The Mediaeval Mind (Volume 2 of 2) / A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages

This superscription was a gentle reminder of their present relationship—in Christ. The writer begins: his not having written since their conversion was to be ascribed not to his negligence, but to his confidence in her wisdom; he did not think that she who, so full of grace, had consoled her sister nuns when prioress, could as abbess need teaching or exhortation for the guidance of her daughters; but if, in her humility, she felt the need of his instruction in matters pertaining to God, she might write, and he would answer, as the Lord should grant. Thanks be to God who had filled their hearts—hers and her nuns—with solicitude for his perils, and had made them participators in his afflictions; through their prayers the divine pity had protected him. He had hastened to send the Psalter, requested by his sister, formerly dear to him in the world and now most dear in Christ, to assist their prayers. The potency of prayer, with God and the saints, and especially the prayer of women for those dear to them, is frequently declared in Scripture; he cites a number of passages to prove it. May these move her to pray for him. He refers with affectionate gratitude to the prayers which the nuns had been offering for him, and encloses a short prayer for his safety, which he begs and implores may be used in their daily canonical hours. If the Lord, however, delivers him into the hands of his enemies to kill him, or if he meet his death in any way, he begs that his body may be brought to the Paraclete for burial, so that the sight of his sepulchre may move his daughters and sisters in Christ to pray for him; no place could be so safe and salutary for the soul of one bitterly repenting of his sins, as that consecrated to the true Paraclete—the Comforter; nor could fitter Christian burial be found than among women devoted by their vows to Christ. He begs that the great solicitude which they now have for his bodily safety, they will then have for the salvation of his soul, and by the suffrage of their prayer for the dead man show how they had loved him when alive. The letter closes, not with a personal word to Heloïse, but with this distich:

Thus as against Heloïse’s beseeching love, Abaelard lifted his hands, palms out, repelling it. His letter ignored all that filled the soul and the letter of Heloïse. His reply did not lack words of spiritual affection, and its tone was not as formal then as it now seems. When Abaelard asked for the prayers of Heloïse and her nuns, he meant it; he desired the efficacy of their prayers. Then he wished to be buried among them. We are touched by this; but, again, Abaelard meant it, as he said, for his soul’s welfare; it was no love sentiment. The letter stirred the heart of Heloïse to a rebellious outcry against the cruelty of God, if not of Abaelard, a soul’s cry against life and the calm attitude of one who no longer was—or at least meant to be no longer—what he had been to her.

This letter gives a view of Heloïse’s mind, its strong grasp and its capacity for reasoning, though its reasoning is here distraught with passion. Scathingly, half-blinded by her pain, she declares the perversities of Providence, as they glared upon her. Such a disclosure of the woman’s mind suggests how broadly based in thought and largely reared was that great love into which her whole soul had been poured, the mind as well as heart. Her love was great, unique, not only from its force of feeling, but from the power and scope of thought by which passion and feeling were carried out so far and fully to the last conclusions of devotion. The letter also shows a woman driven by stress of misery to utter cries and clutch at remedies that her calmer self would have put by. It is not hypocrisy to conceal the desires or imaginings which one would never act upon. To tell these is not true disclosure of oneself, but slander. Torn by pain, Heloïse makes herself more vile and needy than in other moments she knew herself to be. Yet the letter also uncovers her, and in nakedness there is some truth. Doubtless her nun’s garb did clothe a hypocrite. Whatever she felt—and here we see the worst she felt—before the world she had to act the nun. We shall soon see how she forced herself to act, or be, the nun toward Abaelard.

Abaelard replied in a letter filled with religious argument and consolation. It was self-controlled, firm, authoritative, and strong in those arguments regarding God’s mercy which have stood the test of time. If they sometimes fail to satisfy the embittered soul, at least they are the best that man has known. And withal, the letter is calmly and nobly affectionate—what place was there for love’s protestations? They would have increased the evil, adding fuel to Heloïse’s passionate misery.

