XXX. THE SPELL OF THE CLASSICS…

XXX. THE SPELL OF THE CLASSICS

I. CLASSICAL READING.

II. GRAMMAR.

III. THE EFFECT UPON THE MEDIAEVAL MAN; HILDEBERT OF LAVARDIN.

I

During all the mediaeval centuries, men approached the Classics expecting to learn from them. The usual attitude toward the classical heritage was that of docile pupils looking for instruction. One may recall the antecedent reasons of this, which have already been stated at length. In Italy, letters survived as the most impressive legacy from an overshadowing past. In the north, save where they lingered on from the antique time, they came in the train of Latin Christianity, and were offered to men under the same imposing conditions of a higher civilization authoritatively instructing ruder peoples. Moreover, between the ancient times which produced the classic literature and the Carolingian period there intervened centuries of degeneracy and transition, when the Classics were used pedagogically to teach grammar and rhetoric. Then grammars were composed or revised, and other handbooks of elementary instruction. The Classics still were loved; but how shall men love beyond their own natures? Gifted Jerome, great Augustine, loved them with an ardour bringing its own misgivings. Other lovers, like Ausonius and Apollinaris Sidonius, were pedantic imitators.

Both north and south of the Alps another and obviously enduring cause fostered the habit of regarding the Classics as storehouses of knowledge: the fact that they were such for all the mediaeval centuries. They included not only poetry and eloquence, but also history, philosophy, natural knowledge, law and polity. The knowledge contained in them exceeded what the men of western Europe otherwise possessed. As century after century passed, mediaeval men learned more for themselves, and also drew more largely on the classic store. Yet it remained unexhausted. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries constitute the great mediaeval epoch. Men were then opening their eyes a little to observe the natural world, and were thinking a little for themselves. Nevertheless the chief increase in knowledge issued from the gradual discovery and mastering of the works of Aristotle. These centuries, like their predecessors, make clear that men who inherit from a greater past a universal literature containing the best they can conceive and more knowledge than they can otherwise attain, will be likely to regard every part of this literature as in some way a source of knowledge, physical or metaphysical, historical or ethical. And the Classics merited such regard; for where they did not instruct in science, they imparted knowledge of life, and norms and instances of conduct, from which men still may draw guidance. We have outlearned the physics, and perhaps the metaphysics of the Greeks; their knowledge of nature, in comparison with ours, was but as a genial beginning; their polities and their formal ethics we have tried and tested; but we have not risen above the power and inspiration of the story of Greece and Rome, and the exemplifications of life in the Greek and Latin Classics. It has not ceased to be true that he who best loves the Classics, and most deeply feels and glories in their unique excellence as literature, is he who still draws life from them, and discipline and knowledge. Their true lovers, like the true lovers of all noble literature, are always in a state of pupilage to the poems and the histories they love.

Obviously then no final word lies in the statement that through the Middle Ages men turned to the Classics for instruction. They did indeed turn to them for all kinds of knowledge, and for discipline. Often they looked for instruction from Ovid or Virgil in a way to make us smile. Often they were like schoolboys, dully conning words which they did not feel and so did not understand. But in the tenth century, and in the twelfth, some men admired and loved the Latin Classics, and drew from them, as we may, lessons which are learned only by those who love aright.

It would be hard to say what the men of the Middle Ages did not thus gain. The pagan classical literature was one of humanity in its full range of interests. This was true of the Greek; and from the Greek, the universal human passed to the Latin, which the Middle Ages were to know. In both literatures, man was a denizen of earth. The laws of mortality and fate were held before his eyes; and the action of the higher powers bore upon mortal happiness, rather than upon any life to come. When reflecting upon the use and influence of the Classics through the Middle Ages, it is always to be kept in mind that the antique literature was the literature of this life and of this world; that it was universal in its humanity, and still in the Middle Ages might touch every human love and human interest not directly connected with the hopes and terrors of the Judgment Day.

So whenever educated mediaeval men were drawn by the ambitions or moved by the finer joys of human life, it lay in their path to seek instruction or satisfaction from some antique source. If a man wished the common education of a clerk, he drew it from antique text-books and their commentaries. Grammar and rhetoric meant Latin grammar and Latin rhetoric; dialectic also was Latin and antique. Likewise the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, could be studied only in Latin. These ordinary branches of education having been mastered, if then the man’s tastes or ambitions turned to the interests of earth (and who except the saintly recluse was not so drawn?) he would still look to the antique. A civilian or an ecclesiastic would need some knowledge of law, which for the most part was Roman, even when disguised as Canon law.[152] Did a man incline toward philosophy, and the scrutiny of life’s deeper problems, again the source was the antique; and when he lifted his mind to theology, he would still find himself reasoning in categories of antique dialectic. Finally, and this was a broad field of humane inclination, if a clerkly educated man loved poetry, eloquence, and history, for their own sakes, he also would turn to the antique.

There is scarcely need to revert again to the use of the Classics in the earlier Middle Ages. We have seen that in Italy they never ceased to form the conscious background to all intellectual life; and that in the north, letters came a handmaid in the train of Latin Christianity--a handmaid that was apt to assert her own value, and also charm the minds of men. From the first, it was the orthodox view that Latin letters should provide the education enabling men to understand the Christian religion adequately. This is the object set forth in Charlemagne’s Capitularies upon education.[153] Three hundred years later Honorius of Autun says in his sermonizing way:

“Not only, beloved, do the sacred writings lead us to eternal life, but profane letters also teach us; for edifying matter may be drawn from them. In view of sacred examples no one should be scandalized at this. For the children of Israel spoiled the Egyptians; they took gold and silver, gems and precious vestments, which they afterwards turned into God’s treasury to build the tabernacle.”[154]

Honorius used Augustine’s reference to the Egyptians, and followed this Augustinian view, always recognized as orthodox in the Middle Ages. It was narrower than the practice among those who followed letters. Gerbert at the close of the tenth century loved to teach and read the pagan writers, and drew from them training and discipline.[155] In the next century, the German monk Froumund of Tegernsee, with Bernward and Godehard, bishops of Hildesheim, are instances of German love of antique letters.[156] Yet lofty souls might choose to limit their reading of the Classics, at least in theory, to the needs of their Latinity. Such a one was Hugo of St.-Victor, scholar, theologian, man of genius;[157] he professed to care more for the Christian ardours of the soul than for learning even as a means of righteousness, and chose to take the side of those who would read the classic authors only so far as the needs of education demanded:

“There are two kinds of writings, first those which are termed the artes proper, secondly, those which are the supplements (appendentia) of the artes. Artes comprise the works grouped under (supponuntur) philosophy, those which contain some fixed and determined matter of philosophy, as grammar, dialectic and the like. Appendentia artium are those [writings] which touch philosophy less nearly and are occupied with some subject apart from it; and yet sometimes offer flotsam and jetsam from the artes, or simply as narratives smooth the road to philosophy. All the songs of poets are such--tragedies, comedies, satires, heroics, and lyrics too, and iambics, besides certain didactic works (didascalica); tales likewise, and histories; also the writings of those nowadays called philosophers, who extend a brief matter with lengthy circumlocution, and thus darken a simple meaning.

“Note then well the distinction I have drawn for thee: distinct and different (duo) are the artes and their appenditia, ... and often from the latter the student will gain much labour and little fruit. The artes, without their appenditia, may make the reader perfect; but the latter, without the artes, can bring no whit of perfection. Wherefore one should first of all devote himself to the artes, which are so fundamental, and to the aforesaid seven above all, which are the means and instruments (instrumenta) of all philosophy. Then let the rest be read, if one has leisure, since sometimes the playful mingled with the serious especially delights us, and we are apt to remember a moral found in a tale.”[158]

Temperament affected Hugo’s view. He was of the spiritual aristocracy, who may be somewhat disdainful of the common means by which men get their education and round out their natures. The mechanical monotony of pedagogy grated on him and evoked the ironical sketch of a school-room, which he put in his dialogue on the Vanity of the World. The little Discipulus, directed by his Magister, is surveying human things.

“Turn again, and look,” says the latter, “and what do you see?”

“I see the schools of learners. There is a great crowd, and of all ages, boys and youths, men young and old. They study various things. Some practise their rude tongue at the alphabet and at words new to them. Others listen to the inflection of words, their composition and derivation; then by reciting and repeating them they try to commit them to memory. Others furrow the waxen tablets with a stylus. Others, guiding the calamus with learned hand, draw figures of different shapes and colours on parchments. Still others with sharper zeal seem to dispute on graver matters and try to trip each other with twistings and impossibilities (gryphis?). I see some also making calculations, and some producing various sounds upon a cord stretched on a frame. Others, again, explain and demonstrate geometric figures; and yet others with various instruments show the positions and courses of the stars and the movement of the heavens. Others, finally, consider the nature of plants, the constitution of men, and the properties and powers of things.”

The Disciple is captivated with this many-coloured show of learning; but the Master declares it to be mostly foolishness, distracting the student from understanding his own nature, his Creator, and his future lot.[159]

These are examples, which might be multiplied indefinitely, of the pious mediaeval view that the artes, with a very little reading of the auctores, were proper for the educated Christian, whose need was to understand Scripture. Sometimes, stung, at least rhetorically, by fear of the lust and idolatry of the antique, mediaeval souls cry out against its lures, even as Jerome’s Christianly protesting nature dreamed that famous dream of exclusion from heaven as a “Ciceronian.” Alcuin, who led the educational movement under Charlemagne, gently chides one whose fondness for Virgil made him forget his friend--“would that the Gospels rather than the Aeneid filled thy breast.”[160] Three hundred years later, St. Peter Damiani, himself a virtuoso in letters and a sometime teacher of rhetoric, arraigns the monks for teaching grammar rather than things spiritual.[161] Damiani speaks with the harshness of one who fears what he loves. In France, about the same time, our worthy sermon-writer, Honorius of Autun, liked the profanities well enough, and drew from them apt moral tales, which preachers might introduce to rouse drowsy congregations. Yet he directs his pulpit-thunder at the cives Babyloniae, the superbi, who after their several tastes finger profane literature to their peril: “Those delighting in quibbling learn Aristotle: the lovers of war have Maro, and the lustful idlers their Naso. Lucan and Statius incite discords, while Horace and Terence equip the pert and wanton (petulantes)--but since the names of these are blotted from the book of life, I shall not commemorate them with my lips.”[162]

This with the excellent Honorius was pious rhetoric. Yet the love and fear of antique letters caused anxiety in many a mediaeval soul, deflected by them from its narrow path to the heavenly Jerusalem. Indeed the love of letters and of knowledge was to play its part, and might take one side or the other, according to the motive of their pursuit, in the great mediaeval psychomachia between the cravings of mortal life and the militant insistencies of the soul’s salvation. This conflict, not confined to mediaeval monks, has its universal aspects. It echoes in the sigh of Michelangelo over the

“affectuosa fantasia, Che l’ arte si fece idolo e monarca,”

--which had so long drawn his heart from Eternity.[163]

Commonly, however, this conflict did not greatly disturb scholars who felt in some degree the classic spell so manifold of delight in themes delightful, of pleasure somehow drawn from clear statement and convincing sequence of thought, of even deeper happiness springing from the stirring of those faculties through which man rejoices in knowledge. To be sure, readers of the Classics, who drew joy from them or satisfaction, or humane instruction, were comparatively few in the mediaeval centuries, as they are to-day. And undoubtedly in the Middle Ages the Classics usually were read in unenlightened schoolboy fashion. Yet making these reservations, we may be sure that letters yielded up their joys to the chosen few in every mediaeval century. “Amor litterarum ab ipso fere initio pueritiae mihi est innatus,” wrote Lupus in the ninth.[164] Gerbert might have said the same, and many of the men who taught at Chartres in the generations following. So likewise might have said John of Salisbury. In studying the Classics he certainly looked to them for instruction. But he also loved them, and found companionship and solace in them, as he says, and as Cicero before him had said of letters.

We may ask ourselves what sort of pleasure do we get from reading the Classics? not necessarily a light distracting of the mind, but rather a deeper gratification: thought is aroused and satisfied, and our nature is appeased by the admirable presentation of things admirable. At the same time we may be conscious of discipline and benefit. There is good reason to suppose that a like pleasure, or satisfaction, with discipline and instruction, came to this exceedingly clever John from reading Terence, Virgil and Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, Persius and Statius, Cicero, Seneca and Quintilian--for he read them all.[165] John is affected, impressed, and trained by his classic reading; he has absorbed his authors; he quotes from them as spontaneously and aptly as he quotes from Scripture. A quotation from the one or the other may give final point to an argument, and have its own eloquent suggestions. Sometimes the tone of one of his own letters--which usually are excellent in form and language--may agree with that of the pithy antique quotation garnishing it. A mediaeval writer was not likely to say just what we should when expressing ourselves on the same matter. Yet John makes quite clear to us how he cared for antique letters, in the Prologue to his Polycraticus, his chief work on philosophy and life; and we may take his word as to the satisfaction which he drew from them, since his own writings prove his assiduity in their cult. This prologue is somewhat cherché, and imbued with a preciosity of sentiment putting one in mind of Cicero’s oration Pro Archia poeta.

“Most delightful in many ways, but in this especially, is the fruit of letters, that banishing the reserve of intervening place and time, they bring friends into each other’s presence, and do not suffer noteworthy things to be obliterated by dust. For the arts would have perished, laws would have vanished, the offices of faith and religion would have fallen away, and even the correct use of language would have failed, had not the divine pity, as a remedy for human infirmity, provided letters for the use of mortals. Ancient examples, which incite to virtue, would have corrected and served no one, had not the pious solicitude of writers transmitted them to posterity.... Who would know the Alexanders and the Caesars, or admire Stoics and Peripatetics, had not the monuments of writers signalized them? Triumphal arches promote the glory of illustrious men from the carved inscription of their deeds. Thereby the observer recognizes the Liberator of his Country, the Establisher of Peace. The light of fame endures for no one save through his own or another’s writing. How many and how great kings thinkest thou there have been, of whom there is neither speech nor cogitation? Vainly have men stormed the heights of glory, if their fame does not shine in the light of letters. Other favour or distinction is as fabled Echo, or the plaudits of the Play, ceasing the moment it has begun.

“Besides all this, solace in grief, recreation in labour, cheerfulness in poverty, modesty amid riches and delights, faithfully are bestowed by letters. For the soul is redeemed from its vices, and even in adversity refreshed with sweet and wondrous cheer, when the mind is intended upon reading or writing what is profitable. Thou shalt find in human life no more pleasing or more useful employment; unless perchance when, with heart dilated through prayer and divine love, the mind perceives and arranges within itself, as with the hand of meditation, the great things of God. Believe one who has tried it, that all the sweets of the world, compared with these exercises, are wormwood.”[166]

Hereupon, still addressing himself to his friend and patron, Thomas à Becket, John suggests that these recreations are peculiarly beneficial to men in their circumstances, burdened with affairs; and he puts his principles in practice, by launching forth upon his lengthy work of learned and philosophic disquisition.

To supplement this outline of John’s appreciation of the Classics, it will be interesting to look into the literary interpretation of a classical poem, from the pen of one of his contemporaries. So little is known of the author, Bernard Silvestris, that he usually has been confused with his more famous fellow, Bernard of Chartres. We may refer to both of them again.[167] Here our business is solely with the Commentum Bernardi Silvestris super sex libros Aeneidos Virgilii.[168] The writer draws from the Saturnalia of the fifth-century grammarian, Macrobius; but his allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid seems to be his own. He finds in the Aeneid a twofold consideration, in that its author meant to teach philosophic truth, and at the same time was not inattentive to the poetic plot.

“Since then Virgil in this poem is both philosopher and poet, we shall first expound the purpose and method of the poet.... His aim is to unfold the calamities of Aeneas and other Trojans, and the labours of the exiles. Herein disregarding the truth of history as told by Dares the Phrygian,[169] and seeking to win the favour of Augustus, he adorns the facts with figments. For Virgil, greatest of Latin poets, wrote in imitation of Homer, greatest of Greek poets. As Homer in the Iliad narrates the fall of Troy and in the Odyssey the exile of Ulysses; so Virgil in the second Book briefly relates the overthrow of Troy, and in the rest the labours of Aeneas. Consider the twin order of narration, the natural and the artistic (artificialem). The natural is when the narrative proceeds according to the sequence of events, telling first what happened first. Lucan and Statius keep to this order. The artistic is when we begin in the middle of the story, and thence revert to the commencement. Terence writes thus, and Virgil in this work. It would have been the natural order to have described first the destruction of Troy, and then brought the Trojans to Crete, from Crete to Sicily, and from Sicily to Libya. But he first brings them to Dido, and introduces Aeneas relating the overthrow of Troy and the other things that he has suffered.[170]

“Up to this point we show how he proceeds: next let us observe why he does it so. With poets there is the reason of usefulness, as with a satirist; the reason of pleasure, as with a writer of comedies; and again these two combined, as with the historical poet. As Horace says:

‘Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae, Aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae.’

