History in English words

CHAPTER VII
DEVOTION

Passion. Lady. Love-longing. Conscience. Inquisition. Authority. Individual. Influence.

Apuleius and other imperial writers have left us a picture, gaudy and fascinating enough, of the earlier centuries of the Roman Empire. In their works the pomps and frivolities of that decaying world pass in procession before our eyes; the tenuous old Roman gods and goddesses rub shoulders in the popular imagination, on the one hand, with powerful relics of the Egyptian Mysteries, and on the other—already in the second century—with full-blooded medieval witches and demons; while the polite scepticism and graceful dissipation of the educated raises its eyebrows and shrugs its shoulders at the credulous fervours of Christians and their numerous fellow-cranks. There are only one or two common English words which throw any direct light on this period. Martyr, the Greek word for a ‘witness’, and so ‘a witness to the truth’, tells its story of the earlier days of the Church, as heresy of the later. The name Constantinople has a double historical significance. It bears the name of the first Roman emperor who recognized Christianity as the established religion of the empire, and it marks the removal in A.D. 330 of the imperial capital from Italy to the shores of the Bosphorus. That removal foreshadowed the inevitable splitting up of the Roman Empire into an eastern and a western half, a schism which survives formally to-day in the difference between the Greek and the Catholic Church. It may be called the starting-point of European history.

For Christian Rome we can go to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and Kingsley’s Hypatia, while Merejkowski, in his Death of the Gods, has attempted to paint, in addition, something of the inner surface of that world, to depict the huge shadowy movements that were taking place deep down in the wills and imaginations of men. Powerful movements they must have been. For now the meanings and associations of all those Latin words which were subsequently to come into our language in the various ways described in Chapter III were being built up or altered, not only by outstanding figures such as St. Jerome and St. Augustine, and the lawyer Emperor Justinian, but also by insignificant Roman legionaries and barbarian private soldiers, by outlandish scholars and studious, dreaming monks. In particular, an increasing number of the profound and manifold concepts which had been laboriously worked into the Greek language in the manner suggested in the last chapter were gradually decanted, either by actual translation or by more indirect methods, into Latin syllables. Thus, side by side with the Septuagint, there came into being the Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments, finished by St. Jerome in A.D. 405, and still the received text of the Roman Catholic Church. But it did not stand alone like the Septuagint. Many volumes of ecclesiastical literature are extant through which we could trace the gradual importation into the Latin language of the new meanings. For example, at the end of the second century—no doubt with the object of distinguishing the Christian Mystery of incarnation, death, and rebirth from its many rivals—Tertullian fixed the Latin ‘sacramentum’ as the proper translation of ‘musterion’ instead of ‘mysterium’, which would probably have disappeared altogether had not Jerome restored it to partial use. Thus one word, as is often the case, split up into two, sacrament remaining within the Church to express, among other things, part of the old technical meaning of mystery, while mystery itself, freed from one half of its associations, moved outside and quickly grew wider and vaguer. ‘Passio’, the Latin word for suffering, used in ecclesiastical literature for the death of Jesus on the cross, gradually extended in a similar way the scope of its pregnant new meaning, and we find already in Tertullian a derivative ‘compassio’. From Latin, largely through French, such new meanings found their way into English, and it was these, as we shall see, more than anything else which transformed the country between the Norman Conquest and the fifteenth century into something like the England which we know to-day.

For if we omit the Dark Ages, and, turning suddenly from the civilization of classical Greece and Rome, raise the curtain on, say, thirteenth-century England, we are struck by a remarkable transformation. An attempt has been made in previous chapters to trace the general changes of meaning in certain key-words of human thought and feeling, such as God and love, life and death, heaven and hell,... When we reach medieval Europe, it is necessary to add a new class of key-word altogether. Let us look at a fifteenth-century English carol:

In such a poem we have once more a kind of cross-section of the growth of European outlook. Between its lines we seem to be able to hear, as in a dream, the monotonous intonings of Egyptian priests, the quiet words of Socrates in the Academy, and the alert speculative hum of the Alexandrian world. It is so graceful that for the moment it seems as though all these things, with all the pillages and massacres and crucifixions and vast imperial achievements of Rome, had been conspiring together merely to load the homely old Teutonic word ‘loaf-kneader’ with new semantic significance, to transform it into that mystery and symbol in the imaginations of men, a lady.