The master-note is struck in the address: “To the spouse of Christ, His servant.” The letter seeks to turn Heloïse’s thoughts to her nun’s calling and her soul’s salvation. It divides her expressions of complaint under four heads. First, he had put her name first, because she had become his superior from the moment of her bridal with his master Christ. Jerome writing to Eustochium called her Lady, when she had become the spouse of Jerome’s Lord. Abaelard shows, with citations from the Song of Songs, the glory of the spouse, and how her prayers should be sought by one who was the servant of her Husband. Second, as to the terrors roused in her by his mention of his peril and possible death, he points out that in her first letter she had bidden him write of those perils; if they brought him death, she should deem that a kind release. She should not wish to see his miseries drawn out, even for her sake. Third, he shows that his praise of her was justified even by her disclaimer of merit—as it is written, Who humbles himself shall be exalted. He warns her against false modesty which may be vanity.

He turns at last to the old and ceaseless plaint which she makes against God for cruelty, when she should rather glorify Him; he had thought that that bitterness had departed, so dangerous for her, so painful to him. If she wished to please him, let her lay it aside; retaining it, she could not please him or advance with him to blessedness; let her have this much religion, not to separate herself from him hastening to God; let her take comfort in their journeying to the same goal. He then shows her that his punishment was just as well as merciful; he had deserved it from God and also from Fulbert. If she will consider, she will see in it God’s justice and His mercy; God had saved them from shipwreck; had raised a barrier against shame and lust. For himself the punishment was purification, not privation; will not she, as his inseparable comrade, participate in the workings of this grace, even as she shared the guilt and its pardon? Once he had thought of binding her to him in wedlock; but God found a means to turn them both to Him; and the Lord was continuing His mercy towards her, causing her to bring forth spiritual daughters, when otherwise she would only have borne children in the flesh; in her the curse of Eve is turned to the blessing of Mary. God had purified them both; whom God loveth He correcteth. Oh! let her thoughts dwell with the Son of God, seized, dragged, beaten, spit upon, crowned with thorns, hung on a vile cross. Let her think of Him as her spouse, and for Him let her make lament; He bought her with himself, He loved her. In comparison with His love, his own (Abaelard’s) was lust, seeking the pleasure it could get from her. If he, Abaelard, had suffered for her, it was not willingly nor for her sake, as Christ had suffered, and for her salvation. Let her weep for Him who made her whole, not for her corrupter; for her Redeemer, not for her defiler; for the Lord who died for her, not for the living servant, himself just freed from the death. Let his sister accept with patience what came to her in mercy from Him who wounded the body to save the soul.

In her next letter Heloïse obeys, and turns her pen if not her thoughts to the topics suggested by Abaelard’s admonitions. The short scholastically phrased address cannot be rendered in any modern fashion: “Domino specialiter sua singulariter.”

The rest of this long letter shows Heloïse putting her principles in practice. She is forcing her mind to consider and her pen to discourse upon topics which might properly occupy an abbess’s thoughts—topics, moreover, which would satisfy Abaelard and call forth long letters in reply. Whether she cared really for these matters or ever came to care for them; or whether she turned to them to distract her mind and keep up some poor makeshift of intercourse with one who would and could no longer be her lover; or whether all these motives mingled, and in what proportion, perhaps may best be left to Him who tries the heart.

The abbess writes:

Heloïse, having set this task for Abaelard, proceeds to show how the various monastic regulae, from Benedict’s downward, failed to make suitable provision for the habits and requirements and weaknesses of women, the regulae hitherto having been concerned with the weaknesses of men. She enters upon matters of clothing and diet, and everything concerning the lives of nuns. She writes as one learned in Scripture and the writings of the Fathers, and sets the whole matter forth, in its details, with admirable understanding of its intricacies. She concludes, reminding Abaelard that it is for him in his lifetime to set a regula for them to follow forever; after God, he is their founder. They might thereafter have some teacher who would build in alien fashion; such a one might have less care and understanding, and might not be as readily obeyed as himself; it is for him to speak, and they will listen. Vale.