“This kind of a historical poem is shown by its figurative and polished diction and in the various mischances and deeds narrated. If any one will study to imitate it he will gain skill in writing. The narrative also contains instances and arguments for following the right and avoiding what is evil. Hence a twofold profit to the reader: skill in writing, gained through imitation, and prudence in conduct, drawn from example and precept. For instance, in the labours of Aeneas we have an example of endurance; and one of piety, in his affection for Anchises and Ascanius. From the reverence which he shows the gods, from the oracles which he supplicates, from the sacrifices which he offers, from the vows and prayers which he pours forth, we feel drawn to religion: while through Dido’s unbridled love, we are recalled from desire for the forbidden.”

The above is excellent, but not particularly original. It shows, however, that Bernard could appreciate the Aeneid in this way. His allegorical interpretation is of a piece with current mediaeval methods. Yet to take a poem allegorically was not distinctively mediaeval; for Homer and other poets had been thus expounded from the days of Plato, who did not himself approve. With Bernard, each Book of the Aeneid represents one of the ages of man, the first Book betokening infancy, the second boyhood, and so forth. Allegorical etymologies are applied to the names of the personages; and in general the whole natural course and setting of the poem is taken allegorically. “The sea is the human body moved and tossed by drunkenness and lusts, which are represented by waves.” Aeneas, to wit, the human soul joined to its body, comes to Carthage, the mundane city where Dido reigns, which is lust; this allegory is unfolded in detail. So the interpretation ambles on, not more and not less jejune than such ingenuities usually are.

* * * * *

Classical studies reached their zenith in the twelfth century. For in every way that century surpassed its predecessors; and in classical studies it excelled the thirteenth, which devoted to them a smaller portion of its intellectual energies. The twelfth century, to be sure, was prodigiously interested in dialectic and theology. Yet these had not quite engulfed the humanities; nor had any newly awakened interest in physical or experimental science distracted the eyes of men from the charms of the ancient written page. The change took place in the thirteenth century. Its best intellectual efforts, north of the Alps at least, were directed to the study and theological appropriation of the Aristotelian encyclopaedia of metaphysics and universal knowledge.[171] The effect of Aristotle was totally unliterary. And the minds of men, absorbed in mastering this giant mass of knowledge and argument, ceased to regard literary form and the humane aspects of Latin literature.

Until the thirteenth century, dialectic and theology were not completely severed from belles lettres. The Platonic-Augustinian theology of the twelfth century had been idealizing and imaginative, not to say poetical. Such an interesting exponent of it as Hugo of St. Victor appears as a literary personage, despite his stinted advocacy of classical study. One notes that for his time the chief single source of physical knowledge was the Latin version of the Timaeus, certainly not a prosaic composition. Thus, for the twelfth century, an effective cause of the continuance of the study of letters lay herein: whatever branch of natural knowledge might allure the student, he could not draw it bodily from a serious but unliterary repository, like the Physics or De animalibus of Aristotle, which were not yet available; he must follow his bent through the writings of various Latin poets as well as prose-writers. In fine, the sources of profane knowledge open to the twelfth century were literary in their nature, and might form part of the literature which would be read by a student of grammar or rhetoric.

One sees this in John of Salisbury. There may have been a few men who knew more than he did of some particular topic. But his range and readiness of knowledge were unique. And it is evident from his writings that his knowledge (except in logic) had no special or scientific source, but was derived from a promiscuous reading of Latin literature. As a result, he is himself a literary man. One may say much the same of his younger contemporary, Alanus de Insulis.[172] He too has gathered knowledge from literary sources, and he himself is one of the best Latin poets of the Middle Ages. Another extremely poetic philosopher was Bernard Silvestris, the interpreter of Virgil. His De mundi unitate is a Pantheistic exposition of the Universe; it is also a poem; and incidentally it affords another illustration of the general fact, that before the works of Aristotle were made known and expounded in the thirteenth century, all kinds of natural and quasi-philosophic knowledge were drawn from a variety of writings, some of them poor enough from any point of view, but none of them distinctly scientific and unliterary, like the works of Aristotle. Formal logic or dialectic, as cultivated by Abaelard for example, appears as an exception. It had been specialized and more scientifically treated than any branch of substantial knowledge; for indeed it was based on the logical treatises of Aristotle, most of which were in use before Abaelard’s death, and all of which were known to Thierry of Chartres and John of Salisbury.[173]

The contrast between the cathedral school of Chartres and the University of Paris illustrates the change from the twelfth to the thirteenth century. The former has been spoken of in a previous chapter, where its story was brought down to the times of its great teachers, Bernard and Thierry, of whom we shall have to speak in connection with the teaching of grammar and the reading of classical authors. The school flourished exceedingly until the middle of the twelfth century.[174] By that time the schools of Paris had received an enormous impetus from the popularity of Abaelard, and scholars had begun to push thither from all quarters. But it was not till the latter part of the century that the University, with its organization of Masters and Faculties, began visibly to emerge out of the antecedent cathedral school.[175] Chartres was a home of letters; and there Latin literature was read enthusiastically. But in Paris Abaelard was pre-eminently a dialectician; and after he died, through those decades when the University was coming into existence, the tide of study set irresistibly toward theology and metaphysics. Students and masters of the Faculty of Arts outnumbered all the other Faculties; nevertheless, counting not by tumultuous numbers, but by intellectual strength, the great matter was Theology, and the majority of the Masters in the Arts were students in the divine science. The Arts were regarded as a preparatory discipline. So through its great period, which roughly coincides with the thirteenth century, the University of Paris was for all Europe the supreme seat of Dialectic, Metaphysics, and Theology, and yet no kindly nurse of belles lettres.

The tendencies of Oxford were not quite the same as those of Paris, yet Latin literature as such does not seem to have been cultivated there for its own fair sake. This apparently was unaffected by the fact that a movement for “close” or exact scholarship existed at the English university. Grosseteste, its first great chancellor, teacher and inspirer, unquestionably introduced, or encouraged, the study of Greek; and his famous pupil, Roger Bacon, was a serious Greek scholar, and wrote a grammar of that tongue. But neither Grosseteste nor Bacon appears to have been moved by any literary interest in Greek literature; both one and the other urged the importance of Greek, and of Hebrew too and Arabic, in order to reach a surer knowledge of Scripture and Aristotle. They sought to open the veritable founts of theology and natural knowledge, an intelligent aim indeed, but quite unliterary. In spirit both these men belong to the thirteenth century, not to the twelfth.[176]

In Italy, one does not find that the passage from the twelfth to the thirteenth century displays the decline in classical studies which is apparent north of the Alps. The reasons seem obvious. The passion for metaphysical theology did not invade this land of practical ecclesiasticism and urban living, where pagan antiquity, dumb, broken, and defaced, yet everywhere surviving, was the medium of life and thought and temperamental inclination in the thirteenth as well as in the twelfth century. Nor was Italy as yet becoming scientific, or greatly interested in physical hypothesis; although medicine was cultivated in various centres, Salerno, for example, and Bologna. But for the twelfth, and for the thirteenth century as well, Italy’s great intellectual achievement was in the two closely neighbouring sciences of canon and civil law. These made the University of Bologna as pre-eminent in law as Paris was in theology. There had been schools of grammar and rhetoric at Bologna and Ravenna, before the lecturing of Irnerius on the Pandects drew to the first-named town the concourse of mature and seemly students who were gradually to organize themselves into a university.[177] Thus at Bologna law flourished and grew great, springing upward from an antecedent base of grammatical if not literary studies. The study of the law never cut itself away from this foundation. For the exigencies of legal business demanded training in the scrivener’s and notarial arts of inditing epistles and drawing documents, for which the ars dictaminis, to wit, the art of composition was of primary utility. This ars, teaching as it did both the general rules of composition and the more specific forms of legal or other formal documents, pertained to law as well as grammar. Of the latter study it was perhaps in Italy the main element, or, rather, end. But even without this hybrid link of the dictamen, grammar was needed for the interpretation of the Pandects; and indeed some of the glosses of Irnerius and other early glossators are grammatical rather than legal explanations of the text. We should bear in mind that this august body of jurisprudential law existed not in the inflated statutory Latin of Justinian’s time, but in the sonorous and correct language of the earlier empire, when the great Jurists lived, as well as Quintilian. Accordingly a close study of the Pandects required, as well as yielded, a knowledge of classical Latinity. Thus law tended to foster, rather than repress, grammar and rhetoric; and had no unfavourable effect on classical studies. And even as such studies “flourished” in Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they did not cease to “flourish,” there in the thirteenth, in the same general though rather dull and uncreative way. For it will hereafter appear that the productions of the Latin poets and rhetoricians of Italy were below the literary level of those composed north of the Loire in France, or in England.

II

From the days of the Roman Empire, the study of grammar was, and never ceased to be, the basis of the conscious and rational knowledge of the Latin tongue. The Roman boys studied it at Rome; the Latin-speaking provincials studied it, and all people of education who remained in the lands of western Europe which once had formed part of the Empire; its study was renewed under Charlemagne; he and Alcuin and all the scholars of the ninth century were deeply interested in what to them represented tangible Latinity, and in fact was to be a chief means by which their mediaeval civilization should maintain its continuity with its source. For grammar was most instrumental in preserving mediaeval Latin from violent deflections, which would have left the ancient literature as the literature of a forgotten tongue. Had mediaeval Latin failed to keep itself veritable Latin; had it instead suffered transmutation into local Romance dialects, the Latin classics, and all that hung from them, might have become as unknown to the Middle Ages as the Greek, and even have been lost forever. It was the study of Latin grammar, with classic texts to illustrate its rules, that kept Latin Latin, and preserved standards of universal usage throughout western Europe, by which one language was read and spoken everywhere by educated people. From century to century this language suffered modification, and varied according to the knowledge and training of those who used it; yet its changes were never such as to destroy its identity as a language, or prevent the Latin writer of one age or country from understanding whatever in any land or century had been written in that perennial tongue.

Therefore fortunately, as the Carolingian scholars studied Latin grammar, so likewise did those of all succeeding mediaeval generations, thereby holding themselves to at least a homogeneity, though not an unvarying uniformity, of usage. Evidently, however, the method of grammatical instruction had to vary with the needs of the learners and the teachers’ skill. The Romans prattled Latin on their mothers’ knees; and so, with gradually widening deflections, did the Latinized provincials. Neither Roman nor Provincial prattled Ciceronian periods, or used quite the vocabulary of Virgil; yet it was Latin that they talked. Thenceforward there was to be a difference between the people who lived in countries where Romance dialects had emerged from the spoken Latin and prevailed, and those people who spoke a Teuton speech. Although always drawing away, the natal speech of Romance peoples was so like Latin, that in learning it they seemed rather to correct their vulgar tongue than to acquire a new language. So it was in the Christian parts of Spain, in Gaul, and, above all, in Italy, where the vulgar dialects were tardiest in taking distinctive form. Nevertheless, as the Romance dialects, for instance in the country north of the Loire, developed into the various forms of what is called Old French, young people at school would have to learn Latin as a quasi-foreign tongue. Across the Rhine in Germany boys ordinarily had to learn it at school, as a strange language, just as they must to-day; and every effort was devoted to this end.[178] It was not likely that the grammars composed for Roman boys, or at least for boys who spoke Latin from their infancy, would altogether meet the needs of German, or even French, youth. Yet only gradually and slowly in the Middle Ages were grammars put together to make good the insufficiencies of Donatus and Priscian.

The former was the teacher of St. Jerome. He composed a short work, in the form of questions and answers, explaining the eight parts of speech, but giving no rules of gender, or forms of declension and conjugation, needed for the instruction of those who, unlike the Roman youth, could not speak the language. This little book went by the name of the Ars minor. The same grammarian composed a more extensive work, the third book of which was called the Barbarismus, after its opening chapter. It defined the figures of speech (figurae, locutiones), and was much used through the mediaeval period.

The Ars minor explained in simple fashion the elements of speech. But the Institutiones grammaticae of Priscian, a contemporary of Cassiodorus, offered a mine of knowledge. Of its eighteen books the first sixteen were devoted to the parts of speech and their forms, considered under the variations of gender, declension, and conjugation. The remaining two treated of constructio or syntax. As early as the tenth century Priscian was separated into these two parts, which came to be known as Priscianus major and minor. The Priscian manuscripts, whose name is legion, usually present the former. Diffuse in language, confused in arrangement, and overladen perhaps with its thousands of examples, it was berated for its labyrinthine qualities even in the Middle Ages; yet its sixteen books remained the chief source of etymological knowledge. Priscianus minor was less widely used.

The grammarians of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries followed Donatus and Priscian, making extracts from their works, or abridgements, and now and then introducing examples of deviation from the ancient usage. The last came usually from the Vulgate text of Scripture, which sometimes departed from the idioms or even word-forms approved by the old authorities.[179] The Ars minor of Donatus became enveloped in commentaries; but Priscian was so formidable that in these early centuries he was merely glossed, that is, annotated in brief marginal fashion.

It would be tedious to dwell upon mediaeval grammatical studies. But the tendencies characterizing them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries may be indicated briefly. The substance of the Priscianus major was followed by mediaeval grammarians. That is to say, while admitting certain novelties,[180] they adhered to its rules and examples relating to the forms of words, their declension and conjugation. But the Priscianus minor, although used, was departed from. In the first place its treatment of its subject (syntax) was confused and inadequate. There was, however, a broader reason for seeking rules elsewhere. Mediaeval Latin, in its progress as a living or quasi-living language, departed from the classical norms far more in syntax and composition than in word-forms. The latter continued much the same as in antiquity. But the popular and so to speak Romance tendencies of mediaeval Latin brought radical changes of word-order and style, which worked back necessarily upon the rules of syntax. These had been but hazily stated by the old writers, and the task of constructing an adequate Latin syntax remained undone. It was a task of vital importance for the preservation of the Latin tongue. Word-forms alone will not preserve the continuity of a language; it is essential that their use in speech and writing should be kept congruous through appropriate principles of syntax. Such were intelligently formulated by mediaeval grammarians. The result was not exactly what it would have been had the task been carried out in the fourth century: yet it has endured in spite of the attacks, pseudo-attacks indeed, of the cinquecento; and the mediaeval treatment of Latin syntax is the basis of the modern treatment. One may add that syntax or constructio was taken broadly as embracing not only the agreements of number and gender, and the governing[181] of cases, but also the order of words in a sentence, which had changed so utterly between the time of Cicero and Thomas Aquinas.

These general statements find illustration in the famous Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa-Dei, whose author was born in Normandy in the latter half of the twelfth century. He studied at Paris, and in course of time was summoned by the Bishop of Dol to instruct his nepotes in grammar. While acting as their tutor, he appears to have helped their memory by setting his rules in rhyme; and the bishop asked him to write a Summa of grammar in some such fashion. Complying, he composed the Doctrinale in the year 1199, putting his work into leonine or rhyming hexameter, to make it easier to memorize. Rarely has a school-book met with such success. It soon came into use in Paris and elsewhere, and for some three hundred years was the common manual of grammatical teaching throughout western Europe. It was then attacked and apparently driven from the field by the so-called Humanists, who, however, failed to offer anything better in its place, and plagiarized from the work which they professed to execrate.[182]

The etymological portions of the Doctrinale follow the teachings of the Priscianus major; the part devoted to syntax, or constructio, shows traces of the influence of the Priscianus minor. But Alexander’s treatment of syntax is more systematic and elaborate than Priscian’s; and he did not hesitate to defer to the Vulgate and other Christian Latin writings. Thus he made his work conform to contemporary usage, which its purpose was to set forth. He did the same in the section on Prosody, in which he says that the ancient metricians distinguished a number of feet no longer used, and he will confine himself to six--the dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapaest, iambus, and tribrach.[183] In contradiction to classical usage he condemns elision;[184] and in his chapter on accent he throws over the ancient rules:

“Accentus normas legitur posuisse vetustas; Non tamen has credo servandas tempore nostro.”[185]

Alexander was not really an innovator. He followed previous grammarians in condemning elision, and in what he says of quantity and accent. In his syntax he endeavoured to set forth rules conforming to the best Latin usage of his time, like other mediaeval grammarians before him. He was indeed vehement in his advocacy of recent and Christian authors as standards of writing, and he inveighed against the scholars of Orleans, who read the Classics, and would have us sacrifice to the gods and observe the indecent festivals of Faunus and Jove.[186] But others defended the Orleans school, and perhaps still regarded the Classics as the best arbiters of grammar and eloquence. There exist thirteenth-century grammars which follow Priscian more closely than Alexander does.[187] Yet his work represents the dominant tendencies of his time.

