THE MEDLEVAL MIND.*

TAE name of Mr. Taylor's work is pregnant with suggestion, and it raises many problems which affect our own traditional opinions, especially in theology. In other directions, and • The Medianal Mind. By Henry Osborn Taylor. Two vols. London : Hacaull' an and Co. [21s. net.]

notably in the whole field of science, the progress .of the European world since the fifteenth century has been won by an ever-strengthening and widening revolt against the domi- nation of a spirit which may be personified conveniently in the term Medieval. But in theology, medirevalism prevails far more generally than the average man suspects. It is no monopoly of Roman Catholics or of High Church Anglicans, since it infects the whole body of our current Evangelical theories, and it is the foundation upon which all the Calvinistic systems of the sixteenth century were built.

Mr. Taylor, then, has chosen a large and a very comprehen- sive labour, and he has prepared himself for it by his two pre- vious works. In his Ancient Ideals, a study of intellectual and spiritual growth from early times to the establishment of Christianity, he has filled two long volumes with his picture of a mental evolution, which was not always progressive, in the Gram-Roman world. Then in The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages he showed what was saved from the wreckage of that great civilization to equip mankind for their onward voyage through dark and very stormy seas. The present work is in some ways more laborious than its pre- decessors, because it is concerned with a subject that is more difficult and complex. We must pay our tribute of commen- dation, without any reserve, to Mr. Taylor's immense reading, which is nothing short of stupendous, considering the numbers and the bulk of his authorities ; to his sane and sturdy judg- ment, which seldom fails ; and to his unfailing impartiality, from which he never swerves. We cannot, however, pay as high a compliment to his execution. His style is not a work of art. His arrangement leaves much to be desired. His repetitions and redundancies are a weariness in the flesh, and might all have been avoided by remembering what the great wit and critic says about lucid order, the duties of compo- sition, and the erasing pen. Besides, Mr. Taylor is too fond of strange words, which do not justify themselves by their felicity. " Compend," instead of the usual compendium, is a frequent example of this blemish ; but the volumes are so long, and the lapses are so numerous, that we can only give a general warning against Mr. Taylor's perversity and impropriety in the use of language. It is all the more regrettable in him because he is rightly sensitive to these faults in others. Speaking about certain German Latinists of the eleventh century, he says, " The spirit is grand, the literary result awful." And again, of a later celebrity, "As our author was a thoughtful German, his style is difficult and involved." Mr. Taylor's own practice compels us to remind him of the Horatian shaft, "Egomet mi ignosco "; and of the retort that such blind self-love is silly and shameless : " stultus et improbus" (L Sat. iii. -24). " The true lovers " of the classics, as Mr. Taylor says so finely, "like the true lovers of all noble literature, are always in a state of pupilage to the poems and the histories they love." It is most creditable that in so long a work there should be so few blunders, either textual or in the facts; but the description of the Pons Milvius as "the Malvern Bridge" contains an error of both kinds. No lover of Piranesi, or of the bewitch- ing" Ponte Mole," engraved by Major, after Claude Lorraine, could have blundered so awkwardly. On page 196 " Colurn- ban's " is, we think, printed for Columbanus' ; and Charles Martel's name is misspelled on page 197 of vol. i.

But we may turn away from these flaws, which ought, how- ever, to be branded, and concern ourselves henceforth with the strength and excellences of Mr. Taylor's work. And we must begin by explaining briefly what he understands by the Middle Ages, and how he interprets his duty as their historian. " The Middle Ages ! They seem so far away ; intellectually so preposterous, spiritually so strange" ; but, he adds, "their mask is by no means dumb; in full voice speaks the noble beauty of Chartres Cathedral." He protests, however, as Anatole France does, too, against the current notion that the Middle Ages were "romantic" in the common meaning of that word. "They were not, God knows, a time of romance, in the sense commonly taken," that is, in real and practical life. But their mental world "was the land of metaphysical construction and the land of spiritual passion. There lay their romance, thither pointed their veriest thinking, thither drew their utter yearning." To explore and to explain that land of dreams is Mr. Taylor's purpose ; and he warns us against being led away by the minute details of practical life on the one hand and being misled into theological mazes on the other. The historian, he adds, must explain "by the standards and limitations of the times to which his people belong." He

must be sympathetic. But he must also judge wisely and righteously. Sincerity alone is not a sufficient -virtue, since "the fool, the maniac, is sincere; the mainsprings of the good

which we commend lie deeper." We may sympathize when ideals are lived up to; but we should only commend when those ideals make for light, not for darkness ; when they lead on towards progress and beneficence. Further,

"whatever may be one's beliefs, a realization of the power and im- port of the Christian faith is needed for an understanding of the thoughts and feelings moving the men and women of the Middle Ages and for a just appreciation of their aims and ideals. Per- haps the fittest standard to apply to them is one's own broadest conception of the Christian scheme, the Christian scheme whole and entire with the full life of Christ's Gospel."

