he not esteemed the Bible to be the one great text-book for his people.
He himself was filled with Biblical notions. In his private circle, a
club for promoting classical reading, he was called David. And it was,
indeed, the Old Testament idea of the theocratic king which governed
his mind. The king chosen by God and elected by the people, the king a
representative of God and the head of the people, the king a valiant
warrior and a royal psalmist at the same time, this was his ideal, in
which old German notions were combined with Old Testament views. While
revering the priest, he always felt himself superior even to the bishop
of Rome. He willingly accepted the role of a defender, of a protector;
he never would have accepted his crown from the hand of a priest.
Nothing is so alien to Charlemagne as the later mediaeval theory of the
two swords, both given by God to Saint Peter, the one spiritual, kept by
himself and his successors, the other worldly, given by them to the
emperor. No, he had his sword from God directly, and his royalty
included the power and the duty of looking after the church's affairs as
well. The Bible tells of a king of Judah, called Josiah, who, on being
informed that the book of the Law given by Moses and hidden for a long
time had been rediscovered, forthwith ordered everything to be reformed
and restored according to this law. That served as the model for
Charlemagne's own ecclesiastical work. Being the king, he felt
responsible for the purity of worship and of doctrine. Therefore, when
the question arose in the East if worship was due to the pictures of
Christ and the saints, and the bishop of Rome did not please him in his
answer, Charlemagne himself, assisted by Alcuin and other theologians of
his staff, wrote a treatise on the subject, which he himself thought to
be decisive, the so-called _Libri Carolini_, a document of a rather
Puritan character, showing the austere spirit of early Western theology.
When in Spain a discussion began about the divine nature of Christ, he
again interfered, sending his theologians to discuss the matter
according to the true teaching of the Bible--as is said expressly in
their instructions--and after they had decided he even took political
measures against those whom he believed to be heretics. We can scarcely
understand his attitude in those cases without keeping in mind that he
felt himself a new David and a new Josiah.
[Illustration: PLATE X--THEODULF'S BIBLE
(Brit. Mus. add. 24142)
Written in three columns like many Spanish manuscripts, and in lines
of various length, "cata cola et commata," as St. Jerome says.
From "Fac-similes of Biblical Manuscripts." By permission of the
Trustees of the British Museum.]
Sometimes it is a true evangelical spirit which pervades his ordinances
for the church. In a proclamation of 811 he says: "We will ask the
clergy themselves, those who are not only to read the holy Scriptures by
themselves but are to teach them to others also: who are those to whom
the apostle says, Be my imitators? or who is the man of whom he says, No
soldier on service entangleth himself with the affairs of this life?--or
how to imitate the apostle and how to do service to God? What is it to
leave the world? does it mean simply not to wear weapons and not to be
married publicly? does it mean to enlarge one's property daily, oppress
the poor and induce men to perjury?" Charlemagne is particularly strict
about avoiding perjury, not only in the solemn form of public oath,
which is taken on the holy Gospel or on the altar or on the relics of
the saints, but in common conversation as well. He tries to introduce
Matt. 5 : 16, "Even so let your light shine before men that they may see
your good works and glorify your father which is in heaven," as the
motto for every Christian's life. That is quite evangelical. But it is
from the Old Testament that the tenor of his laws comes. They all have a
strong mark of severity, in particular the so-called Saxon laws, which
were imposed upon the Saxon tribes when after a very hard resistance
they were finally defeated and subdued. Through this law runs, like a
bloody thread, the frightful menace: _morte moriatur_, by death shall he
die. This sounds harsh, but it is nothing else than the adaptation of a
well-known Biblical phrase (Ex. 19 : 12; 21 : 12: "He shall surely be
put to death," R. V.). That is an example of Biblical phraseology. But
the Bible influenced the legislation of Charlemagne also in content. I
choose three instances: in all three cases the work of Charlemagne was
prepared for by church councils. Christianity had begun by voluntarily
adopting Old Testament laws; then the church had made their observance
compulsory; now Charlemagne gives to the ecclesiastical ordinances the
sanction of the state and inflicts penalty upon trespassers. The first
instance is Sunday; it was called the Lord's Day; from the sixth century
synods and councils had tried to make the people keep this day in a more
solemn fashion. They did not refer to the Old Testament commandment at
first; they did not even demand that all manual work should be stopped.