The first of Heloïse’s letters is a great expression of a great love; in the second, anguish drives the writer’s hand; in the third, she has gained self-control; she suppresses her heart, and writes a letter which is discursive and impersonal from the beginning to the little Vale at the end.

Abaelard returned a long epistle upon the Scriptural origin of the order of nuns, and soon followed it with another, still longer, containing instruction, advice, and rules for the nuns of the Paraclete. He also wrote them a letter upon the study of Scripture. From this time forth he proved his devotion to Heloïse and her nuns by the large body of writings which he composed for their edification. Heloïse sent him a long list of questions upon obscure phrases and knotty points of Scripture, which he answered diligently in detail.[6] He then sent her a collection of hymns written or “rearranged” by himself for the use of the nuns, accompanied by a prefatory letter: “At thy prayers, my sister Heloïse, once dear to me in the world, now most dear in Christ, I have composed what in Greek are called hymns, and in Hebrew tillim.” He then explains why, yielding to the requests of the nuns, he had written hymns, of which the Church had such a store.

Next he composed for them a large volume of sermons, which he also sent with a letter to Heloïse: “Having completed the book of hymns and sequences, revered in Christ and loved sister Heloïse, I have hastened to compose some sermons for your congregation; I have paid more attention to the meaning than the language. But perhaps an unstudied style is well suited to simple auditors. In composing and arranging these sermons I have followed the order of Church festivals. Farewell in the Lord, servant of His, once dear to me in the world, now most dear in Christ: in the flesh then my wife, now my sister in the spirit and partner in our sacred calling.”

At a subsequent period, when his opinions were condemned by the Council of Sens, he sent to Heloïse a confession of faith. Shortly afterward his stormy life found a last refuge in the monastery of Cluny. His closing years (of peace?) are described in a letter to Heloïse from the good and revered abbot, Peter the Venerable. He writes that he had received with joy the letter which her affection had dictated,[7] and now took the first opportunity to express his recognition of her affection and his reverence for herself. He refers to her keenly prosecuted studies (so rare for women) before taking the veil, and then to the glorious example of her sage and holy life in the nun’s sacred calling—her victory over the proud Prince of this World. His admiration for her was deep; his expression of it was extreme. A learned, wise, and holy woman could not be praised more ardently than Heloïse is praised by this good man. He had spoken of the advantages his monastery would have derived from her presence, and then continued:

The abbot afterwards visited the Paraclete, and on returning to Cluny received this letter from the abbess:

The good abbot replied with a kind and affectionate letter, confirming his gift of the Tricenarium, promising to do all he could for Astralabius, and sending with his letter the record of Abaelard’s absolution, as follows:

Abaelard died in the year 1142, aged sixty-three. Twenty-one years afterward Heloïse died at the same age, and was buried in the same tomb with him at the Paraclete:

CHAPTER XXVI

A different and already mediaevalized element had also become part of German culture, to wit, the matter of the French Arthurian romances and the lyric fashions of Provence, which, working together, had captivated modish German circles from the Rhine to the Danube. Nevertheless the German character maintained itself in the Minnelieder which followed Provençal poetry, and in the höfisch (courtly) epics which were palpable translations from the French.[8] The distinguished group of German poets whose lives fall around the year 1200, were as German as their language, although they borrowed from abroad the form and matter of their compositions.

There could be no better Germans than the two most thoughtful of this group, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide. Most Germanically the former wrestled with that ancient theme, “from suffering, wisdom,” which he pressed into the tale of Parzival. His great poem, achieved with toil and sweat, was mighty in its climaxes, and fit to strengthen the hearts of those men who through sorrow and loneliness and despair’s temptations were growing “slowly wise.”

