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CAROLINGIAN PERIOD: THE FIRST STAGE IN THE APPROPRIATION OF THE PATRISTIC AND ANTIQUE

With the conversion of Teuton peoples and their introduction to the Latin culture accompanying the new religion, the factors of mediaeval development came at last into conjunction. The mediaeval development was to issue from their combined action, rather than from the singular nature of any one of them.[237] Taking up the introductory theme concerning the meeting of these forces, we followed the Latinizing of the West resulting from the expansion of the Roman Republic, which represents the political and social preparation of the field. Then we considered the antique pagan gospel of philosophy and letters, which had quickened this Latin civilization and was to form the spiritual environment of patristic Christianity. Next in order we observed the intellectual interests of the Latin Fathers, and then turned to the great Latin transmitters of the somewhat amalgamated antique and patristic material—Boëthius, Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great, and Isidore of Seville—who gathered what they might, and did much to reduce the same to decadent forms, suited to the barbaric understanding. Then the course of the barbaric disruption of the Empire was reviewed; and this led to a consideration of the qualities and circumstances of the Celts and Teutons, both those who to all appearances had been Latinized, and those who took active part in the barbarization and disruption of the Roman order. And finally we closed these introductory, though essential, chapters by tracing the ways in which Christianity, with the now humbled and degraded antique culture, was presented to this renewed and largely Teutonic barbarism.

Having now reached the epoch of conjunction of the various elements of the mediaeval evolution, it lies before us to consider the first stage in the action of true mediaeval conditions upon the two chief spiritual forces, the first stage, in other words, of the mediaeval appropriation of the patristic and antique material. The period is what is called Carlovingian or Carolingian, after the great ruler Charlemagne. Intellectually considered, it may be said to have begun when Charles palpably evinced his interest in sacred and liberal studies by calling Alcuin and other scholars to his Court about the year 781. Let us note the political and social situation.

The Merovingian kingdom created by Clovis and his house has been spoken of.[238] One may properly refer to it in the singular, although frequently, instead of one, there were several kingdoms, since upon the death of a Merovingian monarch his realm was divided among his sons. But no true son of the house could leave the others unconquered or unmurdered; and therefore if the Merovingian kingdom constantly was divided, it also tended to coalesce again, coerced to unity. Constituted both of Roman and Teutonic elements, it operated as a mediating power between Latin Christendom and barbaric heathendom. Its energies were great, and were not waning when its royal house was passing into insignificance before the power of the nobles and the chief personage among them who had become the major domus (“Mayor of the palace”) and virtual ruler. Moreover, experience, contact with Latin civilization, membership in the Roman Catholic Church, were informing the Merovingian energies. They were becoming just a little less barbarous and a little more instructed; in fine, were changing from Merovingian to Carolingian.

In the latter part of the seventh century, Pippin, called “of Heristal,” ruled as major domus (as one or more of his ancestors before him) in Austrasia, the eastern Frankish kingdom. Many were his wars, especially with the Neustrian or western Frankish kingdom, under its major domus, Ebroin. This somewhat unconquerable man at last was murdered, and one of the two Merovingian kings being murdered likewise, Pippin about the year 688 became princeps regiminis ac major domus for the now united realm. From this date the Merovingians are but shadow kings, whose names are not worth recording. Pippin’s rule marks the advent of his house to virtual sovereignty, and also the passing of the preponderance of power from Neustria to Austrasia. These two facts became clear after Pippin’s death (714), when his redoubtable son Charles in a five years’ struggle against great odds made himself sole major domus, and with his Austrasians overwhelmed the Neustrian army. Thenceforth this Charles, called Martell the Hammer, mightily prevailed, smiting Saxons, Bavarians, and Alemanni, and, after much warfare in the south with Saracens, at last vindicated the Cross against the Crescent at Tours in 732. Nine years longer he was to reign, increasing his power to the end, and supporting the establishment of Catholicism in Frisia, by the Anglo-Saxon Willibrord, and in heathen German lands by St. Boniface.[239] He died in 741, dividing what virtually was his realm between his sons Carloman and Pippin: the former receiving Austrasia, Alemannia, Thuringia; the latter, Neustria, Burgundy, Provence.

These two sons valiantly took up their task, reforming the Church under the inspiration of Boniface, and ruling their domains without conflict with each other until 747, when Carloman retired and became a monk, leaving the entire realm to Pippin. The latter in 751 at Soissons, with universal approval and the consent of the Pope, was crowned king, and anointed by the hand of Boniface. This able and energetic sovereign pursued the course of his father and grandfather, but on still larger scale; aiding the popes and reducing the Lombard power in Italy, carrying on wars around the borders of his realm, bringing Aquitania to full submission, and expelling the Saracens from Narbonne and other fortress towns. In 768 he died, again dividing his vast realm between his two sons Carloman and Charles.

These bore each other little love; but fortunately the former died (771) before an open breach occurred. So Charles was left to rule alone, and prove himself, all things considered, the greatest of mediaeval sovereigns. Having fought his many wars of conquest and subjugation against Saracens, Saxons, Avars, Bavarians, Slavs, Danes, Lombards; having conquered much of Italy and freed the Pope from neighbouring domination; having been crowned and anointed emperor in the year 800; having restored letters, uplifted the Church, issued much wise legislation, and Christianized with iron hand the stubborn heathen; and above all, having administered his vast realm with never-failing energy, he died in 814—just one hundred years after the time when his grandfather Charles was left to fight so doughtily for life and power.

