Progress and History Part 5

It may, however, be said that this may all be true, but that in all this we have after all only an example of the preoccupation of the Middle Ages with conduct and religion. I must, therefore, ask you to consider the character and development of the intellectual movement of the Middle Ages. And here, fortunately, we can find the best of guidance in Dr.

Rashdall's great work on _The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages_, and in Dr. R. L. Poole's _Ill.u.s.trations of Mediaeval Thought_.

Indeed I could wish that a little more attention was given to the history and character of the intellectual movement which the Universities represent, and perhaps a little less to reading and discussing the great scholastic works of the thirteenth century, which are almost impossible to understand except in relation to the intellectual movements of the twelfth century.

The new intellectual movement came very suddenly in the last years of the eleventh century; why it should have come then is hard to determine, but it seems reasonable to say that it represents the reawakening of the desire for knowledge which had been in abeyance during the stormy centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, when men had little leisure for anything but the constant labour to secure a little decent order and peace. For a few years, indeed, in the ninth century the genius of Charlemagne had almost restored the order of civilization, and even in those few years the human mind rea.s.serted itself, and for a moment the learning and culture which had been preserved mainly by the Irish and their pupils in Britain, and in Central Europe, flowered and bore fruit; but with his death Western Europe plunged again into anarchy and misery, and it was only slowly that the genius of the great German emperors in Central Europe, and of the Norman settlers in France and England, rebuilt the commonwealth of European civilization. By the end of the eleventh century the work was not indeed done, but was being done, and men had again a little leisure, and the desire for knowledge reawakened, but indeed it was no mere gentle desire, but a veritable pa.s.sion which possessed the men of the twelfth century, and it was this spontaneous pa.s.sion which produced the universities.

The first thing, indeed, which we must observe about the oldest universities of Europe, especially Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, is just this, that they were not made by any external authority, that they did not derive their being from Church or State, from pope or king, but that they were formed by the enthusiasm and pa.s.sion which drew men from every quarter of Europe to sit at the feet of some man or another who could give them the knowledge which they desired, and, in their turn, to become teachers. It is quite true that as time went on, and they found that popes and kings were friendly and interested, these groups of students procured for themselves bulls and charters of recognition and protection, but while later universities may trace their foundation to these respectable patrons, the older universities recognize them indeed as benefactors and friends, but not as founders, but rather claim that they grew out of men's desire for knowledge, and that they were recognized by the general consent of the civilized world.

In the second place it is important, and especially I think in these days, to understand that the men who thus created the universities in their eagerness to learn, were of every cla.s.s and condition, rich and poor, n.o.ble and simple, and they lived as they could, in comfortable quarters if they were wealthy men, or in the garrets and cellars of the citizens if they were poor, and for the most part they were poor; but neither poverty nor riches could destroy their n.o.ble thirst for knowledge. The life of the universities was indeed turbulent and disorderly, the students were always at war with the citizens, and, when they were not breaking the heads of the citizens or having their heads broken by them, they were at war with each other, the men of the north with the southerners, the western with the eastern; for the universities were not local or national inst.i.tutions, but were made up of a cosmopolitan crowd of men of every nation in Europe, intelligible to each other, as unhappily we are not, by the universal knowledge and use of that mediaeval Latin, which might distress the Ciceronian ears of a pedant of the Renaissance, but was a good, useful, and adaptable language. It was a turbulent, disorderly, brutal, profligate, and drunken world, for the students were as hard drinkers as the citizens, but it was animated, it was made alive by a true pa.s.sion for knowledge, by an unwearied and never satisfied intellectual curiosity.

But it will be asked, what did they learn? Well, the only answer that one can give is that they learned whatever there was to learn. Our literary friends have often still the impression that in the Middle Ages men spent their whole time in learning theology, and were afraid of other forms of knowledge, but this is a singular delusion. As the universities developed a system, their studies were arranged in the main under four heads, the general studies of what came to be called the Faculty of Arts, and the professional studies of the three superior Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology, but the student was not normally allowed to study in the three superior Faculties until he had spent some years in the studies of the Faculty of Arts. It is therefore with this latter that we are primarily occupied. The studies in the Faculty of Arts consisted, to use our modern terminology, of literature, philosophy, and science, and the accomplished mediaeval student was expected to know whatever there was to know.

And this means--what is strangely often forgotten--that the studies of the mediaeval universities were primarily based upon the literature which had survived from the ancient world. The Latin poets and orators were their models of literary art, the surviving treatises of the ancients their text-books in medicine, and the Greek philosophers in Latin translations, or in Latin works founded on them, their masters in thought. To understand the extent of the influence and the knowledge of antiquity of a twelfth-century scholar we need only turn again to John of Salisbury, and we shall find him as familiar as any Renaissance scholar with Latin literature, and possessing a very considerable acquaintance with Greek literature so far as it could be obtained through the Latin.[30] Indeed, so much is he possessed by the literature of antiquity that in works like the _Policraticus_ he can hardly write two lines together without a quotation from some cla.s.sical author. This type of literary scholarship has been too much overlooked, and, as I said before, too exclusive an attention has been given to the thirteenth-century schoolmen, who are neither from a literary nor from a philosophical point of view as representative of mediaeval scholars, and philosophically they are often really unmediaeval, for the general quality of mediaeval thought is its Platonism: the Aristotelian logic was indeed known to the Middle Ages through Boethius, but the other Aristotelian works were not known till towards the middle of the thirteenth century.

