IftRARY /EtSITY OP •IFOHNIA ^ MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN CIVILISATION MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN CIVILISATION A SERIES OF LECTURES DELIVERED AT KING'S COLLEGE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON EDITED BY F. J. C. HEARNSHAW^ M.A. LL.D. PROFESSOR OF MEDI/EVAL HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON WITH A PREFACE BY ERNEST BARKER M.A. PRINCIPAL OF king's COLLEGE NEW YORK HENRY HOLT & COMPANY 1922 Printed at The Ballantyne Press Spottiswoode, Ballantyne S- Co. Ltd, Colchester, London cS* Eton, Hngland /t-' UBRARY m til IV PREFACE GIERKE, in an arresting sentence which, once read, is caught and embedded in the memory, speaks of the great Leibniz as one " who in so many directions went deeper than his contemporaries, and who, perhaps for that reason, so often turned his eyes backward toward mediiEval ways of thought." If this be a true saying, and if to go backward to the Middle Ages is to go deeper into the vraie verite des choseSy it is a wise man's duty to turn mediaevalist. And at any rate some of those who have hazarded the adventure have brought back lessons of some price and of much influence. Gierke himself has found in mediaeval theory and practice a lesson concerning groups — their spontaneous origin and growth; their underived and inherent scope of action — which, filtered through the genius and the style of Maitland, has influenced on the one hand ecclesiastics such as Dr Figgis, helping them to a vindication of the rights of ecclesiastical societies, and on the other hand publicists such as Mr Sidney Webb and Mr Cole, who have found comfort and countenance in Gierke's teaching for their advocacy of the rights and powers of trade unions. Above all, prior to Gierke, of a more native strain, with a wood-note of his own, there is William Morris. He went back to the Middle Ages for the true notion of art, which for him was of the nature of folk craftsman- ship — " made for the people and by the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user." And he found in the Middle PREFACE Ages not only the true notion of art, but also the true notion of the social life of man — the notion of fellowship, which he expanded in The Dream of John Ball ; the fellowship which is heaven, and the lack thereof hell, " and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellow- ship's sake that ye do them . . . and each one of you part of it." The mediaeval contributions to modern civilisation, which are the theme of this book, arc twofold. There is the contribution of the idealised Middle Ages, magnified, mirrored, and roseate in the reflective thought of modern man concerning the Middle Ages. This is their con- tribution as it appeared to Morris, or as it appears to Mr Belloc, or Mr Chesterton, or the votaries of guild socialism. It is a contribution made not by the actual Middle Ages, but by a projection of the Middle Ages on an ideal screen by an idealising mind. It is a contribution, but it is an indirect contribution ; it moves the mind and stirs the spirit of men, but the motion and the stirring are those not of the Middle Ages themselves, but rather of a certain antiquarian idealism — an inverted Utopianism, as it were, leading men to find the Utopia, or Nowhere, of the future in what one may call a Never Was of the past. But besides this indirect and ideal contribution — none the less real because it is indirect and ideal — there is the direct and actual contribution of the Middle Ages as they actually were. It is this contribution which is the peculiar theme of this book. That contribution is very real, and very profound. The Middle Ages are the pit from which we were digged, and the rock from which we were hewn. They are the beginnings and the origin of the things that exist to-day; and " if one should look at things as they grow from the 6 PREFACE beginning," said Aristotle, "it would be the best method of study." The ParHament of England, as Professor Pollard has lately taught us, can only be understood in the light of its whole evolution. The law of England is embedded in the Middle Ages. Our architecture is still mediaeval: if we build Houses of Parliament or churches to-day, we build something which perhaps our mediaeval forefathers would not have built, but some- thing, too, which we should not have built as we have built it if they had not built before us. Economically we have travelled far from the Middle Ages : the open- field village with its common pasture and common life, the guilded town with its mysteries and its apprentices — these things are gone, and between them and us stretches the deep abyss cut by the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century — perhaps the greatest revolution in the daily life of man of which history bears record. It may be that here we have travelled too far from the Middle Ages ; it may be that, sooner or later, we shall turn back to some of their ways. Even if we do, the structure we build, whatever the similarities or the imitation, will be fundamentally new; and in the field of economics it will remain true that we must think of the relation between ourselves and the Middle Ages in terms not of analogy or affiliation, but of difference and contrast. I am proud to add any words of mine by way of preface to the lectures printed in this volume. The lectures were delivered in the autumn term of 1920, as part of the general scheme of public lectures at King's College, which has been in operation (and, I am happy to think, in fruitful operation) for some years past. They were planned by Professor Hearnshaw: seven of them were delivered bv 7 PREFACE members of the staff of King's College; three were delivered, in a generous collaboration, by members of the staff of University College and of Bedford College. They bear testimony to the vitality of historical study in London ; and their appearance is opportune at a time when the University of London is founding an Institute of Historical Research— the first of its kind to be founded in this country— for the advanced study of history. The study of history has a natural home in London, rich as it is both in its own history and in its accumulated store of the records of the general national life. London is modern —sometimes, one feels, terribly modern ; but London is also medieval. So long as Westminster Abbey stands, so long are the Middle Ages incarnate in stone among us, and the age of faith, and of the beauty that was based on faith, is not yet entirely dead. With its own past, and with its rich records, London is a natural home of mediaeval studies. But medieval studies can flourish on any soil. They can flourish, as they do abundantly, in Manchester: they can also flourish across the seas, in Boston and in New Haven, at the Universities of Harvard and of Yale. This book is a testimony to their vigour ; and I trust that it will be welcomed by mediaevalists everywhere for the sake of the subject which they all love. ERNEST BARKER King's College University of London March, 1 92 1 CONTENTS PAGE I. Introductory : The Middle Ages and their Characteristic Features i i By F. J. C. Hearnshaw, M.A., LL.D. II. The Religious Contribution of the Middle Ages 42 By the Rev. Claude Jenkins, M.A., F.S.A., Librarian and Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Pro- fessor of Ecclesiastical History in King's College, London. III. Philosophy 82 By H. WiLDON Carr, D.Litt., Professor of Philosophy in King's College, London. IV. Science 106 By Charles Singer, M.A., M.D., Lecturer in the History of Medicine in University College, London, and m the University of Oxford. V. Art 149 By the Rev. Percy Dearmer, D.D., Professor of Eccle- siastical Art in King's College, London. VI. The Middle Ages in the Lineage of English Poetry 174 By Sir Israel Gollancz, Litt.D., F.B.A., Professor of English Language and Literature in King's College, London. VII. Education 190 By J. W. Adamson, B.A., Professor of Education in King's College, London. CONTENTS PACE VIII. Society %i^^ By Hilda Johnstone, M.A., Reader in History in King's College, London. IX. Economics 232 By E. R. Adair, M.A., Lecturer in Economic History in University College, London. X. Politics 255 By J. W. Allen, M.A., Professor of History and Political Science in Bedford College, London. 10 MEDI/EVAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN CIVILISATION INTRODUCTORY THE MIDDLE AGES AND THEIR CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES I A RE the Middle Ages worth studying ? The full /% answer to that question would involve answers ^ J^to the larger questions, Is any history worth studying ? Is anything worth studying ? Is life worth living ? This is not the place, however, to enter into a discussion of these vast themes. Something must be taken for granted. It must be assumed that existence has a meaning and a value; that education has a function and an end ; that history of some sort or other has its part to play in the educational scheme. The question is thus narrowed down to the practical issue, whether or not the Middle Ages can claim attention as compared with other periods, ancient or modern. What is the test of worth in history ? How can we determine our choice of time or topic .'' Lord Morley provides us with a useful criterion. '* I do not," he says, " in the least want to know what happened in the past, except as it enables me to see my way more clearly through that which is happening to-day." That is a severe yet perfectly clear and rational test — the test of present utility. It is severe ; for in its demand that II MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS history should pour direct illumination through the opaque- ness of politics, it refuses to recognise as adequate several pleas for the study of history which have been urged or admitted by modern educationists. Even Professor Ray Lankester, no friend of history, concedes from the depths of his armchair that it is a legitimate form of amuse- ment ; Messieurs Langlois and Seignobos, while denying its political value, maintain its indirect worth as an instru- ment of intellectual culture; Principal Caird places its chief service in the sphere of ethics ; Emerson treasures it metaphysically as an interpreter of microcosmic man. On all the grounds urged or admitted by these eminent men it would be possible to make out a good case for the study of the Middle Ages : their records are intensely interesting and diverting ; they are rich in thought- compelling problems ; they are mirrors of conspicuous and unrelieved virtues and vices ; they are radiant with macrocosmic illumination. But there is no need to take advantage of these pleas. Lord Morley's test may with confidence be appHed in all its severity. The study of the Middle Ages can be defended on the strictly utilitarian ground that it is indispensable to the up-to-date man of affairs who wishes to see his way clearly *' through that which is happening to-day." It is not, of course, contended that a knowledge of the Middle Ages is nearly so important to the modern poli- tician as is a knowledge of more recent times. The prob- lems of the present have for the most part taken shape in the crowded and critical century that has succeeded the overthrow of Napoleon and the Vienna resettlement of Europe : a close acquaintance with the history of the period since 1815 is undoubtedly the most urgent need of the statesman who desires intelligently to serve his own 12 TO MODERN CIVILISATION generation and to further the interests of posterity. But the study of the history of the nineteenth century reveals the fact that no full comprehension of the questions which agitated that era is possible unless they be traced back to their sources in far earlier times. It was, indeed, in the Middle Ages that most of them had their rise. It was then that the modern national states were formed ; it was then that the rivalries of French and Germans, Russians and Poles, Magyars and Southern Slavs began ; it was then that religion became militant here on earth, and that the secular conflict between the Crescent and the Cross was inaugurated ; it was then, in a word, that Western civilisation as we know it came into existence. To those, therefore, who would penetrate beneath the surface of things some study of the Middle Ages is essential. Yet we must keep our sense of proportion. If we deprecate undue disparagement of the Middle Ages, we must not make exaggerated claims on their behalf. We have to steer the sane and reasonable via media between the excessive contempt poured upon them by the radical modernist, and the uncritical adulation with which they are idealised and idolised by the modern reactionary. Milton dismissed their conflicts with the sneer that they were " battles of kites and crows " ; an eighteenth-century rationalist boasted that he knew nothing of those ages which knew nothing ; even the Dean of St Paul's in his brilliant Romanes lecture on " The Idea of Progress " speaks of them as '* the longest and dreariest set-back that humanity has ever experienced within the historical period ... a veritable glacial age of the spirit." These utterances represent the extreme of depreciation. By those who adopt this attitude the Middle Ages are commonly spoken of as the Dark 13 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS Ages. On the other hand, and especially within the last few years, writers have arisen to whom the Middle Ages appear as the only ages of light. Such modern reactionaries carry appreciation to the extreme of romance ; they injure the cause of history by their excessive claims and their irrational prejudices. Three examples must suffice : they are culled from the recent writings of Messrs G. K. Chesterton, H. Belloc, and A. J. Penty. Mr Chesterton in 1917 wrote what he called A Short History of England. Reviewing it in The Observer, with less than his usual felicity, Mr Bernard Shaw commended it as " something like a history of England." It deserved the qualified praise which Mr Bernard Shaw gave to it ; but it deserved it on quite other grounds than those which he assigned. It was, indeed, nothing like a history of England ; but it was very much like Mr Chesterton's other writings. To say that is praise enough. For few literary men of the present day are more marvellously skilled in standing (literarily) upon their head, and describin»g in inverted language the topsy- turvy scenes which they behold from this depression. Mr Chesterton perceives in " popular tradition " the norm of historic truth, and he proclaims that " it is especially in the matter of the Middle Ages that the popular histories trample upon the popular tradition." He then proceeds to revive the " popular tradition " of a mediaeval " merrie England " free from Puritans, utiHtarians, vegetarians, and teetotallers. What Mr Chesterton in his Short History does for England, that Mr Belloc does for Christendom as a whole in his Europe and the Faith. He treats the Reformation as a disaster, and speaks of everything that followed it as " modern and therefore part of a decline." He idealises the Middle Ages as the period of unmitigated orthodoxy and unpolluted beer. He burns with enthusiasm 14 TO MODERN CIVILISATION for the Roman tradition, both imperial and ecclesiastical, as it maintained its dominance throughout the thousand years which divided Justinian from Charles V. Mr A. J. Penty in his Guildsman s Interpretation of History does not share Mr Belloc's passion for Rome. On the contrary, Roman law (of any detailed knowledge of which he is obviously entirely innocent) is his bete noire ; to its reception in England he attributes the greater portion of the evils of modern capitalistic society. But he too, on economic rather than religious grounds, exalts the Middle Ages. He sees in them the golden period of healthy agriculture, artistic industry, and equitable com- merce, embodied in a society grouped naturally according to its productive activities. The truth about the Middle Ages lies somewhere midway between the gloomy depreciation of the modern rationalists and the fantastic over-glorification of the young idealists. The Middle Ages were not dark, but were illuminated by a light which enabled those who walked by it to attain heights of holiness rarely reached by men either before or since. They were not a mere episode in the history of the race, a breach in the continuity of classical civilisation ; they had strongly marked charac- teristics of their own, and they added elements of incal- culable worth to the spiritual heritage of mankind. They were not even a * set-back ' or retrogression, if rightly viewed. For the Graeco-Roman culture which for a time they submerged was far from perfect in its quality', and those who shared its advantages were few. When after a thousand years of partial obscuration it re-emerged in the modern day, it came with a moral content which it had never before possessed, and it came — by means of printed page and popular university — to an 15 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS immeasurably larger public than it had reached in the old world.i But if it be true that the Middle Ages were not dark, or fruitless, or unprogressive, it is also true, on the other hand, that they were far removed from the ideal. They were no golden epoch to which we should seek to return. They were centuries of extreme hardship, of chronic war, of devastating pestilence, of recurrent famine, of prevailing ignorance, of degrading superstition, of paralysing terror, of furious passion and consuming lust. Only through the fires of fierce adversity and the waters of penitential dis- cipline did they purge themselves of their more enor- mous faults, and prepare the world for the higher and more widespread civilisation of the modern day. It is the purpose of these lectures, first, to give some account of the life and work of the Middle Ages ; secondly, to estimate their permanent contribution to the culture and humanity of the present day; thirdly, to ask how far it is possible or desirable in these late complex times to revert to the simpler ideas and the more primitive institutions of our mediasval progenitors. Can we, or should we, •^ The defect of all the civilisations which up to the present the earth has known is that they have been the possession of the few. This is not the fault of the few, for the masses of mankind have never yet shown them- selves capable of civilisation. The masses of mankind have always been, and still remain, barbarians. They see enough of culture to perceive that it immensely enhances the value of life, making it indeed worth living ; they emulously and eagerly seek to capture it ; they fail to do so, and then in envious fury they destroy it. Every great civilisation so far has been overwhelmed by barbarians, whether invaders from without or insurgents from within. But each time a new civilisation rises from the wreck of the old it is shared by a larger community. The progress of humanity, if cyclic, is continuous : it is of the nature of a rising tide, each wave reaching a point higher than the last. History justifies a sober optimism. A histo- rian who loses his faith in progress ceases to be a historian and becomes a philosopher or a But, no, I must not even appear to speak dis- respectfully of high ecclesiastical dignitaries. i6 TO MODERN CIVILISATION attempt in any measure to revive the patristic theology ; rehabihtate the scholastic philosophy ; restore Byzantine or Gothic art ; return to mediaeval literary models ; re- establish the communal ideab of monastic education ; recover the rigid organisation of feudal society ; rebuild the shattered fragments of the guild system of industry ; go behind the modern State with its monopoly of sovereignty, and try to revive the corporations which in the Middle Ages shared with the political authority the loyalty of the Christian man ? To this course the present lecture is merely preliminary and prophetic. It aims at performing the function of the chorus in the Greek drama, viz., that of introducing the protagonists and indicating the scope of the play. In particular it proposes, first, to define the Middle Ages ; secondly, to specify the chief periods into which they naturally fall ; and, thirdly, to mark some of their char- acteristic features. II The term * Middle Ages * implies a threefold division of universal history into the sections (i) ancient, (2) mediaeval, (3) modern. This division was first adopted in the eighteenth century, and it has persisted to the present time. Of late, however, it has been subjected to some severe criticism. Professor Freeman, for example, objected to it because it obscured what to him was the fundamental fact of history, viz., its unbroken continuity : although he was a professor of modern history, he refused to be bound by restrictions in date ; he treated as modern everything that had happened since the call of Abraham ; his chief interest centred round the eleventh-century Norman conquest of England ; the only things that he h 17 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS regarded as really ancient and obsolete were such things as the rule of the Turk in Europe and the conservatism of Bishop Stubbs. Again, and still more recently, Mr H. G. Wells in his Outline of History has discarded the threefold division because of its lack of proportion. Mr Wells begins his study of mankind 600,000 years before the Christian era ; hence, to accept the traditional classi- fication would be to construct a time-chart divided into three sections in the ratio of 4 inches (modern), 10 inches (mediaeval), and 167 yards (ancient). Which is absurd 1 And yet in practice Mr Wells does not diverge from the normal so much as might have been expected. The story of the unrealisable asons of antiquity to the time of the Roman Empire occupies almost exactly one-third of his work ; the second third carries us to the Reformation ; the remaining aliquot part is devoted to the last four centuries. The disproportion in duration of time is nicely counter- balanced by the increase in the fulness of the records and the growth in interest and importance. The old division vindicates itself against the charge of irrationality. As against Professor Freeman's charge of schism it can also make a good defence. For continuity is by no means the most conspicuous feature of history. The connexion of one civilisation with another is often obscure ; it is a matter of faith rather than of sight ; belief in it is a deduction from the axioms of science, and not an induction from observed phenomena. The phenomena which strike the eye from time to time are apparent breaches of continuity, and of these breaches two are particularly prominent. The first is that which presents itself in the fifth century of the Christian era, when the Roman Empire in the West is submerged by barbarian invaders : the Europe of a.d. 550 is im- measurably different from the Europe of a.d. 450. The 18 TO MODERN CIVILISATION second is that which presents itself in the fifteenth century of the Christian era, when the great geographical discoveries of Vasco da Gama and Columbus open up new worlds to the wondering eyes of the West : the Europe of a.d. 1550 is a continent changed almost beyond recognition from the Europe of a.d. 1450. It would be a perverted view of history which, in its effort to discover the continuity which no doubt existed during these periods of rapid transition, ignored the cataclysmic changes which distinguished them, or denied the entrance of new and decisive factors into the evolution of Western society. The period intervening between these two transitional eras is what we call the Middle Ages. It is the millennium from the fifth to the fifteenth century ; from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West to the fall of the Roman Empire in the East ; from the triumph of Christianity over classical paganism to the revolt of Protestantism against Catholic Christianity. It is the thousand years which saw the rise, the mighty reign, and the decline of the papal monarchy ; which witnessed the dominance of Feudalism and chivalry, whereby the cosmopolitan commonwealth of later Rome was transmuted into the new integration of the modern state-system ; which beheld, and indeed achieved, the education and evangelisation of the bar- barians whose ignorant and demoniac hordes at first over- whelmed both Latin culture and the Catholic faith ; which, finally, effected the fusion of Roman and Teuton into a single homogeneous society. No precise date, of course, marks either the beginning or the end of this mediaeval millennium. Both at the com- mencement and the termination one age merged into the next with the same imperceptible gradation as the seasons of the year pass each into its successor. Those who study the 19 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS Middle Ages have to start their investigations long before the fifth century in order that they may understand what was that world of pagan antiquity which by some subtle alchemy was transformed into the world of the papal hierarchy. Similarly they have to carry their researches far beyond the limits of the fifteenth century in order that they may trace mediaeval institutions and ideas which persisted for many generations after the circumstances that engendered them had passed away — many of which, indeed, are extant still. For purposes of study, in fact, mediaeval history resolves itself into three periods. First there is that of the transition from the ancient : this should be traced from, at latest, the principate of Diocletian, and should be regarded as complete only in the pontificate of Gregory the Great ; the years covered by this initial phase are thus roughly a.d. 300-600. Secondly, there are the seven centuries from Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII, the true heart of the Middle Ages, a.d. 600-1300. Finally, there is the period of transition from the mediaeval to the modern, which may be taken as falling within the two hundred years a.d. i 300-1 500. Let us proceed to note a few of the characteristic features of each of these three in turn. Ill Gibbon, at the close of his great work, attributes the fall of the Roman Empire to the bishops and the bar- barians. He had grounds for this attribution, but there was a third cause which he tends to underestimate, viz., internal decay. Those, indeed, who seek to explain the catastrophe which brought to ruin the noblest polity that up to that time the genius of man had constructed have 20 TO MODERN CIVILISATION first and foremost to examine the fabric of the Empire itself, and to discover the fatal flaws which existed in both its foundations and its framework. Having done this they may follow Gibbon in noting how both the spirit of the Christian Church and its episcopal organisation were incompatible with the polytheistic and autocratic empire of the Caesars, and in tracing the process of the Teutonic invasions which ultimately broke the defensive frontiers of the weakened Roman dominion and flooded the provinces with barbarian hordes. The Roman Empire developed from a city-state by a process of almost miraculous expansion. True, it was built up through conquest, and was constructed by means of the military efficiency, indomitable courage, and patriotic devotion of its incomparable legions. But no mere aptitude for war can account for its continuance ; for the fact that it cemented the subject peoples into an organic polity, winning their allegiance and even their enthusiastic devotion ; for the marvellous tranquillity which it gave to the Western world during a space of some four hundred years — a tranquillity undisturbed by insurrection, almost unbroken by attack from without. The perma- nence of the Roman Empire, its most remarkable feature, was due not so much to its belligerent might as to its genius in the art of government. It evolved a superb and equitable system of law ; it threw open the privileges of its citizenship to its multitudinous provincials ; it allowed them a large measure of local autonomy ; it established peace, maintained order, developed economic resources, and rendered possible a prosperity without precedent. Although shadows have to be inserted into the over- radiant picture of the age of the Antonines as painted by Gibbon, it is still in the main true to say that " if a man 21 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus," i.e., a.d. 96-180. But even in this Golden Age of Roman imperialism grave defects in the constitution of the State and in the structure of society manifested themselves. In the next century (a.d. 180-284) of bad rulers, military insurrections, civil wars, popular disorders, plagues, pestilences, and famines, these defects became glaringly evident as radical and irremediable flaws, fatal to the well-being and even to the continuance of the body politic. What were they ? Six may be singled out as most conspicuous. First, the Empire included within its far-flung bounds peoples so various in race and in civilisation that it was impossible to weld them into unity ; in particular, Celt-Ivernian, Latin, Greek, Oriental constituted four groups whose differences precluded complete fusion. Secondly, with a constitutional hypocrisy strange in a people so practical and so brave, the Romans refused to face the fact that the Empire was not a republic ; they persisted in regarding the emperor as a mere composite official elected jointly and severally by the Senate — Caesar Augustus, imperator, consul, censor, tribune, pontifex maximus, etc., etc. — and consequently they made no rules for the succession ; hence, with increasing frequency and in growing violence, the death of a princeps precipitated conflicts of factions, furious rivalries, internecine civil wars, horrible assassinations.^ Thirdly, the economic foundations of the Roman dominion were unsound ; nearly half the population were 1 Between a.d. 211 and 284 there were twenty-three emperors, of whom twenty were murdered. 22 TO MODERN CIVILISATION slaves, productive industry was despised as servile, taxa- tion pressed with extinguishing severity upon the middle class, the cities were infested with a lazy proletariat fed with doles, agriculture languished on gigantic latijundia. Fourthly, economic unsoundness was matched by a growing moral depravity ; the character of the Romans was not able to stand the strain of early prosperity and power ; the austere virtues of the fathers of the State gave place in their degenerate descendants to pride, cruelty, extravagance, self-indulgence, and lust ; a debilitated bureaucracy had to face the tremendous problems of a world in transition. Fifthly, ignorance of science, and especially of hygiene and medicine, rendered the Romans helpless in the presence of devastating pestilences which made their per- manent abodes in the fetid slums of the great cities, and issued thence with increasing frequency to ravage the Empire. Hence the population diminished not merely relatively as compared with the barbarians beyond the borders, but absolutely with accelerating rapidity. The horrors of pestilential death, moreover, began to haunt the spirits of the survivors, and to oppress them with the sense of an adverse and inevitable fate. Finally, religious disintegration set in ; the Romans lost faith in the gods on whose divine aid their fathers had trusted in building up the State, and whose worship formed an integral part of the structure of the constitution. In vain did Neoplatonic philosophers strive by rationalist interpretations to bring the incredible within the limits of belief; the brains of paganism were out. It was in these circumstances of dissolution and decline that the Christian Church developed its doctrine and organisation within the Empire, and that the barbarians began to make their destructive raids across its frontiers. 23 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS The one accelerated the religious disintegration of Rome, both by introducing a cult hostile to the civic gods, and by dissociating worship from politics and allying it with ethics. The other shattered the defences of the Empire, destroyed its administrative system, and brought its rotting social structure in ruins to the ground. A few words concerning each of the two must suffice. The Christian Church rose as heir to the Jewish tradition : Christ came as the Messiah promised to Israel. As de- veloped by St Paul, it claimed further to fulfil the aspirations of the Gentiles : it revealed the Deity whom the heathen had ignorantly sought. The Roman Empire at first regarded the activities of the apostles and evangelists without disfavour or alarm. The Christians seemed harmless and innocent, even if eccentric and superstitious. The magistrates treated them indulgently, and protected them from the inexplicable fury of the Jews. But a change of attitude on the part of the imperial authorities soon took place ; they speedily discovered that the new religion was not so innocuous as it had at first seemed to be. It was exclusive and intolerant, denunciatory of the other religions of the Empire, unwilling to take its licensed place as a lowly member of the numerous company of cults, assertive of supremacy and monopoly ; it was unpatriotic, showing no enthusiasm for the polity of Rome, withdrawing its votaries from the service of the State, forbidding them to offer symbolic incense at the shrine of the deified Cassar ; it was anti-social, proclaiming the imminent end of the age, holding aloof from secular concerns, shunning theatres and games, shrinking from convivial intercourse, abstaining from commerce and marriage, devoting itself to the inauguration of a new order of things ; it was dangerous, for its members formed themselves into churches under 24 TO MODERN CIVILISATION the authoritative control of bishops, churches grouped themselves into archiepiscopal federations, and these again became associated and linked together under metropolitans and patriarchs, and thus the Christian community grew to be an im-perium in imperioj aloof from and antagonistic to the State. Hence arose the great persecutions — the effort of the State to suppress doctrines subversive of its genius and to eradicate a parasitic growth which threatened its very existence. The persecutions failed, and deserved to fail. For in the Church and not in the Empire was life and the promise of life. All the same the triumph of the communion of saints over the might and majesty of imperial Rome was so remarkable an event that it remains one of the most absorbing of historical problems. The full explanation of the miracle lies, perhaps, in realms beyond the sphere of the historian. Yet even he on his low plane of mundane sequences can see four facts which go far to solve the mystery. First, Christianity was, as a faith, incomparably superior to its rivals, whether they were the old theologies of Rome or the newer and more popular Oriental cults ; it satisfied the religious sense as none of them did, with its revelation of an incarnation, its pro- clamation of an atonement, its offer of redemption, and its promise of eternal life. Secondly, it provided a more rational explanation of man and the universe than did any of the current philosophies, rendering more intelligible the mystery of existence, sundering the veil of scepticism and despair. Thirdly, it set before the eyes of a world sated with bestiality and blood a new and lofty ethical ideal : the old gods were non-moral ; the cults were often frankly immoral ; Christianity came to raise a standard of exalted purity, it showed the ideal already realised in the life of the Perfect Man, and it possessed a power which enabled 25 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS it to cleanse and transform the debasement of the vilest mortal into the same immaculate sanctity. Finally, the Church had in its organisation — its bishops and presbyters, its synods and councils, its missionaries and evangelists, its monks and anchorites — a social structure of such immense stability and strength that it was able to withstand the most violent shocks of all its foes. The most formid- able of the long series of assaults made by the decadent Empire upon the growing Church was that delivered during the reign of Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century. The completeness of its failure was, without question, one of the causes which led Diocletian's successor, the Emperor Constantine, to make peace with the invincible hierarchy and to recognise Christianity as a lawful religion (a.d. 313). Within eighty years Chris- tianity had secured the suppression of paganism, and had established itself as the only lawful religion of the Empire. The triumph of Christianity within the Roman Empire synchronised almost exactly with the breaking of the Roman frontiers by the barbarians. The Visigoths crossed the Danube in 375 ; the Vandals, Alans, and Sueves rushed the frozen Rhine on the first day of 406 ; Rome itself was sacked in 410. The two centuries which followed these cardinal events were centuries of rapid transition. The barbarians spread themselves over all the Roman provinces of the West, extinguishing the imperial power. Vandals in Africa, Visigoths in Spain, Ostrogoths and Lombards in Italy, Franks and Burgundians in Gaul, Angles and Saxons in Britain — such were some of the settlements which displaced the central administration of the Caesars. In the East, however, the Roman Empire continued to maintain itself, strong in its homogeneous populations, secure in its command of the sea, and impregnably seated 26 TO MODERN CIVILISATION in its new fortress-capital at Constantinople. Meantime the Church pursued its victorious career. In Byzantium and the Orient, it is true, although all the peoples became nominally Christian, the hierarchy remained subservient to the emperor, and the Church continued to be what Con- stantine made it, a department of the State. In the West, however, a very different condition of things developed. There the imperial authority passed away, and the sole heir to the tradition of Rome was the Catholic episcopate. To the bishop of the Eternal City in particular fell the work of perpetuating the rule of the vanished Caesars. He took their ancient title of Pontifex Maximus, and with more than their divine authority assumed their task of bringing the lost provinces of the West once again into obedience to the sceptre of Rome. He sent out missionary preachers and monastic embassies, and with these ghostly armies renewed the triumphs of the legions. One by one the barbarian chieftains who had settled in Gaul, Britain, Spain, Italy, were subdued to the obedience of the Cross and brought beneath the sway of the papal monarchy. Greatest and most successful of all the early Popes was Gregory I (590-604). Through his agency the Jutish kingdom of Kent, the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, the Lombard kingdom of Italy, all were brought into com- munion with the Roman see. From Gregory I may be dated the establishment of the papal monarchy, and hence the beginning of the Middle Ages proper. IV The seven centuries of the Middle Ages proper extended, as we have already noted, from the pontificate of Gregory the Great to that of Boniface VIII {d. 1303). Their out- 27 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS standing characteristic throughout the wide extent of Christendom was the uncontested dominance of the Church. The strength of the Church, by means of which it was enabled without effort to retain its ascendancy, was its hold over the minds and consciences of the community at large. Orientals sated with sensuous cults ; Greeks weary of the uncertainties of philosophy ; Latins disillusioned by the collapse of their Empire ; Celt-Ivernians eager to escape from the barbarities of their crude paganism — all sought and found in the sublime morality, the intelligible theology, the organic vitality, and the mild beneficence of Christianity the satisfaction of their deeper needs. They accepted the faith of the Cross as expounded by their clergy as their guide not only in matters celestial, but also in matters appertaining to the brief probationary term of earthly existence : it controlled their politics, regulated their industry and commerce, ordered their social relations, monopolised their education, inspired their literature and art. Heresies were almost unknown, and such as fitfully arose were easily suppressed : the older rivals to the ortho- dox faith, such as Arianism, had died down, and not till quite the end of this central mediaeval period did those formidable precursors of Protestantism, the heresies of the Albigenses and the Lollards, make their appearance. But, although the Church was comparatively untroubled by heresy, she was rent by the most deplorable and irre- parable of all her schisms, viz., the schism of East from West, of Greek Christianity from Latin Christianity. The process of the severance was slow: not till 1054 was it completed amid a tempest of mutual anathemas and ex- communications. But it was a process which began early, and it was due to causes which were operative from the very first. There was a radical difference of genius 28 TO MODERN CIVILISATION between the Greek and the Latin. They were divided not only by language, but by a fundamental antagonism of ideas. The one was metaphysical, speculative, disputa- tious, aesthetic, ritualistic, emotional ; the other was legal, practical, authoritarian, averse from controversy, ready for compromise, eager for conquest, zealous in missionary enter- prise, masterly in organisation and government. While, therefore, the patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria, Con- stantinople and Jerusalem involved themselves in fratri- cidal conflicts with one another, and remained subservient to the imperial yoke, the Bishop of Rome, sole patriarch of the Occident, " alien from their mutations and unrest," advanced by slow, undeviating steps toward the papal primacy. His was the see founded (it was believed) by Peter and confirmed by Paul, nurtured by the blood of the martyrs, preserved from error by an unbroken apostolic tradition ; his the mother Church of the converted bar- barians, and he the heir of the sovereignty of the Western Caesars. The claims of the Papacy were maintained, and the triumphant establishment of its monarchy hastened, by the devoted labours of an army of monks, organised from the sixth century onward under the rule of St Benedict. By the seventh century the dominion of the Bishop of Rome was as wide as that of the Emperor Honorius had been at the end of the fourth ; moreover, " regions Caesar never knew," beyond the Danube and the Rhine, and across the Irish Sea, were being brought beneath the ghostly sway of Caesar's apostolic successor. The political superiority which the Pope still recognised as vested in the Byzantine emperor was becoming a mere empty suzerainty. The development of the dominant Christendom — in the East under the Emperor, in the West under the Pope — was suddenly and disastrously interrupted in both Orient 29 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS and Occident, during the course of that seventh cen- tury, by the unheralded assault of a new foe of the same order as Christendom itself, viz., a theocratic monarchy. Mahomet — or Muhammad, as he is now generally and more correctly called — lived during the years 570-632. During the last ten of these years he formulated his simple creed, and organised the nomads of Arabia into the fanatical army of the faithful. Immediately after the death of the Prophet, Islam launched itself upon divided Christendom ; overran and permanently annexed Syria, Egypt, and