnus,

also of Corbie,[269] and others might still try to veil the matter, with

utterances capable of more equivocal meaning; might try to make it all

more dim, and therefore more possibly reasonable. That was not what the

Carolingian time, or the centuries to come, wanted; but rather the

definite tangible statement, which they could grasp as readily as they

could see and touch the elements before their eyes. In disenveloping the

question and conclusion from every wavering consideration and veiling

ambiguity, the Carolingian period was creative in this Paschal

controversy. New propositions were not devised; but the old, such of them

as fitted, were put together and given the unity and force of a

projectile.

It was the same and yet different with the Predestination strife.

Gottschalk, who raised the storm, stated doctrines of Augustine. But he

set them out naked and alone, with nothing else as counterpoise, as

Augustine had not done. Thus to draw a single doctrine out from the

totality of a man’s work and the demonstrative suggestiveness of all the

rest of his teachings, whether that man be Paul or Augustine, is to

present it so as to make it something else. For thereby it is left naked

and alone, and unadjusted with the connected and mitigating considerations

yielded by the rest of the man’s opinions. Such a procedure is a garbling,

at least in spirit. It is almost like quoting the first half of a sentence

and leaving off everything following the author’s “but” in the middle of

it.

At all events the hard and fast, complete and twin (_gemina_), divine

predestination, unto hell as well as heaven, was too unmitigated for the

Carolingian Church. This doctrine, and his own intractible temper, immured

the unhappy announcer of it in a monastic dungeon till he died. It was

monstrous, as monstrous as transubstantiation, for example! But

transubstantiation saved; and while the Church could stand the doctrine of

the election of the Elect to salvation, it revolted from the

counter-inference, of the election of the damned to hell, which

contradicted too drastically the sweet and lovely teaching that Christ

died for all. The theologians of one and more generations were drawn into

the strife, which was to have a less definitive result than the Paschal

controversy. Even to-day the adjustment of human free-will with omnipotent

foreknowledge has not been made quite clear.[270]

There was one man who was drawn into the Predestination strife, although

for him it lacked cardinal import. For the Neo-Platonic principles of John

Scotus Eriugena scarcely permitted him to see in evil more than

non-existence, and led him to trace all phases of reality downward from

the primal Source. His intellectual attitude, interests, and faculties

were exceptional, and yet nevertheless partook of the characteristics of

his time, out of which not even an Eriugena could lift himself. He was an

Irishman, who came to the Court of Charles the Bald on invitation, and

for many years, until his orthodoxy became too suspect, was the head of

the palace school. He may have died about the year 877.

Eriugena was in the first place a man of learning, widely read in the

works of the Greek Fathers. From the _Celestial Hierarchy_ of

Pseudo-Dionysius and other sources, he had absorbed huge draughts of

Neo-Platonism. One must not think of him always as an original thinker. A

large part of his literary labours correspond with those of

contemporaries. He was a translator of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, for

he knew Greek. Then he composed or compiled Commentaries upon those

writings. He cared supremely for the fruits of those faculties with which

he was pre-eminently endowed. He, the man of acquisitive powers, loved

learning; and he, the man with a faculty of constructive reason, loved

rational truth and the labour of its systematic and syllogistic

presentation. He ascribed primal validity to what was true by force of

logic, and in his soul set reason above authority. Certain of his

contemporaries, with a discernment springing from repugnance, perceived

his self-reliant intellectual mood. The same ground underlay their

detestation, which centuries after underlay St. Bernard’s, for Abaelard.

That Abaelard should deem himself to be something! here was the root of

the saint’s abhorrence. And, similarly, good Deacon Florus of Lyons wrote

a vituperative polemic quite as much against the man Eriugena as against

his detestable views of Predestination. Eriugena, forsooth, would be

disputing with human argument, which he draws from philosophy, and for

which he would be accountable to none. He proffers no authority from the

Fathers, “as if daring to define with his own presumption what should be

held and followed.”[271] Such was not the way that Carolingian Churchmen

liked to argue, but rather with attested sentences from Augustine or

Gregory. Manifestly Eriugena was not one of them.