Twelfth and thirteenth century grammarians recommended to their pupils a variety of reading, in which mediaeval and early Christian compositions held as large a place as Virgil and Ovid. The Doctrinale advocates no work more emphatically than Petrus Riga’s Aurora, a versified paraphrase of Scripture. Its author was a chorister in Rheims, and died in 1209.[188] The works of scholastic philosophers were not cited as frequently as the compositions of verse-writers; yet mediaeval grammarians were influenced by the language of philosophy, and drew from its training principles which they applied to their own science. Grammar could not help becoming dialectical when the intellectual world was turning to logic and metaphysics. Commencing in the twelfth century, overmasteringly in the thirteenth, logic penetrated grammar and compelled an application of its principles. Often grammarians might better have looked to linguistic usage than to dialectic; yet if grammar was to become a rational science, it had to systematize itself through principles of logic, and make use of dialectic in its endeavour to state a reason for its rules. Those who applied logic to grammar at least endeavoured to distinguish between the two, not always fruitfully. But a real difference could not fail to assert itself inasmuch as logic was in truth of universal application, while mediaeval grammar never ceased to be the grammar of the Latin language. Nevertheless its terminology was largely drawn from logic.[189]

So dialectic brought both good and ill, proving itself helpful in the regulation of syntax, but banefully affecting grammarians with the conviction that language was the creature of reason, and must conform to principles of logic. One likewise notes with curious interest, that, from their dialectic training apparently, grammarians first found as many species of grammar as languages,[190] and then forsook this idea for the view that, in order to be a science, grammar must be universal, or, as they phrased it, one, and must possess principles not applicable specially to Greek or Latin, but to congruous construction in the abstract; “de constructione congrua secundum quod abstrahit ab omni lingua speciali,” are the words of the English thirteenth-century philosopher and grammarian, Robert Kilwardby.[191] A like idea affected Roger Bacon, who composed a Greek grammar,[192] which appears to have been intended as the first part of a work upon the grammars of the learned languages other than Latin. It was adapted to afford a grounding in the elements of Greek: yet it touches matters in a way showing that the writer had thought deeply on the affinities of languages and the common principles of grammar. Of this the following passage is evidence:

“Therefore, because I wish to treat of the properties of Greek grammar, it should be known that there are differences in the Greek language, to be hereafter noted in giving the names of these dialects (idiomata). And I call them idiomata and not linguas, because they are not different languages, but different properties which are peculiarities (idiomata) of the same language.[193] Wishing to set forth Greek grammar, for the use of the Latins, it is necessary to compare it with Latin grammar, because I commonly speak Latin myself, seeing that the crowd does not know Greek; also because grammar is of one and the same substance in all languages, although varying in its non-essentials (accidentaliter), also because Latin grammar in a certain special way is derived from Greek, as Priscian says, and other grammarians.”[194]

The dialecticizing of grammar took place in the north, under influences radiating from Paris, the chief dialectic centre. These did not deeply affect grammatical studies in Italy, or in the Midi of France, which in some respects exhibited like intellectual tendencies. Grammar was zealously studied in Italy, but it did not there become either speculative or dialectical. To be sure northern manuals were used, especially the Doctrinale; but the study remained practical, an art rather than a science, and its chief element, or end, was the ars dictaminis or dictandi. The grammatical treatises of Italians were treatises upon this art of epistolary composition and the proper ways of drawing documents. These works were studied also in the North, where the ars dictaminis was by no means neglected.[195]

Latin grammar, although over-dialecticized in the North, and in Italy made very practical, remained of necessity the foundation of classical studies, and of mediaeval literary effort, in prose and verse. As the basis of liberal studies, it had no truer home than the cathedral school of Chartres.[196] Contemporary writers picture the manner in which this study was there made to perform its most liberal office, under favourable mediaeval conditions, in the first half of the twelfth century. The time antedates the Doctrinale, and one notes at once that the Chartrian masters used the ancient grammatical authorities. This is shown by the Eptateuchon of Thierry, who was headmaster (scholasticus) and then Chancellor there for a number of years between 1120 and 1150. As its name implies, the work was a manual, or rather an encyclopaedia, of the Seven Arts. Thierry compiled it from the writings of the “chief doctors on the arts.” He transcribed the Ars minor of Donatus and then portions of his larger work. Having commended this author for his conciseness and subtilty, Thierry next copied out the whole of Priscian. As text-books for the second branch of the Trivium, he gives Cicero’s De inventione rhetorica libri 2, Rhetoricorum ad Herennium libri 4, De partitione oratoria dialogus, and concludes with the rhetorical writings of Martianus Capella and J. Severianus.[197]

So much for the books. Now for the method of teaching as described by John of Salisbury. He gives the practice of Bernard of Chartres, Thierry’s elder brother, who was scholasticus and Chancellor before him, in the first quarter of the twelfth century. John has been advocating the study of grammar as the fundamentum atque radix of those exercises by which virtue and philosophy are reached; and he is advising a generous reading of the Classics by the student, and their constant use by the professor, to illustrate his teaching.

“This method was followed by Bernard of Chartres, exundissimus modernis temporibus fons litterarum in Gallia. By citations from the authors he showed what was simple and regular; he brought into relief the grammatical figures, the rhetorical colours, the artifices of sophistry, and pointed out how the text in hand bore upon other studies; not that he sought to teach everything in a single session, for he kept in mind the capacity of his audience. He inculcated correctness and propriety of diction, and a fitting use of congruous figures. Realizing that practise strengthens memory and sharpens faculty, he urged his pupils to imitate what they had heard, inciting some by admonitions, others by whipping and penalties. Each pupil recited the next day something from what he had heard on the preceding. The evening exercise, called the declinatio, was filled with such an abundance of grammar that any one, of fair intelligence, by attending it for a year, would have at his fingers’ ends the art of writing and speaking, and would know the meaning of all words in common use. But since no day and no school ought to be vacant of religion, Bernard would select for study a subject edifying to faith and morals. The closing part of this declinatio, or rather philosophical recitation, was stamped with piety: the souls of the dead were commended, a penitential Psalm was recited, and the Lord’s Prayer.

“For those boys who had to write exercises in prose or verse, he selected the poets and orators, and showed how they should be imitated in the linking of words and the elegant ending of passages. If any one sewed another’s cloth into his garment, he was reproved for the theft, but usually was not punished. Yet Bernard gently pointed out to awkward borrowers that whoever imitated the ancients (majores) should himself become worthy of imitation by posterity. He impressed upon his pupils the virtue of economy, and the values of things and words: he explained where a meagreness and tenuity of diction was fitting, and where copiousness or even excess should be allowed, and the advantage of due measure everywhere. He admonished them to go through the histories and poems with diligence, and daily to fix passages in their memory. He advised them, in reading, to avoid the superfluous, and confine themselves to the works of distinguished authors. For, he said (quoting from Quintilian) that to follow out what every contemptible person has said, is irksome and vainglorious, and destructive of the capacity which should remain free for better things. To the same effect he cited Augustine, and remarked that the ancients thought it a virtue in a grammarian to be ignorant of something. But since in school exercises nothing is more useful than to practise what should be accomplished by the art, his scholars wrote daily in prose and verse, and proved themselves in discussions.”[198]

This passage indicates with what generous use of the auctores Bernard expounded grammar and explained the orators and poets; how he assigned portions of their works for memorizing, and with what care he corrected his pupils’ prose and metrical compositions, criticizing their knowledge and their taste. He was a man mindful of his Christian piety toward the dead and living, but caring greatly for the Classics, and loving study. “The old man of Chartres (senex Carnotensis),” says John of Salisbury, meaning Bernard, “named wisdom’s keys in a few lines, and though I am not taken with the sweetness of the metre, I approve the sense:

‘Mens humilis, studium quaerendi, vita quieta, Scrutinium tacitum, paupertas, terra aliena....’”[199]

Bernard, Thierry, and other masters and scholars of their school, as the advocates of classical education, detested the men called by John of Salisbury Cornificiani, who were for shortening the academic course, as one would say to-day, so that the student might finish it up in two or three years, and proceed to the business of life. A good many in the twelfth century adopted this notion, and turned from the pagan classics, not as impious, but as a waste of time. Some of the good scholars of Chartres lost heart, among them William of Conches and a certain Richard, both teachers of John of Salisbury. They had followed Bernard’s methods; “but when the time came that so many men, to the great prejudice of truth, preferred to seem, rather than be, philosophers and professors of the arts, engaging to impart the whole of philosophy in less than three years, or even two, then my masters vanquished by the clamour of the ignorant crowd, stopped. Since then, less time has been given to grammar. So it has come about that those who profess to teach all the arts, both liberal and mechanical, are ignorant of the first of them, without which vainly will one try to get the rest.”[200]

Upon these people who seemed charlatans, and yet may have represented tendencies of the coming time, Thierry, Gilbert de la Porrèe,[201] and John of Salisbury poured their sarcasms. The controversy may have clarified Bernard’s consciousness of the value of classical studies and deepened his sense of obligation to the ancients, until it drew from him perhaps the finest of mediaeval utterances touching the matter: “Bernard of Chartres used to say that we were like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants. If we see more and further than they, it is not due to our own clear eyes or tall bodies, but because we are raised on high and upborne by their gigantic bigness.”[202]

Echoes of this same controversy--have they ever quite died away?--are heard in letters of the scholarly Peter of Blois, who was educated at Paris in the middle of the twelfth century, became a secretary of Henry Plantagenet and spent the greater part of his life in England, dying about the year 1200. He writes to a friend:

“You greatly commend your nephew, saying that never have you found a man of subtler vein: because, forsooth, skimming over grammar, and skipping the reading of the classical authors, he has flown to the trickeries of the logicians, where not in the books themselves but from abstracts and note-books, he has learned dialectic. Knowledge of letters cannot rest on such, and the subtilty you praise may be pernicious. For Seneca says, nothing is more odious than subtilty when it is only subtilty. Some people, without the elements of education, would discuss point and line and superficies, fate, chance and free-will, physics and matter and the void, the causes of things and the secrets of nature and the sources of the Nile! Our tender years used to be spent in rules of grammar, analogies, barbarisms, solecisms, tropes, with Donatus, Priscian, and Bede, who would not have devoted pains to these matters had they supposed that a solid basis of knowledge could be got without them. Quintilian, Caesar, Cicero, urge youths to study grammar. Why condemn the writings of the ancients? it is written that in antiquis est scientia. You rise from the darkness of ignorance to the light of science only by their diligent study. Jerome glories in having read Origen; Horace boasts of reading Homer over and over. It was much to my profit, when as a little chap I was studying how to make verses, that, as my master bade me, I took my matter not from fables but from truthful histories. And I profited from the letters of Hildebert of Le Mans, with their elegance of style and sweet urbanity; for as a boy I was made to learn some of them by heart. Besides other books, well known in the schools, I gained from keeping company with Trogus Pompeius, Josephus, Suetonius, Hegesippus, Quintus Curtius, Tacitus and Livy, all of whom throw into their histories much that makes for moral edification and the advance of liberal science. And I read other books, which had nothing to do with history--very many of them. From all of them we may pluck sweet flowers, and cultivate ourselves from their urbane suavity of speech.”[203]

In another letter Peter writes to his bishop of Bath, as touching the accusation of some “hidden detractor,” that he, Peter, is but a useless compiler, who fills letters and sermons with the plunder of the ancients and Holy Writ:

“Let him cease, or he will hear what he does not like; for I am full of cracks, and can hold in nothing, as Terence says. Let him try his hand at compiling, as he calls it.--But what of it! Though dogs may bark and pigs may grunt, I shall always pattern on the writings of the ancients; with them shall be my occupation; nor ever, while I am able, shall the sun find me idle.”[204]

It is evident how broadly Peter of Blois, or John of Salisbury, or the Chartrians, were read in the Latin Classics. Peter mentions even Tacitus, a writer not thought to have been much read in the Middle Ages. We have been looking at the matter rather in regard to poetry and eloquence--belles lettres. But one may also note the same broad reading (among the few who read at all) on the part of those who sought for the ethical wisdom of the ancients. This is apparent (perhaps more apparent than real) with Abaelard, who is ready with a store of antique ethical citations.[205] It is also borne witness to by the treatise Moralis philosophia de honesto et utili, placed among the works of Hildebert of Le Mans,[206] but probably from the pen of William of Conches, grammaticus post Bernardum Carnotensem opulentissimus, as John of Salisbury calls him.[207] In some manuscripts it is entitled Summa moralium philosophorum, quite appropriately. One might hardly compare it for organic inclusiveness with the Christian Summa of Thomas Aquinas; but it may very well be likened to the more compact Sentences of the Lombard[208] which were so solidly put together about the same time. The Lombard drew his Sentences from the writings of the Church Fathers; William’s work consists of moral extracts, mainly from Cicero, Seneca, Sallust, Terence, Horace, Lucan, and Boëthius. The first part, De honesto, reviews Prudentia, Justitia, Fortitudo, and under these a number of particular virtues in correspondence with which the extracts are arranged. The De utili considers the adventitious goods of circumstance and fortune.

The extracts forming the substance of this work were intelligently selected and smoothly joined; and the treatise was much used by those who studied the antique philosophy of life. It was drawn upon, for instance, by that truculent and well-born Welshman, Giraldus Cambrensis, in his De instructione principum, which the author wrote partly to show how evilly Henry Plantagenet performed the functions of a king. This irrepressible claimant of St. David’s See had been long a prickly thorn for Henry’s side.[209] But he was a scholar, and quotes from the whole range of the Latin Classics.

III

When a man is not a mere transcriber, but puts something of himself into the product of his pen, his work will reflect his personality, and may disclose the various factors of his spiritual constitution. To discover from the writings of mediaeval scholars the effect of their classical studies upon their characters is of greater interest than to trace from their citations the authors read by them. Such a compilation as the Summa moralium which has just been noticed, while plainly disclosing the latter information, tells nothing of the personality of him who strung the extracts together. Yet he had read writings which could hardly have failed to influence him. Cicero and Seneca do not leave their reader unchanged, especially if he be seeking ethical instruction. And there was a work known to this particular compiler which moved men in the Middle Ages. Deep must have been the effect of that book so widely read and pondered on and loved, the De consolatione of Boëthius with its intimate consolings, its ways of reasoning and looking upon life, its setting of the intellectual above the physical, its insistence that mind rather than body makes the man. Imagine it brought home to a vigorous struggling personality--imagine Alfred reading and translating it, and adding to it from the teachings of his own experience.[210] The study of such a book might form the turning of a mediaeval life; at least could not fail to temper the convulsions of a soul storm-driven amid unreconcilable spiritual conflicts.

One may look back even to the time of Alfred or Charlemagne and note suggestions coming from classical reading. For instance, the antique civilization being essentially urban, words denoting qualities of disciplined and polished men had sprung from city life, as contrasted with rustic rudeness. Thus the word urbanitas passed over into mediaeval use when the quality itself hardly existed outside of the transmitted Latin literature. For an Anglo-Saxon or a Frank to use and even partly comprehend its significance meant his introduction to a new idea. Alcuin writes to Charlemagne that he knows how it rejoices the latter to meet with zeal for learning and church discipline, and how pleasing to him is anything which is seasoned with a touch of wit--urbanitatis sale conditum.[211] And again, in more curious phrase, he compliments a certain worthy upon his metrical exposition of the creed, “wherein I have found gold-spouting whirlpools (aurivomos gurgites) of spiritual meanings abounding with gems of scholastic wit (scholasticae urbanitatis).”[212] Though doubtless this “scholastic wit” was flat enough, it was something for these men to get the notion of what was witty and entertaining through a word so vocalized with city life as urbanitas, a word that we have seen used quite knowingly by the more sophisticated scholar, Peter of Blois.

Again, it is matter of common observation that a feeling for nature’s loveliness depends somewhat on the growth of towns. But mediaeval men constantly had the idea suggested to them by the classic poetry of city-dwelling poets. Here are some lines by Alcuin or one of his friends, expressing sentiments which never came to them from the woods with which they were disagreeably familiar:

“O mea cella, mihi habitatio, dulcis, amata, Semper in aeternum, o mea cella, vale. Undique te cingit ramis resonantibus arbos, Silvula florigeris semper onusta comis.”[213]

These are little hints of the effect of the antique literature upon men who still were somewhat rough-hewn. Advancing a century and a half, the influence of classic study is seen, as it were, “in the round” in Gerbert.[214] It is likewise clear and full in John of Salisbury, of whom we have spoken, and shall speak again.[215] For an admirable example, however, of the subtle working of the antique literature upon character and temperament, we may look to that scholar-prelate whose letters the youthful Peter of Blois studied with profit, Hildebert of Lavardin, Bishop of Le Mans, and Archbishop of Tours. He shows the effect of the antique not so strikingly in the knowledge which he possessed or the particular opinions which he entertained, as in the balance and temperance of his views, and incidentally in his fine facility of scholarship.

