They stood less for the interruption
of colloquial intercourse than for wide intellectual schisms and radical
diversities of mind.
of colloquial intercourse than for wide intellectual schisms and radical
diversities of mind.
Cambridge Medieval History - v5 - Contest of Empire and the Papacy
vii, p.
40; pp.
70–71.
## p. 775 (#821) ############################################
Theodulf of Orleans
775
nothing, as oblates, or possibly as candidates for the secular clergy also.
The next canon probably refers to the teaching of day scholars : “ Let
priests in towns and villages have schools, and if any of the faithful
wishes to commend his little ones to them to learn letters, they ought to
receive them . . . and teach them with the greatest affection. . . . They shall
demand nothing in this matter by way of price, nor shall they receive
anything from them, except what the parents. . . shall bestow upon them
voluntarily. ". This canon shews the high-water mark of Carolingian
advance, and shews the ideal of one of the greatest scholars of Charles?
court--of one also acquainted with conditions in Italy, where grammar
masters were fairly plentiful. The whole set of canons are rather counsels
of perfection than ecclesiastical laws; the laity were equally canonically
bound to say their prayers at least twice a day, and priests to confess
their sins with groans and tears, reciting the fifty-first psalm, once or
twice a day, or as much oftener as possible. Theodulf was at one time
Abbot of St Benoît (Fleury), and energetic in the reform movement
connected with St Benedict of Aniane, and hence his capitulary was read
and copied by monastic reformers. Dunstan and the English reformers
were closely in touch with Fleury, and this probably explains the presence
of different parts of the capitulary in two English manuscripts, both in
Latin with English translations. The part of the capitulary dealing with
schools occurs in a manuscript following some “statuta” collected by
Abbot Aelfric of Eynsham; but there is no evidence that it was ever
“lecta et publicata” in any English synod, or even that the translator
was Aelfric. Another copy in a monastery at Ghent attributed it
explicitly, but certainly wrongly, to the Council of Constantinople, 680,
causing confusion to later writers. The canon about schools is not drawn
from any Eastern council, but was Theodulf's own work.
Charlemagne’s capitularies were not universally obeyed. In 813 the
Council of Chalon reiterated that schools must be set up; and in 817
the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle dealt with both monastic and cathedral
schools. In monasteries there were to be schools only of oblates; a few,
like Fulda and St Gall, continued for a time to have "scholae exteriores
seu canonicae” for training secular clerks. Chrodegang's rule, revised
and enlarged by some chapters, was to be observed, as the “regula
Aquisgranensis,” by all the cathedrals of the Empire. A chapter of the
rule regulated the provisions for the cathedral school. As earlier, it was
to be an internal school, in which the young clerks were maintained by
the chapter; the boys slept and worked together, in charge of an aged
and discreet canon, though they might have a younger one to teach them.
The rule was influential in reforms carried out by Dunstan in England,
1 The teaching may have been intended to include Latin: it was certainly
different from the learning by heart of the Creed and Lord's Prayer, in Latin or
German, by the newly-converted Saxons, as ordered by the Council of Mayence.
(Mansi, xiv, col. 74, cap. xlv. )
CH. XXII.
## p. 776 (#822) ############################################
776
Post-Carolingian episcopal schools
and was forinally adopted by Leofric of Exeter c. 1050. The chapter
describing the school must be taken as descriptive of the normal cathedral
school in the Carolingian Empire from this time forward, apart from
evidence to the contrary in particular cases, and till the communal life
of chapters lapsed. Alcuin's teaching at Tours made the school so famous
that conditions were perhaps abnormal there in his day. External scholars,
boarding in the town, may have been taught by him ; certainly in 843
Amalric, canon and scholasticus, left a bequest to the future preceptors
in the school, to prevent the abominable custom, which had sprung up
in his predecessors' day, of taking a price for instruction, “as from any
other worldly business. ” Whether the endowment was to recompense
the preceptors for renouncing the fees of external scholars, or to enable
them to board these scholars gratis in their house, is not clear. There
was certainly an internal and an external school at Rheims later; and,
from about 900 onwards, the general practice of the cathedrals seems to
have been for the chapter to maintain a number of “clericuli," while
others were taken into the school as a private bargain with their relatives,
and yet others were boarded by individual canons, who made a special
bargain with relatives for “introducing them into the clerical order. ”
Generally speaking, and theoretically, no fees, or very small fees, were
charged for teaching only in the cathedral grammar or theology school,
the masters being maintained by the chapter; but unless they had a
prebend the maintenance was sometimes insufficient, and practice varied.
The ninth century brought difficulties to the schools. Louis the
Pious, in 822, desired that schools should be amended : the parents or
lords of scholars (no longer, significantly, the bishop) must help to provide
for them ; if the diocese (parochia) were very large, two or three places of
study must be founded. The Council of Paris, in 824, ordered each bishop
to shew more zeal to have a school to educate the militia of Christ; to
encourage this, let each bishop bring his scholasticus to the provincial
council. In 824 Lothar, as co-regent with his father, ordered that, since
instruction was lacking in Italy, schools of “ doctrina” should be main-
tained in certain towns, which he specified. In 826 Pope Eugenius II
enacted that, since in some places there were neither masters nor care for
the study of letters, each bishopric, and other places where there was
need, should have masters and doctors to teach letters and the “dogmas
of the liberal arts. " The Council of Paris, in 829, repeated the provisions
of 822, and the bishops petitioned the Emperor Louis that, lest his
father's work should be lost, three “public schools” should be set up in
his Empire; which three schools of Charlemagne they referred to is not
clear, though a subsequent canon shews that they were including Italy
in the Empire. The Council of Meaux, in 845, declared all the capitularies
of Charles and Louis the Pious to be still in force, and ordered all bishops
to build a cloister near their church for the regular training of their
clerks (as Eugenius II had also ordered in 826). In 852 Archbishop
## p. 777 (#823) ############################################
Their difficulties
777
Hincmar of Rheims enjoined in a synod that answers should be made to
certain questions, to be propounded by the magister and the dean “in
each mother-church, and in each chapel of our parochia (archbishopric)" ;
among others: “Had the priest a clerk who could keep school, or read
the epistle and sing, according as was necessary”—the one, probably, in
a mother-church (ecclesia), the other in a chapel (capella). This provision
was perhaps due to a clause in the bomilies of the contemporary Pope
Leo IV that “each priest should have a scholar clerk, who could read
the epistle or lesson and respond at mass, and with whom he could sing
psalms. ” The same Pope, in 853, practically repealed Eugenius' canon
about the schools of liberal arts, by acknowledging that grammar masters
were scarce, and ordering that, in lack of them, masters of divine scriptures
and teachers of the office should be provided.
The ravages of the Northmen and internecine wars had half consumed
learning by the mid-century, and the Council of Valence, summoned in
855 for the provinces of Lyons, Vienne, and Arles, could only order that
“ something should be discussed, and if possible decreed and ordained,
about schools both of divine and secular literature and church chant,
since, from the long intermission of this study, ignorance of the faith
and of all knowledge has overtaken many bishoprics. ” Archbishop Herard
of Tours, in 858, ordered that “priests should have schools as much as
they can, and corrected books”; and Bishop Walter of Orleans in the
same year interpreted this by enacting that “every priest must have
a clerk, whom he must have religiously educated ; and, if it is possible
for him, he must have a school in his church, and wisely take heed that
those whom he receives to teach he may chastely and sincerely nourish. "
This seems an interesting attempt to extend the system of training
lectors from episcopal and collegiate churches to those of single priests;
each priest must train or have trained (procuret educare) one clerk (the
ancestor, of course, of the later parish clerk), and, if it be possible, let
him nourish more. In 859 the Council of Savonnières urged that “scholae
publicae” (apparently implying, at the date, royally-endowed schools)
should be set up, so that fruit both of divine and human learning might
accrue to the Church.
After these enactments, however, the schools gradually recovered and
became flourishing; the records of individual cathedrals indicate greater
prosperity and scholarship. Bishop Ratherius of Verona in 966 decreed
that he would in future promote no ordinands who had not lived in his
own city, or in some monastery, or “ apud quemlibet sapientem," and to
some extent learned letters. The clause about private teaching is char-
acteristic of Italian conditions ; north of the Alps ordinands would have
attached themselves to some cathedral school (unless ordained without
preparation in deference to the wish of some layman). Gregory VII in
1078 ordered that “all bishops were to have the arts of letters taught
1 The Old Testament passage sometimes read in place of the Epistle.
CH. XXII.
## p. 778 (#824) ############################################
778
Chartres
in their churches," i. e. not merely “divine learning” but secular. The
growth of the schools is marked by increase of masters. Fulbert (ob. 1028),
the scholar-Bishop of Chartres, who raised the schools to the pitch of
fame, gave Hildegaire both the birch of the grammaticus and the tablets
of the chancellor as symbols of authority ; in addition, Hildegaire held
the position of sub-dean. Fluctuations still occurred at Chartres between
the work and functions of the chancellor, vice-chancellor, and gram-
maticus ; but by c. 1150 the chancellor as such had a prebend, taught
only theology, and had under him a scholasticus now usually termed the
“magister scholarum. ” The latter had no prebend as such, but was some-
times a canon ; in any case, he received the usual distributions of food
and
money for attendance at offices. Development at other cathedrals
was roughly parallel, the magister scholarum of the earlier centuries
becoming the chancellor in the twelfth century, and teaching only
theology, with a grammar master under him. In all dioceses other
granımar schools were now fairly frequent, the right of teaching, however,
remaining a strict monopoly, guarded by the chancellor of the diocese.
After the rise of the universities (c. 1170), the best scholars were drawn
away from the cathedral schools as such, and the teaching of the liberal
arts in these dwindled to the teaching of grammar and rhetoric.
The decline of diocesan teaching roused the anxiety of the Church.
In the lesser cathedrals there was difficulty even in obtaining a grammar
master, since no benefice was provided for him, and there was more
lucrative employment elsewhere. The Third Lateran Council, in 1179,
ordered that a competent benefice should be given in every cathedral to
a master, who should teach the clerks of the church and
poor
scholars
for nothing ; nor was the ecclesiastical authority to charge for the license
to teach, nor deny it to any suitable candidate. The Fourth Lateran
Council, in 1215, asserted that this provision had remained widely unful-
filled; it ordered each cathedral church, and other (collegiate) churches
which had the means, to provide a prebend for a grammar master, and
each metropolitan church one for a theology master. The provisions still
remained largely unfulfilled, the difficulty being to get the chapter to
give up a prebend for the purpose, especially as so many prebends were
anticipated by papal provision. The friars, however, set up in this
century their own hierarchy of schools, in some of which the presence of
seculars was allowed. St Thomas Aquinas wrote in 1257 that the decree
for the provision of a theology master in each metropolitan church had
not been observed “through lack of letters," but now it had been more
than fulfilled by the religious.
