body and blood of Christ could they save the souls of the
partakers.

In partial disagreement with these hard and fast con-
clusions, Ratnunnus, also of Corbie,^ and others might still
try to veil the matter, with utterances capable of more
equivocal meaning ; might try to make it all more dim, and
therefore more possibly reasonable. That was not what the
Carolingian time, or the centuries to come, wanted; but
rather the definite tangible statement, which they could v
gra^ as readily as they could see and touch the elements

> Ratnnmafl, De corpore, etc. (Migne 121, col. 125-170).



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228 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND book n

before their eyes. In disenvelopiDg the question and
conclusion from every wavering consideration and veiling
ambiguity, the Carolingian period w^^ cre ^tiye_ in t^ds
Paschal contrpyergyA New propositions were not devised;
but the old, such of them as fitted, were put together and
given the unity and force of a projectile.

It was the same and yet different with the Predestination
strife. Gottschalk, who raised the storm, stated doctrines of
Augustine. But he set them out naked and alone, with
nothing else as coimterpoise, as Augustine had not done.
Thus to draw a single doctrine out from the totality of a
man's work and the demonstrative suggestiveness of all the
rest of his teachings, whether that man be Paul or Augustine,
is to present it so as to make it something else. For thereby
it is left naked and alone, and unadjusted with the connected
and mitigating considerations yielded by the rest of the
man's opinions. Such a procedwe is a garbling, at least
in spirit. It is almost like quoting the first half of a sentence
and leaving off everything following the author's ''but"
in the middle of it.

At all events the hard and fast, complete and twin
(gemina) divine predestination, imto heU as well as heaven,
was too unmitigated for the CaroUngian Church. This
doctrine, and his own intractable temper, immured the
imhappy annoimcer of it in a monastic dimgeon till he died.
It was monstrous, as monstrous as transubstantiation, for
example! But transubstantiation saved; and while the
Chiurch could stand the doctrine of the election of the
Elect to salvation, it revolted from the counter-inference, of
the election of the damned to hell, which contradicted too
drastically the sweet and lovely teaching that Christ died
for all. The theologians of one and more generations were
drawn into the strife, which was to have a less definitive
result than the Paschal controversy. Even to-day the
adjustment of hiunan free-will with onmipotent fore-
knowledge has not been made quite clear.^

There was one man who was drawn into the Predestina-
tion strife, although for him it lacked cardinal import. For

1 On the Carolingiaii controversies upon Predestination and the Eucharist, tee
Hamack, Dogmmgetckkkte, vol iii. chap. vL



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CHAP. X CAROLINGIAN PERIOD 229

the Neo-Platonic principles of John Scotus Eriugena scarcely
pennitted him to see in evil more than non-existence, and
led him to trace all phases of reality downward from the
primal Source. His intellectual attitude, interests, and
faculties were excq>tional, and yet nevertheless partook of
the characteristics of his time, out of which not even an
Eriugena could lift himself. He was an Irishman, who ^
came to the Court of Charles the Bald on invitation, and for
many years, until his orthodoxy became too suspect, was
the head of the Palace School. He may have died about
the year 877.

Eriugena was in the first place a man of learning, widely
read in the works of the Greek Fathers. From the Celestial
Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius and other sources, he had
absorbed huge draughts of Neo-Platonism. One must
not think of him always as an original thinker. A large <^
part of his literary laboiurs correspond with those of con-
temporaries. He was a translator of the works of Pseudo-
Dionysius, for he knew Greek. Then he composed or
compiled Commentaries upon those writings. He cared
supremely for the fruits of those faculties with which he
was pre-eminently endowed. He, the man of acquisitive
powers, loved learning; and he, the man with a faculty of
constructive reason, loved rational truth and the labour of
its systematic and syllc^tic presentation. He ascribed
primal validity to what was true by force of logic, and in
his soul set reason above authority. Certain of his con-
temporaries, with a discernment springing from repugnance,
perceived his self-reliant intellectual mood. The same
groimd underlay their detestation, which centuries after
underlay St. Bernard's for Abaelard. That Abaelard
should deem himself to be something! here was the root
of the saint's abhorrence. And, similarly, good Deacon
Florus of Lyons wrote a vituperative polemic quite as much
against the man Eriugena as against his detestable views
of Predestination. Eriugena, forsooth, would be diluting
with himian argument, which he draws from philosophy,
and for which he would be accountable to none. He
proffers no authority from the Fathers, "as if daring to
define with his own presimiption what should be held and "^



