Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning

Front matter

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL THOUGHT AND LEARNING

ILLUSTRATIONS

OF THE HISTORY OF

Preface

PREFACE.

To republish a book after a lapse of thirty-six years can only be excused by the fact that it has long been out of print and that it is still asked for. When a new edition was proposed to me, my first intention was to issue the book as it stood, with no more change than the correction of obvious mistakes. But further consideration showed me that a good deal more than this was necessary if it was to be republished at all. Such revision, however, as I have made has been designedly made with a sparing hand, and the book remains in substance and in most details a work not of 1920 but of 1884. Had I written it now, the point of view would not have been quite the same. A large literature on the subjects I dealt with has appeared in the interval, and a fresh examination of the materials would certainly have recommended a different selection of 'illustrations' from that which I made then. It was indeed fortunate that I gave the book the title of Illustrations, because it made no claim to be a coherent history, though it has sometimes been mistaken for one.

The long interval of time which separates the new edition from the original seems to justify some statement as to the manner in which the essays collected in the book came to be written. In 1881 I resigned a post which I held in the department of manuscripts in the British Museum in order to spend two years in study on the Continent. This plan was made feasible by my election to a travelling scholarship on the Hibbert foundation, and I cannot too heartily express my gratitude to the trustees for thus enabling me to begin a course of work which I have carried on ever since. I settled myself then at Leipzig in the autumn of 1881, entered the university, and was 'promoted' doctor of philosophy in the following January. I started my own work by reading John of Salisbury, but soon saw that he could not stand as a beginning. I had become acquainted with the venerable Gotthard Lechler, one of the professors in the theological faculty of the place and superintendent in the reformed church, a man well-known in England for his pioneer studies of Wycliffe. He recommended me to read Hermann Reuter's Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter, and I took his advice. It would not indeed be true to say that I learned much from Reuter's exaggerated and often distorted presentment of facts; but I found his references useful, and in planning the first half of my book I followed pretty closely the scheme of his. But it seemed to me that the field which Reuter surveyed needed an introduction, and in writing this I derived many suggestions from the essay on The Schools of Charles the Great by James Bass Mullinger, whom in after-years I had the pleasure of numbering among my friends.

Not much of this work was done at Leipzig. In the spring of 1882 I removed to Zurich, where I took quarters in a cottage at Riesbach about a mile out of the town. There I had the advantage of access to two libraries well-equipped for my special purposes. Both were established in disused churches; the town library in the Wasserkirche, close by what was then the uppermost bridge over the Limmat, and the university library in the quire of the Dominican church high up on the Hirschengraben. From these two libraries I enjoyed the privilege of borrowing as many as ten volumes at a time, and I made use of the privilege to the full. The limitations of these libraries were also to my benefit. For example, there was no set of Migne's Patrologia in them, and I had to seek my texts in the Benedictine editions of the fathers, in the Lyons Maxima Bibliotheca Patrum, and in the collections of D'Achery, Mabillon, Baluze, Pez, and others; a process which taught me a great deal on the way.

By the time that, working forward from a much earlier period, I had again reached John of Salisbury, the field of my studies was altered by an extraneous cause. It so happened that in the winter which I spent at Leipzig a society was formed with the object of editing Wycliffe's Latin works, and I undertook the charge of the two treatises On Dominion. It was not that I was particularly interested in Wycliffe; but I had a young man's ambition to print an editio princeps, to bring to light matter hitherto known only from scanty citations; and the work had a greater attraction for me because it belonged to an early time in Wycliffe's career, before he had come into conflict with authority on questions of theological doctrine. The treatises which I proposed to edit followed in direct sequel the work of other political theorists; they did not belong to that part of Wycliffe's activity in which he stands forth as a pioneer in the discussion of problems which lay apart from those to which my attention had been directed.

Thus after I had completed what I had to say about John of Salisbury I limited myself to the consideration of political theory; and this restriction prevented me from attempting to include anything which I had contemplated relative to the great period of mature scholasticism. But it was necessary to construct a bridge to join the two parts of my book. A bull of Pope Gregory XI at once directed me to trace the political system of Wycliffe back to Marsiglio of Padua and to William Ockham; and an exposition of John of Salisbury's views, in the setting of the type of opinion which he represented, was introduced to form a counter-piece to my summary of the opposed doctrine. On my return to England in the summer of 1883 I applied myself to filling in the gaps in my essays, which needed a larger library than could be found at Zurich, and to completing the last chapters. In the following year I paid a long visit to Vienna in order to examine the Wycliffe manuscripts in the imperial library, and in the course of the autumn my book was published.

