Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning/Chapter III

by Reginald Lane Poole

CHAPTER III.

THE DARK AGE.

If the attempt of John Scotus to change Christianity into a philosophy failed to make an impression upon the succeeding age, it is the less surprising when we consider that he failed in company with all the wise men of the ninth century. Their religions and their philosophical aims were alike forgotten, the practices and beliefs they combated won a gradual acceptance. In the interval between the decline of the Carolingian house and the reformation of the eleventh century, Christendom sank into a grosser view of religion, into an abasement of morals that pervaded the clergy equally with the laity, into an ignorance all but universal. In this Dark Age, as it is well described, it is a thankless task to seek for the elements of enlightenment of which the vestiges are so scanty. Their existence, however, is proved by the life they manifested as soon as the spirit of religion was reäwakened. It was the divorce between religion and learning, between religion and morality, that signalised the time; a divorce that, just as in the seventh century, was conditioned by the helpless confusion of the external order, its effect in turn reäcting upon itself.

Yet to speak of the age as consciously reverting to paganism,^[1] is to misread its character. When the church surrendered her charge of intellectual things, she assimilated herself no doubt to the returning barbarism of the civil state; and in this process she absorbed a variety of pagan elements which came to be identified with the essence of her religion, and from which her rebellious children in the sixteenth century were by no means able entirely to liberate themselves. The service of God was merged in ceremonial on the one hand, in superstition on the other. Even those men who had the wish to uphold the principles which the nobler minds of the ninth cen tury had professed, had not the strength to carry them out consistently. Ratherius, bishop of Verona, a good example of the cultivated churchman of his day and a sturdy enemy of the worldliness and profligacy of his contemporaries, repeats the declamations of saint Agobard against magic. He denounces the credulous spirit of those who assume its efficacy, and yet he himself recommends for some ailment a remedy of an entirely superstitious nature. He has a just contempt for the fashion in which fasts, penances, and pilgrimages were undertaken, and a very slight opinion of their value at all unless controlled by a high spiritual motive: yet his protests against materialistic views of religion are compatible with so hearty an adhesion to the doctrine of transubstantiation that the treatise of Paschasius Radbert, which first formulated it, was often ascribed to him.

Religion was fast subsiding into mere superstition or into its kindred opposite, materialism. The claim to mysterious powers was the means by which the clergy were enabled to maintain their hold upon the people. Insensibly they were enveloped in the same shadow, and we have actually evidence of a body of Christian priests in the diocese of Vicenza who worshipped a God with eyes and ears and hands; they were branded as a distinct order of heretics, anthropomorphites: such was the result of the popular and authorised image-worship. Nor was it only in the ceremonial of the church or in the medley of Christian and heathen manners and thoughts that the collapse of religion made itself felt. Ambitious churchmen found their only opening, now that the ambition of Christian learning was forgotten, in the service of the secular state, where they were the more indispensable, since in the north, at least, they formed the only class that received any sort of mental culture. But it is one of the contrasts between the northern and southern civilisations that while in the former what schools there were, existed solely for the clergy and did not travel beyond their meagre professional requirements, in Italy the degradation of the church and papacy (the more felt because near at hand) produced so general a contempt for their ordinances and prescriptions that educated men turned away from theology to the more tangible interest of classical learning.

The candidates for ecclesiastical orders here mixed with the sons of nobles at schools which were established and conducted, more often than otherwise, by lay philosophers, for the exclusive purpose of teaching grammar, and which to the stricter churchman appeared directly pagan in their bias. One of these teachers, Anselm of Bisate, complains that he was shunned as a demoniac, almost as a heretic; and Anselm, the Peripatetic as he styles himself, is a good, if late, specimen of his class. He was a highly connected Milanese clergyman, a travelled man too, who had visited Mentz and Bamberg. The Rhetorimachia, which he wrote between the years 1049 and 1056, and dedicated to the emperor Henry the Third, is a masterpiece of laborious futility. How little the pedant's vein was in keeping with catholic notions may be learned from a vision which he relates that he once saw. The saints and the muses, he tells us, struggled for possession of him, and he was in the greatest perplexity to which side he should ally himself, for so noble, so sweet, were both companies that I could not choose either of them; so that, were it possible, I had rather both than either.

Under such training as Anselm's, the future clergy of Italy gave themselves up to their humanistic studies with an enthusiasm which the theology of the day was impotent to excite in them. There are even a few symptoms of a declared hostility to Christianity. One Vilgard of Ravenna is said to have reverenced Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal as infallible authorities;^[2] but we cannot draw too broad an inference from this assertion in an age which, we know from the example of Ratherius, was apt to consider the canons of the church and the forged decretals of Isidore as equally with the Bible and the fathers, the discipline of God.^[3] The patriotism of the Italian seduced him into an error possibly more innocuous than that which approved itself to the orthodoxy of the time. There was a mysterious sanction inherent in written documents which it did not occur to men to criticise or distinguish.

In the same way, if any of these scholastics chanced to engage in the controversies of the church, he was inevitably entangled in a motley confusion of sacred and profane. Eugenius Vulgarius exhausts his classical vocabulary, in language recalling the most servile rhetoric of the brazen age of the empire, to express the divinity of that pope whose pontificate is marked by the deepest ruin of order, the vilest abandonment of decency, that Rome ever witnessed. Yet he dismisses the claims of the apostolic see with a confidence worthy of Claudius of Turin or of a modern protestant, and maintains that a man can only obtain the authority of saint Peter by deserving it.^[4] The contradiction would be inconceivable but for the mixture of heterogeneous ideas which marks the barbarism of the age. The church refused to be taught, and suffered accordingly. The clergy who were educated in the Italian rhetorical schools formed the purely secular portion of their order, and led it into more grievous disrepute. If the training of the scholastic was associated with the function of the clerical politician, the union was but external: by the assumption of literary arms the church as a religious body lost more than it gained.