Had his works been earlier understood, they would have been earlier

condemned. But people did not realize what sort of Neo-Platonic,

pantheistic and emanational, principles this Irishman from over the sea

was setting forth. St. Denis, the great saint who was becoming St. Denis

of France, had been authoritatively (and most preposterously) identified

with Dionysius the Areopagite who heard Paul preach, and, according to the

growing legend, won a martyr’s crown not far from Paris. This was set

forth in his Life by Abbot Hilduin;[272] this was confirmed by Hincmar,

the great Archbishop of Rheims, who said, closing his discussion of the

matter: “veritas saepius agitata magis splendescit in lucem!”[273]

Eriugena seemed to be a translator of his holy writings, and might be

regarded as a setter forth of his exceptionally resplendent truths. He

could use the Fathers’ language too. So in his book on Predestination he

quotes Augustine as saying, Philosophy, which is the study of wisdom, is

not other than religion.[274] But he was not going to keep meaning what

Augustine meant. He slowly extends his talons in the following sentences

which do _not_ stand at the _beginning_ of his great work _De divisione

naturae_.

Says the Magister, for the work is in dialogue form: “You are aware, I

suppose, that what is prior by nature is of greater dignity than what is

prior in time.”

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

Continues Magister: “We learn that reason is prior by nature, but

authority prior in time. For although nature was created at the same

moment with time, authority did not begin with the beginning of time and

nature. But reason sprang with nature and time from the beginning of

things.”

Discipulus clenches the matter: “Reason itself teaches this. Authority

sometimes proceeds from reason; but reason never from authority. For all

authority which is not approved by true reason seems weak. But true

reason, since it is stablished in its own strength, needs to be

strengthened by the assent of no authority.”[275]

No doubt of the talons here! Reason superior to authority--is it not also

prior to faith? Eriugena does not press that reversal of the Christian

position. But his _De divisione naturae_ was a reasoned construction,

although of course the materials were not his own. It was no loosely

compiled encyclopaedia, such as Isidore or Bede or Rabanus would have

presented under such a title. It did not describe every object in nature

known to the writer; but it discussed Nature metaphysically, and presented

its lengthy exposition as a long argument in linked syllogistic form. Yet

it respected its borrowed materials, and preserved their

characteristics--with the exception of Scripture, which Eriugena

recognized as supreme authority! That he interpreted figuratively of

course; so had every one else done. But he differed from other

commentators and from the Church Fathers, in degree if not in kind. For

his interpretation was a systematic moulding of Scriptural phrase to suit

his system. He transformed the meaning with as clear a purpose as once

Philo of Alexandria had done. The pre-Christian Jew changed the

Pentateuch--holding fast, of course, to its authority!--into a Platonic

philosophy; and so, likewise by figurative interpretations, Eriugena

turned Scripture into a semi-Christianized Neo-Platonic scheme.[276] The

logical nature of the man was strong within him, so strong, indeed, that

in its working it could not but present all topics as component parts of a

syllogistic and systematized philosophy.[277] If he borrowed his

materials, he also made them his own with power. He appears as the one man

of his time that really could build with the material received from the

past.

Even beyond the range of such acute theological polemics as we have been

considering, the pressing exigencies of political or ecclesiastical

controversy might cause a capable man to think for himself even in the

ninth century. Such a man was Claudius, Bishop of Turin, the foe of image

and relic-worship, and of other superstitions too crass for one who was a

follower of Augustine.[278] And another such a one even more palpably was

Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons (d. 840), a brave and energetic man,

clear-seeing and enlightened, and incessantly occupied with questions of

living interest, to which his nature responded more quickly than to

theologic lore. Absorbed in the affairs of his diocese, of the Church at

large, and of the Empire, he expresses views which he has made his own.

Practical issues, operating upon his mind, evoked a personal originality

of treatment. His writings are clear illustrations of the originality

which actual issues aroused in the Carolingian epoch. They were directed

against common superstitions and degraded religious opinion, or against

the Jews whose aggressive prosperity in the south of France disturbed him;

or they were political. In fine, they were the fruit of the living issue.

For example, his so often-cited pamphlet, “Against the silly opinion of

the crowd as to hail and thunder,”[279] was doubtless called forth by the

intolerable conditions stated in the first sentence:

“In these parts almost all men, noble and common, city folk and

country folk, old and young, think that hail storms and thunder can be

brought about at the pleasure of men. People say when they hear

thunder and see lightning ‘_Aura levatitia est_.’ When asked what

_aura levatitia_ may be, some are ashamed or conscience-stricken,

while others, with the boldness of ignorance, assert that the air is

raised (_levata_) by the incantations of men called Tempestarii, and

so is called ‘raised air.’”

Agobard does not marshal physical explanations against this folly, but

texts of Scripture showing that God alone can raise and lay the storms.

Perhaps he thought such texts the best arguments for those who needed any.

The manner of the writing is reasonable, and the reader perceives that the

clear-headed archbishop, apart from his Scriptural arguments, deemed these

notions ridiculous, as well as harmful.[280]

In like spirit Agobard argued against trials by combat and ordeal.

