educated people according to the degraded standard and
lessened intellectual energies of those times.^

^Undoubtedly, in its decline this Latin civilization of
Italy could no longer raise barbarians to the level of the
Augustan age. Yet it still was making them over into
the likeness of its own weakened children. The Visigoths
broke into Italy, then, as we are told, passed into southern ^
France ; other confused barbarians came and went, and then
the Ostrogoths, with Theodoric at their head, an excellent
but not very niunerous folk. They stayed in Italy, and
fought and died, or Uved on, changing into indistinguishable
Italians, save for flashes of yellow hair, appearing and re-
appearing where the Goths had lived. "^ And then the
Lombards, crueller than the Goths, but better able to main-
tain their energies effective. Their niunbers also were not
great, compared with the Italians. And thereafter, in spite
of their fierceness and the tenacity of their Germanic customs,
the succeeding Lombard generations became imbued with
the culture of Italy. They became North Italians, gravi-

> Postt Chapter XL



Digitized by



Google



8 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND BOor I

tating to the towns of Lombardy, or perhaps, farther to the
south, holding together in settlements of their own, or
forming the nucleus of a hill-dwelling coimtry nobility.

^ The Italian stock remained predominant over all the
incomers of northern blood. It certainly needed no intro-
duction to what had largely been its own creation, the
Latin civilization.^ With weakened hands, it still held to
the education, the culture, of its own past i it still read its
andent literature, and imitated it in miserable verse. The
incoming barbarians had hastened the land's intellectual
downfall. But all the plagues of inroad and pestilence and
famine, which intermittently devastated Italy from the fifth
to the tenth centiuy, left some squalid continuity of educa-
tion. And those barbarian stoc^ which stayed in that
home of the classics, became imbued with whatever culture
existed around them, and tended gradually to coalesce with
the Italians.

Evidently in its old home, where it merely had become
decadent, this ancient culture would fill a r61e quite different
from any specific influence which it might exert in a country
where the Latin education was freshly introduced. In
Italy, a general survival of Roman law and institution,
custom and tradition, endured so far as these various ele-
ments of the Italian civilization had not been lost or dis-
possessed, or left high and dry above the receding tide of
culture and intelligence. Christianity had been superim-
posed upon paganism ; and the Christian faith held thoughts
incompatible with antique views of life. Teutonic customs
were brought in, and the Lombard codes were enacted,
working some specific supersession of the Roman law.
The tone, the sentiment, the mind of the Italian people had
altered from the patterns presented by Cicero, or Virgil, or
Horace, or Tacitus. '^Nevatheless, the antique remained as
the soil from which things grew, or as the somewhat turgid
atmosphere breathed by living beings. It was not merely
a form of education or vehicle of edifying knowledge, nor
solely a literary standard. The common modes of the
antique were there as well, its daily habits, its urbanity and
its dross.

The relationship toward the antique held by the peoples



Digitized by



Google



CH.I GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 9

of the Iberian peninsula and the lands which eventually
were to make France, was not quite the same as that held
by the Italians. Spaiu, save in intractable mountain r^ons,
had become a domicile of Latin culture before its people
were converted to Christianity. Then it became a strong-
hold of early Catholicism. Latin and Catholic Spain
absorbed its Visigothic invaders, who in a few generations
had appropriated the antique culture, and had turned from
Arianism to the orthodoxy of their new home. Under
Visigothic rule, the Spanish church became exceptionally
authoritative, and its Latin and Catholic learning flourished
at the b^puming of the seventh century. These conditions
gave way before the Moorish conquest, which was most
complete in the most thoroughly Romanized portions of
the land. Yet the permanent Latinization of the territory
where Christianity continued, is borne witness to by the
languages growing from the vulgar Latin dialects. The
endiirance of Latin culture is shown by the polished Latinity
of Theodulphus, a Spanish Goth, who left his home at the
invitation of Charlemagne, and died, the best Latin verse-
maker of his time, as Bishop of Orleans in 821. Thus the
education, culture, and languages of Spain were all from
the antique. Yet the genius of the land was to be specifi-
cally Spanish rather than assimilated to any such deep-soiled
paganism as underlay the ecclesiastical Christianization of
Italy.