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230 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND book n

followed."^ Such was not the way that Carolingian
Churchmen liked to argue, but rather with attested sentences
from Augustine or Gregory. Manifestly Eriugena was not
one of them.
J Had his works been earlier understood, they would have
• been earlier condemned. But people did not realize what
sort of Neo-Platonic, pantheistic and emanational^ principles
this Irishman from over the sea was setting forth. St. Denis,
the great saint who was becoming St. Denis of France, had
been authoritatively (and most preposterously) identified
with Dionysius the Areopagite who heard Paul preach, and,
according to the growing legend, won a martyr's crown not
far from Paris. This was set forth in his Life by Abbot
Hilduin ; * this was confirmed by Hincmar, the great Arch-
bishop of Rheims, who said, closing his discussion of the
matter: 'Veritas saepius agitata magis splendesdt in
lucem!"' Eriugena seemed to be a translator of his holy
writings, and might be regarded as a setter forth of his
exceptionally resplendent truths. He could use the Fathers*
language too. So in his book on Predestination he quotes
Augustine as saying. Philosophy, which is the study of
wisdom, is not oUier than religion.^ But he was not going to
keep meaning what Augustine meant. He slowly extends
his talons in the following sentences which do not stand at
the beginning of his great work De divisiane naturae.

Says the Magister, for the work is in dialogue form:
"You are aware, I suppose, that what is prior by nature is
of greater dignity than what is prior in time."

Answers Disdpulus : "This is known to almost all."

Continues Magister: "We learn that reason is prior by
nature, but authority prior in time. For although nature
was created at the same moment with time, authority did
not begin with the beginning of time and nature. But
reason sprang with nature and time from the beginning of
things."

Disdpulus clenches the matter: "Reason itself teaches

1 Migne 119, col. 103. Flonis called his tract "Libellus Fk>ri advenus cuiuadam
â–¼aniasimi hominis, qui cognominatur Joannes, ineptias et errores de praedestinatione,"
etc. Flonis was a contemporaiy of Eriugena.

* Migne 106.

'Hincmar, Ep. 2$ (Migne 126, col. 153). ^Migne tas, coL 557.



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CHAP. X CAROLINGIAN PERIOD . 231

this. Authority sometimes proceeds from reason; but
reason never from authority. For all authority which is not
approved by true reason seems weak. But true reason, since
it is stablished in its own strength, needs to be strengthened 1/
by the assent of no authority." ^

No doubt of the talons here! Reason superior to
authority — is it not also prior to faith? Eriugena does not
press that reversal of the Christian position. But his De
divisiane naturae was a reasoned construction, although
of course the materials were not his own. It was no loosely
compiled encyclopaedia, such as Isidore or Bede or Rabanus
would have presented under such a title. It did not describe
every object in nature known to the writer ; but it discussed
nature metaphysically, and presented its lengthy exposi-
tion as a long argument in linked syllogistic form. Yet
it respected its borrowed materials, and preserved their
characteristics — ^with the exception of Scripture, which
Eriugena recognized as supreme authority! That he
interpreted figuratively of course; so had every one else
done. But he differed from other conmientators and from
the Chiu'ch Fathers, in degree if not in kind. For his inter-
pretation was a systematic moulding of Scriptural phrase to
suit his system. He transformed the meaning with as clear
a purpose as once Philo of Alexandria had done. The pre-
Christian Jew changed the Pentateuch— holding fast, of
course, to its authority ! — ^into a Platonic philosophy ; and ^
so, likewise by figurative interpretations, Eriugena turned ^
Scripture into a semi-Christianized Neo-Platonic scheme.*
The logical natiure of the man was strong within him, so
strong, indeed, that in its working it could not but present
all topics as component parts of a syllogistic and system-
atized philosophy.' If he borrowed his materials, he also
made them his own with power. He appears as the one yy

1 D4 ii9. ntL L 69 (Migne laa, coL 513).

'One may say that the work of Eriugena in presenting Christianity trans-
formed in substance as well as form, stood to the work of such a one as Thomas
Aquinas as the work of the Gnostics in the second century had stood toward the
dogmatic fonnulation of Christianity by the Fathers of the Church. With the Church
Fathers as with Thomas, there was earnest endeavour to preserve the substance of
Christianity, though presenting it in a changed form. This cannot be said of either 1/
the Gnostics or Eriugena.