Undoubtedly, God might thus announce His righteous judgment, but one

should not expect to elicit it in modes so opposed to justice and

Scripture; again, he cites many texts while also considering the matter

rationally.[281] On the other hand, his book against image-worship is made

up of extracts from Augustine and other Church authorities. There was no

call for originality here, when the subject seemed to have been so

exhaustively and authoritatively treated.[282]

One cannot follow Agobard so comfortably in his rancorous tracts against

the Jews. Doubtless this subject also presented itself to him as an

exigency requiring handling, and he was just in his contention that

heathen slaves belonging to Jews might be converted and baptized, and then

should not be given back to their former masters, but a money equivalent

be made instead. The question was important from its frequency. Yet one

would be loath to approve his arguments, unoriginal as they are. He gives

currency to the common slanders against the Jews, and then at great length

cites passages from the Church Fathers, to show in what detestation they

held that people. Then he sets forth the abominable opinions of the hated

race, and ransacks Scripture to prove that the Jews are therein

authoritatively and incontestably condemned.[283]

The years of Agobard’s maturity belong to the troubled time which came

with the accession of the incompetent Louis, in 814, to the throne of his

father Charlemagne. In the contentions and wars that followed, Agobard

proved himself an apt political partisan and writer. His political tracts,

notwithstanding their constant citation of Scripture, are his own, and

evince an originality evoked by the situation which they were written to

influence.

Something of the originality which the pressing political exigency

imparted to these tracts of Agobard might be transmitted to such history

as was occupied with contemporary events. As long as the historian was a

mere excerpting chronicler extracting his dry summaries from the writings

of former men, his work would not rouse him to independence of conception

or presentation. That would have come with criticism upon the old

authorities. But criticism had scarcely begun to murmur among the

Carolingians, too absorbed with the task of grasping their inherited

material to weigh it, and too overawed by the authority of the past to

question the truth of its transmitted statements. Excerpts, however, could

not be made to tell the stirring events of the period in which the

Carolingian historian lived. He would have to set forth his own perception

and understanding of them, and in manner and language which to a less or

greater extent were his own: to a less extent with those feebly beginning

Annals, or Year-books, which set down the occurrences of cloister life or

the larger happenings of which the report penetrated from the outer

world;[284] to a greater extent, however, with a more veritable history of

some topic of living and coherent interest. In the latter case the writer

must present his conception of events, and therewith something of

himself.[285]

An example of this necessitated originality in the writing of contemporary

history is the work of Count Nithard. He was the son of Charlemagne’s

daughter Bertha and of Angilbert, the emperor’s counsellor and lifelong

friend. His parents were not man and wife, because Charles would not let

his daughters marry, from reasons of policy; but the relationship between

them was open, and apparently approved by the lady’s sire. Angilbert

studied in the palace school with Charlemagne, and became himself a writer

of Latin verse. He was often his sovereign’s ambassador, and continued

active in affairs until his closing years, when he became the lay-abbot of

a rich monastery in Picardy, and received his emperor and virtual

father-in-law as his guest. He died the same year with Charles.

Like his father, Nithard was educated at the palace school, perhaps with

his cousin who was to become Charles the Bald. His loyalty continued

staunch to that king, whose tried confidant he became. He was a

diplomatist and a military leader in the wars following the death of Louis

the Pious; and he felt impelled to present from his side the story of the

strife among the sons of Louis, in “four books of histories” as they grew

to be.[286] Involved with his king in that same hurricane (_eodem

turbine_) he describes those stormy times which they were fighting out

together even while he was writing. This man of action could not but

present himself, his views, his temperament, in narrating the events he

moved in. Throughout, one perceives the pen of the participant, in this

case an honest partisan of his king, and the enemy of those whose conduct

had given the divided realm over to rapine. So the vigorous narrative of

this noble Frank partakes of the originality which inheres in the writings

of men of action when their literary faculty is sufficient to enable them

to put themselves into their compositions.

Engaged, as we have been, with the intellectual or scholarly interests of

the Carolingian period, we should not forget how slender in numbers were

the men who promoted them, and how few were the places where they throve.

There was the central group of open-minded laymen and Churchmen about the

palace school, or following the Court in its journeyings, which were far

and swift. Then there were monastic or episcopal centres of education as

at Tours, or Rheims, or Fulda. The scholars carried from the schools their

precious modicum of knowledge, and passed on through life as educated men

living in the world, or dwelt as learned compilers, reading in the

cloister. But scant were the rays of their enlightening influence amidst

that period’s vast encompassing ignorance.

