The Medieval Mind. Henry Osborn Taylor
phases of thought and mood, were held or felt by many men, who may not have known their source. And Augustine was not only part of all this, but in mind and temper was Platonically inclined. Thus the most important elements of Platonism and Neo-Platonism in Augustine were his cognate spiritual mood and his attitude toward the world of physical fact.
Note the personal affinity between Augustine and Plotinus. Both are absorbed in the higher pointings of their thought; neither is much occupied with its left-handed relationships, which, however, are by no means to be disowned. The minds and souls of both are set upon God the Spirit; the minds and eyes of both are closed to the knowledge of the natural world. Thus neither Plotinus nor Augustine was much affected by the popular beliefs of Christianity or paganism. The former cared little for demon-lore or divination, and was not seriously touched by polytheism. No more was the latter affected by the worship of saints and relics, or by other elements of Christian credulity, which when brought to his attention pass from his mind as quickly as his duties of Christian bishop will permit.
But it was half otherwise with Porphyry, and altogether otherwise with Iamblicus. The first of these was drawn, repelled, and tortured by the common superstitions, especially the magic and theurgy which made men gape; but Iamblicus gladly sported in these mottled currents. On the Christian side, Jerome might be compared with them, or a later man, the last of the Latin Fathers, Gregory the Great. Clear as was the temporal wisdom of this great pope, and heavy as were his duties during the troubled times of his pontificate (590–604), still his mind was busy with the miraculous and diabolic. His mind and temperament have absorbed at least the fruitage of prior superstitions, whether Christian or pagan need not be decided. He certainly was not influenced by Iamblicus. Nor need one look upon these phases of his nature as specifically the result of the absorption of pagan elements. He and his forebears had but gone the path of credulity and mortal blindness, thronged by both pagans and Christians. And so in Gregory the tendencies making for intellectual obliquity do their perfect work. His religious dualism is strident; his resultant ascetism is extreme; and finally the symbolical, the allegorical, habit has shut his mind to the perception of the literal (shall we say, actual) meaning, when engaged with Scripture, as his great Commentary on Job bears witness. The same tendencies, but usually in milder type, had shown themselves with Augustine, who, in these respects, stands to Gregory as Plotinus to Iamblicus. Augustine can push allegory to absurdity; he can be ascetic; he is dualistic. But all these things have not barbarized his mind, as they have Gregory’s.[53] Similarly the elements, which in Plotinus’s personality were held in innocuous abeyance, dominated the entire personality of Iamblicus, and made him a high priest of folly.
Thus we have observed the phases of thought which set the intellectual conditions of the later pagan times, and affected the mental processes of the Latin Fathers. The matter may be summarized briefly in conclusion. Platonism had created an intellectual and intelligible world, wherein a dissolving dialectic turned the cognition of material phenomena into a reflection of the mind’s ideals. This was more palpable in Neo-Platonism than it had been in Plato’s system. Stoicism on the other hand represented a rule of life, the sanction of which was inner peace. Its working principle was the rightly directed action of the self-controlling will. Fundamentally ethical, it set itself to frame a corresponding conception of the universe. Platonism and Neo-Platonism found in material facts illustrations or symbols of ideal truths and principles of human life. Stoicism was interested in them as affording a foundation for ethics. None of these systems was seriously interested in facts apart from their symbolical exemplification of truth, or their bearing on the conduct of life; and the same principles that affected the observation of nature were applied to the interpretation of myth, tradition, and history.
In the opening centuries of the Christian Era the world was becoming less self-reliant. It was tending to look to authority for its peace of mind. In religion men not only sought, as formerly, for superhuman aid, but were reaching outward for what their own rational self-control no longer gave. They needed not merely to be helped by the gods, but to be sustained and saved. Consequently, prodigious interest was taken in the means of bringing man to the divine, and obtaining the saving support which the gods alone could give. The philosophic thought of the time became palpably mediatorial. Neo-Platonism was a system of mediation between man and the Absolute First Principle; and soon its lower phases became occupied with such palpable means as divination and oracles, magic and theurgy.
The human reason has always proved unable to effect this mediation between man and God. The higher Neo-Platonism presented as the furthest goal a supra-rational and ecstatic vision. This was its union with the divine. The lower Neo-Platonism turned this lofty supra-rationality into a principle of credulity more and more agape for fascinating or helpful miracles. Thus a constant looking for divine or demonic action became characteristic of the pagan intelligence.
The Gospel of Christ, in spreading throughout the pagan world, was certain to gather to itself the incidents of its apprehension by pagans, and take various forms, one of which was to become the dominant or Catholic. Conversely, Christians (and we have in mind the educated people) would retain their methods of thinking in spite of change in the contents of their thought. This would be true even of the great and learned Christian leaders, the Fathers of the Church. At the same time the Faith reinspired and redirected their energies. Yet (be it repeated for the sake of emphasis) their mental processes, their ways of apprehending and appreciating facts, would continue those of that paganism which in them had changed to Christianity.
Every phase of intellectual tendency just summarized as characteristic of the pagan world, entered the modes in which the Fathers of the Latin Church apprehended and built out their new religion. First of all, the attitude toward knowledge. No pagan philosophy, not Platonism or any system that came after it, had afforded an incentive for concentration of desire equal to that presented in the person and the precepts of Jesus. The desire of the Kingdom of Heaven was a master-motive such as no previous idealism had offered. It would bring into conformity with itself not only all the practical considerations of life, but verily the whole human desire to know. First it mastered the mind of Tertullian; and in spite of variance and deviation it endured through the Middle Ages as the controlling principle of intellectual effort. Its decree was this: the knowledge which men need and should desire is that which will help them to save and perfect their souls for the Kingdom of God. Some would interpret this broadly, others narrowly; some would actually be constrained by it, and others merely do it a polite obeisance. But acknowledged it was by well-nigh all men, according to their individual tempers and the varying times in which they lived.
Platonism was an idealistic cosmos; Stoicism a cosmos of subjective ethics and teleological conceptions of the physical world. The furthest outcome of both might be represented by Augustine’s cosmos of the soul and God. As for reasoning processes, inwardly inspired and then applied to the world of nature and history, Christianity combined the idealizing, fact-compelling ways of Platonic dialectic with the Stoical interest in moral edification. And, more utterly than either Platonist or Stoic, the Christian Father lacked interest in knowledge of the concrete fact for its own sake. His mental glance was even more oblique than theirs, fixed as it was upon the moral or spiritual—the anagogic—inference. Of course he carried symbolism and allegory further than Stoic and Platonist had done, one reason being that he was impelled by the specific motive of harmonizing the Old Testament with the Gospel, and thereby proving the divine mission of Jesus.
Idealism might tend toward dualistic ethics, and issue in asceticism, as was the tendency in Stoicism and the open result with Plotinus and his disciples. Such, with mightier power and firmer motive, was the outcome of Christian ethics, in monasticism. Christianity was not a dualistic philosophy; but neither was Stoicism nor Neo-Platonism. Yet, like them, it was burningly dualistic in its warfare against the world, the flesh, and the devil.
We turn to other but connected matters: salvation, mediatorship, theory and practice. The need of salvation made men Christians; the God-man was the one and sufficient mediator between man and God. Such was the high dogma, established with toil and pain. And the practice graded downward to mediatorial persons, acts, and things, marvellous, manifold, and utterly analogous to their pagan kin. The mediatorial persons were the Virgin and the saints; the sacraments were the magic mediatorial acts; the relic was the magic mediatorial thing. And, as with Neo-Platonism, there was in Christianity a principle of supra-rational