As for France, in the southern part which had been
Provincia, the antique endured in laws and institutions, in
architecture and in ways of life, to a degree second only to
its dynamic continuity in Italy. And this in spite of the
crude masses of Teutondom which poured into Provinda
to be leavened by its culture. In northern France there
were more barbarian folk and a less imiversally diffused
Latinity. The Merovingian period swept most of the last
away, leaving a fair field to be sown afresh with the Latin
education of the Carolingian revival. Yet the inherited dis-
cipline of obedience to the Roman order was not obliterated
from the Gallic stock, and the lasting Latinization of Gaul
endured in the Romance tongues, which were also to be
impressed upon all German invaders. Franks, Burgundians,



Digitized by



Google



lo THE MEDIAEVAL MIND book i

or Alemanni, who came in contact with the provincials,
began to be affected by their language, their religion, their
ways of living, and by whatever survival of letters there
was among them. The Romance dialects were to trimnph,
were to become French; and in the earliest extant pieces
of this vernacular poetry, the effect of Latin verse-forms
appears. Yet Franks and Biurgundians were not Latinized
in spirit; and, in truth, the Gauls before them had only
become good imitation Latins. At all events, from these
mixed and intermediate conditions, a people were to emerge
who were not German, nor altogether Latin, in spite of
their Romance speech. Latin culture was not quite as a
foreign influence upon these Gallo-Roman, Teutonically re-
inspirited, incipient, French. Nor were they bom and bred
to it, like the Italians. The antique was not to dominate
the French genius; it was not to stem the growth of what
was, so to speak, Gothic or northern or Teutonic. The
glass-paiuting, the sculptiure, the architecture of northern
France were to become their own great French selves; and
while the literature was to hold to forms derived from the
antique and the Romanesque, the spirit and the contents
did not come from Italy.

"^The office of Latin culture in Germany and England was
to be more definite and limited. Germany had never been
subdued to the Roman order; in Anglo-Saxon England,
Roman civilization had been effaced by the Saxon conquest,
which, like the Moorish conquest of Spain, was most com-
plete in those parts of the land where the Roman influence
had been strongest. In neither of these lands was there any
antique atmosphere, or antique pagan substratum — save as
the imiversal human soul is pagan! Latinity came to
Germans and Anglo-Saxons as a foreign culture, which was
not to pertain to all men's daily living.' It was matter for
the educated, for the clergy. Its vehicle was a formal
language, having no connection with the vemaoilar. And
when the antique culture had obtained certain resting-places
in England and Germany, the first benign labours of those
Germans or Anglo-Saxons who had mastered the language
consisted in the translation of edifying Latin matter into
their own tongues. *So Latinity in England and Germany



Digitized by



Google



CH.I GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS ii

was Hkely to remain a distinguishable influence. The
Anglo-Saxons and the rest in England were to become
Englishmen, the Germans were to remain Germans ; nor was
either race ever to become Latinized, however deeply the
educated people of these countries might imbibe Latinity,^
and exercise their intellects upon all that was contained
in the antique metaphysics and natural science, literature
and law.

^Thus diverse were the situations of the yoimg mediaeval
peoples with respect to the antique store. ^ There were like
differences of situation in regard to Latin Christianity. It
had been formed (from some points of view, one might say,
created) by the civilized peoples of the Roman Empire who
had been converted in the course of the original diffusion of
the Faith. It was, in fact, the product of the conversion of
the Roman Empire, and, in Italy and the Latin provinces,
received its final fashioning and temper from die Latin
Fathers. So from the Latin-speaking portions of the
Empire came the system which was to be presented to the
Teutonic heathen peoples of the north. They had neither
made it nor grown up with it. It was brought to the
Franks, to the Anglo-Saxons, and to the Germans east of
the Rhine, as a new and foreign faith. And the import
of the fact that it was introduced to them as an authoritative
religion did not lessen as Christianity became a formative
element in their natures.

