The Mediaeval Mind (Vol. 1&2). Henry Osborn Taylor
working together, and did not spring from the singular nature of any one of them. Accordingly, the proper beginning of the Middle Ages, so far as one may speak of a beginning, should lie in the time of the conjunction of these elements in a joint activity. That could not be before the barbaric disturbers of the Roman peace had settled down to life and progress under the action of Latin Christianity and the surviving antique culture. Nor may this beginning be placed before the time when Gregory the Great (died 604) had refashioned Augustine, and much that was earlier, to the measure of the coming centuries; nor before Boëthius (died 523), Cassiodorus (died 575), and Isidore of Seville (died 636), had prepared the antique pabulum for the mediaeval stomach. All these men were intermediaries or transmitters, and belong to the epoch of transition from the antique and the patristic to the properly inceptive time, when new learners were beginning, in typically mediaeval ways, to rehandle the patristic material and what remained of the antique. Contemporary with those intermediaries, or following hard upon them, were the great missionaries or converters, who laboured to introduce Christianity, with antique thought incorporated in it, and the squalid survival of antique education sheltered in its train, to Teuton peoples in Gaul, England, and Rhenish Germany. Among these was the truculent Irishman, St. Columbanus (died 615), founder of Luxeuil and Bobbio, whose disciple was St. Gall, and whose contemporary was St. Augustine of Canterbury, whom Gregory the Great sent to convert the Anglo-Saxons. A good century later, St. Winifried-Boniface is working to establish Christianity in Germany.[2] Thus it will not be easy to find a large and catholic beginning for the Middle Ages until the eighth century is reached, and we are come on what is called the Carolingian period.
Let us approach a little nearer, and consider the situation of western Europe, with respect to antique culture and Latin Christianity, in the centuries following the disruption of the Roman Empire. The broadest distinction is to be drawn between Italy and the lands north of the Alps. Under the Empire, there was an Italian people. However diverse may have been its ancient stocks, this people had long since become Latin in language, culture, sentiment and tradition. They were the heirs of the Greek, and the creators of the Roman literature, art, philosophy, and law. They were never to become barbarians, although they suffered decadence. Like all great peoples, they had shown a power to assimilate foreigners, which was not lost, but only degraded and diminished, in the fourth and fifth centuries, when Teutonic slaves, immigrants, invaders, seemed to be barbarizing the Latin order quite as much as it was Latinizing them. In these and the following times the culture of Italy sank lamentably low. Yet there was no break of civilization, but only a deep decline and then a re-emergence, in the course of which the Latin civilization had become Italian. For a lowered form of classical education had survived, and the better classes continued to be educated people according to the degraded standard and lessened intellectual energies of those times.[3]
Undoubtedly, in its decline this Latin civilization of Italy could no longer raise barbarians to the level of the Augustan age. Yet it still was making them over into the likeness of its own weakened children. The Visigoths broke into Italy, then, as we are told, passed into southern France; other confused barbarians came and went, and then the Ostrogoths, with Theodoric at their head, an excellent but not very numerous folk. They stayed in Italy, and fought and died, or lived on, changing into indistinguishable Italians, save for flashes of yellow hair, appearing and reappearing where the Goths had lived. And then the Lombards, crueller than the Goths, but better able to maintain their energies effective. Their numbers also were not great, compared with the Italians. And thereafter, in spite of their fierceness and the tenacity of their Germanic customs, the succeeding Lombard generations became imbued with the culture of Italy. They became North Italians, gravitating to the towns of Lombardy, or perhaps, farther to the south, holding together in settlements of their own, or forming the nucleus of a hill-dwelling country nobility.
The Italian stock remained predominant over all the incomers of northern blood. It certainly needed no introduction to what had largely been its own creation, the Latin civilization. With weakened hands, it still held to the education, the culture, of its own past; it still read its ancient literature, and imitated it in miserable verse. The incoming barbarians had hastened the land’s intellectual downfall. But all the plagues of inroad and pestilence and famine, which intermittently devastated Italy from the fifth to the tenth century, left some squalid continuity of education. And those barbarian stocks which stayed in that home of the classics, became imbued with whatever culture existed around them, and tended gradually to coalesce with the Italians.