North Africa ; conquered the bulk of Spain ; and was checked only at Constantinople (717) and on the field of Tours in Gaul (732). Not until the end of the eighth century had the first energy of Islam spent itself; not until the days when Haroun-al-Raschid ruled in Bagdad, and Charle- magne in Aix-la-Chapelle, was a balance of power achieved. In A.D. 800, however, something of stability seemed to have been recovered. The conquests of the Crescent had been completed, and the empire of the caliphs had begun to disintegrate ; the emirate of Cordova had repudiated the authority of Bagdad, so that Spain formed a separate Moslem state. On the other hand, the Franks whose swords had saved Western Christendom at Tours had established a hegemony over almost all the Catholic world, and their king, Charles the Great, or Charlemagne, had been called upon by the Pope to resume the title and power of Roman Emperor. The coronation of Charles as Caesar Augustus on Christmas Day a.d. 800 involved on the part of the Pope the formal repudiation of his antique depen- dence upon the Byzantine ruler. Thus the schism of Christendom was deepened, and Charlemagne found him- self (to his annoyance and regret) in conflict with his compeer at Constantinople. In these circumstances poli- 30 TO MODERN CIVILISATION tical equilibrium was secured and peace maintained by a couple of unnatural alliances. The Byzantine Caesar fostered the revolt of the Emir of Cordova against the Commander of the Faithful ; while Haroun-al-Raschid on his part sent friendly elephants to Charlemagne, entrusted him with the keys of the holy places in Jerusalem, and recognised him as protector of pious pilgrims. Almost the whole of the known world was at the opening of the ninth century divided into these four states, thus grouped into two alliances ; in the Christian West the only important power that lay outside was the English kingdom of Mercia, which had just then been brought to the height of its power by King Offa (d. a.d. 796). The novel tranquillity which the strong and wise rule of Charlemagne secured throughout his extensive empire seemed to promise a return to long-vanished conditions of material prosperity and intellectual advance. The restoration of the Fax Romana was a prelude to a remark- able renaissance of Latin culture. The Latin language recovered something of its pristine purity ; schools were founded ; literary men were encouraged ; the Church was reformed ; the law was humanised. It was possible for men to believe that the painful episodes of barbarian incursions and infidel onslaughts were over, and that the pacific sway of the Eternal City was about to be resumed under the joint authority of the Holy Father and his anointed Emperor. But, alasl the Carolingian dawn was premature. New bands of marauders, terrible in military might, ferocious in hostility to Christendom, untouched by any reverence for the name or civilisation of Rome, were about to hurl themselves upon the devoted West. First, from their Scandinavian strongholds came the Vikings to plunder and to slay. The great Charles himself before he 31 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS died (814) had seen the sails of their warships off the Frisian coast, and had heard how their pagan hosts had ravaged the monasteries and bishoprics of Northern England. Under his weaker successors, Louis the Pious and Charles the Fat, the Christian empire was devastated by them from end to end, and the reviving Latin culture ruthlessly stamped out. Secondly, and simultaneously, the Magyars — a Turanian people akin to the Huns, the Avars, the Bulgars, and the Turks — advanced up the Danube, planting themselves in Hungary and reaching as far as Italy and Burgundy in their raids. Thirdly, Saracen pirates, released from restraint by the break-up of the caliphate, wasted all the coasts of the Mediterranean. Finally, the Slavs from beyond the Oder and the Vistula crept westward toward the Elbe and the Rhine, penetrating and percolating wherever they found Teutonic resistance weak. If any part of the Middle Ages deserves the name of ' dark ' it is the two centuries a.d. 800-1000 which intervened between the coronation of Charlemagne and the conversion of the Magyar king Stephen. During the longer portion of that distressful period central government entirely collapsed ; the forces of Christendom were disin- tegrated, and there was none to whom an abbey plundered or a town besieged could look for protection or redress. Each locality was driven to organise its own defence, or to prepare for perdition. In these circumstances of dire necessity FeudaHsm, which was primarily a military system, sprang up spontaneously, and by its efficiency ' achieved the salvation of Europe. Its strength lay in its walled castles and its panoplied knights ; the massive fortifi- cations of the one provided islands of secure refuge amid the floods of invasion ; the serried hosts of the other after a terrific struggle put a term to the tide of pagan depre- ss TO MODERN CIVILISATION dation. By the millennial year of the Christian era the horror of darkness was past ; Feudalism had done its great work ; the Northmen had become civilised members of the Christian community ; the Magyars had made their submission to the Papacy ; the Saracen pirates were being met and checked on their own element ; the encroach- ments of the Slavs were effectually prevented by a barrier of military marks. Thus the eleventh century opened with a brightness and a hopefulness unknown for many generations. The three hundred years a.d. i 000-1300 were un- doubtedly the culmination and crown of the Middle Ages. It was in this period that the papal monarchy, under Gregory VII (1073-85) and Innocent III (1198-1216), reached the height of its magnificence and power. Under the suzerainty of the Papacy Western Europe was obviously and consciously a unit. Its episcopate, its monastic orders, its chivalry, its schools and its new universities, its Latin literature and its canon law — all were cosmopolitan, and all took their tone from Rome. The great enterprise of the period, viz., the Crusades, was also a cosmopolitan adventure, the effort of Christendom as a whole to defeat Islam with its own weapons of sword and flame, the attempt to recover for the Cross the regions too long usurped by the Crescent, and to restore to the service of the Church the Holy Land where Christ had lived and taught. This strange enterprise, which evoked the wildest enthusiasm throughout the still half-barbaric West, was accompanied by many other symptoms of reviving vitality, rising spirit, and renewed activity. New monastic orders — Cluniac, Cistercian, Carthusian — requickened the flagging zeal of the ancient Benedictine rule. Communities of a still more novel kind, orders of friars — Franciscan, Dominican, Carmelite — carried the beneficence or the orthodoxy of the c 33 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS Church among the outcast and the lost. The imagination of the faithful awoke; the dream of Gothic architecture stirred their souls, and Europe put on her glorious white robe of cathedral and abbey churches. The climax of this great epoch of mediaeval splendour was reached when the princely Innocent III called the Lateran Council in 12 15. It was attended by five hundred bishops and by eight hundred abbots and priors. During a session of less than three weeks, with high enthusiasm and striking unanimity, it passed seventy decrees or canons, many of them of first importance, for the comfort of the Church and the welfare of the world. The century which opened with the ponti- ficate of Innocent III saw before its close that mirror of mediaeval kingship, the reign of St Louis of France ; it saw also the mighty labours of St Thomas Aquinas, who raised in his marvellous Summa the flawless temple of mediaeval thought ; it saw, too, as it ended, the incom- parable Dante pondering those themes, sublime and profound, which make his Divine Comedy the most perfect of all embodiments of the spirit of the Middle Ages at its best. But contemporary with Dante was Pope Boniface VIII, under whom the papal monarchy reached at once the summit of its pretension and the depth of its degrada- tion. At the splendid jubilee of 1300, when the devout of all Christendom flocked in their myriads to the shrines of the Apostles, the haughty pontiff seemed to touch a height of power such as Innocent III had never reached. But by that time the foundations of pontifical autocracy had been undermined, and only three years later, when the hosts of pious pilgrims had dispersed, and the Pope was left lonely among his enemies at Anagni, the authority which had controlled the Middle Ages was defied and overthrown. 34 TO MODERN CIVILISATION The dramatic humiliation of Pope Boniface VIII at Anagni in 1303 by the agents of PhiUp IV of France was merely a striking manifestation to the world of the fact that for a long time forces antagonistic to mediaeval Christen- dom had been sapping the bases of the papal monarchy. The thirteenth century had been full of presages of change. The Papacy itself had become involved in mortal conflict with its creature, the Holy Roman Empire, and in the course of the struggle had prostituted its spiritual powers to the basest ends of secular ascendancy. The unity of Christendom, shattered by this suicidal schism, had been further rent by the growth of national particularism in England, Scotland, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy : the form of the modern state-system had started to shape itself in embryo. A new intellectual ferment had begun to portend the close of the ages of faith ; a new social unrest had commenced to threaten the existence of the feudal order. In the fourteenth century the new influence became dominant, and from the fall of Boniface VIII we may date the definite transition from mediaeval to modern times. What were the causes of this subtle but irresistible change ? They were many and various ; but the following stand out as eminent. First, the Crusades had brought the semi-barbarians of the W^est into contact with the more highly cultivated denizens of the East. The rude knights of chivalry had found to their amazement that the infidels against whom they were launched were not only soldiers equal to themselves in valour, but were also men of a culture far superior to their own. Fanatical hostility had given place to respect and even friendship, and not a few 3S MEDIi^VAL CONTRIBUTIONS Crusaders had accepted Islam as a purer faith than the debased CathoHcism of their day. A new tolerance, a new scepticism, a new eclecticism, had resulted from this intermingling of East and West : the leader of the sixth Crusade is credited (or debited) with the remark that Moses, Christ, and Mahomet were all equally impostors. Secondly, as a result of the Crusades and of the establish- ment of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, commerce between Asia and Europe was immensely developed. New trade routes were opened up ; Christian seamen secured the command of the Mediterranean ; in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and England, towns and cities rose in importance, and a wealthy merchant class began to challenge the monopolies of nobles and of priests. Thirdly, by way of Syria, Egypt, Sicily, and Spain, the learning of the Arabs — mainly the treasured remnants of the herit- age of classical antiquity — began to reach the scholars of the Christian West. Mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, medicine — all were infused with a new vitality as the speculations and discoveries of ancient Hellenic sages and recent Arabian savants came to be known. In particular the recovery of the lost works of Aristotle, with the commentaries thereon of Avicenna and Averroes, marked the opening of a new era in European thought. It was from the fusion of Aristotelian philosophy with Augustinian theology that Scholasticism, the supreme achievement of the mediaeval mind, was developed. Scholasticism, at any rate in its dominant Thomistic form, was orthodox enough ; but the mental gymnastics and moral contortions which it encouraged undoubtedly trained the nascent intellect of Christendom for its approaching revolt against ecclesiastical authority. Last of all came the general classical revival, due in part to the migration of 36 TO MODERN CIVILISATION Greek scholars from the doomed Byzantine empire. There was not, of course, as used to be supposed, any sudden stampede or descent of parchment-laden literati consequent upon the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The movement, indeed, was terminating rather than beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century. For more than three generations it had been in process, as the Ottoman Turks forced their relentless path toward the coveted capital. By way of Southern Italy, where Greek was still a spoken language, the ancient culture had penetrated the mediaeval world, bringing back the pagan spirit and the Hellenic view of life. But the classical revival was only in part Byzantine in origin. It was primarily a spontaneous up- rising of the secular genius of the West itself. So early as the Council of Constance (141 5) the diligent search for antique manuscripts had begun, and the monastic libraries of Europe were being ransacked, with amazing results, by scholars eager to recover the forgotten treasures of pre- Christian Rome. The advent of the modern spirit — secular, ration- alistic, individual, adventurous, curious, anti-clerical, and often anti-Christian — was marked by a change of attitude toward the universe and man. No longer was Nature regarded as inherently evil, or the descendants of Eve as essentially corrupt. No more were asceticism, self- abnegation, penance, withdrawal from the world, mortifica- tion of the flesh, conflict with the Devil, felt to be the ways of sanity and sanctity. The monasteries began to languish for lack of inmates. The study of scholastic philosophy and theology declined as the youth of Europe turned their awakened minds to the reading of romances, the writing of lyrics, the pursuit of science. The recovery of the geographies of Eratosthenes and Ptolemy ; the 37 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS invention of printing, which placed knowledge within the reach of the growing laity of the middle class ; improve- ments in shipping and in the instruments of navigation, opened the way for Vasco da Gama and Columbus to make their adventurous voyages. New oceans and unsuspected continents were brought within the ken of wondering Christendom, and the cosmography of the mediaeval Church was shown to be false and even absurd. Soon the astronomical revelations of Copernicus demonstrated the fact that the Ptolemaic conception of the universe, dominant throughout the Middle Ages, was hopelessly wrong, and that the earth, so far from being the centre of all things, was but an insignificant planet revolving round a minor star. The reduction of man to stellar insignificance, and the discovery of the infinite abysses of space, exploded all the axioms and postulates of mediasval thought, and shook the very foundations of the established theology. Unnumbered and enormous heresies began to display themselves throughout Christendom. For the first time in her long history the Catholic Church — weakened by the Babylonish Captivity of the Papacy, torn by the Great Schism, paralysed by corruptions which the Conciliar Movement was powerless to reform, bewildered by the rationalism of the Renaissance — was unable to meet them and stamp them out. In vain did new orders of preachers restate and defend Catholic dogma ; in vain did the papal Inquisition organise itself to burn the pollution out ; in vain did crusades and dragonnades endeavour to drown in blood the monstrous brood of devilish phantasies which haunted the souls of the sectaries. All that denunciation. Inquisition, and massacre accomplished was to inflame dissent from the Church into a passion of implacable hatred, and to 38 TO MODERN CIVILISATION obliterate the memory of a millennium of beneficence in the more recent recollection of bloody persecution. The way for the new schism of the Protestant Reformation was made straight. VI The Renaissance, with its new representation of life, and the Reformation, with its irremediable disruption of Catholic Christendom, marked the end of the Middle Ages in Western Europe. The thousand years thus terminated had displayed many notable features. They had been dominated by religion ; the powers of the world- to-come had been supreme ; God and the Devil, angels and demons, the saved and the damned, had been more real and potent than persons visible to the mortal eye. The epoch had been characterised by an extreme credulity which no miracle could shock, and no marvel of magic shake. No idea of any order in nature, or any conception of the sequence of cause and effect, awoke a scientific scepticism in the mediaeval mind, or led the faithful to doubt the efficacy of relics and rituals. Movement of all sorts had been slow ; stability great ; pain, peril, and death had been constant companions ; life had, as a rule, been hard and short. Yet, in spite of all, the Middle Ages had had elements of singular charm, irresistible fascination, incon- testable greatness. In particular they had been eminent for their corporate consciousness, for their sense of com- munity, for the way in which their representative men — the builders of their cathedrals, the formulators of their creeds, the framers of their ideals — had been content to remain anonymous, sinking their individuality in the general life. Christendom had been a reality ; and among 39 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS its members the greatest realists had been those who proclaimed it, with all its imperfections, as the ideal City of God. It was necessary and inevitable that the Middle Ages should pass away. They were a time of tutelage, and the growing intellect of Europe could no longer remain subject to authorities whose spirit was alien from the genius of the modern world. But although they passed away, they had not been vain or fruitless. On the contrary, they had been rich and full ; and they left a priceless heritage to succeeding ages. If we are asked what their main con- tributions were, perhaps we may answer: in religion^ the truth that the things of the Spirit are of supreme impor- tance; in philosophy^ that there is an infinite disparity be- tween appearance and reality, between the substance and its accidents ; that the ideal is the real, and that the perfect is the true ; in science^ that phenomena are but mani- festations of occult powers ; in art.^ that the supreme forms of beauty are those that reveal purity, truth, and limit- less aspiration ; in literature, that the language of the people is the proper vehicle for thought and emotion ; in education, that the true aim of all training is to fit a man, not to earn his own living, but to serve his fellows and to worship his Maker ; in society, that all men are equal in the sight of the Highest, and that the humblest creature has an infinite worth ; in economics, that work is a source of dignity and not of degradation, and that justice should determine wages, prices, and all the industrial relations of man to man ; in politics, that all tribes and nations are members of a greater community, that the source of every valid human authority is divine, and that power is a trust for which a solemn account will one day have to be rendered before the judgment-seat of God. 40 TO MODERN CIVILISATION These are contributions to modern civilisation by no means negligible in value, and most of them are purely mediaeval, free from all admixture of elements drawn from the civilisation of pagan antiquitv. It will be the task of the remaining lectures of this course to expand this theme, and to trace the streams of influence one by one. I hope, however, that even this superficial introductory sketch has made clear the truth that the Middle Ages, with all their barbarism and crudity, were not a mere hiatus in the progress of Western civilisation, but an integral and essential part of the evolution of the modern world. F. J. C. Hearnshaw 41 II THE RELIGIOUS CONTRIBUTION OF THE MIDDLE AGES HORACE WALPOLE quotes a story of a Floren- tine ambassador in the time of the Commonwealth who wrote to his Court : " Some say the Protector is dead, others say he is not : for my part I believe neither the one nor t'other." ^ It is at least tempting to apply the mot by substituting for the body of the Lord Protector the spirit of the Middle Ages. And certainly in regard to the formative influences of our later age the historical student may well tread warily where masters disagree. From Freeman we learn that " in our own history, above all, every step in advance has been at the same time a step backward. It has often been shown how our latest con- stitution is, amidst all external differences, essentially the same as our earliest, how every struggle for right and freedom from the thirteenth century onwards has simply been a struggle for recovering something old." " Looking from a different angle. Lord Acton tells us that " the modern age did not proceed from the mediasval by normal succession, with outward tokens of legitimate descent. Unheralded, it founded a new order of things, under a law of innovation, sapping the ancient reign of continuity. ... It was an awakening of new life ; the world revolved ^ Letters, ed. Toynbee, iii, 262 (Clarendon Press, 1904). 2 Historical Essays, Fourth Scries, p. 253 (Macmillan, 1892). 42 CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN CIVILISATION in a different orbit, determined by influences unknown before." ^ Yet he also adds the saving caution that ** we can found no philosophy on the observation of four hundred years, excluding three thousand."^ These considerations may serve for warning or encour- agement according to the temper of the student as he turns to the subject of the religious contribution of the Middle Ages to our modern civilisation, whatever that somewhat elusive expression may be interpreted to mean. -iJ., p. 31. ^ Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone. Introductory Memoir by Herbert Paul, p. Ii (Macmillan, 191 3). 43 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS Bryce in a notable passage has given us a striking illus- tration from Acton himself: " He spoke for six or seven minutes only ; but he spoke like a man inspired, seeming as if, from some mountain summit high in air, he saw beneath him the far-winding path of human progress from dim Cimmerian shores of prehistoric shadow into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time. The eloquence was splendid, but greater than the eloquence was the penetrating vision which discerned through all events and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now creating, now destroying, always transmuting, which had moulded and remoulded institutions, and had given to the human spirit its ceaselessly-changing forms of energy. It was as if the whole landscape of history had been sud- denly lit up by a burst of sunlight." ^ There are lights and shadows in the picture of the Middle Ages, as of other times. If we turn to a general European history like that of Lavisse and Rambaud ^ we shall see in its main divisions some of the reasons, though not all. The first volume outlines eight centuries from the fourth to the eleventh and is called Origins; the second deals with a century and three-quarters (109 5- 12 70) under the title Feudal Europe. The Crusades \ the triptych or trilogy is completed by a volume carrying the narrative to 1492 and styled The Formation of Great States. The next instalment covers less than seventy years (i 492-1 559) oi Renaissance and Reform^ while the fifth, from 1 559-1 648, is a melancholy if inevitable sequel of the Re-formation — The Wars of Religion. It is a far cry from the Edict of Milan (313) or the capture of Rome by Alaric (410) to the 1 Studies in Contemporary Biography, pp. 396-7 (Macmillan, 1903). * Histoire Gcnerale du IF" Siec/e a nos Jours. Twelve volumes (Paris : Armaiid Colin, 1 893-1904). 44 TO MODERN CIVILISATION Reformation or to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), and much may be expected to have happened in twelve or thirteen centuries. But the point which suggests itself to our notice is the interpenetration of the ecclesiastical and secular policies, the apparent leavening of the Church by the World. Yet at the outset of our inquiry a caution is necessary. There are no water-tight compartments in History, however readily we allow ourselves to abstract * epochs * for convenience and dignify them by the title of * special periods.* We are accustomed to speak of ' The Dark Ages,' * The Ages of Faith,' sometimes of an * Age of Reason.' The wise student verifies the contents of his parcel of records as well as the label. It has been, and in some quarters it still is, as common as it is false to represent the life of the Christian society as that of an ideal family within, though sorely tried from without, down to the time of the Edict of Milan, and to attribute to the fourth century with the beginnings of secular associations and patronage the cause of all later troubles. But the conflict or reconciliation of what may be called the two Loyalties begins in Galilee and Judaea, not in Greece or Italy; in the first century, not in any later age. " The separation " of the Church "from the world," says Archbishop Trench, " exists as much for the world's sake as for the Church's own, that so there may be for the world a City of Refuge, an abiding witness in the midst of it for a higher life than its own; which life, higher though it be, may yet be the portion, and on the simplest terms, of every one who will claim his share in it." ^ In one sense the observation is a platitude somewhat unhistorically expressed; in another, and that in which it is most likely to be interpreted, it is profoundly misleading, a relic of the Old Testament rather ' Lectures on Medieval Church History, p. 9 (Macmillan, 1879). 45 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS than of the New. The prayer of the Master for His dis- ciples is not that they should be taken out of the world, but that they should be kept from the evil one. They are to be sheep, it may be, in the midst of wolves, but also, in a changed figure, to be the salt of the earth, the leaven working secretly in the lump; they are to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's; to fulfil all righteousness; to emulate the humility of the publican, the charity of the Good Samaritans of the world, not to imitate the self-satisfied Pharisees or even the priests and Levites of the Temple of the Most High. And if the student be tempted, as he will be, to attribute the decay of Christian ideals to association with * the State,' he will do well to reflect that there are warnings against the corruptions of the world in the pages of New Testament writers at a time when certainly the infant Church cannot be accused either of assimilation to the State or of association with it. You may see the same false antithesis when you are told that the sieges and battles and sufferings of the Crusades do not properly find a place in a Church history at all,^ as though the Church were concerned only with men's ends while the means to attain them and the secular activities amid which they are pursued remained outside its purview. No doubt a series of dark pictures can be drawn in relation to manners and morals from Jerome's description ^ of the scented, bejewelled exquisites among the younger Roman ecclesiastics of the fourth century, to the priests of Strassburg carousing in taverns c. 1 299-1 306, with their long hair and gold-laced coats, their swords and their boots of red, yellow, and green ^; from ' Lectures on Medieval Church History, p, 139 (Macmillan, 1879). =" Ep. ixii, "Ad Eustochium " ; cf. the famous Ep.\\\, " Ad Nepotianum." 2 Martenc et Durand, Thesaurus Novus, iv, 529-556 (Paris, 1717). 46 I TO MODERN CIVILISATION the rhetorical invectives of Salvian of Marseilles ^ against social standards in the fifth century to the record of visi- tations like that of Cardinal Morton of the Abbey of St Albans ^ in the fifteenth. We can paint if we wish in darker colours still scenes from the history of the Crusades, of persecutions like that of the Albigenses, or the like. We may summarise them as Ranke does in the first chapter of his History of the Popes^ finding the strange combinations of piety and cruelty " eloquently illustrative of those times and of that politico-religious government."^ For those to whom religion is an intractable element, a surd in the calculation by which they seek to resolve human history into its component parts, the " Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum " of Lucretius may seem to find at length an appropriate conclusion in " Ecrasez I'infame." It is of course no answer to inquire whether the crimes committed in the name of Liberty be not greater than those perpetrated under the sanctions of Religion, since unless we adopt a purely naturalistic standpoint the latter would in any case be more heinous. A writer who will not be sus- pected of clericalism observes in regard to a later period that " it became painfully clear how great a mistake it was to suppose the clergy tainted with some special curse of cruelty. Then, as usually, for good or for evil, they were on about the same moral level with an immense number of laymen, and were not much more than the incarnation of the average darkness of the hour."^ The historian's function is not to extenuate facts but to endeavour to state them truly, and few it is to be hoped will derive much comfort 1 Salvian, De Gubernatione Dei, iii, 9, and Lib. vii, passim. * Cf. Reg. Morton, i, fF. 22b-23b. » (Bell, 191 3.) Vol. i, pp. 25-6. * Voltaire, p. 229 (Macmillan, 1897). 47 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS from Lord Morley's apologia for the clergy of eighteenth- century France. But truthfulness of statement depends on an effort to include all relevant factors and to display them in a just proportion. There is an element of truth in all these transcripts from life, but they are not the whole story nor from every part of the field. The treasure is in earthen vessels; but there is a treasure to be found none the less by those who neither choose by the view nor turn aside after husks and garbage. It is a commonplace of political philosophers that the root-conception of mediaeval theory is the organic unity of all mankind ^ ; but further this organic unity has a spiritual basis, since all mankind derives its origin from a single Creator, owes obedience to a single Ruler — God Himself. As the course of the Middle Ages proceeds you may see the working of other conceptions, as for example when the formula for the manumission of a bondman by Robert Mascall, the Carmelite Bishop of Hereford (1404- 16), opens with the words '* Whereas from the beginning nature created all men freely or free, and afterward the law of nations (ius genciuni) subjected some of them to the yoke of servitude, we therefore judge that it would be a pious act and one deservedly to be rewarded by God to restore some of those, whose deserts require it, to their pristine liberty " ^; but the fundamental idea is unchanged. And in conse- quence, as it has been said, " Christendom, which in destiny is identical with Mankind, is set before us as a single, universal Community, founded and governed by God Himself." ^ But in the realm of human affairs God governs 1 See Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, edited by F. W. Maitland, pp. 9 fF. (Cambridge University Press, 1900). * Contained in Edmund de Lacy's Register, f. ib (Canterbury and York Society, 191 8). 3 Gierke, op. cit., p. 10, cf. p. 18 f. 48 TO MODERN CIVILISATION by human instruments, and the relation of these instru- ments to God and to one another and to the rest of mankind was one of the supreme problems for mediaeval thinkers. As will be evident, it was a religious problem as well as a political one : its solution was of almost immeasurable practical importance ; and if we approach it with some greater measure of hopefulness, for we have not as yet fully solved it, that is because we have the experience of the Middle Ages behind us. Is the relation of the spiritual and the temporal, the ecclesiastical and the secular powers, to be one of co-ordination or is the one to be subordinate to the other, and, if so, which is higher, which lower, and upon what grounds is the solution adopted to be defended .'' Let us look at the situation in the East as well as in the West. It is from many points of view unfortunate, though it has been perhaps inevitable, that to us the story of the Middle Ages presents itself as that of Western civilisation, or, as Dr Poole has preferred to put it, " The history of the middle ages is the history of the Latin church." ^ Yet the survival of the Eastern Empire from the fourth to the fifteenth century is a factor in European history that we do ill to neglect. Byzantine Hellenism has for many nothing that is attractive, much that is repellent ; but it remains Hellenism even if marred and in a state of sus- pended development. And the history of non-Western Christianity illustrates one solution of the relations of Church and State of which we are bound to take account, whether or not we approve it, for it has been seen still in use for ^ Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought, p. 2 (Williams and Norgate, 1 884). To this work the present writer owes unmeasured gratitude for stimulus many years ago to read the authorities quoted and for constant guidance in doing so. D 49 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS good or for evil down to our own day, and as an inheritance from the Middle Ages. We cannot stay to trace the course of its history ; but look at it at two moments in its development. For twenty years of unceasing conflict at the opening of the ninth century Theodore of Studium, following in the steps of John Damascene, claims for the Church in face of the Iconoclastic emperors the right of complete independence of decision in matters of faith. In the secular sphere princes have complete authority ; but it belongs not to them to decide upon celestial and divine dogmas confided to the Apostles and their successors. No Presbyterian ever upheld the ' Crown Rights * of the Redeemer more strenuously than this militant abbot against time-serving usurpers of the Patriarchal throne and the secular arm of Leo the Armenian, which broke his body but not his spirit. Yet it has its limitations of charity, then as now, this spiritual intransigeance. The Emperor Michael II, having liberated the prisoners, pro- poses a conference between the Iconoclasts and the Orthodox. But Theodore, while expressing his wish that the Emperor would deem him worthy to see his sacred person, to listen to the entrancing utterance of his august mouth learned in divine things, replies that any conference with heretics is forbidden by apostolic precept,^ and dies in exile a martyr to conviction, who as so often has failed to learn the beati- tude which belongs to the makers of peace. After all, even to those of us who are not episcopal chancellors there is illumination to be gained from the study of what actually happened in the long run with regard to ' images,' whether in East or West. But ten centuries later than Theodore the essential characteristic of the Orthodox Church as seen ^ Ep. ii, 86 (Mignc, Patrologia Grceca, xcix, c. 1329). The whole letter is singularly illuminating. 50 TO MODERN CIVILISATION in Russia appears to De Maistre to be the complete submission of the clergy to the civil power, the union in the same hands of spiritual and temporal sovereignty.^ " I am Pope," said Tsar Alexander I to Napoleon ; " it is very much more convenient (bien plus commode).'" We have there in its full development one theory of the relation of the two powers : it is logical, coherent, and it may be doubted whether in practice it has proved itself alto- gether Erastian in the sense in which we abuse that term of abuse. And at least the societas perfecta of Jesuit theory receives in both its forms an unexpected simplification as the ecclesiastical and temporal autocrat of all the Russias exchanges confidences with the imperial heir of the royal dictum " L'Etat, c'est Moi." The world had to wait more than half a century longer before it heard from other lips, not less commanding, the utterance of even fuller significance " La tradizione son* lo." ^ Let us turn then to the West. We shall not, as every one knows, escape from the influence of Hellenic thought, though its results in combination with other strains may be different. In the agony of the fifth century — at the opening, as some would say, of the Middle Ages — Augus- tine of Hippo bequeathed to later days the great treatise De Ci-vitate Dei., a much celebrated legacy whose magni- ficence seems still for many who write about it unspoiled by familiarity. Yet it was the book selected by preference, so we are told, to be read to him at his dinner-table by Charlemagne, in whose reign Dr R. L. Poole has seen • Cf. C. Latreille, Joseph de Maistre et la P apatite, p. 19 (Hachette, 1906). "^ The attribution to Pius IX was accepted by Lord Acton in his article on " The Vatican Council " {North British Review, Oct. 1870), reprinted in The History of Freedom and other Essays (Macmillan, 1907). Whether it would have satisfied the canons of E. Fournier's provoking but fascinating work, 1.^ Esprit dans I'Histoire (Paris, Dentu, 1883), is another matter. 51 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS " the dividing line between ancient and medieval history . . . not only by virtue of its political facts but also because it begins the age of the education of the northern races, fitting them in time to rule the world as the Romans had done before them." ^ What that education might mean the non-Christian races saw on the one hand in the Emperor's efforts to " compel them to come in," not by the appeal of the philanthropy of Christ, but by the less gentle induce- ments of the sword and the block, on the other in the history of the Crusades. It would be absurd to make Augustine responsible for the excesses of his readers, but it is almost impossible to overestimate the extent of his influence : it seems sometimes so constant and so uni- versal as to make it legitimate at least to suspect its presence even when unacknowledged. For Augustine there are two kinds of human society or association, and two only — two citizenships or modes of living, a heavenly and an earthly, with different ends attain- able by different means. But the conception implied in the first and last chapters of the fourteenth book was almost inevitably replaced by the conception of two States, and therewith came difficulties of a very serious kind, since the ordinary mind tends to think of States in terms of institu- tions. The student whether of Augustine or of the thinkers of the Middle Ages will need again and again to be on his guard against the persistent if subconscious tendency to interpret their language in terms of the modern antithesis of Church and State, and the view of each which that antithesis implies; and he will find this the more diflicult because the Empire and the Papacy, the Emperor and the Pope, will seem to him two great factors in the political and religious situation in the Middle Ages, exactly corresponding with 1 Medieval Thought, p. 15. 52 TO MODERN CIVILISATION that antithesis. He must ask himself not simply what was their history, what did they do, but for what, in the view of mediseval thinkers, did they stand ? Of this he will learn much from Gierke's Political Theories of the Middle Age, splendidly edited by F. W. Maitland, Dr Poole's Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought, Dr Figgis' From Gerson to Grotius and other works, and Bishop Robertson's Regnum Dei. But if he would fully realise how much trouble the matter gave to medieval thinkers from many points of view he must study for himself that truly painful compilation, the Monarchia of Mel- chior Goldast ^ in the seventeenth century, and that, as he will ruefully find, is far more than an Opus Nonaginta Dierum, if we may misapply the title of the treatise by William of Ockham which one of the volumes contains. " The State is not in the Church, the Church is in the State : . . . above the Emperor there is God alone, who made the Emperor": so says Optatus of Milevum in the fifth century.^ " The spiritual power," answers Hugh of St Victor in the twelfth, " is superior to the secular in antiquity, dignity and usefulness." ^ " God ought to obey the Devil," * if Wyclif be not libelled in the fourteenth, while Luther, like Gerard of York, puts the secular ruler in the place of the Ignatian bishop and solemnly burns the Canon Law. But if in the opening years of the eleventh century there had been realised the dream of the Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II of an Empire and a Papacy, such as in a ^ Monarchia S. Romani Imperii (Hanovise, 1612— 13). 2 Optati Milezitani Libri VII, ed. Ziwsa " Corp. Script. Eccl. Lat.," ixvi (Vindobonae, 1883), iii, 3: " Non enim respublica est in ecclesia, sed ecclesia in republica, id est in imperio Romano " (p. 74) ; " Cum super imperatorem non sit nisi solus deus, qui fecit imperatorem " {ibid., p. 75). 3 Cf. De Sacram., . . . ii, 2 throughout (Migne, P. L., clxxvi,c. 41 5 fF.). ' Cf. Reg. Courtcney, f. 25. MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS modified form Nicolas of Cusa yearned for centuries later, wherein the two powers ordained of God should exercise an universal rule in amity and concord side by side, the continent of Europe might have witnessed an experiment which would have made the later ideals of Gregory VII, Innocent III, and Boniface VIII on the one hand or those of Dante in the Be Monarchia or Marsiglio of Padua in the Defensor Pads on the other appear superfluous, if not un-Christian. True, the Donation of Constantine and the pseudo-Isidorian Decretals were ready to hand for anyone who cared to use them, and had been so for more than two centuries before Hildebrand ; but they would probably have remained in decent obscurity, or been summarily ejected from the Concordance of Discordant Canons^ had not political circumstances arisen in which they could be prayed in aid of a theory of the Church's universal juris- diction which was clearly, as it would seem, not based upon them, but for which they were quoted with probably much less of conscious dishonesty than has often been assumed by controversialists. Origins are a notoriously difficult subject, and assertion has been known to take the place of evidence in the pedigrees of institutions and customs as well as of men. Few of us, perhaps, would accept without hesitation Newman's statement in the treatise on Development which was his last gift to the Church of England that " first local disturbances gave rise to Bishops, and next ecumenical disturbances gave rise to Popes," ^ even though supported in part by the authority of St Jerome. Still less readily, probably, shall we assent when we hear : " Who does not know that [kings] had their 1 (Oxford : Parker, 1845), p. 167, Cf. Hier. in Ep. adTitum, i, 5, and the use made of it by Wyclif, De Potestate Pape, cap. iv, quoting from Decretum, Pars P dist. 95, c 5. 