The frequent repetition of the decree seems to prove that it was rather
unsuccessful even in this limited form. Now the government interferes,
and its injunctions secure at once to the Lord's Day the strictest
observance. It is remarkable that Charlemagne expressly refers to the
Old Testament commandment. It is according to the Bible that the day was
counted from sunset to sunset. This is the beginning of the Sabbatarian
question in the West, the East preceding the West, as we have seen, by
about two centuries.
Our second instance is the tithe; it was to be paid, according to the
Bible, by all the other tribes to the tribe of Levi, who served at the
temple. Now Christians began to pay voluntarily a tithe to their
priests, accommodating themselves to the Old Testament rule; but by and
by the clergy derived from the Old Testament a right of asking for the
tithe. The farmer had to pay his tithe to his parish priest. Charlemagne
proclaimed this as a law of his kingdom, referring expressly to God's
commandments.
The third instance is given in the prohibition against taking interest.
It is said in Deut. 23 : 19: "Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy
brother." Ecclesiastical authorities took this as forbidding to take any
interest in lending money, and they tried to impress this prohibition
upon the minds of the Christian people. Here, again, Charlemagne gave
his sanction to this ecclesiastical view and made the prohibition
against taking interest a part of the public law. It is obvious that the
economic life of the nation was deeply influenced by this compulsory
adoption of Old Testament laws.
Justice, with the Germans, was to a large extent exercised by means of
the ordeals. We scarcely realise the importance these proceedings had at
that time. People believed in a divine power bringing out guilt and
innocence by means of these curious trials. It was but natural that the
Bible, representing the divine oracles, should be present at the
ceremony, that both parties should revere and kiss it. But people did
more; they made the Bible itself a means of deciding between guilty and
innocent. They had a particular kind of ordeal which they called
determining by means of the Gospels, and another which was called the
ordeal of the Psalter, a copy of the Psalter being swung over the head
of the suspected person.
I have referred to the palace school. This had its continuation in a
graduate school, if we may so call a Bible circle among the theologians
attending the court. These theologians, headed by Alcuin himself, were
first-rate Bible scholars. They knew great parts of the Bible by heart;
they had read all accessible commentaries of the fathers. They had ideas
of their own, too, but they were traditionalists to such an extent that
they would not say anything of their own unless it was said and
supported by the fathers. When asked to write brief commentaries on
Biblical books, because the patristic commentaries were too large and
comprehensive for the students of this time, they simply gave extracts
from the fathers and carefully avoided adding anything of their own. One
went so far as to take even the connecting words from the works of Saint
Augustine; another, whose mental energy was too strong to keep him
within the boundaries of pure traditionalism, excuses himself whenever
he introduces an interpretation of his own.
In these studies the ladies and gentlemen of the court took part. It is
very interesting and often amusing to see what kind of questions they
bring before Alcuin as the great oracle of learning. One lady reading
her Psalter was puzzled by the words in Psalm 116, "All men are liars."
How can babies be liars before they begin to speak, or dumb men? "The
sun shall not smite thee by day nor the moon by night" (Psalm 121 : 6)
seemed to be incompatible with the fact that the moon never burns. A
scholar who had come from Greece troubled the court by putting the
question: To whom was paid the price with which we were bought according
to I Cor. 6 : 20; 7 : 23. Charlemagne himself has other questions. He is
troubled by finding that the hymn sung by Christ and his disciples after
the Last Supper has not been recorded by any of the Gospels. I wonder if
he really was satisfied by Alcuin's answer. After a very learned
explanation of the term hymn, Alcuin gives, first, three views of
different interpreters: (1) That there was no special hymn, only a
general praisegiving; (2) that they had sung the twenty-second Psalm;
(3) that it was some Jewish prayer. Then he proceeds to establish his
own solution: that it is, in fact, the prayer of Jesus, recorded in
John 17, which was meant by the word hymn here. Incidentally, he makes
some important remarks upon the harmony of the Gospels: "Although we see
in the Gospels some things told similarly, others in a different way,
we nevertheless believe that everything is true." That was the leading
idea for the criticism of the fathers, and it was the same for nearly
all the mediaeval centuries. Historical criticism, directed upon the
Gospels, would have seemed to show intolerable lack of piety or certain
evidence of heretical views.
