The Medieval Mind. Henry Osborn Taylor
Rule. The temperance and wisdom of his letters of instructions to Augustine of Canterbury are admirable. The practical exigency seemed always to have the effect of tempering any extreme opinion which apart from it he might have expressed; as one sees, for example, in those letters to this apostle to the English, or in his letter to Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles, who had been too violent as to paintings and images. Gregory’s stand is moderate and reasonable. Likewise he opposes the use of force to convert the Jews, although insisting firmly that no Jew may hold a Christian slave.[121]
There has been occasion to remark that decadence tends to join hands with barbarism on a common intellectual level. Had Boëthius lived in a greater epoch, he might not have been an adapter of an elementary arithmetic and geometry, and his best years would not have been devoted to the translation and illustration of logical treatises. Undoubtedly his labours were needed by the times in which he lived and by the centuries which followed them in spirit as well as chronologically. He was the principal purveyor of the strictly speaking intellectual grist of the early Middle Ages; and it was most apt that the great scholastic controversy as to universals should have drawn its initial text from his translation of Porphyry’s Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle.[122] Gregory, on the other hand, was a purveyor of theology, the subject to which logic chiefly was to be applied. He purveyed matter very much to the mediaeval taste; for example, his wise practical admonishments; his elaboration of such a doctrine as that of penance, so tangible that it could be handled, and felt with one’s very fingers; and, finally, his supreme intellectual endeavour, the allegorical trellising of Scripture, to which the Middle Ages were to devote their thoughts, and were to make warm and living with the love and yearning of their souls. The converging currents—decadence and barbarism—meet and join in Gregory’s powerful personality. He embodies the intellectual decadence which has lost all independent wish for knowledge and has dropped the whole round of the mind’s mortal interests; which has seized upon the near, the tangible, and the ominous in theology till it has rooted religion in the fear of hell. All this may be viewed as a decadent abandonment of the more intellectual and spiritual complement to the brute facts of sin, penance, and hell barely escaped. But, on the other hand, it was also barbarization, and held the strength of barbaric narrowing of motives and the resistlessness of barbaric fear.
Such were the rôles of Boëthius and Gregory in the transmission of antique and patristic intellectual interests into the mediaeval time. Quite different was that of Gregory’s younger contemporary, Isidore, the princely and vastly influential Bishop of Seville, the primary see in that land of Spain, which, however it might change dynasties, was destined never to be free from some kind of sacerdotal bondage. In Isidore’s time, the kingdom of the Visigoths had recently turned from Arianism to Catholicism, and wore its new priestly yoke with ardour. Boëthius had provided a formal discipline and Gregory much substance already mediaevalized. But the whole ground-plan of Isidore’s mind corresponded with the aptitudes and methods of the Carolingian period, which was to be the schoolday of the Middle Ages. By reason of his own habits of study, by reason of the quality of his mind, which led him to select the palpable, the foolish, and the mechanically correlated, by reason, in fine, of his mental faculties and interests, Isidore gathered and arranged in his treatises a conglomerate of knowledge, secular and sacred, exactly suited to the coming centuries.
In drawing from its spiritual heritage, an age takes what it cares for; and if comparatively decadent or barbarized or childlike in its intellectual affinities, it will still manage to draw what is like itself. In that case, probably it will not draw directly from the great sources, but from intermediaries who have partially debased them. From these turbid compositions the still duller age will continue to select the obvious and the worse. This indicates the character of Isidore’s work. His writings speak for themselves through their titles, and are so flat, so transparent, so palpably taken from the nearest authorities, that there is no call to analyze them. But their titles with some slight indication of their contents will show the excerpt character of Isidore’s mental processes, and illustrate by anticipation the like qualities reappearing with the Carolingian doctors.
Isidore’s Quaestiones in vetus Testamentum[123] is his chief work in the nature of a Scripture commentary. It is confined to those passages of the Old Testament which were deemed most pregnant with allegorical meaning. His Preface discloses his usual method of procedure: “We have taken certain of those incidents of the sacred history which were told or done figuratively, and are filled with mystic sacraments, and have woven them together in sequence in this little work; and, collecting the opinions of the old churchmen, we have made a choice of flowers as from divers meadows; and briefly presenting a few matters from so many, with some changes or additions, we offer them not only to studious but fastidious readers who detest prolixity.” Every one may feel assured that he will be reading the interpretations of the Fathers, and not those of Isidore—“my voice is but their tongue.” He states that his sources are Origen, Victorinus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Fulgentius, Cassian, and “Gregory so distinguished for his eloquence in our own time.” The spirit of the mediaeval commentary is in this Preface. The phrase about “culling the opinions of the Fathers like flowers from divers meadows,” will be repeated hundreds of times. Such a commentary is a thing of excerpts; so it rests upon authority. The writer thus comforts both his reader and himself; neither runs the peril of originality, and together they repose on the broad bosom of the Fathers.
Throughout his writings, Isidore commonly proceeds in this way, whether he says so or not. We may name first the casual works which represent separate parcels of his encyclopaedic gleanings, and then glance at his putting together of them, in his Etymologiae.[124] The muster opens with two books of Distinctions (Differentiarum). The first is concerned with the distinctions of like-sounding and like-meaning words. It is alphabetically arranged. The second is concerned with the distinctions of things: it begins with God and the Creation, and passes to the physical parts and spiritual traits of man. No need to say that it contains nothing that is Isidore’s own. Now come the Allegoriae quaedam sacrae Scripturae, which give in chronological order the allegorical signification of all the important persons mentioned in the Old Testament and the New. It was one of the earliest hand-books of Scriptural allegories, and is a sheer bit of the Middle Ages in spirit and method. The substance, of course, is taken from the Fathers. Next, a little work, De ortu et obitu Patrum, states in short paragraphs the birthplace, span of life, place of sepulture, and noticeable traits of Scriptural personages.
There follows a collection of brief Isidorean prefaces to the books of Scripture. Then comes a curious book, which may have been suggested to the writer by the words of Augustine himself. This is the Liber numerorum, the book of the numbers occurring in the Scriptures. It tells the qualities and mystical significance of every number from one to sixteen, and of the chief ones between sixteen and sixty. These numbers were “most holy and most full of mysteries” to Augustine,[125] and Augustine is the man whom Isidore chiefly draws on in this treatise—Augustine at his very worst. One might search far for an apter instance of an ecclesiastical writer elaborately exploiting the most foolish statements that could possibly be found in the writings of a great predecessor.
Isidore composed a polemic treatise on the Catholic Faith against the Jews—De fide Catholica contra Judaeos. The good bishop had nothing to add to the patristic discussion of this weighty controversy. His book is filled with quotations from Scripture. It put the matter together in a way suited to his epoch and the coming centuries, and at an early time was translated into the German and other vernacular tongues. Three books of Sententiae follow, upon the contents of Christian doctrine—as to God, the world, evil, the angels, man, Christ and the Church. They consist of excerpts from the writings of Gregory the Great and earlier Church Fathers.[126] A more original work is the De ecclesiasticis officiis, upon the services of the Church and the orders of clergy and laity. It presents the liturgical practices and ecclesiastical regulations of Isidore’s epoch.
Isidore seems to have put most pious feeling into a work called by him Synonyma, to which name was added the supplementary designation: De lamentatione animae. First the Soul pours out its lament in excruciating iteration, repeating the same commonplace of Christian piety in synonymous phrases. When its lengthy plaint is ended, Reason replies with admonitions synonymously reiterated in the same fashion.[127] This