To have classified the Carolingian intellectual interests according to

topics would have been misleading, since that would have introduced a

fictitious element of individual preference and aptitude, as if the

Carolingian scholar of his spontaneous volition occupied himself with

mathematical studies rather than grammar, or with astronomy rather than

theology. In general, all was a matter of reading and learning from such

books as Isidore’s _Origines_, which handled all topics indiscriminately,

or from Bede, or from the works of Augustine or Gregory, in which every

topic did but form part of the encyclopaedic presentation of the

relationship between the soul and God, and the soul’s way to salvation.

What then did these men care for? Naturally, first of all, for the

elements of their primary education, their studies in the Seven Arts. They

did what they might with Grammar and Rhetoric, and with Dialectic, which

sometimes was Rhetoric and formal Logic joined. Logic, for those who

studied it seriously, was beginning to form an important mental

discipline. The four branches of the quadrivium were pursued more

casually. Knowledge of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (one may

throw in medicine as a fifth) was as it might be in the individual

instance--always rudimentary, and usually rather less than more.

All of this, however, and it was not very much, was but the preparation,

if the man was to be earnest in his pursuit of wisdom. Wisdom lay chiefly

in Theology, to wit, the whole saving contents of Scripture as understood

and interpreted by Gregory and Augustine. There was little mortal

knowledge which this range of Scriptural interpretation might not include.

It compassed such knowledge of the physical world as would enable one to

understand the work of Creation set forth in Genesis; it embraced all that

could be known of man, of his physical nature, and assuredly of his

spiritual part. Here Christian truth might call on the better pagan

philosophy for illustration and rational corroboration, so far as that did

corroborate. When it did not, it was pernicious falsity.

So Christian piety viewed the matter. But the pious commonly have their

temporal fancies, sweet as stolen fruit. These Carolingian scholars, the

man in orders and the man without, studied the Latin poets, historians,

and orators. And in their imaginative or poetic moods, as they followed

classic metre, so they reproduced classic phrase and sentiment in their

verses. The men who made such--it might be Alcuin, or Theodulphus, or

Walafrid Strabo--chose what they would as the subject of their poems; but

the presentation took form and phrase from Virgil and other old poets. The

antique influence so strong in the Carolingian period, included much more

than matters of elegant culture, like poetry and art, or even rhetoric and

grammar. It held the accumulated experience in law and institution, which

still made part of the basis of civic life. Rabanus Maurus recognized it

thus broadly. And, thus largely taken, the antique survives in the

Carolingian time as a co-ordinate dominant, with Latin Christianity.

Neither, as yet, was affected by the solvent processes of transmutation

into new human faculty and power. None the less, this same antique

survival was destined to pass into modes and forms belonging quite as much

to the Middle Ages as to antiquity; and, thus recast, it was to become a

broadening and informing element in the mediaeval personality.

Likewise with the patristic Christianity which had been transmitted to the

Carolingian time, to be then and there not only conned and studied, but

also rearranged by these painful students, so that they and their

successors might the better comprehend it. It was not for them to change

the patristic forms organically, by converting them into the modes of

mediaeval understanding of the same. These would be devised, or rather

achieved, by later men, living in centuries when the patristic heritage of

doctrine, long held and cherished, had permeated the whole spiritual

natures of mediaeval men and women, and had been itself transmuted in what

it had transformed.

CHAPTER XI

MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: ITALY

I. FROM CHARLEMAGNE TO HILDEBRAND.

II. THE HUMAN SITUATION.

III. THE ITALIAN CONTINUITY OF ANTIQUE CULTURE.

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

I

The Empire of Charlemagne could not last. Two obvious causes, among

others, were enough to prevent it. No single government (save when

temporarily energized by some extraordinary ruler) could control such

enormous and widely separated regions, which included much of the present

Germany and Austria, the greater part of Italy, France, and the Low

Countries. Large portions of this Empire were almost trackless, and

nowhere were there good roads and means of transportation. Then, as the

second cause, within these diverse and ununited lands dwelt or moved many

peoples differing from each other in blood and language, in conditions of

life and degrees of civilization or barbarism. No power existed that could

either hold them in subjection or make them into proper constituents of an

Empire.[287]

There were other, more particular, causes of dissolution: the Frankish

custom of partitioning the realm brought war between Louis the Pious and

his sons, and then among the latter; no scion of the Carolingian house was

equal to the situation; under the ensuing turbulence, the royal power

weakened, and local protection, or oppression, took its place; constant

war exhausted the strength of the Empire, and particularly of Austrasia,

while from without Norsemen, Slavs, and Saracens were attacking, invading,

plundering everywhere. These marauders still were heathen, or obstinate

followers of the Prophet; while Christianity was the bond of unity and

empire. Charlemagne and his strong predecessors had been able thus to view

and use the Church; but the weaker successors, beginning with Louis the

Pious, too eager for the Church’s aid and condonation, found their

subservience as a reed that broke and pierced the hand.