The monastic schools saw their two most flourishing centuries after
the Carolingian renaissance. The external schools about which most is
known were those of Fulda, St Gall, and Bec. Raban Maur of Fulda
was sent by his abbot to study under Alcuin at Tours, and was afterwards
given the direction of the monks' school at Fulda, with orders to preserve
## p. 779 (#825) ############################################
External monastic schools
779
Alcuin's method of teaching. He then ruled both schools (for oblates
and clerks) “with piety and doctrine,” and appointed two masters to
teach under him. The schools of St Gall were famous in the ninth
century, when Notker the Stammerer and other scholars were trained
there. « The cloister school with blessed Notker and other children of
the monastic habit was handed over to Marcellus, and the external school,
that is the canonical school, to Iso. " In 937 one of the scholars of this
school started a serious fire in the monastery, to save himself a beating.
The external school started at Bec by Lanfranc was somewhat of a new
departure; it was not maintained to fill the place of a non-existent
canonical, or cathedral, school, but to aid the poverty of the newly-
founded house with fees; it was, in fact, a continuation of Lanfranc's
work as a private rhetoric teacher in Italy. On the other hand, when
St William of Dijon (ob. 1031) was called by Duke Richard to Normandy
to introduce the Cluniac reforms, he substituted monks for clerks in the
abbey of Fécamps, and started an external school there of the old,
canonical type. “For when he saw that knowledge of singing and reading
among the rural clerks was. . . almost perished, not only in that place but
throughout the whole province,. . . he founded a school of the sacred
ministry where the brothers skilled in this office taught freely, for the
love of God. ”
The teaching of laymen in this period has been passed over, for there
were no schools for laymen as such, even the little A. B. C. schools being
mainly intended to teach “song” to little clerks. The sons of the nobility
were more frequently taught reading, writing, and such Latin as they
were considered to need, by their father's chaplain, or the chaplain of
the lay noble, bishop, or abbot to whom they were sent for “nurture. "
Learned laywomen were similarly taught, though the nunneries, being
poorer than the men's houses, more often received little “prebendinants”
(boarders), boys as well as girls, for education. But as a rule the teaching
of laymen and laywomen before 1300 was individual 1.
1 No description of grammar schools, other than those attached to cathedral or
collegiate churches, has been here attempted, for reasons of space. Between the
rise of the universities, c. 1170, when grammar masters became more plentiful, and
the end of the thirteenth century, such schools existed, and even in some numbers;
but they were the same in character and method as they were in the next two
centuries, when they became still more numerous. A full description of such
grammar schools will be given in Vol. viii.
OH. XXII.
## p. 780 (#826) ############################################
780
CHAPTER XXIII.
PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
Not even the briefest sketch of medieval philosophy can dispense with
a preface. Superfluous as it may seem to enquire what is meant by the
“Middle Ages,” and again by “philosophy,” neglect of these elementary
questions has often led to misunderstanding of those still shadowy centuries
which lie between antiquity and ourselves. Precisely when and why the
Middle Ages were first so designated it might be hard to decide. The
presumption of some affinity between the ancient and modern world is
tolerably clear, but when this vague resemblance is tried by a variety of
tests, the grounds for affirming it become more and more obscure. And
since our business here is only with philosophy, it may be well to assert
at once that the ancient status of philosophy has never been reproduced.
To the Greeks, from the days of the half-legendary Pythagoras, philosophy
meant the adoption of a considered way of life which was not the common
way of the world, and did not coincide with observance of the law. On
the one side were the authority of custom and the religion of the State;
on the other curiosity and criticism, the impulse to search for the hidden
meaning of things and to establish a link between knowledge and life.
The original freedom of Greek philosophy must indeed be largely attri-
buted to the inseparable alliance between the Pagan State and the Pagan
religion. For the official religion of the Greeks (as of the Romans) was
founded on no articulate theology and embodied in no visible Church.
The only theologians of early days were the poets. They at least gave
an account of the gods, in the form of scandalous stories; and with them,
therefore, rather than with popular piety, the philosophers were moved to
quarrel when they too began to examine the cosmos and to meditate upon
the agency of the gods. Then it was that “theology," in the predestined
sense of that ominous word, cast its first deep shadow across the life of
man. In answer to poetic travesties of the divine nature, Plato lightly
sketches his "outlines of theology," with their innocent appearance and
their promise of unending dispute. Aristotle in his turn, for all his
reticence on the subject of the gods, gives “theology” as an alternative
name for the “first philosophy,” which posterity was to know as “meta-
physics. ” Whatever name be preferred, the momentous fact is that
monotheism, as an intellectual and moral doctrine, arose in philosophical
circles beyond the range of civic religion, and without reference to the
authority of the State.
## p. 781 (#827) ############################################
Character of Ancient Philosophy
781
The original stamp of philosophy was preserved with some difficulty
in the respectable circumstances of the Academy and the Lyceum. The
danger now was that a brotherhood of seekers after truth would degenerate
into a school of dialecticians. Philosophy languishes sadly as the trade
of professors and the sport of impertinent boys. From this fate it was
partly delivered in Greece by the march of political events. When the
career of Alexander put an end to the reality of the city-state, without
providing a substitute, less attraction was found henceforward in the
political life and more, therefore, in the theoretic. At the same time,
philosophy began to be Hellenistic rather than Hellenic. Zeno of Citium
was a portent of many things, and the tenets of Stoicism, though they
rang a little hollow at times, sounded further abroad than the voice of
the town-crier in Aristotle's diminutive metropolis. Philosophy grew
daily more like a religion, a refuge for the disconsolate and a guide for
the perplexed. Now when there is one religion derived from a philoso-
phical valuation of life, and another bound up with the State but unsup-
ported by theology, we have before us all the elements of a revolution
which sooner or later will overturn the world. What delayed the catas-
trophe in the ancient world was the scorn of philosophers for the vulgar
and the indifference of the State to theological speculation. It remains
to consider briefly the causes which brought this mutual disregard to an
end.
The single object of this hasty glance at the ancient world being to
secure the right line of approach to the medieval period, the story of
philosophy at Rome must be passed over, until the age when the old Latin
elements of culture are well nigh lost in a medley of Greek and Oriental
ideas. Never, perhaps, would the fortunes of philosophy have been united
with those of the imperial city but for the advent of Plotinus in the third
century and the eventual adoption of Neo-Platonism as the forlorn hope
of pagan civilisation against the onset of the Christian Church. The
story of the Church in its early generations has been related many times
and with many objects. Seldom has it been presented in one of its most
genuine aspects, as a struggle with rival philosophies at a time when the
call to a spiritual life was audible to all serious men. When the Christian
society escaped from the circle of Judaism and began to grasp the full
nature of its mission, there existed only two forces sufficiently universal
to compete with it for mastery of the world, Greek philosophy and Roman
Law. The Pagan cults cannot rank as a third and equal competitor.
Neither singly nor collectively did they embody an idea capable of welding
mankind into social coherence. The imperium, on the other hand, the
whole majestic apparatus of law and sovereignty, was a visible bond of
union, and behind it lay, to all appearance, irresistible force. Yet in the
end it was to prove easier for a Christian to mount the throne of the
Caesars than for the new doctrine of the Logos to prevail against its
philosophical rivals. The last and greatest victory of the Church was over
CH. XXIII.
## p. 782 (#828) ############################################
782
Philosophy and Theology
Neo-Platonism, when the spoils of the vanquished passed to the camp of
the victor, to be handed down as part of the armour of faith.
To set Christianity among the philosophies is not fanciful, so long as
we bear in mind that philosophy meant to the Greeks a way of life be-
longing to a particular society. When we read in the Acts of the Apostles
how Paul had once persecuted “this way,” or how the convert was taken
to be further instructed in “the way,” we hear a language long familiar
to Hellenes and easily intelligible to educated Romans. Where the Chris-
tian way differed patently from the others was in making its first appeal
to the simple and in its frank abhorrence of popular religion. For these
reasons it figures in Roman authors as a kind of odium humani generis
long before it was counted worthy of intellectual opposition. But by the
age of Plotinus and Porphyry that phase was concluded. Christianity
had now taken its place as one of the proffered ways of salvation, just as
Gnosticism of a kind was a second, and Neo-Platonism a third. In the school
of Plotinus we see the climax of the tendency to theologise philosophy,
and thus to fashion an exalted religion far removed from the superstitions
of the vulgar. To this conclusion ancient philosophy had grown steadily
nearer, and this was its final legacy to the Church. No greater fiction,
then, can well be alleged as history than the assertion that the Middle
Ages corrupted the nature of philosophy by confusing it with theological
doctrine. On the contrary, the attempted distinction between theology
and philosophy was a characteristic medieval invention. For not until
the last days of Paganism did the occasion for such discrimination
arise.
For philosophy, as for political history, the arresting figure of Julian
is full of significance. Sagacious enough to learn from the Church the
secret of victory, he sought to create a bond between the religion of the
many and the lofty speculations of the few. He failed because Neo-
Platonism, however refined as theology, possessed no means of trans-
lating itself into a rule for the humble. Its solitary implement, already
dull and rusty, was the allegorising of fable and myth. But the multitude,
as Plato had foreseen, could not be saved by hidden meanings. When we
read the last book of the last Ennead, we understand how the new faith
may have failed to touch Plotinus; but when we set the unvarnished
story of the Gospel side by side with any Pagan allegory, the contrast is
almost painfully absurd. Nevertheless, we may learn from the story of
Julian that, as Pagan philosophy had grown ever more theological, so the
Pagan State, under a Neo-Platonist Emperor, might almost have assumed
the character of an authoritative Church. To look at the same facts from
the Christian point of view, we see how the Church, by her double victory
over the imperium of Rome and the philosophy of Greece, committed
herself to the two great enterprises of the Middle Ages, the search for a
distinction between philosophy and theology, and the search for a way of
reconciling the temporal with the spiritual power. As soon as those two
## p. 783 (#829) ############################################
The medieval problems. The Latin world
783
problems are in being, we may know, in fact, that the Middle Ages have
begun. To the Middle Ages, also, it fell to discover, through much toil
and tribulation, that fundamentally the two problems are one.