Poetry and history have conspired to raise the fame of Charlemagne. In more than one chanson de geste, the old French épopée has put his name where that of Pippin, Charles Martell, or perhaps that of some Merovingian should have been.[240] Sober history has not thus falsified its matter, and yet has over-dramatized the incidents of its hero’s reign. For example, every schoolboy has been told of the embassy to Charlemagne from Harun al Raschid, Caliph of Bagdad. But not so many schoolboys know that Pippin had sent an embassy to a previous caliph, which was courteously entertained for three years in Bagdad;[241] and Pippin, like his son, received embassies from the Greek emperor. The careers of Charles Martell and Pippin have not been ignored; and yet historical convention has focused its attention and its phrases upon “the age of Charlemagne.” One should not forget that this exceedingly great man stood upon the shoulders of the great men to whose achievement he succeeded.

Neither politically, socially, intellectually, nor geographically[242] was there discontinuity or break or sudden change between the Merovingian and the Carolingian periods.[243] The character of the monarchy was scarcely affected by the substitution of the house of Pippin of Heristal for the house of Clovis. The baleful custom of dividing the realm upon a monarch’s death survived; but Fortune rendered it innocuous through one strong century, during which (719–814) the realm was free from internecine war, while the tossing streams of humanity were driven onward by three great successive rulers.

The Carolingian, like the Merovingian, realm included many different peoples who were destined never to become one nation; and the whole Carolingian system of government virtually had existed in the Merovingian period. Before, as well as after, the dynastic change, the government throughout the realm was administered by Counts. Likewise the famous missi dominici, or royal legates, are found in Merovingian times; but they were employed more effectively by Charles Martell, Pippin, and, finally, by Charlemagne, who enlarged their sphere of action. He elaborately defined their functions in a famous Capitulary of the year 802. It was set forth that the emperor had chosen these legates from among his best and greatest (ex optimatibus suis), and had authorized them to receive the new oaths of allegiance, and supervise the observance of the laws, the execution of justice, the maintenance of the military and fiscal rights of the emperor. They were given power to see that the permanent functionaries (the counts and their subordinates) duly administered the law as written or recognized. The missi had jurisdiction over ecclesiastical as well as lay officials; and many of them were entrusted with special powers and duties in the particular instance.

Thus Charlemagne developed the functions of these ancient officers. Likewise his Court and royal council, the synods and assemblies of his reign, the military service, modes of holding land, methods of collecting revenue, were not greatly changed from Merovingian prototypes. Yet the old institutions had been renewed and bettered. A vast misjoined and unrelated realm was galvanized into temporary unity. And, most impressive and portentous thing of all, an Empire—the Holy Roman Empire—was resurrected for a time in fact and verity: the same was destined to endure in endeavour and contemplation.

So there was no break politically or socially between the Carolingian Empire and its antecedents, which had made it possible. Likewise there was no discontinuity spiritually and intellectually between the earlier time and that epoch which begins with Charlemagne’s first endeavours to restore knowledge, and extends through the ninth and, if one will, even the tenth century.[244] Western Europe (except Scandinavia) had become nominally Christian, and had been made acquainted with Latin education to the extent indicated in the preceding chapter, the purpose of which was to tell how Christianity and the antique culture were brought to the northern peoples. The present chapter, on the other hand, seeks to describe how the eighth and ninth centuries proceeded to learn and consider and react upon this newly introduced Christianity and antique culture, out of which the spiritual destinies of the Middle Ages were to be forged. The task of Carolingian scholars was to learn what had been brought to them. They scarcely excelled even the later intermediaries through whom this knowledge had been transmitted. One need not look among them for better scholarship than was possessed by Bede, who died in 735, the birth year of Alcuin who drew so much from him, and was to be the chief luminary of the palace school of Charlemagne. Undoubtedly, Charlemagne’s exertions caused a revival of sacred and profane studies through the region of the present France and Rhenish Germany. His primary motive was the purification and extension of Catholic Christianity. Here Charles Martell and Pippin (with his brother Carloman) had done much, as their support of Boniface bears witness to. But Charlemagne’s efforts went beyond those of his predecessors. More clearly than they he understood the need of education, and he was himself intensely interested in knowledge. Hence his endeavours, primarily to uplift the Faith, brought a revival of learning and a literary productivity, consisting mostly in reproduction or rearrangement of old material, doctrinal or profane.[245]

Another preliminary consideration may help us to appreciate the intellectual qualities of the period before us. Charlemagne was primarily a ruler in the largest sense, conqueror, statesman, law-giver, one who realized the needs of the time, and met or forestalled them. His monarchy, with its powers inherited, as well as radiating from his own personality, provided an imperial government for western Europe. The chief activities of this ruler and his epoch were practical, to wit, political and military. In laws, in institutions, and in deeds, he and his Empire represent creativeness and progress; although, to be sure, that conglomerate empire of his had itself to fall in pieces before there could take place a more lasting and national evolution of States. And, of course, Carolingian political creativeness included the conservation of existing social, political, and, above all, ecclesiastical, institutions. In fine, this period was creative and progressive in its practical energies. The factors were the pressing needs and palpable opportunities, which were met or availed of. And to the same effective treatment of problems ecclesiastical and doctrinal was due the modicum of originality in the Carolingian literature. Aside from this, the period’s intellectual accomplishment, in religious as well as secular studies, shows merely a diligent learning and imitation of pagan letters, and a rehandling and arrangement of the work of the Church Fathers and their immediate successors. Its efforts were exhausted in rearranging the heritage of Christian teaching coming from the Church Fathers, or in endeavours to acquire the transmitted antique culture and imitate the antique in phrase and metre. The combined task, or occupation, absorbed the minds of men. The whole period was at school, where it needed to be: at school to the Church Fathers, at school to the transmitters of antique culture. Its task was one of adjustment of its materials to itself, and of itself to its materials.