It is moreover significant that the schools of Italy preserved a tradition of Roman law possibly uninterrupted from ancient times.^[5] The special law-school of Pavia dates from the tenth century, and early the eleventh the study of law is spoken of in a way that gives the impression of its being a long-established institution in the ordinary schools. Milo Crispin records that Lanfranc, the famous archbishop of Canterbury, was trained from boyhood in the schools of liberal arts and civil law, after the custom of his country;—in scholis liberalium artium et legum saecularium ad suae morem patriae. Other circumstances too make it highly probable that law formed a regular subject of instruction in many schools from a much earlier period. It would obviously engage the attention of those churchmen who promised themselves a future of political activity. The principles of Roman law would combine themselves with their theological ideas, and it is difficult not to trace in this connexion one of the opportunities through which, in the judgement of competent lawyers, the phraseology and argumentative methods of the old jurisprudence were enabled to penetrate the theology of western Christendom.

In the north, as we have said, the state of the clergy was different.^[6] They had their professional colleges in the schools attached to the greater monasteries and cathedrals. But these, even if a few, especially in Lotharingia, retained something of their vital force, had long lost their popularity and become appropriated to a class. The slender tradition of learning and thought lay hidden in their libraries rather than shone forth in the mechanical instruction of their teachers. The rare pupils who sought for knowledge were left, as we may learn from the experience of bishop Ratherius, to discover it by their own labour. The pursuit of the few was looked on with suspicious jealousy by the many, and the most tentative steps towards enlarging the compass of education were mistrusted as though they had been directed against religion. An excellent illustration of this attitude of mind is afforded by the history of Bruno the Saxon, known by the time-honoured name of saint Bruno. His brother, Otto the Great, was never more consciously the successor of the great Charles and the second founder of the medieval empire, than when he set himself to organise a body of ministers specially educated for the duties of government. The chancellorship had by this time become a mere titular appendage to the archbishops of Mentz, Cologne, Trèves, and Salzburg, whose work was done by the royal chancery or chapel, the staff of clergymen of the household. It was of the first importance not only to train these into efficiency but also to bring up a new generation of administrators qualified to manage the affairs of what was soon to be an empire. This task Otto entrusted to the young abbat Bruno,^[7] who wisely recognised the necessity of promoting the widest learning attainable. Among his studies Greek is specially mentioned. It is an interesting circumstance that now, as in the first foundation of the Palace School by Charles, it was to the British islands that the German looked for help; and Israel, a Scottish bishop,^[8] was called from his cloister at Treves to be his teacher. The coöperation of the Celt recognised as of singular and indispensable importance.

Bruno’s learned ardour and the pains he took to secure the fittest masters and to collect the choicest classical manuscripts that could be found in Italy, are celebrated with wondering admiration by his biographer.^[9] He restored the long ruined fabric of the seven liberal arts; history, rhetoric, poetry, philosophy, especially the more mysterious problems of metaphysics, were the subjects he loved to discuss with the doctors whom he brought together. He joined in the disputations, ready to give counsel, readier to receive it; he would always rather himself be a learner than a teacher. A man of his receptive nature was sure to exercise a personal attraction over those around him, and the power which Bruno possessed he used with a single purpose of leading them through learning to a wisdom that should raise them into another world than that gross and corrupt society in which they lived. His own example, much like king Alfred's, was a model of the union of a scholar and a statesman. Him self continually occupied with every sort of official business he always reserved his early morning hours for study. He withdrew from the noisy mirth of the supper-table to find relief in his books, his energies apparently freshened by the labours of the day. Wherever he went he carried about his library with him as it had been the ark of the Lord.

Yet the age which gloried in the character of archbishop Bruno, could only find in that love of learning which was his special virtue, a reason for doubting whether he were really the saint men called him. The difficulty was resolved in a legend that soon won currency. A certain Poppo, says Thietmar, fell into a trance and was led to an high mountain, whereon he beheld, a great city with beautiful buildings : then approaching a lofty tower he climbed its steep ascent and upon its spacious top obtained the vision of Christ, seated with all his saints. There was Bruno archbishop of Cologne, being accused by the supreme Judge for his vain pursuit of philosophy: howbeit saint Paul was his advocate and he was restored to his throne. To us looking back at Bruno's work, it is difficult to exaggerate its value whether to his nation or to the church at large. Under his guidance the royal palace became the centre also of intellectual life in Germany. Bruno's aim was to fit the clergy to spread this new civilisation over the country, and when they departed to higher offices afterwards, as when he himself was raised to the see of Cologne, to form each one a fresh centre of learning. In this way he seconded the measures which the wisdom of his father and brother, Henry and Otto, had directed to the revival of the political state. The example was taken up by the religious houses, and their schools—those of Reichenau and Saint Gall are particularly distinguished—entered upon a new course of learned activity. The clergy of Lotharingia and Germany became marked out from the rest of Christendom no less by their education than by its fruit, their moral excellence.^[10] To such, seed the German popes owed their distinction, and through them the restoration of the papacy signalised by Leo the Ninth and Gregory the Seventh was made practicable.

It was long before the intellectual revival which began to shew itself from the middle of the tenth century, was sensibly felt. Guitmund, archbishop of Aversa, speaking of the time when Fulbert, who died in 1029, came to govern the school of Chartres, which he made the chief home of learning in Gaul, confesses that at that time the liberal arts had all but become extinct in the land. A single name illuminates the literary record of the age, and Gerbert the Aquitanian, pope Silvester the Second, owes his unique position less to his writings than to his personal influence as a teacher; as a teacher too not of moral but of natural philosophy, as a master not of theology but of statecraft. The stores of his knowledge, – were they acquired from the Arabs during his stay in the Spanish march, or won by long practice and research in every library accessible to him, – were no doubt unequalled. Gerbert was a mathematician, a natural philosopher, and a pioneer of natural philosophers; his learning was believed to be universal: but, except in the domain of positive science, he was but the ready accumulator and diffuser of what was actually within the range of any well-read student of his day. In theology and metaphysics he produced little or nothing. If we exclude the necessary official productions of a dignitary of the church, sermons and speeches addressed to synods and similar gatherings, and these too concerned not with theology but with ecclesiastical politics,^[11] we shall find that Gerbert composed not one theological work, or, it he wrote any, they have been lost; for the only treatise of this class which has been ascribed to him is certainly not his.^[12]