• See Prantl, Ges. der Logik, iL 20-36.



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232 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND book n

/man of his time that really could build with the material

^ received from the past.

Beyond the range of these acute theological polemics
which we have been considering, the pressing exigencies of
political or ecclesiastical controversy might cause a capable
man to think for himself even in the ninth century. Such
a man was Claudius, Bishop of Turin, the foe of image and
relic worship, and of other superstitions too crass for one
who was a follower of Augustine.^ And another such a
one even more palpably was Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons
(d. 840), a brave and energetic man, clear-seeing and en-
lightened, and incessantly occupied with questions of Kving
interest, to which his nature responded more quickly than
to theologic lore. Absorbed in the affairs of his diocese, of
the Church at large, and of the Empire, he expresses views
which he has made his own. Practical issues, operating
upon his mind, evoked a personal originality of treatment.
His writings are clear illustrations of the originality which
actual issues aroused in the Carolingian epoch. They were
directed against common superstitions and degraded religious
opinion, or against the Jews whose aggressive prosperity in
the south of France disturbed him; or they were political.

^ In fine, they were the fruit of the living issue. For example,
his so-often-dted pamphlet, "Against the silly opinion of
the crowd as to hail and thunder," ^ was doubtless called
forth by the intolerable conditions stated in the first
sentence :

"In these parts almost all men, noble and common, dty folk
and country folk, old and young, think that hail storms and
thunder can be brought about at the pleasure of men. People
say when they hear thunder and see lightning ^Aura levaUHa est J*
When asked what aura levatitia may be, some are ashamed or
conscience-stricken, while others, with the boldness of ignorance,
assert that the air is raised (levata) by the incantations of men
called Tempestarii, and so is called 'raised air.' "

Agobard does not marshal physical explanations against
this folly, but texts of Scripture showing that God alone can
raise and lay the storms. Perhaps he thought such texts

^ Oaudiua died about 830. His works are in tome 104 of Migne.
* Migne X04, col. 147-158.



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CHAP. X CAROLINGIAN PERIOD 233

the best arguments for those who needed any. The manner
of the writing is reasonable, and the reader perceives that
the clear-headed archbishop, apart from his Scriptural
arguments, deemed these notions ridiculous, as well as
harmful.^

In like spirit Agobard argued against trials by combat
and ordeal. Undoubtedly, God might thus announce His
righteous judgment, but one should not expect to elidt it in
modes so opposed to justice and Scripture; again, he dtes
many texts while also considering the matter rationally.*
On die other hand, his book against image-worship is made
up of extracts from Augustine and other Church authorities.
Tliere was no call for originality here, when the subject
seemed to have been so exhaustively and authoritatively
treated.*

One cannot follow Agobard so comfortably in his ran-
corous tracts against the Jews. Doubtless this subject
also presented itself to him as an exigency requiring hand-
ling, and he was just in his contention that heathen slaves ,
belonging to Jews might be converted and baptized, and
then should not be given back to their former masters, but
a money equivalent be made instead. The question was
important from its frequency. Yet one would be loath to
approve his arguments, unoriginal as they are. He gives
currency to the common slanders against the Jews, and then
at great length dtes passages from the Church Fathers, to
show in what detestation they held that people. Then he
sets forth the abominable opinions of the hated race, and
ransacks Scrq)ture to prove that the Jews are therein
authoritativdy and incontestably condemned.^

> Compare Agobard's Ep. ad BartholowMtmm (Migne 104, col. 179).

^ Liber contra judicium Dei (Migne 104, col. 250-26S). Here the powerful
Hincmar, Archbbhop of Rheims, is emphatically on the opposite side, and argues
lengthily in support of the judicium aquae frigidact in Epist. 26, Migne 126, col. 161.
Htncmar (dr. 806-882) was a man of imposing eminence. He was a great ecclesi-
astical statesman. The compass and character of his writings is what might be
expected from such an archiepiscopal man of affairs. They include edifying
tracts for the use of the king, an authoritative Life of St. Remi, and writings
theological, political, and controversial. As the writer was not a profound
thinker, hb wprks have mainly that originality which was impressed upon them by
the nature of whatever exigency called them forth. They are contained in Migne
X2S, 126.