(- One may say that an attitude of hiunble inferiority
before Christianity and Latin culture was an initial condition
of mediaeval development, having much to do with setting
its future lines. In Italy, men looked back to what seemed
even as a greater ancestral self, while in the minds of the
northern peoples the ancient Empire represented all know-
ledge and the sunmiit of hmnan greatness.^ The formulated
and ordered Latin Christianity evoked even deeper homage. -^
Well it might, since besides the resistless Gospel (its source
of life) it held the intelligence and the organizing power of
Rome, which had passed into its own last creation, the
Catholic Church. And when this Christianity, so mighty
in itself and august through the prestige of Rome, was pre-
sented as imder authority, its new converts might well be



Digitized by



Google



y



12 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND book i

struck with awe.^ It was such as this that acknowledged
the claims of the Roman bishops, and made possible a Roman
and Catholic Church — ^the most potent unifying influence
of the Middle Ages.

^ Still more was the character of mediaeval progress set by
the action and effect of these two forces. The Latin culture
provided the means and method of elementary education, as
well as the material for study; while Latin Christianity,
with transforming power, worked itself into the souls of
the young mediaeval peoples. The two were assuredly the
moulding forces of all mediaeval develc^ment ; and whatever
sprang to life beyond the range of their action was not,
properly speaking, mediaeval, even though seeing the light in
the twelfth century^ Yet one should not think of these two
great influences as entities, unchanging and utterly distinct
from what must be called for simplicity's sake the native
traits of the mediaeval peoples. The antique culture had
never ceased to be part of the nature and faculties of Italians,
and to some extent still made the inherited equipment of
the Latinized or Latin-descended people of Spain and
France. In the same lands also, Latin Christianity had
attained its form. And even in England and Germany,
Christianity and Latin culture would be distinct from the
Teuton folk only at the first moment of presentation and

1 See posi. Chapter DC., as to the maimer of the coming of Augustine to Eng-
land.

• The Icelandic Sagas, for example, were then brought into written form.
They have a genius of their own; they are realistic and without a trace of
lymboHsm. Th^ are wonderful expressions of the people among whom they
were composed. Post, Chapter VIII. But, products of a remote island, they were
unaffected by the moulding forces of mediaeval devebpment, nor did they exert
any influence in turn. The native traits of the mediaeval peoples were the great
oomplementaiy factor in mediaeval progres8 - oomplementary, that b to say, to
Latin Christianity and antique culture. Mediaeval characteristics sprang from the
interaction of these dements; they certainly did not spring from any such indepen-
dent and severed growth of native Teuton quality as is evinced by the Sagas. One
will look far, however, for another instance of sudi spiritual aloofness. For clear
as are the different racial or national traits throughout the mediaeval period, they
constantly appear in conjunction with other elements. They are discerned work-
ing beneath, possibly reacting against, and always affected by, the genius of the
Middle Ages, to wit, the genius of the mutual interaction of the whole. Wolfram's
very German Panival, the old French Ckamon de Rdamd, and above them all
the Divma CommeHa, are mediaevaL In these compositions in the vernacular,
racial traits manifest themselves distinctly, and yet are affected by the mediaeval
spirit



Digitized by



Google



CH.I GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 13

acceptance. Thereupon the two would b^in to enter into
and affect theu: new disciples, and would themselves change
under the process of their own assimilation by these Teutonic
natures.

* Nevertheless, the Latin Christianity of the Fathers and
the antique fund of sentiment and knowledge, through their
self-conserving strength, affected men in constant ways.^
Under their action the peoples of western Europe, from die
eighth to the thirteenth century, passed through a homo-
geneous growth, and evolved a q>irit different from that of
any other period of history — a spirit which stood in awe
before its monitors divine and human, and deemed that
knowledge was to be drawn from the storehouse of the past ;
which seemed to rely on everything excqpt its sin-crushed
self, and trusted everything except its senses; which in the
actual looked for the ideal, in the concrete saw the symbol, .
in the earthly Church beheld the heavenly, and in fleshly
joys discerned the devil's lures ; which lived in the unrecon^
cfled opposition between the lust and vain-glory of earth
and the attainment of salvation ; which felt life's taror and
its pitifulness, and its eternal hope; around which waved
concrete infinitudes, and over which flamed the terror of
darkness and the Judgment Day.