The reinvigoration of studies marking the life-time of Charlemagne did not extend to Italy, where letters, although decayed, had never ceased, nor to Anglo-Saxon England, where Bede had taught and whence Alcuin had come. The revival radiated, one may say, from the palace school attached to the Court, which had its least intermittent domicile at Aix-la-Chapelle. It extended to the chief monastic centres of Gaul and Germany, and to cathedral schools where such existed. From many lands scholars were drawn by that great hand so generous in giving, so mighty to protect. Some came on invitation more or less compelling, and many of their own free will. The first and most famous of them all was the Anglo-Saxon, Alcuin of York. Charles first saw him at Parma in the year 781, and ever after kept him in his service as his most trusted teacher and director of studies. Love of home drew Alcuin back, once at least, to England. In 796 Charles permitted him to leave the Court, and entrusted him with the re-establishment of the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours and its schools. There he lived and laboured till his death in 804.

Another scholar was Peter of Pisa, a grammarian, who seems to have shared with Alcuin the honourable task of instructing the king. Of greater note was Paulus Diaconus, who, like Alcuin himself, was to sigh for the pious or scholarly quiet which the seething, half-barbarous, and loose-mannered Court did not afford. Paulus at last gained Charles’s consent to retire to Monte Cassino. He was of the Lombard race, like another favourite of Charles, Paulinus of Aquileia. From Spain, apparently, came Theodulphus, by descent a Goth, and reputed the most elegant Latin versifier of his time. Charles made him Bishop of Orleans. A little later, Einhart the Frank appears, who was to be the emperor’s secretary and biographer. Likewise came certain sons of Erin, among them such a problematic poet as he who styled himself “Hibernicus Exul”—not the first or last of his line!

These belonged to the generation about the emperor. Belonging to the next generation, and for the most part pupils of the older men, were Abbot Smaragdus, grammarian and didactic writer; the German, Rabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda and, against his will, Archbishop of Mainz, an encyclopaedic excerpter and educator, primus praeceptor Germaniae; his pupil was Walafrid Strabo, the cleverest putter-together of the excerpt commentary, and a pleasing poet. In Lorraine at the same time flourished the Irishman, Sedulius Scotus, and in the West that ardent classical scholar, Servatus Lupus, Abbot of Ferrières, and Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, a man practical and hard-headed, with whom one may couple Claudius, Bishop of Turin, the opponent of relic-worship. One might also mention those theological controversialists, Radbertus Paschasius and Ratramnus, Hincmar, the great Archbishop of Rheims, and Gottschalk, the unhappy monk, ever recalcitrant; at the end John Scotus Eriugena should stand, the somewhat too intellectual Neo-Platonic Irishman, translator of Pseudo-Dionysius, and announcer of various rationalizing propositions for which men were to look on him askance.

There will be occasion to speak more particularly of a number of these men. They were all scholars, and interested in the maintenance of elementary Latin education as well as in theology. They wished to write good Latin, and sometimes tried for a classical standard, as Einhart did in his Vita Caroli. Few of them refrained from verse, for they were addicted to metrical compositions made of borrowed classic phrase and often of reflected classic sentiment, sometimes prettily composed, but usually insipid, and in the mass, which was great, exceptionally uninspired. Such metrical effort, quite as much as Einhart’s consciously classicizing Latin prose, represents a survival of the antique excited to recrudescence in forms which, if they were not classical, at least had not become anything else. Stylistically, and perhaps temperamentally, it represented the ending of what had nearly passed away, rather than the beginning of the more organic development which was to come.[246]

Among these men, Alcuin and Rabanus broadly represent at once the intellectual interests of the period and the first stage in the process of the mediaeval appropriation of the patristic and antique material. The affectionate and sympathetic personality of the former[247] appears throughout his voluminous correspondence with Charles and others, which shows, among other matters, the interest of the time in elementary points of Latinity, and the alertness of the mind of the great king, who put so many questions to his genial instructor upon grammar, astronomy, and such like knowledge. An examination of the works of Alcuin will indicate the range and character of the educational and more usual intellectual interests of the epoch. In fact, they are outlined in a simple fashion suited to youthful minds in his treatise upon Grammar.[248] Its opening colloquy presents a sort of programme and justification of elementary secular studies.

“We have heard you saying,” begins Discipulus, “that philosophy is the teacher (magistra) of all virtues, and that she alone of secular riches has never left the possessor miserable. Lend a hand, good Master,”—and the pupil becomes self-deprecatory. “Flint has fire within, which comes out only when struck; so the light of knowledge exists by nature in human minds, but a teacher is needed to knock it out.”

“It is easy,” responds the Master, “to show you wisdom’s path, if only you will pursue it for the sake of God, for the sake of the soul’s purity and to learn the truth, and also for its own sake, and not for human praise and honour.”

We confess, answers little Discipulus, that we love happiness, but know not whether it can exist in this world. And the dialogue rambles on in discursive comment upon the superiority of the lasting over the transitory, with some feeble echoing of notes from Boëthius’s De consolatione. There is talk to show that man, a rational animal, the image of his Creator, and immortal in his better part, should seek what is truly of himself, and not what is alien, the abiding and not the fugitive. In fine, one should adorn the soul, which is eternal, with wisdom, the soul’s true lasting dignity. There is some coy demurring over the steepness of the way; but the pupil is ardent, and the Master confident that with the aid of Divine Grace they will ascend the seven grades of philosophy, by which philosophers have gained honour brighter than that of kings, and the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith have triumphed over all heresiarchs. “Through these paths, dearest son, let your youth run its daily course, until its completed years and strengthened mind shall attain to the heights of the Holy Scriptures upon which you and your like shall become armed defenders of the Faith and invincible assertors of its truth.” This means, of course, that the Liberal Arts are the proper preparation for the study of Scripture, that is, theology. But Alcuin’s discourse seems to tarry with those studies as if detained by some love of them for their own sake.