The virtues which Wolfram praised and embodied in his hero were those praised in the verses, and even, one may think, strugglingly exemplified in the conduct, of Walther von der Vogelweide,[9] most famous of Minnesingers, and a power in the German lands through his Sprüche, or verses personal and political. Less is known of his life than of his whole and manly views, his poetic fancies, his musings, his hopes, and great depressions. Many places have claimed the honour of his birth, which took place somewhat before 1170. He was poor, and through his youth and manhood moved about from castle to castle, and from court to court, seeking to win some recompense for his excellent verses and good company. Thus he learned much of men, “climbing another’s stairs,” with his fellows, at the Landgraf Hermann’s Wartburg, or at the Austrian ducal Court.

Walther’s Sprüche render his moods most surely, and reflect his outlook on the world. His charming Minnelieder bear more conventional evidence. The courtly German love-songs passing by this name were affected by the conceits and conventions of the Provençal poetry upon which they were modelled. A strong nature might use such with power, or break with their influence. Walther made his own the high convention of trouvère and troubadour, that love uplifts the lover’s being. Besides this, and besides the lighter forms and phrases current in such poetry, his Lieder carry natural feeling, joy, and moral levity, according to the theme; they also may express Walther’s convictions.

To take examples: Walther’s Tagelied[10] imitates the Provençal alba (dawn), in which knight and truant lady bewail the coming of the light and the parting which it brings. Far more joyous, and as immoral as one pleases, is Unter der Linde, most famous of his songs. Marvellously it gives the mood of love’s joy remembered—and anticipated too. The immorality is complete (if we will be serious), and is rendered most alluring by the utter gladness of the girl’s song—no repentance, no regret; only joy and roguish laughter.

Walther was young, he was a knight and a Minnesinger; he had doubtless loved, in this way! His love-songs have plenty to say of the red mouth, good for kissing—I care not who knows it either. But he also realizes, and greatly sings, the height and breadth and worth of love the true and stable, the blessing and completion of two lives, which comes to a false heart never.[11] He seems to feel it necessary to defend love for itself, perhaps because marriage was taken more seriously in this imitative German literature than in the French and Provençal originals: “Who says that love is sin, let him consider well. Many an honour dwells with her, and troth and happiness. If one does ill to the other, love is grieved. I do not mean false love; that were better named un-love. No friend of that, am I.” But his thoughts turn quickly to love as a lasting union: “He happy man, she happy woman, whose hearts are to each other true; both lives increased in price and worth; blessed their years and all their days.”[12]

Giving play to his caustic temper, Walther puts scorn upon the light of love: “Fool he who cannot understand what joy and good, love brings. But the light man is ever pleased with light things, as is fit!”[13] This Minnesinger applied most earnest standards to life; lofty his praise of the qualities of womanhood, which are better than beauty or riches: “woman” is a higher word than “lady”[14]—it took a German to say this. “He who carries hidden sorrow in his heart, let him think upon a good woman—he is freed.”[15] With a burst of patriotism, in one of his greatest poems Walther praises German women as the best in all the world.[16]

But even in the Minnelieder, Walther has his despondencies. One of the most definite, and possibly conventional, was regret for love’s labour lost, and the days of youth spent in service of an ungracious fair. The poet wonders how it is that he who has helped other men is tongue-tied before his lady. Again, his reflections broaden from thoughts of unresponsive fair ones to a conviction of life’s thanklessness. “I have well served the World (Frau Welt, Society), and gladly would serve her more, but for her evil thanks and her way of preferring fools to me.... Come, World, give me better greeting—the loss is not all mine.” He knows his good unbending temper which will not endure to hear ill spoken of the upright. But he thinks, what is the use? why speak so sweetly, why sing, when virtue and beauty are so lightly held, and every one does evil, fearing nought? The verse which carries these reflections is tossing in the squally haven of Society; soon the poet will encounter the wild sea without. Still from the windy harbour comes one grand lament over art’s decline: “The worst songs please, frogs’ voices! Oh, I laugh from anger! Lady World, no score of mine is on your devil’s slate. Many a life of man and woman have I made glad—might I so have gladdened mine! Here, I make my Will, and bequeath my goods—to the envious my ill-luck, my sorrows to the liars, my follies to false lovers, and to the ladies my heart’s pain.”[17] He makes a solemn offering of his poems: “Good women, worthy men, a loving greeting is my due. Forty years have I sung fittingly of love; and now, take my songs which gladden, as my gift to you. Your favour be my return. And with my staff I will fare on, still wooing worth with undisheartened work, as from my childhood. So shall I be, in lowly lot, one of the Noble—for me enough.”