Theological thinking does not go beyond the limits of Biblical doctrine.
Scarcely one or two men dare to think in their own way or speculate on
such problems as darkness and nothing (that is, what was before the
creation) or on the nature of miracle. There was hardly any attempt at
scientific theories. And the best men, indeed, as, for instance, Alcuin,
were proud of basing their theology entirely on Biblical ideas.
* * * * *
The one great event in the expansion of Christianity among the German
nations is the mission of Saint Augustine to England. When Pope Gregory
found some Anglo-Saxon youths at the slave market of Rome and perceived
that in the North there was still a pagan nation to be baptised, he sent
one of his monks to England, and this monk, who was Saint Augustine,
took with him the Bible and introduced it to the Anglo-Saxons, and one
of his followers brought with him from Rome pictures showing the
Biblical history, and decorated the walls of the church in the monastery
of Wearmouth. We do not enter here into the difficult question of the
relations between this newly founded Anglo-Saxon church and the old
Iro-Scottish church. Differences of Bible text had something to do with
the pitiful struggles which arose between the churches and ended in the
devastation of the older one. The one point which interests us here is
the fact that both Iro-Scottish and Anglo-Saxon monks were driven into
missionary work by the Bible. When, in the service, they heard read from
the Old Testament or from the epistle to the Hebrews that Abraham and
the patriarchs had all left their home, their parents, their native
country, and had gone to a foreign land which they did not know, simply
in order to please God, then they felt bound to do the same. When at the
mass the Gospel was read, "And every one that hath left houses or
brethren or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for my
name's sake, shall receive a hundredfold and shall inherit eternal
life," then they hurried away, not knowing where to go, looking only for
a far-distant and desert place. It was this ascetic view of the Bible
which drove the Iro-Scottish monks over the sea to France, Italy,
Germany, which made them preach the gospel to the Germans who had not
yet heard of it. It was this same motive which caused Willibrord and
Boniface to cross the North Sea and come to preach among the Frisians
and Saxons. Boniface is said to have received the deadly stroke from a
pagan while holding his Bible over his head. They still show the copy at
Fulda.
Again, it was the Bible which determined Charlemagne to use force
against the Saxons in order to bring them to baptism and Christian
faith. Saint Augustine had discovered the passage in the Lord's parable
of the great supper, where the servant is told to go out into the
highways and hedges and "constrain" them to come in. This _coge
intrare_, he explained, might excuse the using of secular power for the
purpose of bringing heretics back to the church or of causing pagans to
join the church. Charlemagne knew no better than to suppose that this
was the true meaning of the saying of our Lord, and so he felt in
conscience bound to use military force and the full strength of the law
in christianising the Saxons.
But it was the Bible itself and not Charlemagne's sharp sword and his
cruel law which brought over the wild Saxon tribes into Christendom.
They had among themselves a poet who had the gift of singing the gospel
into their hearts. Charlemagne himself was fond of the national songs;
he loved his German language as much as he esteemed Latin. He was
convinced that a man ought to pray to God in his native tongue. There
are not only three sacred languages, he says, in which to pray and to
praise God--Hebrew, Greek, Latin--you may praise him in your German as
well. Therefore he arranged that a priest should translate the Biblical
lessons and the sermon to the people who did not understand Latin. He
would probably have approved a German translation of the Bible; but the
clergy were not prepared to do this. They took Latin as the basis of
civilisation, and only a few of them had any regard for the uncultivated
people. There are preserved some few attempts at translating parts of
the Bible into German; they attest what might have come out of this
Carolingian movement if the bigotry and narrowness of Charlemagne's son
Louis had not stopped it. Among the Saxons a fresh and vigorous spirit
was still alive. Having been introduced to Christianity by brute force
of war, they embraced the gospel, trying to make it their own by putting
it into the form of their national song. We do not know the name of the
poet; he seems to have been a clergyman, instructed in the best
commentaries of his time, such as were available at the monastery of
Fulda. For the framework he used a Gospel harmony which is contained in
the famous Codex Fuldensis of the Vulgate, originating at Capua (in
south Italy) and brought probably by Boniface himself from England to
Fulda. This Gospel harmony he translated freely into some six thousand
Saxon verses. His poem is one of the finest assimilations of the Gospel
history to national German feeling, to be compared only with Duerer's
engravings and Eduard von Gebhardt's paintings. Christ is the heavenly
king; the apostles are his loyal kinsmen; he wanders with them through
the Saxon wood; he stops at a native spring; all Oriental character has
gone, but the gospel has lost nothing. It is as fresh and as real as it
ever had been. The fact our author detests most is Christ's betrayal by
one of his own men; nothing is so bad as this according to the German
mind. Christ on the cross is not suffering; he dies as a victorious
warrior. When he says, "I thirst," he expresses by this the fact that he
is thirsting after the souls of men, to bring them into paradise. It is
wonderful how the gospel has penetrated the German soul in order to
produce a harmony like this.