n

^ Under the action of Latin Christianity and the antique
culture the mediaeval genius developed, as it fused the
constituents of its growth into temperament and power.
It was not its destiny to produce an extension of knowl-
edge or originate substantial novelties either of thought
or imaginative conception. Its energies were rather to
e]q>end thonselves in the creation of new forms — forms of
aiyrehending and presenting what was (or might be) known
frcnn the old books, and all that from century to century
was ever more plastically felt. This princq>le is most
important for the true appreciation of the intellectual and
emotional phenomena of the Middle Ages. ^

Whai a sublime religion is offered to capable but half-
dvilized peoples, and at the same time an acquaintance



Digitized by



Google



14 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND book i

is opened to them with the education, the knowledge, the
literature of a great civilization, they cannot create new
forms or presentations of what they have received, imtil the
same has been assimilated, and has become plastic in their
minds, as it were, part of their faculty and feeling. Mani-
festly the northern peoples cotdd not at once transmute the
lofty and superabundant matter of Latin Christianity and
its accompanying Latin culture, and present the same in
new forms. Nor in truth could Italy, involved as she was
in a disturbed decadence, wherein she seemed to be receding
from an imderstanding of the nobler portions of her antique
and Christian heritage, rather than progressing toward a
vital use of one or the other. In Spain and France there
was some decadence among Latinized provincials; and the
Teutonic conquerors were novices in both Christianity and
Latinity. In these lands neither decadence nor the novelty
of the matter was the sole embarrassment, but both com-
bined to hinder creativeness, although the decadence was
less obvious than in Italy, and the newness of the matter
less utter than in Germany.

'^The andent material was appropriated, and then re-
expressed in new forms, through two general ways of
transmutation, the intellectual and the emotional.^ Al-
though patently distinguishable, these would usually work
together, with one or the other dominating the joint
progress.

Of the two, the intellectual is the easier to analyze.
Thinking is necessarily dependent on the thinker, although
it appear less intimately part of him than his emotions, and
less expressive of his character. Accordingly, the mediaeval
genius shows somewhat more palely in its intellectual pro-
ductions, than in the more emotional phases of literature and
art. Yet the former exemplify not only mediaeval capacities,
but also the mediaeval intellectual temperament, or, as it
were, the 'synthetic predisposition of the mediaeval mind.'
This temperament, this intellectual predisposition, became in
general more marked through the centuries from the ninth
to the twelfth. People could not go on generation after
generation occupied with like topics of intellectual interest,
reasoning upon them along certain lines of religious and



Digitized by



Google



CH.I GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 15

ethical suggestion, without developing or intensifying some
general type of intellectual temper.

From the Carolingian period onward, the men interested
in knowledge learned the patristic theology, and, in gradually
expanding compass, acquired antique logic and metaphysics, ^
mathematics, natural science and jurisprudence. What they
learned, they laboured to restate or expound. With each
succeeding generation, the subjects of mediaeval study were
made more closely part of the intelligence occupied with
them ; because the matter had been considered for a longer
time, and had been constantly restated and restudied in
terms more nearly adapted to the comprehension of the men
who were learning and restating it. 'At length mediaeval
men made the antique and patristic material, or rather their
understanding of it, dynamicaUy their own. Their com-
prehension of it became part of their intellectual faculties,
they could think for themselves in its terms, think almost
originally and creatively, and could present as their own the
matter of their thoughts in restatements, that is, in forms
essentially new.^

'From century to century may be traced the process of
restatement of patristic Christianity, with the antique
material contained in it. The Christianity of the fifth
century contained an amplitude of thought and learning.
To the creative work of earlier and chiefly eastern men, the
Latin intellect finally incorporate in Ambrose, Jerome, and
Augustine had added its further great accomplishment and
ordering. The siun of dogma was well-nigh made up; the
Trinity was established; Christian learning had reached a
compass beyond which it was not to pass for the next
thousand years ; the doctrines as to the " sacred mysteries, "
as to the fimctions of the Chxurch and its spiritual authority,
existed in substance; the principles of s3rmbolism and
allegory had been set ; the great mass of allegorical Scriptural
interpretations had been devised; the spiritual relationship
of man to God's ordainment, to wit, the part to be played
by the human will in man's salvation or danmation, had
been reasoned out; and man's need and love of God, his
nothingness apart from the Source and King and End of
Life, had been uttered in words which men still use. Evi-



