LITMIR.BIZ

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France were to become their own great French selves; and while the literature was to hold to forms derived from the antique and the Romanesque, the spirit and the contents did not come from Italy.

      The office of Latin culture in Germany and England was to be more definite and limited. Germany had never been subdued to the Roman order; in Anglo-Saxon England, Roman civilization had been effaced by the Saxon conquest, which, like the Moorish conquest of Spain, was most complete in those parts of the land where the Roman influence had been strongest. In neither of these lands was there any antique atmosphere, or antique pagan substratum—save as the universal human soul is pagan! Latinity came to Germans and Anglo-Saxons as a foreign culture, which was not to pertain to all men’s daily living. It was matter for the educated, for the clergy. Its vehicle was a formal language, having no connection with the vernacular. And when the antique culture had obtained certain resting-places in England and Germany, the first benign labours of those Germans or Anglo-Saxons who had mastered the language consisted in the translation of edifying Latin matter into their own tongues. So Latinity in England and Germany was likely to remain a distinguishable influence. The Anglo-Saxons and the rest in England were to become Englishmen, the Germans were to remain Germans; nor was either race ever to become Latinized, however deeply the educated people of these countries might imbibe Latinity, and exercise their intellects upon all that was contained in the antique metaphysics and natural science, literature and law.

      Thus diverse were the situations of the young mediaeval peoples with respect to the antique store. There were like differences of situation in regard to Latin Christianity. It had been formed (from some points of view one might say, created) by the civilized peoples of the Roman Empire who had been converted in the course of the original diffusion of the Faith. It was, in fact, the product of the conversion of the Roman Empire, and, in Italy and the Latin provinces received its final fashioning and temper from the Latin Fathers. Thus within the Latin-speaking portions of the Empire was formed the system which was to be presented to the Teutonic heathen peoples of the north. They had neither made it nor grown up with it. It was brought to the Franks, to the Anglo-Saxons, and to the Germans east of the Rhine, as a new and foreign faith. And the import of the fact that it was introduced to them as an authoritative religion brought from afar, did not lessen as Christianity became a formative element in their natures.

      One may say that an attitude of humble inferiority before Christianity and Latin culture was an initial condition of mediaeval development, having much to do with setting its future lines. In Italy, men looked back to what seemed even as a greater ancestral self, while in the minds of the northern peoples the ancient Empire represented all knowledge and the summit of human greatness. The formulated and ordered Latin Christianity evoked even deeper homage. Well it might, since besides the resistless Gospel (its source of life) it held the intelligence and the organizing power of Rome, which had passed into its own last creation, the Catholic Church. And when this Christianity, so mighty in itself and august through the prestige of Rome, was presented as under authority, its new converts might well be struck with awe.[4] It was such awe as this that acknowledged the claims of the Roman bishops, and made possible a Roman and Catholic Church—the most potent unifying influence of the Middle Ages.

      Still more was the character of mediaeval progress set by the action and effect of these two forces. The Latin culture provided the means and method of elementary education, as well as the material for study; while Latin Christianity, with transforming power, worked itself into the souls of the young mediaeval peoples. The two were assuredly the moulding forces of all mediaeval development; and whatever sprang to life beyond the range of their action was not, properly speaking, mediaeval, even though seeing the light in the twelfth century.[5] Yet one should not think of these two great influences as entities, unchanging and utterly distinct from what must be called for simplicity’s sake the native traits of the mediaeval peoples. The antique culture had never ceased to form part of the nature and faculties of Italians, and to some extent still made the inherited equipment of the Latinized or Latin-descended people of Spain and France. In the same lands also, Latin Christianity had attained its form. And even in England and Germany, Christianity and Latin culture would be distinct from the Teuton folk only at the first moment of presentation and acceptance. Thereupon the two would begin to enter into and affect their new disciples, and would themselves change under the process of their own assimilation by these Teutonic natures.

      Nevertheless, the Latin Christianity of the Fathers and the antique fund of sentiment and knowledge, through their self-conserving strength, affected men in constant ways. Under their action the peoples of western Europe, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, passed through a homogeneous growth, and evolved a spirit different from that of any other period of history—a spirit which stood in awe before its monitors divine and human, and deemed that knowledge was to be drawn from the storehouse of the past; which seemed to rely on everything except its sin-crushed self, and trusted everything except its senses; which in the actual looked for the ideal, in the concrete saw the symbol, in the earthly Church beheld the heavenly, and in fleshly joys discerned the devil’s lures; which lived in the unreconciled opposition between the lust and vain-glory of earth and the attainment of salvation; which felt life’s terror and its pitifulness, and its eternal hope; around which waved concrete infinitudes, and over which flamed the terror of darkness and the Judgment Day.

      II

      Under the action of Latin Christianity and the antique culture the mediaeval genius developed, as it fused the constituents of its growth into temperament and power. Its energies were neither to produce an extension of knowledge, nor originate substantial novelties either of thought or imaginative conception. They were rather to expend themselves in the creation of new forms—forms of apprehending and presenting what was (or might be) known from the old books, and all that from century to century was ever more plastically felt. This principle is most important for the true appreciation of the intellectual and emotional phenomena of the Middle Ages.

      When a sublime religion is presented to capable but half-civilized peoples, and at the same time an acquaintance is opened to them with the education, the knowledge, the literature of a great civilization, they cannot create new forms or presentations of what they have received, until the same has been assimilated, and has become plastic in their minds, as it were, part of their faculty and feeling. Manifestly the northern peoples could not at once transmute the lofty and superabundant matter of Latin Christianity and its accompanying Latin culture, and present the same in new forms. Nor in truth could Italy, involved as she was in a disturbed decadence, wherein she seemed to be receding from an understanding of the nobler portions of her antique and Christian heritage, rather than progressing toward a vital use of one or the other. In Spain and France there was some decadence among Latinized provincials; and the Teutonic conquerors were novices in both Christianity and Latinity. In these lands neither decadence nor the novelty of the matter was the sole embarrassment, but both combined to hinder creativeness, although the decadence was less obvious than in Italy, and the newness of the matter less utter than in Germany.

      The ancient material was appropriated, and then re-expressed in new forms, through two general ways of transmutation, the intellectual and the emotional. Although patently distinguishable, these would usually work together, with one or the other dominating the joint progress.

      Of the two, the intellectual is the easier to analyze. Thinking is necessarily dependent on the thinker, although it appear less intimately part of him than his emotions, and less expressive of his character. Accordingly, the mediaeval genius shows somewhat more palely in its intellectual productions, than in the more emotional phases of literature and art. Yet the former exemplify not only mediaeval capacities, but also the mediaeval intellectual temperament, or, as it were, the synthetic predisposition of the mediaeval mind. This temperament, this intellectual predisposition, became in general more marked through the centuries from the ninth to the twelfth. People could not go on generation after generation occupied with like topics of intellectual interest, reasoning upon them along certain lines of religious and ethical suggestion, without developing or intensifying some general type of intellectual temper.

      From the Carolingian period onward, the men interested in knowledge learned the patristic theology, and, in gradually expanding compass, acquired antique logic and metaphysics, mathematics, natural science and jurisprudence. What they learned,

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