The body of this treatise is in form a disputation between two youthful pupils, a Frank and a Saxon. A Magister makes a third interlocutor, and sets the subject of the argument. These personae discuss letters and syllables in definitions taken from Donatus, Priscian, or Isidore; and whenever Alcuin permits any one of them to stray from the words of those authorities, the language shows at once his own confused ideas regarding the parts of speech. He uses terms without adequately comprehending them, and thus affords one of the myriad examples of how, under decadent or barbarized conditions, phrases may outlive an intelligent understanding of their meaning. “Grammar,” says the Magister, when solicited to define it, “is the science of letters, and the guardian of correct speech and writing. It rests on nature, reason, authority, and custom.” “In how many species is it divided?” “In twenty-six: words, letters, syllables, clauses, dictions, speeches, definitions, feet, accent, punctuation, signs, spelling, analogies, etymologies, glosses, differences, barbarism, solecism, faults, metaplasm, schemata, tropes, prose, metre, fables and histories.”[249] The actual treatise does not cover these twenty-six topics, but confines itself to the division of grammar commonly called Etymology.

Though the mental processes of an individual preserve a working harmony, some of them appear more rational than others. Such disparities may be glaring in men who enter upon the learning of a higher civilization without proper pilotage. How are they to discriminate between the valuable and the foolish? The common sense, which they apply to familiar matters, contrasts with their childlike lucubrations upon novel topics of education or philosophy. And if that higher culture to which such pupils are introduced be in part decadent, it will itself contain disparities between the stronger thinking held in the surviving writings of a prior time and the later degeneracies which are declining to the level, it may be, of these new learners.

There would naturally be disparities in the mental processes of an Anglo-Saxon like Alcuin introduced to the debris of Latin education and the writings of the Fathers; and his state would typify the character of the studies at the palace school of Charlemagne and at monastic schools through his northern realm. This newly stimulated scholarship held the same disparities that appear in the writings of Alcuin. He may seem to be adapting his teaching to barbaric needs, but it is evident that his matter accords with his own intellectual tastes, as, for example, when he introduces into his educational writings the habit of riddling in metaphors, so dear to the Anglo-Saxon.[250] The sound but very elementary portions of his teaching were needed by the ignorance of his scholars. For instance, no information regarding Latin orthography could come amiss in the eighth century. And Alcuin in his treatise on that subject[251] took many words commonly misspelled and contrasted them with those which sounded like them, but were quite different in meaning and derivation. One should not, for example, confuse habeo with abeo; or bibo and vivo. Such warnings were valuable. The use of the vulgar Romance-forms of Latin spoken through a large part of Charles’s dominions implied no knowledge of correct Latinity. Even among the clergy, there was almost universal ignorance of Latin orthography and grammar.

As a companion to his Grammar and Orthography, Alcuin composed a De rhetorica et virtutibus,[252] in the form of a dialogue between Charles and himself. The king desired such instruction to equip him for the civil disputes (civiles quaestiones) which were brought before him from all parts of his realm. And Alcuin proceeded to furnish him with a compend of the scientia bene dicendi, which is Rhetoric. This crude epitome was based chiefly on Cicero’s De inventione, but indicates a use of other of his oratorical writings, and has bits here and there which apparently have filtered through from the Rhetoric of Aristotle. Some illustrations are taken from Scripture. The work is most successful in showing the difference between Cicero and Alcuin. The genius, the spirit, the art of the great orator’s treatises are lost; a naked skeleton of statement remains. We have words, terms, definitions, even rules; and Alcuin is not conscious that beyond them there is the living spirit of discourse.

A more complete descent from substance to a clatter of words and definitions is exhibited by Alcuin’s De dialectica.[253] In logical studies facilis descensus! Others had illustrated this before him. His treatise is again a dialogue, with Charlemagne for questioner. Opening with the stock definitions and divisions of philosophy, it arrives at logic, which is composed (as Isidore and Cassiodorus said) of dialectic and rhetoric, “the shut and open fist,” a simile which had come down from Varro. Says Charles: “What are the species of dialectic?” Answers Alcuin: “Five principal ones: Isagogae, categories, forms of syllogisms and definitions, topics, periermeniae.” What a classification! Introductions, categories, syllogisms, topics, De interpretatione-s! It is not a classification but in reality an enumeration of the treatises which had served as sources for those men from whom Alcuin drew! Evidently this excerpter is not really thinking in the terms and categories of his subject. His work shows no intelligence beyond Isidore’s, from whose Etymologies it is largely taken. And the genius of our author for metaphysics may be perceived from the definition which he offers Charles of substance—substantia or usia (i.e. οὐσία): it is that which is discerned by corporeal sense; while accidens is that which changes frequently and is apprehended by the mind. Substantia is the underlying, the subjacens, in which the accidentia are said to be.[254] One observes the crassness and inconsistency of these statements.