54 TO MODERN CIVILISATION beginning from those who, being ignorant of God, by pride, by acts of brigandage, perfidy, homicide, and finally by almost every species of crime, at the instigation of the prince of the world, that is the Devil, by blind cupidity and in- tolerable presumption affected to exercise dominion over their peers, namely, over men ? " The introduction of the reference to supernatural agency, even though it be diabolical, forbids us to discern in this full-blooded rhetoric an anticipation of Bolshevist propaganda — it is taken of course from the well-known letter^ of Gregory VII; and by a polite fiction of considerable pragmatic value the balance can readily be adjusted. Regard the Pope's theory in the spirit once more of De Maistre, and say that " it is from the Pope that sovereignty descends on crowned heads, and it is he who gives them that consecrated character which commands respect and obedience," - and all is simple and straightforward. The organic unity is preserved and the Spiritual Power reigns supreme. The only difficulty is to find a period in which the facts really corresponded with the theory. And two observations may be made. It need not trouble us in theory that for some seven centuries at any rate of the Middle Ages there were two opposed Empires of East and West — a condition of affairs very different from the original plan of Diocletian; and in this regard the student may derive considerable amusement from reading side by side the Alexiad of Anna Comnena and the Letters of Gregory VII. In theory there was still only one Empire, though in reference to this again modern interpretation will not easily square with medieval theory. The Empire of Charlemagne ^ Epp. viii, 21, to Herman of Metz in 1081 (Jaffe, Mon. Greg., p. 457, Berlin, 1865). Cf. iv, 2, in 1076, to the same {ibid., p. 243). * Latreille, op. cit., p. ii, and the second book of Du Pape, esp, c. 5. MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS we are accustomed to hear was not a new creation of the Pope nor a legitimate succession to the Empire of the West : it was a transfer in more or less dubious circum- stances, by a person to whom it did not belong to a person to whom it belonged still less, of the Eastern Empire seated at Constantinople. And the Holy Roman Empire which bulks so large and for so long in mediaeval history is a succession to neither, but a German invention of which one of the wittiest of Frenchmen has written the epitaph and one of the most erudite of English political thinkers has articulated the skeleton. And secondly, it is impos- sible not to be struck with the continental character of this mediaeval theorising : this is as true in reading William of Ockham as in the case of the other works collected by Goldast. Neither English sovereigns nor the Eng- lish people were wanting generally in deference to the see of Rome in the Middle Ages ; but the attitude of William the Conqueror to Gregory VII's demand for homage finds an echo in the sense of intolerable outrage to national feeling with which the chroniclers record John's surrender of his crown to Innocent III ; and therefrom followed consequences of which papal statesmen seem always to have failed to appreciate the significance. There are few investigations more fascinating, if more elusive, than that of the power of ideas to mould facts as well as to account for them. From some writers one would judge that the Hildebrandine idea of the Papacy presented itself to the world as a strange and monstrous portent in the eleventh century. It would seem to them not less original perhaps in its development, but at any rate less catastrophic, if they would consider on the one hand the conception of the Christian State which underlies the Code 5^ * TO MODERN CIVILISATION of Justinian, a monarch for whom orthodoxy was a political duty/ or the fact that in the Eastern Empire at the beginning of the eighth century Baptism was the gate to citizenship for men of every race - ; or on the other hand the circumstances of the pontificate, and some of the utterances of Gregory the Great more than two centuries earlier, and the very curious little disquisition by Agobard of Lyons in the ninth century on the two rules — ecclesias- tical and secular. We have spoken of the influence of Augustine, but there are others to be taken into account. If you seek to build as mediaeval thinkers did your political and religious theory upon bases so discordant as the Holy Scriptures, Aristotle, and the Civil Law, you may expect results as strange as some seem desirous of achieving in our own day on the foundations of Rousseau, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, and Count Tolstoy. The modern student who sets himself to examine the mediaeval exegesis of Scripture will at least recognise the reason for Lord Acton's differentiation of the modern age. Columbus, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Luther, Copernicus are his examples of the men who stand between us and the Middle Ages.^ In a very well-known passage Dr Figgis has described the changed position. " It would require," he says, " an intellectual revolution — quite inconceivable in magnitude — to induce us to regard it as an argument for the Papal power, that the sun is superior to the moon, or that S. Peter gave two swords to Christ ; that the Pope is like Sinai, the source of the oracles of God, and is ^ A convenient summary, though only a summary, of the efFects of this view upon Justinian's legislation will be found in W. G. Holmes, The Age of Justinian and Theodora, vol. ii, cc. xiv, iv (London : G. Bell & Sons, 2nd edit., 191 2). * Cf. Lavisse et Rambaud, Hist. Gen., i, 201. 3 Stud^ of History, p. 8. 57 MEDIi^VAL CONTRIBUTIONS superior to all kings and princes, because Mount Sinai is higher than all other hills (which it is not) ; that when Daniel speaks of beasts, the writer means that tyranny is the origin of earthly power ; that the command to feed my sheep, and the committal of the keys to S. Peter gave to the Papacy the absolute political sovereignty of the world ; or on the other side that Adam was the first king, and Cain the first priest, that the text forbidding murder proves immediately the Divine origin of secular lordship, that unction is not indelible save in France, but there it is so because the oil is provided by an angel." ^ These things have served at least to enliven the dreariness for the modern reader of many a mediaeval disquisition sometimes of great value, usually of great length ; and one may be allowed to add to the list for the delight which it caused when first read to one who has lived under the prosaic regime of the Third Republic the reason why the crown of France may be worn neither by a workman nor a woman : viz., that the lilies " toil not, neither do they spin." It is easy to be contemptuous, but it is a sure bar to understanding ; and in appropriateness of exegesis the modern observer may possibly think that there is little to choose on either side for some centuries before and after the Reforma- tion. However this may be, it is at least significant that the attempt to interpret and to apply the Scriptures with due regard to their proper setting should have been deferred, though with some exceptions, until to our lasting impoverishment they are, apart from public ser- vices and professional studies, rapidly ceasing to be read at all. No one now reads Boethius, though there are still a few 1 From Gerson to Grotius, pp. 23-4 (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edit., 1916). 58 TO MODERN CIVILISATION who are believed to find consolation in philosophy. He announced, we remember, his intention of translating into Latin every work of Aristotle within his reach. Of the influence of Aristotle's Politics upon Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century all students have heard; but have you ever examined a succession of great political and theological treatises of the Middle Ages in the West to see what would be left of them if you excised all traces of Aris- totle ? The result is so startling as to suggest that the whole course of Western history, civil, philosophical, scientific, religious, might have been changed had his works as we now possess them been known in Latin from say four hundred years after the death of Boethius in 52 5. It is no mere affecta- tion of the pedant which makes Wyclif begin his treatise on the power of the Pope with Aristotle's fourfold distinc- tion of power as active, passive, purposively controlled or accidentally acquired (the illustration of the last is medical skill). ^ He adopts the method because it was natural to his age. Holy Scripture for him includes all truth but it does not provide a dialectic, and though it may be true that he is Platonist rather than Aristotelian and that his conclusions owe more to reflection on the Scriptures and on Augustine than to any other influences, such Platonism as he may have learnt from Augustine would not have given either to him or to his age what was wanted for their expression. To Dr Poole "the fundamental principle of" Wyclif's "Doctrine of Lordship justifies its author's title to be considered in no partial sense the father of modern Christianity " - — a judgment with which some of us would venture strongly to disagree ; but just as you can most easily read the handwriting of some people by determinino- 1 De Potestate Pape, cap. i, " Wyclif Society," pp. 2-4 (Triibner, 1907), * Op. cit., p. 306. 59 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS the angle from which they wrote, so you can more readily understand the thought of a systematic writer of the Middle Ages if you can imagine anew the framework in which in the process of thinking new ideas struggled for expression. And the inquiry as to the latest writer for whom a text from Scripture and a text from Aristotle, when not discordant, had equal validity as an argument in pari materia would yield more useful results than the quest for the latest ecclesiastic who wore a wig. A lecturer who enters upon the subject of the Civil Law, especially if he live in the parts of Britain south of the Tweed and be a clerk in orders, will nowadays order himself more lowly and reverently than has always been the fashion. One is sorely tempted in the terms of the stately preface to Bacon's Maxims of the Law to try to estimate the political bearings of the differences between the Roman civil law and the laws of England, but one observation cannot be omitted, at any rate, because of its direct bearing upon the present subject. The maxim that the pleasure of the ruler has the force of law is re- garded with just disapprobation by many who do not know that it comes from the Digest^ \ for that reason the fact is often overlooked that it is based on a theory that the source of rule is to be found in the will of the people. And however strange the transformations which it sus- tained in the hands of mediaeval writers and those of the modern age the idea of popular sovereignty which is therein contained is one of the many for which we owe a debt to the Middle Ages which preserved though they did not create it. What is the real legacy of the Middle Ages in Western | 1 " Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem," 1. i, Dig., i, 4. See the interesting discussion in Gierke, op. cit., pp. 37 ff, 147. 60 I TO MODERN CIVILISATION Europe to our modern day on the political side so far as it affects or is affected by religious conceptions ? Professor Tout, in a notable and striking passage, has illustrated the efforts both of Pope and Emperor each in his own way to establish God's Kingdom upon earth. Beside Hildebrand he sets the noblest of the House of Hohen- staufen, Frederick Barbarossa, " the most imposing, the most heroic, and the most brilliant of the long line of German princes, who strove to realise the impracticable but glorious political ideal of the Middle Ages." ^ And yet, one may venture to think, if our inheritance is still the vision of a Civitas Dei which those ages learnt from Augustine and Augustine from the New Testament, we shall not take from them the conception of its possible realisation either through an universal Empire — a world- domination German, French, Latin, British, Mongolian, or Slav, wherein religious activities might probably be cither ordered by a Minister of Public Worship or peremptorily excluded, nor through an universal Papacy, the earthly embodiment of that Divine Wisdom by whom kings reign and princes decree justice. We shall seek it rather through the development of that national consciousness among the several races of the civilised world which then rendered impossible the achievement of the ideal of the mediaeval Popes and on the other hand fostered a national expression of religion which we are gradually learning to regard as involving, not the negation of that unity among Christians for which their Master prayed, but an enrich- ment of the life of the One Body " fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint supplieth." Clearly this view will not pass unchallenged. Lord Acton, for example, would have rejected such a conclusion ; ^ The Empire and the Papacy, p, 247 (Rivingtons, 1909). 61 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS and there are many indeed to whom such a statement will seem a bewildering confusion of the issues raised by the facts of what is called the * religious situation * in the several nations of Western Europe, even if we take no wider outlook. As so often, the mental constructions of one epoch are the prisons of the next until the power of some new idea avails to burst the bonds which men forge for themselves from age to age. The formation of great states rendered improbable the continued recognition any- where of the Holy Roman Empire as being still in theory what it had never been in fact, the Civitas Dei. The forces political, intellectual, religious, which made them- selves felt in the century from 1450 to 1550, but of whose presence we may find indications a century earlier, served to disintegrate the mediaeval conception of the Catholic Church. An attempt was made, is still made, to sub- stitute for it one less vulnerable if more elusive, because ex hypothesi invisible, though neither was that idea again wholly new. But its unity was marred from the outset by the fierce claim of the several Churches to exclude from it all others of whose principles and practice they disapproved, and those who were themselves, like the Pilgrim Fathers, the victims of intolerance could not always show a subsequent record free from the stain of persecution; while in theology the new scholasticism proved for many generations even more burdensome than the old. Let us look a little closer. On the political side we should all reject the abominable doctrine expressed in the words Cuius regio eius religio — the theory that the ruler has the right to determine the religion of his subjects, an inheritance not from the Middle Ages but from the Reformation period of which you may find an exemplification in the Peace of Augsburg in the sixteenth century or in some of the con- 62 TO MODERN CIVILISATION sequences of the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth. On the other hand, whether we agree or disagree with Lord Acton's famous essay on " The Protestant Theory of Perse- cution," ^ the student will find himself obliged to conclude that in the history of the struggle for religious toleration the prime movers have seldom been found among the official representatives of organised Christianity, Catholic or Protestant. He may also infer without sacrifice of his- torical truth that that toleration which is actually guaranteed by every enlightened state is the product not of indifference but, as a matter of fact, of the Christian conscience of the majority of its citizens. And within the expansive limits of that toleration so painfully won our later age has seen the signs of a new ra-pprochement^ a consciousness of shame at our unhappy divisions, a recognition of a unity in diversity which at one time seemed impossible, and still to some is an idle dream. From the sense of an underlying unity has come a new conception of a visible Church, the realisation of which may indeed be far distant but which has possibilities that men are at least ready to explore. The Reformation is seen as a stage in the drama of Western Christendom, an episode of enormous import- ance necessary to the development of the action, but not the whole, one which indeed cannot be understood by blotting out twelve centuries of Christian history. And those who turn with reawakened curiosity to the Middle Ages will assuredly not return unrewarded. Where will you find a nobler expression of the true ideal of the new commonwealth which we are seeking to build than in Marsiglio's adoption of Aristotle's definition - of the * The Rambler, March 1862, reprinted in The History of Freedom (Macmillan, 1907), * Politics, \, I ; Mars., Def. Pads, \, 4 (Goldast, Monarch., \\, 157). 63 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS rationale of the State "in order that men may Hve well " and his explication of "living well" as "having leisure for liberal tasks, such as are those of the virtues of the soul as well of thought as of action " ? If it be suggested that we have been dwelling too much upon the political side of mediaeval thought in our search for religious contributions to our modern civilisation, it must be remembered that, humanly speaking, if ever the kingdom of the world is to become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ it will be because the visible Church of which we dream is not a City of Refuge but the embodiment of Christian citizenship because of Christian discipleship. You cannot divorce the politics and the religion of the true citizen without detriment to the State, any more than you can build a common life on a basis of self-interest, however much enlightened. It is often argued that religious men are unpractical, but it may be questioned whether the stricture sounds well in the mouth of people who are endeavouring to teach what by a new barbarism is called Civics, in which we may recognise some of the maxims of Christian conduct divorced from the Christian motive. Again, the mediaeval aspirations after a life of evangelical poverty, which are found so beautiful to read even by many who frankly admit that they could never themselves attempt to rise to their level, represent a reaction against the impoverishment of Christian ideals, the degradation of Christian practice observable in the life of the mediaeval Church. But those aspirations are themselves part of that life. As we study them in Arnold of Brescia, in the Rule of St Francis of Assisi or the works of Franciscans like Archbishop Peckham or of Dominicans like Tauler, to take only a few instances, or as we trace the later history of the Spiritual Franciscans, we may possibly feel the same 64 TO MODERN CIVILISATION superiority or the same sadness in noting where on the practical side their doctrine fails, and why, as we might in reading Mr George Jacob Holyoake's history of the early stages of the Co-operative Movement.^ But study their implications and see whether you may not find in them some of the principles for which our modern age is still seeking. " The whole social economy of the Fran- ciscans," says a modern exponent of it, " proceeded from the ideal of service having for its motive the evangelical law of love. ... So far the Franciscan social ideal is that of a perfect democracy ; of a society in which all the mem- bers are on an equality of comradeship, whatever be the accident of their place or position, and in which all, whether rulers or governed, are subject to the same law of personal service. But where the Franciscan democracy differs from the ordinary political democracy is, in the first place, that with the Franciscan equality is generated in voluntary assumption of common duties and responsibilities and not in the assertion of individual rights. The Franciscan begins at the other end from that generally taken by the political democrat. He starts practically from the idea that he himself owes a duty to his neighbour rather than that his neighbour owes a duty to him ; he is more con- cerned to curb his own arrogance and selfishness than to curb that of others ; he is more willing to submit to the will of another than to claim another's submission to his will. In short, the ideal Franciscan society is akin to that democracy of spirit which exists in the personal relations of all true men." ^ It is strange to contrast such an ideal, which to many will seem no unfair representation of that 1 The History of Co-operation (Trubncr, 1875, 1879), revised and com- pleted (T. Fisher Unvvin, 1906). * Fr Cuthbcrt, O.S.F.C., The Romanticism of St Francis, pp. 64-5 (Longmans, 191 5). E 65 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS spirit of St Francis himself which lives on from the Middle Ages in the freshness of an eternal spring, with the language of Gregory VII as to the origin of secular governments or with a definition of the purpose of the laws that was still being taught in England within living memory — that they were intended " to preserve the rich in their possessions and to restrain the vicious poor." Once more, of course, a caution is necessary. The casual student will learn, shall we say, from Lord Acton's works that the Whig theory of the Revolution may be found in the works of St Thomas Aquinas, written at the time when Simon de Montfort summoned the Commons,^ or that the doctrines of the sovereignty of the nation, representative government, the superiority of the legis- lature over the executive, and the liberty of conscience were worked out by Marsiglio of Padua, who lived at the same time as Edward 11.^ These facts are dear to students of politics, if unknown to politicians who do not study. But it would be the wildest absurdity to suppose that the theologians and jurists of the Middle Ages were generally in favour of liberty of conscience any more than of repre- sentative government ; or that such an injunction met with universal approval as is found in the Decretals that " secular judges who with damnable presumption compel ecclesiastical persons to pay debts are to be restrained from such temerity by ecclesiastical censure through the ordinaries of the places." ^ And the fact that in a bygone age an idea is tentatively sketched out, or even seriously 1 This much misquoted statement occurs in the remarkable address to the members of the Bridgnorth Institution in 1877 on "The History of Freedom in Christianity," printed in The History of Freedom (see pp. 36-7). 2 Ibid., p. 37. ^ Quoted by Figgis, From Gerson to Grotius, p. 260, from the Sext., ii, 2, 2, 66 TO MODERN CIVILISATION put forward, which seems to some the acme of ' modernity,* [ is no ground in itself for claiming that we receive it by legitimate succession or for denying the originality of its presentation in our own day. Dr Poole with justice has claimed Marsiglio as one of " that rarest class of doctrinaires whom future ages may rightly look back upon as prophets," ^ but in their own day they were as a rule rather solitary figures, and even where they attracted followers they had usually few successors. It is a striking and curious fact, but it is no more, that William of Ockham should have argued in the fourteenth century for the inclusion not merely of laymen but of women in the general councils of the Church, where the wisdom, goodness, or power of women should be necessary for the treatment of the Faith.^ And even the suggestion of the Invincible Doctor, perhaps not intended to be taken very seriously, though he puts it forward with gravity, must yield place to the rich variety of novelties in the tractate Of the Recovery of the Holy Land -^ by the Norman advocate Pierre du Bois. Dr Figgis calls ''' it " a mine of reforming ideas," though we may well think that some of them would have startled the Fathers of the , Reformation. " Disendowment of the Church, and ofi the monasteries, absolute authority for the secular State, ' women's enfranchisement, mixed education, are all ad- j vanced with the one object of increasing the power of the \ French king, who is to be made Emperor and to rule at ; Constantinople. International Arbitration was to decrease the horrors of war, and educated women were to be sent to the Holy Land in order to marry and convert both the Saracens and the priests of the Orthodox Church, and also 1 Op. cit., p. 275. * " Propter unitaiem fidei . . . quae omnest angit et in qua non masculus nee fcmina " [Dia/ogus, c. 85 ad Jin. Goldast, Mori., ii, 605). 67 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS to become trained nurses and teachers. . . . The whole spirit of the book is secular and modern. Bishop Stubbs was wont to declare that everything was in it, including the new woman." ^ It is required of the Bishops of the Church of England by the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth canons of 1603, under pain of two years' suspension from the power of ordaining, that they admit none to holy orders save after examina- tion and being such as are able as a minimum qualification to render an account of their faith in Latin. The require- ment was certainly enforced as late as the time of Arch- bishop Tenison, and though it may not be a discipline of which the restoration is nowadays much wished, at any rate by ordination candidates, it is certain that much loss has come to clerks as well as to laymen from the fact that they cannot as a rule read with any facility the ecclesiastical Latin of the Middle Ages. In view of this disability, it is worth while to insist upon the fact that any student can now read a considerable part at least if he will of the Summa of St Thomas Aquinas in an admirable English translation. This fact is the more important because in the minds of many the philosophy of the Middle Ages means nothing more than is expressed by a vague reference to the School- men regarded as protagonists of a series of wearisome logomachies, the inventors of antitheses of knowledge falsely so called. Thus to regard it is to stultify reason and to misread history. We may as easily eliminate from the doctrinal content of the theology of the undivided Church the influence of ancient philosophy on, let us say, the Christian Gnostics of Alexandria., as treat the Nomin- 1 Figgis, op. cit. pp. 31-2. There are few works of equal compass from which the student may derive so much amusement as Langlois' edition of the De Recuperatione Terras Sanct<£ (Paris : Picard, 1891). 68 TO MODERN CIVILISATION alists and Realists of the West with their quest for truth in forms borrowed from Platonist and AristoteHan sources, acutely studied if imperfectly known, as mere triflers. The sanity of the nobler minds of the Middle Ages is seen in other fields of religious interest besides politics. Mr Taylor in his useful if discursive work on The Mediaeval Mind has spoken of those who in the twelfth century cultivated logic and metaphysics with the desire to know more active in them than the fear of hell.^ ** By doubting," says Abelard in his Sic et Non, " we are led to inquire ; by inquiry we perceive the truth." " After all, one may suppose that logic is not always the enemy of truth — was it not deemed a requisite for a degree in medicine at Salerno ? — though theologians have perhaps been more prone than other men to take refuge in language such as St Bernard allowed himself with regard to Abelard : " Would not a mouth which says such things more justly be beaten with bludgeons than refuted with reasons?"^ One who has spent more time than he cares to remember in turning pages of manuscripts of Rabanus Maurus in search for other things may be excused if in what follows he shows that, like Rabanus, according to Mr Taylor, ** the operations of his mind " are " predominantly Caro- lingian, which is to say that ninety-nine per cent, of the contents of" what he has to say "consists of material extracted from prior writers." ^ To Rabanus " the foun- dation, the state, and the perfection of wisdom is knowledge of the Holy Scriptures."'' Philosophy, in the view of the 1 i, 247 (Macmillan, 191 1). * " Dubitando ad inquisitionem venimus : inquirendo veritatem percipi- mus " [P. L., clxxviii, c. 1349). 3 Ep. de Erroribus Abdlardi, v, § 11. Cf. Dr Rashdall's comment in his Idea of Atonement, p. 359, note 4 (Macmillan, 1919). * Taylor, op. cit., i, 222. ^ Rabanus, C/er. Inst., iii, 2 [P. L., cvii, c. 379). 69 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS early Middle Ages, is a part of secular riches, even if, as Alcuin taught, it be the only part which has never left its possessor miserable. ■"• But just as Alcuin insists on a religious purpose in all education, Rabanus holds that the clergy ought to learn logic 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." ^ But if we have papal authority for the statement that God is not tied by the rules of grammar, it was no less certain that the time would arrive when the freedom of inquiry allowed in the philo- sophical schools would extend into the domain of theology. For our present purpose it is irrelevant to consider whether such excursions were officially regarded as orthodox or the reverse. If it be contended that the attitude of ecclesiastical authority in all ages has seldom been found to be a mean between excessive rigorism and a no less dangerous credulity, it would not be unfair to extend the stricture to the official exponents of philosophy and of natural science. What is important for us to remember is that, with whatever necessary qualifications, the demand for a rational theology is a legacy handed on from some of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages : true, it did not originate with them, but still less is it a new discovery of our own day. And the liberty of prophesying would always be dearly bought at the price of the liberty of thinking. Of course the attempted solutions are conditioned in every age by the circumstances of the time ; and there will inevitably be periods of reaction. Those who have read Dr Poole's delightful chapter on John of Salisbury will remember its closing reflections on the ^ Taylor, op. cii., i, 216. 2 /^zV., i, 222. Rabanus, C/er. Inst., iii, 20 {P. L., cvii, c. 397), reading " dicta veneficata." 70 TO MODERN CIVILISATION attempt at the opening of the thirteenth century to proscribe the Physics and Metaphysics of Aristotle ; and it is very easy for us who live in an age when Greek has not as yet been again forgotten to be unjust to the Latin West. But this in itself makes it the more necessary that we should not treat the Eastern Church as though it had no history with which we need concern ourselves. Its dogmatic controversies, extending into the Middle Ages, have an importance which the development of modern philosophical theology may yet bring into higher relief. And it is surely not unworthy of remark, though it is often forgotten, that the one Creed of the universal Church is an Eastern creed. M. Lavisse, in a striking picture of the East and the West, recalls the contrast familiar to every student between the spirit of the philosopher and that of the jurist. " The Pope is a theologian making laws, whilst a philo- sopher survives in every Eastern theologian." -^ " Haereti- corum patriarchae philosophi," jibes the lawyer Tertullian ^; and it is significant that the one Western philosopher of the early Middle Ages whose philosophy of religion, though evolved among Christian associations, has some- times been regarded as capable of sustaining without im- poverishment the removal of its Christian elements was a disciple of Hellenic learning. William of Malmesbury ^ tells us that he was stabbed to death with the points of their pens by his English pupils — a pungent warning of the dangers of attempting to teach the unimaginative ; but whether this be true or not it is a fact that, as Dr Poole says, " the voice of orthodoxy on all sides was directed against Johannes Scotus, the belated disciple of Plato, and the last ' Hist. Gen., i, 172. * Adv. Hermogenem, 8 ad Jin., a work which it is none the less good for philosophers (and others) to read. ■" Gesta Pontif., v, §240 (Rolls Series), " garfiis foratus." 71 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS representative of the Greek spirit in the west." ^ Orthodox or not, he anticipated the fundamental principle of Descartes, Cogito^ ergo sum, though that too, as Dr Poole has pointed out, is to be found like so much else already in St Augustine. - We must leave it to others to estimate the specific debt of modern philosophy, so far as such an expression has a meaning, to those great masters of the Middle Ages who dared to think when originality had a spice of danger which might prove a salutary tonic in our own day. But there is a class of thinkers — perhaps we should say one type of mind — regarded in all ages with dislike by the philo- sopher and with suspicion by the theologian, though having affinities with both. Few words have been used to cover so great a variety of disparate and even incoherent beliefs as Mysticism. It is as difficult to find a common term between different schools of mystics, Neoplatonist, Christian, Mohammedan, Persian, and others, with endless combinations of one or more strains, as it is among the early Gnostics. In the exposition of the Aristotelian philosophy by successive Christian interpreters such, for example only, as the Franciscan Alexander of Hales and the Dominicans Albertus Magnus and St Thomas may be found a progressive attempt to express within the four corners of orthodoxy ultimate truths as to the nature of God, of the world, of man regarded from the standpoint of philosophy as well as of Revelation,^ by a union through which each is found to be the proper complement and interpretation of the other. In a sense it would be true to say that the type of scholasticism represented by Aquinas is the supreme triumph of human reason in the Middle Ages. But there is another way of approach with which we are ^ Poole, op. cit., p- 52. - Ibid., p. 65, note 18. ^ Taylor, op. cit., ii, 393-4. 72 TO MODERN CIVILISATION now concerned. Look at it in the twelfth century as you see it in Hugh of St Victor and his followers. A Platonist at heart, even if in some things he follows Aristotle, Hugh found his real source of inspiration in the extraordinary, and in some ways fascinating, Neoplatonist work on the Celestial Hier- archy which was preserved among the supposed writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, a belief in the genuineness of which was sufficient to work miracles in France in the days of St Louis. All true mysticism, so far as one can judge, is concerned with the approach of the soul to God. But in Hugh and his followers, unlike many later schools to which the same title of mystics is applied, this approach is the crown of an intellectual process which it transcends ; it is not a sub- stitute for it. In all this approach involves the surrender of the will ; but seldom if ever in Hugh, or in any of the mystics whose influence has been lasting, has it involved the negation of the reason. The Christian mysticism of the Middle and later ages (which the Dean of St Paul's, it may safely be said, has induced hundreds to study) is widely sundered perhaps in many of its forms from their ordinary modes of thinking or apprehension. Its attrac- tion has lain probably on its ethical side rather than in its philosophical implications, often very imperfectly under- stood ; and the attraction of different mystics for different types of student has certainly varied largely according to their temperament. It has been claimed, justly or unjustly, for Tauler and his school in the fourteenth century that they gave to the German nation a philosophical termin- ology.i But what is more likely to interest most readers is the ideal of living set forth in the Sermons and the criticism of the ideal of poverty of the Spiritual Franciscans, his 1 C. Schmidt, Johannes Tauler von Strassburg, p. 79 (Hamburg, 1841), hard to procure and hard to read, but worth the trouble. 73 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS substitution for the renunciation of all earthly wealth of that poorness of spirit which appropriates nothing but holds all in trust. On the other hand, the self-mortification by almost incredible bodily austerities described in the life of Henry Suso belongs in the last resort to the sphere of morbid psychology rather than of religion. In its exag- gerated form there may seem little to choose between the Servitor as he describes his way of life and St Simeon Stylites as not he himself but Tennyson pictures him ; but in the underlying motive a real difference can be distinguished, for the basis of Suso's actions is neither the averting of wrath nor the acquirement of merit, but, however pitifully misinterpreted, that which is the basis of all true mysticism — the love of God, shown in his case in the passionate yearning to share in the sufferings of his suffering Lord. And those who would see this love for God exhibited on its truer, fuller side should study it in Dame Julian of Norwich or in the joyful spirit of the works of the Hermit of Hampole, Richard Rolle, though even in the latter may be found that distrust of natural human love which is alien to the spirit of the Gospel but quite consonant with much of the teaching alike of the Early Fathers of the Church and of mediaeval theology. Dr Inge says of William Law's book. The Grounds and Reasons of Christian Regeneration, that he knows " no better summary of the theology and ethics of Christian mysticism," -^ and those who are led by his account of it to study it and other works will see that, while Law's theology is his own and in its exposition he is profoundly influenced by the seventeenth-century German mystic whom we call Jacob Behmen, there is not a little in the thought which is common to earlier mystics in the Middle Ages ; and in many of * Studies of English Mystics, pp. 152-3 (John Murray, 1906). 74 TO MODERN CIVILISATION them, one may venture to think, much that breathes the very spirit of the Johannine theology. And so again if there are parts of Meister Eckhart's sermons which seem to Hnk him with Christian Gnosticism, there are others where he is speaking of intelHgence, will, and love in a way that makes us wonder whether he would have regarded Mr McTaggart as a master or a misguided disciple. It is not a question of establishing a legitimate descent in this or like cases, any more than between the ideals of Tauler's Friends of God or the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer, whose story was so beautifully illustrated by Thomas a Kempis, and those of any organised body that is to be seen in our own day. But there is, as Abelard knew, " something divine in every noble thought," ^ and the kernel remains though the husk may perish. We do not condemn the doctrine of the Inner Light or of the spark within the soul because the Beghards of Alsace in the thirteenth century and later abolished the distinction between the Creator and the created or claiming as Brethren of the Free Spirit an antinomian freedom erred concerning the Faith. There are certain tendencies of the human spirit which are reproduced from age to age. " L'histoire ne se repete jamais, mais les hommes se ressemblent toujours " — a fact to which testimony is borne alike by the long continuance of Montanism and by the upholders ; of the Eternal Gospel attributed to Joachim of Floris and many a strange eccentricity of individuals or of communities of our own time. If in some of these things we are the heirs of the Middle Ages, by none of them, let us remember, are those ages represented in any more than a minor degree. If even the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux on the Song of Songs, following a method of interpretation which goes ' Poole, op. cit., p. 170. 75 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS back to Origen, cannot reconcile many to an exegesis which, historically regarded, they would pronounce to have been profoundly mischievous, yet in the same century we may trace the growth of a demand for a more historical treatment of Scripture. Look yet deeper. Thousands and tens of thousands, even though they may not know of the obligation, still find comfort and inspiration for their devotions in language drawn from mediaeval sacramentaries, Gregorian, Leonian, Mozarabic, from the Breviaries of Rome and of Sarum, from Augustine or Alcuin or even from Anselm and Aquinas. Still the Fioretti of Francis of Assisi appeal with the quaint simplicity of the fourteenth century to many who would understand as little of the learned disputations of the world in which the book was written as St Francis himself would have done a century earlier. And still the Imitation of Christ — whether it be written by A Kempis or by Hilton matters little to its readers — speaks to conscience and kindles love with a power which no later work has ever rivalled. Of the religious inspiration of the Art of the Middle Ages others must be left to speak : it would furnish material for many lectures. Who has not felt it — in our own great Abbey of Westminster, in many of the great cathedrals of England or of France, in some parish church which has escaped restoration by a miracle or more miraculously survived it } He understands little of the Middle Ages who has not studied This that never ends. Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, As full of morals half-divined as life. Graceful, grotesque, with ever ntw surprise Of hazardous caprices sure to please. Heavy as nightmare, airy-light as fern. Imagination's very self in stone ! 76 TO MODERN CIVILISATION But of one debt less generally recognised, perhaps, but of even wider significance something must be said. It is in regard to the hymns which we sing. Even if we set aside as too early to be included with fairness those associated with the names of St Ambrose, of Sedulius or Prudentius, of Synesius of Cyrene or the earliest hymns of the Eastern Church there remains an astonishing collec- tion. John Mason Neale's hymn " The day is past and over " is from the Late Evening Service of the Orthodox Church, and goes back to the sixth century. From the eighth are derived " Come, ye faithful, raise the strain Of triumphant gladness " and " The Day of Resurrection," both by St John of Damascus, and from the ninth " Stars of the morning so gloriously bright " by St Joseph the Hymnographer. But the mediaeval hymns of the West have naturally possessed a greater attraction for translators. From Venantius Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers in the sixth century, we inherit " The royal banners forward go " and ** Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle," both first sung as relics of the Cross were borne from Tours to Poitiers, and the " Salve, festa dies," " Hail, festal day! " which many have taken in hand to translate. " Jesu the Father's only Son " is perhaps of the same age. In the following century Ireland gives us " Draw nigh and take the Body of the Lord," and not much later are ** Jesu, our Hope, our heart's Desire " and " Blessed City, heavenly Salem," with its second part, the " Angularis fundamentum Lapis Christus missus est," on which are based " Christ is made the sure Foundation " and " Christ is our corner- stone." To St Theodulph of Orleans (c 820) we owe ** All glory, laud, and honour," and possibly to Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Maintz in the same century, the ** Veni Creator Spiritus," so familiar to us in Bishop 77 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS Cosin's seventeenth-century version, " Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire " ; while from St Gall in Switzerland we have " The strain upraise of joy and praise. Alleluia ! " At Canterbury in the tenth century you might have heard the canons singing " Conditor alme siderum, Sterna lux credentium " — " Creator of the starry height." To the same period belongs "Hark ! a thrilling voice is sounding," a great Advent hymn, and little later are two hymns still more famous — "Alleluia, song of sweetness " ("Alleluia, dulce carmen "), and " Sing Alleluia forth in duteous praise," of whose history in both cases the best-known facts are associated with the disuse of the ' Alleluia ' they proclaim, according to a curious ecclesiastical perversity not unobservable in other connexions. Dr Walter Frere, of the Community of the Resurrection, to whose magnificent historical edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern ^ all students of the subject, and not least the present writer, owe unstinted gratitude, recalls to mind in regard to this the mediaeval custom of burying the ' Alleluia ' at Septuagesima in a coffin with full funeral ceremonies — a custom which is said to have lasted until the fifteenth century. To St Fulbert of Chartres, who died in 1028, is due " Ye choirs of new Jerusalem," and to the same century belongs the famous poe/n formerly attributed to St Bernard but now assigned to a Benedictine abbess, which has given us three hymns — " Jesu, dulcis memoria," rendered as " Jesu, the very thought is sweet," or " Jesu, the very thought of Thee " ; " Jesu, dulcedo cordium," " Jesu, the joy of loving hearts " ; and " Jesu, Rex admirabilis," " O Jesu, King most wonder- ful." To Bernard of Morlas or Cluny in the twelfth century belongs with better right the great poem of over ^ (London: William Clowes & Sons, Ltd., 1909.) 