The clarity and gentle love of this high argument is Anselm. Now the story follows of Anselm and Eadmer and another monk travelling on, sometimes unknown, sometimes acclaimed, through France to Italy and Rome. Anselm’s face inspired reverence in those who did not know him, and the peace of his countenance attracted even Saracens. Had he been born and bred in England, he might have managed better with the Red King. He never got an English point of view, but remained a Churchman with Italian-Hildebrandine convictions. Of course, two policies were clashing then in England, where it happened that there was on one side an able and rapacious tyrant, while the other was represented by a man with the countenance and temperament of an angel. But we may leave Anselm now in Italy, where he is beyond the Red King’s molestation, and turn to his writings.

Their choice and treatment of subject was partly guided by the needs of his pupils and friends at Bec and elsewhere in Normandy or Francia or England. For he wrote much at their solicitation; and the theological problems of which solutions were requested, suggest the intellectual temper of those regions, rather than of Italy. In a way Anselm’s works, treating of separate and selected Christian questions, are a proper continuation of those composed by northern theologians in the ninth century on Predestination and the Eucharist.[345] Only Anselm’s were not evoked by the exigency of actual controversy as much as by the insistency of the eleventh-century mind, and the need it felt of some adjustment regarding certain problems. Anselm’s theological and philosophic consciousness is clear and confident. His faculties are formative and creative, quite different from the compiling instincts of Alcuin or Rabanus. The matter of his argument has become his own; it has been remade in his thinking, and is presented as from himself—and God. He no longer conceives himself as one searching through the “pantries” of the Fathers or culling the choice flowers of their “meadows.” He will set forth the matter as God has deigned to disclose it to him. In the Cur Deus homo he begins by saying that he has been urged by many, verbally and by letter, to consider the reasons why God became man and suffered, and then, assenting, says: “Although, from the holy Fathers on, what should suffice has been said, yet concerning this question I will endeavour to set forth for my inquirers what God shall deign to disclose to me.”[346]

Certain works of Anselm, the Monologion, for instance, present the dry and the formal method of reasoning which was to make its chief home in France; others, like the Proslogion, seem to be Italian in a certain beautiful emotionalism. The feeling is very lofty, even lifted out of the human, very skyey, even. The Proslogion, the Meditationes, do not throb with the red blood of Augustine’s Confessions, the writing which influenced them most. The quality of their feeling suggests rather Dante’s Paradiso; and sometimes with Anselm a sense of formal beauty and perfection seems to disclose the mind of Italy. Moreover, Anselm’s Latin style appears Italian. It is elastic, even apparently idiomatic, and varies with the temper and character of his different works. Throughout, it shows in Latin the fluency and simple word-order natural to an author whose vulgaris eloquentia was even closer to Latin in the time of Anselm than when Dante wrote.

So Anselm’s writings were intimately part of their author, and very part of his life-long meditation upon God. Led by the solicitations of others, as well as impelled by the needs of his own faculties and nature, he takes up one Christian problem after another, and sets forth his understanding of it with his conclusion. He is devout, an absolute believer; and he is wonderfully metaphysical. He is a beautiful, a sublimated, and idealizing reasoner, convinced that a divine reality must exist in correspondence with his thought, which projects itself aloft to evoke from the blue an answering reality. The inspiration, the radiating point of Anselm’s intellectual interest, is clearly given—to understand that which he first believes. It is a spontaneous intellectual interest, not altogether springing from a desire to know how to be saved. It does not seek to understand in order to believe; but seeks the happiness of knowing and understanding that which it believes and loves. Listen to some sentences from the opening of the Proslogion:

So Anselm is first a believer, then a theologian; and his reason devotes itself to the elucidation of his faith. Faith prescribes his intellectual interests, and sets their bounds. His thought does not occupy itself with matters beyond. But it takes a pure intellectual delight in reasoning upon the God which his faith presents and his heart cleaves to. The motive is the intellectual and loving delight which his mind takes in this pursuit. His faith was sure and undisturbed, and ample for his salvation. His intellect, affected by no motive beyond its own strength and joy, delights in reasoning upon the matter of his faith.[348]