For the student of philosophy the result of the successive blows which
shattered the Roman Empire is almost wholly comprised in the division
of civilisation into eastern and western halves. A prophet in the age of
Marcus Aurelius, or even of Trajan, might well have foretold a time when
Hellenism would have completely submerged the Latin elements of culture
carried westward by victorious generals as far as the British Isles. Whether
such a prophecy would ever have been fulfilled it is idle to speculate. The
fact remains that it was not. For the various reasons narrated by historians
there came the great reaction, when the tide of Hellenism rolled back
eastwards, bearing with it the treasures of culture as well as the imperial
throne. Even the greatest of Roman products, jurisprudence, appeared
to forsake its proper home; and while the great codification was being
accomplished at Byzantium, Roman Law in the West was becoming an
adjunct of persons rather than the voice of an independent and sovereign
society. In this cleavage of East and West there was nevertheless, a kind
of historical justice. For between the Greek and the Latin there was, and
is, a deep and abiding antagonism. The enthusiasm of Roman authors
for Hellenic models disguised that truth for antiquity, as the ambiguity
of the term “classical” has often obscured it for ourselves. Yet the fact
persisted, and one clear function of the Middle Ages was to make a new
revelation of latinitas, barely possible until the superior light of Hellas
was at least partially eclipsed. The contrast, perpetually recurring in
medieval authors, between Graeci and Latini does not rest upon differences
of nationality or race. The true line of demarcation was always the
grammatical or literary language. The Latini were simply the miscel-
laneous assemblage of peoples who used Latin as their vehicle of literary
expression; a similar interpretation must be given to Graeci; and for the
same reason, when we arrive in due course at the philosophers of Islām,
the single and sufficient excuse for calling them “Arabs” will be that their
works were composed in the Arabic tongue. These divisions must not,
however, be interpreted too narrowly.
They stood less for the interruption
of colloquial intercourse than for wide intellectual schisms and radical
diversities of mind. Nothing proves this better than a scrutiny of the
several occasions, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, when some
Greek author was newly translated into Latin. We then learn that the
famous Graccia capta ferum. . . , however true in antiquity, became conspicu-
ously false in the medieval centuries. The truth was rather that each
translated Greek became in his turn the captive of latinitas. He entered
a world where the very terminology was steeped in Latin associations, and
where there flourished a spirit of auctoritas as alien from the traditions
of Hellas as the Summa of Aquinas from the dialogues of Plato. To mark
the stages in medieval philosophy as a series of Greek invasions is not
CH. XXIII.
## p. 784 (#830) ############################################
784
The Carolingian Renaissance. John the Scot
unscientific; but we have always to add that the result was rather to
enlarge a Latin structure than to remodel it on pure Hellenic lines.
After two or three of the darkest centuries in European history the
Carolingian renaissance offers a glimmer of daylight. With Charles the
Great we see Europe awaking to the consciousness of ignorance and to
the need of regaining touch with the past. When Alcuin (ob. 804) was
summoned from England to reform the methods of school instruction,
he revived the old curriculum of the seven liberal arts, the famous Trivium
and Quadrivium, and thus incidentally renewed the study of dialectic, the
most durable element in European education. By his own writings, and
still more by his pupils, his educational influence was spread widely abroad.
An attempt has been made to claim more for him. He has been hailed
as the father of Scholasticism (most ambiguous of titles), or at least as
the progenitor of philosophy in France. It is more than doubtful, how-
ever, if the claim can be upheld. The circle of Charles the Great caught
eagerly at the threads of tradition and found novelty enough in ideas far
from original. Philosophia itself was a name that stood for the general
culture of the liberal arts, or sometimes for dialectic in particular, rather than
for the apprehension of grave intellectual problems. In spite, therefore,
of the noble work of Alcuin, and in spite of the encyclopedic learning of
his pupil Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mayence, and, as he has well
been styled, primus praeceptor Germaniae, it is not unfair to judge that
no figure of high import for philosophy emerges before the astonishing
Johannes Scottus Eriugena, court-philosopher and even, if tales be true,
court-jester to Charles the Bald.
The entrance and exit of this mysterious Irishman are swift and his-
trionic. Appearing suddenly from one wing, he remains on the stage of
France just long enough to derange the plot and bewilder the actors,
before he vanishes on the other side and is lost in “confused noise without. "
Long afterwards we learn from William of Malmesbury that the noise
was caused by his English scholars, who were busy murdering their master
with the points of their pens. Doubtless they took the hint from
John's own observation: stilus ferreus alia parte qua scribamus, alia qua
deleamus a fabro factus est? . Uncertainty about his origin and end is,
however, of small consequence. His works are with us, and the occasion
of his first and last appearance in the ecclesiastical drama is notorious.
Gottschalk, a man of noble birth and a reluctant follower of St Benedict,
had extracted from the study of St Augustine a doctrine of “double pre-
destination,” which ensured the damnation of the wicked no less firmly
than the salvation of the good. Whatever the logical difficulty of evading
that conclusion, the moral danger of fatalism was so plainly threatened
by it that Hincmar, the powerful and restless Archbishop of Rheims
(ob. 882), was roused to vigorous action. The unhappy monk was indicted,
condemned, imprisoned, and finally harried into his grave. But Gottschalk
1 MPL, CxxII, 422.
## p. 785 (#831) ############################################
John the Scot and Greek Philosophy
785
or his opinions, did not lack supporters. Assailed from many sides by
weighty rebukes, Hincmar judged it expedient to add reason to force, and
in a rash moment entrusted to John the Scot the task of demolishing
Gottschalk's position. The result was (in the year 851) the treatise on
Predestination, which defeated not only Gottschalk but Hincmar and all
parties concerned.
The knowledge of Greek, now a rare accomplishment, which John
brought with him from Ireland, stood for more than linguistic proficiency.
His philosophy is a genuine derivation from Greek sources, Pagan and
Christian, and must be interpreted rather by the ideas of the fifth century
than by later developments of medieval thought. In the De Praedestina
tione, it is true, he affects to rely solely on Latin authors; whence it has
been doubtfully inferred that he had not yet acknowledged the sway of
the Pseudo-Dionysius. A more likely explanation is found in the contro-
versial character of the work. John's business was to turn against Gott-
schalk the authorities, especially Augustine, to whom he had appealed.
With an ingenuity almost too subtle he carries out this programme, yet
only on the surface. The force and substance of his argument belong to
Neo-Platonism. Either, therefore, he was already familiar with the
Areopagite, or he must in some other way have mastered a body of
doctrine akin to the philosophy of Proclus. In any case, the refutation
of Gottschalk depends entirely on an account of the Divine Nature
developed by Plotinus and his school out of elements originally supplied
by Plato. The essence of God, His will, and His intellect, are one pure
and indivisible substance identical with goodness. From his eternal per-
fection no effects but what are good can proceed. If the will of the
Creator is the necessity of the creature, yet that will is the pure expression
of liberty, and man's necessity is but the appetite for goodness, in which
human liberty essentially consists. How, then, shall we distinguish the
good from the bad? And how leave room for the freedom of decision
upon which moral responsibility depends? John firmly maintains the
reality of liberum arbitrium, and denies that God compels any man to be
either good or bad; but the critical question evidently is whether the
existence of evil in any real sense can be allowed. Boldly and variously
as John wrestles with his problem, he never wavers in his belief that evil
is pure negation. Sin, death, and eternal punishment he sees as indivisible
links in a chain, but God neither knows nor wills them. What God
foreknows he predestinates; whence, if he is said to foreknow evils without
predestinating them, this can only be a modus locutionis, designed to
stimulate us to deeper understanding of the truth. Foreknowledge itself
is but a metaphor; for priority in time has no meaning in relation to
God, in whose life is neither past nor future, but only the eternal now.
To do justice to the argument in a few lines is impossible, but its
two-edged character and its threat to the orthodox view of sin and
punishment will easily be detected. The whole tone of the reasoning, too,
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. XXIII.
50
## p. 786 (#832) ############################################
786
John's view of Reason and Authority
must have been foreign to John's contemporaries, who can hardly have
failed to see how little he trusted to familiar authorities, and how much
to arguments derived from none knew where. It is a mistake, however,
to lay as much emphasis as some modern writers have done on John's
identification (in the first chapter) of vera philosophia with vera religio.
In itself this was no startling novelty, nor was it a mere ruse of debate
for John to quote the precedent of Augustine. Verus philosophus est
amator Deil was Augustine's summary of the aim of philosophy: the test
by which he had tried Socrates and Plato, and found them not far from
the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus far, in fact, John was expressing a sound
historical judgment on the meaning of philosophy in the past. It is
further to be observed that the word is religio, not theologia. A simple
identification of philosophy with theology is far from his intention.
Broadly speaking, theologia always signifies for him some measure of the
divine illumination not vouchsafed outside the Catholic Church. Johannes
theologus is his title for the author of the Fourth Gospel, and all theologi
belong to a privileged class, from which many philosophi would be excluded.
Thus philosophi saeculares is a name for the Pagan sages, and inanis
philosophia serves to describe the practice of Jews and heretics, who cling
to the letter of the scriptures and pay no heed to the spirit. On the other
hand, philosophia in its widest sense can cover the entire search for wisdom,
of which theology is the highest but not the only part. No greater libel,
certainly, can be fastened on John the Scot than to represent him as
dressing up in the garb of Christianity some Pagan philosophy in which
alone he believed. No vestige of such an intention can be traced in his
pages. He is ardently, alınost passionately, Christian. What his feelings
would have been had he learned that “Dionysius” was an author never
heard of before the sixth century, and, possibly, a pupil of Proclus (ob. 485),
it is vain to conjecture. As it is, he had probably never heard of Proclus,
nor ever read a word of Plotinus. Plato he counts the chief of philosophers
-the merest commonplace in Christian writers down to the end of the
twelfth century—but from the Platonic secta he more than once dissociates
himself, and never would he have dreamed of making Plato the equal, in his
theological knowledge, of the Greek Fathers, or Dionysius, or Augustine.
Some caution is needed, again, in describing his view of reason and
authority. For while it is common to quote from him such sayings as
auctoritas ex vera ratione processit, ratio vero nequaquam ex auctoritate",
it is no less common to ignore the qualifications of the context, and to
omit altogether many other passages of a very different colour. Ratio
itself is a difficult and ambiguous term. Sometimes it comprehends all the
operations of the mind; sometimes it means only the discursive, dialec-
tical reason, which stands on a permanently lower level than intellectus sive
animus sive mens. The last thing John would suggest is that reason, in this
narrower sense, can find out and interpret the ways of God. His point is
1 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, viii, 1.
* MPL, cxXII, 613.
## p. 787 (#833) ############################################
The charge of Pantheism
787
rather that auctoritas is valuable only in so far as it represents what the
intellect of saintly theologi has revealed. Reason itself demands our
reverence for what is above reason; it does not, however, demand blind
subservience to patristic utterances, or to the bare letter of the Scriptures,
any more than it encourages us to put our trust in petty dialectic. Vera
auctoritas, says John the Scot, rectae rationi non obsistit, neque recta ratio
verae auctoritati'. To force him into a rigid dilemma of reason and
authority is likely to be an anachronism only less regrettable than the
proposal to enlist him on the side of the Nominalists or the Realists. A
mind like his refuses to be imprisoned in any such antithesis. What he
believes in is the illumination of the mind with a heavenly radiance, as,
easily dimmed by ratio in one way as by auctoritas in another.