It was indeed in practical affairs that Gerbert's interest was engaged, and his thoughts no more than his actions were disquieted by any considerations of religion. From a teacher Gerbert became a politician. We discern his character in the arts by which he obtained the archbishoprick of Rheims.^[13] Full of resource, unscrupulous in intrigue, he had the shrewdness, the practical sagacity, of a man of the world: moral difficulties were no difficulties to him. His record lies not in a fancied inauguration of the crusades (this was to all appearance but the hasty conclusion from a letter in which he laments the spoliation of the holy city, drawn by those who knew the potency of such an appeal a century later^[14]); but in the imperial projects which he impressed on the boy Otto the Third and whereby he hoped to restore to Rome her ancient glory. Gerbert the magician is an imagination of later growth, but the currency of the fable bears witness to the uniqueness of his position.^[15] A scholar who did not concern himself with the higher questions of faith and thought could only, it appeared, be susceptible of influences of an opposite and infernal origin.

Yet the studies which Gerbert avoided were in fact the more dangerous, and it is hardly perhaps a coincidence that the contemporary reawakening of interest in intellectual things was accompanied by a strange crop of heresies. z In a time of mental ferment, now as often in the history of Christianity, it was impossible to restrain the speculations of men with undisciplined faculties, and living, as most of the scholars of the middle ages lived, a cloistered life. The relief which some monks would find from the routine of devotion in works of husbandry or handicraft, the more cultivated would seek in meditation on the mysteries of religion or the secrets of philosophy. If they were teachers such enquiries might be initiated by the questions of pupils. The ambition of novelty, of originality, would be another stimulus to metaphysical exploits; and novelty of this sort would seldom lie within the bounds of the traditional dogma. Men of a less independent spirit, whose minds were just opening to the apprehension of difficulties in the doctrinal system of the church, would be content to accept any new solution of their doubts that was offered to them. In the present instance it was probably contact with the dispersed heretics of the oriental church that kindled the flame,^[16] and hence forward in various lands and under various forms there is a constant current of opposition to the authorised belief of Christendom. Unlike the properly intellectual movement, it affected the easily excited people even more than the clergy. The character of the sectaries, their temperance, their earnestness, their devotion, which appeared in a noble contrast with the greed, the profligacy, the worldliness, of the orthodox, were readily accepted as credentials for the truth of their tenets. The history of these heretics has, however, less interest than some of their peculiarities might seem to promise. What, for instance, can be said of the story told by Rodulph Glaber of a countryman of Vertus near Chalons who had a vision, at its warning put away his wife, went to the church, there destroyed a cross and a picture of the Saviour, and declaimed to the people on the wickedness of paying tithes?^[17] It is added that he sustained his assertions by passages from the Bible, while explaining that what the prophets said was in part not to be believed: whence we may gather that he had imbibed some of the special doctrines of the eastern Paulicians, whose loyalty to the New Testament is supposed (though the evidence is conflicting) to have been balanced by their repudiation of the Old. An extreme case like this betrays, with however much exaggeration, the characteristics of medieval heresy, an incongruous mixture of heterogeneous elements, a dualism borrowed from the religion of Zoroaster, ill-compacted with a rationalism that claimed to represent the teaching of saint Paul.

From the first ages of Christianity there had always been a tendency more or less widely operative, to free the religion from its burthen of Jewish principles and traditions. The puritanism of the Hebrew scriptures was exchanged for another puritanism resting upon the idea of the essential evilness of matter. Marcion and Manes at different epochs framed systems of which the uniting principle was the double reign of good and evil. The authority of the prime God was confronted by a restless malignant power whose rule was coëval with the existence of the universe. The opposition of spirit and matter, of good and evil, was so fundamental that it was impossible, in their view, to conceive the incarnation of the Deity in a human body or his liability to the sufferings of man: such facts, they held with the primitive docetists, were illusions to the senses; they were true only in an ideal acceptation. The same principle forbade their allowing any spiritual, or at least any perfecting, virtue to the material act of baptism or to the sacramental elements of bread and wine. They rejected every emblem of religious worship, the image, the painted cross, the reliques of saints. The human soul was deprived of all accessory aids to salvation, of all that interposed between spirit and spirit: celibacy, the proof of its conquest over matter, was the one indispensable condition to eternal happiness. The schemes of the Manicheans and the Marcionites came to diverge in the idea of the church. Manes inaugurated a priestly caste; his theory was sacerdotal: the later Marcionites on the other hand adopted a congregational system.

From Syria the Marcionites, or as they were afterwards known, the Paulicians, spread over the eastern provinces of Asia Minor. They seem to have absorbed the remnant of the Manicheans; at least they inherited their ill-repute: original differences of doctrine may have been forgotten in community of oppression.^[18] They grew strong and resisted, for a while were victorious; it was attempted to break their strength by a policy of transportation, and numbers were carried over at different times into Thrace, where they came to form a powerful and aggressive community. Extending from Bulgaria among the strictly Slavonian populations of Servia and Bosnia, the Bogomiles, as they are now called, appear to have found the soil already partly prepared for the reception of their teaching by the primitive beliefs and customs of the people; and from these lands, by channels of which we are imperfectly informed, they passed into Sicily, Italy, France, and even Germany; and from the end of the tenth century onward there is hardly a generation in which the catholic church was not troubled by the appearance of their spiritual offspring which it confused under the familiar and infamous name of Manicheans.