The title which I gave to it was Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought in the Departments of Theology and Ecclesiastical Politics. I have now abbreviated it and at the same time expanded its scope. In revising the text I have specially to thank my friend the Rev. F. E. Brightman, D.D., for his great kindness in reading the sheets and suggesting a large number of improvements both in form and matter. In two chapters only, iv and v, have I made extensive alterations. These were required by the new evidence that has been brought to light concerning Bernard of Chartres, whom I have been compelled to distinguish from Bernard Silvestris, and by the discovery of Abailard's early work de Trinitate in 1891. But changes and corrections of less importance have been made throughout the book, and I have added occasional notes referring to works which have appeared since its first publication. These are distinguished by brackets. I have not, however, given a false appearance of novelty by altering references to suit recent editions, except in a few instances, such as the second edition of Prantl's Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, and Mr. Webb's edition of the Policraticus. Nor have I changed the plan of naming the place of publication of books quoted, except when English, French, and German works were published at London, Paris, and Leipzig; and of specifying their size, when it was anything but octavo. References to Bouquet are to the Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France; those to Pertz indicate the folio series of Scriptores in the Monumenta Germaniae historica, and those to Jaffé to the Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicarum. In citations of manuscripts b denotes the verso of the leaf; but when a manuscript is written in double colums A, B, and C, D denote respectively the two columns of recto and verso.

R. L. P.

Oxford,

24 October, 1920.

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

The history of medieval thought falls naturally into two broad divisions, each of which is brought to a close not by the creation of a new method or system from native resources, but by the introduction of fresh materials for study from without. The first period ended when the works of Aristotle, hitherto known only from partial and scanty versions, were translated into Latin; the second, when a knowledge of Greek letters in their own language made it impossible for men to remain satisfied with the views of ancient philosophy to which they had previously been confined and upon which their own philosophy had entirely depended. An age of eclecticism, too eager in its enjoyment of the new-found treasure to care to bind itself, as its predecessors had done, to any single authority, was then followed by an age in which the interests of theological controversy drove out every other interest, until at length in the comparative calm after the tempest of the Reformation, philosophy entered a new phase, and the medieval or traditional method was finally rejected in favour of one common in this respect to both modern and ancient speculation, that it rested upon independent thought, and regarded no authority as beyond appeal.

In the two periods of the middle ages we find nothing absolutely original; advance is measured less by the power with which men used their intellects than by the skill with which they used their materials. Still there is a difference between the periods which makes the earlier the more interesting to the student of human thought considered as apart from any specific production of it: for while the works of Aristotle were almost totally unknown to the Latin world there was a wider sphere for the exercise of ingenuity, for something approaching originality, than there could be when an authoritative text-book lay ready to hand. In the following essay our attention will be mainly directed to these traces of independence, not so much in the domain of formal philosophy as in those regions where philosophy touches religion, where reason meets superstition, and where theology links itself with political theory. In the later period we shall limit ourselves exclusively to this last subject, to the attempts made to frame a political philosophy, and in particular to reconcile the notion of the state with the existence and the claims of an universal church, or to modify those claims by reference to the necessary exigencies of civil government.

The field therefore of our investigation is that of theology, but it does not follow on this account that its produce must also be theological. Theology is no doubt the mode of medieval thought: the history of the middle ages is the history of the Latin church. The overmastering strength of theology, of a clergy which as a rule absorbed all the functions of a literary class, gave its shape to every thing with which it came into contact. Society was treated as though it were actually a theocracy: politics, philosophy, education, were brought under its control and adjusted to a technical theological terminology. But when this characteristic is recognised, it is found to supply not only the explanation of the distance which seems to separate the middle ages from modern times, but also a means of bridging over the interval. Men thought theologically and expressed themselves theologically, but when we penetrate this formal expression we discover their speculations, their aims, their hopes, to be at bottom not very different from our own; we discover a variety beneath the monotonous surface of their thoughts, and at the same time an unity, ill-defined perhaps, but still an unity, pervading the history of European society. There was indeed never a time when the life of Christendom was so confined within the hard shell of its dogmatic system that there was no room left for individual liberty of opinion. A ferment of thought is continually betrayed beneath those forms; there are even frequent indications of a state of opinion antagonistic to the church itself. The necessity of a central power ruling the consciences of men of course passed unquestioned, but when this immense authority appeared not a protection but a menace to religion, it was seldom that it was submitted to in complete silence.