The traditional accusation against the De Divisione Naturae—surely
one of the most remarkable books in the world—is that of Pantheism.
The charge would be more convincing if its authors would sometimes go
so far as to tell us what Pantheism means. Presumably, it implies at least
some kind of identification or confusion of God with His creatures, some
materialisation of the Divine Nature, with loss of transcendence and the
Creator's prerogative. Now in the De Divisione Naturae there is a rich
abundance of statements that seem to point in that direction. Nothing
could be plainer, for example, than the words, proinde non duo a seipsis
distantia debemus intelligere Deum et creaturam, sed unum et id ipsumº;
and this is but one out of many such passages. Yet no one, it is reasonable
to suggest, who has striven to master the book as a whole, with due
appre-
ciation of its earlier sources, will judge “Pantheism” to be other than an
idle and empty description of the doctrines set forth by John the Scot.
The universe, as he conceived of it, is one stupendous yet graded theophania.
God is in omnibus and supra omnia, revealed in all His creatures, yet
eternally transcending them all. They who declare that God is thus
degraded below Himself must be prepared to deny that Jesus was God
as well as man. For man is the officina omnis creaturae, the perfect
microcosm; whence the Incarnation reveals, in a single flash, the whole
relation of God to the universe, even as the resurrection of Christ displays
in a moment the reditus or reversio of all things to God. John himself
was well aware of the danger to which he exposed himself. Anticipating
the charge of Pantheism, he strove by many illustrations and analogies to
accommodate his high and difficult thoughts to men of ruder understand-
ing. In this he did not succeed. When not wholly neglected, his book
was usually suspect. After lying comparatively dormant for more than
three centuries, it was brought into fresh notoriety by the heretical
Amalric of Bene. A preliminary condemnation at Paris in 1210 was
followed in 1225 by the sentence of Honorius III, who ordered all discover-
able copies to be committed to the flames. Upon this, perhaps, the fairest
comment is that, if Amalric and his friends had read John as carelessly
1 MPL, cXXII, 511.
2 Ib. CXXII, 678.
CH. XXIII.
50-2
## p. 788 (#834) ############################################
788
Character of Christendom
as some of his modern critics, the action of Honorius may easily be
excused.
The false dawn of the Carolingian renaissance faded all too soon into
a second spell of darkness. Knowledge of Greek and the power of com-
paring eastern with western traditions John the Scot did not bequeath
to the following generations. His translations of Dionysius and Maximus
Confessor-sad examples of the verbum de verbo method—may well have
been unintelligible, while his commentaries or glosses on Martianus Capella
and Boethius would distinguish him less clearly from other men. Dis-
ordered and confused by the trend of political events, the Latin world
relapsed into the confinement of a narrow circle of authors conned over
and over again, yet often imperfectly known and understood. It is possible,
however, to draw too wide an inference from the poverty of a philosophical
library. Paucity of materials alone will not account for mental stagnation.
To interpret the intellectual condition of the Middle Ages we must look
rather to the vast transformation of the world, as the notion of a civitas
Dei gradually supplanted the ideals of Pagan society. In the eyes of Au-
gustine the secular power, no less than the heathen religion, still belongs
to the civitas impiorum; to possess and wield it can never be the ambition of
the Church. Philosophy again, the property of the Greeks, though far
superior to an idolatrous religion, is only an imperfect alternative to the
Christian life. But the course of history was too strong for these older
partitions and antagonisms. Before the end of the fifth century Pope
Gelasius I was making his memorable pronouncement: duo quippe sunt
quibus principaliter mundus hic regitur, auctoritas sacrata pontificum et
regalis potestas. This royal or imperial power was henceforward to be no
Babylonish relic, but a necessary element in the life of a single, all-
embracing society. However delegated or dispersed among princes, the
temporal sovereignty must remain the sword of the spiritual, the instru-
ment for extending and protecting the Kingdom of God upon earth.
Authority of all kinds was gradually concentrated, until the thought of
a philosophy unrelated to dogmatic propositions became as intolerable as
the pretence of any secular power to stand outside the Church. The
Creed and the Scriptures became the official source alike of law and of
wisdom. The vis coactiva was now the appurtenance of knowledge, the
knowledge divinely imparted to the Christian society. In such a society
(no matter how much the papal theory was disputed) the weight of
tradition could not fail to be overwhelming. From heresy to schism was
now the briefest of steps, and novelty had always to justify itself. “Many
men," says John the Scot, “are roused from slumber by heretics, that they
may see the day of the Lord and rejoice. "? No shrewder judgment could
be passed on the history of medieval philosophy. For most of the greater
changes were due less to original speculation, or even to the acquisition
of new materials, than to the suspicion of heresy. Opinions denounced at
IMPL, cxxii, 359.
## p. 789 (#835) ############################################
Medieval knowledge of Plato and Aristotle
789
first were often enough accepted on second thoughts. The power of
adapting and absorbing fresh ideas never wholly ceased to operate, but
all was governed by the general assumption that unchanging truth was
already revealed. Meanwhile, the habit of deference to tradition was
extended, almost unwittingly, to such records of Pagan knowledge as
fortune had preserved. None would have ranked a Greek philosopher with
the Scriptures, but when reverence for the past was combined with lack
of critical power, the result was to establish certain books or authors in a
position not easy to shake.
Some of the medieval limitations we may briefly illustrate by glancing
at the sources of their acquaintance with Aristotle and Plato. The first
name to be honoured is Boethius. To his translations of the Categories
(with the Isagoge of Porphyry) and the De Interpretatione, together with
his own commentaries and logical treatises, was due virtually the whole
knowledge of Aristotle accessible to medieval students from the sixth
century to the middle of the twelfth. Boethius had intended to introduce
the whole of Aristotle to the Latins, and some confusion has been caused
by the more than doubtful ascription to him of translations of the rest of
the Organon, the De Anima, and the Metaphysics. It is fairly certain,
however, that before the age of John of Salisbury Aristotle was directly
represented only by two of his minor logical works, supplemented by a
few fragments of information gathered from various sources. An impor-
tant consequence, too often overlooked, was the restriction of his authority
to a very narrow sphere. In dialectic he was admittedly the master, but
in philosophy as a whole the evidence is incontestable that Plato occupied
the highest place in general esteem. And yet, when we turn to the
medieval knowledge of Plato, we may well be surprised at his lofty
position. For nothing of his actual writings could be studied in Latin but
a fragment of a single dialogue, the Timaeus.
Between the cases of Plato and Aristotle there was, however, a very
wide difference. When Aristotle arrived in translations he was almost a
stranger; and even when the work of Boethius had raised him to unchal-
lenged sovereignty in the province of logic, he still was enthroned in a
certain isolation, with little historical background and with no evident
affinity to the Christian way of life. Platonism, on the other hand, was
almost inhaled with the air. Boethius himself was a Platonist, and so was
Porphyry. Augustine, too, never forgot his debt to the philosophy which
had delivered him from Manichaeism and carried him a lony stage on the
road to Christ. To indicate all the sources of Platonism would be almost
impossible. It must suffice here to notice two from outside the Christian
circle, the commentary of Chalcidius that accompanied his version of the
Timaeus, and the dissertation of Macrobius on the Somnium Scipionis.
To class Chalcidius as non-Christian is perhaps questionable, for he was
more probably a Christian than a Pagan or a Jew. His work, however,
embodies very little Christian material except an extract from Origen.
CH. XXIII.
## p. 790 (#836) ############################################
790
The Influence of Macrobius
Dating, perhaps, from the early fourth century, it is neither independent
nor critical. The substance of it, if we accept the result of Switalski's
investigation, is derived from an earlier commentary, very possibly by the
hand of the eminent Stoic, Posidonius. The outcome is an eclectic medley
or muddle of divers authorities, gathered under the sway of the infallible
Plato. The later Platonism, we must remember, was even more than
eclectic. Its aim was to absorb and to reconcile, to appear as a summary
of all previous Greek speculation. Much of the uncritical confusion of
ideas that meets us everywhere in the Middle Ages was simply a legacy
from Chalcidius and the less intelligent followers of Plotinus in the decline
of the ancient world.
Roughly similar qualities appear in the work of Macrobius, a writer
who, late in the fifth century, had contrived to remain untouched by the
Christian influence. His detachment from the Church makes it all the
more interesting to discover in him that medievalism of mind so often
rated as a purely Christian product. In him we have already the medieval
Virgil, and along with that strange invention all the baffling mixture of
science and nonsense that was to float about Europe for more than a
thousand
years. How medieval, too, is the deference of Macrobius to the
great names of the past. Neque vero tam immemor mei, he writes, aut ita
male animatus sum, ut ex ingenio meo vel Aristoteli resistam vel adsim
Platoni'. Yet Macrobius is far from contemptible, and the debt of the
Middle Ages to him was immense. To him was due what little was known
of Plotinus (inter philosophiae professores cum Platone princeps)? , the four-
fold classification of the virtues, the threefold gradation of Deus, mens,
and anima, the illumination of all creatures as in an orderly series of
mirrors by the unus fulgor, the descent of the soul to its material habita-
tion, and its yearning for restoration to its eternal home. When Christians
read in Macrobius of the soul's imprisonment in a vesture of clay (indu-
mentum testeum), of its wandering on earth as a pilgrim, of heaven as the
true patria, of philosophy as meditatio mortis, they caught the genuine
accent of religion and welcomed Platonism as a natural ally. Actual
knowledge of the original Plato Macrobius did not greatly increase. Be-
hind the Somnium Scipionis, according to Schedler's recent enquiry, lies
once more the T'imaeus, as interpreted first by Porphyry and handed on
by intermediate writers to Macrobius. If that be so, it helps to account
for the frequent difficulty of deciding, when no names are mentioned,
whether a medieval writer is using Chalcidius, or Macrobius, or sometimes
the De Consolatione of Boethius. The same brand of Platonism, with the
same tincture of new Pythagoreanism, is recognisable in all.
The lines of thought broadly indicated by Plato and Aristotle run
through the Middle Ages. From Plato came the wider inspiration and
the higher call; from Aristotle the perception of difficulties and contra-
dictions, with the demand for dialectical skill. Nowhere, as it happens,
1 Comm. in Somnium Scipionis, 11, 15.
2 Ib. 1, 8.
## p. 791 (#837) ############################################
Importance of dialectic. The tenth century
791
were the defects of medieval knowledge of history more conspicuous than
in this very matter of dialectic. The most learned doctors were unaware
that dialectic had held in Plato's estimation a far higher place than Aris-
totle would allow.