The success of the heretics was assisted by several circumstances in the ecclesiastical condition of the west. Their views of Christian brotherhood were eagerly welcomed by people who groaned under the pretensions of an unworthy priesthood; their other heresy, the enforcement of celibacy, was already the kernel of faith among the stricter churchmen. That horror for the married state which the saint Augustin had retained from his youthful Manichaism, had already subverted the Christian idea of family life. It was the instrument which the reformers of the tenth and eleventh centuries again borrowed from the heretics, and by which they strove to purify the priesthood; for however the doctrine of celibacy was theoretically admitted, the authority of the church had hitherto interfered but little with the domestic relations of the clergy. Pope Hadrian the Second in the ninth century was himself a married man. The clergy of Milan claimed their right as depending on the express rule of saint Ambrose. In Germany, England, and France the parish priests lived openly and without blame with their wives.^[19] The reversal of this state of things, the work of Hildebrand, was undoubtedly designed with the sagacity of a statesman; but if his success established the church as a political power, it did not promote the morality of the clergy.

The defenders of the old custom at Milan were quick to see the dangers that would arise if married persons were excluded from holy orders.^[20] The historian Landulf has preserved a remarkable record (if to some extent imaginary, hardly less valuable as expressing opinions current in Milan not long after the event took place) of a disputation they held with their opponents on the subject.

One declared that to deprive a priest of his wife meant simply to multiply his mistresses: vetando unam et propriam uxorem, centum fornicatrices ac adulteria multa concedis. Another, the archdeacon Wibert, recited the praises of married virtue from the Bible and from saint Ambrose, and boldly declared that whatever was lawful to a layman was lawful also to a clergyman; for all are priests, whosoever be sons of the church, be they laymen or clerks. They invoked the freedom of the apostolic age, and charged the upholders of celibacy with the taint of those of Montforte, a castle not far from Asti which afforded shelter to a sect whose heresy was a matter of common notoriety at the time.^[21] The Milanese had chosen a telling argument. The reproach was so far a just one that the party of Peter Damiani and of Hildebrand, and these despised sectaries were in this regard equally fallen from the primitive humanity of their religion.

The fortunes of the western Paulicians need not detain us long. There was no principle of development in their creed; it reflected no genuine freedom of thought. It took root among the obscurest and rudest orders of society, in the ignorant villages of Lombardy or in the low suburbs of the French or Flemish trading towns. An enthusiast, generally an Italian, might stir up the common people and expose them to the vengeance of the church: such were the victims of catholic zeal at Toulouse,^[22] at Arras, Cambray, and Liège, in the course of the eleventh century. But the influence rarely as yet extended deeper into society, as when, in the case just alluded to, the heretics (here they were clergy as well as laymen) enjoyed the alliance of the countess of Montforte.^[23] In one single instance, if its source be not wrongly traced, we find a whole religious foundation in an important town, a widely frequented clerical school, pervaded by the dangerous current.

Perhaps the most singular fact in the history of these canons of Saint Cross at Orleans is the silent and unsuspected way in which their sect grew. A member of it had been dead three years before his character was discovered. One of the two leaders, Stephen,^[24] had been confessor to the queen of France; he and his colleague Lisoius, or Lisieux, were familiars of the court and of the king. The very council which condemned them admits that they were distinguished among all for wisdom, surpassing in acts of holiness, bountiful in almsgiving. At length their opinions were detected, and a synod convened to examine them. They were charged with nameless atrocities in their secret meetings, calumnies of the same class as those with which the early Christians were wont to insult the heretics of their day, and possibly as false.^[25] The judgement, we may be sure, was the more exemplary on account of their previous favour in high places. The persons whose intimacy with the arraigned canons might seem to commit them too deeply to their errors, attested their own innocence by the savage joy with which they heard the sentence,—the queen, according to one account, plucked out the eye of her old confessor as he passed from the hall;—and thirteen of the number, two others recanting, perished at the stake.

The Acts of the synod of Orleans suggest no clue as to the origin of this sect. Among contemporaries of Chabannais alone describes it as Manichean. He traces it to the teaching of a certain Rusticus—or was he only a rustic?—of Périgord. Rodulph Glaber, on the contrary, says it was imported by a woman from Italy Both these writers, however, betray too plainly their ignorance of the characteristics and motives of the heretics for us to be at liberty to accept their testimony without corroboration. If we examine the indictment against them, we find a variety of articles shewing kinship with the Paulician beliefs. They denied, it was alleged, all the facts of the human life of Christ, the miracles of his birth, his passion, and his resurrection; all miracles, they said, were madness, deliramenta. They assailed doctrines not less closely bound up with the life of the church, the regenerating virtue of baptism, and the presence of the body and blood of the Saviour in the eucharistic species; they denounced the vanity of invoking saints, the superfluity of the Christian works of piety. Rodulph adds that they held the universe to be eternal and without author, and if the specification be true it would place the canons of Orleans in a position by themselves; but the tenet is little in keeping with the spirit of their creed. Its general resemblance to the oriental heresy is plain, but it has long been acknowledged that, however probable the relationship may be, there is no necessity to explain its origin in this way; it might have sprung up by itself, as the result of a rational speculation, tinctured with mysticism: and even if the first impetus was given from abroad, it remains likely that its dissemination at Orleans was assisted by the reviving spirit of enquiry which was already becoming powerful in France.

On the other hand, it would undoubtedly be improper to class these extravagancies with the other manifestations of opinion divergent from the general tenour of catholic belief which we meet with in the eleventh century. They indicate at most a link between the profession of an heresy which seemed to the world repulsive, and the assertion of individual views which might be startling, perhaps on that very account attractive, but which excited the anger of rivals rather than of enemies. To the latter order belong the opinions of Berengar of Tours and of Koscelin, who less by the issues to which they pointed than by the intellectual activity which they roused, are counted among the heralds of the scholastic philosophy. Through their resistance the medieval realism grew into the matured form which it retained until the introduction of the complete works of Aristotle in the thirteenth century. The debate, it is well known, rests upon the problem of the nature of being, a question no doubt insoluble because to all time each man will answer it, spite of argument, according to the special constitution of his own understanding. Existence might be held to reside more truly in the highest and broadest conceptions of which the mind is capable, in truth, in goodness, in every abstraction furthest removed from ocular observation; according to the technical terminology, in the universals. To the realist the ideal was the only true existence; every conception of the mind had necessarily a corresponding reality.^[26] The school of Roscelin proceeded from the opposite extreme, from experience. Our senses, it was felt, are the only certain warrant for existence, and they only reveal to us the individual. The universals, therefore, the cardinal point of dispute, could only be our own generalisations from observed facts.