Digitized by



Google



x6 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND book i

dently succeeding generations of less illumination cotdd not
add to this vast intellectual creation; much indeed had to
be done before they could comprehend and make it theirs,
so as to use it as an element of their own thinking, or possess
it as an inspiration of passionate, imaginative reverie.^

At the darkening close of the patristic period, Gregory
the Great was still partially creative in his barbarizing
handling of patristic themes.^ After his death, for some
three centuries, theologians were to devote themselves to
mastering the great heritage from the Church Fathers. It
was still a time of racial antipathy and conflict. The
disparate elements of the mediaeval personality were as yet
unblended. How cotdd the imformed intellect of such a
period grasp the patristic store of thought? Still less
might this wavering hmnan spirit, uncertain of itself and
unadjusted to novel and great conceptions, transform, and
so renew, them with fresh life. Scarcely any proper re-
casting of patristic doctrine will be found in the Carolingian
period, but merely a shuffling of the matter. There were
some exceptions, arising, as in the case of Eriugena, from
the extraordinary genius of this thinker; or again from
the narrow controversial treatment of a matter argued with
rupturing detachment of patristic opinions from their
setting and balancing qualifications.* But the typical
works of the eighth and ninth centuries were commentaries
upon Scripture, consisting chiefly of excerpts from the
Fathers. The flower of them all was the compendious
Glossa Ordinaria of Walafrid Strabo, a pupil of the volumi-
nous commentator Rabanus Maurus.'

^ Through the tenth and eleventh centuries, one finds no
great advance in the systematic restatement of Christian
doctrine!* Nevertheless, two hundred years of devotion
have been put upon it; and statements of parts of it occur,
showing that the eleventh century has made progress over

1 See ^1, Chapter V.

'The Predestination and Eucharistic controversies are examples; post, Chap-
ter X.

• See ^Kfl, Chapter X.

« The lack of origmality in the first half of the tenth century b illustrated by
the Epitome of Gregory's MoraUa, made by such an energetic person as Odo of
Cluny. It occupies four hundred columns in Migne's Fatrologia LcUna, 133.
Sm p9$t^ Ch^ter XU.



Digitized by



Google



CH. I GENESIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL GENIUS 17

the ninth in its thoughtful and vital apprc^riation of Latin
Christianity. ^A man like German Othloh has thought for
himself within its lines ;^ Anselm of Canterbury has set
forth pieces of it with a dqpth of reflection and intimacy of
understanding which make his works creative f* Peter
Damiani through intensity of feeling has become the
embodiment of Christian asceticism and the grace of Chris-
tian tears;' and Hildebrand has established the mediaeval
papal chiurch. Of a truth, the mediaeval man was adjusting
himself, and reaching his understanding of what the past had
given him.

^The twelfth century presents a imiversal progress in
philosophic and theological thinking. It is the century of
Abaelard, of Hugo of St. Victor and St. Bernard, and of
Peter Lombard. The first of these penetrates into the
logical premises of systematic thought as no mediaeval man
had done before him ; St. Bernard moves the world through
his emotional and political comprehension of the Faith;
Hugo of St. Victor offers a sacramental explanation of the
universe and man, based upon symbolism as the working
principle of creation^ and Peter Lombard makes, or, at
least, typifies, the systematic advance, from the CommerUary
to the Books of Sentences, in which he presents patristic
doctrine arranged according to the cardinal topics of the
Christian scheme. Here Abaelard's Sic et non had been a
precursor rather carping in its excessive clear-sightedness.
Thus, as a rule, each successive mediaeval period shows
a more organic restatement of the old material. Yet this
principle may be impeded or deflected, in its exemplifications,
by social turmoil and disaster, or even by the use of fiurther
antique matter, demanding assimilation. For example,
upon the introduction of the complete works of Aristotle in
the thirteenth century, an enormous intellectual effort was
required for the mastery of their contents. They were not
mastered at once, or by all people who studied the philos-
opher.^ So the works of Hugo of St. Victor, of the first