It would be impossible here, even if I were competent, which I am not, to discuss the character of mediaeval thought, but one thing we can observe, one aspect of the intellectual method which may serve to clear away some confusion. The great intellectual master of the Middle Ages was Abelard, and the method which he elaborated in his _Sic et Non_ is the method which imposed itself upon all aspects of mediaeval thought.

It has often been supposed that mediaeval thinkers were in such a sense the creatures of authority that it was impossible for them to exercise any independent judgement; how far this may have been true of the decadent scholasticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries I do not pretend to say, but such a judgement is a ludicrous caricature of the living and active thought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and a little consideration of the critical method which Abelard developed is sufficient to correct this. This is as follows: first some general principle is enunciated for consideration, then all the authorities which may seem to support it are cited, then all the authorities against, and finally the writer delivers his own judgement, criticizing and explaining the opinions which may seem contrary to it.

The method has its defects and its limitations, but its characteristic is rather that of scepticism than of credulity. And it is on this method that the most important systems of knowledge of the Middle Ages are constructed. It was applied by Gratian in his _Decretum_, the first great reasoned treatise on Church law, and leads there often to somewhat unexpected conclusions, such as that even the legislative authority of the Pope is limited by the consenting custom of the Christian people;[31] and it is this method upon which the great systematic treatises, like the _Suma Theologica_ of St. Thomas Aquinas, were constructed in the thirteenth century. Whatever its defects may be the method cannot fairly be accused of ignoring difficulties and of a submission to authority which leaves no place for the critical reason.

I have, I hope, said enough to make it clear that there was a real and living intellectual movement in the Middle Ages, and that even in those days men had resumed the great adventure of the pursuit of truth.

We can only for a moment consider the significance and the character of mediaeval civilization as it expresses itself in Art, and we must begin by noticing a distinction between mediaeval art and mediaeval learning, which is of the first importance.

The intellectual movement of the Middle Ages was related to the ancient world, both in virtue of that continuity which was mediated by the Christian Fathers, whose education was that of the later Empire, and also in virtue of the intense and eager care with which mediaeval scholars studied all that they possessed of ancient literature. The relation of the art of the Middle Ages to the ancient world was quite different. There was no continuity between the vernacular poetry of the Middle Ages and that of the ancient world, and while there was a certain continuity in architecture and in mosaic painting, this amounted to little more than that the mediaeval artists took the formal structure or method as the starting-point of their own independent and original work.

For the western art of the third and fourth centuries was conventional and decadent, and had apparently lost its power of recovery, while the art of the centuries which followed was at first rude and imperfect, but was full of new life, determined in its reality and dominated by some intimate sense of beauty; it was in no sense imitative of ancient art, but grew and changed under the terms of its own inherent life and power.

Mediaeval art, whatever else is to be said about it, was new and independent, and it had all the variety, the audacious experiments, characteristic of a living art. Nothing is so foolish as to imagine that it was uniform and unchanging. Indeed, from the historical point of view, the interest of the study of it is curiously contrasted with that of the art of the ancient world. There we have only an imperfect and fragmentary knowledge of the earlier and ruder form; its history, as we know it, might almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the history of a long decadence, not indeed without new developments of importance, as for instance in the architectural structure of Roman building, and perhaps in the sculpture of the Early Empire on one side, and in certain aspects of Latin literature on another. The history of mediaeval art is the history of the long development from what are generally rude forms to the highly developed art of the thirteenth century, a development full of incidents and experiments and variety. I have called the early form rude, but the phrase is not very happy, as those who know either the early mosaic or the early epic will understand.

There are still some people, I suppose, who think that mediaeval poetry was all of one kind, cast in one mould, but the truth is that it is of every form and character. It ranges from the bold imaginative realism of the Epic of England, Iceland, Germany, and France, to the exquisite and gracious but somewhat artificial allegory of the _Romance of the Rose_.

It includes the first great emotional poetry of the modern world--the sense of the greatness and tragedy of human pa.s.sion has perhaps never been expressed in more moving terms than in the _Tristan and Iseult_ of Thomas or Beroul--but it also includes the mordant satire of the Renard poetry and of Jean de Meun, and the gross realistic humour of the Fabliaux. The mediaeval drama, in whose complex development we have to trace many strands, probably represents in its oldest forms the coa.r.s.e farcical buffoonery which may be related to the last fashions of the ancient world; it received a new impulse from the dramatization of scripture history in the twelfth century; but in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at least in France, it had already become substantially a drama of romantic or contemporary life, as we can see in Jean Bodel's _Jeu de St. Nicholas_, in Adam de la Halle's _Jeu de la Feuillee_ and _Robin et Marion_, and in dramas like the _Empress of Rome_ or the _Otho_. Whatever criticism we might want to make on mediaeval literature, at least we cannot say that it was of one type and of one mood.