Roscelin, who brought the latter view prominently into the field of discussion, was not, however, as is commonly presumed, nor was Berengar, the first nominalist of the middle ages. This position, according to an early chronicler, belongs to John the Sophist, whose identification with John Scotus, long suspected, has been made probable by the acute arguments of Dr von Prantl. So hearty a Platonist as the Scot could not but be a realist iv. in his ontology: but equally little could a logician escape the influence of Aristotle, the philosopher to whom he owed his method; and John's view of language and of the scope and functions of logic is far removed from the arid tradition of Isidore and Alcuin.^[27] Dialectic, he admitted, had kinship with grammar and rhetoric, in so far as it dealt with human speech pure and simple. But words and thoughts, and therefore words and things, were definitely if imperfectly correlative. John therefore claimed for dialectic a higher dignity than that of a mere mechanical instrument: it was the searcher out of the common conceptions of the mind,^[28] the guide of reason.

It was easy to carry this train of reasoning a stage further, and to argue that the general terms with which logic occupies itself are not its source but its product. The universals, the Scot had agreed, are words; what if they be mere words? Already in his lifetime the suggestion was taken up by Heric of Auxerre,^[29] whose pupil, however, saint Remigius of Auxerre, reverted to a declared realism. The party division may therefore be dated from the close of the ninth century. Remigius was a far more important person than Heric. At Rheims, and afterwards at Paris, he was unrivalled as a teacher of grammar, dialectic, and music; and the rapidly advancing greatness of the Paris school, assisted by the reputation not only of the teacher but of such of his pupils as Odo, the second abbat of Cluny and the creator of its fame, would naturally tend to fix the principles of Remigius in an age which had no mind for independent thought. Thus, with apparently the single exception of the learned centre of Saint Gall, realism held everywhere an undisputed reign. Gerbert, whose dialectical activity is represented for us by a debate in which he took part before Otto the Third, and by a slight treatise in which he pursued a little further one of the points raised on that occasion, was hardly at all in sympathy with the subjective aims of metaphysics; although probably his literary interest and his energy as a teacher were the means of restoring to the use of the schools some of the materials for logical study which had fallen into neglect in the century before him. Otherwise his practical temper was satisfied to accept the tradition as he found it. It was not until thought was again turned to religious questions, and doctrine subjected to the test of reason, that the opposition was revived.

The principles of the realist combined readily with a Christian idealism: he relied upon the safe foundation of authority—the various elements of the church tradition, the Bible, the fathers, the canons of councils, and the decretals of popes; and treated logic as its useful but docile handmaid.^[30] The nominalist on the contrary, though he might not wish to overthrow the ancient and respectable fabric of authority, reduced its importance by giving, as John Scotus gave, an equal if not a superior place to reason. Reason was the basis on which he rested, and logic, as the method which controlled the exercise of its powers, became the science of sciences. It was therefore natural that the dialectical reaction should ally itself with the protest of reason against the dogma of transubstantiation. Berengar of Tours, who maintained what may be called the Zwinglian view of the Lord's supper, is therefore so far the beginner of the new movement that the rationalism of the opinions he put forth set the whole catholic world thinking, questioning, disputing. Himself ready enough to recant under pressure, the number of his immediate disciples may not have been large: but the stream of speculation once let loose, could not be restrained at will. It was a time of religious reform, and reform went hand in hand with the promotion of education. Monasteries and their schools were restored or founded in a continually expanding circle. They busied themselves with the rudimentary 'arts' of the Trivium, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic; and the last, because of its universal applicability, remained the most popular study even for those who proceeded to the higher branches of the Quadrivium, or to the faculties of theology or law. The disputations which in the English universities only died out at the end of the eighteenth century, and retained much later a formal existence in the superior faculties, are the shadowy survivors of a system which was in its fresh ardour in the eleventh century. To the enthusiastic dialectician everything would seem to depend upon the turn of a debate; a challenge to a disputation was as serious as a challenge to the combat: logic became the centre round which all speculation revolved, and the question about its metaphysical basis became the absorbing one for all who pretended to share in the commonwealth of scholars.

Nevertheless the suspicion with which theologians regarded the new study was not soon averted. Apart from antecedent principles it was not likely that they should look with approval upon an art in which they were usually outmatched by their opponents. Arch- bishop Lanfranc, a learned man and a good lawyer, was greatest in the practical affairs of the state: in dialectical warfare he shewed but poorly. He vanquished Berengar by transparent sophisms. Logic in his hands was an imperfect instrument which he had not fully learned to use.^[31] The difference between this controversy and that which was provoked by Roscelin towards the close of the century is worth noticing. Whereas & Berengar seems to have been led by moral doubts in reference to the miracle of the Lord's supper, to investigate minutely its claims to belief and thus to open the whole question of the meaning of authority,^[32] while the dialectical form in which his polemic was cast was the last stage in his intellectual process; in Roscelin’s case the order was reversed. The conclusion of the one was the starting-point of the other. By the sheer honesty and consistency of his logic Roscelin came to dispute the accepted dogma of the holy Trinity. He refused to exempt any fact from the jurisdiction of reason, and fearlessly applied his nominalistic principles to the supreme problem. If in God, he argued, the three Persons are one thing and not three things, then the Father and the holy Ghost must have been incarnate with the Son: if on the contrary they are three things each by itself severally, as three angels or three souls, yet so as in will and power they be altogether one, then, did usage permit, we ought to speak of three Gods.^[33] The terms of the dilemma are those which in the early history of Christianity had been inspired only by the venom of enemies. Rejecting the error charged to the patripassians, Roscelin frankly accepted the reproach of tritheism. But we may learn from the extreme rigour with which he stated the alternatives, that with him there was not a religious principle but simply a speculative position at stake. ^[34]