The medieval lyric, as it gradually loses its exclusive preoccupation with ecclesiastical subjects, becomes more and more concerned with woman, and concerned with her in a new way. Through the poetry of Italy, where the Renaissance was already stirring, the troubadour literature of France, and that strange “Rose” tradition which is preserved to us in Chaucer’s translation of the Roman de la Rose, there grew up during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a small special vocabulary defining the landmarks in that new region of the imagination which the poets, and even the scholars, of Europe were just discovering; we might call it the region of devotional love. Indeed, it was more than a vocabulary; it developed at one time into a sort of miniature mythology, for the various conflicting elements in a lady’s disposition which the lover had to meet with and overcome were actually personified, ‘Danger’ being a kind of mixture of modesty and haughtiness—an ill-omened creature whom ‘Pity’ or ‘Mercy’, if the lover was fortunate, finally put to rout:

In these three lines from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women the four Anglo-French words Danger, Pity, Gentle, and Mercy are all Latin terms whose forms had altered, and whose meanings had received the Christian stamp during the Dark Ages. Pity comes from ‘pietas’ (compare piety); gentle from ‘gentilis’ meaning ‘of the same family’ and later ‘of noble birth’; and mercy from ‘merces’, ‘a reward’, then ‘a reward in heaven for kindness displayed on earth’. None of them—with the exception of mercy in its theological sense—are known to have been used in English before the thirteenth century. Anguish, beauty, bounty, charity, comfort, compassion, courtesy, delicate, devotion, grace, honour, humble, passion, patience, peace, purity, tender are further examples of this new vocabulary of tenderness which came to us from Latin through Early French. Some of them, such as charity, delicate, and passion, were probably brought to England by the preaching friars before the Conquest; others came with the devout Normans, and did not develop a secular meaning until after they had reached our shores (devotion remaining purely theological until as late as the sixteenth century); while yet a third class had already been secularized by nimble spirits like Petrarch and Ronsard a century or two before they reached us by the Norman route along with more frivolous terms, amorous, dainty, dalliance, debonair, delight, pleasure, pleasance, and the like, in which there is no particular reason to perceive a strong ecclesiastical influence. All of them, apart from the last group, are alike in that they started with a theological meaning and subsequently developed an affectionate one alongside of it. We may think of them as gifts presented to the lyric lover by the Bride of Christ—well-chosen gifts; for were they not the ardent creations of her own early passion?

Thus, side by side with such lyrics as the carol quoted above, we find in the Middle Ages charming little secular poems almost indistinguishable from them in tone and manner:

And along with the influx of Anglo-French words further semantic changes were, of course, taking place in the more important Old English words. If there are occasions when a single word seems to throw more light on the workings of men’s minds than a whole volume of history or a whole page of contemporary literature, the Middle English love-longing is certainly one of them.

A new element had entered into human relationships, for which perhaps the best name that can be found is ‘tenderness’. And so—at any rate in the world of imagination—children as well as women gradually became the objects of a new solicitude. We do not find in all literature prior to the Middle Ages quite that pathetic sense of childhood which Chaucer has expressed so delicately in the story of Ugolino of Pisa in his Monk’s Tale:

Quotations are scarcely needed to intimate how such colourless words as little—here sentimentally repeated—children, and even cruelty, had gradually been laden with fresh emotional significance by the Roman Church’s worship of the baby Jesus and its popular expression in carol and drama. We still have a few examples of these old Nativity Plays, from the individual scenes of which we take the word pageant, and about the same time that Chaucer wrote we know that the tailors of Coventry composed and sang the beautiful carol which begins:

Thus, when Tindale and Coverdale came to make their translations of the Bible in the sixteenth century, they found ready to their hand a vocabulary of feeling which had indeed been drawn in the first place from the austerities of the religious life, but which had in many cases acquired warmer and more human echoes by having been applied to secular uses. And just as lyrical devotion to the Virgin Mary and to the infant Jesus had evolved a vocabulary which could express, and thus partly create, a sentiment of tenderness towards all women and young children, so we seem to feel the warmth of human affection, as it were, reflected back into religious emotion in such creations as Coverdale’s lovingkindness and tender mercy, Tindale’s long-suffering, mercifulness, peacemaker, and beautiful (for it was he who brought this word into general use), and in many of the majestically simple phrases of the Authorised Version.