Hildebert was born at Lavardin, a village near the mouth of the Loire, about the year 1055. He belonged to an unimportant but gentle family. Dubious tradition has it that one of his teachers was Berengar of Tours, and that he passed some time in the monastery of Cluny, of whose great abbot, Hugh, he wrote a life. It is more probable that he studied at Le Mans. But whatever appears to have been the character of his early environment, Hildebert belongs essentially to the secular clergy, and never was a monk. While comparatively young, he was made head of the cathedral school of Le Mans, and then archdeacon. In the year 1096, the old bishop of Le Mans died, and Hildebert, then about forty years of age, was somewhat quickly chosen his successor, by the clergy and people of the town, in spite of the protests of certain of the canons of the cathedral. The none too happy scholar-bishop found himself at once a powerless but not negligible element of a violently complicated feudal situation. There was the noble Helias, Count of Maine, who was holding his domain against Robert de Bellesme, the latter slackly supported by William Rufus of England, who claimed the overlordship of the land. Helias reluctantly acquiesced in Hildebert’s election. Not so Rufus, who never ceased to hate and persecute the man that had obtained the see which had been in the gift of his father, William the Conqueror. It happened soon after that Count Helias was taken prisoner by his opponent, and was delivered over to Rufus at Rouen. But Fulk of Anjou now thrust himself into this feudal mêlée, appeared at Le Mans, entered, and was acknowledged as its lord. He left a garrison, and departed before the Red King reached the town. The latter began its siege, but soon made terms with Fulk, by which Le Mans was to be given to Rufus, Helias was to be set free, and many other matters were left quite unsettled.

Now Rufus entered the town (1098), where Hildebert nervously received him; Helias, set free by the King, offered to become his feudal retainer; Rufus would have none of him; so Helias defied the King, and was permitted to go his way by that strange man, who held his knightly honour sacred, but otherwise might commit any atrocity prompted by rage or greed. It was well for Helias that trouble with the French King now drew Rufus to the north. The next year, 1099, Rufus in England heard that the Count had renewed the war, and captured Le Mans, except the citadel. He hurried across the channel, rushed through the land, entered Le Mans, and passed on through it, chasing Helias. But the war languished, and Rufus returned to Le Mans, or to what was left of it. Hildebert had cause to tremble. He had met the King on the latter’s hurried arrival from England for the war. Rufus had spoken him fair. But now, at Le Mans, he was accused before the monarch of complicity in the revolt. Quickly flared the King’s anger against the man whom he never had ceased to detest. He ordered him to pull down the towers of his cathedral, which rose threatening and massive over the city’s ruins and the citadel of the King. What could the defenceless bishop do to avert disgrace and the desolation of his beloved church? Words were left him, but they did not prove effectual. Rufus commanded him to choose between immediate compliance and going to England, there to submit himself to the judgment of the English bishops. He accepted the latter alternative, and followed the King, leaving his diocese ruined and his people dispersed. In England, Rufus dangled him along between fear and hope, till at last the disheartened prelate returned to the Continent, having ambiguously consented to pull down those towers. But instead, he set to work to repair the devastation of his diocese. The reiterated mandate of the King was not long in following him, and this time coupled with an accusation of treason. Hildebert’s state was desperate. His clergy were forbidden to obey him, his palace was sacked, his own property destroyed. Such were William’s methods of persuasion. Then the King proposed that the bishop should purge himself by the ordeal of hot iron. Hildebert, the bishop, the theologian, the scholar, was almost on the verge of taking up the challenge, when a letter from Yves, the saintly Bishop of Chartres, dissuaded him. At this moment, with ruin for his portion, and no escape, an arrow ended the Red King’s life in the New Forest. It was the year of grace 1100.

Now, what a change! Henry Beauclerc was from the first his friend, as William Rufus to the last had been his enemy. Hitherto Hildebert has appeared weakly endeavouring to elude destruction, and perhaps with no unshaken loyalty in his bosom toward any cause except his dire necessities. Henceforth, sailing a calmer sea, he repays Henry’s favour with adherence and admiration. He has no support to offer Anselm of Canterbury, still struggling with the English monarchy over investitures; nor has he one word of censure for the clever cold-eyed scholar King who kept his brother, Robert of Normandy, a prisoner for twenty-eight years till he died.

Hildebert had still thirty years of life before him; nor were they all to be untroubled. Shortly after the Red King’s death, he made a voyage to Rome, to obtain the papal benediction. To judge from his poems, he was deeply impressed with the ruins of the ancient city. Returning he devoted himself to the affairs of his diocese and to rebuilding the cathedral and other churches of Le Mans. In 1125, in spite of his unwillingness, for he was seventy years old, he was enthroned Archbishop of Tours, where he was to be worried by disputes with Louis le Gros of France over investitures. But he acquitted himself with vigour, especially through his letters. A famous one relates to this struggle of his closing years:

“In adversity it is a comfort to hope for happier times. Long has this hope flattered me; and as the harvest in the fields cheers the countryman, the expectation of a fair season has comforted my soul. But now I no longer hope for the clearing of the cloudy weather, nor see where the storm-driven ship, on whose deck I sit, may gain the harbour of rest.

“Friends are silent; silent are the priests of Jesus Christ. And those also are silent through whose prayers I thought the king would be reconciled with me. I thought indeed, but in their silence the king has added to the pain of my wounds. Yet it was theirs to resist the injury to the canonical institutes of the Church. Theirs was it, if the matter had demanded it, to raise a wall before the house of Israel. Yet with the most serene king there is call for exhortation rather than threat, for advice rather than command, for instruction rather than the rod. By these he should have been drawn to agree, by these reverently taught not to sheath his arrows in an aged priest, nor make void the canonical laws, nor persecute the ashes of a church already buried, ashes in which I eat the bread of grief, in which I drink the cup of mourning, from which to be snatched away and escape is to pass from death to life.

“Yet amid these dire straits, anger has never triumphed over me, that I should raise a hue and cry against the anointed of the Lord, or wrest peace from him with the strong hand and by the arm of the Church. Suspect is the peace to which high potentates are brought not by love, but by force. Easily is it broken, and sometimes the final state is worse than the first. There is another way by which, Christ leading, I can better reach it. I will cast my thought upon the Lord, and He will give me the desire of my heart. The Lord remembered Joseph, forgotten by Pharaoh’s chief butler when prosperity had returned to him; He remembered David abandoned by his own son. Perhaps He will remember even me, and bring the tossing ship to rest on the desired shore. He it is who looks upon the petition of the meek, and does not spurn their prayers. He it is in whose hand the hearts of kings are wax. If I shall have found grace in His eyes, I shall easily obtain the grace of the king or advantageously lose it. For to offend man for the sake of God is to win God’s grace.”[216]

Hildebert was a classical scholar, and in his time unmatched as a writer of Latin prose and verse. Many of his elegiac poems survive, some of them so antique in sentiment and so correct in metre as to have been taken for products of the pagan period. One of the best is an elegy on Rome obviously inspired by his visit to that city of ruins:

“Par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina.”

Its closing lines are interesting:

“Hic superûm formas superi mirantur et ipsi, Et cupiunt fictis vultibus esse pares. Non potuit natura deos hoc ore creare Quo miranda deûm signa creavit homo. Vultus adest his numinibus, potiusque coluntur Artificum studio quam deitate sua. Urbs felix, si vel dominis urbs illa careret, Vel dominis esset turpe carere fide!”

Such phrases, such frank admiration for the idols of pagan Rome, are startling from the pen of a contemporary of St. Bernard. The spell of the antique lay on Hildebert, as on others of his time. “The gods themselves marvel at their own images, and desire to equal their sculptured forms. Nature was unable to make gods with such visages as man has created in these wondrous images of the gods. There is a look (vultus) about these deities, and they are worshipped for the skill of the sculptor rather than for their divinity.”[217] Hildebert was not only a bishop, he was a Christian; but the sense and feeling of ancient Rome had entered into him. Besides the poem just quoted, he wrote another, either in Rome or after his return, Christian in thought but most antique in sympathy and turn of phrase.

“Dum simulacra mihi, dum numina vana placerent, Militia, populo, moenibus alta fui;

* * * * *

ruit alta senatus Gloria, procumbunt templa, theatra jacent.”

The antique feeling of these lines is hardly balanced by the expressed sentiment: “plus Caesare Petrus!”[218] And again we hear the echo of the antique in

“Nil artes, nil pura fides, nil gloria linguae, Nil fons ingenii, nil probitas sine re.”[219]

Hildebert has also a poem “On his Exile,” perhaps written while in England with the Red King. Quite in antique style it sings the loss of friends and fields, gardens and granaries, which the writer possessed while prospera fata smiled. Then

“Jurares superos intra mea vota teneri!”

--a very antique sentiment. But the Christian faith of the despoiled and exiled bishop reasserts itself as the poem closes.[220] Did Hildebert also write the still more palpably “antique” elegiacs on Hermaphrodite, and other questionable subjects?[221] That is hard to say. He may or may not have been the author of a somewhat scurrilous squib against a woman who seems to have sent him verses:

“Femina perfida, femina sordida, digna catenis.

“O miserabilis, insatiabilis, insatiata, Desine scribere, desine mittere, carmina blandia, Carmina turpia, carmina mollia, vix memoranda, Nec tibi mittere, nec tibi scribere, disposui me.

“Mens tua vitrea, plumbea, saxea, ferrea, nequam, Fingere, fallere, prodere, perdere, rem putat aequam.”[222]

With all his classical leanings, the major part of Hildebert was Christian. His theological writings which survive, his zeal against certain riotous heretics, and in general his letters, leave no doubt of this. It is from the Christian point of view that he gives his sincerest counsels; it is from that that he balances the advantages of an active or contemplative life, the claims of the Christian vita activa and vita contemplativa. Yet his classic tastes gave temperance to his Christian views, and often drew him to sheer scholarly pleasures and to an antique consideration of the incidents of life.

How sweetly the elements were mixed in him appears in a famous letter written to William of Champeaux, that Goliath of realism whom Abaelard discomfited in the Paris schools. The unhappy William retreated a little way across the Seine, and laid the foundations of the abbey of St. Victor in the years between 1108 and 1113. He sought to abandon his studies and his lectures, and surrender himself to the austere salvation of his soul, and yet scarcely with such irrevocable purpose as would rebuff the temperate advice of Hildebert’s letter proffered with tactful understanding.

“Over thy change of life my soul is glad and exults, that at length it has come to thee to determine to philosophize. For thou hadst not the true odour of a philosopher so long as thou didst not cull beauty of conduct from thy philosophic knowledge. Now, as honey from the honeycomb, thou hast drawn from that a worthy rule of living. This is to gather all of thee within virtue’s boundaries, no longer huckstering with nature for thy life, but attending less to what the flesh is able for, than to what the spirit wills. This is truly to philosophize; to live thus is already to enter the fellowship of those above. Easily shalt thou come to them if thou dost advance disburdened. The mind is a burden to itself until it ceases to hope and fear. Because Diogenes looked for no favour, he feared the power of no one. What the cynic infidel abhorred, the Christian doctor far more amply must abhor, since his profession is so much more fruitful through faith. For such are stumbling-blocks of conduct, impeding those who move toward virtue.

“But the report comes that you have been persuaded to abstain from lecturing. Hear me as to this. It is virtue to furnish the material of virtue. Thy new way of life calls for no partial sacrifice, but a holocaust. Offer thyself altogether to the Lord, since so He sacrificed Himself for thee. Gold shines more when scattered than when locked up. Knowledge also when distributed takes increase, and unless given forth, scorning the miserly possessor, it slips away. Therefore do not close the streams of thy learning.”[223]

Eventually William followed this, or other like advice. One sees Hildebert’s sympathetic point of view; he entirely approves of William’s renunciation of the world--a good bishop of the twelfth century might also have wished to renounce its troublous honours! Yes, William has at last turned to the true and most disburdened way of living. But this abandonment of worldly ends entails no abandonment of Christian knowledge or surrender of the cause of Christian learning. Nay, let William resume, and herein give himself to God’s will without reserve.

So the letter presents a temperate and noble view of the matter, a view as sound in the twentieth century as in the twelfth. And a like broad consideration Hildebert brings to a more particular discussion of the two modes of Christian living, the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary. He amply distinguishes these two ways of serving God from any mode of life with selfish aims. It happened that a devout monk and friend of Hildebert was made abbot of the monastery of St. Vincent, in the neighbourhood of Le Mans. The administrative duties of an abbot might be as pressing as a bishop’s, and this good man deplored his withdrawal from a life of more complete contemplation. So Hildebert wrote him a long discursive letter, of which our extracts will give the thread of argument:

“You bewail the peace of contemplation which is snatched away, and the imposed burden of active responsibilities. You were sitting with Mary at the feet of the Lord Jesus, when lo, you were ordered to serve with Martha. You confess that those dishes which Mary receives, sitting and listening, are more savoury than those which zealous Martha prepares. In these, indeed, is the bread of men, in those the bread of angels.”

And Hildebert descants upon the raptures of the vita contemplativa, of which his friend is now bereft.

“The contemplative and the active life, my dearest brother, you sometimes find in the same person, and sometimes apart. As the examples of Scripture show us. Jacob was joined to both Leah and Rachel; Christ teaches in the fields, anon He prays on the mountains; Moses is in the tents of the people, and again speaks with God upon the heights. So Peter, so Paul. Again, action alone is found, as in Leah and Martha, while contemplation gleams in Mary and Rachel. Martha, as I think, represents the clergy of our time, with whom the press of business closes the shrine of contemplation, and dries up the sacrifice of tears.

“No one can speak with the Lord while he has to prattle with the whole world. Such a prattler am I, and such a priest, who when I spend the livelong day caring for the herds, have not a moment for the care of souls. Affairs, the enemies of my spirit, come upon me; they claim me for their own, they thieve the private hour of prayer, they defraud the services of the sanctuary, they irritate me with their stings by day and infest my sleep; and what I can scarcely speak of without tears, the creeping furtive memory of disputes follows me miserable to the altar’s sacraments,--all such are even as the vultures which Abraham drove away from the carcases (Gen. xv. 11).

“Nay more, what untold loss of virtue is entailed by these occupations of the captive mind! While under their power we do not even serve with Martha. She ministered, but to Christ; she bustled about, but for Christ. We truly, who like Martha bustle about, and, like Martha, minister, neither bustle about for Christ nor minister to Him. For if in such bustling ministry thou seekest to win thine own desire, art taken with the gossip of the mob, or with pandering to carnal pleasures, thou art neither the Martha whom thou dost counterfeit nor the Mary for whom thou dost sigh.

“In that case, dearest brother, you would have just cause for grief and tears. But if you do the part of Martha simply, you do well; if, like Jacob, you hasten to and fro between Leah and Rachel, you do better; if with Mary you sit and listen, you do best. For action is good, whose pressing instancy, though it kill contemplation, draws back the brother wandering from Christ. Yet it is better, sometimes seated, to lay aside administrative cares, and amid the irksome nights of Leah, draw fresh life from Rachel’s loved embrace. From this intermixture the course to the celestials becomes more inclusive, for thereby the same soul now strives for the blessedness of men and anon participates in that of the angels. But of the zeal single for Mary, why should I speak? Is not the Saviour’s word enough, ‘Mary hath chosen the best part, which shall not be taken from her.’”

And in closing, Hildebert shows his friend the abbot that for him the true course is to follow Jacob interchanging Leah and Rachel; and then in the watches of his pastoral duties the celestial vision shall be also his.[224]

Could any one adjust more fairly this contest, so insistent throughout the annals of mediaeval piety, between active duties and heavenly contemplation? The only solution for abbot and bishop was to join Leah with Rachel. And how clearly Hildebert sees the pervasive peril of the active life, that the prelate be drawn to serve his pleasures and not Christ. Many souls of prelates had that cast into hell!

In theory Hildebert is clear as day, and altogether Christian, so far as we have followed the counsels of these letters. But in fact the quiet life had for him a temptation, to which he yielded himself more generously than to any of the grosser lures of his high prelacy. This temptation, so alluring and insidious, so fairly masked under the proffer of learning leading to fuller Christian knowledge, was of course the all too beloved pagan literature, and the all too humanly convincing plausibilities of pagan philosophy. Hildebert’s writings evince that kind of classical scholarship which springs only from great study and great love. His soul does not appear to have been riven by a consciousness of sin in this behoof. Sometimes he passes so gently from Christian to pagan ethics, as to lead one to suspect that he did not deeply feel the inconsistency between them. Or again, he seems satisfied with the moral reasonings of paganism, and sets them forth without a qualm. For there was the antique pagan side of our good bishop; and how pagan thoughts and views of life had become a part of Hildebert’s nature, appears in a most interesting letter written to King Henry, consoling him upon the loss of his son and the noble company so gaily sailing from Normandy in that ill-starred White Ship in the year 1120.

Hildebert begins reminding the King how much more it is for a monarch to rule himself than others. Hitherto he has triumphed over fortune, if fortune be anything; now she has wounded him with her sharpest dart. Yet that cannot penetrate the well-guarded mind. It is wisdom not to vaunt oneself in prosperity, nor be overwhelmed with grief in adversity. Hildebert then reasons on the excellence of man’s nature and will; he speaks of the effect of Adam’s sin in loss of grace and entailment of misery on the human race. He quotes from the Old Testament and from Virgil. Then he proceeds more specifically with his fortifying arguments. Their sum is, let the breast of man abound in weapons of defence and contemn the thrusts of fortune; there is nothing over which the triumphant soul may not triumph.