If it was almost an accident of time that connected Roscelin with a theological debate, it was certainly nothing more that involved saint Anselm in one of dialectics. A thinker of immensely larger capacity than Lanfranc, Anselm, like his predecessor in the see of Canterbury, belongs in spirit to the past. He is, it has been finely said, the last of the fathers. Unlike Lanfranc, he belongs also to the far future: as a philosopher, he is in at least one notable train of reasoning the parent of Descartes. His serene vision overlooks the chasm of scholasticism; he is not engulphed in it. Some of the questions on which he meditated are so alien from the temper of his time that one cannot but ask whence he derived the impulse. To this question, however, no answer has yet been given, and for the present we may still believe that the idea of constructing an argument for the existence of God originated in his solitary thought. At first indeed Plato, through the channel of saint Augustin, supplied him with the suggestion that the existence of relative good upon earth implies the existence of an absolute Good of which it is a reflexion. To this purpose he wrote the Monologion. But he was not content until he had perfected an argument the profoundness of which might, he felt, appeal to every reasonable man. Such he discovered in the famous ontological argument of the Proslogion, that the existence of God is proved by our thought of him.^[35] It is the very subtilty of the conception that makes the reasoning silent to mere logicians; but among philosophers it has commanded a wide-spread sympathy. Anselm's confidence in its truth has been justified by the manner in which his argument has been woven and re-woven into the systems of modern thought.

Thus Anselm's interest lay in a field above the controversies of logic; his thoughts did not readily move within that formal circle. He joined of necessity in debates to which one cannot be brought to believe that he devoted his best faculties.^[36] The technical victory in his controversy with Gaunilo lay with his opponent, and although our scanty information of the literary proceedings of the time tells us nothing relevant of the reception of his other writings, we may be fairly sure that the realists, or traditionary party, had not yet trained them selves to the same expertness in the manipulation of logic which the nominalists already possessed. A story told by a chronicler of the abbey of Saint Martin at Tournay, and relating to the last years of the century, throws a curious light upon this relation. There was a master there, Odo, afterwards bishop of Cambray, whose fame was so eminent that not only from France, Flanders, and Normandy, but even from far distant Italy, Saxony, and Burgundy, divers clergymen flowed together in crowds to hear him daily; so that if thou shouldst walk about the public places of the city and behold the throngs of disputants—greges disputantium—thou wouldst say that the citizens had left off their other labours and given themselves over entirely to philosophy. But after a while a check came. Odo, who was an old-fashioned realist, found his position menaced by the increasing popularity of a certain Raimbert and a whole school of nominalists at Lille; since it was observed that the lectures of the latter had a much more practical result in training men to reasoning and to readiness of speech; maxime quia eorum lectiones ad exercitium disputandi vel eloquentiae, imo loquacitatis et facundiae, plus valere dicebant. Yet there could be no fault in Odo, for he departed not from the doctrine of the ancients. Thus exercised in his mind, therefore, one of the canons of the church had recourse to a wizard, who unhesitatingly declared in favour of the realist. To him realism had indeed the support of authority; and the fact expressed under this grotesque guise still holds good in a more reasonable form when we approach the master to whose credit is usually assigned the establishment of realism. The distinction of the parties is still the same; the realism of William of Champeaux, like that of saint Anselm, proceeds from a metaphysical rather than a logical starting-point.

But the dialectical spirit was now too strong to endure a subordinate rank: it animated the realists, now that William of Champeaux had given them a tangible formula, just as vigorously as the nominalists. But the formula was no sooner discovered than the appearance of Abailard, and his criticism first of one side and then of the other, drove each to its defences. The immediate effect of this disturbance was to break up the parties into manifold subdivisions. John of Salisbury, the acutest historian of the movement, reckons no less than ten distinct positions on the mam dialectical problem, and this enumeration is not exhaustive.^[37] With this universal outburst of criticism the intellectual history of the middle ages enters into its second youth. The interval of darkness is now quite past. The age of the church schools is about to be succeeded by the age of the universities. The nature of the discussion indeed takes it out of the sphere of any but a professed history of philosophy, not merely because of its extremely technical form, which it is difficult to render into modern language, but also because the apparent minuteness and triviality of its distinctions, unless subjected to a long and searching examination, tend rather to conceal than to disclose the ferment of thought from which it sprang. But we shall learn perhaps more of the real character of the age and of the forces at work in it by studying the manner in which men learned and taught, and had their controversies, and making acquaintance with some types of its culture, than by a direct analysis of its dialectical theories.