78 TO MODERN CIVILISATION 3000 lines from which are derived " Brief Kfe is here our portion," " The world is very evil," " For thee, O dear, dear country," and " Jerusalem the golden." Equally well known, and perhaps even more popular, is " O Quanta, qualia sunt ilia sabbata," " O what the joy and the glory must be," which comes from the collection of hymns made by Abelard for Helo'ise in 1 129. As one hears people sing- ing the "Pange lingua," "Of the glorious Body telling," with its second part " Tantum ergo," " Therefore we, before Him bending"; the " Verbum supernum pro- diens," "The Heavenly Word proceeding forth," with its second part "O salutaris hostia," "O saving Victim"; or the " Adoro te devote, latens deitas," " Thee we adore, O hidden Saviour, Thee," one sometimes wonders how much we have learnt in our day and in our own ex- perience of the blending of reason with faith and faith with reason which was taught by the great scholastic who wrote those hymns — St Thomas of Aquinum in the thirteenth century. To the greatest Pope of that century, Innocent III, are assigned, though not with certainty, " Veni Sancte Spiritus," " Come, Thou Holy Spirit, come," and " Stabat mater dolorosa," " At the Cross her station keeping." And it may help us to understand a little more of the spirit of the Middle Ages that the author of the " Dies ir^," " Day of wrath ! O Day of mourning ! " should have been Thomas of Celano, the friend and biographer of St Francis. Our list of debts to the Middle Ages might be largely extended, but we may close it with the mention of three from the collection assigned to Thomas a Kempis. " O Love, how deep ! how broad ! how high ! " (" O Amor quam ecstaticus !"); "If there be that skills to reckon All the number of the blest " (" Quisquis valet numerare"); and "Light's abode, celestial Salem." 79 MEDIi^VAL CONTRIBUTIONS Jerusalem luminosa I It is the brighter side, the undying hope of the Christian's faith. In passing from the Middle Ages to the period of the Reformation men did not change their Hell but only their view of its occupants. And though in the preaching of our day the emphasis has shifted almost immeasurably, as some of us can recognise whose memories go back perhaps no more than thirty years, the number is probably growing rather than decreas- ing of those who would understand what Carlyle meant when in his lecture on " The Hero as Poet " he says that " Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner Life," even though Carlyle's modern Europe is now eighty years behind us. An historian of Italian name writing in a great French history has found himself able to give to Dante rather less than ten scattered lines which tell us that he was a Floren- tine, a scholastic, that he attacked Boniface VIII, wrote the De Monarchia^ and in the Divine Comedy prepared the cult of antiquity for the Renaissance that was to come. So much for the modern historian on what Carlyle calls " the most remarkable of all modern Books," the " mystic Song, at once of one of the greatest human souls, and of the highest thing that Europe had hitherto realised for itself." And yet the last two cantos of the Paradiso are, one might suppose, the most characteristic expression of the Middle Ages, on more sides than one, that can anywhere be found. Cicero, Vergil, St Paul, St Augustine of Hippo, St Thomas of Aquinum — many have read them since, even perhaps understood them better ; but what makes the Divine Comedy different from a Sic etNon is the poet himself; and as the poet is often the true historian, even though here 80 TO MODERN CIVILISATION and there his blunder may evoke a footnote of learned superiority, so we may venture to think he is often and again the true theologian. Not that Dante's theology is more or less complete than that of the Fathers or of the writers of the Reformation : it is different in kind ; and there is another side which few perhaps save the mystics could grasp from the days of Augustine to the nineteenth century. " God has ordained that the Pauline aspect of Christianity, and the Pauline nomenclature, should for the last three hundred years at least mould almost exclusively the thoughts of His church: but we must not forget, that St John's thoughts, and St John's words, are equally in- spired with those of St Paul." So wrote Charles Kingsley in his preface to Miss Winkworth's edition of Tauler's History and Lije} And as men in our own time turn from a Paulinism, distorted, misinterpreted, perhaps sometimes outgrown, from the cramping fetters of Augustinianism or an etiolating modernism which leaves the mind unsatis- fied and the soul unfed, to the Christ whom Paul preached, they may learn with Dante from the questionings of St John to understand the cords that draw them to the Divine Wisdom, the Incarnate Word whom Paul also knew. And perhaps, too, they may find something more. For if the Middle Ages open with the dream of the City of God, it is certain that our modern age which has inherited the dream is tending toward a struggle for results more utilitarian, but likely to be less satisfying. And the last canto of the Paradiso may still have its lesson ; for its end is the vision of the Light Eternal and a will wholly guided, moved, and turned at length by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. Claude Jenkins * Republished 1905 (London : H. R. AUenson). F 81 Ill PHILOSOPHY THE inquiry which I propose to undertake I have formulated in the following question. Is there any dominating concept in our modern mind, giving it a definite and characteristic direction in the search for truth, warping it perhaps with a distinctive bias, which it does not derive from ancient Greece, and which it would not possess had it not lived through the dominating concepts of the mediaeval period ? I hope it will be possible to suggest, not merely a vague and general, but a precise answer. The method I must follow in such an inquiry is different from that of the historian who, studying original records and documents, endeavours to discover the origin and trace the development of the ideas which have materialised in institutions. It is different also from that of the student of the history of philosophy who, studying the connected narratives, attempts to give an inventory of, or make a classi- fied catalogue of, the philosophical output of a period and appreciate its value. My method is to look at history in its grand outlines and, disregarding minutiae and details, to endeavour to discover and lay bare the concepts which dominate the mentality of a period, concepts which find expression in its art, religion, philosophy, political and social institutions. The history of any period can only be interpreted, it seems to me, when we are able to discover and understand the concepts of reality which determine 82 CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN CIVILISATION its philosophy. For example, during the first centuries of the Christian era the pure Greek philosophy still lived and developed side by side with the Christian concepts which were becoming increasingly dominant. There was, that is to say, not only an influence of Greek philosophy on Christian doctrine ; there was also a contrast and competi- tion between them. We have recently had our attention called to this in the very valuable work of Dean Inge on the philosophy of Plotinus. I mention this work not merely because it illustrates the method I propose, nor on account of its high value as a contribution to history and to philosophy, but because it affords me a starting-point for the philosophical reflection I am about to follow. The great service which it appears to me Dean Inge has ren- dered to contemporary philosophy is that in his lucid exposition of the history of that last period of the ancient philosophy, the neoplatonic, he has brought out with in- cisive clearness the nature of the dominating concept in the mentality of the Greek world. It was the concept of a reality purely intelligible, eternal and perfect, a world of fixed forms, change being unreal and time the moving image of eternity. The philosophical, apart from the his- torical, value of Dean Inge's work is due in great measure to the fact that he has not only expounded that concept with sympathetic appreciation, but he has let it take hold of him. Proclaiming himself a Platonist, he has thrown down a challenge to the modern world in his rejection of the idea of progress. This idea is so deeply rooted in our modern thought, so intimate a part of our science, politics, and religion, particularly since the principle of evolution has become generally accepted, that to challenge it is, in effect, to challenge the intellectual soundness of the con- cept on which modern civilisation rests. In contrast with 83 MEDIv^VAL CONTRIBUTIONS the philosophy of ancient Greece, particularly in its final period, the dominating concept in our philosophy to-day is the reality of change. We may be said to have turned away from the contemplation of things sub specie ^eternitatis^ and to be absorbed in the problems of activity, evolution, and relativity. I do not defend the idea of progress in so far as it can be taken to mean the attainment by the modern world of a higher plane of existence as judged by its ethical, social, political, or religious standards, nor do I think there exists any criterion by which the standards themselves can be judged, but I do hold that the modern world is dominated by the concept of reality as activity, and the philosophy which seems to me effectively interpretative in our world ' to-day is not Platonism, a philosophy of unchanging forms, \ but a philosophy of change, based on a new concept of \ time and history. It is to me a significant fact that Bergson, who has given such forcible expression to this dominating concept of modern thought, the reality of change, had his interest in the philosophical problem awakened, and the direction of his speculation directed, by the study of Plotinus. The effect of that study on Bergson was, however, so he has told us, to convince him that the last and greatest effort of the ancient philosophy ended in failure, that if philosophy is to succeed it must seek out and follow a new way. The concept of change as fundamentally real, of time as the very stuff of reality, is the direct opposite of the Platonic theory of the eternal forms. Identifying myself with the philosophy of change, regarding it as what is most charac- teristic of the modern spirit, I proceed to inquire what there is in the dominating concept of the mediaeval mind which may have served to give birth to it. 84 TO MODERN CIVILISATION History is continuous. When we view it from within there are no transitions, no breaks in its flow. When we view it externally, however, it appears as a stream of events in which we mark off very sharply the beginnings and ends of periods. In the history of philosophy the old Greek period comes definitely to an end and the modern period has a definite beginning. The two events are separated by an intervening period which we describe vaguely as the middle age or mediaeval period and which, whatever value we assign to it, in regard to philosophy, when compared with the Greek and the modern periods, appears emphatically negative. The middle age seems to separate the old philosophy from the new, and not in any respect to supply a connecting link. This negative char- acter of the mediaeval philosophy is the more pronounced by reason of the quite definite events which we are accustomed to assign as marking the end of the old and the beginning of the new. Greek philosophy, which had developed con- tinuously for more than a thousand years, died a violent death when Justinian closed the schools of Athens in the year 529, and modern philosophy was literally born, and began a new life, when Descartes published the Discours de la Methode in the year 1637. In the two centuries which immediately preceded this new birth Europe had witnessed the renascence of classical learning, the refor- mation in religion, and the rise of the natural sciences, but philosophy, as we recognise it to-day, in its special problems, its principles, and its methods, began with Descartes. In the true sense he is its father. A period, therefore, of over a thousand years separates ancient and modern philosophy. Two opposite and conflicting views are held to-day with regard to the philosophy of this middle period. Increasing knowledge has toned down sharp historical judgments 85 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS and blunted the incisiveness of verdicts. Nevertheless, there are many who still take the view that in the Middle Ages philosophy, in the only true meaning of the word, did not and could not exist. Throughout the whole period, according to this view, there is desolation. Philosophy could not exist by reason of the repressive legislation of religion exercising authority over the reason. It was a period, we are told, when the human mind was in bondage, when reason was suppressed and human life in consequence became degraded and sunk in superstition. Gibbon is in large measure responsible for this view, and has given forcible expression to it. Following his account of the suppression of the schools of Athens by Justinian, he says : The Gothic arms were less fatal to the Schools of Athens than the establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superseded the exercise of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or sceptic to eternal flames. In many a volume of laborious controversy they exposed the weakness of the understanding and the corruption of the heart, insulted human nature in the sages of antiquity, and proscribed the spirit of philosophical inquiry, so repugnant to the doctrine, or at least to the temper, of an humble believer.^ The irony of the passage has lost its bite, but the view it represents survives. A student presenting himself for an Honours Degree in philosophy in this university is required to know the history of ancient philosophy and the history of modern philosophy, from Descartes to Kant, and must have special knowledge of the books of those periods, but mediaeval philosophy is no part of the course. Were anyone to offer a thesis in it he would probably be referred to the department of history or theology. On the other hand, there are many who can claim to be representative exponents of modern thought who hold that ^ Decline and Fall, chap. xi. 86 TO MODERN CIVILISATION the mediaeval period, and more particularly the later part of that period to which the scholastic philosophy belongs, was that in which philosophy in its true meaning, both as a formal science of reasoning and as a material science of metaphysic, ontology, and theology, attained its zenith. In the Catholic universities and seminaries, philosophy, quite distinct from dogmatic theology, is the subject of a long and laborious discipline, and the history and text- books deal exclusively with the schoolmen. Now both these views — the view that philosophy in the Middle Ages was non-existent and the view that only then did philosophy exist — have some truth, for each follows a perfectly consistent definition of the particular nature of philosophy and of its content or subject-matter. But there is a third view which rests on a wholly different and profounder meaning of philosophy. This is the view that the concept which found expression in the mediaeval period, which determined the direction of its thought, the bias in its mentality, and the character of its social and political institutions, is a philosophy. Philosophy is not, that is to say, a special principle or a special method which one may accept and another reject ; it is an activity of the mind, inherent in the human spirit, its life. In this meaning philosophy does not exist at one time and not exist at another, for the absence of any particular principle or method is the presence of another, and therefore the very negation of the principle of one philosophy is itself the affirmation of another. In every period of history the expression of the life of the period is to be interpreted by the concept which determines the mentality of the period. The idea of an historical revelation and its expression in the institution of an authoritative Church is based on a concept of philosophy. 87 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS The three great periods into which the history of Western civiHsation is divided, the Greek, the medieval, the modern, are distinguished by their philosophy. In each there is a characteristic outward expression of a concept of the nature of reahty, and it dominates the mentaHty and directs the activity. The dominating concept of the Greek mind is the sovereign supremacy of reason as interpreta- tive of hfe and nature. The dominating concept of the mediaeval mind is history as the revelation of meaning and purpose — history as the divine event. The dominating concept of the modern mind is the infallibility of the ex- perimental method, and this is not a mere reassertion of the principle of reason ; it is a new thing, giving its charac- teristic bent to the modern mind. From this standpoint the view of Gibbon that the new religion, in whose interest the schools of Athens were closed, destroyed philosophy, is seen to be, not false, but based on a complete misconception of what philosophy really is. The new religion rested on a pure concept of philosophy. The special character and the particular form of expression which distinguished it outwardly from the religions it supplanted were adventitious, but the concept on which it depended was a new concept, and it was that underlying and supporting concept which dominated the mediaeval mind. We may trace its origin to Hellenistic and Judaeistic sources, but as we find it embodied in Chris- tian doctrine, it is a new concept, giving a bent or bias to the human mind, causing it to express itself in forms of activity wholly new, and it is this concept which gives its characteristic feature to the thought of the Middle Ages. " God who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath TO MODERN CIVILISATION appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds." If we suppress in these words, as we easily can, the special application, which the writer intends and is about to make explicitly, to the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, we may read in them the pure concept of philo- sophy which they express. Stripped of all special reference, that concept is the concept of history itself revealing reality. It is something much profounder than an appeal to the belief in the significance of facts supported by the evidence of records. It is the concept that history is purpose and reveals purpose. The notion of gods or of one supreme God was a general notion. The idea that the gods interested themselves in human affairs and occasionally made known their will in particular revelations was quite famiUar. Homer had conceived the Trojan War as having its reflection, and also its deeper causes, in the conflicts of the gods. Herodotus had conceived history on the analogy of a great drama. Thucydides had made history point a political moral. The Hebrew chroniclers had presented history as the expression of the favour or anger of a divine ruler. But here there is a totally different concept — a concept which finds its embodiment in the Kingdom of Heaven, the City of God, the Universal Church — the concept of historical revelation. It seems to me that we owe this concept to the Apostle Paul. If we look at Christianity as a philosophy, it is clear that the founder, Jesus himself, belongs to a different category from that in which we place the philosophers. Paul was essentially a philosopher. It is universally ac- knowledged that he rationalised the new religion to which he was converted, his mind ready prepared in the Greek and Hebrew learning. In my view Paul did much more than this, and he should be ranked with the great philosophers, 89 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS with those who, Uke Plato, Hke Descartes, Hke Kant, have given expression to new concepts — concepts which have transformed and reformed the mode of our mentaHty. There are no doubt other channels by which philosophy entered into the beliefs of the new religion, but it seems to me that Christianity owes its dominating concept, and that which specially stamps it as a philosophy, as something more than a mere rule of life, to the Apostle Paul. Only consider what Christianity would have been without it ! There is an instructive parallel in Mohammedanism. Undoubtedly there is a philosophical concept of the nature of reality underlying alike the gospel of Mohammed and the gospel of Jesus, and it is quite a fair comparison to consider the preachers of those gospels and the founders of those new religions as representing those concepts. Each proclaims himself a prophet sent by God and divinely inspired to reveal to men a new way of life. But compare the religions. Where in Mohammedanism do we find anything like the profound concept which comes to expression in Christianity in the words " the fulness of time " ? The Jesus whom Paul preached was not a prophet who might have appeared at any time and whose message was indifferent to his par- ticular age. Paul has a completely new concept of history. History is reality manifested or self-revealing. Without this Pauline concept Christianity might have been a Sermon on the Mount — a beautiful, possibly a realisable, ideal of life — it would not have been to mankind a new concept of reality dominating its whole mentaHty. The mediaeval mind was dominated, then, by a concept which, I maintain, was a pure concept of philosophy, and it found expression in its characteristic institutions, and especially in that of an authoritative Church. What, then, was the character of that dominating concept ? It 90 TO MODERN CIVILISATION cannot be denied that, judged by the philosophy which preceded it and the philosophy which succeeded it, it presents to us a distinctly negative character. The reason is plain. It holds within it an inherent contradiction. Throughout the whole period of mediaeval philosophy we find two factors in continual opposition, a principle of reason and a principle of faith. The whole philo- sophic effort is an attempt to reconcile them, to justify authority by an appeal to reason in the interest of faith. It ended in failure. It was bound to do so, for the only principle the philosopher could invoke to recon- cile the contradiction was the principle of reason of the Greek philosophy, and this principle was itself one of the opposing factors. It is this inherent contradiction in the mediaeval mind which gives to its philosophy throughout the whole period that negative character which it assumes even in its most enlightened exponents. Credo quia impossibile^ Credo ut intelUgam — these are its watch- words. The Pauline doctrine of justification by faith is the embodiment of the contradiction. The faith to which Paul appealed was not intuition or any form of the mind reconcilable with reason. It was an irrational and an anti-rational principle, and this was the tragedy so far as philosophy is concerned. I maintain, then, that despite the negative character of mediaeval philosophy and the inherent contradiction with which it had to struggle, despite the fact also that one of the conflicting principles was the principle of reason itself, particularly in the form in which it had found expression in Greek philosophy, the fundamental concept which domi- nated the thought and activity of the whole mediaeval period was not anti-philosophical, but a pure concept of philosophy, the concept of history revealing reality. 91 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS I want now to direct attention to another significant fact and one which is vital for the appreciation of what I contend is the essentially modern concept, the concept that reality is change. Every dominating concept creates in the mind a bias or inclination giving rise to a mode of mentality. We are wholly unconscious of this bias in our own thinking, and only with difficulty become conscious of it if we compare the mentality of one historical period with that of another. An illustration will perhaps make my meaning clear. There is a well-known story of the early days of the Royal Society which relates that some one appealed to the members to explain why, when a living fish is placed in a bowl of water, the weight is not increased, whereas it is if the fish be dead. It is said that several ingenious explanations were put forward by members of the Society, and that Charles II came to hear about it. He was curious to see the experiment, and it then appeared that the weight was increased just the same whether the fish was alive or dead. Now a story like this makes an immediate appeal to the modern mind. We have a natural bias or bent which makes us in the search for truth depend primarily, and rely abso- lutely, on the experimental method. If we transport our- selves in imagination into the Middle Ages, however, and try to look at nature as the mediaeval mind conceived it, we see at once that such a story would make no appeal at all. For the mediaeval mind the unseen world was full of occult forces, it was peopled with malignant and beneficent spirit agents, the scientific workers were the alchemists and astrologers, a suspect and uncanny folk, and successful ex- periment depended on the terms the experimenter was on with those spirit agents and forces. The mind naturally directed its attention rather to the experimenter than to the experiment ; it was his control of natural occult influences 92 TO MODERN CIVILISATION which was supposed to determine the event. But now, if we transport ourselves in imagination to ancient Greece, say to Athens in the fourth century B.C., we feel very differently. The Greek mentality seems so like our own that we can easily suppose the story of the Royal Society adapted to the imagery of the time, and told, let us say, by Aristo- phanes as having occurred at the Phrontisterion of Socrates described in The Clouds. Yet if we reflect we shall see that this too is quite impossible. To the Greek men- tality the story would be pointless and its moral irrelevant — but for a different reason. The Greek mentality had a bias which directed the mind from the principle to the fact, and not vice versa. It would have been natural to the Greek philosopher to decide the principle first as the Fellows of the Royal Society are said to have done, and they would not necessarily or immediately have been discon- certed by the failure of the experiment. I doubt if it would have seemed relevant to the Greek to make the experiment ; I am sure it would not have seemed the primary condition to satisfy. It was not because it did not happen to occur to Aristotle to make experiments like those which Galileo made on the inclined plane, and from the leaning tower of Pisa, that Aristotle did not forestall by nearly two thousand years Galileo's discoveries. It never could have occurred to Aristotle to investigate nature in that order, for the bent or bias of his mentality would not allow his mind to take that direction. The Greeks were, indeed, pre-eminently mathematicians, but mathematics indicates an entirely different direction of thought from that of modern experimental philosophy. I can quite well imagine, for example, that a Greek might have discovered Einstein's principle of relativity. It is exactly the kind of theory which would have appealed with special force to the 93 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS Greek mind. I am quite sure, however, that if a Greek philosopher had formulated the principle it would not have occurred to him as the first condition of recommending its acceptance that he should be able to devise some means by which it could be brought to an experimental test. That direction of Einstein's thought is peculiarly modern. I do not mean that the ancients did not experiment. I do not forget Archimedes and his practical devices. What I refer to is the unqualified confidence which the modern mind has in experiment. No better instance of it can be given than the principle of relativity to which I have referred. This originated in a single experiment, the famous ex- periment of Michelson and Morley, the result of which was disconcerting, and which appeared also irrational and para- doxical in the highest degree; but the experiment as a test of truth was never challenged. The experiment was repeated indeed, but only to test the conditions, not the authority, of the experiment. The mediaeval mind presents a complete contrast to the modern mind in this respect. Take as an example the mediaeval attitude toward a doctrine like that of the Real Presence, which filled so preponderating and central a place in the popular imagination as to the nature of the Christian scheme of redemption and the Christian cosmogony generally. I do not refer, of course, to the doctrine itself as a religious dogma, or to its inner meaning or truth, or to any philosophical problem it raises. I refer only to the imagery in which the doctrine presented itself to the mediaeval mind. Over and over again we find this taking definite materialistic shape and giving rise to tales of wonderful appearances, tales which claim to verify the actual fact of miracle in its grosser as apart from its spiritual meaning. To us such claims would immediately challenge 94 TO MODERN CIVILISATION laboratory tests. Why did they not to the mediaeval mind ? Surely not on account of sacrilege ; to suppose this is to miss the whole point of their claim to be evidence. The reason is that the mediaeval mind did not work that way, A story is told of St Thomas Aquinas which illustrates very markedly the difference between the mediaeval and the modern mind in regard to what we call evidence. In 1 27 1 (three years before he died) Aquinas was appointed to the chair of theology at Naples, and the following anec- dote, which I quote from Mr O'Neill's introduction to his Things New and Old in St Thomas Aquinas^ relates to this time. Romanus, to whom Aquinas had but recently resigned the chair of theology at Paris, appeared to him and told him that he was dead and now in heaven ! Aqui- nas immediately asked : " Do acquired habits remain to us in heaven } " Romanus replied that God absorbed all his thoughts. Aquinas then asked: "Do you see Him immediately or by means of some similitude ? " To appreciate the mentality thus disclosed, compare the story with any of the modern stories of communications with the dead, with the famous " Honolulu " story in Raymond^ for example. (The medium professing to be the vehicle of Raymond's communication uttered the word chosen as a test, there being a practical certainty of the entire absence of collusion.) What strikes us at once is how in the one case the questions directly concern what the inquirer is eager to know, and reveal an underlying assurance that the answers will themselves provide the evidence or verifi- cation. In the other case, the information sought is always trivial, intended only to afford evidence. Modern'psychical research is entirely absorbed in the evidential character of alleged communications, and has no use for, and does not look for, intrinsic value in their content. This difference 95 MEDIi^VAL CONTRIBUTIONS is not to be explained by saying that the Middle Ages were a period of faith while our modern age is a period of doubt. Faith and doubt are not characteristics of periods. It is a difference in the mental bias, and this bias is formed by the dominating philosophical concept. What, then, was the dominating concept which determined the mentality of the Middle Ages ? It found expression in the Christian idea of divine revelation, of a fore-ordained Redeemer, and of an authoritative Church supported by Scripture and tradition. All this, however, was its imaginative clothing, its embodiment. Let us strip off the particular religious beliefs and the particular application to historical personages and events, and we find a concept of history, distinct from the ancient concepts, Greek or Semitic, and distinct from and in marked contrast to our modern concept. It is the concept of the whole course of universal human history, not as directed by God, not as ruled or overruled by divine providence, but as the real work itself which God is in process of accomplishing. The history to which Paul appealed, and which he intel- lectualised, was the history recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures. But that is accidental, or at any rate adven- titious. Paul knows no other; for him, the Hebrew record is the authentic account of human history from the Crea- tion up to times present. The Jews are the central interest indeed, but in the same way in which in mediaeval cosmology Jerusalem is the centre of the earth, as in Greek cosmology Delphi had been. For Paul, the first man is Adam, through whom came death, and the second Adam is Jesus Christ, through whom has come eternal life. But it is no longer the concept of a creator God, who has made man and let him go his way, at times repenting that he has made him, and even despairing of him. We can take 96 TO MODERN CIVILISATION away from the concept its entire mythological embodiment, and then we see that it is a new concept of history itself. History is the real thing. Not only is purpose revealed in histor}', but history is the embodiment of purpose. It is this concept which makes the mediaeval mind present to us so striking a contrast to the old Greek mind and to the modern mind. In the Greeks we have the domination of mathematical concepts, in the moderns we have the domination of scientific concepts; separating these, and presenting the contrast of a direct negation, we have in the mediaeval mind the domination of spiritistic concepts. It affects every domain, not art, religion, and ethics merely, but scientific conceptions. Every physicist is familiar with the very modern hypo- thesis known as ' Clerk Maxwell's demon.' The famous professor once gave a striking illustration of the way in which a law of nature might conceivably be reversed in its direction; for example, how heat might be made to flow from a cool to a hot body in contradiction to the law of degradation of energy. He supposed that there might be a demon who, without adding to, or taking anything from, the sources of energy, that is, without creating or destroying physical energy, would simply open or shut a door in the path of an individual molecule. The notion of a demon producing real effects without performing actual work is strange and fantastic to us only because the imagery is unusual, a mixture of mediaeval and modern conceptions of the nature of causal agency. To the mediaeval mind the notion of a demon would have been commonplace. The whole universe was full of such forces, often conceived as playing fantastic and mischievous tricks. Not only the material world but the mental world, human life and history, was the stage and G 97 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS drama of spirit forces. We smile at what we call the naive and childish ignorance displayed in the notion. To us it is not only pre-scientific, but anti-scientific. This is to fail to understand the mentality. It is a view of nature which follows from the dominating concept that in history reality is revealing itself as an embodiment of universal purpose. When we endeavour to discover, following the same method, what is the dominating concept in our modern period, and inquire further what is the warp or bias it is giving to our mentality, we meet at the outset a formidable difficulty to which we must at least be respectful. We are ourselves subject to the warping influence of the dominating concepts of our own time, and the very principle we invoke warns us that we may ourselves each individually be prejudiced by our own particular predilections and be following our own warped judgment when professing and believing that we are interpreting the modern mind. With this caution kept continually before us, we may pro- ceed. There is, then, characteristic of the modern mind, by universal agreement, the experimental method. This is not what psychologists name the principle of trial and error, nor is it the utilitarian bent in human intellectual nature which enables it to profit by the practical devices which it may invent or discover. It finds expression in the notions of law in the natural world, and of the unity and uniformity of nature. As a method it depends on the concept that the behaviour of anything under specified conditions follows from and reveals the whole nature of the thing, and that consequently sufficient knowledge of the history of anything enables us to predict absolutely how the thing will behave under all conditions. We do not usually attribute this concept to any particular philosopher's 98 TO MODERN CIVILISATION insight or to any individual scientific worker's discovery. We see its origin in the gradual rise and development of positive science, and it appears to be not so much a dis- covery as an emancipation of the mind. We describe the experimental method as the direct interrogation of reality, and the employment of it seems natural to an enlightened age. It does not seem to us to rest on any concept of reality, and so far from appearing to warp our mentality it seems to indicate simple freedom from every kind of warp. Yet reflection will show that beneath this expres- sion of the modern mind there is a distinctive concept, and to me at least (I am obliged to speak diffidently, for there are many and discordant voices) it is a new concept of time and history. In speaking of a dominating concept finding expression in the modern mind, I am not able to point to any definite formulation of a concept of reality which may be said to be at once recognisable beneath the diverse forms of the modern problem. These concepts do not spring up before us and present themselves " in questionable shape." What I have in mind is a tendency rather than a form, a concept vague at first but which gradually assumes a definite shape as we watch its emergence through an historical development. The experimental method, indeed, is in its nature and origin directly associated by us with a materialistic, or at least with a definitely mechanistic, concept of reality. The first form which modern philosophy assumed when it took shape in the Cartesian system was that of a rigid mechanism. But it contained from the first a principle destined to alter completely that aspect. It is only when we look at the course of philosophical speculation from Descartes to times present as one continuous unfolding, or development, or living 99 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS evolution that we are able to discover the true nature of the concept which is dominating it. It is then seen that the whole tendency of modern thought is to pass from a static to a dynamic standpoint. Externally it is easily explicable by the order in which the natural sciences have had attention concentrated on them and have consequently perfected their methods. First in order to receive atten- tion are the mathematical and physical sciences dealing primarily and essentially with spatial relations and generally with space. It was inevitable that it should be so, first because the new science is closely associated with the renascence of the old learning, and secondly because it is the astronomical discovery, the Copernican revolution, which has overthrown the mediaeval cosmology. In the first formulation all reality is conceived in terms of exten- sion and movement, and movement is conceived as a fixed quantity and purely mechanical. This determined also the sciences of the organism and of the mind, physiology and psychology, which slowly differentiated themselves. Science remained dominated by the concept of reality as fundamentally spatial. Not till two hundred years after Descartes, not until quite close to our present era, did time begin to supplant space as the essential form of what is fundamentally real. It is only in Darwin and with the rise of the biological sciences that time and history begin to present the central metaphysical problem. But it is not a kaleidoscopic change; it is a continuous development, quite definite and distinctive in its tendency and direction. One and the same principle is at work from Galileo to Einstein, from Descartes to Bergson. A concept of activity, a concept of reality as creation, a concept of change as real, a concept of life as involving the fundamental reality of time and history, is the dominating concept of lOO TO MODERN CIVILISATION the modern mind. One could illustrate it abundantly, but I must be content to indicate it. In every one of the sciences we have seen a complete revolution in method and standpoint. It is premature, perhaps, to say that chemists and physicists have now at last abandoned the search for a primordial stuff, but it no longer counts or serves as a necessary hypothetical basis of the universe. It is energy, not stuff, which is interpretative in science. The atoms of modern physics and chemistry are only in name identical with the atoms of the old theory of Democritus, or even with the modern theory of Dalton. The essential doctrine of the philosophy of change is that stability, shape, repetition, in nature, the spatial articu- lation of reality, are derivative and not original. Space is relative to the intellect, and intellect is a mode of activity the particular function of which is spatialisation. The * real ' things which our intellect apprehends are not shapes cut out in a solid matrix, but * actions ' virtual or carried out, just as for physical science mass is not the continuous solid, but a function of the trajectories of moving particles. The concept which underlies this philosophy is that history is reality, that the past