To relish Walther’s love-songs, one need not know whether she was dark or fair, kept forest-tryst or listened by some castle’s hearth, or in what German land that castle stood. Likewise in his Sprüche, which have other bearing, the roll of his protesting voice carries the universal human. To comprehend them it were well to know that life was then as now niggardly in rewarding virtue; beyond this, one needs to have the type-idea of the Empire and the Papacy, those two powers which were set, somewhat antagonistically, on the decree of God; both claiming the world’s headship; the one, Roman in tradition, but in strength and temper German, and of this world decidedly. The other, Roman in the genius of its organization, and Christian in its subordination of the life below to the life to come, if not in the methods of establishing this consummation; Christian too, but more especially mediaeval, in its formal disdain for whatever belonged to earth. In Germany these two partial opposites were further antagonized, since the native resources recoiled from the foreign drain upon them, and the struggling patriotism of a broken land resented the pressure of a state within and above the state of duke and king and emperor.

In Walther’s time Innocent III. swayed the nations from Peter’s throne. Just before Innocent’s accession, Germany’s able emperor, Henry VI., died suddenly in Sicily (September 1197), leaving an heir not two years old. The queen-mother, dying the next year, bequeathed this child, Frederick, to the paternal care of Innocent, his feudal as well as ghostly lord, since the queen, for herself and child, had accepted the Pope as the feudal suzerain of their kingdom of Sicily. In Germany (using that name loosely and broadly) Philip Hohenstauffen, Henry’s brother and Duke of Suabia, claimed the throne. His unequal opponent was Otto of Brunswick, of the ever-rebellious house of Henry the Lion. The Pope opposed the Hohenstauffen; but was obliged to acknowledge him when the course of the ten years of wasting civil war in Germany decided in his favour—whereupon, alack! Philip was murdered (1207). Quickly the Pope turned back to Otto; but the latter, after he had been crowned king and emperor, became intolerable to Innocent through the compulsion of his position as the head of an empire inherently hostile to the papacy. To thwart him Innocent set up his own ward, Frederick. Soon this precocious youth began to make head against pope-forsaken Otto; and then the excommunicated emperor was overthrown in 1214 by Philip Augustus of France, who had intervened in Frederick’s favour. So Otto passed away, and, some time after, Frederick was crowned German king at Aix-la-Chapelle.[18] In the meanwhile Innocent died (1216), and amity followed between Frederick and the gentle Honorius III., who crowned Frederick emperor at Rome in 1220. This peace ended quickly when the sterner Gregory IX. ascended the papal throne on the death of Honorius in 1227.

Walther’s life extended through these events. Though apparently changing sides under the stress of his necessities, he was patriotically German to the end. First he clave to the Hohenstauffen, Philip, as the true upholder of German interests against Otto and the Pope. On Philip’s death, he turned to Otto; but with all the world left him at last for Frederick. It is known that Walther, an easily angered man, felt himself ill-used by Otto and justified in turning to the open-handed Frederick, who finally gave him a small fief. To the last, Walther upheld him as Germany’s sovereign. Probably the poet died in the year 1228, just as Gregory was succeeding Honorius, and the death-struggle of the Empire with the Papacy was opening.

With no light heart, as well may be imagined, had Walther looked about him on the death of the emperor Henry in 1197. “I sat upon a rock, crossed knee on knee, and with elbow so supported, chin on hand I leaned. Anxiously I pondered. I could see no way to win gain without loss. Honour and riches do not go hand in hand, both of less value than God’s favour. Would I have them all? Alas! riches and worldly honour and God’s favour come not within the closure of one heart’s wishes. The ways are barred; perfidy lurks in secret, and might walks the highroads. Peace and law are wounded.”[19]

The personal dilemma of the poet with his fortune to make, but desirous of doing right, mirrors the desperate situation of the State: “Woe is thee, German tongue; ill stand thy order and thy honour!—I hear the lies of Rome betraying two kings!” And in verses of wrath Walther inveighs against the Pope. The sweeping nature of his denunciation raises the question whether he merely attacked the supposed treachery of the reigning pope, or was opposed to the papacy as an institution hostile to the German nation.