References

1. This is a conclusion which vitiates much of Dr Reuter's view of the period, Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung 1. 67-78: to his references however I am frequently indebted.
2. See the somewhat fabulous account of Rodulph Glaber, Hist. ii. 12 in Bouquet 10. 23, 1760.
3. Compare the Discordia inter Ratherium et clericos: Quod vero scriptum invenitur in lege Moysis et prophetis et psalmis, quod in evangelico, actibus et praedicationibus apostolorum, decretalibus pontificum et constitutionibus canonum, non rursum a Deo tibi elucet inspiratum: d'Achery 1. 364 a.
4. Debuerat certe erubesci homo velle Deo tollere quod suum est. Pater enim omne iudicium dedisse Filio dicitur, non Romae: neque Filius dixit, Tu es Roma et super hanc Romam aedificabo ecclesiam meam, sed Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram; non dixit Petrum sed petram, intelligi volens eius fidei et confessionis soliditatem aedificare et firmare immeritorum subsequacium consimilem, non quidem sequacium sine merito: alioquin non est sequax Petri, si non habeat meritum illius Petri. Quid igitur? ostende mihi fidem sine operibus, et ego ostendam tibi sequacem Petri sine merito illius Petri. . . . Num dicendum est profuisse summis sacerdotibus super cathedram Moysis sedisse? &c. De causa Formosiana xi., Dümmler, Auxilius und Vulgarius 130.
5. [Cf . Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 1. 95-108.]
6. There is a curious and ancient gloss in the margin of the codex containing Gerbert's treatise De rationali et ratione uti, itself nearly contemporary with the author, which deserves quotation. 'Italia,' it runs, 'fertilis in ferendis est frugibus, Gallia et Germania nobilis in nutriendis militibus. Nesciunt Itali quid sapiunt Galli. Itali denarios cumulant, Galli sapientiam corradunt'; Bernhard Pez, Thesaurus Anecdotorum novissimus 1 (2) 151 mg., Augsburg 1721 folio.
7. See Giesebrecht, 1. 321-331 and Vogel 1. 154-173.
8. Ruotger calls him episcopus Scotigena, Vit. Brunon. vii, Pertz 4. 257; 1841. Flodoard, a. 947, ib. 3. 394 (1839) and Richer, Hist. ii. 66, ib. 602, say Britto or Brittigena: he was no doubt an Irishman.
9. Non suffecit ci in gazophilatium cordis sui colligere quod in promptu habebat; peregrina in super conduxit aenigmata, et quicquid phylosophicum terrenisque sensibus remotissimum sensit, hoc undecumque contraxit: Ruotger v. p. 257.
10. This is recognised by bishop Arnulf of Orleans (if the author be not Gerbert) in his famous speech before the council of Saint Basol near Rheims in the year 991: 'In Belgica et Germania . . . summos sacerdotes Dei religione admodum praestantes inveniri,' Act. conc. Rem. xxviii, Pertz 3. 673.
11. It would be more accurate to say, one sermon (De inform. episc., Migne 139. 169-178) and one speech of a substantive character and of undisputed authenticity (that delivered before the council of Mouzon in 995, Mansi 19. 193 D-196 B; 1774): see the bibliography in Fabricius, Biblioth. Lat. med. et inf. Aet. 3. 43 sq., ed Florence 1858.
12. The book De corpore et sanguine domini (Migne 139. 177 sqq.), at first printed as anonymous, was reëdited by Pez from a manuscript at Goettweih which bore Gerbert's name: see the editor's dissertatio isagogica to his Thesaurus Anecd. noviss. 1 pp. lxviii, lxix; and the ascription has been generally admitted. See the Histoire littéraire de la France 6. 587 sq., 1742; Neander, History of the Christian Religion and Church 6. 308; Gfrörer, Kirchengeschichte 3. 1585; cf. supra, p.76, n. 24. Long ago, however, the laborious Mabillon found reason to attribute the work to Heriger abbat of Lobbes; see his preface to the Actt. SS. O. S. B. 4 (2) pp. xxii-xxiv, Paris 1680 folio: and this opinion was favoured by Dr R. Koepke (praef. in Herigeri et Anselmi Gest. episc., Pertz 7. 146 sq.) and Dr Vogel, Ratherius 2. 46 sqq. [Neither view seems to be tenable, for Heriger's own work, which is altogether different from that printed by Pez, has been discovered in MS. 909 in the University Library at Ghent: see E. Dümmler, in the Neues Archiv 26 (1901) 755-759, and A. Hauck, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, 3. 319 n. 2, ed. 3, 1906.]
13. The Acts of the synod of Saint Basol by which his predecessor was deposed are printed in Bouquet 10. 513 sqq., and in Pertz 3. 658-686. The remarkable speech of Arnulf bishop of Orleans, which depicts the degradation of the papacy and fearlessly proposes an entire secession from its authority (Pertz 672 sq., 676), has been substantially reproduced by most of the historians: see Gfrörer 3. 1476 sqq., cf. vol. 4. 508; Milman 3. 338 sqq.; Giesebrecht 1. 654 sq. It deserves mention in this place because the Acts, if we are to believe Richer, Hist. iv. 51 Pertz 3. 648, and Gerbert's own preface, were edited by the latter; and, the province of an editor being undefined, we may reasonably give him a considerable share not only of the diction but of the spirit of the speech: cf. Neander, 6. 132 n. 1.
14. [The letter seems to be merely an ornamental circular sent out to invite contributions for the charitable foundations established by the Christians in the Holy Land: 'Quod armis nequis consilio et opum auxilio subveni. Quid est quod das aut cui das? nempe ex multo modicum et ei qui omne quod habes gratis dedit nec tamen ingratus recipit.' Cf. Havet, Oeuvres de Gerbert, p. 22 n. 3.]
15. It is significant that Gerbert was too much of a personality to be lost in his pontifical title. Thus in the Fleury chronicle, a. 1002, we have his obituary as Girbertus Papa, Baluze, Miscell. 2. 307; 1679. On the genesis of the story about Gerbert's magical powers and league with the devil, see J. J. I. von Döllinger, Die Papst-Fabeln des Mittelalters, 155-159, Munich 1863.
16. The historical review prefixed to Mr [now Sir] Arthur J. Evans’s travels Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina, pp. xxiv-xliii, 1876, abundantly shews that such an influence was possible as early as the tenth century; it is admitted by Noander, 6. 429, 439; and the fact that it. existed later may justify the conclusion that similar results were produced by similar means at the time with which we are here concerned. The firm hold too which the name Bulgarian, as a term of infamous import, has taken both in the French and English languages, points in the same direction.