Evidently in its old home, where it merely had become decadent, this ancient culture would fill a rôle quite different from any specific influence which it might exert in a country where the Latin education was freshly introduced. In Italy, a general survival of Roman law and institution, custom and tradition, endured so far as these various elements of the Italian civilization had not been lost or dispossessed, or left high and dry above the receding tide of culture and intelligence. Christianity had been superimposed upon paganism; and the Christian faith held thoughts incompatible with antique views of life. Teutonic customs were brought in, and the Lombard codes were enacted, working some specific supersession of the Roman law. The tone, the sentiment, the mind of the Italian people had altered from the patterns presented by Cicero, or Virgil, or Horace, or Tacitus. Nevertheless, the antique remained as the soil from which things grew, or as the somewhat turgid atmosphere breathed by living beings. It was not merely a form of education or vehicle of edifying knowledge, nor solely a literary standard. The common modes of the antique were there as well, its daily habits, its urbanity and its dross.
The relationship toward the antique held by the peoples of the Iberian peninsula and the lands which eventually were to make France, was not quite the same as that held by the Italians. Spain, save in intractable mountain regions, had become a domicile of Latin culture before its people were converted to Christianity. Then it became a stronghold of early Catholicism. Latin and Catholic Spain absorbed its Visigothic invaders, who in a few generations had appropriated the antique culture, and had turned from Arianism to the orthodoxy of their new home. Under Visigothic rule, the Spanish Church became exceptionally authoritative, and its Latin and Catholic learning flourished at the beginning of the seventh century. These conditions gave way before the Moorish conquest, which was most complete in the most thoroughly Romanized portions of the land. Yet the permanent Latinization of the territory where Christianity continued, is borne witness to by the languages growing from the vulgar Latin dialects. The endurance of Latin culture is shown by the polished Latinity of Theodulphus, a Spanish Goth, who left his home at the invitation of Charlemagne, and died, the best Latin verse-maker of his time, as Bishop of Orleans in 821. Thus the education, culture, and languages of Spain were all from the antique. Yet the genius of the land was to be specifically Spanish rather than assimilated to any such deep-soiled paganism as underlay the ecclesiastical Christianization of Italy.
As for France, in the southern part which had been Provincia, the antique endured in laws and institutions, in architecture and in ways of life, to a degree second only to its dynamic continuity in Italy. And this in spite of the crude masses of Teutondom which poured into Provincia to be leavened by its culture. In northern France there were more barbarian folk and a less universally diffused Latinity. The Merovingian period swept most of the last away, leaving a fair field to be sown afresh with the Latin education of the Carolingian revival. Yet the inherited discipline of obedience to the Roman order was not obliterated from the Gallic stock, and the lasting Latinization of Gaul endured in the Romance tongues, which were also to be impressed upon all German invaders. Franks, Burgundians, or Alemanni, who came in contact with the provincials, began to be affected by their language, their religion, their ways of living, and by whatever survival of letters there was among them. The Romance dialects were to triumph, were to become French; and in the earliest extant pieces of this vernacular poetry, the effect of Latin verse-forms appears. Yet Franks and Burgundians were not Latinized in spirit; and, in truth, the Gauls before them had only become good imitation Latins. At all events, from these mixed and intermediate conditions, a people were to emerge who were not German, nor altogether Latin, in spite of their Romance speech. Latin culture was not quite as a foreign influence upon these Gallo-Roman, Teutonically re-inspirited, incipient, French. Nor were they born and bred to it, like the Italians. The antique was not to dominate the French genius; it was not to stem the growth of what was, so to speak, Gothic or northern or Teutonic. The glass-painting, the sculpture, the architecture