It is hardly necessary to point out the movement and changes in the other forms of art in the Middle Ages; it is only necessary to remind ourselves that, while we can see that the artists were often hampered by inadequate technical knowledge, they were not conventional or merely imitative.

It would be impossible here to consider the history of mosaic painting, and its development from the decadent Graeco-Roman work of Santa Pudenziana in Rome, to the magnificent and living decorations of St.

Mark's in Venice, or of the cathedral of Monreale. It is enough to remind ourselves of the immense interval which lies between the rude but living sculpture of the ninth century, and the exquisite grace of Chester or Wells, and of that development of architecture which culminates in the majesty of Durham, and in the beauty of Chartres and Westminster Abbey.

It is doubtful if we have yet at all fully or correctly appreciated the nature of mediaeval art; there has been a good deal of foolish talk about 'primitives', which usually goes with a singular ignorance of mediaeval civilization; the one thing which is already clear, and which grows clearer, is that the men of those ages had an instinct and a pa.s.sion for beauty which expressed itself in almost every thing that they touched; and, whatever we have gained, we have in a large measure lost this.

The mediaeval world was then a living growing world, neither cut off from the past, nor unrelated to the future. It was a rough and turbulent world, our ancestors were dogged, quarrelsome, and self-a.s.sertive, and the first task of civilization was to produce some sort of decent order.

The world was a long way off from the firm urbanity of the English policeman. And yet the men of the Middle Ages never fell into that delusion which, as it would seem, has ruined other civilizations; the great effort for order was not in their mind to be fulfilled by any mere mechanical discipline, by any system imposed from outside, the only system of order which they were prepared to accept was one which should express the character, the tradition, and finally the will of the whole community. The great phrase of Edward I's summons to Parliament, 'Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur' (That which concerns all, must be approved by all), was not a mere tag, as some foolish people have thought, but expressed the character and the genius of a living political civilization.

And this rough turbulent world was inspired by a great breath of spiritual and intellectual and artistic life and freedom.

It might well seem as though the Church and religion were merely a new bondage, and in part that is true, but it is not the whole truth. With all its mistakes the religion of the Middle Ages meant the growing apprehension of the reality of that 'love which moves the sun and other stars', it meant the growth of reverence for that which is beyond and above humanity and which is also within it. For it is the last truth of the Christian faith that we know G.o.d only under the terms of human life and nature. And with all the cruelty and brutality of the Middle Ages they taught men love as well as obedience.

Again, it was in these ages, as soon as the confusion of the outer world was a little reduced, that the pa.s.sion for knowledge awoke again in men's hearts. It is true that some were afraid lest the eager inquiry of men's minds should destroy the foundations of that order which men were slowly achieving, but still the pa.s.sionate pursuit of knowledge has rarely been more determined. And once again the world was rough, but these men had an instinct, a pa.s.sion for beauty which expressed itself in almost everything which they touched. They had not, indeed, the almost miraculous sense and mastery of the great artists of Greece, that did not come again till the time of the great Italian artists of the fifteenth century. But they were free from pedantry, from formalism, they left the dying art of the ancient world and made their own way.

Their sense of colour was almost infallible, as those who have seen the mosaics of the older Roman basilicas and of St. Mark's in Venice will know; but, indeed, we have only to look at the illuminated ma.n.u.scripts which are to be found in all our libraries. And in that great art in which, above all perhaps, they expressed themselves, in their great architecture, we see the growth of a constructive genius which is only overshadowed by the superb beauty of its form.

A rough, disorderly, turbulent, greedy, cruel world, but it knew the human soul, and it knew the human heart. The ancient world had ended in a great destruction, but the sadness and emptiness of its last days compel us to feel that it was well that it should end. And the new world was a world of life, of crude force and restless energy, and from it we have received the principles and the forms of a great civilization, and the temper which is never satisfied, for there is no end to life.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

H. W. C. Davis, _Mediaeval Europe_ (Home University Library).

Lord Bryce, _History of Roman Empire_.

Rashdall, _Universities of Empire in the Middle Ages_.

R. L. Poole, _Ill.u.s.trations of Mediaeval Thought_.

Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_.

W. P. Ker, _Epic and Romance_.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] Cf. Cicero, _De Legibus_, i. 10-12; and Seneca, _De Beneficiis_, iii. 18.

[24] Cf. Decretals, v. 39. 44, 28.

[25] Cf. Carlyle, _Mediaeval Political Theory_, vol. ii. pp. 244-9.

[26] Cf. John of Salisbury, _Policraticus_, iv. 1.

[27] Cf. Bracton, _De Legibus et Consuetudinibus_, i. 8, 5.

[28] Cf. Manegold, _Ad Gebehardum_, c. x.x.x.

[29] Cf. John of Salisbury, _Policraticus_, iii. 15, viii. 17, 18, 20.

[30] Cf. C. C. J. Webb's edition of John of Salisbury's _Policraticus_, introduction.

[31] Cf. Gratian, _Decretum_, D. iv. c. 3.

V

PROGRESS IN RELIGION