17. As omnimodis superfluuni et inane, Rodulph Glab. hist. ii. 11, Bouquet 10. 23. The chronicler is sure that the man (his name was Leutard) was out of his mind; and it is remarkable that the bishop to whom the scene was reported felt satisfied with the explanation and let him go free. Leutard proceeded to drown himself in a reaction, it was said, of despair, At the same time, as Neander hints, p. 445, it is not improbable that the suicide was a figment and that the enthusiast fell a victim to the fanatic zeal of the populace.
18. In this way it appears possible to reconcile the title usually applied to the heretics of western Europe with their known lineage from the Paulicians whose teaching in regard to the church was plainly opposed to Manichaism: cf. Evans pp. xxxiii, xxxiv. The distinction is pointed out by Mosheim, Instit. Hist, eccles. 312, ed. 2, Helmstadt 1764 quarto; and by Gf rorer 3. 199. See on the whole subject of the history of the sect, Gibbon's fifty-fourth chapter [with Mr. J.B. Bury s notes, and ap- pendix vi.,invol. 6. 540sqq., 1898].
19. See the vigorous description of Milman 3. 440-447, 468-477; 4. 17-24 (the pages following about Dunstan contain a variety of errors of fact and inference); also pp. 61 sqq.
20. This was the only point at issue: it was admitted that no one could marry after ordination: cf . Landulf, Hist. Mediolan, iii. 26, Pertz 8. 94; 1848. Gerbert's profession at Rheims, Nuptias non prohibeo, secunda matrimonia non damno, Mansi 19. 108 A, was only the extravagant pledge of a political aspirant: cf. Gfrörer 3. 1462.
21. Forsitan adhuc illa sententia implicitus ea qua olim illi de Monteforti te imbuerant; qui omnem Christianitatem mulierem non tangere et genus humanum sine semine virili, apum more, nasci dicentes, falsis sententiis affirmabant: Landulf iii. 26 p. 93. Milman has related this singular debate at some length: vol. 3. 470 n. 2. On the Milanese usage with respect to marriage, compare Anselm the Peripatetic's language: 'Nobis enim clericis quibus licet liceat; in uxoribus et filiis libera est potestas. Usus quidem prestat, ipsa defendit auctoritas:' Rhetorimach. ii. p. 45.
22. Ademar of Chabannais connects the execution of certain Manicheans at Toulouse in 1022 with the appearance of these heralds of Antichrist in many parts of the west: Hist. iii. 59 Pertz 4. 143 (or Bouquet 10. 159 d).
23. Milman's treatment of them, 3. 442 sq., 5. 402, is exceptionally perfunctory. It may be noticed that they, unlike the eastern Paulicians, were covetous of martyrdom. The Albigenses after their overthrow returned to the primitive custom of the sect, and dissembled their opinions.
24. Rodulph Glaber calls him Heribert by a mistake that has been often corrected. Heribert was in fact the traitor of the heresy.
25. Milman's remark that they 'were, if their accusers speak true, profligates rather than sectarians' (he enters into no detail in the matter) may be contrasted with the judicial impartiality of the Benedictine editors of the acts of the synod, p. 538 n., from whom I have borrowed the parallel in the text. Gibbon has given a lively picture of the corresponding passages in the history of the ancient church, ch. xvi, vol. 2. 155 sq.
26. I have purposely described the theory by an illustration of its practical issue, since for our present purpose we are hardly at all concerned with its technical definition.
27. [Cf. Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, 2. 36 sq., in the second edition, 1885; and E. K. Rand, Johannes Scottus, p. 19, Munich 1906.]
28. Communium animi conceptionum rationabilium diligens investigatrixque disciplina: De div. nat. i. 29 p. 19.
29. [On Heric, see L. Traube, in the Neues Archiv, 18, 71-105; 1892.]
30. 'Quae tamen artis humanae peritia,' says saint Peter Damiani, Opuse. xxxvi. 5, 'si quando tractandis sacris eloquiis adhibetur,non debet ius magisterii sibimet arroganter arripere, sed velut ancilla dominae quodam familiatus obsequio subservire, ne si praecedit oberret.
31. On Lanfranc's controversy with Berengar see the extracts in Prantl 2. 75 [76] n. 308, and compare Remusat, Abelard 2. 162 sq. Dr von Prantl, vol. 2. 73, note 302, accepts Lanfranc as the author of the Elucidarium. This text-book of theology has been variously ascribed to Augustin, to Guibert of Nogent, and to Honorius of Autun; as well as to saint Anselm, among whose works it has even appeared in print. See the Histoire litteraire de la France, 12. 167; 1763. [The book is generally believed to be a compilation by Honorius Augustodunensis, but whether he was of Autun or of Augsburg is still disputed.]
32. Dr Reuter remarks, 1. 93, of the tendency of the doctrine of transubstantiation, Das Mirakel horte auf Mittel zu sein, es wurde Zweck.
33. The argument as reported to Anselm (Baluze, Miscell. 2. 174, ed. Mansi) and stated by him in the De fide Trinitatis, i. p. 41 b, presents but one horn of the dilemma. Both are given, but in a somewhat involved form, in Anselm's letter to Fulk of Beauvais, Epp. ii. 41 p. 357 b. I have extracted the statement in the text from a. comparison of these three passages.
34. This was long ago seen by the candid Mosheim, p. 382, 2nd note. Still the charge of blasphemous heresy long clung to Roscelin; see Abailard's letter to the bishop of Paris, written about 1120, Opp. 2. 150, ed. Cousin: and Roscelin's reply, ibid. pp. 796-801, still insists, in however modified language, upon the Three in preference to the One.
35. The argument has been spoken of as derived from Augustin and Boethius, but it is clearly shown by F. R. Hasse, Anselm von Canterbury 2. 240 (1852), that this statement rests upon a confusion of the motive of the Proslogion with that of the Monologion.
36. Cousin justly remarks, il retombe dans la barbaric de son temps des qu il quitte le Christianisme et s engage dans la dialectique scholastique. . . . Ce n est pas la qu il faut chercher saint Anselme: Fragments philosophiques 2. 102, 5th ed., 1865.
37. A lucid summary of the principal points of difference will be found in Carl Schaarschmidt's Johannes Saresberiensis nach Leben und Studien, Schriften und Philosophic 319 sqq.; 1862. See also the analysis given by Dr. von Prantl, vol. 2. 118 [119] sqq.