In tracing the elements of modern consciousness through the history of words in this way, there is one mistake which it is especially important to avoid, and that is the mistake of over-simplification. For instance, just as it is true that the shade of feeling which we call ‘tenderness’ can be traced back to the literature of the Middle Ages, and that from there we can trace it farther back still, through the Mariolatry of the Roman Church to the opening chapters of the Luke Gospel, and so to the old Egyptian Isis-worship and the philosophy of Plato, so it is also true that it can be understood more perfectly and felt more fully when we have thus unravelled it. But not to realize that with the appearance of a poetic tradition which can give rise to such a poem as “I sing of a maiden” something quite new, something with no perceptible historical origin, enters into humanity, is to cultivate a deaf ear to literature, and to mistake quite as grievously both the method and the object of understanding history.

If medieval Europe is cut off from Greece and Rome by her imaginative conception of women, she is cut off even more completely by her abstention from slavery. Of this development, thus negatively stated, there are few, if any, signs in our language; but traces are by no means wanting of a certain deeper and more interior change which must have underlain the other two. Perhaps it can best be expressed as a new consciousness of the individual human soul. On the one hand the sense of its independent being and activity, of bottomless depths and soaring heights within it, to be explored in fear and trembling or with hope and joy—with delight and mirth, or with agony, anguish, despair, repentance—and on the other hand that feeling of its being an inner world, which has since developed so fully that this book, for example, has fallen naturally into two halves.

In this connection it is particularly interesting to note the appearance of conscience in the thirteenth century. In classical times the Latin ‘conscientia’ seems to have meant something more like ‘consciousness’ or ‘knowledge’; it was generally qualified by some other word (‘virtutum, vitiorum’—‘consciousness of virtues, of vices,’ ...), and its termination, similar to that of science, intelligence, ... suggests that it was conceived of by the Romans more as a general, abstract quality, which one would partake of, but not actually possess—just as one has knowledge or happiness, but not “a knowledge” or “a happiness”. Used in ecclesiastical Latin and later in English, conscience seems to have grown more and more real, until at last it became that semi-personified and perfectly private mentor whom we are inclined to mean to-day when we speak of “my conscience” or “his conscience”.

The movement towards “individualism”, like many other phenomena of modern civilization, has long ago shifted its centre of gravity outside the walls of the Church. Once it was felt as the peculiar glory of the Christian religion. In the Dark Ages heresies which attempted to explain away the significant paradox of Christ’s simultaneous divinity and humanity were hunted down with the utmost rigour, and it is probable that a vivid sense of the dignity of the individual human soul was at the bottom of a good many actions which now seem to us like the very stultification of such a conviction. This great inner world of consciousness, we may suppose, which each individual was now felt to control in some measure for himself, was a thing to fear as well as to respect. It gave to every single soul almost infinite potentialities, for evil as well as good; and even the wisest heads seem to have felt that civilization could only be held together as long as all these souls maintained a certain uniformity of pattern. Thus, while the influence of Christianity had ensured to all men—not merely to a small slave-owning class—a modicum of personal liberty, it deprived them in the same breath of that dearest of all possessions, freedom of thought. The grim meaning gradually acquired by the Latin word Inquisition, meaning an ‘inquiry’, still signifies to us the ruthless pains that were now taken, for the first time in the world’s history, to pry into and endeavour to control that private thinking life of men which had suddenly acquired such a vast importance in their eyes. The still grimmer auto-da-fé began life as a Spanish phrase meaning simply an ‘act of faith’.