## p. 775 (#821) ############################################
Theodulf of Orleans
775
nothing, as oblates, or possibly as candidates for the secular clergy also.
The next canon probably refers to the teaching of day scholars : “ Let
priests in towns and villages have schools, and if any of the faithful
wishes to commend his little ones to them to learn letters, they ought to
receive them . . . and teach them with the greatest affection. . . . They shall
demand nothing in this matter by way of price, nor shall they receive
anything from them, except what the parents. . . shall bestow upon them
voluntarily. ". This canon shews the high-water mark of Carolingian
advance, and shews the ideal of one of the greatest scholars of Charles?
court--of one also acquainted with conditions in Italy, where grammar
masters were fairly plentiful. The whole set of canons are rather counsels
of perfection than ecclesiastical laws; the laity were equally canonically
bound to say their prayers at least twice a day, and priests to confess
their sins with groans and tears, reciting the fifty-first psalm, once or
twice a day, or as much oftener as possible. Theodulf was at one time
Abbot of St Benoît (Fleury), and energetic in the reform movement
connected with St Benedict of Aniane, and hence his capitulary was read
and copied by monastic reformers. Dunstan and the English reformers
were closely in touch with Fleury, and this probably explains the presence
of different parts of the capitulary in two English manuscripts, both in
Latin with English translations. The part of the capitulary dealing with
schools occurs in a manuscript following some “statuta” collected by
Abbot Aelfric of Eynsham; but there is no evidence that it was ever
“lecta et publicata” in any English synod, or even that the translator
was Aelfric. Another copy in a monastery at Ghent attributed it
explicitly, but certainly wrongly, to the Council of Constantinople, 680,
causing confusion to later writers. The canon about schools is not drawn
from any Eastern council, but was Theodulf's own work.
Charlemagne’s capitularies were not universally obeyed. In 813 the
Council of Chalon reiterated that schools must be set up; and in 817
the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle dealt with both monastic and cathedral
schools. In monasteries there were to be schools only of oblates; a few,
like Fulda and St Gall, continued for a time to have "scholae exteriores
seu canonicae” for training secular clerks. Chrodegang's rule, revised
and enlarged by some chapters, was to be observed, as the “regula
Aquisgranensis,” by all the cathedrals of the Empire. A chapter of the
rule regulated the provisions for the cathedral school. As earlier, it was
to be an internal school, in which the young clerks were maintained by
the chapter; the boys slept and worked together, in charge of an aged
and discreet canon, though they might have a younger one to teach them.
The rule was influential in reforms carried out by Dunstan in England,
1 The teaching may have been intended to include Latin: it was certainly
different from the learning by heart of the Creed and Lord's Prayer, in Latin or
German, by the newly-converted Saxons, as ordered by the Council of Mayence.
(Mansi, xiv, col. 74, cap. xlv. )
CH. XXII.
## p. 776 (#822) ############################################
776
Post-Carolingian episcopal schools
and was forinally adopted by Leofric of Exeter c. 1050. The chapter
describing the school must be taken as descriptive of the normal cathedral
school in the Carolingian Empire from this time forward, apart from
evidence to the contrary in particular cases, and till the communal life
of chapters lapsed. Alcuin's teaching at Tours made the school so famous
that conditions were perhaps abnormal there in his day. External scholars,
boarding in the town, may have been taught by him ; certainly in 843
Amalric, canon and scholasticus, left a bequest to the future preceptors
in the school, to prevent the abominable custom, which had sprung up
in his predecessors' day, of taking a price for instruction, “as from any
other worldly business. ” Whether the endowment was to recompense
the preceptors for renouncing the fees of external scholars, or to enable
them to board these scholars gratis in their house, is not clear. There
was certainly an internal and an external school at Rheims later; and,
from about 900 onwards, the general practice of the cathedrals seems to
have been for the chapter to maintain a number of “clericuli," while
others were taken into the school as a private bargain with their relatives,
and yet others were boarded by individual canons, who made a special
bargain with relatives for “introducing them into the clerical order. ”
Generally speaking, and theoretically, no fees, or very small fees, were
charged for teaching only in the cathedral grammar or theology school,
the masters being maintained by the chapter; but unless they had a
prebend the maintenance was sometimes insufficient, and practice varied.
The ninth century brought difficulties to the schools. Louis the
Pious, in 822, desired that schools should be amended : the parents or
lords of scholars (no longer, significantly, the bishop) must help to provide
for them ; if the diocese (parochia) were very large, two or three places of
study must be founded. The Council of Paris, in 824, ordered each bishop
to shew more zeal to have a school to educate the militia of Christ; to
encourage this, let each bishop bring his scholasticus to the provincial
council. In 824 Lothar, as co-regent with his father, ordered that, since
instruction was lacking in Italy, schools of “ doctrina” should be main-
tained in certain towns, which he specified. In 826 Pope Eugenius II
enacted that, since in some places there were neither masters nor care for
the study of letters, each bishopric, and other places where there was
need, should have masters and doctors to teach letters and the “dogmas
of the liberal arts. " The Council of Paris, in 829, repeated the provisions
of 822, and the bishops petitioned the Emperor Louis that, lest his
father's work should be lost, three “public schools” should be set up in
his Empire; which three schools of Charlemagne they referred to is not
clear, though a subsequent canon shews that they were including Italy
in the Empire. The Council of Meaux, in 845, declared all the capitularies
of Charles and Louis the Pious to be still in force, and ordered all bishops
to build a cloister near their church for the regular training of their
clerks (as Eugenius II had also ordered in 826). In 852 Archbishop
## p. 777 (#823) ############################################
Their difficulties
777
Hincmar of Rheims enjoined in a synod that answers should be made to
certain questions, to be propounded by the magister and the dean “in
each mother-church, and in each chapel of our parochia (archbishopric)" ;
among others: “Had the priest a clerk who could keep school, or read
the epistle and sing, according as was necessary”—the one, probably, in
a mother-church (ecclesia), the other in a chapel (capella). This provision
was perhaps due to a clause in the bomilies of the contemporary Pope
Leo IV that “each priest should have a scholar clerk, who could read
the epistle or lesson and respond at mass, and with whom he could sing
psalms. ” The same Pope, in 853, practically repealed Eugenius' canon
about the schools of liberal arts, by acknowledging that grammar masters
were scarce, and ordering that, in lack of them, masters of divine scriptures
and teachers of the office should be provided.
The ravages of the Northmen and internecine wars had half consumed
learning by the mid-century, and the Council of Valence, summoned in
855 for the provinces of Lyons, Vienne, and Arles, could only order that
“ something should be discussed, and if possible decreed and ordained,
about schools both of divine and secular literature and church chant,
since, from the long intermission of this study, ignorance of the faith
and of all knowledge has overtaken many bishoprics. ” Archbishop Herard
of Tours, in 858, ordered that “priests should have schools as much as
they can, and corrected books”; and Bishop Walter of Orleans in the
same year interpreted this by enacting that “every priest must have
a clerk, whom he must have religiously educated ; and, if it is possible
for him, he must have a school in his church, and wisely take heed that
those whom he receives to teach he may chastely and sincerely nourish. "
This seems an interesting attempt to extend the system of training
lectors from episcopal and collegiate churches to those of single priests;
each priest must train or have trained (procuret educare) one clerk (the
ancestor, of course, of the later parish clerk), and, if it be possible, let
him nourish more. In 859 the Council of Savonnières urged that “scholae
publicae” (apparently implying, at the date, royally-endowed schools)
should be set up, so that fruit both of divine and human learning might
accrue to the Church.
After these enactments, however, the schools gradually recovered and
became flourishing; the records of individual cathedrals indicate greater
prosperity and scholarship. Bishop Ratherius of Verona in 966 decreed
that he would in future promote no ordinands who had not lived in his
own city, or in some monastery, or “ apud quemlibet sapientem," and to
some extent learned letters. The clause about private teaching is char-
acteristic of Italian conditions ; north of the Alps ordinands would have
attached themselves to some cathedral school (unless ordained without
preparation in deference to the wish of some layman). Gregory VII in
1078 ordered that “all bishops were to have the arts of letters taught
1 The Old Testament passage sometimes read in place of the Epistle.
CH. XXII.
## p. 778 (#824) ############################################
778
Chartres
in their churches," i. e. not merely “divine learning” but secular. The
growth of the schools is marked by increase of masters. Fulbert (ob. 1028),
the scholar-Bishop of Chartres, who raised the schools to the pitch of
fame, gave Hildegaire both the birch of the grammaticus and the tablets
of the chancellor as symbols of authority ; in addition, Hildegaire held
the position of sub-dean. Fluctuations still occurred at Chartres between
the work and functions of the chancellor, vice-chancellor, and gram-
maticus ; but by c. 1150 the chancellor as such had a prebend, taught
only theology, and had under him a scholasticus now usually termed the
“magister scholarum. ” The latter had no prebend as such, but was some-
times a canon ; in any case, he received the usual distributions of food
and
money for attendance at offices. Development at other cathedrals
was roughly parallel, the magister scholarum of the earlier centuries
becoming the chancellor in the twelfth century, and teaching only
theology, with a grammar master under him. In all dioceses other
granımar schools were now fairly frequent, the right of teaching, however,
remaining a strict monopoly, guarded by the chancellor of the diocese.
After the rise of the universities (c. 1170), the best scholars were drawn
away from the cathedral schools as such, and the teaching of the liberal
arts in these dwindled to the teaching of grammar and rhetoric.
The decline of diocesan teaching roused the anxiety of the Church.
In the lesser cathedrals there was difficulty even in obtaining a grammar
master, since no benefice was provided for him, and there was more
lucrative employment elsewhere. The Third Lateran Council, in 1179,
ordered that a competent benefice should be given in every cathedral to
a master, who should teach the clerks of the church and
poor
scholars
for nothing ; nor was the ecclesiastical authority to charge for the license
to teach, nor deny it to any suitable candidate. The Fourth Lateran
Council, in 1215, asserted that this provision had remained widely unful-
filled; it ordered each cathedral church, and other (collegiate) churches
which had the means, to provide a prebend for a grammar master, and
each metropolitan church one for a theology master. The provisions still
remained largely unfulfilled, the difficulty being to get the chapter to
give up a prebend for the purpose, especially as so many prebends were
anticipated by papal provision. The friars, however, set up in this
century their own hierarchy of schools, in some of which the presence of
seculars was allowed. St Thomas Aquinas wrote in 1257 that the decree
for the provision of a theology master in each metropolitan church had
not been observed “through lack of letters," but now it had been more
than fulfilled by the religious.