There are illustrations of the knowledge and methods shown in the educational writings of the man who, next to Charles himself, was the guiding spirit of the intellectual revival. No mention has been made of those of his works that were representative of the chief intellectual labour of the period—that of exploiting the Patristic material. Here Alcuin contributed a compend of Augustine’s doctrines on the Trinity,[255] and a book on the Vices and Virtues, drawn chiefly from Augustine’s sermons.[256] Like most of his learned contemporaries, he also compiled Commentaries upon Scripture, the method of which is prettily told in a prefatory epistle placed by him before his Commentary on the Gospel of John, and addressed to two pious women:

“Devoutly searching the pantries of the holy Fathers, I let you taste whatever I have been able to find in them. Nor did I deem it fitting to cull the blossoms from any meadow of my own, but with humble heart and head bowed low, to search through the flowering fields of many Fathers, and thus safely satisfy your pious pleasure. First of all I seek the suffrage of Saint Augustine, who laboured with such zeal upon this Gospel; then I draw something from the tracts of the most holy doctor Saint Ambrose; nor have I neglected the homilies of Father Gregory the pope, or those of the blessed Bede, nor, in fact, the works of others of the holy Fathers. I have cited their interpretations, as I found them, preferring to use their meanings and their words, than trust to my own presumption.”[257]

In the next generation, a most industrious compiler of such Commentaries was Alcuin’s pupil, Rabanus Maurus.[258] More deeply learned than his master, his conception of the purposes of study has not changed essentially. Like Alcuin, he sets forth a proper intellectual programme for the instruction of the clergy: “The foundation, the state, and the perfection, of wisdom is knowledge of the Holy Scriptures.” The Seven Arts are the ancillary disciplinae; the first three constitute that grammatical, rhetorical, and logical training which is needed for an understanding of the holy texts and their interpretation. Likewise arithmetic and the rest of the quadrivium have place in the cleric’s education. A knowledge of pagan philosophy need not be avoided: “The philosophers, especially the Platonists, if perchance they have spoken truths accordant with our faith, are not to be shunned, but their truths appropriated, as from unjust possessors.”[259] And Rabanus continues with the never-failing metaphor of Moses despoiling the Egyptians.

Raban, however, had somewhat larger thoughts of education than his master. For example, he takes a broader view of grammar, which he regards as the scientia of interpreting the poets and historians, and the ratio of correct speech and writing.[260] Likewise he treats Dialectica more seriously. With him it is the “disciplina of rational investigation, of defining and discussing, and distinguishing the true from the false. It is therefore the disciplina disciplinarum. It teaches how to teach and how to learn; in this same study, reason itself demonstrates what it is and what it wills. This art alone knows how to know, and is willing and able to make knowers. Reasoning in it, we learn what we are, and whence, and also to know Creator and creature; through it we trace truth and detect falsity, we argue and discover what is consequent and what inconsequent, what is contrary to the nature of things, what is true, what is probable, and what is intrinsically false in disputations. Wherefore the clergy ought to know this noble art, and have its laws in constant meditation, so that subtly they may discern the wiles of heretics, and confute their poisoned sayings with the conclusions of the syllogism.”[261]

This somewhat extravagant but not novel view of logic’s function was prophetic of the coming scholastic reliance upon it as the means and instrument of truth. Rabanus had no hesitancy in commending this edged tool to his pupils. But the operations of his mind were predominantly Carolingian, which is to say that ninety-nine per cent of the contents of his opera consist of material extracted from prior writers. His Commentaries upon Scripture outbulk all his other works taken together, and are compiled in this manner. So is his encyclopaedic compilation, De universo libri XXII.,[262] two books more than those of Isidore’s Etymologies, from which he chiefly drew; but he changed the arrangement, and devoted a larger part of his parchment to religious topics; and he added further matter gleaned from the Church Fathers, from whom he had drawn his Commentaries. This further matter consisted of the mystical interpretations of things, which he subjoined to their “natural” explanations. He says, in his Praefatio, addressed to King Louis:

“Much is set forth in this work concerning the natures of things and the meanings of words, and also as to the mystical signification of things. Accordingly I have arranged my matter so that the reader may find the historical and mystical explanations of each thing set together—continuatim positam; and may be able to satisfy his desire to know both significations.”

These allegorical elaborations accorded with the habits of this compiler of allegorical comment upon Scripture.[263]

Rabanus was a full Teutonic personality, a massive scholar for his time, untiring in labour and intrinsically honest. Except when involved in the foolishness of the mystic qualities of numbers, or following the will-o’-wisps of allegory, he evinces much sound wisdom. He abhors the pretence of teaching what one has not first diligently learned; and his good sense is shown in his admonition to teachers to use words which their pupils or audience will understand. His views upon profane knowledge were liberal: one should use the treasured experience and accumulated wisdom of the ancients, for that is still the mainstay of human society; but one should shun their vain as well as pernicious idolatries and superstitions.[264] Let us by all means preserve their sound educational learning and the elements of their philosophy which accord with the verities of Christian doctrine. Raban also realized the sublimity of the study of Astronomy, which he deemed “a worthy argument for the religious and a torment for the curious. If pursued with chaste and sober mind, it floods our thoughts with immense love. How admirable to mount the heavens in spirit, and with inquiring reason consider that whole celestial fabric, and from every side gather in the mind’s reflective heights what those vast recesses veil.”[265] He then rebukes the folly of those who vainly would draw auguries from the stars.[266]

Raban’s mental activities were commonly constrained by the need felt by him and his pious contemporaries to master the works of the Latin Fathers. Perhaps more than any other one man (though here his pupil Walafrid Strabo made a skilful second) he contributed to what necessarily was the first stage in this mediaeval achievement of appropriating patristic Christianity, to wit, the preliminary task of rearranging the doctrinal expositions of the Fathers conveniently, and for the most part in Commentaries following verse and chapter of the canonical books of Scripture. But, like many of his contemporaries, Raban, when compelled by controversial exigencies, would think for himself if the situation could not be met with matter taken from a Father. Accordingly, individual and personal views are vigorously put in some of his writings, as in his Liber de oblatione puerorum,[267] directed against the attempt of the interesting Saxon, Gottschalk, to free himself from the vows made by those who dedicated him in boyhood as an oblatus at the monastery of Fulda, of which Raban was abbot. Raban’s tract maintained that the monastic vows made upon such dedication of children could not be broken by the latter on reaching years of discretion.

