The Medieval Mind. Henry Osborn Taylor
his father, Nithard was educated at the palace school, perhaps with his cousin who was to become Charles the Bald. His loyalty continued staunch to that king, whose tried confidant he became. He was a diplomatist and a military leader in the wars following the death of Louis the Pious; and he felt impelled to present from his side the story of the strife among the sons of Louis, in “four books of histories” as they grew to be.[286] Involved with his king in that same hurricane (eodem turbine) he describes those stormy times which they were fighting out together even while he was writing. This man of action could not but present himself, his views, his temperament, in narrating the events he moved in. Throughout, one perceives the pen of the participant, in this case an honest partisan of his king, and the enemy of those whose conduct had given the divided realm over to rapine. So the vigorous narrative of this noble Frank partakes of the originality which inheres in the writings of men of action when their literary faculty is sufficient to enable them to put themselves into their compositions.
Engaged, as we have been, with the intellectual or scholarly interests of the Carolingian period, we should not forget how slender in numbers were the men who promoted them, and how few were the places where they throve. There was the central group of open-minded laymen and Churchmen about the palace school, or following the Court in its journeyings, which were far and swift. Then there were monastic or episcopal centres of education as at Tours, or Rheims, or Fulda. The scholars carried from the schools their precious modicum of knowledge, and passed on through life as educated men living in the world, or dwelt as learned compilers, reading in the cloister. But scant were the rays of their enlightening influence amidst that period’s vast encompassing ignorance.
To have classified the Carolingian intellectual interests according to topics would have been misleading, since that would have introduced a fictitious element of individual preference and aptitude, as if the Carolingian scholar of his spontaneous volition occupied himself with mathematical studies rather than grammar, or with astronomy rather than theology. In general, all was a matter of reading and learning from such books as Isidore’s Origines, which handled all topics indiscriminately, or from Bede, or from the works of Augustine or Gregory, in which every topic did but form part of the encyclopaedic presentation of the relationship between the soul and God, and the soul’s way to salvation.
What then did these men care for? Naturally, first of all, for the elements of their primary education, their studies in the Seven Arts. They did what they might with Grammar and Rhetoric, and with Dialectic, which sometimes was Rhetoric and formal Logic joined. Logic, for those who studied it seriously, was beginning to form an important mental discipline. The four branches of the quadrivium were pursued more casually. Knowledge of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (one may throw in medicine as a fifth) was as it might be in the individual instance—always rudimentary, and usually rather less than more.
All of this, however, and it was not very much, was but the preparation, if the man was to be earnest in his pursuit of wisdom. Wisdom lay chiefly in Theology, to wit, the whole saving contents of Scripture as understood and interpreted by Gregory and Augustine. There was little mortal knowledge which this range of Scriptural interpretation might not include. It compassed such knowledge of the physical world as would enable one to understand the work of Creation set forth in Genesis; it embraced all that could be known of man, of his physical nature, and assuredly of his spiritual part. Here Christian truth might call on the better pagan philosophy for illustration and rational corroboration, so far as that did corroborate. When it did not, it was pernicious falsity.
So Christian piety viewed the matter. But the pious commonly have their temporal fancies, sweet as stolen fruit. These Carolingian scholars, the man in orders and the man without, studied the Latin poets, historians, and orators. And in their imaginative or poetic moods, as they followed classic metre, so they reproduced classic phrase and sentiment in their verses. The men who made such—it might be Alcuin, or Theodulphus, or Walafrid Strabo—chose what they would as the subject of their poems; but the presentation took form and phrase from Virgil and other old poets. The antique influence so strong in the Carolingian period, included much more than matters of elegant culture, like poetry and art, or even rhetoric and grammar. It held the accumulated experience in law and institution, which still made part of the basis of civic life. Rabanus Maurus recognized it thus broadly. And, thus largely taken, the antique survives in the Carolingian time as a co-ordinate dominant, with Latin Christianity. Neither, as yet, was affected by the solvent processes of transmutation into new human faculty and power. None the less, this same antique survival was destined to pass into modes and forms belonging quite as much to the Middle Ages as to antiquity; and, thus recast, it was to become a broadening and informing element in the mediaeval personality.
Likewise with the patristic Christianity which had been transmitted to the Carolingian time, to be then and there not only conned and studied, but also rearranged by these painful students, so that they and their successors might the better comprehend it. It was not for them to change the patristic forms organically, by converting them into the modes of mediaeval understanding of the same. These would be devised, or rather achieved, by later men, living in centuries when the patristic heritage of doctrine, long held and cherished, had permeated the whole spiritual natures of mediaeval men and women, and had been itself transmuted in what it had transformed.
CHAPTER XI
MENTAL ASPECTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: ITALY
I. From Charlemagne to Hildebrand.
II. The Human Situation.
III. The Italian Continuity of Antique Culture.
IV. Italy’s Intellectual Piety: Peter Damiani and St. Anselm.
I
The Empire of Charlemagne could not last. Two obvious causes, among others, were enough to prevent it. No single government (save when temporarily energized by some extraordinary ruler) could control such enormous and widely separated regions, which included much of the present Germany and Austria, the greater part of Italy, France, and the Low Countries. Large portions of this Empire were almost trackless, and nowhere were there good roads and means of transportation. Then, as the second cause, within these diverse and ununited lands dwelt or moved many peoples differing from each other in blood and language, in conditions of life and degrees of civilization or barbarism. No power existed that could either hold them in subjection or make them into proper constituents of an Empire.[287]
There were other, more particular, causes of dissolution: the Frankish custom of partitioning the realm brought war between Louis the Pious and his sons, and then among the latter; no scion of the Carolingian house was equal to the situation; under the ensuing turbulence, the royal power weakened, and local protection, or oppression, took its place; constant war exhausted the strength of the Empire, and particularly of Austrasia, while from without Norsemen, Slavs, and Saracens were attacking, invading, plundering everywhere. These marauders still were heathen, or obstinate followers of the Prophet; while Christianity was the bond of unity and empire. Charlemagne and his strong predecessors had been able thus to view and use the Church; but the weaker successors, beginning with Louis the Pious, too eager for the Church’s aid and condonation, found their subservience as a reed that broke and pierced the hand.
These causes quickly brought about the Empire’s actual dissolution. On the other hand, a potent conception had been revived in western Europe. Louis the Pious, himself made emperor in Charlemagne’s lifetime, associated his eldest son with him as co-emperor, and made his two younger sons kings, hoping thus to preserve the Empire’s unity. If that unity forthwith became a name, it was a name to conjure with; and the corresponding imperial fact was to be again made actual by the first Saxon Otto, a man worthy to reach back across the years and clasp the hand of the great Charles.
That intervening century and a half preceding the year 962 when Otto was crowned emperor, carried political and social changes. To the West, in the old Neustrian kingdom which was to form the nucleus of mediaeval France, the Carolingian line ran out in degenerates surnamed the Pious, the Bald, the Stammerer, the Simple, and the Fat.