is present. It is what Bergson has named the true duration. I define, then, the dominating concept of modern thought as the identity of history and reality, the concept of history not as the record of the non-existent past, but as the past existing in a creative present. I now come to the question with which I opened. Am I able to answer it ? I have tried to show in what the essence of the mediaeval concept consisted. We may de- scribe it as an anthropocentric concept of history. History is not merely interpretative of human life. It is human life realising its purpose. Now in modern thought I lOI MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS have maintained that the dominating concept is history, but it is no longer anthropocentric, it is no longer the realisation of purpose. It is the concept of history as present creative activity. Let us put aside the meaning of history as record, as what has been but is not, and think of history as the essence of what lives, or rather of life. A living thing is its history, and its past is present in its life and continually creating. This is a new concept; there is nothing resembling it in the old Greek speculation. It is, as I tried to indicate in the beginning, the antithesis of it. Should we have ever reached it, then, had not modern philosophy had as its task not merely to recover the con- tinuity of ancient philosophy but also to solve the in- herent contradiction which the mediaeval concept presented to it ? To give precision and definiteness to this reflection I will give an historical reference which may illustrate my meaning better than argument. Benedetto Croce has raised to notoriety a neglected philosopher who lived in Naples at the beginning of the eighteenth century — Ciambattista Vico. He was professor of rhetoric in the university of his city, and famous in his day for his erudition, particularly for his knowledge of the old Italian learning. The Cartesian philosophy was then enjoying its full influence, and the intellectual society of Naples was filled with adherents and enthusiastic followers of the ' new science.' By the Cartesian philosophy must be understood not the new method, but the new mechanistic system of the vortex movements. Vico vigorously opposed it, but from an altogether different standpoint from that of Locke and Newton in England and Voltaire in France, and by very different arguments. He had no kind of sympathy for these writers if he was acquainted with their I02 TO MODERN CIVILISATION works. His book, now held in honour as one of the classics of Italian philosophy, was named The New Science. The title was ironical; it was directed at the Cartesian philosophy. Your new science, he said in effect, is very old stuff. It is nothing but the old mechanism revived. It is not new, it is only the old arguments and the old ideas of Democritus and Epicurus tricked out in a modern dress, and it is as dead as they are. There is a new science, but that science is not mechanism, it is history. By a science of history Vico revealed in his work the consciousness of a new principle and a new method. For material he had the historical records sacred and profane, and he made a strange mixture of them. He had also the science of language, that is, philology, and the various forms of aesthetic expression. From this material he formed his science of the activity of the human spirit and the develop- ment of its expression. The work, despite its flashes of insight, is full of strange notions and fantastic theories built on Greek and Hebrew legends accepted uncritically, but the idea was fruitful and pointed a new direction. Francesco de Sanctis, the Neapolitan patriot and historian of Italian literature, acknowledged his indebtedness to it, and Croce and Gentile in their philosophy to-day are continually referring to Vico and insisting, almost with reverence, that he is to be regarded as the first who pointed out the true subject-matter and method of modern philosophy. If we follow Croce in holding that the dominating concept in contemporary philosophy is a new meaning of history, a meaning which identifies it with philosophy as pure interpretation of present fact, then we shall see plainly that this concept does not come to us trom the Greek philosophy, for it stands in strong contrast to the mathematical mechanism which dominated the Greek 103 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS mind, and it is not, like the mediaeval concept, a philosophy of history. It is a new concept, which is in very truth a synthesis of the Greek and the mediaeval concepts, the concept that philosophy is history. What, then, is the concept of the modern period which dominates our mentality and which gives us the bias or warp, of which we may easily become conscious, to trust implicitly and unhesitatingly the experimental method ? It is not, like the mediaeval concept, the idea of purpose accomplishing itself in the unfolding of human history. Neither is it the idea of a force or agency, natural or super- natural, expressing itself in and through, and in despite of, a recalcitrant material. Were it only the notion of some matter which has a history, matter the nature of which is independent of and indifferent to its history, whence would the experimental method derive its cogency ? The experi- mental method is rational only if the thing we conceive is identical with its history. It sounds paradoxical only because we do not at once realise the implications of our ordinary reasoning methods. If there is a stuff unchanged and unaffected by, and indifferent to, what it is doing when we experiment to observe it, why should any amount of experimenting inform us what it is ? The modern concept is, then, the idea of an activity, real in the sense in which Hfe and consciousness are real, con- tinually creating new, unforeseeable forms, and limiting and circumscribing itself in the forms it is creating. This is what we now call the vitalistic concept. I do not claim that it is accepted unchallenged or that it is unchallengeable. I do claim that it has supplanted and is supplanting the old mechanism in ever}^ domain of modern life. It is especially remarkable in physical science where the whole tendency is toward dynamism. The essence of this concept is that 104 TO MODERN CIVILISATION the reality of the world is exhausted in its histor)' — history is not what the world has been, but what it is, there is no core which abides and which in some unexplained and inexplicable way gives rise in time to moving shadows, images of itself. In what sense, then, can we say that we owe this modern concept to the philosophy of the Middle Ages ? The concept itself supplies the answer. If present fact is history, then the present mentality of our Western civilisa- tion is its continuous life. The history of philosophy is not the record of the thoughts which individual men at various times have had about the universe; it is the unity of all thinking in the universal consciousness. Our modern concept is then seen to arise in the process, and as the product of the process, of the life of thought itself. To discover it and to understand it we have to penetrate the forms of the mentality of the great periods. It follows also that there is no finality. The modern concept is not emancipation from superstition and mythology. It is change and it is growth, but also it is changing and growing. It presents to us, indeed, a definite form, but it is creating new form. The more deeply we compre- hend the dominating concepts of the Greek and mediaeval periods, the more we understand our own mentality. H. WiLDON CaRR 105 IV SCIENCE IT is the common opinion that science, in the usual modern sense, was almost entirely absent in the Middle Ages, and there is much to be said for this verdict. Our scientific system is often regarded as essentially an out- growth of classical antiquity. Such a view contains but a partial truth, and is due to the circumstance that for four hundred years there has been a widespread educational attempt to represent our entire civilisation as the continua- tion of that of Greece and Rome. Not until the nineteenth century did anyone begin to doubt this estimate. The brothers Grimm were among the first in the field. They proved that folk-belief had been largely untouched by the great classical models on which we had sought to shape our political and philosophical systems. Next the archaeologists demonstrated a whole series of civilisations passing in majestic procession through the ages, a series of which Greece and Rome were but members, and not even the most ancient nor the longest lasting. Then the anthropologists and the psychologists brought their contribution, and showed how much men of all races and civilisations had in common, independent of the classical culture. And now, coming to the proper subject of our discussion, during the last generation or two there has arisen a school of mediaevalists who are applying a critical spirit to the very copious mediaeval records, and 1 06 CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN CIVILISATION are gradually reconstructing for us a picture of the life of the time, so that we are coming to understand better what our ancestors of the Middle Ages really believed and thought, and whence and how they derived their beliefs and thoughts. However we may define science, it is surely a fact that in mediaeval times men had their beliefs and thoughts on the nature of the external universe, and had their own attitude toward phenomena. This attitude we shall describe by the word science in the pages which follow. Its consideration is an integral part of the history of science, a study which is bound to consider the periods of disintegration and deterioration as well as those of reconstruction and advance. Yet in most histories of science the Middle Ages are substantially omitted and the narrative passes almost direct from Greek to modern times. For this state of affairs mediaeval scholars are partly responsible. In the synthesis of the life of the period, which it is their function to construct, the detailed examination of the mediaeval attitude toward phenomena has had longest to wait. It is, indeed, only in very recent times that a serious attempt has been made toward a comprehensive examination of mediaeval science. This has been largely a task of the twentieth century and is still very incomplete. In scrutinising the results of this work it will be well to make a preliminary examination of the terms we are using. An accurate examination of these terms will lead us some way into our survey of mediaeval science. What then do we mean by the terms science and Middle Ages ? The word science is of course derived from scientia^ knowledge, a common term of scholastic philosophy, but there are many kinds of knowledge that we should not now call science. Most kinds of knowledge, indeed, are 107 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS clearly not science. That kind, for instance, that we call * knowledge of the world ' is not science. May science be described as accurate and organised knowledge .'' I think not, or at least not adequately, though this definition is often used. There is much accurate and organised knowledge that is not science. The election agent, for instance, makes out lists of people who will vote this way or that, and his knowledge is most certainly organised and often wonderfully accurate, but he is not therefore a man of science. The milkman knows accurately how much the law will allow him to dilute his milk, and he has doubt- less an organisation to defend his action, if needed, but his knowledge is not scientific. What knowledge, then, is it that we call scientific } At once such people occur to our minds as the chemist, the biologist, and the mathe- matician. But why should these be called men of science and the title be denied to the equally industrious and more * knowing * election agent and milkman } I think the answer is that the professor's knowledge is progressive, that his science is knowledge-making rather than knowledge per se. The adjective formed from science, we may note, is not sciential or sciencic as it should be on the simple etymological rule, but scientific^ which means literally knowledge-makings and I seriously doubt if the title science should be applied to any knowledge as such, but should not rather be reserved for the process which makes knowledge. Science, in fact, is a process, a method; it is not a subject, as a few schoolmasters and many parents of school-children vainly imagine. Science, the method, may be applied to anything, a language, a school of art, chemicals, religion, a group of plants, a period of history, and it is an error to sup- pose that it has only to do with horrible smells, diseases, and methods of killing an enemy. Science, then, is the process of 1 08 TO MODERN CIVILISATION making knowledge. It must be admitted at once that in discussing ' mediaeval science * we shall encounter little of the knowledge-making process. It is rather with knowledge as such, or supposed knowledge of nature, that we shall have to deal. Let us now turn to the definition of our other term, the Middle Ages. The delimitation of periods is a constant difficulty of historians. It is a problem which all will admit cannot be finally solved, for the human mind does not confine itself within exact secular limits, and the periods of the historian are but a memoria technica on which to build a more detailed statement of movements and peoples. The Middle Ages would therefore be differently defined according as we should be dealing with politics, with literature, with art, or with science. Yet the historian of mediaeval * science ' is perhaps more fortunate than his colleagues in that the principles on which his period is separated from those which precede and those which follow it are relatively clear-cut and simple. We may first consider the terminus a quo of the mediaeval attitude toward the external world, applying our test of science as the progress of making knowledge. The Middle Ages begin for science at that period when the ancients ceased to make knowledge. Now, ancient science can be clearly traced as an active process up to the second half of the second century of the Christian era. Galen, one of the very greatest and most creative biologists of all time, died A.D. 20I. Ptolemy, one of the greatest of the cosmo- graphers, was his contemporary. After Galen and Ptolemy Greek science flags. Some scientific writings survive from the succeeding generations. Several of these, such as the works of Oribasius (a.d. 3-5-403), are very laborious. Others, such as that of Nemesius [c, 390), show considerable 109 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS philosophical grasp with some conception of the limits of contemporary knowledge. Both groups exhibit much power of organised arrangement, with some sense of the nature of experiment, yet with very little capacity or desire themselves to appeal to experience. As time goes on the ancient scientific inspiration dwindles. Mathematics holds out the longest, but with the mathematician Theon of Alexandria, at the end of the fourth century, we part altogether with the impulse of the science of antiquity. Stoicism and Neoplatonism too, the chief systems of thought of the late Empire, are dying and are giving place to that great philosophical and religious move- ment the repercussion of which is felt right through the Middle Ages and down to our own time. The standpoint of its great protagonists, Tertullian (155-222), Lactantius (260-340), and, above all, St Jerome (340-420) and St Augustine (354-430), is outside the department with which we have here to deal, but it was assuredly not con- ducive to the exact study and record of phenomena. The work of the physician Vindician (c. 400), the friend, countryman, and convert of St Augustine, represents an expiring flicker of Greek science. More degraded are the medical works of the provincial Christians, Sextus Placitus {c. 400) the Galatian, and Marcellus Empiricus (c. 420) the Gaul. The tradition of Greek scientific method was now utterly gone, and we may fix the commencement of the Middle Ages for science at the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century. The terminus ad quern of mediaeval science is, perhaps, less easy to determine. Mediasvalisation, in our view, was a slow process under the action of which the human mind, without consciously increasing the stock of phenomenal knowledge, sank slowly into an increasing ineptitude, but no TO MODERN CIVILISATION at a certain point reached the nadir and tended again upward. The point of lowest degradation of the human intellect was probably about the tenth century. After this may be discerned a slow ascent. Later, in the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries, we encounter considerable extension of natural knowledge. There is still, however, no widespread acceptance of the ancient view that know- ledge may be indefinitely extendible, an essential element in any effective doctrine of progress. In this scholastic period at last appear a very few such forward-looking minds as that of Bacon (12 14-1294), but these are as yet very rare and exceptional. When at last we get to the fifteenth century we encounter a larger number of forward-looking thinkers, but they are still isolated. Not until the sixteenth century is any effort made, at once organised and conscious, to translate into action this new-born hope in the future. If we have to name a year for the end-point of mediaeval science we would select 1543, when appeared two funda- mental modern works based on the experimental method, the De jahrica corporis humani of the Belgian Andreas Vesalius and the De revolutiontbus erbium coelestium of the Pole Nicholas Copernicus. It is true that for many generations after the time of Vesalius and Copernicus the characteristic doctrines of the science of the Middle Ages were almost universally taught in the schools and diffused by litera- ture, and are, for instance, displayed in the writings of Shakespeare. But the ideas on which the works of Vesalius and Copernicus had been based gain, from now on, an ever wider hearing. It is also true that for generations before 1543 there was a dawning consciousness of the inadequacy of the mediaeval cosmic system. But that year saw for the first time two published and authoritative works that formally rejected the old view and supplied a new one. 1 1 1 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS For science, then, 1543 is the natural terminus ad quern of the Middle Ages. Now, since the human mind turned on its upward course about the tenth century, and since the process was accel- erated during the great scholastic period of the thirteenth century and again at the Revival of Learning of the four- teenth and fifteenth centuries, it may be asked, why should we not choose one or other of these dates as the end-point of the scientific Middle Ages ? The thirteenth century, the great epoch of consolidation of Catholic philosophy, has been selected as one of exceptional enlightenment, and has been specially exalted by those who lay great emphasis on the continuing role of the Church in the development of the intellectual system of our modern world. There are, therefore, some who would place the division in the thirteenth rather than the sixteenth century. There are yet others, biased perhaps by the literary training of the classics, who would place the cleavage a little later, say in the second half of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth century. They would make the Revival of Learning, and especially of Greek letters, the basis of the differentiation between mediaeval and modern. For them the fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Turks in 1453 forms a convenient separation. Yet to make the great division in the tenth, in the thirteenth, or in the fifteenth century would be, to my mind, a philosophical and historical error, because, with very few exceptions, the point of view of the eleventh-century ency- clopaedist, of the thirteenth-century scholastic, and of the fifteenth-century scholar was formally and essentially an effort to return to the past. It was the literature and language of antiquity, the antiquity of the Fathers, of the philosophers, or of the poets, that these men sought more or less vainly 112 TO MODERN CIVILISATION to revive. Both the clerical and the classical education of our day still bear the trace of these backward-gazing stand- points. It would surely be unjust to deny that there are elements both in our clerical and in our classical education that do not partake of this character ; but much of the form in which such studies have been cast is due to a desire to imitate rather than to build. The great Catholic scholastics believed that they were mainly reconstructing the philosophy of Aristotle ; whether they were right or wrong is beside the point for our purpose. Imitation rather than origina- tion was the characteristic mental attitude also of the most enthusiastic scholars during the period that we call the Revival of Learning. Even the process by which they recovered the ancient texts, though it may rightly be regarded as containing scientific elements, had for its motive the imitation of the past by the present, rather than the modern archaeological aim of the mental reconstruction of the past with the object of understanding the present. What is true of the literary studies of the Renaissance is just as true of the scientific studies of the period. The recovery of the Greek texts, even if it enlarged the mental horizon, chained men's minds more closely than ever to the past. There is a point, however, at which the gaze of those interested in phenomena, of the physicists, and especially of the physicians, is at last turned away from the past and toward the future. What the philosophical basis of this change may be can hardly be discussed here. I would but briefly state my own belief that the essential bases are the hope in mankind, and its corollary the idea of progress, with which is bound up the idea of the indefinite extendi- bility of knowledge ; and I would further claim that this idea is not unconnected with the disturbance in the religious outlook of the period. We may at least say of the two great H 113 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS works that appeared in 1 543 that they present a new thing in the thought of the time, they are consciously creative, and their authors are aware of a break with the past and are looking to the future for the development and vindication of their views. The work of Copernicus, though it appeared in 1 543, had been prepared many years before. It is there- fore much the more conservative of the two. But when the proof-sheets were brought to the old man as he lay on his death-bed, he must, I think, have been sufficiently aware that times had changed since he first penned those pages. He must have felt that his outlook in his seventieth year had greatly changed from that of the class-rooms of Bologna and Padua where, as a young man, he discussed with a group of brilliant fellow-students the problems of heaven and earth. Very different is the history of the second of these two great early works of modern science. Vesalius when he produced his magnificently printed and illustrated Anatomy was a vigorous young man of twenty-eight. He was in full revolt against tradition, and he saw the situation clearly and saw it whole. He parts definitely with the Middle Ages, and has no use for ancient knowledge save when he can demonstrate it to be in accord with anatomical details as he sees them before him. He is every inch a modern. Thus for effective purposes we may place the limits of mediaeval science between the years 400 and 1543. This vast stretch of time is divided by an event of the highest importance for the history of the human intellect. Between the beginning of the tenth and the end of the twelfth century there was a remarkable outburst of intellectual activity in Western Islam. This movement reacted with great effect on Latin Europe, and especially on its scientific views, by means of works translated from Arabic which gradually reached Christendom. In the light of this great 114 TO MODERN CIVILISATION intellectual event we may divide our scientific Middle Ages into three parts, an earlier Dark Age, an intermediate Age of Arabic Infiltration and Translation, and a later Scholastic Age. During these three periods the general principles of science hardly change, but the difference in presentment of the material is such that the student of mediaeval science is seldom in doubt into which category to place any document that may come into his hands. The task of the first mediaeval period was the conveyance of the remains of the ancient wisdom to later ages. During the closing centuries of the classical decline the literature that was to be conveyed had been delimited and translated into the only language common to the learned West. We may briefly discuss this classical heritage. The work of Plato that is least attractive and most obscure to the modern mind fitted in well with the prevalent views of the Neoplatonists. The commentary on the Tim^eus prepared by Chalcidius in the third century from a translation of Apuleius in the second presents the basis of views held throughout the entire Middle Ages on the nature of the universe and of man. Thus the Tim^eus became one of the most influential of all the works of antiquity, and especially it carried the central dogma of mediaeval science, the doctrine of the macrocosm and microcosm. Of Aristotle there survived only the Categories and the De interpretatione^ translated in the sixth century by Boethius (480-524). A Greek introduction to the Categories had been prepared by Porphyry in the second centur)', and this also was rendered into Latin by Boethius. Thus the only Aristotelian writings known to the Dark Age of science were the logical works, and these determined the main extra-theological interest for many centuries. It is a world- misfortune that Boethius did not see his way to prepare MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS versions of those works of the Peripatetic school that displayed powers of observation. Had a translation of Aristotle's Historia animalium or De generatione animalium survived, or had a Latin version of the works of Theo- phrastus on plants reached the earlier Middle Ages, the whole mental history of the race might have been different. Boethius repaired the omission, to some small extent, by handing on certain mathematical treatises of his own compilation, the De institiitione arithmetical the De insti- tutione musica, and the (doubtful) Geometrica. These works preserved throughout the darkest centuries some fragment of mathematical knowledge. Thanks to them we can at least say that during the long degradation of the human intellect, mathematics, the science last to sink with the fall of the Greek intellect, was not dragged down quite so low as the other departments of knowledge. The main gift of Boethius to the world, his De consolatione philosophise, which preserved some classical taste and feeling, lies out- side our field. A somewhat similar service to that of Boethius was rendered by his approximate contemporaries, Martianus Capella (c. 500) and Macrobius (395-423). The former, in his Satyricon, a work of far less literary value than the masterpiece of Boethius, provided the Dark Age with a com- plete encyclopaedia. The work is divided into nine books. The first two contain an allegory, in heavy and clumsy style, of the marriage of the god Mercury to the nymph Philology. Of the last seven books of the work, each contains an account of one of the ' Liberal Arts,' grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music, a classification of studies that was retained throughout the Middle Ages. The section on astronomy has a passage containing a heliocentric view of the universe that had 116 TO MODERN CIVILISATION been familiar to certain earlier Greek astronomers. The passage gave rise to no comment in the Middle Ages, but it may have drawn the attention of Copernicus, who quotes Capella. In other respects the cosmology of Capella, like that of Chalcidius, is Neoplatonic, as is also that of Macro bius, whose commentary on the Somnium Scipionis of Cicero gave rise to some of the most prevalent cosmological conceptions of the first mediaeval period. In addition to the cosmography, mathematics, and astronomy that could be gleaned from such writings as these, the Dark Age inherited a group of scientific and medical works from the period of classical decline. The most important was the Natural History of Pliny, which deeply influenced the early encyclopaedists. Very curious and characteristic is a group of later pseudepigrapha bearing the names of Dioscorides, Hippocrates, and Apuleius, the history of which has not yet been fully investigated. They were probably all prepared between the fourth and sixth centuries. Manuscripts of the pseudo- Apuleian treatise On the Virtues of Herbs are often beautifully illustrated by miniatures, and examples from every century from the sixth to the sixteenth have come down to us, showing the most extraordinary constancy of tradition. The Dark Age inherited also certain medical works in translation from Greek. These were prepared between the fifth and eighth centuries, and included treatises of Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Galen, Oribasius, Alexander of Tralles, and Paul of i^gina. A very curious medical survival of this period is a work on embryology for the use of women, translated by the sixth-century Moschion from a work of the second-century Soranus. This material, then, was the basis of the medicEval scientific heritage. Traces of much of it are encountered 117 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS in De institutionibus divinarum et humanarum literarum of Cassiodorus (490-585), perhaps the earHest general writer whose works bear the authentic mediaeval stamp. The scientific heritage, however, is much more fully displayed in the Origines of Isidore of Seville, a late sixth-century work which formed a cyclopaedia of all the sciences in the form of an explanation of the terms proper to each. For many centuries Isidore was very widely read, and the series, Isidore (560-636), Bede (673-735), Alcuin (735-804), Raban (7 8 6-856), who borrow from one another successively, and all from Pliny, may be said to contain the science of the Dark Age. The work of these writers is summarised by the early eleventh-century English writer Byrhtferth {d.c. 1020), whose copious commentary on Bede's scientific work may be regarded as the final product of Dark Age science. The only Dark Age writer who deals with cosmological problems in an original way is Erigena {c. %qo-c. 877). But his remarkable genius hardly concerned itself with phenomena, and so we may pass him by, relegating him to the philosophers. With the somewhat belated Byrhtferth we part company with the Dark Age and enter upon a new period, with new forces and new movements at work. The tenth century and those that follow bring us into relation with the wisdom of the East. In these centuries the relation of East and West with which we are now- adays familiar is reversed. In our time most Oriental races recognise the value of Western culture, and give it the sincerest form of flattery. The Oriental recognises that with the Occident are science and learning, power and organisation and public spirit. But the admitted supe- riority of the West does not extend to the sphere of religion. The Oriental who gladly accepts the Occidental as his judge, his physician, or his teacher wholly repudiates, and 118 TO MODERN CIVILISATION perhaps despises, his rehgion. In the Europe of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries it was far otherwise. The Westerner knew well that Islam held the learning and science of antiquity. His proficiency in arms and adminis- tration had been sufficiently well proved — the Occidental belief in them is enshrined in our Semitic word ' admiral,' There was a longing, too, for the intellectual treasures of the East, but the same fear and repugnance to its religion that the East now feels for Western religion. And the W^estern experienced obstacles in obtaining the desired Oriental learning analogous to those now encountered by the Eastern in the Occident. The earliest definitely Oriental influence that we can discern in the department of science is of the nature of infiltration rather than direct translation, and the earliest agents of this process, for reasons which we shall presently discuss, appear to have been Jews who had been under Sara- cen rule. Such influence can first be traced in two works in the Hebrew language by Sabbatai ben Abraham (9 1 3-970), better known as Donnolo, a Jew of Otranto who practised medicine at Rossano in Southern Italy. One of his works is an ' antidotarium,' or book of remedies, and bears slight but definite evidence of Arabic influence. His other can be dated to the year 946, and is on astrology. It un- questionably draws on Arabic sources, and sets forth fully the doctrine of the macrocosm and microcosm. Donnolo learnt Arabic while a prisoner in Saracen hands; he was taught the language by a Bagdadi, and, like Constantine in the next century, he claimed to have studied " the sciences of the Greeks, Arabs, Babylonians, and Indians." He travelled in the Italian peninsula in search of learning and thus must have spread some of his Arabic science. The first Latin document betraying Oriental influence 119 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS of the type traced in Donnolo has only been discovered during the last few years. It is a treatise on astrology to which the name * Alcandrius ' (Alexander) is attached. This work has come down to us in but a single manuscript written about 950 or a little later, probably in Southern France. The repeated use of Hebrew equivalents for the names of constellations and planets, and the occasional use of Hebrew script, leave no doubt that it has passed through Jewish hands. The existence of these works of Donnolo and ' Alcan- drius ' enables us to understand the Saracenic influence detected in the mathematical writings of the learned Pope Silvester II (Gerbert, d. 1003), who spent some years in Northern Spain. Gerbert was, perhaps, among the earliest to introduce the Arabic system of numbering which slowly replaced the much clumsier Roman system, with its tiresome use of the abacus for simple mathematical processes. He is also believed to have instigated a translation from the Arabic of a work on the astrolabe. Hermann the Cripple (loi 3-1054) spent his life at the Benedictine abbey of Reichenau in Switzerland. He wrote certain mathematical and astrological works which were extensively used in the following century by Bernard Sylvestris. There is no evidence that Hermann could read Arabic, and, since he was unable to travel by reason of his infirmity, it is unlikely that he had any opportunity of learning that language. Yet his writings display much Arabic influence, which was almost certainly conveyed to him by wandering scholars of the type of Donnolo and * Alcandrius.' Similar evidence of the somewhat belated influence of what we have called the process of Arabic infiltration is exhibited in the lapidary of Marbod of Anjou, Bishop of Rennes (i 035-1 123), and in the work 120 TO MODERN CIVILISATION on the medicinal use of herbs by Odo of Meune, Abbot of Beauprai (Macer Floridus, d. 1161). The Arabic learning that was thus beginning to trickle through to the West in a much corrupted form was, however, by no means an entirely native Saracen product ; it was derived ultimately from Greek work. There was, indeed, yet one channel by which the original Greek wisdom might still reach Europe. Communication between the West and the Byzantine East was very little in evidence in the centuries with which we are now concerned, but a Greek tradition still lingered in certain Southern Italian centres, and especially in Sicily. That island had been a part of Magna Graecia, and its dialects bear traces, to this very day, of the Greek spoken there and in Calabria and Apulia until late mediaeval times. But the Saracens had begun their attacks on the island as early as the seventh century, and their rule did not cease until the Norman conquest of the eleventh century. The Semitic language of the Saracens left the same impres- sion on the island as did their art and architecture, so that between the tenth and twelfth centuries Sicily is a source of both Greek and Arabic learning for Western Europe. One seat of learning felt especially early the influence of the Grasco-Arabic culture of Sicily and Southern Italy. Salerno, on the Gulf of Naples, possessed something in the nature of a medical school at least as far back as the ninth century. It is clear from surviving manuscripts that, even apart from the Greek language, some traces of ancient Greek medicine lingered widely diffused in Magna Graecia during the centuries that succeeded the downfall of the Western Empire. Such Greek learning as remained was galvanised into life by Saracenic energy in Sicily and Southern Italy, and, with what we now know of the carr)-ing agents of Arabic culture, it is quite easy to understand the 121 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS popular tradition that attributes the founding of the great medical school of Salerno to the co-operation of a Greek, an Arab, a Latin, and a Jew. The very earliest Salernitan writings that have survived, such as that of Gariopontus (c, 1050), are, it is true, free of Arabic influence, but from the end of the eleventh century Salernitan material is full of Semitic words, some of which remain in medical nomen- clature to this day. A very important agent of this early Arabic revival was Constantine the African (d. 1087), a native of Carthage, who came to Italy about the middle of the eleventh century. He became a monk at Montecassino, and spent the rest of his life turning current Arabic medical and scientific works into Latin. In his desire for self-exaltation he often conceals his sources, or gives them inaccurately. His knowledge of both the languages which he was treating was far from thorough, and his translations are wretched. But these versions were very influential, and they remained current in the West long after they had been replaced by the better workmanship of such Toledo students as Gerard of Cremona in the twelfth century and Gerard of Sabbioneta in the thirteenth. The earliest Oriental influences that reached the West had thus been brought by foreign agents or carriers, such as Constantine or Donnolo. But the desire for know- ledge could not be satisfied thus. The movement that was soon to give rise to the universities was shaping itself, and the Western student was beginning to become more curious and more desirous of going to the well-springs of Eastern wisdom. Yet there was many a lion in the path. The main difficulty was one of language. Arabic was the language of Eastern science and letters, and its idiom was utterly difi^crcnt from the speech of the peoples of 122 TO MODERN CIVILISATION Europe. Moreover, its grammar had not yet been re- duced to rule in any Latin work, nor could teachers be easily procured. Even in the thirteenth century we find that Bacon, though he clearly perceived the importance of linguistic study and eagerly sought to unlock the litera- ture of foreign tongues, had still not found the key. He had only time to commence laboriously the grammatical apparatus of the Greek and Hebrew languages. He was still without an Arabic grammar. The only way to learn Arabic was to go to an Arabic-speaking country. Yet this was a dangerous and difficult adventure involving hardship, secrecy, and perhaps abjuration of faith. More- over, to learn the language at all adequately for rendering scientific treatises into Latin meant a stay of years, while the work of translation demanded also some understanding of the subject-matter to be translated. There is good evidence that an effective knowledge of this kind was very rarely attained by Westerns, and probably never until the later twelfth century. At the period during which Western science begins to draw from Moslem sources there were only two points of contact : these were respectively Spain and Sicily. The conditions in the two were somewhat similar. In the tenth century the Iberian peninsula was Moslem save for the small kingdoms of the Spanish march, Leon, Navarre, and Aragon. Here the grip of Islam had relaxed after a short hold, and this territory remained historically, re- ligiously, racially, and linguistically a part of the Latin West. The Moslem South was ruled from Cordova, which became increasingly Mohammedanised, but at the more northern Toledo the subject population, though speaking an Arabic patois^ remained largely Christian. It was at Toledo that most of the work of transmission took place. 