This same Gottschalk was the centre of the storm, which he indeed blew up, over Predestination; and again Raban was his fierce opponent. This controversy, with that relating to the Eucharist, will serve to illustrate the doctrinal interests of the time, and also to exemplify the quasi-originality of its controversial productions.

Of course Predestination and the Eucharist had been exhaustively discussed by the Latin Fathers. No man of the ninth century could really add anything to the arguments touching the former set forth in the works of Augustine and his Pelagian adversaries. And the substance of the discussion as to the eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ had permeated countless tomes, both Greek and Latin, from the time of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (d. 202); and yet neither as to the impossible topic of Predestination, nor as to the distinctly Christian mystery of the Eucharist, had the Latin Church authoritatively and finally fixed doctrine in dogma or put together the arguments. The ninth century with its lack of elastic thinking, and its greater need of tangible authority, was compelled by its mental limitations to attempt in each of these matters to drag a definite conclusion from out of its entourage of argument, and strip it of its decently veiling obscurities. Thereupon, and with its justifying and balanced foundation of reasons and considerations knocked from under, the conclusion had to sustain itself in mid air, just at the level of the common eye.

Such, obviously, was the result of the Eucharistic or Paschal controversy. The symbol, all indecision brushed away, hardened into the tangible miraculous reality. Radbertus, Abbot of Corbie, who was so rightly named Paschasius, was the chief agent in the process. His method of procedure, just as the result which he obtained, was what the time required. The method was almost a bit of creation in itself: he put the matter in a separate monograph, De corpore et sanguine Domini,[268] the first work exclusively devoted to the subject. This was needed as a matter of arrangement and presentation. Men could not endure to look here and thither among many books on many subjects, for arguments one way and the other. That was too distraught. There was call for a compendium, a manual of the matter; and in providing it Paschasius was a master mechanic for his time. Inevitably the discussion and the conclusion took on a new definiteness. It is impossible to glean and gather arguments and matter from all sides, and bring them together into a single composition, without making the thesis more organic, tangible, definite. Thus Paschasius presented the scattered, wavering discussion—the victorious side of it—as a clear dogma reached at last. And whatever qualification of counter-doctrine there was in his grouped arguments, there was none in the conclusion; and the definite conclusion was what men wanted.

And practically for the whole western Church, clergy and laity, the conclusion was but one, and accorded with what was already the current acceptance of the matter. Radbert’s arguments embraced the spiritual realism of Augustine, according to which the ultra reality of the eucharistic elements consisted in the virtus sacramenti, that is in their miraculous and real, but invisible, transformation into the veritable substance of Christ’s veritable body. This took place through priestly consecration, and existed only for believers. For the brute to eat the elements was nothing more than to consume other similar natural substances. For the misbeliever it was not so simple. He indeed ate not Christ’s body, but his own judicium, his own deeper damnation. Here lay the terror, which made more anxious, more poignant, the believer’s hope, that he was faithful and humbled, and was eating the veritable Christ-body to his sure salvation. For the Eucharist could not fail, though the partaker might.

Out of all of this emerged the one clear thing, the point, the practical conclusion, which was transubstantiation, though the word was not yet made. Here it is in Paschasius; says he: “That body and blood veritably come into existence (fiat) by the consecration of the Mystery, no one doubts who believes the divine words; hence Truth says, ‘For my flesh verily is food, and my blood verily is drink’ (John vi. 55). And that it should be clearer to the disciples who did not rightly understand of what flesh He spoke, or of what blood, He added, to make this plain, ‘Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me and I in him’ (ibid. 56). Therefore, if it is veritably food, it is veritable flesh; and if it is veritably drink, it also is veritable blood. Otherwise how could He have said, ‘The bread which I will give is my flesh for the life of the world’ (ibid. 52)?”

Could anything be more positive and simplified? At first sight it is a marvel how Paschasius, even though treading in the steps of so many who had gone before, could give a literal interpretation to words which Christ seems to have used as figuratively as when He said, “I am the vine, ye are the branches.” A marvel indeed, when we think that Paschasius and all of his generation, as well as those who went before, had abandoned themselves to the most wonderful and far-fetched allegorical interpretations of every historical and literal statement in the Scriptures. And this same Paschasius, and all the rest too, do not hesitate to interpret and explain by allegory the significance of every accompanying act and circumstance of the mass. This might seem the climax of the marvel, but it is a step toward explaining it. For the literal interpretation of the phrases which Paschasius quotes was followed for the sake of the more absolute miracle, the deeper mystery, the fuller florescence of encompassing allegorical meaning. Only thus could be brought about the transformation of the palpable symbol into the miraculous reality; and only then could that bread and wine be what Cyril of Alexandria and others, five hundred years before Paschasius, had called it: “the drug of immortality.” Only through the miraculous and real identity of the elements of the Eucharist with the body and blood of Christ could they save the souls of the partakers.

In partial disagreement with these hard and fast conclusions, Ratramnus, also of Corbie,[269] and others might still try to veil the matter, with utterances capable of more equivocal meaning; might try to make it all more dim, and therefore more possibly reasonable. That was not what the Carolingian time, or the centuries to come, wanted; but rather the definite tangible statement, which they could grasp as readily as they could see and touch the elements before their eyes. In disenveloping the question and conclusion from every wavering consideration and veiling ambiguity, the Carolingian period was creative in this Paschal controversy. New propositions were not devised; but the old, such of them as fitted, were put together and given the unity and force of a projectile.