• lAber de imagtmibus samcterum (Migne 104, coL 199-226).

« These writings are also in voL 104 of Migne.



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234 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND book n

The years of Agobard's maturity belong to the troubled
time which came with the accession of the incompetent
Louis, in 814, to the throne of his father Charlemagne. In
the contentions and wars that followed, Agobard proved
himself an apt political partisan and writer. His political
tracts, notwithstanding their constant citation of Scripture,
are his own, and evince an originality evoked by the situation
which they were written to influence.

Something of the originality which the pressing political
exigency imparted to these tracts of Agobard might be
transmitted to such history as was occupied with con-
temporary events. As long as the historian was a mere
excerpting chronicler extracting his dry summaries from the
writings of former men, his work would not rouse him to
independence of conception or presentation. That would
have come with criticism upon the old authorities. But
^ criticism had scarcely begun to murmur among the Caro-
\ Ungians, too absorbed with the task of grasping their inherited
; material to weigh it, and too overawed by the authority of
[ the past to question the truth of its transmitted statements.
Excerpts, however, could not be made to tell the stirring
events of the period in which the Carolingian historian lived.
He would have to set forth his own perception and under-
standing of them, and in manner and language which to a
less or greater extent were his own : to a less extent with
those feebly beginning Annals, or Year-books, which set
down the occurrences of cloister life or the larger happenings
of which the report penetrated from the outer world ; ^ to a
greater extent, however, with a more veritable history of
some topic of living and coherent interest. In the latter
case the writer must present his conception of events, and
therewith something of himself.*

1 See Wattenbach, Deulscklands GesckkktsgnetteH, i. 150-143 (sth ed.). Writ-
ings known as AnnaUs drew their origin from the notes made by monks upon
the margin of their calendars. These notes were put together the following year,
and subsequently might be revised, perhaps by some person of larger view and
literary skUL Thus the Annals found in the cbister of Lorsch are supposed to have
been rewritten in part by EUnhart.

* There were two great earlier examples of such histories : one was the Historia
Prancofum of Gregory of Tours, the author of which was of distinguished Romaa
descent, bom in 540 and dying in 504; the other was Bede's CImrck Hisitry tf ike
English People, which was completed shortly before its author's death in 735. In



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CHAP. X CAROLINGIAN PERIOD 235

An example of this necessitated originality in the writing
of contemporary history is the work of Count Nithard.
He was the son of Charlemagne's daughter Bertha and of
Angilbert, the emperor's counsellor and lifelong friend.
His parents were not man and wife, because Charles would
not let his daughters marry, from reasons of policy; but
the relationship between them was open, and apparently
approved by the lady's sire. Angilbert studied in the
Palace School with Charlemagne, and became himself a
writer of Latin verse. He was often his sovereign's am-
bassador, and continued active in affairs until his closing
years, when he became the lay-abbot of a rich monastery in
Picardy, and received his emperor and virtual father-in-law
as his guest. He died the same year with Charles.

Like his father, Nithard was educated at the Palace
School, perhaps with his cousin who was to become Charles
the Bald. His loyalty continued staimch to that king,
whose tried confidant he became. He was a diplomatist
and a military leader in the wars following the death of
Louis the Pious; and he felt impelled to present from his
side the story of the strife among the sons of Louis, in
*'four books of histories" as they grew to be.* Livolved
with his king in that same hurricane {eodem turbine) he
describes those stormy times which they were fighting out
together even while he was writing. This man of action
could not but present himself, his views, his temperament,
in narrating the events he moved in. Throughout, one
perceives the pen of the participant, in this case an honest
partisan of his king, and the enemy of those whose conduct
had given the divided realm over to rapine. So the vigorous
narrative of this noble Frank partakes of the originality
which inheres in the writings of men of action when their
literary faculty is sufficient to enable them to put themselves
into their compositions.

Engaged, as we have been, with the intellectual or
scholarly interests of the CaroHngian period, we should not

individuality and picturesqueness of narrative, these two works surpass all the his-
torical writing of the CaroHngian tune.