When the church seemed to be departing from its spiritual dignity and defiling its ceremonial by the superstitions and the prodigies of heathenism, or when its pontiffs seemed to have adopted all the vices of secular princes and to have exchanged totally the church for the world, there were rarely wanting advocates of a purer Christian order, advocates whose denunciations might rival in vehemence those of a modern protestant. Even the doctrinal fabric of the church was not always safe from attack; for although no one impugned the truth of Christianity, the attempt was still repeatedly made to clear away the dust of centuries and reveal the simpler system of primitive belief. Such efforts, until we approach the border-line of modern history, were invariably disappointed. They rarely exerted even a momentary influence over a wide circle. In truth, however generously conceived, however heroically sustained, the aims of the premature reformers were often too audaciously, too wantonly, directed against the beliefs of the mass of their fellow-Christians to deserve success. We may admire their nobility or their constancy, but an impartial judgement can hardly regret that they failed. They troubled the world, it might be for a few years, and left their single memorial in their writings. Yet, though they may occupy but a small place in the history of civilisation, the light they cast upon the unusual tendencies of thought, the eccentricities, of the middle ages, makes them a not unfruitful subject of study.

A still more suggestive line of enquiry is opened in the general history of thought and learning. The masculine spirit and the confidence with which the philosophers of the period carried on their speculations is hardly suspected by those who are not familiar with the original literature. Men who were least of all inclined to oppose anything that bore the stamp of traditional authority, displayed a freedom of judgement which could not but tend to consequences in one way or another divergent from the established system. The methods by which they accommodated the two are indeed evidence of the imperfect grasp they possessed of the inexorable demands of the reasoning faculties: their theological consciences were equally inexorable in requiring the adjustment; or perhaps more truly, the necessary conformity of reason and authority was so regularly assumed that they were unaware of the act of accommodation; the theological correctness of the conclusion, however arrived at, was the inevitable consequence of this implicit identification of contradictory terms in the premises. We are often at liberty to leave the ultimate reconciliation out of account, as a mode characteristic of the time rather than an argument due to the individual writer. It is the road on which their thoughts travel that retains its interest for the student of philosophical history.

The continuous activity of the human reason in Latin Christendom has its witness partly in the opposition, conscious or unconscious, to the tradition of the church, partly in the spirit of its philosophy. Through these currents we may learn the deeper springs which existed in men's minds and which, however often dormant, frozen by the rigid strength of theology, were yet capable of welling forth to nourish the world. The position held by intellectual studies and by learned men is uniformly the measure of the prevalence of these liberal forces in society; yet since the greatest writers have usually exercised a more powerful influence over posterity than over their own generation, it is chiefly from their works that we can estimate the power which the stimulus once given to learning and thought could gain in a few minds outstripping their fellows. The history of learning therefore not only supplies the links that connect the several divisions of the first part of our enquiry, but also the groundwork on which its argument must be constructed.

It is well known that the rise of the western church was accompanied by a rapid decline in the study of classical letters. Learning, such as it was, became restricted to the clergy and the monks, and these became more and more inclined to elevate their professional study at the expense, or to the condemnation, of every other. The rhetorical schools which had kept alive, however poorly, the tradition of classical learning, were suffered themselves to die out, and their place was only in a small part taken by the seminaries which gradually grew up about different cathedral or monastic establishments. The grammarian was expelled by the scholastic, and the scholastic had little interest or little power to imbue his disciples with more knowledge than was required for the performance of the offices of the church. Those who aspired to lead others would seek to advance to an acquaintance, seldom profound or extensive, with the writings of the fathers; and might thus obtain an indirect and distant view of that country from which Augustin and even Jerome had not been able, however desirous, to shake themselves free. But since the day when the expiring paganism of Rome had entered its last conflict with Christianity, the church had granted no terms to the system she had displaced. It was not alone that the philosophical spirit had proved inimical to orthodoxy: Tertullian's famous saying, a Haereticorum patriarchae philosophi, expresses but a portion of the truth. The entire classical tradition, all learning in its large sense, was treated not merely as irrelevant to the studies of the Christian, but as a snare from which he was taught to flee as from a temptation of the evil one. Such an antagonism inevitably tended to limit the aims and to narrow the character of the Christian church. It is not necessary here to trace its immediate result upon her doctrine and ceremonial; the fact by itself suffices to show that as Christianity extended its sway among the nations that had overwhelmed the empire, it could not bring with it those refining influences by which it would have been attended, had it absorbed and purified the culture of Rome. As it was, the church was built upon the ruins of a subjugated society; its fabric was but a step less barbarous than that of the Teutonic civilisation by which it was confronted.