The answer is not clear. Mediaeval denunciations of the Church range from indictments of particular abuses, on through more general invectives, to the clear protests of heretics impugning the ecclesiastical system. It is not always easy to ascertain the speaker’s meaning. Usually the abuse and not the system is attacked. Hostility to the latter, however sweeping the language of satirist or preacher, is not lightly to be inferred. The invectives of St. Bernard and Damiani are very broad; but where had the Church more devoted sons? Even the satirists composing in Old French rarely intended an assault upon her spiritual authority. It would seem as if, at least in the Romance countries, one must look for such hostility to heretical circles, the Waldenses for example. And from the orthodox mediaeval standpoint, this was their most accursed heresy.

It would have been hard for any German to use broader language than some of the French satirists and Latin castigators. If there was a difference, it must be sought in the specific matter of the German disapproval viewed in connection with the political situation. Was a position ever taken incompatible with the Church’s absolute spiritual authority? or one intrinsically irreconcilable with the secular power of the papacy? At any time, in any country, papal claims might become irreconcilable with the royal prerogative—as William the Conqueror had held those of Gregory VII. in England, and as, two centuries afterwards, Philip the Fair was to hold those of Boniface VIII. in France. But in neither case was there such sheer and fundamental antagonism as men felt to exist between the Empire and the Papacy. Perhaps it was possible in the early thirteenth century for a German whose whole heart was on the German side to dispute even the sacerdotal principle of papal authority. It is hard to judge otherwise of Freidank, the very German composer or collector of trenchant sayings in the early thirteenth century. Many of these sneer at Rome and the Pope, and some of them strike the gist of the matter: “Sunde nieman mac vergeben wan Got alein” (“God alone can forgive sins”). This is the direct statement; he gives its scornful converse: “Could the Pope absolve me from my oaths and duties, I’d let other sureties go and fasten to him alone.”[20] Such words mean denial of the Church’s authority to forgive, and the Pope’s to grant absolution from oaths of allegiance. Freidank is very near rejecting the principles of the ecclesiastical system.

Walther, Freidank’s contemporary, is more picturesque: “King Constantine, he gave so much—as I will tell you—to the Chair of Rome: spear, cross, and crown. At once the angels cried: ‘Alas! Alas! Alas! Christendom before stood crowned with righteousness. Now is poison fallen on her, and her honey turned to gall—sad for the world henceforth!’ To-day the princes all live in honour; only their highest languishes—so works the priest’s election. Be that denounced to thee, sweet God! The priests would upset laymen’s rights: true is the angels’ prophecy.”[21]

On Constantine’s apocryphal gift, symbolized by the emblems of Christ’s passion, rested the secular authority of the popes, which Walther laments with the angels. “The Chair of Rome was first set up by Sorcerer Gerbert! [Queer history this, but we see what he means.] He destroyed his own soul only; but this one would bring down Christendom with him to perdition. When will all tongues call Heaven to arms, and ask God how long He will sleep? They bring to nought His work, distort His Word. His steward steals His treasure; His judge robs here and murders there; His shepherd has become a wolf among His sheep.”[22] The clergy point their fingers heavenward while they travel fast to hell.[23] How laughs the Pope at us, when at home with his Italians, at the way he empties our German pockets into his “poor boxes.”[24] Walther’s hatred of the foreign Pope is roused at every point. And at last, in a Spruch full of implied meaning, he declares that Christ’s word as to the tribute money meant that the emperor should receive his royal due.[25]