It seems remarkable to us that, in spite of this active discouragement of independent thinking, the Dark and Middle Ages were, beyond dispute, the cradle of European philosophy. Perhaps this was because men did not yet feel the need for such independence. The leading quality of medieval thought was its receptiveness, and towards the end of its life it seems to have become almost conscious of this itself; for it is hardly possible to open a volume of Chaucer without lighting on some half-respectful, half-ironical reference to “olde clerkes” or “olde bokes”. But the profound respect in which the written word had been held throughout the Middle Ages survives in many other curious ways as well. We still use the word authority in its two separate meanings of ‘a quotation from a book’ and ‘the power of controlling’. Of these the first meaning is the older, and from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries it may almost be said to have included the latter within it. Again, our word glamour, a later form of gramarye, suggests an almost mystical reverence for the ‘grammar’ which—along with most of the other branches of medieval learning—was derived entirely from the works of Aristotle. The popularity and general use of term, which began life as a subtle technicality of Aristotelian logic, reminds us again of the universal study of that writer in the Middle Ages, and spice—a corrupted form of ‘species’—is but another indication of the way in which the jargon of classical philosophy crept into their everyday thought.

The change from Greek and Roman civilization to the civilization of modern Europe is often represented as having been more abrupt than it really was. We have deduced some of the intermediate stages in the alterations of feeling. In the world of thought there are actual written documents for our information, philosophical treatises and counter-treatises, which, by revealing to us the very moment of impact, enable us to trace more easily the reverberation of thought from mind to mind. Very soon after the break up of Rome, when the Empire was being partially re-organized under Teutonic dynasties and the defunct Latin Caesar rising again as the Germanic Kaiser, the great medieval “Schools”, of which the most famous was at Paris, began to arise out of the traditions of monastic learning. Their classical library apparently consisted of one Platonic dialogue and two or three works of Aristotle, all of them translated; but the authority of these translations was absolute. At first Plato was considered the greater “authority”, but from the beginning of the thirteenth century it seems to have been accepted almost as a matter of course that the one great object of all philosophy for all time was the harmonization of Aristotelian logic and Catholic dogma. But though the Aristotelian method (as they understood it) was all in all, the actual Platonic system, with the help of Neoplatonism and the Mystics, lingered in sufficient strength to divide medieval philosophy for several hundred years into two rival camps. The one party, known as “Realists”, held with Plato that “ideas”—now usually called universals—had existed before, and could exist quite apart from, things; while the “Nominalists” held that universals had no separate or previous existence. But as time passed, many of the Nominalists went farther still, maintaining that these universals did not exist at all, that they were mere intellectual abstractions or classifications made by the human mind—in fact “ideas” in the sense in which, owing to them, we use the word to-day. One of the reasons—perhaps the chief reason—why so many Schoolmen carried Aristotle beyond himself in this way is a particularly interesting one.

Reference has already been made to the wave of Arabic civilization which surged into Europe early in the Dark Ages. It was a civilization in every sense of the word; for in the ninth century learning had developed under the Caliphs of Baghdad to a degree unparalleled elsewhere in the world, and rapprochements between the two races and civilizations, which had already begun in the world of philosophy, were soon strengthened and increased by those great medieval experiments, the Crusades.[36] Now Arabic scholars were, if anything, more enthusiastic Aristotelians than the scholars of Europe. The curious word arabesque, and the fact that words like algebra, cipher, zero, and some others to be mentioned in the next chapter are among the few Arabic words which reached our language before the fourteenth century, are both symptomatic of a certain peculiarity of the Arabic mind which we may perhaps call the tendency to abstraction. The Arab seems to have possessed something of that combination of materialism on the one hand and excessive intellectual abstraction on the other which we have already noticed in the later stages of Roman mythology. Just as he made Mohammedanism out of the Jewish sacred traditions, so he made Nominalism out of Greek philosophy. The influence upon Christian thought of great Arabic philosophers like Averroes and Avicenna is one of the most astonishing chapters in its history. But it is not difficult to see how it occurred. The learning of the Middle Ages was founded entirely on translations, and this was an activity in which, as far as Aristotle’s works were concerned, the Arabs had got in first. According to Renan, some of the current versions of Aristotle were “Latin translations from a Hebrew translation of a Commentary of Averroes made on an Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of a Greek text”.