If we confine our view to the literary aspect of the question, the marks of retrogression are clear and unmistakeable. Among the few who still cultivated learning oratory degenerated into panegyric, poetry occupied itself with mean or trivial subjects. With the rest the Latin language itself lost its nerve; idiom and even syntax were forgotten: it was enough if a writer could make himself understood at all. If down to the fifth century we find rare examples of an opposite tendency, the hostility of the church towards classical letters is thenceforth strongly marked. In the sixth century indeed Cassiodorus labours to prove that secular learning is good and profitable, utilis et non refugienda cognitio, and anxiously supports his argument by a catalogue of learned men downwards from Moses to the fathers: but the apology itself implies the discredit into which learning had fallen. A little later that discredit was completed when Gregory the Great employed his unrivalled authority to denounce all secular learning. The common story that the pope burned the Palatine library, because, as John of Salisbury hints, he had a greater interest in the holy Scriptures, is no doubt false; but it not inaccurately represents the attitude Gregory took up in regard to classical studies. The letter which he wrote on the subject to Desiderius, bishop of Vienne, has been often quoted, but it is too characteristic to be omitted here. The bishop, it seems, had ventured to teach grammar and read the poets. Gregory's remonstrance is as follows: A report has reached us which we cannot mention without a blush, that thou expoundest grammar to certain friends; whereat we are so offended and filled with scorn that our former opinion of thee is turned to mourning and sorrow. The same mouth singeth not the praises of Jove and the praises of Christ. Think how grievous and unspeakable a thing it is for a bishop to utter that which becometh not even a religious layman. . . . If hereafter it be clearly established that the rumour which we have heard is false and that thou art not applying thyself to the idle vanities of secular learning nugis et secularibus litteris, a significant hendiadys, we shall render thanks to our God who hath not delivered over thy heart to be defiled by the blasphemous praises of unspeakable men.

This then was the policy, of we may so call it, of the church with regard to education, declared by him who has an undisputed title to be called the father of the medieval papacy, and whose example was law to his successors, as indeed it was to the whole of Latin Christendom for many ages. From this authority there was however one corner of Europe practically exempted. Ireland had as yet remained free from the invasion of foreign barbarians, and had held its own tradition not only of Christian but also of classical culture. Although it did not receive Christianity until the middle of the fifth century, the newly-planted religion had grown up with astonishing rapidity and strength. The Irish, or, to give them their proper name, the Scots, had no sooner been enlightened by the preaching of a foreign missionary, saint Patrick, than they pressed forward to make all nations participators in the knowledge of their new faith. Already there was a steady emigration across the north channel into that country which was soon to borrow the civilisation, the very name, of the settlers. Now, that emigration took a distinctively religious character. The little island of Hy off the coast of Mull became the head spring from which Christianity was to penetrate among the rude inhabitants of the Pictish highlands, or the English of Northumbria or Mercia. But the zeal of the Irish missionaries could not be confined within the compass of Britain. The Celt yielded not to the Northman in his passion for travel; then as now the poverty of the land was the peremptory cause of emigration: but the ambition of the missionary supplied a far stronger incentive to distant enterprises than the mere love of adventure or the mere hope of gain; and those who had once been known but as the pirates whose terrible fleets ravaged the coasts of Britain or Gaul, became the peaceful colonists of Christianity in nearly every land where the Teuton in his advance westward had established himself. From Iceland to the Danube or the Apennines, among Frank or Burgundian or Lombard, the Irish energy seemed omnipotent and inexhaustible.

To account in any sort for this astonishing activity we have to go back to the form in which the Celtic church had grown up, and observe how its loose and irregular organisation left its ministers free to choose their own work where they would. In other countries the diocese had been the basis of Christian organisation: in Ireland it was the monastery. This was the centre of the religious community; the abbat, not the bishop, was its representative chief. When gifts were made to the church the monastery was the recipient; the abbat was their steward. Round the monastery then the clergy of the neighbourhood grouped themselves as a tribe or clan. The absence of any fixed endowment was an insuperable obstacle to the formation of an ecclesiastical constitution after the common pattern. Almost everywhere the bishops were untrammelled by the cares of a definite diocese; often a band of many bishops is found settled at one place. The lesser clergy were driven to earn a living as they might, in the secular business of the farm or the plough. They had no hopes of ecclesiastical preferment to tempt them to stay at home: poverty was their natural lot, and it might be met with as little inconvenience abroad. Thus they poured forth upon the continent, the most devoted, the least self-seeking of missionaries: how poor they were we may learn from the fact that special hostelries were founded for their reception in many places of the Frankish realm by the charity of their wealthier fellow-countrymen.