“Unhappy he who lacks this armament; and most unhappy he who besides does not know it. Here Democritus found matter for laughter, Demosthenes (sic) matter for tears. Far be it from thee that the chance cast of things should affect thee so, and the loss of wisdom follow the loss of offspring. Thou hast suffered on dry land more grievous shipwreck than thy son in the brine, if fortune’s storm has wrested wisdom from the wise.”

After a while Hildebert passes on to consider what is man, and wherein consists his welfare:

“To any one carefully considering what man is, nothing will seem more probable than that he is a divine animal, distinguished by a certain share of divinity (numinis). By bone and flesh he smacks of the earth. By reason his affinity to God is shown. Moses, inspired, certifies that by this prerogative man was created in the image of God. Whence it also follows for man, that he should through reason recognize and love his true good. Now reason teaches that what pertains to virtue is the true good, and that it is within us. The things we temporally possess are good only by opinion (opinione, i.e. not ratione), and these are about us. What is about us is not within our jus but another’s (alterius juris sunt). Chance directs them; they neither come nor stand under our arbitrament. For us they are at the lender’s will (precaria), like a slave belonging to another.[225] Through such, true felicity is neither had nor lost. Indeed no one is happy, no one is wretched by reason of what is another’s. It is his own that makes a man’s good or ill, and whatever is not within him is not his own.”

Then Hildebert speaks of dignities, of wife and child, of the fruits of the earth and riches--bona vaga, bona sunt pennata haec omnia. Men quarrel and struggle about all these things--ecce vides quanta mundus laboret insania.[226]

No one need point out how much more natural this reasoning would have been from the lips of Seneca than from those of an archiepiscopal contemporary of St. Bernard. One may, however, comment on the patent fact that this reflection of the antique in Hildebert’s ethical consolation reflects a manner of reasoning rather than an emotional mood, and in this it is an instance of the general fact that mediaeval methods of reasoning consciously or unconsciously followed the antique; while the emotion, the love and yearning, of mediaeval religion was more largely the gift of Christianity.

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XXXI. EVOLUTION OF MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE

Classical antiquity lay far back of the mediaeval period, while in the nearer background pressed the centuries of transition, the time of the Church Fathers. The patristic material and a crude knowledge of the antique passed over to the early Middle Ages. Mediaeval progress was to consist, very largely, in the mastery and appropriation of the one and the other.

The varied illustration of these propositions has filled a large portion of this work. In this and the next chapter we are concerned with literature, properly speaking; and with the effect of the Classics, the pure literary antique, upon mediaeval literary productions. The latter are to be viewed as literature; not considering their substance, but their form, their composition, style, and temperamental shading, qualities which show the faculties and temper of their authors. We are to discover, if we can, wherein the qualities of mediaeval literature reflect the Latin Classics, or in any way betray their influence.

It is an affair of dull diligence to learn what Classics were read by the various mediaeval writers; and likewise is it a dull affair to note in mediaeval writings the direct borrowing from the Classics of fact, opinion, sentiment, or phrase. Such borrowing was incessant, resorted to as of course wherever opportunity offered and the knowledge was at hand. It would not commonly occur to a mediaeval writer to state in his own way what he could take from an ancient author, save in so far as change of medium--from prose to verse, or from Latin to the vernacular--compelled him. So the church builders in Rome never thought of hewing new blocks of stone, or making new columns, when some ancient palace or temple afforded a quarry. The details of such spoliations offer little interest in comparison with the effect of antique architecture upon later styles. So we should like to discover the effect of the ancient compositions upon the mediaeval, and observe how far the faculties and mental processes of classic authors, incorporate in their writings, were transmitted to mediaeval men, to become incorporate in theirs.

Unless you are Virgil or Cicero, you cannot write like Virgil or Cicero. Writing, real writing, that is to say, creative self-expressive composition, is the personal product and closely mirrored reflex of the writer’s temperament and mentality. It gives forth indirectly the influences which have blended in him, education and environment, his past and present. His personality makes his style, his untransmittable style. Yet a group of men affected by the same past, and living at the same time and place, or under like spiritual influences, may show a like faculty and taste. Having more in common with one another than with men of other time, their mental processes, and therefore their ways of writing, will present more common qualities. Around and above them, as well as through their natal and acquired faculties, sweeps the genius of the language, itself the age-long product of a like-minded race. In harmony with it, not in opposition and repugnancy, each writer must, if he will write that language, shape his more personal diction.

Obviously the personal elements in classic writings were no more capable of transmission than the personal qualities of the writers. Likewise, the genius of the Latin language, though one might think it fixed in approved compositions, changed with the spiritual fortune of the Roman people, and constantly transmitted an altered self and novel tenets of construction to control the linguistic usages of succeeding men. None but himself could have written Cicero’s letters. No man of Juvenal’s time could have written the Aeneid, nor any man of the time of Diocletian the histories of Tacitus. There were, however, common elements in these compositions, all of them possessing certain qualities which are associated with classical writing. These may be difficult to formulate, but they become clear enough in contrast with the qualities of mediaeval Latin literature. The mediaeval man did not feel and reason like a contemporary of Virgil or Cicero; he had not the same training in Greek literature; he did not have the same definitude of conception, did not care so much that a composition should have limit and the unity springing from adherence to a single topic; he did not, in fine, stand on the same level of attainment and faculty and taste with men of the Augustan time. He had his own heights and depths, his own temperament and predilections, his own capacities. Reading the Classics had not transformed him into Cicero or Seneca, or set his feet in the Roman Forum. His feet wandered in the ways of the Middle Ages, and whatever he wrote in prose or verse, in Latin or in his own vernacular, was himself and of himself, and but indirectly due to the antecedent influences which had been transmuted even in entering his nature and becoming part of his temper and faculty.

Any consideration of the knowledge and appreciation of the Classics in the Middle Ages would be followed naturally by a consideration of their effect upon mediaeval composition; which in turn forms part of any discussion of the literary qualities of mediaeval Latin literature. But inasmuch as mediaeval form and diction tend to remove further and further from classical standards, the whole discussion may seem a lucus a non lucendo for all the light it throws upon the effect of the Classics on mediaeval literature. Our best plan will be to note the beginnings of mediaeval Latinity in that post-Augustan and largely patristic diction which had been enriched and reinvigorated with many phrases from daily speech; and then to follow the living if sluggish river as it moves on, receiving increment along its course, its currents mottled with the silt of mediaeval Italy, France, Germany. We shall suppose this flood to divide in rivers of Latin prose and verse; and we may follow them, and see where they overflow their channels, carrying antique flotsam into the ample marshes of vernacular poetry.

There has always been a difference in diction between speech and literature. At Rome, Cicero and Caesar, and of course the poets, did not, in writing, use quite the language of the people. All the words of daily speech were not taken into the literary or classical vocabulary, which had often quite other words of its own. Moreover the writers, in forming their prose and verse and constructing their compositions, were affected deeply by their study of Greek literature.[227] If Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, and their friends spoke differently from the Roman shopkeepers, there was a still greater difference between their writings and the parlance of the town.

No one need be told that it was the spoken, and not the classical Latin, which in Italy, Spain, Provence, and Northern France developed into Italian, Spanish, Provençal, and French. On the other hand, the descent of written mediaeval Latin from the classical diction or the popular speech, or both, is not so clear, or at least not so simple. It cannot be said that mediaeval Latin came straight from the classical; and manifestly it cannot have sprung from the popular spoken Latin, like the Romance tongues, without other influence or admixture; because then, instead of remaining Latin, it would have become Romance; which it did not. Evidently mediaeval Latin, the literary and to some extent the spoken medium of educated men in the Middle Ages, must have carried classic strains, or have kept itself Latin by the study of Latin grammar and a conscious adherence to a veritable, if not classical, Latin diction. The mediaeval reading of the Classics, and the earnest and constant study of Latin grammar spoken of in the previous chapter, were the chief means by which mediaeval Latin maintained its Latinity. Nevertheless, while it kept the word forms and inflections of classical Latin, with most of the classical vocabulary, it also took up an indefinite supplement of words from the spoken Latin of the late imperial or patristic period.

In order to understand the genesis and qualities of mediaeval Latin, one must bear in mind (as with most things mediaeval) that its immediate antecedents lie in the transitional fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, and not in the classical period.[228] Those centuries went far toward declassicizing Latin prose, by departing from the balanced structure of the classic sentences and introducing words from the spoken tongue. The style became less correct, freer, and better suited to the expression of the novel thoughts and interests coming with Christianity. The change is seen in the works of the men to whom it was largely due, Tertullian, Jerome, and other great patristic writers.[229] Such men knew the Classics well, and regarded them as literary models, and yet wrote differently. For a new spirit was upon them and new necessities of expression, and they lived when, even outside of Christian circles, the classic forms of style were loosening with the falling away of the strenuous intellectual temper, the poise, the self-reliance and the self-control distinguishing the classical epoch.

The stylistic genius of Augustine and Jerome was not the genius of the formative beginnings of the Romance tongues, with, for instance, its inability to rely on the close logic of the case ending, and its need to help the meaning by the more explicit preposition. Yet the spirit of these two great men was turning that way. They were not classic writers, but students of the Classics, who assisted their own genius by the study of what no longer was themselves. So in the following centuries the most careful Latin writers are students of the Classics, and do not study Jerome and Augustine for style. Yet their writings carry out the tendencies beginning (or rather not beginning) with these two.

It was not in diction alone that the Fathers were the forerunners of mediaeval writers. Classic Latin authors, both from themselves and through their study of Greek literature, had the sense and faculty of form. Their works maintain a clear sequence of thought, along with strict pertinency to the main topic, or adherence to the central current of the narrative, avoiding digression and refraining from excessive amplification. The classic writer did not lose himself in his subject, or wander with it wherever it might lead him. But in patristic writings the subject is apt to dominate the man, draw him after its own necessities, or by its casual suggestions cause him to digress. The Fathers in their polemic or expository works became prolix and circumstantial, intent, like a lawyer with a brief, on proving every point and leaving no loophole to the adversary. In their works literary unity and strict sequence of argument may be cast to the winds. Above all, as it seems to us, and as it would have seemed to Caesar or Cicero or Tacitus, allegorical interpretation carries them at its own errant and fantastic will into footless mazes.

Yet whoever will understand and appreciate the writings of the Fathers and of the mediaeval generations after them, should beware of inelastic notions. The question of unity hangs on what the writer deems the veritable topic of his work, and that may be the universal course of the providence of God, which was the subject of Augustine’s Civitas Dei. Indeed, the infinite relationship of any Christian topic was like enough to break through academic limits of literary unity. Likewise, the proper sequence of thought depends on what constitutes the true connection between one matter and another; it must follow what with the writer are the veritable relationships of his topics. If the visible facts of a man’s environment and the narratives of history are to him primarily neither actual facts nor literal narratives, but symbols and allegories of spiritual things, then the true sequence of thought for him is from symbol to symbol and from allegory to allegory. He is justified in ignoring the apparent connection of visible facts and the logic of the literal story, and in surrendering himself to that sequence of thought which follows what is for him the veritable significance of the matter.

Yet here we must apply another standard besides that of the writer’s conception of his subject’s significance. He should be wise, and not foolish. Other men and later ages will judge him according to their own best wisdom. And with respect to the writings of the Fathers viewed as literature, the modern critic cannot fail to see them entering upon that course of prolixity which in mediaeval writings will develop into the endless; looking forward, he will see their errant habits resolving into the mediaeval lack of determined topic, and their symbolically driven sequences of thought turning into the most ridiculous topical transitions, as the less cogent faculties of later men permit themselves to be suggested anywhither.

The Fathers developed their distinguishing qualities of style and language under the demands of the topics absorbing them, and the influence of modes of feeling coming with Christianity. They were compelling an established language to express novel matter. In the centuries after them, further changes were to come through the linguistic tendencies moulding the evolution of the Romance tongues, through the counter influence of the study of grammar and rhetoric, and also through the ignorance and intellectual limitations of the writers. But as with the Latin of the Fathers, so with the Latin of the Middle Ages, the change of style and language was intimately and spiritually dependent upon the minds and temperaments of the writers and the qualities of the subjects for which they were seeking an expression. A profound influence in the evolution of mediaeval Latin was the continual endeavour of the mediaeval genius to express the thoughts and feelings through which it was becoming itself. With impressive adequacy and power the Christian writers of the Middle Ages moulded their inherited and acquired Latin tongue to utter the varied matters which moved their minds and lifted up their hearts. We marvel to see a language which once had told the stately tale of Rome here lowered to fantastic incident and dull stupidity, then with almost gospel simplicity telling the moving story of some saintly life; again sonorously uttering thoughts to lift men from the earth and denunciations crushing them to hell; quivering with hope and fear and love, and chanting the last verities of the human soul.

As to the evolution of various styles of written Latin from the close of the patristic period on through the following centuries, one may premise the remark that there would commonly be two opposite influences upon the writer; that of the genius of his native tongue, and that of his education in Latinity. If he lived in a land where Teutonic speech had never given way to the spoken Latin of the Empire, his native tongue would be so different from the Latin which he learned at school, that while it might impede, it could hardly draw to its own genius the learned language. But in Romance countries there was no such absolute difference between the vernacular and the Latin, and the analytic genius of the growing Romance dialects did not fail to affect the latter. Accordingly in France, for example, the spoken Latin dialect, or one may say the genius that was forming the old French dialects to what they were to be, tends to break up the ancient periods, to introduce the auxiliary verb in the place of elaborate inflections, and rely on prepositions instead of case endings, which were disappearing and whose force was ceasing to be felt. One result was to simplify the order of words in a sentence; for it was not possible to move a noun with its accompanying preposition wherever it had been feasible to place a noun whose relation to the rest of the sentence was felt from its case ending. Gregory of Tours is the famous example of these tendencies, with his Historia francorum, an ideal forerunner of Froissart. He became Bishop of Tours in the year 573. In his writings he followed the instincts of the inchoate Romance tongues. He acknowledges and perhaps overstates his ignorance of Latin grammar and the rules of composition. Such ignorance was destined to become still blanker; and ignorance in itself was a disintegrating influence upon written Latin, and also gave freer play to the gathering tendencies of Romance speech.

Evidently, had all these influences worked unchecked, they would have obliterated Latinity from mediaeval Latin. Grammatical and rhetorical education countered them effectively, and the mighty genius of the ancient language endured in the extant masterpieces. Nevertheless the spirit of classical Latinity was never again to be a spontaneous creative power. The most that men thenceforth could do was to study, and endeavour to imitate, the forms in which it had embodied its living self.

In brief, some of the chief influences upon the writing of Latin in the Middle Ages were: the classical genius dead, leaving only its works for imitation; the school education in Latin grammar and rhetoric; endeavour to follow classic models and write correctly; inability to do so from lack of capacity and knowledge; conscious disregard of classicism; the spirit of the Teutonic tongues clogging Latinity, and that of the Romance tongues deflecting it from classical constructions; and finally, the plastic faculties of advancing Christian mediaeval civilization educing power from confusion, and creating modes of language suited to express the thoughts and feelings of mediaeval men.

The life, that is to say the living development, of mediaeval Latin prose, was to lie in the capacity of successive generations of educated men to maintain a sufficient grammatical correctness, while at the same time writing Latin, not classically, but in accordance with the necessities and spirit of their times. There resulted an enormous literature which was not dead, nor altogether living, and lacked throughout the spontaneity of writings in a mother tongue; for Latin was not the speech of hearth and home, nor everywhere the tongue of the market-place and camp. But it was the language of mediaeval education and acquired culture; it was the language also of the universal church, and, above all other tongues, expressed the thoughts by which men were saved or damned. More profoundly than any vernacular mediaeval literature, the Latin literature of the Middle Ages expresses the mediaeval mind. It thundered with the authority that held the keys of heaven; it was resonant with feeling, and through long centuries gave voice to emotions, shattering, terror-stricken, convulsively loving. When, say with the close of the eleventh century, the mediaeval peoples had absorbed with power the teachings of patristic Christianity, and had undergone some centuries of Latin schooling, and when under these two chief influences certain distinctive and homogeneous ways of thinking, feeling, and looking upon life, had been reached; when, in fine, the Middle Ages had become themselves and had evolved a genius that could create,--then and from that time appears the adaptability and power of mediaeval Latin to serve the ends of intellectual effort and the expression of emotion.