The monastic schools saw their two most flourishing centuries after
the Carolingian renaissance. The external schools about which most is
known were those of Fulda, St Gall, and Bec. Raban Maur of Fulda
was sent by his abbot to study under Alcuin at Tours, and was afterwards
given the direction of the monks' school at Fulda, with orders to preserve
## p. 779 (#825) ############################################
External monastic schools
779
Alcuin's method of teaching. He then ruled both schools (for oblates
and clerks) “with piety and doctrine,” and appointed two masters to
teach under him. The schools of St Gall were famous in the ninth
century, when Notker the Stammerer and other scholars were trained
there. « The cloister school with blessed Notker and other children of
the monastic habit was handed over to Marcellus, and the external school,
that is the canonical school, to Iso. " In 937 one of the scholars of this
school started a serious fire in the monastery, to save himself a beating.
The external school started at Bec by Lanfranc was somewhat of a new
departure; it was not maintained to fill the place of a non-existent
canonical, or cathedral, school, but to aid the poverty of the newly-
founded house with fees; it was, in fact, a continuation of Lanfranc's
work as a private rhetoric teacher in Italy. On the other hand, when
St William of Dijon (ob. 1031) was called by Duke Richard to Normandy
to introduce the Cluniac reforms, he substituted monks for clerks in the
abbey of Fécamps, and started an external school there of the old,
canonical type. “For when he saw that knowledge of singing and reading
among the rural clerks was. . . almost perished, not only in that place but
throughout the whole province,. . . he founded a school of the sacred
ministry where the brothers skilled in this office taught freely, for the
love of God. ”
The teaching of laymen in this period has been passed over, for there
were no schools for laymen as such, even the little A. B. C. schools being
mainly intended to teach “song” to little clerks. The sons of the nobility
were more frequently taught reading, writing, and such Latin as they
were considered to need, by their father's chaplain, or the chaplain of
the lay noble, bishop, or abbot to whom they were sent for “nurture. "
Learned laywomen were similarly taught, though the nunneries, being
poorer than the men's houses, more often received little “prebendinants”
(boarders), boys as well as girls, for education. But as a rule the teaching
of laymen and laywomen before 1300 was individual 1.
1 No description of grammar schools, other than those attached to cathedral or
collegiate churches, has been here attempted, for reasons of space. Between the
rise of the universities, c. 1170, when grammar masters became more plentiful, and
the end of the thirteenth century, such schools existed, and even in some numbers;
but they were the same in character and method as they were in the next two
centuries, when they became still more numerous. A full description of such
grammar schools will be given in Vol. viii.
OH. XXII.
## p. 780 (#826) ############################################
780
CHAPTER XXIII.
PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
Not even the briefest sketch of medieval philosophy can dispense with
a preface. Superfluous as it may seem to enquire what is meant by the
“Middle Ages,” and again by “philosophy,” neglect of these elementary
questions has often led to misunderstanding of those still shadowy centuries
which lie between antiquity and ourselves. Precisely when and why the
Middle Ages were first so designated it might be hard to decide. The
presumption of some affinity between the ancient and modern world is
tolerably clear, but when this vague resemblance is tried by a variety of
tests, the grounds for affirming it become more and more obscure. And
since our business here is only with philosophy, it may be well to assert
at once that the ancient status of philosophy has never been reproduced.
To the Greeks, from the days of the half-legendary Pythagoras, philosophy
meant the adoption of a considered way of life which was not the common
way of the world, and did not coincide with observance of the law. On
the one side were the authority of custom and the religion of the State;
on the other curiosity and criticism, the impulse to search for the hidden
meaning of things and to establish a link between knowledge and life.
The original freedom of Greek philosophy must indeed be largely attri-
buted to the inseparable alliance between the Pagan State and the Pagan
religion. For the official religion of the Greeks (as of the Romans) was
founded on no articulate theology and embodied in no visible Church.
The only theologians of early days were the poets. They at least gave
an account of the gods, in the form of scandalous stories; and with them,
therefore, rather than with popular piety, the philosophers were moved to
quarrel when they too began to examine the cosmos and to meditate upon
the agency of the gods. Then it was that “theology," in the predestined
sense of that ominous word, cast its first deep shadow across the life of
man. In answer to poetic travesties of the divine nature, Plato lightly
sketches his "outlines of theology," with their innocent appearance and
their promise of unending dispute. Aristotle in his turn, for all his
reticence on the subject of the gods, gives “theology” as an alternative
name for the “first philosophy,” which posterity was to know as “meta-
physics. ” Whatever name be preferred, the momentous fact is that
monotheism, as an intellectual and moral doctrine, arose in philosophical
circles beyond the range of civic religion, and without reference to the
authority of the State.
## p. 781 (#827) ############################################
Character of Ancient Philosophy
781
The original stamp of philosophy was preserved with some difficulty
in the respectable circumstances of the Academy and the Lyceum. The
danger now was that a brotherhood of seekers after truth would degenerate
into a school of dialecticians. Philosophy languishes sadly as the trade
of professors and the sport of impertinent boys. From this fate it was
partly delivered in Greece by the march of political events. When the
career of Alexander put an end to the reality of the city-state, without
providing a substitute, less attraction was found henceforward in the
political life and more, therefore, in the theoretic. At the same time,
philosophy began to be Hellenistic rather than Hellenic. Zeno of Citium
was a portent of many things, and the tenets of Stoicism, though they
rang a little hollow at times, sounded further abroad than the voice of
the town-crier in Aristotle's diminutive metropolis. Philosophy grew
daily more like a religion, a refuge for the disconsolate and a guide for
the perplexed. Now when there is one religion derived from a philoso-
phical valuation of life, and another bound up with the State but unsup-
ported by theology, we have before us all the elements of a revolution
which sooner or later will overturn the world. What delayed the catas-
trophe in the ancient world was the scorn of philosophers for the vulgar
and the indifference of the State to theological speculation. It remains
to consider briefly the causes which brought this mutual disregard to an
end.
The single object of this hasty glance at the ancient world being to
secure the right line of approach to the medieval period, the story of
philosophy at Rome must be passed over, until the age when the old Latin
elements of culture are well nigh lost in a medley of Greek and Oriental
ideas. Never, perhaps, would the fortunes of philosophy have been united
with those of the imperial city but for the advent of Plotinus in the third
century and the eventual adoption of Neo-Platonism as the forlorn hope
of pagan civilisation against the onset of the Christian Church. The
story of the Church in its early generations has been related many times
and with many objects. Seldom has it been presented in one of its most
genuine aspects, as a struggle with rival philosophies at a time when the
call to a spiritual life was audible to all serious men. When the Christian
society escaped from the circle of Judaism and began to grasp the full
nature of its mission, there existed only two forces sufficiently universal
to compete with it for mastery of the world, Greek philosophy and Roman
Law. The Pagan cults cannot rank as a third and equal competitor.
Neither singly nor collectively did they embody an idea capable of welding
mankind into social coherence. The imperium, on the other hand, the
whole majestic apparatus of law and sovereignty, was a visible bond of
union, and behind it lay, to all appearance, irresistible force. Yet in the
end it was to prove easier for a Christian to mount the throne of the
Caesars than for the new doctrine of the Logos to prevail against its
philosophical rivals. The last and greatest victory of the Church was over
CH. XXIII.
## p. 782 (#828) ############################################
782
Philosophy and Theology
Neo-Platonism, when the spoils of the vanquished passed to the camp of
the victor, to be handed down as part of the armour of faith.
To set Christianity among the philosophies is not fanciful, so long as
we bear in mind that philosophy meant to the Greeks a way of life be-
longing to a particular society. When we read in the Acts of the Apostles
how Paul had once persecuted “this way,” or how the convert was taken
to be further instructed in “the way,” we hear a language long familiar
to Hellenes and easily intelligible to educated Romans. Where the Chris-
tian way differed patently from the others was in making its first appeal
to the simple and in its frank abhorrence of popular religion. For these
reasons it figures in Roman authors as a kind of odium humani generis
long before it was counted worthy of intellectual opposition. But by the
age of Plotinus and Porphyry that phase was concluded. Christianity
had now taken its place as one of the proffered ways of salvation, just as
Gnosticism of a kind was a second, and Neo-Platonism a third. In the school
of Plotinus we see the climax of the tendency to theologise philosophy,
and thus to fashion an exalted religion far removed from the superstitions
of the vulgar. To this conclusion ancient philosophy had grown steadily
nearer, and this was its final legacy to the Church. No greater fiction,
then, can well be alleged as history than the assertion that the Middle
Ages corrupted the nature of philosophy by confusing it with theological
doctrine. On the contrary, the attempted distinction between theology
and philosophy was a characteristic medieval invention. For not until
the last days of Paganism did the occasion for such discrimination
arise.
For philosophy, as for political history, the arresting figure of Julian
is full of significance. Sagacious enough to learn from the Church the
secret of victory, he sought to create a bond between the religion of the
many and the lofty speculations of the few. He failed because Neo-
Platonism, however refined as theology, possessed no means of trans-
lating itself into a rule for the humble. Its solitary implement, already
dull and rusty, was the allegorising of fable and myth. But the multitude,
as Plato had foreseen, could not be saved by hidden meanings. When we
read the last book of the last Ennead, we understand how the new faith
may have failed to touch Plotinus; but when we set the unvarnished
story of the Gospel side by side with any Pagan allegory, the contrast is
almost painfully absurd. Nevertheless, we may learn from the story of
Julian that, as Pagan philosophy had grown ever more theological, so the
Pagan State, under a Neo-Platonist Emperor, might almost have assumed
the character of an authoritative Church. To look at the same facts from
the Christian point of view, we see how the Church, by her double victory
over the imperium of Rome and the philosophy of Greece, committed
herself to the two great enterprises of the Middle Ages, the search for a
distinction between philosophy and theology, and the search for a way of
reconciling the temporal with the spiritual power. As soon as those two
## p. 783 (#829) ############################################
The medieval problems. The Latin world
783
problems are in being, we may know, in fact, that the Middle Ages have
begun. To the Middle Ages, also, it fell to discover, through much toil
and tribulation, that fundamentally the two problems are one.