123 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS It is probable that the process was frequently carried on by the intervention of Jewish students. The tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, a time of low degradation of the Latin intellect, was the best period of Jewish learning in Spain. Arabic was the natural linguistic medium of these learned Jews, the works of some of whom, as Ibn Gebirol, disguised in Latin works as Avicebron, and Maimonides, known to the scholastics as Rabbi Moses, were themselves rendered into Latin, and formed part of the Eastern heritage won by the translators during these centuries. We can fairly picture to ourselves the very details of the actual process, piecing our scene together from a variety of documents. An eccentric and restless European student, dissatisfied with the teaching of Paris, of Bologna, or of Oxford, and attracted by floating stories of the wonders of Arabic learning, arrives at Toledo or Cordova. He has crossed the frontier from the Spanish march, having evaded or bribed the sentries. Perhaps he carries letters from a patron in his native land to an official of the native church. These native dignitaries bear something of the same relation to the governing powers that the Christian rayahs in the late Turkish empire bore to the ruling powers. All are in a state of nervous subjection, leagued together by common instinct and common interest. Even after the Moslem retreat, generations must pass before such men can free themselves from the servile inheritance of ignorance. Our student makes his way to the church or monastery and establishes his credentials. His host can converse with him in Latin, but only with difficulty, for their pronunciations differ greatly. The student has now to be housed with a monastery or family, that he may learn the vernacular of the place. The language that was to develop as Castilian is hardly yet known, for the native Christians have adopted the speech 124 TO MODERN CIVILISATION of their conquerors. The vernacular of these Mozarabs is a non-Hterary patois of mixed Arabic and Latin origin. To acquire facility in this is essential before the task of trans- lation can be thought of. Later, in the twelfth century, when the tide had turned and Islam was in retreat, it was occasionally possible for a scholar with a gift for languages, such as Gerard of Cremona (i 1 14-1 187), to find a skilled native Christian teacher such as Ibn Ghalib. But in the tenth or eleventh century Christian learning and Christian society in Spain were subject and depressed. Like many modern peoples similarly placed, these native Christians were attached with the more fanaticism to the religion which held them together, and to the language of their Church. The student of an earlier time could find no effective Christian teacher of literary Arabic, while the very sciences which he sought to acquire were suspect as the mark of the infidel and the oppressor. The Jews of Spain of that age, however, though equally subject to the Moslem, had entered with greater spirit into the scientific heritage of Islam. While quite ignorant of Latin, with which they had not the same spiritual link as their Christian fellow-subjects, many of them spoke and wrote the language of science, the literary language of the Koran. Our student, now with some command of the vernacular, makes the acquaintance of a Jew of this type, and arranges a series of meetings with him and with a native clerk who has some knowledge of Latin. The work selected for translation might be in Arabic or Hebrew, for many of the most important Arabic works of science had been turned into the latter language. In either event it is improbable that the Christian members of the seance could read the Semitic script, or that the Jew could read the Latin. The Jew would then laboriously turn the 125 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS Hebrew or Arabic text, sentence by sentence, into the vernacular, and the student, aided by his native assis- tant, would then translate from the vernacular to Latin. Naturally, in this process many words would be met that could not be rendered either into the vernacular or into the barbarous Latin of the student who had now long been away from any centre of Latin learning. Especial diffi- culty would be encountered with the technical scientific terms. The meaning of some of these might well be imperfectly known to the Jewish translator himself. Such words would simply be carried over in a transliterated Arabic or Hebrew form into the translation, and the early versions are full of these Semitic expressions. The mediaeval astronomical and medical vocabularies abound in Semitic words, some of which, such as 'azure,' 'zero,' * zenith,' and * nucha,' have come down to the speech of our own time. The sort of translation which emerged from this process may be imagined. When it is also remembered that to reach the Arabic from the original Greek it had already passed through similar stages, probably with Syriac as an intermediary, it will be understood that the first scientific books that reached the West were a wretched travesty of the Greek originals from which they were ultimately derived. Men who may be supposed to have worked in such a way as we have pictured are Adelard of Bath (c. 1 1 oo), who visited both Spain and Sicily, and who published a compendium of Arabic science — and his pupil John O'Crea, who translated Euclid's Elements from the Arabic. To the same group belongs Michael Scot (i 175 .''-1234 ?), who produced versions or abridgements of the biological works of Aristotle. More scientific in their methods were Robert of Chester {c. 1 1 50), who rendered the Koran into Latin and translated works on alchemy and astronomy 126 TO MODERN CIVILISATION and the valuable algebra of Al Khowarizmi, and Alfred the Englishman {c. 1220), who rendered the Peripatetic work On Plants, and thus preserved for us a fragment of a work of the Aristotelian school that would otherwise be lost. But the greatest of all the translators was Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187), who spent many years at Toledo and obtained a thorough knowledge of Arabic from a native Christian teacher. He and his successor Gerard of Sabbioneta (c. 1230) translated into Latin a multitude of works, among them the Almagest of Ptolemy on which Regiomontanus began his work in the fifteenth century, and the Canon of Avicenna, the most widely read medical treatise that has ever been penned. Contemporary with Gerard of Cremona, and perhaps stimulated by him, were certain native translators, one of whom was Domenico Gonzalez, a Christian who rendered into Latin the Physica and the De coelo etmundi of Aristotle, and another Johannes Hispalensis or Avendeath, a converted Jew who translated, among many other works, the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise Secretum secretorum philosophorum which greatly influ- enced Roger Bacon, as well as the astronomical works of Messahalah which long formed the staple popular account of the system of the world. These all worked in Spain. The Sicilian group was less active. The last translator of Sicilian origin, the Jew Farragut (Farradj ben Selim, Moses Farachi, d. 1285), was a student at Salerno, and his works were among the latest of any influence that issued from that ancient seat of learning. These later translators are, however, mainly unimportant, and at the end of the twelfth century we may say that the period of translation was rapidly closing. We have now to turn to the actual material thus conveyed to Latin Christendom. It difl^ered rather in degree than in kind from that of the earlier Dark Age and from that of 127 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS the Age of Arabian Infiltration. The systems differed in the degree to which the logical conclusions from the premises provided were pushed, and in the degree to which each was influenced by certain theological conceptions. In the late classical age there had developed the Stoic system of thought, which divided with Neoplatonism all the more philosophical minds of the ancient world. This Stoic philosophy assumed that man's fate was determined by an interplay of forces the nature and character of which were, in theory at least, completely knowable. The micro- cosm, man, reflected the macrocosm, the great world that lay around him. But how and to what extent did he reflect it ? In seeking to determine these points Stoicism and Neoplatonism and the other philosophical systems of the classical twilight gleaned from many sources material which they passed on in a corrupted state to the Latin world. In a somewhat less imperfect form these materials lingered for centuries in the Byzantine world until, with the great outburst of Islam, they were caught up and elaborated by the Arabic culture. Thus elaborated, they were sent forth a second time to Latin Europe by the process of infiltration and translation. The astrological conceptions of the Stoics and of the later Christian ages drew both on Plato and on Aristotle. The hylozoism of the Tim^us, the doctrine that the uni- verse itself and the matter of which it is composed is living, gave a suggestive outline to the hypothesis of the paral- lelism of macrocosm and microcosm. But the main details of the hypothesis were drawn from Aristotle, whose views of the structure of the universe were the framework on which the whole of mediaeval science was built. Especially Aristotle's conception of the stars as living things, of a nature higher and nobler than that of any substance or 128 TO MODERN CIVILISATION being in the spheres below, was a clear point of departure from which the influence of the heavenly bodies over human destinies might be developed. The changes under- gone by physical bodies on the earth below were held to be controlled by parallel movements in the heavens above. Aristotelian theory carried the matter farther. It distin- guished the perfect, regular, circular motion of the fixed stars from imperfect, irregular, and linear motion, such as that of the planets. The stars moving regularly in a circle controlled the ordered course of nature, the events that pro- ceeded along regular, manifest, and unalterable rounds, such as those of winter and summer, night and day, growth and decay; the erratic planets governed the less ascer- tainable group of events that comprise the variable elements in the world around and within us, the happenings that make life the uncertain, hopeful, dangerous, happy thing it is. It was to the ascertainment of the factors governing this kaleidoscope of life that astrology set itself. The broad general happenings were certain, death in the end was sure, and, to the believing Christian, life after it. But there was a great uncertain zone between the sure and the unsure that might be predicted and perhaps avoided, or, if not avoided, its worst consequences abated. It was to this process of insurance that the astrologer set himself, and his task remained the same throughout the Middle Ages. In this hope savoir ajin de prevoir the mediaeval was at one with the modern scientist. The matter is sum- marised for us by Chaucer : Paraventure in thilke large book, Which that men clipe the hevene, y-writen was With sterres, whan that he his birthe took, That he for love sholde han his deeth, alias ! For in the sterres, clerer than is glas, \ I2Q MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS Is written, God woot, whoso koude it rede. The deeth of every man, withouten drede. . . . But mennes wittes ben so dulle That no wight kan wel rede it atte fulle. The Man of Lawes Tale There was, however, another relationship which we cannot fully treat here. In all ages there are two prevalent types of mind. The religious type sees that the world cannot be wholly explained and falls back on supernatural hypotheses. The scientific type prefers to assume that the laws he is able to trace in regions he knows and under- stands are but a sample of those which govern the universe in all its unknown parts also, and that if we knew enough we should be able to trace law everywhere. The type of the scientific intellect is Lucretius, who accepts, as a matter of course, the control of man's fate by a law which includes even the heavenly bodies. *' We must," he says, ** give good account of the things on high, in what way the courses of sun and moon come to be, and by what force all things are governed on earth." He will not allow immortality to the stars, much less to man. All are subject to the same immutable law of generation and corruption. Very different is the attitude of St Ambrose, who takes no interest in aught but final causes, for whom the very investigation of phenomena seems frivolous and aimless. *' To discuss the nature and position of the earth," he says, " does not help us in our hope of life to come. It is enough to know what Scripture says, that * he hung up the earth upon nothing * (Job xxvi, 7). Why, then„ argue whether He hung it up in air or upon water, and raise a controversy as to how the thin air could sustain the earth, or why, if upon waters, the earth goes not crashing to the 130 TO MODERN CIVILISATION bottom ? . . . Not because the earth is in the middle, as if suspended on an even balance, but because the majesty of God constrains it by the law of His will, does it endure stable upon the unstable and the void." (Hexaemeron, i, 6.) Between two such extremes the mind of man has always hovered, and thus hovered the mediaeval mind. The average man recognises the reign of law in the smaller events of life, but places all his spiritual and mental life in the hands of God. The average scientifically trained man recognises the reign of law in higher matters also, but believes in his own free will, and in another will outside his own that ultimately governs the higher and greater events of his life. Beyond these two stand the religious mystic on the one hand and the materialist on the other; the one for whom all the world is but the projection of the will of a spirit, the other for whom all those elements in our lives which most men assign to spirit are but the workings and interaction of the properties of matter. In the earlier Middle Ages, as in the earliest Christian centuries, the world was but God's footstool, and all its phenomena were as little worthy of study as Ambrose held them to be. This sums up the general attitude of the fourth and fifth centuries set forth by Augustine, who speaks of " those impostors whom they style mathema- ticians (i.e.^ astrologers) . . . who use no sacrifice, nor pray to any spirit for their divinations, which arts Christian and true piety consistently rejects and condemns." ^ By the sixth and seventh centuries, however, the Church has come to terms with astrology, and Isidore regards it, in part at least, as a legitimate science. He distinguishes, however, between natural and superstitious astrology. The latter is " that science which is practised by the mathematici who ^ Confessions ^ iv, 4. MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS read prophecies in the heavens, and who place the twelve constellations as rulers over the members of man's body and soul, and who predict the nativities and dispositions of men by the courses of the stars." ^ Nevertheless Isidore accepts many of the conclusions of astrology. He advises the physicians to study it, ascribes to the moon an influence over plant and animal life and control over the humours of man, while he accepts without question the influence of the dog-star and of comets. He is followed by the other Dark Age scientists, who each accept a little more astrological doctrine, until finally in such a writer as Byrhtferth we get the complete scheme. (See Fig. i.) With the advent of the Arabian learning astrology became the central interest, and remained so until the triumph of the experimental method in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies. We cannot here follow the details of the developed astrological scheme. It is enough for our purpose to have observed that the general material law which it implies had become widely accepted in the Middle Ages, and to have traced its passage from antiquity and from the Orient into the thought of the period of which we are treating. There was another fundamental theory of mediaeval science which, equally with astrology, was inherited from antiquity, and equally with it was reinforced and amplified by the Arabian revival. The doctrine of the four elements was conveyed to the Middle Ages by the Aristotelian writings. All matter was held to be made up of four essential elements — earth, air, fire, and water. Each of the elements was in its turn compounded of the four * primary qualities,' heat and cold, moistness and dryness, in binary com- bination. Thus earth was cold and dry, water cold and moist, air hot and moist, and fire hot and dry. Moreover, 1 Origines, iii, 27. 132 TO MODERN CIVILISATION Fig. I. Scheme showing Relation of Macrocosm and Microcosm, AFTER ByRHTFERTH (f. lOOO) ns MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS each element in the macrocosm corresponded to one of four imaginary 'humours' in the microcosm; thus ele- mental earth corresponded to ' black bile,' elemental water to ' phlegm,' elemental air to ' red bile,' and elemental fire to * blood.' (See Fig. 2.) Now, it must not be imagined Kui WtU < — Ai tarth — » BWk bile Fig. 2. Scheme of the Four Qualities, the Four Elements, and THE Four Humours that these elements were the substances that we know by the names of earth, water, air, and fire in this world below. The elements are found here only in combination, that is, in their state of mistio, to use the technical mediaeval expression. Thus the substance water, though it contains a preponderance of the element water, contains also less amounts of the other three elements ; so the substance air is not pure elemental air, but contains only a preponderance of that element intermixed with the others. It was usually admitted, however, that the elements were to be found 134 TO MODERN CIVILISATION in a pure form in certain regions of the world, though where and how distributed these pure elements might be, was a matter of varying opinion. The usual view was something like this. Earth, the heaviest, drossiest, and least aspiring of the elements, Fig. 3. Scheme of the Spheres naturally tended to the centre of the world. It was least likely of all :he elements to be found pure because of its dressiness. On its surface floated material water, and above that was the air, also in the material state in which we breathe it. High up in the air, far beyond the reach of men, were the eternal zones of the stars, both fixed and wandering, but just below these spheres, wherein the celestial MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS bodies dwelt, were three concentric zones of the upper and pure elements. These, proceeding outward and in ascending degrees of tenuity, were water, air (sometimes confused with ether), and fire. The watery zone exhibited evidence of its presence by clouds, the waters that God had placed above the firmament. The fiery outermost zone was somehow related to the eternal fire of the heavenly bodies which lay in a series of concentric spheres around it. In these outer concentric spheres moved the planets, each in its own sphere, and beyond them all was the sphere of the fixed stars, surrounded by the outermost zone of all, the sphere of the primum mobile. (See Fig. 3.) Tiiere was a certain amount of variation in the details of the scheme, but a full and characteristic development of it is provided for us by such a writer as Dante. (See Fig. 4.) Especial attention was always paid to the relation of the zodiacal signs to the planets. Each zodiacal sign was held to govern or to have special influence on some region of the body, and each of the planets was held to influence a special organ. The actual relations of zodiacal signs, planets, and bodily parts and organs is set forth in suca late Latin writers as Firmicus Maternus {c. 330) and Avienus {c. 380), and in innumerable Greek texts. This belief, conveyed to the Dark Age, but gradually lost during its course, was brought back again to the West by the Arabs. Nothing is commoner in mediaeval manuscripts of tae scholastic period than a human figure on the various bodily parts of which are placed the signs of the zodiac held to control that part. Common, too, and penetrating even to Books of Hours, are schemes showing the relation of the organs to the seven planets. The whole system thus became intimately interwoven with the conception of the relation of macrocosm and microcosm. 136 TO MODERN CIVILISATION Fig. 4. Dante's Conception of the Universe 137 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS Doctrine of this type received into Europe was stamped with the special form of Western thought. Now, it was characteristic of the mediaeval Western thinker that he sought always a complete scheme of things. He was not content to separate, as we do, one department of know- ledge or one class of phenomena, and consider it in and by itself. Still less would he have held it a virtue to become a specialist, to limit his outlook to one department with the object of increasing the sum of knowledge in it. His universe, it must be remembered, so far as it was material, was limited. The outer limit was the primum mobile, and of all within that he had been provided with a definite scheme. His task, and at first his only task, was to elaborate that scheme in connexion with the moral world. To do this was in the first post-Arabian period the work especially of the mystics. Such writers as Hugh of St Victor (1095-1141), who drew on the earlier and more vague Arabian rumours, Bernard Sylvestris {c. 1 1 50), who relied on Hermann the Cripple, and Hildegard (1098-1180), who was influenced by Sylvestris and by other Arabicised writings, all produced most elaborate mystical schemes based on the doctrine of the macrocosm and microcosm. These schemes took into account the form of the world and of man as derived from Arabian accounts, and read into each relationship a spiritual mean- ing. For such an attitude of mind there could be no ultimate distinction between physical events, moral truths, and spiritual experiences. In their fusion of the internal and external universe these mystics have much in common with the mystics of all ages. The culmination of the process, so far as our period is concerned, is reached with Dante (1265-1321). But with the thirteenth century new currents of thought 138 TO MODERN CIVILISATION set in. The Arabian science was at last won, the scientific works of Aristotle were becoming accessible and gradually entering the curriculum, the universities were firmly established, and there were the beginnings of a knowledge of Greek. We are now in the high scholastic period. The appointed task of the great teachers of that period, Alexander of Hales {d. 1245), Robert Grosseteste {d. 1253), Albertus Magnus (i 193-1280), and St Thomas Aquinas (i 225-1 274), was to marshal the new knowledge and to make it more readily accessible. It is remarkable that this process, involving a rapid change and development in the whole mental life of the world, involving, that is to say, progress in fact, did not develop a more passionate and more conscious faith in progress in knowledge. Yet there is little or no evidence of direct observation of nature in the great physical encyclopaedias of the thirteenth century, such as that of Alexander of Neckam (11 57-1 2 17), Vincent de Beauvais (i 190-1264), and Bartholomew de Glanvil (c. 1260). The mediaeval mind was obsessed with the idea of the mortal world as finite, and therefore completely knowable both in space and in time, so that the motive for detailed research, in our modern sense of the word, was not present. The task of the writers of these encyclopaedias was rather to give a general outline of knowledge in their scheme, to set forth such a survey of the universe as would be in accord with spiritual truth. The frame-work on which this encyclopaedic scheme was built was Aristotle, largely as conveyed by the Arab commentator Averroes. Yet it is an amusing reflection on the incomplete- ness of all philosophical systems that Albert, who perhaps more than any man was responsible for the scholastic world- system, was among the very few mediaeval writers who were real observers of nature. It is, after all, in the very essence 139 MEDL^VAL CONTRIBUTIONS of the human animal to love the world around it and to watch its creatures. Naturam expellas jurca tamen usque recurret. Albert, scholastic of the scholastics, drowned in erudition and the most learned man of his time, has left us evidence in his De vegetabilibus that the scientific spirit was beginning to awake. As an independent botanical observer he is by no means contemptible, and this element in him marks the new dawn which we trace better in his successors. Thus the best of the systematisers among the schoolmen were leading on to the direct observation of nature. Con- temporary with Albert and Aquinas were several remarkable scholastic writers who form the earliest group with whom the conscious advancement of knowledge was a permanent interest. These men were the first consciously forward- looking scientific thinkers since the fourth century. The earliest of them was the Pole Witelo {c. 1250), an acute mathematical investigator, whose work was based on a trans- lation of the Arab Alhazen. Witelo knew something of optics, and was aware of the action of segments of a crystal sphere as lenses. Contemporary with Witelo was a very remarkable Franciscan group. There is no stranger and more im- pressive chapter in the whole history of thought than that of the early history of the Franciscans. Within the memory of men who had known the saintly founder of the Order (11 81-1226), the 'Penitents of Assisi,' the 'friars minor,' sworn as 'jongleurs of God' to bring Christ cheerfully to the humblest and the meanest, sworn to possess nothing, to earn their bread from day to day by the work of their own hands, or at need by begging, for- bidden to lay by store or to accumulate capital, this Order of humble servants of Christ had produced a series of 140 TO MODERN CIVILISATION monumental and scholarly intellects, who between them not only initiated what bid fair to be a renaissance of science and letters, but also aided in the formation of the bulwark which long resisted the very movement that thus emanated from the Order itself. To both parties the English Fran- ciscan houses contributed an overwhelming share. To the former, or scientific party, as we may call them, belonged Robert Grosseteste Bishop of Lincoln, John Pecham Archbishop of Canterbury, the elusive Adam Marsh, and, above all, Roger Bacon; to the latter or theological party are attached the names of Alexander of Hales {d. 1245), Duns Scotus (1265 ?-i3o8 ?), and William of Ockham {d. 1349). The primary inspirer of the scientific movement was undoubtedly the great Bishop of Lincoln himself, and its aims are set forth for us by his pupil Roger. " Nobody," says Bacon, " can attain to proficiency in the science of mathematics by the method hitherto known unless he devotes to its study thirty or forty years, as is evident from the case of those who have flourished in those departments of knowledge, such as the Lord Robert of holy memory and Friar Adam Marsh . . . and that is the reason why so few study that science." Again : " There were found some famous men, as Robert Bishop of Lincoln, and Adam Marsh, and some others, who knew how by the power of mathematics to unfold the causes of all things and to give a sufficient explanation of human and divine phenomena; and the assurance of this fact is to be found in the writings of those great men, as, for instance, in their works on the impression [of the elements], on the rainbow and the comets, on the sphere, and on other questions appertaining both to theology and to natural philosophy." The work of this remarkable group of Franciscans at Oxford extended 141 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS beyond the sciences to language and literature. There was the beginning of a real renaissance of Greek letters which died an early death. But the scientific revival lingered on until recalled to life by a second revival of a later century. It may be convenient to have on record a summary of the scientific achievements of Bacon, the greatest of the Franciscan group and the first man of science in the modern sense. 1. He attempted to set forth a system of natural know- ledge far in advance of his time. The basis of that system was observation and experiment. He was clearly the first man in modern Europe of whom this can be said. 2. He was the first man in modern Europe to see the need for the accurate study of foreign and ancient languages. He attempted grammars of Greek and Hebrew along definite scientific lines. He also projected a grammar of Arabic. Moreover, he laid down those lines of textual criticism which have only been developed within the last century. 3. He not only expatiated on the experimental method, but was himself an experimenter. The criteria of priority were not then what they are now, but his writings are im- portant in the development of the following sciences : (a) Optics. His work on this subject was a text- book for the next two centuries. He saw the im- portance of lenses and concave mirrors, and showed a grasp of mathematical optics. He described a system which is equivalent to a two-lens apparatus, and there is trustworthy evidence that he actually used a compound system of lenses equivalent to a telescope. (b) Astronomy was Bacon's perpetual interest. He spent the best part of twenty years in the con- struction of astronomical tables. His letter to the Pope in favour of the correction of the calendar, J 42 TO MODERN CIVILISATION though unsuccessful in his own days, was borrowed and reborrowed, and finally, at third-hand, produced the Gregorian correction. (c) Geography. He was the first geographer of the Middle Ages. He gave a systematic description of Europe, Asia, and part of Africa. He collected first-hand evidence from travellers in all these con- tinents. His arguments as to the size and spheri- city of the earth were among those that influenced Columbus. (d) Mechanical Science, Suggestions by him in- clude the automatic propulsion of vehicles and vessels. He records the working out of a plan for a flying- machine. (e) Chemistry. The chemical knowledge of his time was systematised in his tracts. His description of the composition and manufacture of gunpowder is the earliest that has reached us. It is clear that he had worked out for himself some of the chemistry of the subject. (f) Mathematics. His insistence on the supreme value of mathematics as a foundation for education recalls the attitude of Plato. It was an insistence that the method of thought was at least as important as its content. Summed up, his legacy to thought may be regarded as accuracy of method, criticism of authority, and reliance on experiment — the pillars of modern science. The interest taken in Roger Bacon's works was con- tinuous. " Friar Thomas Bungay, whom ancient tradition associates with Bacon, was the tenth lector to the friars at Oxford. John Pccham, the eleventh lector, studied mathe- matics and optics under Bacon, and was first attracted and 143 '/ MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS finally repelled by his astrological theories. William Herbert, who afterward became lector at Oxford, was at Paris about the time of Bacon's death, and diligently collected manuscripts of his works for the friary at Hereford. Before the end of the thirteenth century attempts were made to ' edit * Bacon by collecting together passages from his writings bearing on the same or kindred subjects. Pierre Dubois recommended the study of his mathematical work at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The large number of manuscripts of his Perspectiva, or Optics, still existing, some of them * school copies,' and references to it in disputations at Oxford, show that the work was studied and regarded as authoritative in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But his influence extended beyond the Middle Ages; through Pierre d'Ailly and the Imago mundi Bacon reaches out his hand to Columbus; through Paul of Middelburg (1445-1534) and the reform of the calendar to Copernicus." {A. G. Little^ Bacon was not an isolated phenomenon, but an important link in the chain of scientific development. But during the century after Bacon, though his mathe- matical and philosophical works were still studied in the schools, the greatest advances were rather among the physicians, of whom the last half of the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth century exhibit an especially brilliant group. Bologna had possessed a medical school since the twelfth century, and had inherited the learning of Salerno. At Bologna had worked Hugh of Lucca (^.1252?) and his son or pupil Theodoric (1206-1298). Here, after Salerno, surgery may be said to have been born again with the practice of Roland of Parma {c, 1250), the successor and faithful follower of Roger of Salerno. Here, above all, William of Saliceto (l 201-1280) established a 144 TO MODERN CIVILISATION practical method of anatomisatlon which was inherited by Mondino da Luzzi (1276- 1328), whose work became the general anatomical text-book of the later Middle Ages. The medical school of Montpellier was now coming to the fore, and here practised one of the most remarkable personalities of mediaeval medicine. Arnald of Villanova (1235— 13 1 3) was not only one of the earliest exponents of the Hippocratic method of observing and carefully recording symptoms of actual cases of disease, but he also deeply influenced alchemy. Even more remarkable and more modern in his outlook was the heretical Peter of Abano (i 250-1 320). He had a knowledge of Greek, but the chief philosophical influence under which he came was that of the Spanish Arab Averroes, whose doctrine of the infinite extension of the universe gave a better background to a progressive outlook than the more prevalent mediaeval view. Peter's greatest and best-known work, the Conciliator^ expresses his mediation between the now commencing humanistic Greek school and the Arabists. Among his views most worth record may be mentioned his statements that the air has weight, that the brain is the source of the nerves and the heart of the vessels — all ideas that in his time were new. He made a remarkably accurate measure of the length of the year as 365 days, 6 hours, 4 minutes. The second half of the fourteenth century, in part owing to the prevalence of epidemics and notably of the Black Death, shows a distinct falling off in the advance. In medicine the most noteworthy name is that of Guy de Chauliac of Montpellier (i 300-1 370), perhaps the most influential of all the mediaeval surgeons. Outside the ranks of the physicians perhaps the most remarkable figure in fourteenth-century science is the French Jewish philosopher Levi ben Gerson (12 8 8-1 344). His work as astronomer K 145 CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN CIVILISATION was important as illustrating the consciousness of a growing discontent with the Ptolemaic system of the universe. With the fifteenth century discontent with the entire medi- aeval scientific scheme becomes more obvious, and there is a real attempt to adjust theory by means of experiment. The turning-point is provided by the work of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), who became a cardinal and made a fruitless attempt to reform the calendar. The philo- sophical basis of his experimental bias is set forth in his book De docta ignorantia^ which has nothing to do with the absurdity of erudition, as its name might be thought to imply, but concerns itself with acknowledged ignorance, i.e.^ with the inability of the human mind to conceive the absolute or infinite. His theoretical views led him to a belief that the earth is moving, though he attained to no genuine heliocentric theory. He is a real experimenter, and he records a careful experiment on a growing plant — afterward pirated by the seventeenth-century writer van Helmont — proving that it does absorb something of weight from the air. This is the first biological experi- ment of modern times, and incidentally the first formal proof that the air has weight. Beginning with Nicholas of Cusa, we may watch the Middle Ages branch out into the Renaissance period. In philosophy Nicholas reaches out through Pomponazzi and Ramus to Francis Bacon and Descartes; in his conceptions of the nature of matter, through Paracelsus to the dawn of modern chemistry; in astronomy, through Purbach, Regio- montanus, and Paul of Middelburg to Copernicus. By the work of such men as these the whole fabric of the mediaeval teaching of the macrocosm was gradually torn to shreds. The history of the process from this stage onward is 146 CHRONOLOGY OF MEDI^.VAL SCIENCE THE CLASSICAL TWILIGHT Latins Apuleius Porphyry Cbalcidius 300 400 ( -Dioscorides Pseudo -I -Hippocrates i -Apuleius Firmicus Avienus Vindician Ptolemy Soranus Galen Greeks Oribasius Nemesius Martianus Capella Macrobius Sextus Placitus Marcellus Empiricus 500 Moschion Boethius Cassiodorus 6°° Isidore 700 Bede Alcuin 800 Raban Erigena 900 Byrhtferth Gariopontus and other early Salemitans Translators Constantine Adelard " O'Crea Avendeatn^^Goozalez Robert of Chester Gerard of Cremona . Michael Scot 1300 1400 Gerard of Sabbioneta Alfred the Englishman Farragut THE DARK AGE Alexander of Tralles Paul of /Egina Fathers Tertullian Lactantius [Baptism of Constantine] Ambrose Jerome Augustine 500 Gregory the Great 800 AGE OF ARABIAN INFILTRATION First Arabian Itnpact Donnolo ' Alcandrius ' Gerbert Hermann the Cripple Later Salemitans Marbod Odo of Meune SCHOLASTIC AGE Experimenters W'itelo Adam Marsh Roger Bacon Pecham William of Saliceto Theodoric Amald Mondino Peter of Abano Levi ben Gerson Guy de Chauliac Transmutors Hugh of St Victor Bernard Sylvestris Hildegard Alexander of Neckam Alexander of Hales Albert Aquinas GrossetesteVincentBeauvais Bartholomew de Glanvil X300 Nicholas of Cusa Purbach Regiomontanus Pomponazzi Leonardo Paracelsus Copernicus Vesalius 1500 CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN CIVILISATION not very complex. Anatomy had been systematically studied in the universities since the thirteenth century. By the end of the fifteenth it was common for artists and physicians to have had some experience of dissection, and the genius of Leonardo was only working on a subject of general study. With the dawn of the sixteenth century anatomy was a recognised subject of investigation as well as of teaching, and the achievement of Vesalius, vast though it was, differed from that of his predecessors in exactness, completeness, and independence, but not in its fundamental character. By 1543 it was as difficult for an anatomist to trace in the lineaments of the viscera the impress of the heavenly bodies as it was for the astronomer to believe that the heavens were foreshadowed in the anatomy of the body of man. In theology too the vociferous insistence of both religious parties on the divine origin of their doctrines implied an independence of the spiritual from the material universe that woald have been incomprehensible to the mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The material world had ceased to have its old spiritual significance, and was become the acknowledged dwelling-place of laws, discoverable but not discovered. As the proof-sheets of the De revolutionihus orbium ccelestium fell fluttering to the ground from the dying hand of Copernicus, something more than his great spirit had gone from the world ; the whole system of mediaeval science was no more. Charles Singer 148 ART I IT has been said — and such epigrams serve to hang a half-truth in the memory — that all the great representa- tive art of the world flows from two sources, Greece and China. The art of China never penetrated into Europe ; and therefore, though it was a mediaeval art, and the painters of the T'ang and Sung dynasties were during some centuries the greatest in the world, I will make a present of it to the Adversary and confine myself to Europe — nay, to Christendom ; since the argument for mediaeval art is so great that we can afford to neglect those Persian, Saracenic, and Mughal developments, derivative from Byzantinism or interwoven with it, and to make of them also a present to the Adversary — leaving them as reserves behind the lines of our argument which it will not be necessary to draw upon. We have a period of a thousand years, from the fifth century to the fifteenth, from Theodoric with his basilicas and mosaics, from Justinian, when architectural creation culminated in the glory of St Sofia, from the purely Byzan- tine city of Rome between the sixth and ninth centuries, through the giant vitality of the Romanesque period and the mastery of Gothic, to the dispersion of the Greeks and of their ' new ' old learning in 1453, and the discovery of America in 1492. 149 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS The end of this period was very brilliant. Consider painting, for instance. Before the fall of Constantinople, Duccio, Giotto, Orcagna, Taddeo Gaddi, Masaccio, the Van Eycks were already figures of the past; Van der Weyden was some fifty-three years old, Fra Angelico within two years of his death. Or if you take the later date, 1492, as the close of the Middle Ages, Paolo Uccello and Dierick Bouts were dead, the two Bellinis were over sixty, Crivelli was probably dead, Memlinc and Ghirlandajo had but two years to live, and Benozzo Gozzoli six. Nay, by 1492 Botticelli was already forty-six and Leonardo forty; even Diirer, Michelangelo, and Titian had begun to draw. We owe the art of modern painting to the later centuries of the Middle Ages. That, in the realm of art, is one 'mediaeval contribution to modern civilisation.' It is so stupendous that I feel tempted to say " My lecture is now over " ; or, at least, following an old custom, to sit down for a moment and take a pinch of snuff. II I understand that the historians of the twentieth century have no use for the Renaissance. We have discovered the principle of continuity. Even in natural science there was no renaissance : there was just a beginning, and that beginning came, I understand, in the England of the thirteenth century. In art also we have, I think, no real use for the word, except to describe a style of architecture — at first Italian — which became really articulate with Alberti in 1460 and Bramante in 1490. There was, it is true, a growing antiquarian ' enthusiasm in the fifteenth century which 150 TO MODERN CIVILISATION more or less affected all the arts,^ and revolutionised orna- ment, so that to the revival of Roman decorative motives we may also justly apply the word ' Renaissance,' as a convenient though inaccurate term, like ' Gothic ' ; but there was no renaissance or rebirth of art in the fifteenth century. There was only a continued growth ; and that growth, when it was fully infected by the classical anti- quarianism, was quickly smitten with decay, so that in the first half of the sixteenth century its decline was in full progress, and the end came while Michelangelo was still towering to his grave. There remained, of course, the technical mastery which had been acquired between the eleventh century and the sixteenth. That skill has never left us ; and at all periods since the thirteenth century it has therefore been possible for great accomplished artists to arise. Victorian writers like John Addington Symonds, while freely acknowledging the speedy and pitiful collapse, under the blight of pedantry and pseudo-paganism, of what they called the Renaissance, exaggerated the im- portance of this imaginary rebirth by including every Italian painter of distinction, as far back as the thirteenth- century Cimabue. In architecture they were more modest, and dated the Renaissance from Brunellesco's great dome at Florence (1420), which is partly Byzantine, partly Gothic, and wholly Brunellesco. They used also to claim all the later mediaeval Italian sculptors, not only Niccola but Giovanni and Andrea Pisano, Giotto, Orcagna, Ghiberti, Donatello, Luca della Robbia, Mino da Fiesole. Yet ^ Painting was never directly affected, because there were no antique paintings then to be copied — only statues, buildings, and books {cf. B. Bcren- son. The Fenetian Painters of the Renaissance, 3rd edit., p. 7). Luckily for us, Pompei was then well hidden under its scoria. MEDI/EVAL CONTRIBUTIONS they acknowledged that even enthusiasts for the antique, like Ghiberti and Donatello, never copied it, but remained wholly original and realistic. •'■ The truth is, of course, that art in the Middle Ages had moved on natural lines, and therefore had continued to be traditional, and had never broken with antiquity — as the very word * Romanesque ' (of which Gothic was a development) should remind us. The earliest Christian art was Graeco-Roman ; this was followed by the develop- ment of Hellenistic art which we call Byzantine, which in turn modified Basilican art into Byzantinesque and Romanesque. In the eleventh century, side by side with Byzantine sculpture and painting in Sicily and Venice, Roman capitals were still carved in Italy and France.^ As Romanesque passed into Gothic, we find sculpture sometimes obviously inspired by antique Roman models, as in the Visitation group at Reims Cathedral, the remark- able little school in Apulia under Frederick II (1240), and in 1260 the sculpture of Niccola Pisano (an artist whose merits have been exaggerated), who himself came * It is characteristic of our false perspective that even in so excellent and modern a history of art as Reinach's Apollo, Duccio and Fra Angelico come in a chapter after that on Renaissance architecture. 