This "Heliand" by the anonymous Saxon poet we shall admire even more if
we compare it with the other attempt at bringing the life of Christ into
German poesy. It is by Otfried of Strassburg, whose "Christ" is a very
learned elaboration, partly in German, partly in Latin, therefore
undoubtedly much preferred in the literary circles of that time, but
infinitely inferior to the "Heliand" in freshness and popular quality.
It is remarkable that there is something similar to the "Heliand" in
the Anglo-Saxon poem, the "Genesis." The theory has been successfully
started and proved by later discoveries that both have the same origin.
The Saxons of Germany and the Saxons of England were not so far away one
from the other that they could not have intercourse and exchange (Plate
XI).
However this may be, it is evident that the Bible had an influence in
teaching the German nations from the beginning, and that the new
civilisation which was to be built would have the Bible as one of its
foundations.
[Illustration: PLATE XI--LINDISFARNE GOSPELS
(Brit. Mus. Cotton: Nero D IV.)
Written about 690 in honour of St. Cuthbert ([dagger symbol] 687),
in English round style. The interlinear version was added two
hundred and fifty years later--remark in the midst of the
left-hand column the words: _xpi_ (=Christi) _evangelium_ with
_Cristes godspell_ above it.
From "Fac-similes of Biblical Manuscripts." By permission of the
Trustees of the British Museum.]
IV
THE BIBLE BECOMES ONE BASIS OF MEDIAEVAL CIVILISATION (800-1150 A. D.)
The Middle Ages, the dark Middle Ages, that is what we are wont to call
the period we now enter in our journey through the centuries. Scholars
of the sixteenth century called it so, when they looked back to the
classical period, from which they drew all their light and inspiration.
The centuries between counted for nothing; they seemed to be barbarous,
uneducated; the humanistic scholar would simply drop them out of the
world's history. Time passed and men became enthusiastic about the
beauties of these Middle Ages. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century Europe was enchanted by romanticism. Nothing was fashionable
that was not mediaeval in art, customs, manners. At present we view these
centuries more calmly in the light of their own time; we see what was
their defect, and we see at the same time what was their merit. It is
true that civilisation had only begun to recover from the shock which
the great migrations had given to it. If a chronicler thinks it worth
while to mention that the emperor Henry IV was able to read to himself
the petitions brought before him, we must infer that the art of reading
was not wide-spread, even among the nobility. And the famous poet
Wolfram von Eschenbach tells us himself that he was no friend of this
art. On the other hand, I need only remind my readers of the beautiful
buildings we still admire at Cologne: the massive old church of Saint
Gereon in Romanesque style and the light and airy cathedral, whose
Gothic arches and spires reach up toward heaven--to mention only these
two well-known examples--in order to make them realise the power and the
splendour of this civilisation, which never will cease to impress the
human mind. We cannot drop this period from our history; nor can
Americans deny that this mediaeval civilisation is an element even in
their modern civilisation.
There is an ingenious theory that history always repeats itself: the
German migrations corresponded to the migrations of the Greek tribes;
the time of chivalry was like the time of Homer's heroes; humanism
represents the age of Plato and Aristotle; only the repetition always
has the advantage of using the results of the former cycle. But we must
not forget that from time to time new forces enter those cycles and
change their relation. At the end of the classical period Christianity
has come in and now runs as a straight line through the parallel cycles;
therefore nothing in this parallelism is quite exact.