For the student of philosophy the result of the successive blows which
shattered the Roman Empire is almost wholly comprised in the division
of civilisation into eastern and western halves. A prophet in the age of
Marcus Aurelius, or even of Trajan, might well have foretold a time when
Hellenism would have completely submerged the Latin elements of culture
carried westward by victorious generals as far as the British Isles. Whether
such a prophecy would ever have been fulfilled it is idle to speculate. The
fact remains that it was not. For the various reasons narrated by historians
there came the great reaction, when the tide of Hellenism rolled back
eastwards, bearing with it the treasures of culture as well as the imperial
throne. Even the greatest of Roman products, jurisprudence, appeared
to forsake its proper home; and while the great codification was being
accomplished at Byzantium, Roman Law in the West was becoming an
adjunct of persons rather than the voice of an independent and sovereign
society. In this cleavage of East and West there was nevertheless, a kind
of historical justice. For between the Greek and the Latin there was, and
is, a deep and abiding antagonism. The enthusiasm of Roman authors
for Hellenic models disguised that truth for antiquity, as the ambiguity
of the term “classical” has often obscured it for ourselves. Yet the fact
persisted, and one clear function of the Middle Ages was to make a new
revelation of latinitas, barely possible until the superior light of Hellas
was at least partially eclipsed. The contrast, perpetually recurring in
medieval authors, between Graeci and Latini does not rest upon differences
of nationality or race. The true line of demarcation was always the
grammatical or literary language. The Latini were simply the miscel-
laneous assemblage of peoples who used Latin as their vehicle of literary
expression; a similar interpretation must be given to Graeci; and for the
same reason, when we arrive in due course at the philosophers of Islām,
the single and sufficient excuse for calling them “Arabs” will be that their
works were composed in the Arabic tongue. These divisions must not,
however, be interpreted too narrowly.
They stood less for the interruption
of colloquial intercourse than for wide intellectual schisms and radical
diversities of mind. Nothing proves this better than a scrutiny of the
several occasions, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, when some
Greek author was newly translated into Latin. We then learn that the
famous Graccia capta ferum. . . , however true in antiquity, became conspicu-
ously false in the medieval centuries. The truth was rather that each
translated Greek became in his turn the captive of latinitas. He entered
a world where the very terminology was steeped in Latin associations, and
where there flourished a spirit of auctoritas as alien from the traditions
of Hellas as the Summa of Aquinas from the dialogues of Plato. To mark
the stages in medieval philosophy as a series of Greek invasions is not
CH. XXIII.
## p. 784 (#830) ############################################
784
The Carolingian Renaissance. John the Scot
unscientific; but we have always to add that the result was rather to
enlarge a Latin structure than to remodel it on pure Hellenic lines.
After two or three of the darkest centuries in European history the
Carolingian renaissance offers a glimmer of daylight. With Charles the
Great we see Europe awaking to the consciousness of ignorance and to
the need of regaining touch with the past. When Alcuin (ob. 804) was
summoned from England to reform the methods of school instruction,
he revived the old curriculum of the seven liberal arts, the famous Trivium
and Quadrivium, and thus incidentally renewed the study of dialectic, the
most durable element in European education. By his own writings, and
still more by his pupils, his educational influence was spread widely abroad.
An attempt has been made to claim more for him. He has been hailed
as the father of Scholasticism (most ambiguous of titles), or at least as
the progenitor of philosophy in France. It is more than doubtful, how-
ever, if the claim can be upheld. The circle of Charles the Great caught
eagerly at the threads of tradition and found novelty enough in ideas far
from original. Philosophia itself was a name that stood for the general
culture of the liberal arts, or sometimes for dialectic in particular, rather than
for the apprehension of grave intellectual problems. In spite, therefore,
of the noble work of Alcuin, and in spite of the encyclopedic learning of
his pupil Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mayence, and, as he has well
been styled, primus praeceptor Germaniae, it is not unfair to judge that
no figure of high import for philosophy emerges before the astonishing
Johannes Scottus Eriugena, court-philosopher and even, if tales be true,
court-jester to Charles the Bald.
The entrance and exit of this mysterious Irishman are swift and his-
trionic. Appearing suddenly from one wing, he remains on the stage of
France just long enough to derange the plot and bewilder the actors,
before he vanishes on the other side and is lost in “confused noise without. "
Long afterwards we learn from William of Malmesbury that the noise
was caused by his English scholars, who were busy murdering their master
with the points of their pens. Doubtless they took the hint from
John's own observation: stilus ferreus alia parte qua scribamus, alia qua
deleamus a fabro factus est? . Uncertainty about his origin and end is,
however, of small consequence. His works are with us, and the occasion
of his first and last appearance in the ecclesiastical drama is notorious.
Gottschalk, a man of noble birth and a reluctant follower of St Benedict,
had extracted from the study of St Augustine a doctrine of “double pre-
destination,” which ensured the damnation of the wicked no less firmly
than the salvation of the good. Whatever the logical difficulty of evading
that conclusion, the moral danger of fatalism was so plainly threatened
by it that Hincmar, the powerful and restless Archbishop of Rheims
(ob. 882), was roused to vigorous action. The unhappy monk was indicted,
condemned, imprisoned, and finally harried into his grave. But Gottschalk
1 MPL, CxxII, 422.
## p. 785 (#831) ############################################
John the Scot and Greek Philosophy
785
or his opinions, did not lack supporters. Assailed from many sides by
weighty rebukes, Hincmar judged it expedient to add reason to force, and
in a rash moment entrusted to John the Scot the task of demolishing
Gottschalk's position. The result was (in the year 851) the treatise on
Predestination, which defeated not only Gottschalk but Hincmar and all
parties concerned.
The knowledge of Greek, now a rare accomplishment, which John
brought with him from Ireland, stood for more than linguistic proficiency.
His philosophy is a genuine derivation from Greek sources, Pagan and
Christian, and must be interpreted rather by the ideas of the fifth century
than by later developments of medieval thought. In the De Praedestina
tione, it is true, he affects to rely solely on Latin authors; whence it has
been doubtfully inferred that he had not yet acknowledged the sway of
the Pseudo-Dionysius. A more likely explanation is found in the contro-
versial character of the work. John's business was to turn against Gott-
schalk the authorities, especially Augustine, to whom he had appealed.
With an ingenuity almost too subtle he carries out this programme, yet
only on the surface. The force and substance of his argument belong to
Neo-Platonism. Either, therefore, he was already familiar with the
Areopagite, or he must in some other way have mastered a body of
doctrine akin to the philosophy of Proclus. In any case, the refutation
of Gottschalk depends entirely on an account of the Divine Nature
developed by Plotinus and his school out of elements originally supplied
by Plato. The essence of God, His will, and His intellect, are one pure
and indivisible substance identical with goodness. From his eternal per-
fection no effects but what are good can proceed. If the will of the
Creator is the necessity of the creature, yet that will is the pure expression
of liberty, and man's necessity is but the appetite for goodness, in which
human liberty essentially consists. How, then, shall we distinguish the
good from the bad? And how leave room for the freedom of decision
upon which moral responsibility depends? John firmly maintains the
reality of liberum arbitrium, and denies that God compels any man to be
either good or bad; but the critical question evidently is whether the
existence of evil in any real sense can be allowed. Boldly and variously
as John wrestles with his problem, he never wavers in his belief that evil
is pure negation. Sin, death, and eternal punishment he sees as indivisible
links in a chain, but God neither knows nor wills them. What God
foreknows he predestinates; whence, if he is said to foreknow evils without
predestinating them, this can only be a modus locutionis, designed to
stimulate us to deeper understanding of the truth. Foreknowledge itself
is but a metaphor; for priority in time has no meaning in relation to
God, in whose life is neither past nor future, but only the eternal now.
To do justice to the argument in a few lines is impossible, but its
two-edged character and its threat to the orthodox view of sin and
punishment will easily be detected. The whole tone of the reasoning, too,
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. XXIII.
50
## p. 786 (#832) ############################################
786
John's view of Reason and Authority
must have been foreign to John's contemporaries, who can hardly have
failed to see how little he trusted to familiar authorities, and how much
to arguments derived from none knew where. It is a mistake, however,
to lay as much emphasis as some modern writers have done on John's
identification (in the first chapter) of vera philosophia with vera religio.
In itself this was no startling novelty, nor was it a mere ruse of debate
for John to quote the precedent of Augustine. Verus philosophus est
amator Deil was Augustine's summary of the aim of philosophy: the test
by which he had tried Socrates and Plato, and found them not far from
the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus far, in fact, John was expressing a sound
historical judgment on the meaning of philosophy in the past. It is
further to be observed that the word is religio, not theologia. A simple
identification of philosophy with theology is far from his intention.
Broadly speaking, theologia always signifies for him some measure of the
divine illumination not vouchsafed outside the Catholic Church. Johannes
theologus is his title for the author of the Fourth Gospel, and all theologi
belong to a privileged class, from which many philosophi would be excluded.
Thus philosophi saeculares is a name for the Pagan sages, and inanis
philosophia serves to describe the practice of Jews and heretics, who cling
to the letter of the scriptures and pay no heed to the spirit. On the other
hand, philosophia in its widest sense can cover the entire search for wisdom,
of which theology is the highest but not the only part. No greater libel,
certainly, can be fastened on John the Scot than to represent him as
dressing up in the garb of Christianity some Pagan philosophy in which
alone he believed. No vestige of such an intention can be traced in his
pages. He is ardently, alınost passionately, Christian. What his feelings
would have been had he learned that “Dionysius” was an author never
heard of before the sixth century, and, possibly, a pupil of Proclus (ob. 485),
it is vain to conjecture. As it is, he had probably never heard of Proclus,
nor ever read a word of Plotinus. Plato he counts the chief of philosophers
-the merest commonplace in Christian writers down to the end of the
twelfth century—but from the Platonic secta he more than once dissociates
himself, and never would he have dreamed of making Plato the equal, in his
theological knowledge, of the Greek Fathers, or Dionysius, or Augustine.
Some caution is needed, again, in describing his view of reason and
authority. For while it is common to quote from him such sayings as
auctoritas ex vera ratione processit, ratio vero nequaquam ex auctoritate",
it is no less common to ignore the qualifications of the context, and to
omit altogether many other passages of a very different colour. Ratio
itself is a difficult and ambiguous term. Sometimes it comprehends all the
operations of the mind; sometimes it means only the discursive, dialec-
tical reason, which stands on a permanently lower level than intellectus sive
animus sive mens. The last thing John would suggest is that reason, in this
narrower sense, can find out and interpret the ways of God. His point is
1 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, viii, 1.
* MPL, cxXII, 613.
## p. 787 (#833) ############################################
The charge of Pantheism
787
rather that auctoritas is valuable only in so far as it represents what the
intellect of saintly theologi has revealed. Reason itself demands our
reverence for what is above reason; it does not, however, demand blind
subservience to patristic utterances, or to the bare letter of the Scriptures,
any more than it encourages us to put our trust in petty dialectic. Vera
auctoritas, says John the Scot, rectae rationi non obsistit, neque recta ratio
verae auctoritati'. To force him into a rigid dilemma of reason and
authority is likely to be an anachronism only less regrettable than the
proposal to enlist him on the side of the Nominalists or the Realists. A
mind like his refuses to be imprisoned in any such antithesis. What he
believes in is the illumination of the mind with a heavenly radiance, as,
easily dimmed by ratio in one way as by auctoritas in another.