These are comfortable words and excellent aims, but easier to write than to carry out, because " every age has offered an interpretation of that Gospel and an attempt at fulfilment" ; and they are all different, if not contradictory. Mr. Taylor, however, in a later page (169), speaks more firmly and clearly, with a truer criticism, when he defines Mediaeval Christianity as "the religion called after the name of Christ." Mr. Taylor, them distinguishes clearly in this passage between the principles of Jesus and the ecclesiastical Christianity of the Middle Ages. A similar distinction must always be made and remembered between the principles of Jesus and the very different religions system which was established by Constantine. We are led ultimately and irresistibly to make a clearer dis- tinction between what Jesus actually taught and held and

-what later men thought and wrote about Him.

A want of understanding in these matters led the mediaeval world into many of its crimes and blunders; and it has lured the modern world into the errors of romanticism and of the Tractarian Movement.

The early eighteenth century despised and ignored the Middle Ages ; the early nineteenth was inclined to worship them, or at any rate to worship after what it thought was their manner. Both attitudes were equally uncritical. We, at any rate, understand the Middle Ages

better, and many recent books have increased our knowledge. Boissier's Religion .Romaine, Mr. Glover's Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire and his Life and Letters in the Fourth Century, Professor Dill's Roman Society, Maitland's most brilliant and solid writing, and in another field Bishop Stubbs, have all thrown floods of light, both on the Middle Ages themselves and on those distressing centuries when the Imperial fabric of the Caesars was crumbling away. In Italy alone, as Mr. Taylor says, there was no break between the old civilization and the mediaeval society -which was developed out of its ruins. Those early times of development were literally the dark ages, times of decadence and barbarism reaching from the fifth century to the ninth. Mr. Taylor shows very clearly what that darkness was in itself, and what it means for us. Into that gulf was plunged, not only the outward fabric of society, but its thinkers and their systems, including

Christianity. History was no longer historical. Science was proscribed. Letters were studied, not for their own sake, but as a means of edification. Everything was viewed with reference to a supposed scheme of salvation, which was formu- lated by Augustine out of a narrow and exaggerated remodel- ling of St. Paul, and it all depended on a complete misreading of the Jewish Scriptures ; not a misreading of what was in them, but of the way in which they should be, and must be, understood. We cannot commend this part of Mr. Taylor's work too highly. It is painful reading, but the knowledge is indispensable, because out of that gulf of ignorance there emerged our present ecclesiastical systems and our current theologies of every colour; and it is only through understanding the whole process of decline and degradation that Church history and theology can be cleared from the infection of a very ignorant period.

Far pleasanter is the account which follows of growth and of revival, filled as it is with all the charm and blitheness of a youthful world. Central and Northern France, as Mr.

Taylor says truly, is the home of the most originative mediaeval development, both in building and writing. Most delightful, again, is his little history of those Latin hymns, which are one of our best inheritances from the Middle Ages Earnest and informing, as the subject itself, is his tribute to the majestic and beneficent Roman law, which more than any other single element brought civilization back to Europe- Freedom, as Mr. Taylor observes truly, belongs to civilization rather than to barbarism. And he reminds us that "it was the soul of Latium and not the soul of Hellas that imbued these lands with a new homogeneity of civic order." Then he shows how the revival of law led on to the establishment of civics life and of lay influences ; how intellectual freedom was desired and struggled for by such men as Abelard and Roger Bacon. After them be shows a scholasticism perishing of its own defects, reasoning itself out of human reach. The death of thm mediaeval world is not unlike the close of "The Dunciad.' At any rate its last great embodiment, Duns Scotus, has given his name to all subsequent dunces. And so we are led on very profitably to the dawn of the sixteenth century.

We regret that we may not quote the many excellent things which Mr. Taylor says in his long progress, because they often throw much light on past history and current problems ; but we may note a few. The Merovingian Church was national, subject to the king, and quite independent of Rome until the seventh century. All the Irish failed in obedience, order, and effective organization. They had cleverness, facility, ardour, and energy ; but, through their defects, they fell behind when they had delivered their message to more solid races. Thoroughly sound, again, is Mr. Taylor's account of the Mediaeval Papacy, which he sees began only in the eleventh century; and he may help some who are not Romanists to see that many of the beliefs and most of the practices which they describe as " Catholic " do not go further back than the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Finally, if it be not too pre- sumptuous, we would remind Pins X. that " there is nothing new under the sun," not even Modernism. Loisy was condemned, among other offences, for distinguishing between truths of theology and truths of science or history; but the distinc- tion must be allowed unless we are to return to that mediaeval darkness which was caused so largely by forgetting it.