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

At all events the hard and fast, complete and twin (gemina), divine predestination, unto hell as well as heaven, was too unmitigated for the Carolingian Church. This doctrine, and his own intractible temper, immured the unhappy announcer of it in a monastic dungeon till he died. It was monstrous, as monstrous as transubstantiation, for example! But transubstantiation saved; and while the Church could stand the doctrine of the election of the Elect to salvation, it revolted from the counter-inference, of the election of the damned to hell, which contradicted too drastically the sweet and lovely teaching that Christ died for all. The theologians of one and more generations were drawn into the strife, which was to have a less definitive result than the Paschal controversy. Even to-day the adjustment of human free-will with omnipotent foreknowledge has not been made quite clear.[270]

There was one man who was drawn into the Predestination strife, although for him it lacked cardinal import. For the Neo-Platonic principles of John Scotus Eriugena scarcely permitted him to see in evil more than non-existence, and led him to trace all phases of reality downward from the primal Source. His intellectual attitude, interests, and faculties were exceptional, and yet nevertheless partook of the characteristics of his time, out of which not even an Eriugena could lift himself. He was an Irishman, who came to the Court of Charles the Bald on invitation, and for many years, until his orthodoxy became too suspect, was the head of the palace school. He may have died about the year 877.

Eriugena was in the first place a man of learning, widely read in the works of the Greek Fathers. From the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius and other sources, he had absorbed huge draughts of Neo-Platonism. One must not think of him always as an original thinker. A large part of his literary labours correspond with those of contemporaries. He was a translator of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, for he knew Greek. Then he composed or compiled Commentaries upon those writings. He cared supremely for the fruits of those faculties with which he was pre-eminently endowed. He, the man of acquisitive powers, loved learning; and he, the man with a faculty of constructive reason, loved rational truth and the labour of its systematic and syllogistic presentation. He ascribed primal validity to what was true by force of logic, and in his soul set reason above authority. Certain of his contemporaries, with a discernment springing from repugnance, perceived his self-reliant intellectual mood. The same ground underlay their detestation, which centuries after underlay St. Bernard’s, for Abaelard. That Abaelard should deem himself to be something! here was the root of the saint’s abhorrence. And, similarly, good Deacon Florus of Lyons wrote a vituperative polemic quite as much against the man Eriugena as against his detestable views of Predestination. Eriugena, forsooth, would be disputing with human argument, which he draws from philosophy, and for which he would be accountable to none. He proffers no authority from the Fathers, “as if daring to define with his own presumption what should be held and followed.”[271] Such was not the way that Carolingian Churchmen liked to argue, but rather with attested sentences from Augustine or Gregory. Manifestly Eriugena was not one of them.

Had his works been earlier understood, they would have been earlier condemned. But people did not realize what sort of Neo-Platonic, pantheistic and emanational, principles this Irishman from over the sea was setting forth. St. Denis, the great saint who was becoming St. Denis of France, had been authoritatively (and most preposterously) identified with Dionysius the Areopagite who heard Paul preach, and, according to the growing legend, won a martyr’s crown not far from Paris. This was set forth in his Life by Abbot Hilduin;[272] this was confirmed by Hincmar, the great Archbishop of Rheims, who said, closing his discussion of the matter: “veritas saepius agitata magis splendescit in lucem!”[273] Eriugena seemed to be a translator of his holy writings, and might be regarded as a setter forth of his exceptionally resplendent truths. He could use the Fathers’ language too. So in his book on Predestination he quotes Augustine as saying, Philosophy, which is the study of wisdom, is not other than religion.[274] But he was not going to keep meaning what Augustine meant. He slowly extends his talons in the following sentences which do not stand at the beginning of his great work De divisione naturae.

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

Answers Discipulus: “This is known to almost all.”

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

Discipulus clenches the matter: “Reason itself teaches this. Authority sometimes proceeds from reason; but reason never from authority. For all authority which is not approved by true reason seems weak. But true reason, since it is stablished in its own strength, needs to be strengthened by the assent of no authority.”[275]

No doubt of the talons here! Reason superior to authority—is it not also prior to faith? Eriugena does not press that reversal of the Christian position. But his De divisione naturae was a reasoned construction, although of course the materials were not his own. It was no loosely compiled encyclopaedia, such as Isidore or Bede or Rabanus would have presented under such a title. It did not describe every object in nature known to the writer; but it discussed Nature metaphysically, and presented its lengthy exposition as a long argument in linked syllogistic form. Yet it respected its borrowed materials, and preserved their characteristics—with the exception of Scripture, which Eriugena recognized as supreme authority! That he interpreted figuratively of course; so had every one else done. But he differed from other commentators and from the Church Fathers, in degree if not in kind. For his interpretation was a systematic moulding of Scriptural phrase to suit his system. He transformed the meaning with as clear a purpose as once Philo of Alexandria had done. The pre-Christian Jew changed the Pentateuch—holding fast, of course, to its authority!—into a Platonic philosophy; and so, likewise by figurative interpretations, Eriugena turned Scripture into a semi-Christianized Neo-Platonic scheme.[276] The logical nature of the man was strong within him, so strong, indeed, that in its working it could not but present all topics as component parts of a syllogistic and systematized philosophy.[277] If he borrowed his materials, he also made them his own with power. He appears as the one man of his time that really could build with the material received from the past.