To estimate the literary qualities of classical Latin is a simpler task than to judge the Latinity and style of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages. Classic Latin prose has a common likeness. In general one feels that what Cicero and Caesar would have rejected, Tacitus and Quintilian would not have admitted. The syntax of these writers shows still greater uniformity. No such common likeness, or avoidance of stylistic aberration and grammatical solecism, obtains in mediaeval prose or verse. The one and the other include many kinds of Latin, and vary from century to century, diversified in idiom and deflected from linguistic uniformity by influences of race and native speech, of ignorance and knowledge. He who would appreciate mediaeval Latin will be diffident of academic standards, and mistrust his classical predilections lest he see aberration and barbarism where he might discover the evolution of new constructions and novel styles; lest he bestow encomium upon clever imitations of classical models, and withhold it from more living creations of the mediaeval spirit. He will realize that to appreciate mediaeval Latin literature, he must shelve his Virgil and his Cicero.[230]

The following pages do not offer themselves even as a slight sketch of mediaeval Latin literature. Their purpose is to indicate the stages of development of the prose and the phases of evolution of the verse; and to illustrate the way in which antique themes and antique knowledge passed into vernacular poetry. Classical standards will supply us less with a point of view than with a point of departure. Nothing more need be said of the Latin of the Church Fathers and Gregory of Tours. But one must refer to the Carolingian period, in order to appreciate the Latin styles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The revival of education and classical scholarship under the strong rule and fostering care of the greatest of mediaeval monarchs has not always been rightly judged. The vision of that prodigious personality ruling, christianizing, striving to civilize masses of barbarians and barbarized descendants of Romans and provincials; at the same time with eager interest endeavouring to revive the culture of the past, and press it into the service of the Christian faith; the striking success of his endeavours, men of learning coming from Ireland, England, Spain, and Italy, creating a peripatetic centre of knowledge at the imperial court, and establishing schools in many a monastery and episcopal residence--all this has never failed to arouse enthusiasm for the great achievement, and has veiled the creative deadness of it all, a deadness which in some provinces of intellectual endeavour was quite veritably moribund, while in others it betokened the necessary preparation for creative epochs to come.[231]

Carolingian scholarship was directed to the mastery of Latin. Grammar was taught, and the rules of composition. Then the scholars were bidden, or bade themselves, do likewise. So they wrote verse or prose according to their school lessons. They might write correctly; but they had no style of their own. This was hopelessly true as to their metrical verses;[232] it was only somewhat less tangibly true of their prose. The “classic” of the period, in the eyes of modern classical scholars and also in the opinion of the mediaeval centuries, is Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne. Numberless encomiums have been passed on it, and justly too. It was an excellent imitation of Suetonius’s Life of Augustus; and the writer had made a careful study of Caesar and Livy.[233] There is no need to quote from a writing so accessible and well known. Yet one remark may be added to what others have said: if Einhard’s composition was an excellent copy of classical Latin it was nothing else; it has no stylistic individuality.[234]

Turning from this famous biography, we will illustrate our point by quoting from the letters of him who stands as the type of the Carolingian revival, the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin. All praise to this noble educational coadjutor of Charlemagne; his learning was conscientious; his work was important, his character was lovable. His affectionate nature speaks in a letter to his former brethren at York, where his home had been before he entered Charlemagne’s service. Here is a sentence:

“O omnium dilectissimi patres et fratres, memores mei estote; ego vester ero, sive in vita, sive in morte. Et forte miserebitur mei Deus, ut cujus infantiam aluistis, ejus senectutem sepeliatis.”[235]

It were invidious to find fault with this Latin, in which the homesick man expresses his hope of sepulture in his old home. Note also the balance of the following, written to a sick friend:

“Gratias agamus Deo Jesu, vulneranti et medenti, flagellanti et consolanti. Dolor corporis salus est animae, et infirmitas temporalis, sanitas perpetua. Libenter accipiamus, patienter feramus voluntatem Salvatoris nostri.”[236]

This too is excellent, in language as in sentiment. So is another, and last, sentence from our author, in a letter congratulating Charlemagne on his final subjugation of the Huns, through which the survivors were brought to a knowledge of the truth:

“Qualis erit tibi gloria, O beatissime rex, in die aeternae retributionis, quando hi omnes qui per tuam sollicitudinem ab adolatriae cultura ad cognoscendum verum Deum conversi sunt, te ante tribunal Domini nostri Jesu Christi in beata sorte stantem sequentur!”[237]

Again, the only trouble is stylelessness. In fine, an absence of quality characterizes Carolingian prose, of which a last example may be taken from the Spaniard Theodulphus, Bishop of Orleans, “an accomplished Latin poet,” and an educator yielding in importance to Alcuin alone. The sentence is from an official admonition to the clergy, warning them to attach more value to salvation than to lucre:

“Admonendi sunt qui negotiis ac mercationibus rerum invigilant, ut non plus terrenam quam viam cupiant sempiternam. Nam qui plus de rebus terrenis quam de animae suae salute cogitat, valde a via veritatis aberrat.”[238]

Evidently there was a good knowledge of Latin among these Carolingians, who laboured for the revival of education and the preservation of the Classics. The nadir of classical learning falls in the succeeding period of break-up, confusion, and dawning re-adjustment. In the century or two following the year 850, the writers were too unskilled in Latin and often too cumbered by it, to manifest in their writings that unhampered and distinctive reflex of a personality which we term style. A rare exception would appear in such a potent scholar as Gerbert, who mastered whatever he learned, and made it part of his own faculties and temperament. His letters, consequently, have an individual style, however good or bad we may be disposed to deem it.[239]

Accordingly, until after the millennial year Latin prose shows little beyond a clumsy heaviness resulting from the writer’s insufficient mastery of his medium; and there are many instances of barbarism and corruption of the tongue without any compensating positive qualities. A dreadful example is afforded by the Chronicon of Benedictus, a monk of St. Andrews in Monte Soracte, who lived in the latter part of the tenth century. He relates, as history, the fable of Charlemagne’s journey to the Holy Land; and his own eyes may have witnessed the atrocious times of John XII., of whom he speaks as follows:

“Inter haec non multum tempus Agapitus papa decessit (an. 956). Octabianus in sede sanctissima susceptus est, et vocatus est Johannes duodecimi pape. Factus est tam lubricus sui corporis, et tam audaces, quantum nunc in gentilis populo solebat fieri. Habebat consuetudinem sepius venandi non quasi apostolicus sed quasi homo ferus. Erat enim cogitio ejus vanum; diligebat collectio feminarum, odibiles aecclesiarum, amabilis juvenis ferocitantes. Tanta denique libidine sui corporis exarsit, quanta nunc (non?) possumus enarrare.”[240]

No need to draw further from this writing, which is characterized throughout by crass ignorance of grammar and all else pertaining to Latin. It has no individual qualities; it has no style. Leaving this example of illiteracy, let us turn to a man of more knowledge, Odo, one of the greatest of the abbots of Cluny, who died in the year 943. He left lengthy writings, one of them a bulky epitome of the famous Moralia of Gregory the Great.[241] More original were his three dull books of Collationes, or moral comments upon the Scriptures. They open with a heavy note which their author might have drawn from the dark temperament of that great pope whom he so deeply admired; but the language has a leaden quality which is not Gregory’s, but Odo’s.

“Auctor igitur et judex hominum Deus, licet ab illa felicitate paradisi genus nostrum juste repulerit, suae tamen bonitatis memor, ne totus reus homo quod meretur incurrat, hujus peregrinationis molestias multis beneficiis demulcet.”

And, again, a little further on:

“Omnis vero ejusdem Scripturae intentio est, ut nos ab hujus vitae pravitatibus compescat. Nam idcirco terribilibus suis sententiis cor nostrum, quasi quibusdam stimulis pungit, ut homo terrore pulsatus expavescat, et divina judicia quae aut voluptate carnis aut terrena sollicitudine discissus oblivisci facile solet, ad memoriam reducat.”[242]

One feels the dull heaviness of this. Odo, like many of his contemporaries, knew enough of Latin grammar, and had read some of the Classics. But he had not mastered what he knew, and his knowledge was not converted into power. The tenth century was still painfully learning the lessons of its Christian and classical heritage. A similar lack of personal facility may be observed in Ruotger’s biography of Bruno, the worthy brother of the great emperor Otto I., and Archbishop of Cologne. Bruno died in 965, and Ruotger, who had been his companion, wrote his Life without delay. It has not the didactic ponderousness of Odo’s writing, but its language is clumsy. The following passage is of interest as showing Bruno’s education and the kind of learned man it made him.

“Deinde ubi prima grammaticae artis rudimenta percepit, sicut ab ipso in Dei omnipotentis gloriam hoc saepius ruminante didicimus, Prudentium poetam tradente magistro legere coepit. Qui sicut est et fide intentioneque catholicus, et eloquentia veritateque praecipuus, et metrorum librorumque varietate elegantissimus, tanta mox dulcedine palato cordis ejus complacuit, ut jam non tantum exteriorum verborum scientiam, verum intimi medullam sensus, et nectar ut ita dicam liquidissimum, majori quam dici possit aviditate hauriret. Postea nullum penitus erat studiorum liberalium genus in omni Graeca vel Latina eloquentia, quod ingenii sui vivacitatem aufugeret. Nec vero, ut solet, aut divitiarum affluentia, aut turbarum circumstrepentium assiduitas, aut ullum aliunde subrepens fastidium ab hoc nobili otio animum ejus unquam avertit.... Saepe inter Graecorum et Latinorum doctissimos de philosophiae sublimitate aut de cujuslibet in illa florentis disciplinae subtilitate disputantes doctus interpres medius ipse consedit, et disputantibus ad plausum omnium, quo nihil minus amaverat, satisfecit.”[243]

The gradual improvement in the writing of Latin in the Middle Ages, and the evolution of distinctive mediaeval styles, did not result from a larger acquaintance with the Classics, or a better knowledge of grammar and school rhetoric. The range of classical reading might extend, or from time to time contract, and Donatus and Priscian were used in the ninth century as well as in the twelfth. It is true that the study of grammar became more intelligent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and its teachers deferred less absolutely to the old rules and illustrations. They recognized Christian standards of diction: first of all the Vulgate; next, early Christian poets like Prudentius; and then gradually the mediaeval versifiers who wrote and won approval in the twelfth century. Thus grammar sought to follow current usage.[244] This endeavour culminated at the close of the twelfth century in the Doctrinale of Alexander of Villa Dei.[245] Before this, much of the best mediaeval Latin prose and verse had been written, and the period most devoted to the Classics had come and was already waning. That period was this same twelfth century. During its earlier half, Latinity gained doubtless from such improvement in the courses of the Trivium as took place at Chartres, for example, an improvement connected with the intellectual growth of the time. But the increase in the knowledge of Latin was mainly such as a mature man may realize within himself, if he has kept up his Latin reading, however little he seem to have added to his knowledge since leaving his Alma Mater.

So the development of mediaeval Latin prose (and also verse) advanced with the maturing of mediaeval civilization. That which was at the same time a living factor in this growth and a result of it, was the more organic appropriation of the classical and Christian heritages of culture and religion. As intellectual faculties strengthened, and men drew power from the past, they gained facility in moulding their Latin to their purposes. Writings begin to reflect the personalities of the writers; the diction ceases to be that of clumsy or clever school compositions, and presents an evolution of tangible mediaeval styles. Henceforth, although a man be an eager student of the Classics, like John of Salisbury for example, and try to imitate their excellences, he will still write mediaeval Latin, and with a personal style if he be a strong personality. The classical models no longer trammel, but assist him to be more effectively himself on a higher plane.

If mediaeval civilization is to be regarded as that which the peoples of western Europe attained under the two universal influences of Christianity and antique culture, then nothing more mediaeval will be seen than mediaeval Latin. To make it, the antique Latin had been modified and reinspired and loosed by the Christian energies of the Fathers; and had then passed on to peoples who never had been, or no longer were, antique. They barbarized the language down to the rudeness of their faculties. As they themselves advanced, they brought up Latin with them, as it were, from the depths of the ninth and tenth centuries, but a Latin which in the crude natures of these men had been stripped of classical quality; a Latin barbarous and naked, and ready to be clothed upon with novel qualities which should make it a new creature. Throughout all this process, while Latin was sinking and re-emerging, it was worked upon and inspired by the spirit of the uses to which it was predominantly applied, which were those of the Roman Catholic Church and of the intimacies of the Christian soul, pressing to expression in the learned tongue which they were transforming.

In considering the Latin writings of the Middle Ages one should bear in mind the differences between Italy and the North with respect to the ancient language. These were important through the earlier Middle Ages, when modes of diction sufficiently characteristic to be called styles, were forming. The men of Latin-sodden Italy might have a fluent Latin when those of the North still had theirs to learn. Thus there were Italians in the eleventh century who wrote quite a distinctive Latin prose.[246] Among them were St. Peter Damiani, and St. Anselm of Aosta, Bec, and Canterbury.

The former died full of virtue in the year 1072. We have elsewhere observed his character and followed his career.[247] He was, to his great anxiety, a classical scholar, who had earned large sums as a teacher of rhetoric before natural inclination and fears for his soul drove him to an ascetic life. He was a master of the Latin which he used. His style is intense, eloquent, personal to himself as well as suited to his matter, and reflects his ardent character and keen perceptions. The following is a rhetorical yet beautiful description of a “last leaf,” taken from one of his compositions in praise of the hermit way of salvation.

“Videamus in arbore folium sub ipsis pruinis hiemalibus lapsabundum, et consumpto autumnalis clementiae virore, jamjam pene casurum, ita ut vix ramusculo, cui dependet, inhaereat, sed apertissima levis ruinae signa praetendat: inhorrescunt flabra, venti furentes hic inde concutiunt, brumalis horror crassi aeris rigore densatur: atque, ut magis stupeas, defluentibus reliquis undique foliis terra sternitur, et depositis comis arbor suo decore nudatur; cum illud solum nullo manente permaneat, et velut cohaeredum superstes in fraternae possessionis jura succedat. Quid autem intelligendum in hujus rei consideratione relinquitur, nisi quia nec arboris folium potest cadere, nisi divinum praesumat imperium?”[248]

Anselm’s diction, in spite of its frequent cloister rhetoric, has a simple and modern word-order. An account has already been given of his life and of his thoughts, so beautifully sky-blue, unpurpled with the crimson of human passion, which made the words of Augustine more veritably incandescent.[249] The great African was the strongest individual influence upon Anselm’s thought and language. But the latter’s style has departed further from the classical sentence, and of itself indicates that the writer belongs neither to the patristic period nor to the Carolingian time, busied with its rearrangement of patristic thought. The following is from his Proslogion upon the existence of God. Through this discourse, Deity and the Soul are addressed in the second person after the manner of Augustine’s Confessions.

“Excita nunc, anima mea, et erige totum intellectum tuum, et cogita quantum potes quale et quantum sit illud bonum (i.e. Deus). Si enim singula bona delectabilia sunt, cogita intente quam delectabile sit illud bonum quod continet jucunditatem omnium bonorum; et non qualem in rebus creatis sumus experti, sed tanto differentem quanto differt Creator a creatura. Si enim bona est vita creata, quam bona est vita creatrix! Si jucunda est salus facta, quam jucunda est salus quae fecit omnem salutem! Si amabilis est sapientia in cognitione rerum conditarum, quam amabilis est sapientia quae omnia condidit ex nihilo! Denique, si multae et magnae delectationes sunt in rebus delectabilibus, qualis et quanta delectatio est in illo qui fecit ipsa delectabilia!”[250]

In a more emotional passage Anselm arouses in his soul the terror of the Judgment. It is from a “Meditatio”:

“Taedet animam meam vitae meae; vivere erubesco, mori pertimesco. Quid ergo restat tibi, o peccator, nisi ut in tota vita tua plores totam vitam tuam, ut ipsa tota se ploret totam? Sed est in hoc quoque anima mea miserabiliter mirabilis et mirabiliter miserabilis, quia non tantum dolet quantum se noscit; sed sic secura torpet, velut quid patiatur ignoret. O anima sterilis, quid agis? quid torpes, anima peccatrix? Dies judicii venit, juxta est dies Domini magnus, juxta et velox nimis, dies irae dies illa, dies tribulationis et angustiae, dies calamitatis et miseriae, dies tenebrarum et caliginis, dies nebulae et turbinis, dies tubae et clangoris. O vox diei Domini amara! Quid dormitas, anima tepida et digna evomi?”[251]

Damiani wrote in the middle of the eleventh century, Anselm in the latter part. The northern lands could as yet show no such characteristic styles,[252] although the classically educated German, Lambert of Hersfeld, wrote as correctly and perspicuously as either. His Annals have won admiration for their clear and correct Latinity, modelled upon the styles of Sallust and Livy. He died in 1077, the year of Canossa, his Annals covering the conflict between Henry IV. and Hildebrand up to that event. The narrative moves with spirit, as one may see by reading his description of King Henry and his consort struggling through Alpine ice and snow to reach that castle never to be forgotten, and gain absolution from the Pope before the ban should have completed Henry’s ruin.[253]

For the North, the best period of mediaeval Latin, prose as well as verse, opens with the twelfth century. It was indeed the great literary period of the Middle Ages. For the vernacular literatures flourished as well as the Latin. Provençal literature began as the eleventh century closed, and was stifled in the thirteenth by the Albigensian Crusade. So the twelfth was its great period. Likewise with the Old French literature: except the Roland which is earlier, the chief chansons de geste belong to the twelfth century; also the romances of antiquity, to be spoken of hereafter; also the romances of the Round Table, and a great mass of chansons and fabliaux. The Old German--or rather, Mittel Hochdeutsch--literature touches its height as the century closes and the next begins, in the works of Heinrich von Veldeke, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide.

