The Mediaeval Mind (Vol. 1&2). Henry Osborn Taylor
not quickly reached. It could not outrun the intelligent appropriation of Latin Christianity. Its media, moreover, as in the case of sculpture, might present retarding difficulties, to be overcome before that means of presentation could be mastered. A sequence may be observed in the evolution of the mediaeval emotional expression of patristic Christianity. One of the first attained was impassioned devotional Latin prose, like that of Peter Damiani or St. Anselm of Canterbury.[14] But prose is a halting means of emotional expression. It is too circumstantial and too slow. Only in the chanted strophe, winged with the power of rhythm, can emotion pour out its unimpeded strength. But before the thought can be fused in verse, it must be plastic, molten indeed. Even then, the finished verse is not produced at once. The perfected mediaeval Latin strophe was a final form of religious emotional expression, which was not attained until the twelfth century.[15]
Impassioned prose may be art; the loftier forms of verse are surely art. And art is not spontaneous, but carefully intended; no babbling of a child, but a mutual fitting of form and content, in which efficient unison the artist’s intellect has worked. Such intellectual, such artistic endeavour, was evinced in the long development of mediaeval plastic art. The sculpture and the painted glass, which tell the Christian story in Chartres Cathedral, set forth the patristic and antique matter in forms expressive of the feeling and emotion which had gathered around the scheme of Latin Christianity. They were forms never to be outdone for appropriateness and power. Several centuries not only of spiritual growth, but of mechanical and artistic endeavour, had been needed for their perfecting.
In these and like emotional recastings, or indeed creations, patristic and antique elements were transformed and transfigured. And again, in fields non-religious and non-philosophical, through a combined evolution of the mediaeval mind and heart, novelties of sentiment and situation were introduced into antique themes of fiction; new forms of romance, new phases of human love and devotion were evolved, in which (witness the poetry of chivalric love in Provençal and Old French) the energies of intellect and passion were curiously blended.[16] These represented a side of human growth not unrelated to the supreme mediaeval achievement, the vital appropriation and emotional humanizing of patristic Christianity. For that carried an impassioning of its teachings with love and tears, a fostering of them with devotion, an adorning of them with quivering fantasies, a translation of them into art, into poetry, into romance. With what wealth of love and terror, with what grandeur of imagination, with what power of mystery and symbolism, did the Middle Ages glorify their heritage, turning its precepts into spirit.
Of a surety the emotional is not to be separated from the intellectual recasting of Christianity. The greatest exponents of the one had their share in the other. Hugo of St. Victor as well as St. Bernard were mighty agents of this spiritually passionate mode of apprehending Latin Christianity, and transfusing it with emotion, or reviving the Gospel elements in it. Here work, knowingly or instinctively, many men and women, Peter Damiani and St. Francis of Assisi, St. Hildegard of Bingen and Mechthild of Magdeburg, who, according to their diverse temperaments, overmasteringly and burningly loved Christ. With them the intellectual appropriation of dogmatic Christianity was subordinate.
Such men and women were poets and artists, even when they wrote no poetry, and did not carve or paint. For their lives were poems, unisons of overmastering thoughts and the emotions inspired by them. The life of Francis was a living poem. It was kin to the Dies Irae, the Stabat Mater, the hymns of Adam of St. Victor, and in a later time, the Divina Commedia. For all these poems, in their different ways, using Christian thought and feeling as symbols, created imaginative presentations of universal human moods, even as the lives of Francis and many a cloistered soul presented like moods in visible embodiment.
Such lives likewise close in with art. They poured themselves around the symbols of the human person of Christ and its sacrificial presence in the Eucharist; they grasped the infinite and universal through these tangibilities. But the poems also sprang into being through a concrete realizing in mood, and a visualizing in narrative, of such symbols. And the same need of grasping the infinite and universal through symbols was the inspiration of mediaeval art: it built the cathedrals, painted their windows, filled their niches with statues, carving prophet types, carving the times and seasons of God’s providence, carving the vices and virtues of the soul and its eternal destiny, and at the same time augmenting the Liturgy with symbolic words and acts. So saint and poet and artist-craftsman join in that appropriation of Christianity which was putting life into whatever had come from the Latin Fathers, by pondering upon it, loving it, living it, imagining it, and making it into poetry and art.
It is better not to generalize further, or attempt more specifically to characterize the mediaeval genius. As its manifestations pass before our consideration, we shall see the complexity of thought and life within the interplay of the moulding forces of mediaeval development, as they strove with each other or wrought in harmony, as they were displayed in frightful contrasts between the brutalities of life, and the lofty, but not less real, strainings of the spirit, or again in the opposition between inchoately variant ideals and the endeavour for their more inclusive reconcilement. Various phases of the mediaeval spirit were to unfold only too diversely with popes, kings and knights, monks, nuns, and heretics, satirists, troubadours and minnesingers; in emotional yearnings and intellectual ideals; in the literature of love and the literature of its suppression; in mistress-worship, and the worship of the Virgin and the passion-flooded Christ of Canticles. Sublimely will this spirit show itself in the resistless apotheosis of symbolism, and in art and poetry giving utterance to the mediaeval conceptions of order and beauty. Other of its phases will be evinced in the striving of earnest souls for spiritual certitude; in the scholastic structure and accomplishment; in the ways in which men felt the spell of the Classics; and everywhere and universally in the mediaeval conflict between life’s fulness and the insistency of the soul’s salvation.
CHAPTER II
THE LATINIZING OF THE WEST
The intellectual and spiritual life of the partly Hellenized and, at last, Christianized, Roman Empire furnished the contents of the intellectual and spiritual development of the Middle Ages.[17] In Latin forms the Christian and antique elements passed to the mediaeval period. Their Latinization, their continuance, and their passing on, were due to the existence of the Empire as a political and social fact. Rome’s equal government facilitated the transmission of Greek thought through the Mediterranean west; Roman arms, Roman qualities conquered Spain and Gaul, subdued them to the Roman order, opened them to Graeco-Latin influences, also to Christianity. Indelibly Latinized in language and temper, Spain, Gaul, and Italy present first a homogeneity of culture and civic order, and then a common decadence and confusion. But decadence and confusion did not obliterate the ancient elements; which painfully endured, passing down disfigured and bedimmed, to form the basis of mediaeval culture.
The all-important Latinization of western Europe began with the unification of Italy under Rome. This took five centuries of war. In central Italy, Marsians, Samnites, Umbrians, Etruscans, were slowly conquered; and in the south Rome stood forth at last triumphant after the war against Tarentum and Pyrrhus of Epirus. With Rome’s political domination, the Latin language also won its way to supremacy throughout the peninsula, being drastically forced, along with Roman civic institutions, upon Tarentum and the other Greek communities of Magna Graecia.[18] Yet in revenge, from this time on, Greek medicine and manners, mythology, art, poetry, philosophy—Greek thought in every guise—entered the Latin pale.
At the time of which we speak, the third century before Christ, the northern boundaries of Italy were still the rivers Arno and, to the east, the Aesis, which flows into the Adriatic, near Ancona. North-west of the Arno, Ligurian highlanders held the mountain lands as far as Nice. North of the Aesis lay the valley of the Po. That great plain may have been occupied at an early time by Etruscan communities scattered through a Celtic population gradually settling to an agricultural life. Whatever may be the facts as to the existence of these earlier Celts, other and ruder Celtic tribes swarmed down from the Alps[19] about 400 B.C., spread through the Po Valley, pushing the Etruscans back into Etruria, and following them there to carry