Even beyond the range of such acute theological polemics as we have been considering, the pressing exigencies of political or ecclesiastical controversy might cause a capable man to think for himself even in the ninth century. Such a man was Claudius, Bishop of Turin, the foe of image and relic-worship, and of other superstitions too crass for one who was a follower of Augustine.[278] And another such a one even more palpably was Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons (d. 840), a brave and energetic man, clear-seeing and enlightened, and incessantly occupied with questions of living interest, to which his nature responded more quickly than to theologic lore. Absorbed in the affairs of his diocese, of the Church at large, and of the Empire, he expresses views which he has made his own. Practical issues, operating upon his mind, evoked a personal originality of treatment. His writings are clear illustrations of the originality which actual issues aroused in the Carolingian epoch. They were directed against common superstitions and degraded religious opinion, or against the Jews whose aggressive prosperity in the south of France disturbed him; or they were political. In fine, they were the fruit of the living issue. For example, his so often-cited pamphlet, “Against the silly opinion of the crowd as to hail and thunder,”[279] was doubtless called forth by the intolerable conditions stated in the first sentence:

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

Agobard does not marshal physical explanations against this folly, but texts of Scripture showing that God alone can raise and lay the storms. Perhaps he thought such texts the best arguments for those who needed any. The manner of the writing is reasonable, and the reader perceives that the clear-headed archbishop, apart from his Scriptural arguments, deemed these notions ridiculous, as well as harmful.[280]

In like spirit Agobard argued against trials by combat and ordeal. Undoubtedly, God might thus announce His righteous judgment, but one should not expect to elicit it in modes so opposed to justice and Scripture; again, he cites many texts while also considering the matter rationally.[281] On the other hand, his book against image-worship is made up of extracts from Augustine and other Church authorities. There was no call for originality here, when the subject seemed to have been so exhaustively and authoritatively treated.[282]

One cannot follow Agobard so comfortably in his rancorous tracts against the Jews. Doubtless this subject also presented itself to him as an exigency requiring handling, and he was just in his contention that heathen slaves belonging to Jews might be converted and baptized, and then should not be given back to their former masters, but a money equivalent be made instead. The question was important from its frequency. Yet one would be loath to approve his arguments, unoriginal as they are. He gives currency to the common slanders against the Jews, and then at great length cites passages from the Church Fathers, to show in what detestation they held that people. Then he sets forth the abominable opinions of the hated race, and ransacks Scripture to prove that the Jews are therein authoritatively and incontestably condemned.[283]

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

Something of the originality which the pressing political exigency imparted to these tracts of Agobard might be transmitted to such history as was occupied with contemporary events. As long as the historian was a mere excerpting chronicler extracting his dry summaries from the writings of former men, his work would not rouse him to independence of conception or presentation. That would have come with criticism upon the old authorities. But criticism had scarcely begun to murmur among the Carolingians, too absorbed with the task of grasping their inherited material to weigh it, and too overawed by the authority of the past to question the truth of its transmitted statements. Excerpts, however, could not be made to tell the stirring events of the period in which the Carolingian historian lived. He would have to set forth his own perception and understanding of them, and in manner and language which to a less or greater extent were his own: to a less extent with those feebly beginning Annals, or Year-books, which set down the occurrences of cloister life or the larger happenings of which the report penetrated from the outer world;[284] to a greater extent, however, with a more veritable history of some topic of living and coherent interest. In the latter case the writer must present his conception of events, and therewith something of himself.[285]

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

Like his father, Nithard was educated at the palace school, perhaps with his cousin who was to become Charles the Bald. His loyalty continued staunch to that king, whose tried confidant he became. He was a diplomatist and a military leader in the wars following the death of Louis the Pious; and he felt impelled to present from his side the story of the strife among the sons of Louis, in “four books of histories” as they grew to be.[286] Involved with his king in that same hurricane (eodem turbine) he describes those stormy times which they were fighting out together even while he was writing. This man of action could not but present himself, his views, his temperament, in narrating the events he moved in. Throughout, one perceives the pen of the participant, in this case an honest partisan of his king, and the enemy of those whose conduct had given the divided realm over to rapine. So the vigorous narrative of this noble Frank partakes of the originality which inheres in the writings of men of action when their literary faculty is sufficient to enable them to put themselves into their compositions.

Engaged, as we have been, with the intellectual or scholarly interests of the Carolingian period, we should not forget how slender in numbers were the men who promoted them, and how few were the places where they throve. There was the central group of open-minded laymen and Churchmen about the palace school, or following the Court in its journeyings, which were far and swift. Then there were monastic or episcopal centres of education as at Tours, or Rheims, or Fulda. The scholars carried from the schools their precious modicum of knowledge, and passed on through life as educated men living in the world, or dwelt as learned compilers, reading in the cloister. But scant were the rays of their enlightening influence amidst that period’s vast encompassing ignorance.

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

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

All of this, however, and it was not very much, was but the preparation, if the man was to be earnest in his pursuit of wisdom. Wisdom lay chiefly in Theology, to wit, the whole saving contents of Scripture as understood and interpreted by Gregory and Augustine. There was little mortal knowledge which this range of Scriptural interpretation might not include. It compassed such knowledge of the physical world as would enable one to understand the work of Creation set forth in Genesis; it embraced all that could be known of man, of his physical nature, and assuredly of his spiritual part. Here Christian truth might call on the better pagan philosophy for illustration and rational corroboration, so far as that did corroborate. When it did not, it was pernicious falsity.

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

Likewise with the patristic Christianity which had been transmitted to the Carolingian time, to be then and there not only conned and studied, but also rearranged by these painful students, so that they and their successors might the better comprehend it. It was not for them to change the patristic forms organically, by converting them into the modes of mediaeval understanding of the same. These would be devised, or rather achieved, by later men, living in centuries when the patristic heritage of doctrine, long held and cherished, had permeated the whole spiritual natures of mediaeval men and women, and had been itself transmuted in what it had transformed.