These utterances, considered in the light of the political and racial situation, seem to deny, at least implicitly, the secular power of the papacy. Yet in matters of religion Walther apparently was entirely orthodox, and a pious Christian. He has left a sweet prayer to Christ, with ample recognition of the angels and the saints, and a beautiful verse of penitent contrition, in which he confesses his sins to God very directly—how that he does the wrong, and leaves the right, and fails in love of neighbour. “Father, Son, may thy Spirit lighten mine; how may I love him who does me ill? Ever dear to me is he who treats me well!”[26] Walther’s questing spirit also pondered over God’s greatness and incomprehensibility.[27] His open mind is shown by the famous line: “Him (God) Christians, Jews, and heathen serve,”[28] a breadth of view shared by his friend Wolfram von Eschenbach, who speaks of the chaste virtue of a heathen lady as equal to baptism.[29]

The personal lot of this proud heart was not an easy one; homelessness broke him down, and the bitterness of eating others’ bread. Too well had he learned of the world and all its changing ways, and how poor becomes the soul that follows them. Mortality is a trite sorrow; there are worse: “We all complain that the old die and pass away; rather let us lament taints of another hue, that troth and seemliness and honour are dead.”[30] At the last Walther’s grey memory of life and his vainly yearning hope took form in a great elegy. After long years he seemed, with heavy steps, and leaning on his wanderer’s staff, to be returning to a home which was changed forever: “Alas! whither are they vanished, my many years! Did I dream my life, or is it real? what I once deemed it, was it that? And now I wake, and all the things and people once familiar, strange! My playmates, dull and old! And the fields changed; only that the streams still flow as then they flowed, my heart would break with thinking on the glad days, vanished in the sea. And the young people! slow and mirthless! and the knights go clad as peasants! Ah! Rome! thy ban! Our groans have stilled the song of birds. Fool I, to speak and so despair,—and the earth looks fair! Up knights again: your swords, your armour! would to God I might fare with your victor band, and gain my pay too—not in lands of earth! Oh! might I win the eternal crown from that sweet voyage beyond the sea, then would I sing O joy! and never more, alas—never more, alas.”[31]

BOOK V
SYMBOLISM

CHAPTER XXVII

Words, pictures, and other vehicles of expression are symbols of whatever they are intended to designate. A certain unavoidable symbolism also inheres in human mental processes; for the mind in knowing “turns itself to images,” as Aquinas says following Aristotle; and every statement or formulation is a casting together of data in some presentable and representative form. An example is the Apostles’ Creed, called also by this very name of Symbol, being a casting together, an elementary formula, of the essentials of the Christian Faith. In the same sense the “law of gravitation” or a moral precept is a deduction, induction, or gathering together into a representative symbol, of otherwise unassembled and uncorrelated experience. In the present and following chapters, however, the term symbol will be used in its common acceptation to indicate a thing, an act, or a word invested with an adventitious representative significance. All statements or expressions (through language or by means of pictures) which are intended to carry, besides their palpable meaning, another which is veiled and more spiritual, are symbolical or figurative, and more specifically are called allegories.[32]

These devices of the mind have a history as old as humanity. From inscrutable beginnings, in time they become recognized as makeshifts; yet they remain prone to enter new stages of confusion. The mind seeking to express the transcendental, avails itself of symbols. All religions have teemed with them, in their primitive phases scarcely distinguishing between symbol and fact; then a difference becomes evident to clearer-minded men, while perhaps at the same time others are elaborately maintaining that the symbol magically is, or brings to pass, that which it represents. Such obscuring mysticism existed not merely in confused Egypt and Brahminical India, but everywhere—in antique Greece and Rome, and then afterwards through the times of the Christian Church Fathers and the entire Middle Ages. Fact and symbol are seen constantly closing together and becoming each other like the serpent-souls in the twenty-fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno.

Allegory properly speaking, which involves a conscious and sustained effort to invest concrete or material statements with more general or spiritual meaning, played an interesting rôle in epochs antecedent to the patristic and mediaeval periods. Even before Plato’s time the personal myths of the gods shocked the Greek ethical intellect, which thereupon proceeded to convert them into allegories. Greek allegorical interpretation of ancient myth was apologetic to both the critical mind and the moral sense.