2 Not in Italy only, but in France as a whole. Even a district as far north as Burgundy is rich in fluted Corinthian pilasters of the twelfth century. Provence abounds in Roman ornament and Byzantine statuary : it did not become part of France till the fifteenth century, and passed straight from Romanesque to Renaissance. In architecture, it is curious to compare with Brunellesco's dome or with his Pazzi Chapel in Florence {c. 1415) such a piece of work as the twelfth-century porch at Notre Dame des Doms, Avignon, which is so classical that it might be mistaken for Roman work ; whereas the Pazzi Chapel is, like the dome, wholly original, and could never be mistaken for Roman. Neither could the earlier Renaissance palaces, or the fa(,ade of the Certosa of Pavia (1491), which might be described as flamboyant Romanesque. When Renaissance architecture had freed itself from the mediaeval spirit, it speedily lost its character and developed into the Baroque and Jesuit styles at the end of the sixteenth century. / 152 TO MODERN CIVILISATION from Apulia.^ And it was just at this time that there came the great period of Gothic sculpture, an art realistic and original. All the while in the East the autumn glory of Byzantine art had continued, alive but unchanged. In painting itself, there lay behind the great Italian developments of the thirteenth century a long unbroken tradition of wall-painting, which reaches back to the beginning of the mediaeval period, — beside which there runs a similar practice of miniature painting, unequal, uncertain, but alive and full of power. Of the wall- paintings, naturally, most have been destroyed ; but it must be remembered that Romanesque architecture afforded wide spaces of wall, and it was the practice to cover these spaces with pictures. The earliest that have survived in France, at St Savin in Vienne, belonging to the end of the eleventh century, are worthy to be compared with the frescoes attributed to Cimabue, two hundred years later.^ He and his predecessors of the thirteenth century worked on an older mediaeval tradition, just as Leonardo worked on a later, and Raffael worked on Leonardo. Furthermore, there is one form of painting, the painting with small cubes of glass upon walls and other surfaces, ^ J. A. Symonds, while ascribing all Italian * Renaissance ' sculpture to the influence of Niccola Pisano, is full of admissions : he " could not wholly free himself from the defects of the later Romanesque manner," he " resorted to his native Tuscan models," he introduced " a stir of life and movement, and felt his subjects with an intensity alien to the ideal of Graeco-Roman sculpture." {Renaissance in Italy, 1882, pp. 106, 113.) Niccola also intro- duced the new Gothic cusps into his pulpit at Pisa, and his son Giovanni was intensely Gothic, as Symonds agrees. * Discoveries in recent years show that these beautiful paintings were by no means exceptional. We know also that mural painting went on in France from as early as the fifth century. Romanesque examples have been found in Germany. In Italy there are the noble frescoes at San Clcmente. ^S2, MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS called mosaic, which belongs in the main to the Middle Ages, and is at its greatest in the earlier centuries, though it lasted at Venice and elsewhere into the modern period. Rising to perfection in the great Byzantine churches of the fifth and sixth centuries, it was not less fine in the Greece of the eleventh, in the Sicily, Venice, and Rome of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth, and in Constantinople, where in the fourteenth century there was an independent renaissance of painting — a movement of great promise, cut short by the Turkish conquest. Mosaic is a noble form of the pictorial art which is beyond us to-day, with its glittering lights, its soft, dusky shadows, its depth of colour, its majesty of vision and vastness of design. The painting of the thirteenth century sprang out of it. In other words, there had been a continued development of art from ancient Egypt, Crete, Greece, through classical and Byzantine Rome, and through the Middle Ages; interrupted sporadically by the barbarian invasions during the first half of the Middle Ages, but reinforced from the Eastern Empire, and from Syria and Armenia. There was a quickened development from the eleventh century to the sixteenth, which survived the so-called Renaissance — the reaction of the doctrinaire upon art — by about a century, and then declined. This great movement was, admittedly, not a reconstruction of the antique; but there had been a real continuation of the antique throughout the Middle Ages. Ill Based on a misapprehension of history, the theory of the Renaissance vitiated generations of criticism and still poisons the minds of artists to-day — the theory that there was a gap between the paganism of the antique and the TO MODERN CIVILISATION neo-paganism of the Renaissance. In Symonds' words, " No true form of figurative art intervened between Greek sculpture and Italian painting." This theory of the gap was held more intensely in France and on the Continent : it was an indictment not only of the Middle Ages, but of Christianity. Because of it, the art of the Renaissance itself ran quickly into decadence; because of it, in part, arose the Puritan opposition to art ; because of it, the modern world has been confused, wan- dering without any working philosophy of aesthetic (except the false one that the end of art is to give pleasure), without any working principle by which to live — for if the moral excellence of Christianity is opposed to the aesthetic excel- lence of the body and of art, then the spirit of man is torn asunder. Therefore still to-day the world outside the artists follows its own business — its commerce, science, and measure of well- and ill-doing ; while those who care for beauty still in large measure (and more so abroad than here) have regarded themselves as rebels against our common civilisation, living in a peculiar pale of their own, often in a ' Bohemia ' aloof alike from the sphere of ethics and of knowledge. To be an artist, they had been told, was to be ' pagan,' since art was not possible till men went back behind the Christian era at the Renaissance; and paganism meant a crude notion of following one's own impulses and discarding the accumulated wisdom of the last two thousand years. It ignored the fact that the mind of man has been profoundly changed, and that we cannot go back to some imaginary age when men were supposed to be like beautiful untroubled children. The result was that artists were often trained in centres of great shallowness and narrow-mindedness, and in a real ignorance of the world. They had made a world of their own, they were out of ^55 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS touch with the great mass of human tradition ; and as a consequence they have failed to convert the world back to an understanding of beauty, while often the most accom- plished work has lacked the power which comes from adequate spiritual impulses. Now the truth, of course, is that there was no gap. Men followed art in the Christian era as well as in any other, and there are extant Christian paintings as early as the first century. They did what they could. Sculpture, indeed, did almost disappear in the pagan empire of the second century, between Hadrian and Constantine. It revived under definitely Christian inspiration after Con- stantine, and produced beautiful reliefs in marble and ivory in the fifth and sixth centuries — sculptures about which connoisseurs would have raved — such has been our snobbishness — had they been found buried beneath the ruins of some ancient Greek city. The Byzantine ivories continued to be made throughout the Middle Ages. Side by side with this representation of the human form went decorative sculpture, the Byzantine capitals, for instance, of the sixth century — more beautiful than those of Greece, infinitely more varied and full of life — these capitals we find still being made and developed at Venice in the twelfth century. In that century also France entered the first stage of her great development. Need I remind you of the Gothic decorative art in thirteenth-century France and England ; or of the great French statuary ? ** Twice," says Professor Lethaby, " in the history of art has sculpture reached a mark which placed it apart from that of all other periods " — Greek and Gothic ^ ; to which I would add the Italian sculpture from the thirteenth century to Michelangelo. 1 Mediaeval Art, 191 2, p. 216. 156 TO MODERN CIVILISATION But the illusion about a gap has this amount of foundation. Between the fifth century and the tenth the whole of Europe (except the Eastern Empire, whose turn came later) was overrun by successive hordes of barbarians. They were, indeed, tamed, converted, civilised, in a marvellous way; but before their conversion they were giant destroyers, and, after it, they required some centuries of education. As a result, we do find, especially in the north-west, art almost as base sometimes as that in the London of to-day. Up to the year looo, art was either Byzantine or barbaric; but after that date Europe — or rather the patch of free Europe outside Moorish Spain, outside the still heathen north-east, and the Slav line where Tatars and Turks were later to get dominion — that patch of Europe, which looks small enough on the map, was to settle down and have peace enough to express itself. We forget the lurid centuries in which our forefathers struggled against an all-prevailing Bolshevism. Well, this little Western Europe expressed herself quickly enough — in communes, in free-cities, in guilds, in nationalities, and in art. Already in 985 the Othonian 'Renaissance' had begun. Mean- while, from the earliest beginnings of Christian education, the art of Constantinople, its beautiful ivories, miniatures, enamels, metal-work, textiles, had never ceased to pene- trate the West, like rain, causing such passing efflorescences as the Ruthwell and Bewcastle crosses in the eighth century, inspiring men like Benedict Biscop in the seventh, or the artists of the Carolingian revival in the ninth, and supplying the models which led the men of the Romanesque period toward the perfection of Gothic sculpture. All the time, the Christian Church had been no enemy of the representation of the human form. On the contrary the Church needed this representation and demanded it ; MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS for without this representation it was impossible to ex- press the central principles of Christianity; and therein she differed from Islam, as Christian art always has differed from the purely decorative art of the Muslim peoples. I have mentioned the Church in order to restore the balance and arrive at the truth — not to encourage, but rather to prevent that reaction against our pseudo-classical grandfathers which would exaggerate the virtues of the Middle Ages. Nothing is more exasperating, indeed, than the attempt to make ecclesiastical capital out of the art of the thirteenth century. There were doubtless bishops without aesthetic under- standing in the Middle Ages, as there are, I understand, to-day. There was also a strong ideal of asceticism among the monks; yet the monks covered our Europe with a * white mantle of churches ' in the Romanesque period. Such a mighty outburst of beauty had never happened before ; and their monasteries were great workshops — workshops which were studios. Yet mediaeval art did not reach its zenith till it had passed out of monastic control by the thirteenth century into the hands of the burghers and the guilds. But it was still Christian art, still the expression of the Christian inspiration : the sculpture of French Gothic, of Donatello and Michelangelo, was still the art of the Church. For the Church is not the clergy, nor is it bishops and popes : it is the people. And it was the people then — men to whom religion was indeed a great reality — but cheery, and indeed beery, fellows in leather aprons, who, amid all the wars and oppressions, laughed and thrived, and banded themselves together in their crafts — in Constantinople many centuries earlier than in the West. The towns swarmed with these workmen who hap- pened to be artists — these artists who were content to be 158 TO MODERN CIVILISATION workmen. The idea that their interests were in sadness and suffering, or that their art was gaunt and emaciated, has long been exploded.-^ IV Let us come to architecture. It is the fundamental art. Without it, you may have a few brilHant men painting pictures for a few brilHant picture-dealers; you may have many profiteers recognising that a gilt picture-frame must have something in it; but you will not have art as a vital principle of life — you will not find the people seizing a great picture and carrying it in triumphal procession down the Strand. Clever artists will continue to arise, both in painting and sculpture, and a few discerning people will rejoice in them; geniuses will break through from time to time — generally under intense discouragement. New schools will try new experiments, and be intensely bored with the experiments of the schools before them. But you will not make art again secure and inevitable, as it always had been, everywhere in the world, before the Renaissance broke the tradition and expired together with its victim — you will not establish art again as the habit of mankind, until you set men's paths about with beauty again ; and this involves two things. It involves architecture, the mightiest and most serious of the arts, and costume, the lightest and most capricious — yes, if Pericles had worn a top-hat and 1 The cultivation of false pathos appears in the fourteenth century, and increases with the decline of intellectual leadership in the Church. In its wake follows the humanist reaction, but also the macabre. " II semble," says M. Male in L'Art Rcligieux de la fin du Moyen Age, 1908, p. 76, " que desormais le mot mysterieux, le mot qui contient le secret du christianisme, ne soit plus ' aimer,' mais ' souffrir.' " The absolute reserve of early Christian art is in the most striking contrast with the morbid emphasis on the Crucifixion and Passion during the past six centuries. MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS spats, where would Pheidias have been ? How much of the prestige of our ancient universities is due to their architectural beauty, and to the fact that in the academic habit some relics of mediaeval costume are retained ? Yet I notice in some modern universities a tendency to regard even the humble minimum of a black gown as something to be discarded as much as possible, because it happens to be both convenient and graceful. It is characteristic of our age that men affect to despise costume, and then spend much money, care, and time in making themselves look nattily ridiculous. The beaux remain, though the beauty has gone. But until the streets we live in, and even the men who walk about in them, are tolerable to the vision, our eyes will not recover from their distortion and become normal again. Fortunately, I need not take up your time with plead- ing the virtues of mediaeval architecture. That battle has been long won. In the young days of this College, when it was regarded as the latest echo of the Parthenon, any gathering here would have believed that, as with painting and sculpture, so with architecture, there had been a great gap — say between the Coliseum and St Peter's at Rome — a gap precariously filled with the barbarous litter which our great-grandfathers called ' Gothic ' — meaning what we should mean by the word ' Hun.' That illusion has disappeared, though the majority of our pro- fessional architects still act as if it were true. There are, however, two facts about mediaeval architec- ture which are, I think, not yet quite generally realised. I. Gothic occupied only some three or four centuries out of our period of a thousand years, and that only in Western Europe. The East was untouched by it; in Rome it was a foreign fashion which never seriously inter- rupted Romanesque work; even North Italy remained on 1 60 TO MODERN CIVILISATION the whole a land of basilican and Romanesque buildings. Europe between the fifth century and the fifteenth had five great kinds of architecture, Basilican, Byzantine, and Byzantinesque,^ Romanesque, and Gothic, and within these main styles an unprecedented number of varieties which testify to their amazing vitality. These styles include nearly all the greatest buildings in the world ; they include what most artists agree to call the greatest of all — St Sofia at Constantinople, where all the problems of architecture were solved into perfection at the beginning of the Middle Ages; they include the loveliest and most graceful of the basilicas from the fifth century to the eleventh — Ravenna, Torcello, Fiesole ; they include the Byzantine of Venice and Aquitaine; the splendid Romanesque schools of Pisa, Florence, and Sicily; the cluster of great churches along the Rhine and in Lombardy; the several mighty schools of France, and masterpieces like our own Durham. And these classes of architecture culminated from the end of the twelfth century in our Western Gothic — reaching, shall we say, to the crown of Beauvais — an architecture so wonderful that it has about it something which we moderns, with all our admiration, have not been able even to see^ as our attempts at restoration or revival so painfully testify. 2. All mediaeval architecture has this common charac- teristic — it is free. Compared with it, the art of other periods is as crystals are to plants. Ancient Roman archi- tecture had indeed partly extricated itself from the close limitations of ancient Greece : it had introduced the arch, but, excepting in its aqueducts and other works of utility (which form the real greatness of Roman architecture), it fails between two incompatible principles — that of the lintel which takes pressure direct and that of the arch 1 Cattaneo's word, ' Italo-Byzantine,' is unnecessarily ugly. L l6l MEDIv^VAL CONTRIBUTIONS which spreads the pressure : its columns and entablatures are therefore usually only a veneer. Roman ornament, also, is seldom free from heaviness and vulgarity; Roman domes and vaults are giant lids of concrete : it was reserved to the architects of St Sofia to invent the true dome. In architecture, science is always struggling with art ; and the ultimate perfection is only obtained when the two are reconciled, as they are in St Sofia, as they are in the final structural triumphs of Gothic. The architects throughout the Middle Ages worked as free men, that is to say, as real artists. They were never enslaved, as we are to-day, by any superstition about correct Vitruvian orders. Look at the capitals of Ravenna, Salonica, Constantinople, and Venice, of French Roman- esque and English Gothic; they invented for their new necessities new capitals, of infinite variety. They did this because, without ever breaking from the past, they used the past to make the present. They lived and grew, they dared, they experimented ; their art was dynamic ; in every age, in every province, they were themselves, and never the shadow of something that had once lived and was dead. As Sir Thomas Jackson says, ** Byzantine and Romanesque art was in fact a revulsion from convention to the unaffected expression of natural law and methods of construction " ; and he adds (too indulgently) that some of us, " the strict classic " purists, *' value consistent obedience to authority and precedent, to strict canons of orthodoxy, correctness, and propriety, according to certain accepted formulas.**^ They do, indeed 1 But this is not art. It is the negation of art, the corpse of art. And how was architecture thus killed ? It was killed 1 T. G. Jackson, R.A., Byzaniine and Romanesque Architecture, ii, 268 (1913)- 162 TO MODERN CIVILISATION by what is called the Renaissance. Men discovered that a certain Roman named Vitruvius had laid down certain "canons of orthodoxy, correctness, and propriety"; and this became to them a gospel. Modern scholars have discovered that Vitruvius was not an architect at all, but just a literary gentleman, with an atrociously obscure style, who chatted about architecture. But he was set up as the evangelist, infallible for all time : nothing that could not be read therein or proved thereby was henceforward to be orthodox. Here, as in the other arts, great men did greatly within the formulas : the spirit of the Middle Ages did not die at once — it lived, for instance, still in Chris- topher Wren and his school, as the spire of St Mary-le- Strand, and dozens of other mediaeval spires with classical detail, bear witness. But a fatal blow had been struck at architecture. It had become mimetic — so mimetic that when the Gothic enthu- siasm arose in the nineteenth century the revivalists could not free themselves from the central error of the Renaissance. They also were mimes, they tried to capture the Gothic spirit with rule and measure. They imitated Gothic in everything but this — that Gothic is not an imitation. They were mediaeval in everything except in being mediasval. The Gothic revival was the last stage of the Renaissance, and the worst. For art is life: it is not revival. At the present moment London, and the world, is thickly strewn with shams, Roman shams, Greek shams, Gothic shams — there was even an awful moment of Venetian shams — and now Roman shams again. When- ever we try to be grand, we become dull. Our only living architecture — and it is worthy to be considered with that of any age — is that of our country cottages and countr)' houses; because here wc build for our comfort and 163 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS convenience, we build what we like and not what we are told we ought to like, and we give no shadow of thought to the pages of Vitruvius — or of Pugin. Yes, here in our beauti- ful country homes we are truly Gothic; here we are really mediaeval, and here the spirit of the Middle Ages does contribute to our own time. May new schools of archi- tecture arise now and be mediseval altogether, since to be truly mediaeval is to be entirely modern ! I have spoken of the Renaissance as the reaction of the pundit upon art, and the consequent destruction of the free mediaeval spirit. The word, indeed, has too many mean- ings; and I do not mean the new learning, nor the partial emancipation of the intellect from certain phases of tradition and authority. I mean simply that trammelling of intuition which accompanied it, which established a freezing scholas- ticism in the studio and put young and old alike under the rule of pedantic schoolmasters. It is this tyranny of the ' correct ' in art that is the reason for the universal absence of beauty in the modern world which we all recog- nise and deplore. V But, alas! if we climb out of our pedantry in architecture, as we have long done in painting, as we are doing in sculpture, there will still be one thing lacking. Before I mention it, I would ask you to add to architecture ornament, and the various minor arts and crafts which architecture encloses and protects. The one thing lacking would be democracy — to use the only word we have got. Briefly, that interruption of tradition which we call the Renaissance was, as we say nowadays, undemocratic : it was the conscious, artificial 164 TO MODERN CIVILISATION work of a small class of grammarians, princes, and rich merchants. It had nothing to do with the people : it robbed the people of their art, till artists had to be the para- sites of the rich, and the people relapsed into barbarism. The art of succeeding ages, beautiful as it has often been, has been the art of the drawing-room, not of the street; and the parish church has long ceased to be what it once was, the centre of beauty in every little village, the living home (not the mere museum) of an exquisite and popular art. Of course, parish halls might have taken the place of parish churches ; but as a matter of fact they did not. The people of Europe have had their art stolen from them by the rich; and to-day there is hardly a scintilla of the divine understanding left among them. Now, I would put it to you as an axiom that the paralysis of art among the people creeps upward to the whole body ; that an art which is the art of a class must always be more or less artificial ; and that you cannot have a great, living, and stable art, growing steadily from age to age, unless it is shared by all the nation, loved in all the nation, recruited from every class of the nation. And I would suggest to you that the present instability of our living art of painting, its somewhat reckless experiments, its abiding discontent, is due to the fact that it is not rooted in the common life of Europe. This, then, is the second great contribution that I desire from the Middle Ages to the art of to-day : the first was liberty, the second is life. Indeed, they are one. Now the art of the Middle Ages comes between an art resting on slavery, which we call classical, and an art resting on exploitation, which has been the art of recent centuries. With all its crimes, ignorances, oppressions, with all its still unsubdued savagery, the mediaeval period 165 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS was, after all, an age of gradual emancipation, a period during which the shackles of slavery and serfdom were falling away, and workmen were learning to respect them- selves and .0 combine. Wherever and whenever society was sufficiently settled, combine they did; and wherever their trade involved the making of permanent things, we find them to be craftsmen, artists in their degree — and not less artistic than the overlords, but more. Certainly the common folk of the Middle Ages loved the art which was created around them, and shared in its beauty. We know this best of that period which to most artists is the Middle Ages, the second half, when the worst disturbances were over, and society had a chance of expressing itself. Romanesque architecture (and therefore, of course, Gothic, its derivative), as Choisy and Enlart have shown, was due to the abolition of slavery — briefly, because, in the absence of slave labour, smaller stones had to be used.^ In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the communes arose, city after city became free, the craft-guilds were formed. Gothic art sprang from Romanesque, and contemporaneously there arose the first assertions of nationality and the recognition of public liberty. Gothic is the result of the democratic movement in the twelfth century, and in Gothic, as Ruskin has shown in that great chapter, " The Nature of Gothic," ^ men had pleasure in their work, and therefore did not look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. The never-ceasing action, the undying strain of thrust and counter-thrust which lies hidden under the quiet grey ^ Auguste Choisy, Histoire de f Architecture, ii, 142-5. Cf. Camille Enlart, in Histoire de I'Art, i, 443 (A. Michel, 1905). » Stones of Venice, 1886, ii, 15 1-23 1, especially p, 163. I venture to think that the time has come for us to repudiate that depreciation of the art-writings of Ruskin, which was brought about by the next generation of writers, men who seldom reached his level of intelligence and discernment. 166 TO MODERN CIVILISATION stones of those soaring cathedrals, was indeed itself the assertion of freedom, as it was of the strength of those masons who so unconcernedly handled the dangerous powers they were unloosing. There were no * architects ' in those days, only guilds of masons, with a master-mason, who had worked his way up, to direct the building, at which he had started, perhaps, as a poor apprentice. No incitement to pedantry there ! And the enormous output of the thirteenth century rested on a great popular enthu- siasm. Gothic was not the work of the monks, as Northern Romanesque had often been : it was the work of the people, of the peasants and the burghers, of the guilds ; and the sculpture, the wrought metal, the glorious carved screens which astonish us to-day in our remote country places, were the work of the village mason, the village carpenter, the village blacksmith. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries there was already a passion for building and for all the arts that go with architecture — leading incidentally in the twelfth to the invention of a new art of painting, the wonderful art of painting glass windows. Men did not build from neces- sity — there were on the whole plenty of churches already : they built because they had a passion for building and for the daughter arts; and that passion was certainly not the sentiment of any one rich or cultured class. In the thirteenth century nearly every important town was again at work upon a gigantic cathedral — and in the fourteenth or fifteenth — though hardly a city of Europe then had a population of more than twenty thousand souls. And, with the building, there went on rapturously every form of painting, sculpture, metal-work, and of all the crafts, now raised to the highest point of delicacy and loveliness. This was not monastic, it was not merely clerical; it was I 67 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS civic, it was the self-expression of simple burghers and peasants and artisans ; and the pulse of the people beat so truly that the expression varied in each nation, nay, in each province of countries like France and Italy. By contrast I have used the word * exploitation * of the modern period. We remember our own * Great Pillage ' in the reign of Edward VI, which was an act of vandalism against art, as well as the robbery of the poor by the rich, and the destruction of workmen's unions; we remember the enslavement of Italy; we remember what happened to Germany in the Thirty Years War; we remember the social conditions of France before the Revolution; and Mr and Mrs Hammond have reminded us lately, with an abundance of new illustration, of the bitter serfdom of the English artisan a hundred years ago. Still, fifty years ago there remained the resulting ignorance, and what Mr Tawney calls ** an almost animal incapacity for responsibility." ^ We know, indeed, that in many other ways the world has progressed enormously during the modern period. We do not wish to be back in the Middle Ages ; but I submit that, in the matter of art, civilisation has drifted from its moorings, and that those moorings are, as William Morris rightly taught, in labour — the freedom of the workman to realise himself, to express himself in his work and to rejoice in it. Many are annoyed at the labour unrest of to-day; but at the bottom of it is an impulse of the utmost promise — the desire of labour for its share of human recognition and human responsibility. If, in the last generation, as Mr Arnold Bennett says of the art museum at Copenhagen, people " were never guilty of inadvertence. Their instinct against beauty in any form was unerring,"^ we have to 1 R. J. Tawney, The Sickness of an Acquisitive Society, p. 71 (1920). • Arnold Bennett, The Log of the Velsa, pp. 129-30. 168 TO MODERN CIVILISATION remember that beauty is part of the Divine Absolute, and that in this as in other things we cannot serve God and Mammon. Of the great cathedrals Professor Lethaby says: " They are more than buildings. . . . The work of a man, a man may understand ; but these are the work of ages, of nations. . , . Nothing is marked, nothing is clever, nothing is individual nor thrust forward as artistic; they are serene, masterly, non-personal, like works of nature — indeed, they are such, natural manifestations of the minds of men working under the impulse of a noble idea." Their use " had been perfected by the daily practice of a thousand years, and was linked to a music that belonged to it as the blast of trumpets belongs to war. All were parts of a marvellous drama, the ceremonial life of a people." ^ Of the towns themselves one need hardly speak. A few have in part survived the Vandals of our modern era, to show us in what magic streets the feet of our forefathers used to walk — Bruges, Domfront, Estavayer, Rothenburg, some towns in the Riviera, in Spain, Italy, the Balkans. Their beauty is confounding. Modern designers, in our good, new zeal for town-planning, are trying to catch some portion of their spirit — some have even tried to discover a hidden scientific formula in those turns and curves, those sudden breaks, and happy groupings of perfect gables, walls, turrets, spires, bridges, which are but the expression of an unerring instinct for that which is fit and beautiful. Such towns as these had each its craft-guilds ; and these guilds were the universities of art. When the workman sent in his 'masterpiece' for examination, he became, if it was passed, literally a master of his art. There were graduates in art, as well as in 'arts,' under that system; 1 W. R. Lethaby, Medtcez'al Art, pp. 142-4 (191 2). 169 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS and everyone recognised the master's worth, the honour of his rough hands. To-day, art is a frill upon the edges of life ; it was then the stuff of life itself. It was then no factitious adjunct to work, but the very manner of work, and the impulse. We have seen our civic beauty fallen to ruins. In the fourteenth century men sought for municipal office to promote the utmost development of communal life, to increase the municipal magnificence. To-day, the best of those who stand for election seek rather for the removal of municipal degradation : they no longer take office in the local council '* because they are proud of their city, but because they are ashamed of it." We cannot copy the Middle Ages — neither their guilds nor their cities, nor their Church, nor their art ; but by ceasing to copy and by making art the friend of the poor and not the mere lacquey of the rich, we can recover the old spirit, which is the eternal spirit of humanity, and therefore will most surely arise again feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. VI The spirit of ancient Greek art was flowing through Europe during the Middle Ages; but it had already changed and become Hellenistic, and it was changed again into a deeper wisdom and a new power by the spirit of Christendom. Across the history of art during the first half of the mediaeval period lay the shadow of the barbarian invaders. Other savage incursions had destroyed what they overthrew; but the power which had now come into 170 TO MODERN CIVILISATION the world was deathless : Christian civilisation turned and subdued the conquerors, transmuting their strength into sweetness. Of all this, the mediaeval art of Europe was the expression ; to this it owed its infinite variety and its ultimate mastery of every human craft, including that of melody in music, and above all its spiritual depth. The subject of music would need another lecture, like that of poetry; but we will not forget that the unrivalled acoustic properties of the great mediaeval churches were not thrown away : music of singular beauty existed all the time, and developed, though more slowly. Music is the most spiritual of the arts ; and it is spirituality that gives to the whole realm of European mediaeval art, overwhelmingly vaster in mere production than any other, its supreme mark of greatness. For mediaeval art compares with all other as the art of more spiritual beings, of men who believe that they are but little lower than the angels, of men who are always striving after something which is beyond them in the eternal reality of the spirit. It is tremulous with aspiration, humble even in its majesty. The art of ancient Greece is, after all, only young with the physical perfection of youth, its satisfaction with what life can give. In another sense it is old with the finality of age. The statues of the great period of Greek sculpture express the beauty of the human form and of glorious drapery: their faces are often the faces of very noble animals. Let it be admitted — for we have been a little uncritical about classical art, our Bible, our Old Testament — they sometimes wholly lack expression. But the statues and paintings of the Middle Ages give us human beings with souls — men like ourselves, heavy with thought, bright with hope, tender with love, perturbed by some intensity of vision. A soul has crept into the marble. And when Michelangelo seems to be reviving the old 171 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS classical tradition, he remains a child of the Middle Ages : the soul cannot be banished — in the words of his famous sonnet — Non ha rottimo artista alcun concetto Ch'un marmo solo in se non circonscriva Col suo soverchio, e sola a quello arriva La man che obbedisce all'intelletto. His paintings and his statues are eloquent beyond the capacities of speech ; they seem to groan and travail with strivings that cannot be uttered — even by his supreme genius. So the art of the Middle Ages is really the art of youth. It has no finality, because that which it expresses cannot ever be finished. It lives with unmeasured poten- tialities still before it. Until the Renaissance, and men's subsequent concentration upon commerce and science, it seldom rested in the West, but grew from one stage to another — as in our still living arts— of painting, and music, poetry, and the drama — we still move and change and grow. The Middle Ages were the age of youth. I do not mean merely of young nations, but of men who were building up the future and had unlimited development before them. It was our youth, and we are growing from it. In so far as our art lives — the art of our intelligentsia — it is growing from that stem. In so far as it is dead, it is in those forms of art which have ignored their own parent- age, such as architecture, ornament, the crafts, and much sculpture, and have tried to form themselves from ancient models in the pedantry of the schools. They are cut off from the stem, and they languish. But painting, like music and poetry, has gone on without a break and is alive to-day. 172 TO MODERN CIVILISATION Over four centuries have passed since the real severance began ; but the mediasval tradition still lived in England three centuries ago, still lived unfashionably among the people two centuries ago, has lingered last of all in folk- song. It is not a very long period ; and men have risen to vast achievements in other spheres, though they have been more concerned during it with truth, and some forms of goodness, than with beauty. But the severance has never been complete : the sap has never ceased to flow : there is no break between the mosaics of Ravenna and the war- pictures of Mr Rothenstein. Let us take heart. We are the heirs of those old craftsmen. They have left us the next stage of their work to do, and they have shown us how to do it. The nineteenth century made the world ugly and debased. We can still make it beautiful again. Percy Dearmer 173 VI THE MIDDLE AGES IN THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH POETRY I MY theme is English literature of the Middle Ages, and some few salient features in its relation to the more modern periods. There is a growing ten- dency at present to disparage the literature of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the farther off these Middle Ages happen to -be, the more severe is the disparagement. To my mind, the perspective of English literature is often alto- gether distorted, because the relationship of Early English to later literature, and the component elements of the literature of the Middle Ages, are not clearly understood. One of the main causes of this attitude of some critics and historians is due to the fact that the literature of England goes back to a far-off age, long before the Norman Conquest, and that in consequence its language is so archaic that it cannot be readily understood without careful study. Chaucer's spelling may be bad enough, yet he can be read without much difficulty ; but in the case of Chaucer's predecessors by some five or six hundred years it is not merely a matter of spelling — the language itself seems utterly different, with its strange vocabulary, syntax, and ^ Cp. Sir A. Quiller-Couch, "The Lineage of English Literature" and other chapters, in Studies in Literature. First and Second Series. Cambridge University Press. CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN CIVILISATION grammar. I fear that one has often to fight against what is tantamount to a plea for ignorance. Because the ancient literature of England can be traced so far back, and because its language is so archaic as to necessitate serious study, it is dismissed as unworthy of consideration. The main object of my observations will be to dispel, if possible, some of these errors in respect of the place of older English literature, and of poetry in particular, in the lineage of our literature from the period of Chaucer to more modern times. The term * Middle Ages * is vague indeed. Writers in the eighteenth century would comprehensively describe previous ages, including even some part of the Elizabethan age, by the convenient epithet * Gothic ' — by which term was meant what was opposed to classical, what was rugged, what was well-nigh barbarous. The thirteenth and four- teenth centuries are generally called up to mind when one speaks of the Middle Ages with reference to English literature; but there were the earlier Middle Ages, the so-called Dark Ages, centuries before the Norman Con- quest, a period of no little interest for students of English literature. It is this Old English period which is more particularly singled out for the disparagement to which I have referred. Yet the extant remains of this literature from the seventh to the eleventh century are striking mani- festations of the genius of Old England in its strength and its simplicity, before the later alien elements had become infused. We are able to judge therefrom the spirit of that old English folk to whom are due not only the basic elements of English speech, but also the foundations of English institutional life, and much that is most characteristic in English ideals. What do we discover from a rapid survey of this literature MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS of the early Middle Ages ? We are not confronted with the rude beginnings, the rough scaffolding, on which a noble structure was to be built up. We see rather a finished effort of a special type, the culmination of a long previous period of development, on special lines and with marked characteristics. In the productions of the Anglian poets of the eighth century we have a poetry remarkable for a certain stateliness, from which is absent what is uncouth or rudimentary. It is marked, too, by a high seriousness, as though the poets felt that the purpose of their art was to edify and to instruct. Indeed, this hall-mark of earnestness often testifies to something deeper in spirit than can find expression in form. In the heroic poetry of this age the minstrel held up a mirror of heroic life, showing how a young warrior should behave, how he should comport himself, how he should regard life as of no value when honour was at stake. The burden of Beowulf is that " death is better than a life of reproach." It is not only in the Christian poetry of the Anglo-Saxons that we find the fine note of seriousness. True, Beowulf when compared with the Odyssey^ may easily invite disparage- ment, but it is surely a strange attitude for those who deal with the history of English literature to argue that because the Teutonic heroic poem is altogether inferior to the Greek epic, it is therefore of no value whatsoever in the pedigree of English poetry. Esthetic consideration is one thing; the right appraising of a document in genealogy is apart from aesthetic consideration. At all events, the business of the critic is to attempt to understand why and in what respects the Teutonic genius differs from the more glorious genius of Greece. If the search is for enchantment, one must look elsewhere than among the remains of English poetry of pre-Conquest times. In tone 176 TO MODERN CIVILISATION and spirit this poetry is severely epic. It calls for no apology, but it demands study. From the seventh to the early part of the ninth century, until under King Alfred the centre of literary activity passed from Anglia to Wessex, Anglian poets produced work well worthy of the recognition that should be given to some notable achievement preserved miraculously from ancient days to our own time. II Anglo-Saxon civilisation was not suddenly put an end to by the Norman Conquest, though by that time it had come to its full development, and was passing into its decline. It is true that toward the end of that period the English muse had become anaemic and weak; she needed new strength, new forces of vitality. Let us turn to the fourteenth century. During the second half of the century the arresting figure of Chaucer claims our first attention. Born in London, associated from his youth with the brilliant court of Edward III and the higher social life of his time, Chaucer was the disciple of the gracious poets of France. Finding nothing to quicken his poetic sense in contemporary or earlier English poetry, he turned to France and set himself the congenial task of bringing into native English the measures, the inspiration, the charm and delicacy of the French poets, with their joyance, picturesqueness, and delight in dreams of beauty. The magic of the Romaunt of the Rose^ and of the school of poets under the spell of that Poets' Bible of the Middle Ages, must have won his heart in his boyhood. When he had tarried long enough in this Temple of Glass, he turned elsewhere, and dwelt with the greater intellectual forces of Italy. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, through M 177 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS Chaucer, became part of English literary tradition. Having learnt what he could from these mighty patriarchs of Humanism, Chaucer discovered the full strength of his own genius as the inimitable story-teller in verse. His pre-eminence as poet was acclaimed in his own time, and through the centuries to our own day he has stood forth with undiminished fame. From the historical point of view, as Tennyson well put it, Chaucer " preluded . . . the spacious days of great Elizabeth." He is the forward link in the lineage of English literature. In the first place, he was the poet of London, the centre of the social life of his time — the poet of the East Midland district of England. His greatness obscured the position of those of his contemporaries who belonged to more provincial parts of England, and who could not escape the oblivion that overtakes mere local fame. The place of these poets in the perspective of English literature it is my purpose to emphasise. Along the Welsh Marches, up to Lancashire and Westmorland, as in many other districts of England, there lived those who held strongly to the older traditions of the English race. There were families in these regions who treasured their memories from ancient times, and who prided themselves on having lived in these parts long before the coming of William the Con- queror. Among these the English element predominated, even as the Norman among those of higher social life in London and the great social centres near. While Chaucer was singing his delightful ballades, charming the ears of courtiers and ladies by his French love-songs in English verse, there was a voice to be heard other than that of " the new gladness of a great people, which utters itself in the verse of Geoffrey Chaucer." It was a 178 TO MODERN CIVILISATION sterner voice, that disdained the gauds of rhyme and the harmonies of the French school of poetry. For let us think of the real conditions of the time. At the court there was the pomp, extravagance, and display of chivalry, the luxury and splendour of a revived Camelot. The glamour was truly great. But between Cregy and Poitiers there was dire national tribulation. There were grave economic and social problems, due partly to the Black Death, which in 1349 carried off large parts of the popula- tion, and also to the continuous wars with France. The splendours of the Order of the Garter proved no antidote to these ills. The condition of the country was bad; there was corruption in Church and State. Then it was that a stern voice arose in the West Midlands, the voice of Langland, like that of some Hebrew prophet-poet of old, telling the people, in language that went readily home, in the rhymeless alliterative metre of the old days before the Conquest, the stern truth that their sufferings were due to national shortcomings, and that a guide should be found to lead them to the shrine of Truth. Perchance from among the lowly, the humble tillers of the soil, such a true leader might be found. This was the purpose of The Vision of Piers Plowman. By the intensity of its lesson, the Vision seems to have spread far and wide throughout the land; Langland appears to be the only poet of the West Midland school who gained recognition as a national, and not merely local, poet. The school of West Midland alliterative poets, of whom there were many, though hardly a name other than Langland's has come down to us, holds a distinctive place in the lineage of English literature. These poets, in respect of metre, manner, and spirit, for the most part harked back to the time before the Conquest. I do not mean to sny for a 179 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS moment that they were acquainted with the writings of Caedmon or Cynewulf, or any pre-Conquest Hterature ; yet they were something more than the spiritual heirs of the older English poets. In some way or other — the problem is a difficult one — the Old English alliterative metre lived on during the centuries that followed the Norman Conquest, and suddenly, about the middle of the fourteenth century, to judge from extant poetry, there was a great revival of this archaic form of poetry. Even where these poets chose their matter from France or from Latin sources, the spirit of the handling is characteristic and altogether differentiated from the Chaucerian method. All the West Midland poets may not have the technical skill and finish attained by the poet of Cleanness and Patience^ but where the treatment shows a weaker hand, the purpose is none the less marked, namely, that the lesson is the first consideration, transcending all effort in search of the artistic and aesthetic. In common with Langland, the whole school of West Midland poets represents the backward link in the genealogy of Eng- lish poetry, that is, they link the age of Chaucer, in spirit as well as in form, to the far-off days before the Conquest. Nor was the alliterative revival, as we shall see, a mere barren antiquarian freak. The voice of William Langland was not a passing voice; it re-echoed down the ages. The Vision of Piers Plowman cannot with any appre- ciation of the facts be regarded as " the last dying spasm " of Anglo-Saxon literature, as Sir A. Quiller-Couch, University Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, futilely, in my opinion, attempts to demonstrate, in his zeal to maintain the worthlessness of Middle English poetry, save that of Chaucer, in the lineage of English i8o TO MODERN CIVILISATION literature. " I shall attempt to convince you," he states, ** that Chaucer did not inherit any secret from Caedmon or Cynewulf." As though, forsooth, it were necessary, at this time of day, to prove what no sane person would for a moment contest! The fundamental error in all these discussions seems to be a failure to understand that there were these two schools of poetry, the Chaucerian and the West Midland, representing two great voices in the harmonies of English poetry, the one with its quest for beauty and melody, and the other, by utterance more homely and direct, seeking primarily to enforce the lesson. In their attitude toward Nature the two schools may well be contrasted, the Chaucerian with its conventional bright May mornings and landscapes of joyance, the West Mid- land poets with their interpretation of Nature in her more rugged moods, with their fondness for storms and tempests and lowering clouds. Even in Chaucer's own time one poet at least sought to harmonise the two voices. The poet of Pearl was a West Midland poet who sought to blend the spirit of exalted religious aspiration with the beauty, harmony, and picturesqueness of the Romance poets. With one hand, as it were, toward Langland, and one toward Chaucer, he, in a sense, more truly than Chaucer, is the herald of the Elizabethan poets ; certainly so, if Spenser is to be regarded as the Elizabethan poet par excellence. As the author of Gawain and the Green Knight^ this West Midland poet is the prophet of The Faerie Queene^ and stands on the very threshold of modern English poetry, in the fullest sense of the term. If Chaucer was "the father of English poetry," and the old title may well remain, let us at all events under- stand the place of his contemporaries in the pedigree of his descendants. i8i MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS III Let us come to the Elizabethan Age. The Elizabethan Age may roughly be described as the meeting-point of the Ages of the world. We pass from the Middle Ages to what we call the modern time. True, the Middle Ages were not far off, and their glamour was still a potent source of inspiration. Antiquity had been rediscovered — the great literatures of Judaea, Greece, and Rome. The Revival of Learning was not only the revived interest in classical antiquity; the Bible became an open book, and the Reformation in England, as elsewhere, was one manifestation of this aspect of the Renaissance. It is of Edmund Spenser that one thinks as the poet of the Eliza- bethan Age in spirit, in form, and in apparel ; and the secret of Spenser's poetry, I am inclined to hold, may perhaps best be understood with reference to the theory I am propounding. In text-books on Spenser critics glibly enumerate the poet's limitations, as well as the marks of his greatness, instead of endeavouring to understand some of their difficulties in dealing with a poet who is perhaps the truest representative of the greatest age of English poetry. There can be little doubt that his latent poetic genius was stirred into life by turning over the pages of a black-letter folio of Chaucer, and that instinctively the London schoolboy, for Spenser was a poet while still at school, fell under the spell of the older poet, and learned from him something of the true beauty of form and harmony. And yet, great as was the disciple's debt to his master, would it be possible to find two geniuses more utterly different in spirit and character than the poet of Troilus and Criseyde and the poet of The Faerie Queene, of whom Milton said he was " a greater 182 TO MODERN CIVILISATION teacher than Aquinas " ? One thinks of the smile that would have played across the features of Chaucer, had some one hinted to him that he was primarily a great teacher, or had any qualifications or aspirations for that office. But with Spenser it was otherwise; and the secret of Spenser is this, that whereas as regards beauty of form and the technical art of poetry he was truly the disciple of Chaucer, in spirit he belonged rather to the West Midland poets, the school of Langland. This explains why it is that, although he gives us creations steeped in beauty, sparkling with light, dream pictures, armour of richest damascene, his object is to protect and save and exalt the human soul. You may well say that Spenser, as Chaucer, was a Londoner. What had he in common with the old poets of the West Midlands, with the spirit of Langland, even though he may have read a black- letter edition of The Vision of Piers Plowman ? My answer might be that the spirit of a work is a thing apart from its immediate environment. But one need not dismiss the question so lightly. It is a fact that the family to which Spenser and all his forbears belonged lived in Lancashire; and this is significant as regards those marked elements in the spirit of his poetry which link him with the West Midland school. In this Elizabethan poet par excellence there lived on, spiritually, much that differentiates him from Chaucer and the Chaucerians, even as an analysis of his archaic English reveals a most significant attempt to blend words due to his reading of Chaucer with native mother-words belonging to the family Lancashire home. To illustrate some of these dialect words, one must turn to the alliterative poems written by Chaucer's contemporaries of the West. Gawain and the Green Knight, as I have already suggested, 183 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS might well have stood as a canto of The Faerie Queene^ and indeed the Gawain legend has its analogues there. In beauty, in technical skill, and in picturesqueness that fourteenth-century poet is the counterpart of Spenser, though the poet of the Renaissance had richer stores of knowledge to draw on. Yet, steeped as Spenser was in all the New Learning, in the glory of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and in the inspiration of Neoplatonism, it is remarkable that his close kinship with the fourteenth- century poet of the alliterative revival is so unmistakable. Spenser, indeed, blended successfully, even as the poet of Pearl attempted to blend, the two main voices in the great harmony of English song. It is not without significance that he himself, when first he came before the world as the new poet, with due humility indicated his literary progenitors : Dare not to match thy pype with Tityrus hys style, Nor with the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde awhyle ; But followe them farre off, and their high steppes adore : The better please, the worse despise ; I aske nomore. And what of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan drama and their debt to the Middle Ages } The Elizabethan drama perhaps owed its greatest debt to the Middle Ages in being rescued, through the freedom and ease that characterised the earlier drama, from slavish adherence to the conventional classical forms of tragedy and comedy, from the tyranny of Seneca and Plautus and Terence, from the unities of time and place and action. In respect of matter, it might be an easy thing to point to the mediaeval sources of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan drama. The matter of Britain and France, mediaeval romances and tales, chronicles, ballads, and folklore all contributed materials on which the dramatists worked. As regards the chief 184 TO MODERN CIVILISATION instrument of expression, blank verse, which was originally a purely academic importation from Italy, it became the plastic instrument able to bear the impress of varied human emotions, only when it had become, as it were, thoroughly Teutonised. Shakespeare, and to some extent Marlowe before him, unconsciously rediscovered that freedom which characterised the Old English metre, and imposed it on this alien blank verse. Of course, in reality it was the English spirit resisting slavery to an academic convention, and naturalising an alien metre. Yet what- ever one may adduce tending to link Shakespeare's work to the Middle Ages, and although he may wear the ap- parelling of his own age, his powers transcend altogether the stuff on which his genius worked. And so it is that I have chosen Spenser, rather than Shakespeare, to illus- trate the underlying purpose of my discourse. Much as I would wish to dwell on the varied forms of poetry, the sonnet, the lyrical measures, complaints, and other forms of Elizabethan poetry derived from earlier ages, as these do not help forward my main contention, I pass them by with this brief reference. Taken comprehensively, as Taine well put it, the Renaissance in England was the renaissance of the Saxon genius. From this point of view it is significant that Shakespeare's greatest achievement, Hamlet^ is the pre- sentment of a typically northern hero, the embodiment of the northern character : Dark and true and tender is the North IV In the period known as the Romantic Revival, anti- quarianism holds almost as great a place as the ' return to nature.' The instinctive protest against * good sense * 185 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS led to the groping for far-off things and for the truer understanding of nature apart from convention. The various elements of mediaevalism that were contributory sources of inspiration to the poets of the period of the Romantic Revival have been ably dealt with by more than one historian of English literature. Percy's Reliques, and Macpherson's Ossian, the Runic poetry that inspired Gray, Chatterton's infatuation, all represent phases in the effort to recapture the matter, spirit, and form of far-off days. Very often that return to the past meant a return to the Elizabethans, and to Spenser in particular, and through Spenser men unwittingly got much of the spirit of the Middle Ages. Then came Coleridge and Wordsworth, and their efforts to regain something that had been lost to English poetry. T/ie Ancient Mariner and Christabel are the manifestations of the effort of the new poetry in its adventures in the eerie realms of mediaeval lore. But for my purpose, as enforcing my theme, I would for the moment rather dwell on Wordsworth's poetry, in which there is so little of direct inspiration from mediiEvalism. There is no wild Gothic terror and wonderment that one can point to as linking him with mediaeval machinery. Yet in his very canons of poetic diction, his early contemning of artifice, his exaltation of spirit, aiming seriously at the truth of things, his placing of the lesson over and above the form, his treatment of Nature especially in her sterner moods, his attitude as prophet-poet dealing with the realities of his time, the very limitations noted in him as poet, help to remind one that we are not here dealing with a poet of London, but one bred among the solitary cliffs, among the Presences of Nature in the sky And on the earth, i86 TO MODERN CIVILISATION among the " visions of the hills, and souls of lonely places." It is of no small interest that the chief of the Lake Poets is a West Midland poet, and belongs to about the same district as that assigned to the poet of Pearl and of Gawain and the Green Knight. Mediaeval beauty revealed itself truly through Keats, who through Spenser passed on to Chaucer^ and touched with his own genius mediaevalism, even as he transformed the myths of Hellas. Keats entered into the land of faery, his poetic soul untouched by mere antiquarianism, and for sheer inimitable mediaeval glamour nothing can exceed his transmuting touch: I met a lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery's child ; Her hair was long, her foot was light. And her eyes were wild. I set her on my pacing steed. And nothing else saw all day long ; For sideways would she lean, and sing A faery's song. " The Wizard of the North," on whom the spell of medi- aevalism worked so mightily, restored with marvellous precision the panorama of mediaeval life. It is not here a matter of the poet's own spiritual outlook. Yet one may recapture much of the matter of mediaevalism without being affected by its spirit. The theme of King Arthur is perhaps of all others the most abiding and inspiring in English literature; but the artistic beauty, delicacy, and charm of Tennyson's Idylls are a long way off from any antiquarian revival. He feels himself inheritor of the great mediaeval theme, and applies thereto his own ideals and workmanship. Through Keats, back through the ages to Chaucer, 187 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS Tennyson links himself to those poets who gave the first place in the art of poetry to the quest for the beautiful in harmony, diction, and picturesqueness — a contrast to his contemporary Browning, whose alleged obscurity and neglect of finesse remind one of the other type of the poetic mind, caring more for the message than the form. The Pre-Raphaelite movement manifested itself in literature as well as in art. Rossetti, if not Holman Hunt, belongs to, and was not merely associated with, English literature. But one of the brotherhood, William Morris, represents better than anyone of the age that has passed some of the main aspects of the subject here dealt with. In memorable lines addressed to Chaucer he hailed that poet as " the idle singer of an empty day," a refrain which later on he applied to himself. He, the poet of " art for art's sake," found his own heart near to Chaucer, " great of heart and tongue"; and in his jfirst published book. The Defence of Guenevere^ we find him stretching out his arms to capture the fancies of mediaeval romance and repicturing them with new artistic charms. The spirit of Chaucer is on him in this volume, which was the earnest of even greater achievement. That spell still held him as the poet of The Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise. Then came upon him the deeper spirit that set him pondering on social problems, and " the idle singer of an empty day " became the protagonist of the cause of social reform and the dignity of work. Another spell possessed him, linking him to the spirit of Langland, or, at all events, of Langland's contemporary, John Ball, with his famous text : TO MODERN CIVILISATION When Adam dalf, and Eve span, Who was thanne a gentilman ? He brought into English literature the riches, not only of mediaeval Romantic literature, but also of the Sagas and Eddas of old Scandinavia. As artist he had kinship with Chaucer; but there co-existed in his being that other spirit of the literature of Chaucer's time represented by his great contemporary, the author of The Vision of Piers Plowman. Translator of the Odyssey and the Mneid^ he ERRATA ^ On page i88 lines 14, 15, read "as not" instead of "as," and " humbly " instead of " later on." strams. ine quest ror me uciiuLuui win ima cApicssiun in richest harmonies, and the teaching of the lesson will still be enforced by prophet-poets. As in the past, so in the future there will be many mansions in the great house of English Poetry, and one at least there will always be, richly storied from the realms of Mediaeval Romance, with Magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Israel Gollancz 189 VII EDUCATION THE previous lectures of this course have told of the mediaeval contribution to religion, philosophy, science, art, literature; lectures yet to be given will discuss mediaeval society, politics, and economics. There is not one of these things which does not educate; and if those lectures satisfy you that the Middle Ages made substantial additions to human culture, then the case for mediaeval education is already argued and proved. But there is a use of the word * education * which confines its range to schools and to similar institutions; presum- ably the word was so interpreted by those who arranged the present series. Although I deprecate as strongly as possible this limitation of the term, I will try to keep within it. Our subject is the mediaeval contribution to education so understood ; and I propose to use the word ' contribu- tion * so as to include negative as well as positive factors. Any historical period may be regarded as a field upon which men experimented in the art of living ; when men of a later age come to survey such a period from their own vantage-ground they will detect failure as well as success, weak points and strong points in their prede- cessors* experimenting. So regarded, our subject is of much more than antiquarian interest. The ultra-modern man who thinks of the Middle Ages as * reactionary,' obsolete, or sunk without leaving a trace will discover in 190 CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN CIVILISATION mediaeval shortcomings matter suggestive of reform in the practice of to-day. He will have the added satisfaction of saying that he had " told you so." The record of defect is a negative contribution, but a contribution never- theless. We ourselves are past doubt making similar contributions to the future. But the historically informed man, knowing that his own age is the residuary legatee of the ages which have preceded, will attend rather to the mediaeval successes, the positive contributions of the past, and these he will discover to be neither few nor unimportant, but fraught with instruction for the present time. How has it come about that for centuries past all formal schooling in Western Europe has had a literary foundation, and a superstructure which, in the main, has also been literary — a business of papers, pens, and ink ? The answer goes back beyond the early limit of our period, to the pre-Christian time when the rhetorical education prevailed throughout the Roman Empire. Grammar — that is, the study of the languages and literatures of Rome and of Greece — was the staple of the instruction then given, its higher stages constituting a training in rhetoric whose chief merit was thought to be in style, whether of the written or the spoken word. The two literatures make a mirror of human life, of its highest ideals and of its lowest, poorest performances no less, as Greeks and Latins conceived or observed them. When Christianity reached the classes whose education had been of this kind, and the question arose. How should the converts' children be educated .'' these adherents of the new faith were in a quandary. The only general public form of schooling available was that which they themselves had received in the State and municipal schools of the Empire. But the 191 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS instruction there given was based upon, and largely consisted of, the study of literatures which were uncom- promisingly pagan, and sometimes flagrantly opposed to Christian morals. " Hearts devoted to Christ find no room for the Muses, nor lie open to Apollo." Tertullian (a.d. 150-230) reflects this quandary In an age when a Christian literature was only in process of consolidation, and therefore not yet available for school use. He held that it was impossible for a Christian to be a schoolmaster or to teach letters, since the exercise of that profession implied belief in a pagan theology and the daily practice of pagan rites and customs. But the pupil was in a different case. As a learner already fortified by knowledge of the Christian faith, ** he neither receives nor becomes a party to " the paganism which necessarily forms so large a part of Greek and Latin letters. This is, of course, an entirely inconsistent attitude for Tertullian to take up. But note his reason for adopting it. " We know it may be said that, if it is not permissible to the servants of God to teach letters, neither will it be permis- sible to learn them. How, then, may anyone be trained to human intelligence or to any understanding or business, since literature is the record of all life ? How can we repudiate secular studies^ without which divine studies are not -possible ? Let us, therefore, appreciate the necessity of literary learning in its incompatibility on the one hand and its inevitableness on the other." There was much life in Tertullian's paradox, since the necessity of studying Latin, if not Latin and Greek, became more evident as time advanced. On the break-up of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, Latin, and such knowledge of Greek as survived in the West in the original or in Latin translation, constituted the sole de- 192 TO MODERN CIVILISATION positories of knowledge of all kinds, whether desired for the sake of a profession or for purposes of culture. St Augustine of Hippo toward the close of the fourth century declared that a knowledge of the Liberal Arts was necessary if the Scriptures were to be understood. Some two cen- turies or more later Virgilius the Grammarian gave the same reason for studying * grammar.' Both were repeating Tertullian's dictum respecting " secular studies, without which divine studies are not possible." Since * divine studies,' or divinity, meant the study of the Scriptures and the writings of the Christian Fathers, grammar, the systematic study of the languages in which these were written, was the indispensable gate of approach. Thus, however unwillingly, the Christian Church for Christian purposes kept alive so much of the ancient pre-Christian civilisation as is revealed in Latin and, to a much less degree in the West, in Greek literature. The Church's recognised form of secular instruction was simply the rhetorical education of Imperial Rome as described by Quintilian. The politic * conversions ' which took place after the reign of Constantine must have included many whose conversion was merely acquiescence, and amongst these would be found adherents to the old reli- gion and culture. Of course, men, whether Christian or not, were not all insensible to the intrinsic attraction, beauty, and moral value of Latin and Greek letters ; there were Christians not a few of whom St Jerome was typical. The Saint was himself a distinguished product of the older culture as it existed in the fourth century. While lying ill in Syria, he turned for solace to Plautus and Cicero in preference to the Psalter. He dreamed that he was dead, and on the threshold of the other world was met by the challenge, " Who art thou ? " To his answer, " A N 193 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS Christian," he received the reply, " No, no Christian, but a Ciceronian ; where the treasure is, there is the heart also." The dates of some early extant manuscripts -of Virgil are significant from this point of view. Those at St Gall and in the Vatican Library belong to the fourth century, while the Florentine manuscript, which once belonged to the monastery of Bobbio, was written in the fifth. Virgil remained a favourite author throughout the Middle Ages; the part which Dante makes him play in the Commedia will be recalled. Such names as those of Donatus, St Augustine, Boethius are symbolic of the close interplay between the Christian and pagan civilisations. It is possible, nay, comparatively easy, to draw up a list of names of men who possessed a knowledge of ancient literature, the names traversing the centuries through the so-called Dark Ages right down to the revival of classical learning and the beginning of the modern period. When account is taken of the dis- covery by fifteenth-century scholars of ancient manuscripts of the classics in monastic libraries, it is well to dilate upon the dust and neglect of their condition; but it is not well to ignore the significance of the fact that they were there to be discovered. The Middle Ages, then, continued the rhetorical instruc- tion which had constituted the formal schooling of Latins and Greeks. But the word ' rhetoric ' (which literally should mean no more than composition, particularly of speeches), when used comprehensively as meaning a mode of education, involved much more than this. Quintilian describes the orator as " the good man skilled in speaking," and he certainly attaches as much importance to the good- ness as to the skill. Moreover, he has a prejudice in favour of the view, not universally entertained by rhetori- 194 TO MODERN CIVILISATION cians, that the orator should be a well-informed man who really has something to communicate when he speaks. In consequence, the education of the orator, as Quintilian conceived him, included instruction in a great variety of matters as well as in the art of composition. At the beginning of our period, early in the fifth century, the curriculum had become organised into the Seven Liberal Arts, which are sometimes subdivided into the three ' arts * of the Trivium, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and the four * disciplines ' of the Quadrivium, geometry, arith- metic, astronomy, music. The all-round character of this course of study will be noted, although all the seven terms are not synonymous with the same words as used to-day. Dialectic, which at its best meant what we now call philo- sophy, at its worst meant formal logic, a dry and some- what sterile form of which was in great favour in mediaeval schools and universities. Grammar, as already said, was the study of both language and literature; the Middle Ages were over when the word acquired its present-day meaning. Arithmetic under Boethius, the master-mathe- matician of mediaeval students, stood for the study of the properties of numbers, particularly of the doctrine of ratio and proportion. Astronomy tended to wander into astrology. Music was not so much the practical art as the mathematical and physical study of musical sound. Grammar was the universal entrance to all these arts, and beyond them to the professional studies of the theo- logian, lawyer, and medical man, since the matter of their studies was to be found in the works of Latin authors and of Greek authors whose books were known to the West chiefly in Latin versions. Accordingly, grammar was par excellence the work of the school, though in the later Middle Ages * trivial schools ' aspired to go beyond it. MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS The conditions of mediaeval teaching called for the preservation and diffusion of books when printing was unknown ; that art, itself a great mediaeval contribution to education, was not invented in Europe till near the close of our period, the mid-fifteenth century. What was done during the intervening centuries ? The word ' manu- script ' calls up visions of splendid colour and of delicate craftsmanship in many minds, to the exclusion of all thought of cheapness or of multiplicity of copies. Yet there were cheap and, no doubt, poor manuscripts in ancient Rome and in mediaeval Italy. These, like the earliest books printed outside these islands, were school books, books of devotion and of learning, books of stand- ing which were comparatively in general request. But the production of manuscripts on a large scale involves a settled order of life not easily found in the centuries which witnessed the prostration of Rome. In the middle of the sixth century Cassiodorus, who had been an Italian civil servant of the highest rank, founded a monastery in Southern Italy, and made the transcription of manuscripts part of the business of his monks. While the prime purpose was the preservation and extension of * divine letters,' secondary objects were the study of * grammar * as preparatory to divinity, and the pursuit of the Seven Liberal Arts as auxiliary to both. In other words, this particular form of monastic labour tended to the preservation and propagation of ancient letters and learn- ing. Other monasteries and other monastic societies followed the example thus set. With the rise of univer- sities in the twelfth century and the multiplication of schools, the copying of manuscripts became a trade exercised independently of monasteries and of the devo- tion of the individual scholar. At the close of our period 196 TO MODERN CIVILISATION there were in England Greeks, whose names and places of work are on record, who were employed in transcribing Greek manuscripts. The writing-room of the monastery implied its book- room or library. Alcuin, at that time scolastkus^ or director, of the cathedral school of York, has left an account of its library as it was in the late eighth century. It contained copies of the Scriptures and the writings of divines of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew origin ; the Greek and Hebrew were very probably in Latin translations. It also included the writings of Christian Latin poets, and works by Aristotle (again, in Latin), Pliny, Cicero, Virgil, Statius, Lucan, as well as treatises by the grammarians. There were famous libraries in the great monasteries of Bobbio, St Gall, and Luxeuil, foundations of Irish origin dating from the sixth and seventh centuries. Bobbio in particular owned great store of manuscripts. Shortage of writing material, a strong desire to write what chiefly in- terested contemporary monastic readers, and a weakened sense of the worth of classical works united to favour the reprehensible practice of erasing the original handwriting and using the vellum skins afresh. These palimpsests afford a striking illustration of a possible danger lurking behind a consuming desire to be * up-to-date,* since the second writing very rarely compensated for the loss of the first. Dr M. R. James thinks that these erasures seldom, if ever, were perpetrated after the eleventh cen- tury ; manuscripts now extant show that there was great activity in transcribing classical authors during the ninth century, and that manuscripts were produced in great numbers during the twelfth century.^ Toward the close of our period the library catalogue ^ M. R. James, The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts (1919). 197 MEDIAEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS of Peterhouse shows entries under the names of Sallust, QuintiHan, Seneca, Ovid, Statius, Lucan — a few authors of the first rank amongst a great welter of forgotten mediaeval writers. In 1439, and again in 1443, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, presented to the University of Oxford books in manuscript which included works by Cicero, a Greek-Latin vocabulary, and Latin translations from Plato, Aristotle, and ^Eschines. But in Duke Humphrey we have an amateur of the revived classical learning, and are therefore moving beyond the Middle Ages, his date not- withstanding. Still, his library marks the time of transi- tion, the greater portion consisting of mediaeval treatises on the Seven Liberal Arts, on divinity, law, and medicine. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the beginning of such great collections of books as those of the Louvre, the Vatican, and the Laurentian Library at Florence. In these various ways the Middle Ages transmitted a knowledge and a certain appreciation of the civilisation of Rome and Greece. Parenthetically it may be pointed out that these islands played no mean part in this transmission. An inherent weakness in rhetorical instruction, its exces- sive admiration for form as such, reduced continental writing in the sixth and seventh centuries to a trivial pedantry and the neglect of literature, faults which were intensified by the comparative ignorance of Greek. Ireland never formed part of the Roman Empire. By ways on which authorities are not agreed, Irish scholars, who were invariably Christian monks, kept touch with the East, retained some knowledge of the Greek language as well as of classical Latin literature, avoided the stupid pedantry of their continental contemporaries, and in due course taught these virtues to the English of Northumbria. Both Irish and English, but the former especially, com- 198 TO MODERN CIVILISATION municated these benefits to Gaul, to Alemannia, and to the Prankish kingdoms. So it came about that the literary, bookish type of education, established originally within the Latin civilisa- tion, was maintained and made the system of the mediaeval schools, the system which flourished down to our own day — if indeed it is appropriate to speak of it in the past tense. The Middle Ages, however, supplemented this literary culture in a way to be described presently. The present-day curriculum is greatly indebted to that which was in operation under the Roman Empire; and we owe the transmission chiefly to mediaeval solicitude for the study of divinity. The same interest also caused the Middle Ages to produce a system of institutions and of their administration from which the main lines of modern public instruction have been evolved. When the Christian Church became an integral part of the Roman imperial polity, its bishops were usually drawn from socially prominent families, whose sons had received the customary rhetorical education. In such cases the bishop's seat formed a local centre of culture, clerical and lay. When Church and Empire fell upon evil days, this concentration of culture was intensified. Missionary work amongst barbarian populations and theological controversy with pagan fellow-citizens made great demands upon the teaching function of the Church. Education was particu- larly conceived as a training in divine letters, to which grammar and the Liberal Arts were necessary. The supreme educational authority and administrator within each diocese was the bishop, or his representative. From time to time councils of the Church laid the duty of education upon cathedral and collegiate churches and upon the greater monasteries. It was held that the instruction given in 199 MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS these capitular and monastic schools should be gratuitous. Teaching in grammar and divinity was necessary for those who were to become priests ; the choristers must be able to read the Latin Psalter and service-book and to sing. Divinity developed into theology, and the latter involved obvious relations with philosophy which, under the in- fluence of Aristotelian teaching, became scholasticism. At the base of this theological and philosophical learning lay ' grammar ' and the Liberal Arts. Thus, a cathedral or a collegiate church or a monastery which was active in discharging the function of teaching contained in embryo both a grammar-school and a university. In favourable circumstances, such as those of Paris, Orleans, Chartres, those institutions were actually evolved from the eccle- siastical centre. The song schools, which taught music and the mere reading of Latin as the language of worship, had powers of development which sometimes carried them beyond their own modest function and into the sphere of the grammar-school. At an early period the supervision of these ecclesiastical schools was delegated by the bishop, or abbot, to a member of the chapter (in most cases, the chancellor), who in respect of this duty was known as the scolasticus, archiscolus, or archiscola. He might, or might not, actively exercise the office of teacher; but in all cases he licensed all school- masters within the diocese, determined whether a school was needed in a particular district, and took measures intended to prevent overlapping and excessive competition. He claimed to supervise schools of lay origin, such as those founded by town councils and guilds, and schools attached to hospitals. His jurisdiction naturally extended to the numerous schools which were associated with chantries either by express foundation or by custom. In short, 200 TO MODERN CIVILISATION the Middle Ages gave to later times not only a substantial part of the curriculum, but also schools, universities, and the conception of public education locally administered by a director. Gratuitous instruction and the licensing of schoolmasters without exacting a fee were principles of that administration which were not observed at all times and in all places; nevertheless, when fees were charged they were always low. Board and lodging were, of course, paid for by pupils who were not * on the foundation,' and therefore had no claim upon it beyond instruction. The university is a peculiarly mediaeval institution in point of origin. Athens, Alexandria, Rhodes, and other centres of the ancient civilisation possessed places of higher education which attracted young men from distant lands. But they had little in common with universities as we know them, on their administrative side especially. The division of teachers and of students into faculties, the ordered systems of curricula and of corresponding degrees, the government of the university society, are all forms of development which took shape in mediaeval times. The very name * university,' /.