The best Latin writers of the century lived, or sojourned, or were educated, for the most part in the France north of the Loire. Not that all of them were natives of that territory; for some were German born, some saw the light in England, and the birthplace of many is unknown. Yet they seem to belong to France. Nearly all were ecclesiastics, secular or regular. Many of them were notables in theology, like Hugo of St. Victor, Abaelard, Alanus de Insulis (Lille); many were poets as well, like Alanus and Hildebert and John of Salisbury too; one was a thunderer on the earth, and a most deft politician, Bernard of Clairvaux. Some again are known only as poets, sacred or profane, like Adam of St. Victor, and Walter of Chatillon--but of these hereafter. The best Latin prose writing of this, or any other, mediaeval period, had its definite purpose, metaphysical, theological, or pietistic; and the writers have been or will be spoken of in connection with their specific fields of intellectual achievement or religious fervour. Here, without discussing the men or their works, some favourable examples of their writing will be given.

In the last passage quoted from Anselm, the reader must have felt the working of cloister rhetoric, and have noticed the antitheses and rhymes, to which mediaeval Latin lent itself so readily. Yet it is a slight affair compared with the confounding sonorousness, the flaring pictures, and terrifying climaxes of St. Bernard when preaching upon the same topic--the Judgment Day. In one of his famous sermons on Canticles, the saint has been suggesting to his audience, the monks of Clara Vallis, that although the Father might ignore faults, not so the Dominus and Creator: “et qui parcit filio, non parcet figmento, non parcet servo nequam.” Listen to the carrying out and pointing of this thought:

“Pensa cujus sit formidinis et horroris tuum atque omnium contempsisse factorem, offendisse Dominum majestatis. Majestatis est timeri, Domini est timeri, et maxime hujus majestatis, hujusque Domini. Nam si reum regiae majestatis, quamvis humanae, humanis legibus plecti capite sancitum sit, quis finis contemnentium divinam omnipotentiam erit? Tangit montes, et fumigant; et tam tremendam majestatem audet irritare vilis pulvisculus, uno levi flatu mox dispergendus, et minime recolligendus? Ille, ille timendus est, qui postquam acciderit corpus, potestatem habet mittere et in gehennam. Paveo gehennam, paveo judicis vultum, ipsis quoque tremendum angelicis potestatibus. Contremisco ab ira potentis, a facie furoris ejus, a fragore ruentis mundi, a conflagratione elementorum, a tempestate valida, a voce archangeli, et a verbo aspero. [Feel the climax of this sentence, which tells the end of the sinner.] Contremisco a dentibus bestiae infernalis, a ventre inferi, a rugientibus praeparatis ad escam. Horreo vermem rodentem, et ignem torrentem, fumum, et vaporem, et sulphur, et spiritum procellarum; horreo tenebras exteriores. Quis dabit capiti meo aquam, et oculis meis fontem lacrymarum ut praeveniam fletibus fletum, et stridorem dentium, et manuum pedumque dura vincula, et pondus catenarum prementium, stringentium, urentium, nec consumentium? Heu me, mater mea! utquid me genuisti filium doloris, filium amaritudinis, indignationis et plorationis aeternae? Cur exceptus genibus, cur lactatus uberibus, natus in combustionem, et cibus ignis?”[254]

As one recovers from the sound and power of this high-wrought passage, he notices how readily it might be turned into the form of a Latin hymn; and also how very modern is its sequence of words. Bernard’s Latin could whisper intimate love, as well as thunder terror. He says, preaching on the medicina, the healing power, of Jesu’s name:

“Hoc tibi electuarium habes, o anima mea, reconditum in vasculo vocabuli hujus quod est Jesus, salutiferum, certe, quodque nulli unquam pesti tuae inveniatur inefficax.”[255]

With the music of this prose one may compare the sweet personal plaint of the following:

“Felices quos abscondit in tabernaculo suo in umbra alarum suarum sperantes, donec transeat iniquitas. Caeterum ego infelix, pauper et nudus, homo natus ad laborem, implumis avicula pene omni tempore nidulo exsulans, vento exposita et turbini, turbatus sum et motus sum sicut ebrius, et omnis conscientia mea devorata est.”[256]

Extracts can give no idea of Bernard’s literary powers, any more than a small volume could tell the story of that life which, so to speak, was magna pars of all contemporary history. But since he was one of the best of Latin letter-writers, one should not omit an example of his varied epistolary style, which can be known in its compass only from a large reading of his letters. The following is a short letter, written to win back to the cloister a delicately nurtured youth whose parents had lured him out into the world.

“Doleo super te, fili mi Gaufride, doleo super te. Et merito. Quis enim non doleat florem juventutis tuae, quem laetantibus angelis Deo illibatum obtuleras in odorem suavitatis, nunc a daemonibus conculcari, vitiorum spurcitiis, et saeculi sordibus inquinari? Quomodo qui vocatus eras a Deo, revocantem diabolum sequeris, et quem Christus trahere coeperat post se, repente pedem ab ipso introitu gloriae retraxisti? In te experior nunc veritatem sermonis Domini, quem dixit: Inimici hominis, domestici ejus (Matt. x. 36). Amici tui et proximi tui adversum te appropinquaverunt, et steterunt. Revocaverunt te in fauces leonis, et in portis mortis iterum collocaverunt te. Collocaverunt te in obscuris, sicut mortuos saeculi: et jam parum est ut descendas in ventrem inferi; jam te deglutire festinat, ac rugientibus praeparatis ad escam tradere devorandum.

“Revertere, quaeso, revertere, priusquam te absorbeat profundum, et urgeat super te puteus os suum; priusquam demergaris, unde ulterius non emergas; priusquam ligatis manibus et pedibus projiciaris in tenebras exteriores, ubi est fletus et stridor dentium; priusquam detrudaris in locum tenebrosum, et opertum mortis caligine. Erubescis forte redire, quia ad horam cessisti. Erubesce fugam, et non post fugam reverti in proelium, et rursum pugnare. Necdum finis pugnae, necdum ab invicem dimicantes acies discesserunt: adhuc victoria prae manibus est. Si vis, nolumus vincere sine te, nec tuam tibi invidemus gloriae portionem. Laeti occuremus tibi, laetis te recipiemus amplexibus, dicemusque: Epulari et gaudere oportet, quia hic filius noster mortuus fuerat, et revixit; perierat, et inventus est” (Luc. xv. 32).[257]

The argument of this letter is, from the standpoint of Bernard’s time, as resistless as the style. Did it win back the little monk? Many wonderful examples of loving expression could be drawn from Bernard’s letters;[258] but instead an instance may be given of his none too subtle way of uttering his hate: “Arnaldus de Brixia, cujus conversatio mel et doctrina venenum, cui caput columbae, cauda scorpionis est, quem Brixia evomuit, Roma exhorruit, Francia repulit, Germania abominatur, Italia non vult recipere, fertur esse vobiscum.”[259] And then he proceeds to warn his correspondent of the danger of intercourse with this arch-enemy of the Church.

Considering that Latin was a tongue which youths learned at school rather than at their mothers’ knees, such writing as Bernard’s is a triumphant recasting of an ancient language. One notices in him, as generally with mediaeval religious writers, the influence of the Vulgate, which was mainly in the language of St. Jerome--of Jerome when not writing as a literary virtuoso, but as a scholar occupied with rendering the meaning, and willing to accept such linguistic innovations as served his purpose.[260] But beyond this influence, one sees how masterful is Bernard’s diction, quite freed from observance of classical principles, quite of the writer and his time, adapting itself with ease and power to the topic and character of the composition, and always expressive of the personality of the mighty saint.

Hildebert of Le Mans was a few years older than St. Bernard. As an example of his prose a letter may be cited, of which the translation has been given. It was written in 1128, when he was Archbishop of Tours, in protest against the encroachments of the royal power of the French king, Louis the Fat, upon the rights of the Archiepiscopacy of Tours in the matter of ecclesiastical appointments within that diocese:

“In adversis nonnullum solatium est, tempora sperare laetiora. Diutius spes haec mihi blandita est, et velut agricolam messis in herba, sic animum meum prosperitatis expectatio confortavit. Caeterum jam nihil est quo serenitatem nimbosi temporis exspectem, nihil est quo navis, in cujus puppi sedeo, crebris agitata turbinibus, portum quietis attingat.

“Silent amici, silent sacerdotes Jesu Christi. Denique silent et illi quorum suffragio credidi regem mecum in gratiam rediturum. Credidi quidem, sed super dolorem vulnerum meorum rex, illis silentibus, adjecit. Eorum tamen erat gravamini ecclesiae canonicis obviare institutis. Eorum erat, si res postulasset, opponere murum pro domo Israel. Verum apud serenissimum regem opus est exhortatione potius quam increpatione, consilio quam praecepto, doctrina quam virga. His ille conveniendus fuit, his reverenter instruendus, ne sagittas suas in sene compleret sacerdote, ne sanctiones canonicas evacuaret, ne persequeretur cineres Ecclesiae jam sepultae, cineres in quibus ego panem doloris manduco, in quibus bibo calicem luctus, de quibus eripi et evadere, de morte ad vitam transire est.

“Inter has tamen angustias, nunquam de me sic ira triumphavit, ut aliquem super Christo Domini clamorem deponere vellem, seu pacem ipsius in manu forti et brachio Ecclesiae adipisci. Suspecta est pax ad quam, non amore sed vi, sublimes veniunt potestates. Ea facile rescindetur, et fiunt aliquando novissima pejora prioribus. Alia est via qua compendiosius ad eam Christo perducente pertingam. Jactabo cogitatum meum in Domino, et ipse dabit mihi petitionem cordis mei. Recordatus est Dominus Joseph, cujus pincerna Pharaonis oblitus, dum prospera succederent, interveniendi pro eo curam abjecit.... Fortassis recordabitur et mei, atque in desiderato littore navem sistet fluctuantem. Ipse enim est qui respicit in orationem humilium, et non spernit preces eorum. Ipse est in cujus manu corda regum cerea sunt. Si invenero gratiam in oculis ejus, gratiam regis vel facile consequar, vel utiliter amittam. Siquidem offendere hominem proper Deum lucrari est gratiam Dei.”[261]

John of Salisbury (1110-1180), much younger than Hildebert and a little younger than Bernard, seems to have been the best scholar of his time. With the Classics he is as one in the company of friends; he cites them as readily as Scripture; their sententiae have become part of his views of life. John was an eager humanist, who followed his studies to whatever town and to the feet of whatsoever teacher they might lead him. So he listened to Abaelard and many others. His writing is always lively and often forcible, especially when vituperating the set who despised classic reading. His most vivacious work, the Metalogicus, was directed against their unnamed prophet, whom he dubs “Cornificus.”[262] Its opening passage is of interest as John’s exordium, and because a somewhat consciously intending stylist like our John is likely to exhibit his utmost virtuosity in the opening sentences of an important work:

“Adversus insigne donum naturae parentis et gratiae, calumniam veterem et majorum nostrorum judicio condemnatam excitat improbus litigator, et conquirens undique imperitiae suae solatia, sibi proficere sperat ad gloriam, si multos similes sui, id est si eos viderit imperitos; habet enim hoc proprium arrogantiae tumor, ut se commetiatur aliis, bona sua, si qua sunt, efferens, deprimens aliena; defectumque proximi, suum putet esse profectum. Omnibus autem recte sapientibus indubium est quod natura, clementissima parens omnium, et dispositissima moderatrix, inter caetera quae genuit animantia, hominem privilegio rationis extulit, et usu eloquii insignivit: id agens sedulitate officiosa, et lege dispositissima, ut homo qui gravedine faeculentioris naturae et molis corporeae tarditate premebatur et trahebatur ad ima, his quasi subvectus alis, ad alta ascendat, et ad obtinendum verae beatitudinis bravium, omnia alia felici compendio antecebat. Dum itaque naturam fecundat gratia, ratio rebus perspiciendis et examinandis invigilat; naturae sinus excutit, metitur fructus et efficaciam singulorum: et innatus omnibus amor boni, naturali urgente se appetitu, hoc, aut solum, aut prae caeteris sequitur, quod percipiendae beatitudini maxime videtur esse accommodum.”[263]

One perceives the effect of classical studies; yet the passage is good twelfth-century Latin, quite different from the compositions of the Carolingian epoch, those, for example, from the pen of Alcuin, who had studied the Classics like John, but unlike him had no personal style. One gains similar impressions from the diction of the Polycraticus, a lengthy, discursive work in which John surprises us with his classical equipment. Although containing many quoted passages, it is not made of extracts strung together; but reflects the sentiments or tells the opinions of ancient philosophers in the writer’s own way. The following shows John’s knowledge of early Greek philosophers, and is a fair example of his ordinary style:

“Alterum vero philosophorum genus est, quod Ionicum dicitur et a Graecis ulterioribus traxit originem. Horum princeps fuit Thales Milesius, unus illorum septem, qui dicti sunt sapientes. Iste cum rerum naturam scrutatus, inter caeteros emicuisset, maxime admirabilis exstitit, quod astrologiae numeris comprehensis, solis et lunae defectus praedicebat. Huic successit Anaximander ejus auditor, qui Anaximenem discipulum reliquit et successorem. Diogenes quoque ejusdem auditor exstitit, et Anaxagoras, qui omnium rerum quas videmus, effectorem divinum animum docuit. Ei successit auditor ejus Archelaüs, cujus discipulus Socrates fuisse perhibetur, magister Platonis, qui, teste Apuleio, prius Aristoteles dictus est, sed deinde a latitudine pectoris Plato, et in tantam eminentiam philosophiae, et vigore ingenii, et studii exercitio, et omnium morum venustate, eloquii quoque suavitate et copia subvectus est, ut quasi in throno sapientiae residens, praecepta quadam auctoritate visus est, tam antecessoribus quam successoribus philosophis, imperare. Et primus quidem Socrates universam philosophiam ad corrigendos componendosque mores flexisse memoratur, cum ante illum omnes physicis, id est rebus naturalibus perscrutandis, maximam operam dederint.”[264]

These extracts from the writings of saints and scholars may be supplemented by two extracts from compositions of another class. The mediaeval chronicle has not a good reputation. Its credulity and uncritical spirit varied with the time and man. Little can be said in favour of its general form, which usually is stupidly chronological, or annalistic. The example of classical historical composition was lost on mediaeval annalists. Yet their work is not always dull; and, by the twelfth century, their diction had become as mediaeval as that of the theologian rhetoricians, although it rarely crystallizes to personal style by reason of the insignificance of the writers. A well-known work of this kind is the Gesta Dei per Francos, by Guibert of Nogent, who wrote his account of the First Crusade a few years after its turmoil had passed by. The following passage tells of proceedings upon the conclusion of Urban’s great crusading oration at the Council of Clermont in 1099:

“Peroraverat vir excellentissimus, et omnes qui se ituros voverant, beati Petri potestate absolvit, eadem, ipsa apostolica auctoritate firmavit, et signum satis conveniens hujus tam honestae professionis instituit, et veluti cingulum militiae, vel potius militaturis Deo passionis Dominicae stigma tradens, crucis figuram, ex cujuslibet materiae panni, tunicis, byrris et palliis iturorum, assui mandavit. Quod si quis, post hujus signi acceptionem, aut post evidentis voti pollicitationem ab ista benevolentia, prava poenitudine, aut aliquorum suorum affectione resileret, ut exlex perpetuo haberetur omnino praecepit, nisi resipisceret; idemque quod omiserat foede repeteret. Praeterea omnes illos atroci damnavit anathemate, qui eorum uxoribus, filiis, aut possessionibus, qui hoc Dei iter aggrederentur, per integrum triennii tempus, molestiam auderent inferre. Ad extremum, cuidam viro omnimodis laudibus efferendo, Podiensis urbis episcopo, cujus nomen doleo quia neque usquam reperi, nec audivi, curam super eadem expeditione regenda contulit, et vices suas ipsi, super Christiani populi quocunque venirent institutione, commisit. Unde et manus ei, more apostolorum, data pariter benedictione, imposuit. Quod ille quam sagaciter sit exsecutus, docet mirabilis operis tanti exitus.”[265]

This Frenchman Guibert is almost vivacious. A certain younger contemporary of his, of English birth, could construct his narrative quite as well. Ordericus Vitalis (d. 1142) is said to have been born at Wroxeter, though he spent most of his life as monk of St. Evroult in Normandy. There he wrote his Historia Ecclesiastica of Normandy and England. His account of the loss of the White Ship in 1120 tells the story:

“Thomas, filius Stephani, regem adiit, eique marcum auri offerens, ait: ‘Stephanus, Airardi filius, genitor meus fuit, et ipse in omni vita sua patri tuo in mari servivit. Nam illum, in sua puppe vectum, in Angliam conduxit, quando contra Haraldum pugnaturus, in Angliam perrexit. Hujusmodi autem officio usque ad mortem famulando ei placuit, et ab eo multis honoratus exeniis, inter contribules suos magnifice floruit. Hoc feudum, domine rex, a te requiro, et vas quod Candida-Navis appellatur, merito ad regalem famulatum optime instructum habeo.’ Cui rex ait: ‘Gratum habeo quod petis. Mihi quidem aptam navim elegi, quam non mutabo; sed filios meos, Guillelmum et Richardum, quos sicut me diligo, cum multa regni mei nobilitate, nunc tibi commendo.’