It is not however with the religious work of the Scots that we are immediately concerned: their literary tradition is still more remarkable and characteristic. Isolated in a remote island, the stream of classical learning had remained pure while the rest of Roman Europe had suffered it to be corrupted or dried up in the weary decay of the empire that followed the Teutonic influx. In Ireland it was still fresh and buoyant; and from the Irish it passed back to the continent in greater and greater waves. Of the means by which their education was acquired at home we are but scantily informed. In the seventh century, Bede tells us, the Northumbrian nobles, and others too of middle rank, flocked to the schools of Ireland; and while some faithfully dedicated themselves to the monastic life, others chose rather to pass in turn through the cells of the masters and give their labour to study: and the Scots most readily received them, and provided them daily their food without charge, and books also to read, and free instruction. But we have to guess from a variety of scattered notices and suggestions the precise way in which the Irish tradition of learning differed from that current on the continent. At one moment we read of saint Caimin, a teacher on an island of Loughderg, who made a critical edition of the Psalms; and there is at all events evidence to shew that the Scots possessed, in common with the Britons, a Latin version of the Bible distinct from the vulgate. It has been thought too that the Greek language which had almost ceased to be known elsewhere in the west, was widely cultivated in the schools of Ireland.

But of greater significance is the fact that there reigned, not only among her professed scholars but also among the plain missionaries whom she sent forth to preach the gospel to the heathen, a classical spirit, a love of literature for its own sake, a keen delight in poetry. The very field of study of which the Latin was taught to say, This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish, was that to which the Scot turned with the purest enthusiasm. The gaiety of the Celtic nature made him shew his devotion to the classical poets by imitating them. Saint Columban, the apostle of Burgundy, whom men knew as the stern preacher of an austere discipline, as the haughty rebuker of kings, was wont to seek refreshment from his religious labours in sending his friends letters in verse, now in the rhymed couplets of his own day, now m hexameters. Sometimes k the initials of the an acrostich : once the saint writes a long letter composed of a string of adonics. Meagre as his performances may appear, if judged by ancient models. Columban's more serious poems are neither awkward nor ungraceful. All of them are full of conceits and mythological allusions; they read as the work of an entire pagan. Equally they prove the breadth and freedom of the training which he had received at Banchor and which was the peculiar possession of the Scots. There is a vein of poetry running through the whole lives of these Irish confessors, a poetry of which the stories of their acts are indeed better witnesses than their practical essays in verse-making. They brought imagination, as they brought spiritual force, into a world well-nigh sunk in materialism.

Their lighter productions shew one side of the Scottish nature: their earnest, single-hearted pursuit of learning in the widest sense attainable, their solid hard work as scholars, is not less characteristic. Ireland was once the university, the literary market not only, as we have seen, of northern England, but also m of the Frankish realm; and if its progress at home was arrested after the fatal inroad of the Northmen in 795, the seed the Scots had sown in other lands grew to a nobler maturity than it had ever reached on its own soil. Wherever they went they founded schools. Malmesbury, the house of which saint Aldhelm was a scholar and ultimately abbat, took its origin from the company of disciples that gathered about a poor Scottish teacher, Mailduf, as he sat in his hut beside the walls of the old castle of Ingelborne. The foundations of saint Columban, Luxeuil, and Bobbio, long remained centres of learned activity in Burgundy and Lombardy; the settlement of his comrade, saint Gall, rose into the proud abbey which yet retains his name, and which was for centuries a beacon-tower of learning in western Europe; the sister-abbey of Reichenau, its rival both in power and in cultivation, also owed its fame, if not its actual establishment on its island in the lower lake of Constance, to Scottish teachers. Under the shelter of these great houses, and of such as these, learning was planted in a multitude of lesser societies scattered over the tracts of German colonisation; and most commonly the impulse which led to their formation as schools as well as monasteries is directly due to the energetic devotion of the Scottish travellers.

A new epoch in their labours abroad is opened in the empire of Charles the Great, whose hearty goodwill towards scholars and whose zeal for the promotion of learning are as characteristic and well-known as his skill as a warrior or as a king. If his reign marks the dividing line between ancient and medieval history, it is not only by virtue of its political facts but also because it begins the age of the education of the northern races, fitting them in time to rule the world as the Romans had done before them. In this great work the Scots, instead of toiling humbly by themselves, were now welcomed and recognised as indispensable cooperators. Their entry into the Frankish realm is related in the Acts of Charles the Great, written by a monk of Saint Gall towards the end of the ninth century, whose account, however much coloured by legendary ornaments, may still P contain some features of a genuine tradition; at the least it points rightly to the main source from which the impulse of learning was communicated afresh to the continent.