To the Popes and those who had the power and interest of the Church most at heart the problem appeared in quite a different light. It was a question of steering Christian dogma between the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of materialism and its logical conclusion, scepticism. Thus, throughout the history of Scholasticism we have to do with a sort of triangle of intellectual forces: Realism and Nominalism fighting a five hundred years’ war, and the Church, in its official capacity, anxiously endeavouring to hold the balance between them. One wonders whether the three parties to this ancient dispute may not have found symbolic expression in Tweedledum, Tweedledee, and the “Monstrous Crow” of nursery legend. But it is no disparagement of the intellects of that day to say that to us the chief interest of their polemics lies in the many new and accurate instruments of thought with which they provided us. The common word accident is an excellent example. We use it every day without realizing that it was only imported from Latin by the indefatigable efforts of the Schoolmen to reconcile the doctrine of Realism with the Catholic dogma of Transubstantiation. The accidents, when they first came into the English language, meant that part of the sacred bread and wine which remained after the substance had been transmuted into the body and blood of Christ.

On the whole it is a safe rule to assume that those who speak most contemptuously of such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus are the nearest modern representatives of their own idea of what these Schoolmen were; that is to say, they are those whose imaginations are most completely imprisoned within the intellectual horizon of the passing age. Much fun has been made of medieval philosophy for discussing such matters as how many angels can stand on the point of a needle, and whether Christ could have performed His cosmic mission equally well if He had been incarnated as a pea instead of as a man. The growth of a rudimentary historical sense has, it is true, made it fashionable lately to take these ancient thinkers a little more seriously, but it is still the rarest thing to find a philosopher or a psychologist who fully comprehends that he is consuming the fruits of this long, agonizing struggle to state the exact relation between spirit and matter, every time he uses such key-words of thought as absolute, actual, attribute, cause, concept, deduction, essence, existence, intellect, intelligence, intention, intuition, motive, potential, predicate, substance, tendency, transcend; abstract and concrete, entity and identity, matter and form, quality and quantity, objective and subjective, real and ideal, general, special, and species, particular, individual, and universal. ‘Free will’ is the translation of a Latin phrase first used by a Church Father, and ‘argumentum ad hominem’ is an example of a scholastic idiom which has remained untranslated. Many of these words, it is true, are in the first instance Latin translations of Greek terms introduced by pagan writers before the days of the Schoolmen; some, like quality and species, by Cicero himself, and others, like accident, actual, and essence, by later Latin writers such as Quintilian or Macrobius. But it must be remembered that, even in these cases, the words, as we use them to-day, are not mere translations. By their earnest and lengthy discussions the Schoolmen were all the time defining more strictly the meanings of these and of many other words already in use, and so adapting them to the European brain that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was an easy matter for the lawyers and for popular writers like Chaucer and Wyclif to stamp them with the authentic genius of the English language and turn them into current coin.[37] Nobody who understands the amount of pain and energy which go to the creation of new instruments of thought can feel anything but respect for the philosophy of the Middle Ages.

If the philosophy of the Middle Ages is based on the logic of Aristotle, their science can be traced rather to the Greek thought of pre-Aristotelian times. For authority it relied very largely on a single dialogue of Plato, to which may be added Latin translations of a small part of Hippocrates, and of his post-Christian successor and interpreter, Galen. But the way in which its terms have entered right into the heart of our language is proof enough that this medieval science arose, not merely from blind subservience to tradition, but also from an actual survival of the kind of feeling, the kind of outlook which, ages ago, had created the tradition. In spite of that strong and growing sense of the individual soul, man was not yet felt, either physically or psychically, to be isolated from his surroundings in the way that he is to-day. Conversely his mind and soul were not felt to be imprisoned within, and dependent upon, his body. Intellectual classifications were accordingly less dry and clear, and science—that general speculative activity which a later age has split up into such categories as astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, psychology, ...—was as yet almost an undivided whole. Common words like ascendant, aspect, atmosphere, choleric, common sense, complexion, consider, cordial, disaster, disposition, distemper, ether, hearty, humour, humorous, indisposed, influence, jovial, lunatic, melancholy, mercurial, phlegmatic, predominant, sanguine, saturnine, spirited, temper, temperament, with heart, liver, spleen, and stomach in their psychological sense, most of which retained their original and literal meanings down to the fourteenth century, give us more than a glimpse into the relations between body, soul, and cosmos, as they were felt by the medieval scientist.