“His auditis, nautae gavisi sunt, filioque regis adulantes, vinum ab eo ad bibendum postulaverunt. At ille tres vini modios ipsis dari praecepit. Quibus acceptis, biberunt, sociisque abundanter propinaverunt, nimiumque potantes inebriati sunt. Jussu regis multi barones cum filiis suis puppim ascenderunt, et fere trecenti, ut opinor, in infausta nave fuerunt. Duo siquidem monachi Tironis, et Stephanus comes cum duobus militibus, Guillelmus quoque de Rolmara, et Rabellus Camerarius, Eduardus de Salesburia, et alii plures inde exierunt, quia nimiam multitudinem lascivae et pompaticae juventutis inesse conspicati sunt. Periti enim remiges quinquaginta ibi erant, et feroces epibatae, qui jam in navi sedes nacti turgebant, et suimet prae ebrietate immemores, vix aliquem reverenter agnoscebant. Heu! quamplures illorum mentes pia devotione erga Deum habebant vacuas

‘Qui maris immodicas moderatur et aeris iras.’

Unde sacerdotes, qui ad benedicendos illos illuc accesserant, aliosque ministros qui aquam benedictam deferebant, cum dedecore et cachinnis subsannantes abigerunt; sed paulo post derisionis suae ultionem receperunt.

“Soli homines, cum thesauro regis et vasis merum ferentibus, Thomae carinam implebant, ipsumque ut regiam classem, quae jam aequora sulcabat, summopere prosequeretur, commonebant. Ipse vero, quia ebrietate desipiebat, in virtute sua, satellitumque suorum confidebat, et audacter, quia omnes qui jam praecesserant praeiret, spondebat. Tandem navigandi signum dedit. Porro schippae remos haud segniter arripuerunt, et alia laeti, quia quid eis ante oculos penderet nesciebant, armamenta coaptaverunt, navemque cum impetu magno per pontum currere fecerunt. Cumque remiges ebrii totis navigarent conatibus, et infelix gubernio male intenderet cursui dirigendo per pelagus, ingenti saxo quod quotidie fluctu recedente detegitur et rursus accessu maris cooperitur, sinistrum latus Candidae-Navis vehementer illisum est, confractisque duabus tabulis, ex insperato, navis, proh dolor! subversa est. Omnes igitur in tanto discrimine simul exclamaverunt; sed aqua mox implente ora, pariter perierunt. Duo soli virgae qua velum pendebat manus injecerunt, et magna noctis parte pendentes, auxilium quodlibet praestolati sunt. Unus erat Rothomagensis carnifex, nomine Beroldus, et alter generosus puer, nomine Goisfredus, Gisleberti de Aquila filius.

“Tunc luna in signo Tauri nona decima fuit, et fere ix horis radiis suis mundum illustravit, et navigantibus mare lucidum reddidit. Thomas nauclerus post primam submersionem vires resumpsit, suique memor, super undas caput extulit, et videns capita eorum qui ligno utcunque inhaerebant, interrogavit: ‘Filius regis quid devenit?’ Cumque naufragi respondissent illum cum omnibus collegis suis deperisse: ‘Miserum,’ inquit, ‘est amodo meum vivere.’ Hoc dicto, male desperans, maluit illic occumbere, quam furore irati regis pro pernicie prolis oppetere, seu longas in vinculis poenas luere.”[266]

Our examples thus far belong to the twelfth century. As touching its successor, it will be interesting to observe the qualities of two opposite kinds of writing, the one springing from the intellectual activities, and the other from the religious awakening, of the time. In the thirteenth century, scientific and scholastic writing was of representative importance, and deeply affected the development of Latin prose. Very different in style were the Latin stories and vitae of the blessed Francis of Assisi and other saints, composed in Italy.

Roger Bacon, of whom there will be much to say, composed most of his extant works about the year 1267.[267] His language is often rough and involved, from his impetuosity and eagerness to utter what was in him. But it is always vigorous. He took pains to say just what he meant, and what was worth saying; and frequently rewrote his sentences. His writings show little rhetoric; yet they are stamped with a Baconian style, which has a cumulative force. The word-order is modern with scarcely a trace of the antique. Perhaps we may say that he wrote Latin like an Englishman of vehement temper and great intellect. He is powerful in continuous exposition; yet instances of his general, and very striking statements, will illustrate his diction at its best. In the following sentence he recognizes the progressiveness of knowledge, a rare idea in the Middle Ages:

“Nam semper posteriores addiderunt ad opera priorum, et multa correxerunt, et plura mutaverunt, sicut maxime per Aristotelem patet, qui omnes sententias praecedentium discussit.”[268]

Again, he animadverts upon the duty of thirteenth-century Christians to supply the defects of the old philosophers:

“Quapropter antiquorum defectus deberemus nos posteriores supplere, quia introivimus in labores eorum, per quos, nisi simus asini, possumus ad meliora excitari; quia miserrimum est semper uti inventis et nunquam inveniendis.”[269]

Speaking of language, he says:

“Impossibile est quod proprietas unius linguae servetur in alia.”[270] (“The idioms of one language cannot be preserved in a translation.”) And again: “Omnes philosophi fuerunt post patriarchas et prophetas ... et legerunt libros prophetarum et patriarcharum qui sunt in sacro textu.”[271] (“The philosophers of Greece came after the prophets of the Old Testament and read their works contained in the sacred text.”)

In the first of these sentences Bacon shows his linguistic insight; in the second he reflects an uncritical view entertained since the time of the Church Fathers; in both, he writes with an order of words requiring no change in an English translation.

In his time, Bacon had but a sorry fame, and his works no influence. The writings of his younger contemporary Thomas Aquinas exerted greater influence than those of any man after Augustine. They represent the culmination of scholasticism. He was Italian born, and his language, however difficult the matter, is lucidity itself. It is never rhetorical; but measured, temperate, and balanced; properly proceeding from the mind which weighed every proposition in the scales of universal consideration. Sometimes it gains a certain fervour from the clarity and import of the statement which it so lucidly conveys. In article eighth, of the first Questio, of Pars Prima of the Summa theologiae, Thomas thus decides that Theology is a rational (argumentativa) science:

“Respondeo dicendum quod, sicut aliae scientiae non argumentantur ad sua principia probanda, sed ex principiis argumentantur ad ostendendum alia in ipsis scientiis; ita haec doctrina non argumentatur ad sua principia probanda, quae sunt articuli fidei; sed ex eis procedit ad aliquid aliud ostendendum; sicut Apostolus I ad Cor. xv., ex resurrectione Christi argumentatur ad resurrectionem communem probandam.

“Sed tamen considerandum est in scientiis philosophicis, quod inferiores scientiae nec probant sua principia, nec contra negantem principia disputant, sed hoc relinquunt superiori scientiae: suprema vero inter eas, scilicet metaphysica, disputat contra negantem sua principia, si adversarius aliquid concedit: si autem nihil concedit, non potest cum eo disputare, potest tamen solvere rationes ipsius. Unde sacra scriptura (i.e. Theology), cum non habeat superiorem, disputat cum negante sua principia: argumentando quidem, si adversarius aliquid concedat eorum quae per divinam revelationem habentur; sicut per auctoritates sacrae doctrinae disputamus contra hereticos, et per unum articulum contra negantes alium. Si vero adversarius nihil credat eorum quae divinitus revelantur, non remanet amplius via ad probandum articulos fidei per rationes, sed ad solvendum rationes, si quas inducit, contra fidem. Cum enim fides infallibili veritati innitatur, impossibile autem sit de vero demonstrari contrarium, manifestum est probationes quae contra fidem inducuntur, non esse demonstrationes, sed solubilia argumenta.”[272]

Of a different intellectual temperament was John of Fidanza, known as St. Bonaventura.[273] He also was born and passed his youth in Italy. This sainted General of the Franciscan Order was a few years older than the great Dominican, who was his friend. Both doctors died in the year 1274. Bonaventura’s powers of constructive reasoning were excellent. His diction is clear and beautiful, and eloquent with a spiritual fervour whenever the matter is such as to evoke it. His account of how he came to write his famous little Itinerarium mentis in Deum is full of temperament.

“Cum igitur exemplo beatissimi patris Francisci hanc pacem anhelo spiritu quaererem, ego peccator, qui loco ipsius patris beatissimi post eius transitum septimus in generali fratrum ministerio per omnia indignus succedo; contigit, ut nutu divino circa Beati ipsius transitum, anno trigesimo tertio ad montem Alvernae tanquam ad locum quietum amore quaerendi pacem spiritus declinarem, ibique existens, dum mente tractarem aliquas mentales ascensiones in Deum, inter alia occurrit illud miraculum, quod in praedicto loco contigit ipsi beato Francisco, de visione scilicet Seraph alati ad instar Crucifixi. In cuius consideratione statim visum est mihi, quod visio illa praetenderet ipsius patris suspensionem in contemplando et viam, per quam pervenitur ad eam.”[274]

And Bonaventura at the end of his Itinerarium speaks of the perfect passing of Francis into God through the very mystic climax of contemplation, concluding thus:

“Si autem quaeras, quomodo haec fiant, interroga gratiam, non doctrinam; desiderium, non intellectum; gemitum orationis, non studium lectionis; sponsum, non magistrum; Deum, non hominem; caliginem, non claritatem; non lucem, sed ignem totaliter inflammantem et in Deum excessivis unctionibus et ardentissimis affectionibus transferentem.”[275]

Bonaventura’s fervent diction will serve to carry us over from the more unmitigated intellectuality of Bacon and Thomas to the simpler matter of those personal and pious narratives from which may be drawn concluding illustrations of mediaeval Latin prose. Some of the authors will show the skill which comes from training; others are quite innocent of grammar, and their Latin has made a happy surrender to the genius of their vernacular speech, which was the lingua vulgaris of northern Italy.

One of the earliest biographers of St. Francis of Assisi was Thomas of Celano, a skilled Latinist, who was enraptured with the loveliness of Francis’s life. His diction is limpid and rhythmical. A well-known passage in his Vita prima (for he wrote two Lives) tells of Francis’s joyous assurance of the great work which God would accomplish through the simple band who formed the beginnings of the Order. This assurance crystallized in a vision of multitudes hurrying to join. Francis speaks to the brethren:

“Confortamini, charissimi, et gaudete in Domino, nec, quia pauci videmini, efficiamini tristes. Ne vos deterreat mea, vel vestra simplicitas, quoniam sicut mihi a Domino in veritate ostensum est, in maximam multitudinem faciet vos crescere Deus, et usque ad fines orbis multipliciter dilatabit. Vidi multitudinem magnam hominum ad nos venientium, et in habitu sanctae conversationis beataeque religionis regula nobiscum volentium conversari; et ecce adhuc sonitus eorum est in auribus meis, euntium, et redeuntium secundum obedientiae sanctae mandatum: vidique vias ipsorum multitudine plenas ex omni fere natione in his partibus convenire. Veniunt Francigenae, festinant Hispani, Teuthonici, et Anglici currunt, et aliarum diversarum linguarum accelerat maxima multitudo.

“Quod cum audissent fratres, repleti sunt gaudio Salvatoris sive propter gratiam, quam dominus Deus contulerat sancto suo, sive quia proximorum lucrum sitiebant ardenter, quos desiderabant ut salvi essent, in idipsum quotidie augmentari.”[276]

We feel the flow and rhythm, and note the agreeable balancing of clauses. Francis died in 1226. The Vita prima by Celano was approved by Gregory IX. in 1229. Already other matter touching the saint was gathering in anecdote and narrative. Much of it was brought together in the so-called Speculum perfectionis, which has been confidently but very questionably ascribed to Francis’s personal disciple, Brother Leo. Brother Leo, or whoever may have been the narrator or compiler, was no scholar; his Latin is naively incorrect, and has also the simplicity of Gospel narrative. Indeed this Latin is as effectively “vulgarized” as the Greek of Matthew’s Gospel. An interesting passage tells with what loving wisdom Francis interpreted a text of Scripture:

“Manente ipso apud Senas venit ad eum quidam doctor sacrae theologiae de ordine Praedicatorum, vir utique humilis et spiritualis valde. Quum ipse cum beato Francisco de verbis Domini simul aliquamdiu contulissent interrogavit eum magister de illo verbo Ezechielis: Si non annuntiaveris impio impietatem suam animam ejus de manu tua requiram. Dixit enim: ‘Multos, bone pater, ego cognosco in peccato mortali quibus non annuntio impietatem eorum, numquid de manu mea ipsorum animae requirentur?’

“Cui beatus Franciscus humiliter dixit se esse idiotam et ideo magis expedire sibi doceri ab eo quam super scripturae sententiam respondere. Tunc ille humilis magister adjecit: ‘Frater, licet ab aliquibus sapientibus hujus verbi expositionem audiverim, tamen libenter super hoc vestrum perciperem intellectum.’ Dixit ergo beatus Franciscus: ‘Si verbum debeat generaliter intelligi, ego taliter accipio ipsum quod servus Dei sic debet vita et sanctitate in seipso ardere vel fulgere ut luce exempli et lingua sanctae conversationis omnes impios reprehendat. Sic, inquam, splendor ejus et odor famae ipsius annuntiabit omnibus iniquitates eorum.’

“Plurimum itaque doctor ille aedificatus recedens dixit sociis beati Francisci: ‘Fratres mei, theologia hujus viri puritate et contemplatione subnixa est aquila volans, nostra vero scientia ventre graditur super terram.’”[277]

Another passage has Francis breaking out in song from the joy of his love of Christ:

“Ebrius amore et compassione Christi beatus Franciscus quandoque talia faciebat, nam dulcissima melodia spiritus intra se ipsum ebulliens frequenter exterius gallice dabat sonum et vena divini susurrii quam auris ejus suscipiebat furtive gallicum erumpebat in jubilum.

“Lignum quandoque colligebat de terra ipsumque sinistro brachio superponens aliud lignum per modum arcus in manu dextera trahebat super illud, quasi super viellam vel aliud instrumentum atque gestus ad hoc idoneos faciens gallice cantabat de Domino Jesu Christo. Terminabatur denique tota haec tripudiatio in lacrymas et in compassionem passionis Christi hic jubilus solvebatur.

“In his trahebat continue suspiria et ingeminatis gemitibus eorum quae tenebat in manibus oblitus suspendebatur ad caelum.”[278]

This Latin is as childlike as the Old Italian of the Fioretti of St. Francis; it has a like word-order, and one might almost add, a like vocabulary. The simple, ignorant writer seems as if held by a direct and personal inspiration from the familiar life of the sweet saint. His language reflects that inspiration, and mirrors his own childlike character. Hence he has a style, direct, effective, moving to tears and joy, like his impression of the blessed Francis.

A not dissimilar kind of childlike Latin could attain to a remarkable symmetry and balance. The Legenda aurea is before us, written by the Dominican Jacobus à Voragine, by race a Genoese, and living toward the close of the thirteenth century. This book was the most popular compend of saints’ lives in use in the later Middle Ages. Its stories are told with fascinating naïveté. We cite the opening sentences from its chapter on the Annunciation, just to show the harmony and balance of its periods. The passage is exceptional and almost formal in these qualities:

“Annunciatio dominica dicitur, quia in tali die ab angelo adventus filii Dei in carnem fuit annuntiatus, congruum enim fuit, ut incarnationem praecederet angelica annuntiatio, triplici ratione. Primo ratione ordinis connotandi, ut scilicet ordo reparationis responderet ordini praevaricationis. Unde sicut dyabolus tentavit mulierem, ut eam pertraheret ad dubitationem et per dubitationem ad consensum et per consensum ad lapsum, sic angelus nuntiavit virgini, ut nuntiando excitaret ad fidem et per fidem ad consensum et per consensum ad concipiendum Dei filium. Secundo ratione ministerii angelici, quia enim angelus est Dei minister et servus et beata virgo electa erat, ut esset Dei mater, et congruum est ministrum dominae famulari, conveniens fuit, ut beatae virgini annuntiatio per angelum fieret. Tertio ratione lapsus angelici reparandi. Quia enim incarnatio non tantum faciebat ad reparationem humani lapsus, sed etiam ad reparationem ruinae angelicae, ideo angeli non debuerunt excludi. Unde sicut sexus mulieris non excluditur a cognitione mysterii incarnationis et resurrectionis, sic etiam nec angelicus nuntius. Imo Deus utrumque angelo mediante nuntiat mulieri, scilicet incarnationem virgini Mariae et resurrectionem Magdelenae.”[279]

These extracts bring us far into the thirteenth century. Two hundred years later, mediaeval Latin prose, if one may say so, sang its swan song in that little book which is a last, sweet, and composite echo of all mellifluous mediaeval piety. Yet perhaps this De imitatione Christi of Thomas à Kempis can scarcely be classed as prose, so full is it of assonances and rhythms fit for chanting.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us