It was the Christian church which served to keep the old civilisation
alive through all troubles and dangers. When classical training had
nearly vanished everywhere else, it was found in some remote
monasteries. Esteem of good style, love of ancient poetry, some chance
bits of philosophy had safely weathered the storm. But it was only in
combination with the Bible that those remains of classical reading were
allowed to persist. The mediaeval civilisation was Biblical at its base.
Saint Jerome, who was a great admirer of classical eloquence but a stern
defender of pure Christianity, tells in a friendly letter to a certain
lady a sad experience of his own. He had read much of Vergil and Cicero
and other pagan books, when one night he found himself suddenly summoned
before the heavenly judge. "Who are you?" he was questioned. "I am a
Christian," he replied. "Thou liest, thou art a Ciceronian," was the
judge's answer. And forthwith he was given over to cruel constables, who
beat him frightfully until he promised never to touch a pagan book
again. When he awoke in the morning he still felt the blows. The story
is mere fancy, and Saint Jerome never proves so guilty of imitating his
adored classical models as in this very letter. He was an actor who knew
how to pose. But by this letter he has caused plenty of people in later
time to dream over again the frightful experience he describes so
suggestively. Dozens of monks and nuns have felt blows struck upon them
by invisible hands for having given themselves too much to the seduction
of reading classical books instead of the Bible. Again and again the
leaders of monastic institutions had to insist upon the rule that the
Bible must be read and no pagan books. Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, the
nun who celebrated the great acts of the emperor Otto I, wrote some
Biblical comedies, in order to prevent the nuns from enjoying the
comedies of Plautus and Terence.
On the other hand, all the great fathers of the church insisted upon
classical training; so did Saint Jerome himself and Saint Augustine, not
to speak of the great classical scholars in Christian bishoprics in the
East (Plate XII). And even in the later centuries, when classical
civilisation had gone and was only kept up artificially by assiduous
reading, it was the church which maintained the right and the necessity
of a classical training for its clergy. Alcuin was proud of the
classical training he had had at home, at the famous monastic school of
York under the direction of Abbot AElbert. He enjoyed finding kernels of
truth in the writings of the heathen, and he pointed out that Saint Paul
had done the same. There was a time when there was no reading at all
outside the clergy and the monasteries, but this reading was a
combination of classical and Biblical. That is the great merit of the
mediaeval church.
[Illustration: PLATE XII--BYZANTINE MINIATURE
(Psalter, Paris B. N. gr. 139)
David, playing harp while watching his sheep, looks like Orpheus
in Greek art. The female figure at the left represents Melody,
while at the right-hand corner Echo, also personified, is
listening behind a pillar. The man in the cave to the right
is Mount Bethlehem.
From "Die Wiener Genesis." F. Tempsky, Vienna.]
Mediaeval civilisation had various foundations, but the Bible was one of
them, and the most important one. That is what we find wherever we try
to analyse mediaeval culture.
What was the aspect of the world at this period? The world seemed to be
an edifice of three floors. Above was the heaven, a compact dome, in
which the stars were fixed, while the planets moved in their own sphere;
over the sky was the space where God or, let us say, according to the
usual expression of that time, the holy Trinity dwells, surrounded and
adored by millions upon millions of angels, who keep heaven and earth in
continuous communication. Besides, the heaven can be rent asunder; then
the angels look down to earth, and from time to time a pious man is
allowed to enter and see the heavenly mysteries and the glory of the
saints. The earth, the abode of man, is a large round plane; its centre
Jerusalem, where, at the same place, Adam was buried and Christ was
crucified, so that the blood of the Saviour dropping down reached Adam's
skull. The earth was surrounded by the ocean. At its boundaries all
kinds of strange beings--men with dogs' faces, giants, pygmies--were to
be found. There was still an earthly paradise--not to be confounded with
the paradise in heaven, the goal of human longing. This earthly paradise
was unknown and inaccessible to the greater part of men, but from time
to time a pious hermit or a favourite of fortune reached it; the lucky
man on his return had exciting stories to tell about the wealth and the
bliss of this paradise, but he never could find the way again. I have
read an accurate description of the way from paradise to Rome, giving
the exact number of days and months, but there was nothing said about
how to come from Rome to paradise!