The traditional accusation against the De Divisione Naturae—surely
one of the most remarkable books in the world—is that of Pantheism.
The charge would be more convincing if its authors would sometimes go
so far as to tell us what Pantheism means. Presumably, it implies at least
some kind of identification or confusion of God with His creatures, some
materialisation of the Divine Nature, with loss of transcendence and the
Creator's prerogative. Now in the De Divisione Naturae there is a rich
abundance of statements that seem to point in that direction. Nothing
could be plainer, for example, than the words, proinde non duo a seipsis
distantia debemus intelligere Deum et creaturam, sed unum et id ipsumº;
and this is but one out of many such passages. Yet no one, it is reasonable
to suggest, who has striven to master the book as a whole, with due
appre-
ciation of its earlier sources, will judge “Pantheism” to be other than an
idle and empty description of the doctrines set forth by John the Scot.
The universe, as he conceived of it, is one stupendous yet graded theophania.
God is in omnibus and supra omnia, revealed in all His creatures, yet
eternally transcending them all. They who declare that God is thus
degraded below Himself must be prepared to deny that Jesus was God
as well as man. For man is the officina omnis creaturae, the perfect
microcosm; whence the Incarnation reveals, in a single flash, the whole
relation of God to the universe, even as the resurrection of Christ displays
in a moment the reditus or reversio of all things to God. John himself
was well aware of the danger to which he exposed himself. Anticipating
the charge of Pantheism, he strove by many illustrations and analogies to
accommodate his high and difficult thoughts to men of ruder understand-
ing. In this he did not succeed. When not wholly neglected, his book
was usually suspect. After lying comparatively dormant for more than
three centuries, it was brought into fresh notoriety by the heretical
Amalric of Bene. A preliminary condemnation at Paris in 1210 was
followed in 1225 by the sentence of Honorius III, who ordered all discover-
able copies to be committed to the flames. Upon this, perhaps, the fairest
comment is that, if Amalric and his friends had read John as carelessly
1 MPL, cXXII, 511.
2 Ib. CXXII, 678.
CH. XXIII.
50-2
## p. 788 (#834) ############################################
788
Character of Christendom
as some of his modern critics, the action of Honorius may easily be
excused.
The false dawn of the Carolingian renaissance faded all too soon into
a second spell of darkness. Knowledge of Greek and the power of com-
paring eastern with western traditions John the Scot did not bequeath
to the following generations. His translations of Dionysius and Maximus
Confessor-sad examples of the verbum de verbo method—may well have
been unintelligible, while his commentaries or glosses on Martianus Capella
and Boethius would distinguish him less clearly from other men. Dis-
ordered and confused by the trend of political events, the Latin world
relapsed into the confinement of a narrow circle of authors conned over
and over again, yet often imperfectly known and understood. It is possible,
however, to draw too wide an inference from the poverty of a philosophical
library. Paucity of materials alone will not account for mental stagnation.
To interpret the intellectual condition of the Middle Ages we must look
rather to the vast transformation of the world, as the notion of a civitas
Dei gradually supplanted the ideals of Pagan society. In the eyes of Au-
gustine the secular power, no less than the heathen religion, still belongs
to the civitas impiorum; to possess and wield it can never be the ambition of
the Church. Philosophy again, the property of the Greeks, though far
superior to an idolatrous religion, is only an imperfect alternative to the
Christian life. But the course of history was too strong for these older
partitions and antagonisms. Before the end of the fifth century Pope
Gelasius I was making his memorable pronouncement: duo quippe sunt
quibus principaliter mundus hic regitur, auctoritas sacrata pontificum et
regalis potestas. This royal or imperial power was henceforward to be no
Babylonish relic, but a necessary element in the life of a single, all-
embracing society. However delegated or dispersed among princes, the
temporal sovereignty must remain the sword of the spiritual, the instru-
ment for extending and protecting the Kingdom of God upon earth.
Authority of all kinds was gradually concentrated, until the thought of
a philosophy unrelated to dogmatic propositions became as intolerable as
the pretence of any secular power to stand outside the Church. The
Creed and the Scriptures became the official source alike of law and of
wisdom. The vis coactiva was now the appurtenance of knowledge, the
knowledge divinely imparted to the Christian society. In such a society
(no matter how much the papal theory was disputed) the weight of
tradition could not fail to be overwhelming. From heresy to schism was
now the briefest of steps, and novelty had always to justify itself. “Many
men," says John the Scot, “are roused from slumber by heretics, that they
may see the day of the Lord and rejoice. "? No shrewder judgment could
be passed on the history of medieval philosophy. For most of the greater
changes were due less to original speculation, or even to the acquisition
of new materials, than to the suspicion of heresy. Opinions denounced at
IMPL, cxxii, 359.
## p. 789 (#835) ############################################
Medieval knowledge of Plato and Aristotle
789
first were often enough accepted on second thoughts. The power of
adapting and absorbing fresh ideas never wholly ceased to operate, but
all was governed by the general assumption that unchanging truth was
already revealed. Meanwhile, the habit of deference to tradition was
extended, almost unwittingly, to such records of Pagan knowledge as
fortune had preserved. None would have ranked a Greek philosopher with
the Scriptures, but when reverence for the past was combined with lack
of critical power, the result was to establish certain books or authors in a
position not easy to shake.
Some of the medieval limitations we may briefly illustrate by glancing
at the sources of their acquaintance with Aristotle and Plato. The first
name to be honoured is Boethius. To his translations of the Categories
(with the Isagoge of Porphyry) and the De Interpretatione, together with
his own commentaries and logical treatises, was due virtually the whole
knowledge of Aristotle accessible to medieval students from the sixth
century to the middle of the twelfth. Boethius had intended to introduce
the whole of Aristotle to the Latins, and some confusion has been caused
by the more than doubtful ascription to him of translations of the rest of
the Organon, the De Anima, and the Metaphysics. It is fairly certain,
however, that before the age of John of Salisbury Aristotle was directly
represented only by two of his minor logical works, supplemented by a
few fragments of information gathered from various sources. An impor-
tant consequence, too often overlooked, was the restriction of his authority
to a very narrow sphere. In dialectic he was admittedly the master, but
in philosophy as a whole the evidence is incontestable that Plato occupied
the highest place in general esteem. And yet, when we turn to the
medieval knowledge of Plato, we may well be surprised at his lofty
position. For nothing of his actual writings could be studied in Latin but
a fragment of a single dialogue, the Timaeus.
Between the cases of Plato and Aristotle there was, however, a very
wide difference. When Aristotle arrived in translations he was almost a
stranger; and even when the work of Boethius had raised him to unchal-
lenged sovereignty in the province of logic, he still was enthroned in a
certain isolation, with little historical background and with no evident
affinity to the Christian way of life. Platonism, on the other hand, was
almost inhaled with the air. Boethius himself was a Platonist, and so was
Porphyry. Augustine, too, never forgot his debt to the philosophy which
had delivered him from Manichaeism and carried him a lony stage on the
road to Christ. To indicate all the sources of Platonism would be almost
impossible. It must suffice here to notice two from outside the Christian
circle, the commentary of Chalcidius that accompanied his version of the
Timaeus, and the dissertation of Macrobius on the Somnium Scipionis.
To class Chalcidius as non-Christian is perhaps questionable, for he was
more probably a Christian than a Pagan or a Jew. His work, however,
embodies very little Christian material except an extract from Origen.
CH. XXIII.
## p. 790 (#836) ############################################
790
The Influence of Macrobius
Dating, perhaps, from the early fourth century, it is neither independent
nor critical. The substance of it, if we accept the result of Switalski's
investigation, is derived from an earlier commentary, very possibly by the
hand of the eminent Stoic, Posidonius. The outcome is an eclectic medley
or muddle of divers authorities, gathered under the sway of the infallible
Plato. The later Platonism, we must remember, was even more than
eclectic. Its aim was to absorb and to reconcile, to appear as a summary
of all previous Greek speculation. Much of the uncritical confusion of
ideas that meets us everywhere in the Middle Ages was simply a legacy
from Chalcidius and the less intelligent followers of Plotinus in the decline
of the ancient world.
Roughly similar qualities appear in the work of Macrobius, a writer
who, late in the fifth century, had contrived to remain untouched by the
Christian influence. His detachment from the Church makes it all the
more interesting to discover in him that medievalism of mind so often
rated as a purely Christian product. In him we have already the medieval
Virgil, and along with that strange invention all the baffling mixture of
science and nonsense that was to float about Europe for more than a
thousand
years. How medieval, too, is the deference of Macrobius to the
great names of the past. Neque vero tam immemor mei, he writes, aut ita
male animatus sum, ut ex ingenio meo vel Aristoteli resistam vel adsim
Platoni'. Yet Macrobius is far from contemptible, and the debt of the
Middle Ages to him was immense. To him was due what little was known
of Plotinus (inter philosophiae professores cum Platone princeps)? , the four-
fold classification of the virtues, the threefold gradation of Deus, mens,
and anima, the illumination of all creatures as in an orderly series of
mirrors by the unus fulgor, the descent of the soul to its material habita-
tion, and its yearning for restoration to its eternal home. When Christians
read in Macrobius of the soul's imprisonment in a vesture of clay (indu-
mentum testeum), of its wandering on earth as a pilgrim, of heaven as the
true patria, of philosophy as meditatio mortis, they caught the genuine
accent of religion and welcomed Platonism as a natural ally. Actual
knowledge of the original Plato Macrobius did not greatly increase. Be-
hind the Somnium Scipionis, according to Schedler's recent enquiry, lies
once more the T'imaeus, as interpreted first by Porphyry and handed on
by intermediate writers to Macrobius. If that be so, it helps to account
for the frequent difficulty of deciding, when no names are mentioned,
whether a medieval writer is using Chalcidius, or Macrobius, or sometimes
the De Consolatione of Boethius. The same brand of Platonism, with the
same tincture of new Pythagoreanism, is recognisable in all.
The lines of thought broadly indicated by Plato and Aristotle run
through the Middle Ages. From Plato came the wider inspiration and
the higher call; from Aristotle the perception of difficulties and contra-
dictions, with the demand for dialectical skill. Nowhere, as it happens,
1 Comm. in Somnium Scipionis, 11, 15.
2 Ib. 1, 8.
## p. 791 (#837) ############################################
Importance of dialectic. The tenth century
791
were the defects of medieval knowledge of history more conspicuous than
in this very matter of dialectic. The most learned doctors were unaware
that dialectic had held in Plato's estimation a far higher place than Aris-
totle would allow.