With Philo, the Hellenizing Jew of Alexandria, whose philosophy revolted from the literal text of Genesis, the motive for allegorical interpretation was similar. But the document before him was most unlike the Iliad and Odyssey. Genesis contained no palpably immoral stories of Jehovah to be explained away. Its account of divine creation and human beginnings merely needed to be invested with further ethical meaning. So Philo made cardinal virtues of the four rivers of Eden, and through like allegorical conceits transformed the Book of Genesis into a system of Hellenistic ethics. Not cosmogonic myths, but moral meanings, he had discovered in his document.

Advancing along the path which Philo found, Christian allegorical interpretation undertook to substantiate the validity of the Gospel. To this end it fixed special symbolical meanings upon the Old Testament narratives, so as to make them into prefigurative testimonies to the truth of Christian teachings.[33] Allegory was also called on to justify, as against educated pagans, certain acts of that heroic but peccant “type” of Christ, David, the son of Jesse. Such special apologetic needs hardly affected the allegorical interpretation of the Gospel itself, which began at an early day, and from the first was spiritual and anagogic, constantly straining on to educe further salutary meaning from the text.

The Greek and Latin Church Fathers created the mass of doctrine, including Scriptural interpretation,[34] upon which mediaeval theologians were to expend their systematizing and reconstructive labours. Through the Middle Ages, the course of allegory and symbolism strikingly illustrates the mediaeval way of using the patristic heritage—first painfully learning it, then making it their own, and at last creating by means of that which they had organically appropriated. Allegory and symbolism were to impress the Middle Ages as perhaps no other element of their inheritance. The mediaeval man thought and felt in symbols, and the sequence of his thought moved as frequently from symbol to symbol as from fact to fact.

The allegorical faculty with the Fathers was dogmatic and theological; ingenious in devising useful interpretations, but oblivious to all reasonable propriety in the meaning which it twisted into the text: controversial necessities readily overrode the rational and moral requirements of the “historical” or “literal” meaning. For the deeply realized allegorical significance was a law unto itself. These characteristics of patristic allegory passed over to the Middle Ages, which in the course of time were to impress human qualities upon the patristic material.

The Bathsheba and Uriah episode in the life of David was of course taken allegorically, and affords a curious example of a patristic interpretation originating in the exigencies of controversy, and then becoming authoritative for later periods when the echoes of the old controversy had long been silent. Augustine was called upon to answer the book of the clever Manichaean, Faustus, the stress of whose attacks was directed against the Old Testament. Faustus declared that he did not blaspheme “the law and the prophets,” but rejected merely the special Hebrew customs and the vile calumnies of the Old Testament writers, imputing shameful acts to prophets and patriarchs. In his list of shocking narratives to be rejected, was the story “that David after having had such a number of wives, defiled the little woman of Uriah his soldier, and caused him to be slain in battle.”[35]

Augustine responds with a general exclamation at the Manichaean’s failure to understand the sacramental symbols (sacramenta) of the Law and the deeds of the prophets. He then speaks of certain Old Testament statements regarding God and His demands, and proceeds to consider the nature of sin and the questionable deeds of the prophets. Some of the reprehended deeds he justifies, as, for instance, Abraham’s intercourse with Hagar and his deceit in telling Abimelech that Sara was his sister when she was his wife. He also declares that Sara typifies the Church, which is the secret spouse of Christ. Proceeding further, he does not justify, but palliates, the conduct of Lot and his daughters, and then introduces its typological significance. At length he comes to David. First he gives a noble estimate of David’s character, his righteousness, his liability to sin, and his quick penitence.[36] Afterwards he considers, briefly as he says, what David’s sin with Bathsheba signifies prophetically.[37] The passage may be given to show what a mixture of banality and disregard of moral propriety in drawing analogies might emanate from the best mind among the Latin Fathers, and be repeated by later transitional and mediaeval commentators.