These causes quickly brought about the Empire’s actual dissolution. On the

other hand, a potent conception had been revived in western Europe. Louis

the Pious, himself made emperor in Charlemagne’s lifetime, associated his

eldest son with him as co-emperor, and made his two younger sons kings,

hoping thus to preserve the Empire’s unity. If that unity forthwith became

a name, it was a name to conjure with; and the corresponding imperial fact

was to be again made actual by the first Saxon Otto, a man worthy to reach

back across the years and clasp the hand of the great Charles.

That intervening century and a half preceding the year 962 when Otto was

crowned emperor, carried political and social changes. To the West, in the

old Neustrian kingdom which was to form the nucleus of mediaeval France,

the Carolingian line ran out in degenerates surnamed the Pious, the Bald,

the Stammerer, the Simple, and the Fat. The Counts of Paris, Odo, Robert,

Hugh the Great, and, finally, Hugh Capet, playing something like the old

rôle of the palace mayors, were becoming the actual rulers, although not

till 987 was the last-named Hugh formally elected and anointed king.

Other great houses also had arisen through the land of France, which was

very far from being under the power of the last Carolingians or the first

Capetians. The year 911 saw the treaty between Norman Rollo and Charles

the Simple, and may be taken to symbolize the settling down of Norsemen

from freebooters to denizens, with a change of faith. Rollo received the

land between the Epte and the sea, to the borders of Brittany, along with

temporary privileges, granted by the same Simple Charles, of sack and

plunder over the latter. But a generation later the valiant Count Alan of

the Twisted Beard drove out the plunderers, and established the feudal

duchy long to bear the name of Brittany. Likewise, aided by the need of

protection against invading plunderers, feudal principalities were formed

in Flanders, Champagne, Burgundy, Aquitaine, Languedoc.

At the time when Hugh Capet drew near his royal destiny, his brother was

Duke of Burgundy, the Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine were his

brothers-in-law, and Adalberon, Archbishop of Rheims, was his partisan. As

a king elected by his peers, his royal rights were only such as sprang

from the feudal homage and fidelity which they tendered him. Yet he, with

the clergy, deemed that his consecration by the Church gave him the

prerogatives of Frankish sovereigns, which were patterned on those of

Roman emperors and Old Testament kings. It was to be the long endeavour of

the Capetian line to make good these higher claims against the

counter-assumptions of feudal vassals, who individually might be stronger

than the king.[288]

Austrasia, the eastern Frankish kingdom, formed the centre of those

portions of the Carolingian Empire which were to remain German. Throughout

these lands, as in the West, feudal disintegration was progressing. The

great territorial divisions were set by differences of race or _stamm_.

Saxons, Franks, Bavarians, Suabians, had never been one people. In the

tenth century each of these _stamms_, with the land it dwelt in, made a

dukedom; and there were besides marks or frontier lordships, each under

its markgrave, upon whom lay the duty of repelling outer foes. These

divisions, fixed in differences of law, language, and blood, were

destined to prevent the formation of a strong kingdom like that of France.

Yet what was to prove a veritable German royalty sprang from the ducal

Saxon house. Upon the failure of the German Carolingian branch in 911,

Conrad, Duke of Franconia, was elected king, the Saxons and Suabians

consenting. After struggling a few years, mainly against the power of the

Saxon duke Henry, Conrad at his death in 918 pronounced in favour of his

stronger rival. Thereupon Henry, called by later legend “The Fowler,”

became king, and having maintained his royal authority against

recalcitrants, and fought successfully with Hungarians and Bohemians, he

died in 936, naming his son Otto as his successor.

The latter’s reign was to be a long and great one. He was consecrated at

Aix-la-Chapelle in Charlemagne’s basilica, thus at the outset showing what

and whom he had in mind. Then and thereafter all manner of internal

opposition had to be suppressed. His own competing brothers were, first of

all, to be put down; and with them the Dukes of Bavaria, Franconia, and

Lorraine, whom Otto conquered and replaced with men connected with him by

ties of blood or marriage. Far to the West he made his power felt,

settling affairs between Louis and Hugh the Great. Hungarians and Slavs

attacked his realm in vain. New _marks_ were established to hold them in

check, and new bishoprics were founded, fonts of missionary Christianity

and fortresses of defence.