1 In Mom, Germ. Hist. Scrip. iL; also Migne, vol ii6» col. 45-76; trans, in Ger-
man in Gesckichissckreiber der deuUcken VoruU (Leipsig). See also Wattenbach,
DeutscUands Gtschicktsqudlen, \., and Ebert, Ges. der Lit. ii. 370 sqq.



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236 THE MEDIAEVAL MIND book n

forget how slender in numbers were the men who promoted
them, and how few were the places where they throve.
There was the central group of open-mmded laymen and
Churchmen about the palace school, or following the Court
in its joumeyings, which were far and swift. Then there
were monastic or episcopal centres of education as at Tours,
or Rheims, or Fulda. The scholars carried from the schools
their precious modicum of knowledge, and passed on
through life as educated men living in the world, or dwelt
as learned compilers, reading in the cloister. But scant
were the rays of their enlightening influence amidst that
period's vast encompassing ignorance.

To have classified the Carolingian intellectual interests
according to topics would have been misleading, since that
would have introduced a fictitious element of individual
preference and aptitude, as if the Carolingian scholar of his
spontaneous volition occupied himself with mathematical
studies rather than grammar, or with astronomy rather than
theology. In general, all was a matter of reading and
learning from such books as Isidore's Origines, which
handled all topics indiscriminately, or from Bede, or from
the works of Augustine or Gregory, in which every topic
did but form part of the encyclopaedic presentation of the
relationship between the soul and God, and the soul's way
to salvation.

What then did these men care for? Naturally, first of
aU, for the elements of their primary education, their studies
in the Seven Arts. They did what they might with Grammar
and Rhetoric, and with Dialectic, which sometimes was
Rhetoric and formal Logic joined. Logic, for those who
y studied it seriously, was beginning to form an important
mental discipline. The four branches of the quadriviiun
were pursued more casually. Knowledge of arithmetic,
geometry, music, and astronomy (one may throw in medicine
as a fifth) was. as it might be in the individual instance —
always rudimentary, and usually rather less than more.

All of this, however, and it was not very much, was but
the preparation, if the man was to be earnest in his pursuit
of wisdom. Wisdom lay chiefly in Theology, to wit, the
whole saving contents of Scripture as understood and



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CHAP. X CAROLINGIAN PERIOD 237

interpreted by Gregory and Augustine. There was little
mortal knowledge whidi this range of Scriptural interpreta-
tion might not include. It compassed such knowledge of
the physical world as would enable one to imderstand the
work of Creation set forth in Genesis ; it embraced all that
could be known of man, of his physical nature, and assuredly
of his spiritual part. Here Christian truth might call on
the better pagan philosophy for illustration and rational
corroboration, so far as that did corroborate. When it did
not, it was pernicious falsity.

So Christian piety viewed the matter. But the pious
commonly have their temporal fancies, sweet as stolen fruit.
These Carob'ngian scholars, the man in orders and the man
without, studied the Latin poets, historians, and orators.
Among them were ardent humanists like Servatus Lupus ; ^
who loved the classics for their himian message. And in
their imaginative or poetic moods, as they followed classic
metre, so they reproduced classic phrase and sentiment in
their verses. The men who made such — ^it might be Alcuin,
or Theodulphus, or Walafrid Strabo — chose what they
would as the subject of their poems; but the presentation
took form and phrase from Virgil and other old poets.^The
antique influence, so strong in the Carolingian period, in- ^
eluded much more than matters of elegant culture, like
poetry and art, or even rhetoric and grammar. It held the
accumulated experience in law and institution, which still
made part of the basis of civic life. Rabanus Maurus
recognized it thus broadly. And, thus largely taken, the
antique survives in the Carolingian time as a co-orcUnate
dominant with Latin Christianity. Neither, as yet, was
affected by the solvent processes of transmutation into new
human facility and power. None the less, this same antique
siu-vival was destined to pass into modes and forms belonging
quite as much to the Middle Ages as to antiquity; and,
thus recast, it was to become a broadening and informing
element in the mediaeval personality.

Likewise with the patristic Christianity which had been

> His letters show ^srmpathetic knowledge of Livy, Sallust, Caesar, Cicero, Virgil,