Thus, the physical body was said to contain four humours (Latin ‘humor’, ‘moisture’)—blood, phlegm, bile or choler, and black bile (melancholy)—which last had its seat in the hypochondria. Not only diseases, or distempers, but qualities of character were intimately connected with the proper ‘mixture’ (Latin ‘temperamentum’) of these humours, just as modern medical theory sees a connection between the character and the glands. Thus, a man might be good humoured or bad humoured; he might have a good temper or a bad temper; and according to which humour predominated in his temperament or complexion, he was choleric, melancholy, phlegmatic, or sanguine. His character depended on other things as well; for the medieval scientist believed with Hippocrates that the arteries (Greek ‘aēr’, ‘air’) were ducts through which there flowed, not blood, but three different kinds of ether (Greek ‘aithēr’, ‘the upper air’) or spirits (Latin ‘spiritus’, ‘breath’, ‘life’), viz. the animal[38] (Latin ‘anima’, ‘soul’), the vital, and the natural. But the stars and the planets were also living bodies; they were composed of that ‘fifth essence’ or quintessence, which was likewise latent in all terrestrial things, so that the character and the fate of men were determined by the influences (Latin ‘influere’, ‘to flow in’) which came from them. The Earth had its atmosphere (a kind of breath which it exhaled from itself); the Moon, which was regarded as a planet, had a special connection with lunacy, and according as the planet Jupiter, or Saturn, or Mercury was predominant or in the ascendant in the general disposition of stars at a man’s birth, he would be jovial, saturnine, or mercurial. Finally, things or persons which were susceptible to the same influences, or which influenced each other in this occult way, were said to be in sympathy or sympathetic.

Test is an alchemist’s word, coming from the Latin ‘testa’, an earthen pot in which the alchemist made his alloys. The same word was once used as a slang term for ‘head’, and in its French form, ‘tête’, still retains that meaning. The phrase hermetically sealed reminds us that alchemy, known as the ‘hermetic art’, was traced back by its exponents to the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus, who himself took his name from the Greek messenger-god Hermes. Other alchemists’ words are amalgam, alcohol, alembic, alkali, arsenic, and tartar. The last five, together with the word alchemy itself, all come to us from Arabic, and are evidence of the fact that the Arabs of the Dark Ages, besides being philosophers, were the fathers of modern chemistry. It was, indeed, they who first joined the study of chemistry to the practice of medicine, and thus initiated a science of drugs. Moreover, that old ‘humoral’ pathology which has shaped so many of our conceptions of human character—in so far as it was based on ancient authority and tradition—came from Hippocrates to Europe, for the most part not directly, but by way of Baghdad and Spain.

The more intimate and indispensable such conceptions are, the more effort does it require from the twentieth-century imagination to realize how they have grown up. It is so difficult, even when we are reading contemporary literature, to blot out from our consciousness the different meanings which have since gathered round the words. If, however, we can succeed in doing this, we cannot but be struck by the odd nature of the change which they have all undergone. When we reflect on the history of such notions as humour, influence, melancholy, temper, and the rest, it seems for the moment as though some invisible sorcerer had been conjuring them all inside ourselves—sucking them away from the planets, away from the outside world, away from our own warm flesh and blood, down into the shadowy realm of thoughts and feelings. There they still repose; astrology has changed to astronomy; alchemy to chemistry; to-day the cold stars glitter unapproachable overhead, and with a naïve detachment mind watches matter moving incomprehensibly in the void. At last, after four centuries, thought has shaken herself free.