We may still linger for a moment to observe how closely part of Anselm’s nature was his proof of the existence of God.[349] It sprang directly from his saintly soul and the compelling idealism of his reason. In the Monologion Anselm ranged his many arguments concerning the nature and attributes of the summum bonum which is God. Its chain of inductions failed to satisfy him and his pupils. So he set his mind to seek a sole and unconditioned proof (as Eadmer states in the Vita) of God’s existence and the attributes which faith ascribes to Him. Anselm says the same in the Preface to the Proslogion:

The famous proof which at length flashed upon him is substantially this: By very definition the word God means the greatest conceivable being. This conception exists even in the atheist’s mind, for he knows what is meant by the words, the absolutely greatest. But the greatest cannot be in the intellect alone, for then conceivably there would be a greater which would exist in reality as well. And since, by definition, God is the absolutely greatest, He must exist in reality as well as in the mind.[350] Carrying out the scholia to this argument, Anselm then proves that God possesses the various attributes ascribed to Him by the Christian Faith.

That from a definition one may not infer the existence of the thing defined, was pointed out by a certain monk Gaunilo almost as soon as the Proslogion appeared. Anselm answered him that the argument applied only to the greatest conceivable being. Since that time Anselm’s proof has been upheld and disproved many times. It was at all events a great dialectic leap; but likely one may not with such a bound cross the chasm from definition to existence—at least one will be less bold to try when he realizes that this chasm is there. Temperamentally, at least, this proof was the summit of Anselm’s idealism: he could not but conceive things to exist in correspondence to the demands of his conceptions. He never made another so palpable leap from conception to conviction as in this proof of God’s existence; yet his theology proceeded through like processes of thought. For example, he is sure of God’s omnipotence, and also sure that God can do nothing which would detract from the perfection of His nature: God cannot lie: “For it does not follow, if God wills to lie that it is just to lie; but rather that He is not God. For only that will can will to lie in which truth is corrupted, or rather which is corrupted by forsaking truth. Therefore when one says ‘if God wills to lie,’ he says in substance, ‘if God is of such a nature as to will to lie.’”[351]

Anselm’s other famous work was the Cur Deus homo, upon the problem why God became man to redeem mankind. It was connected with his view of sin, and the fall of the angels, as set forth chiefly in his dialogue De casu Diaboli. One may note certain cardinal points in his exposition: Man could be redeemed only by God; for he would have been the bond-servant of whoever redeemed him, and to have been the servant of any one except God would not have restored him to the dignity which would have been his had he not sinned.[352] Or again: The devil had no rights over man, which he lost by unjustly slaying God. For man was not the devil’s, nor does the devil belong to himself but to God.[353] Evidently Anselm frees himself from the conception of any ransom paid to the devil, or any trickery put on him—thoughts which had lowered current views of the Atonement. Anselm’s arguments (which are too large, and too interwoven with his views upon connected subjects, to be done justice to by any casual statement) are free from degrading foolishness. His reasonings were deeply felt, as one may see in his Meditationes, where thought and feeling mutually support and enhance each other. So he recalls Augustine, the great model and predecessor whom he followed and revered. And still the feeling in Anselm’s Meditationes, as in the Proslogion, is somewhat sublimated and lifted above human heart-throbs. Perhaps it may seem rhetorical, and intentionally stimulated in order to edify. Even in the Meditationes upon the humanity and passion of Jesus, Anselm is not very close to the quivering tenderness of St. Bernard, and very far from the impulsive and passionate love of Francis of Assisi. One thinks that his feelings rarely distorted his countenance or wet it with tears.[354]

CHAPTER XII

The difference is seen in the personality and writings of Gerbert of Aurillac,[355] the man who with such intellectual catholicity opens the story of this period. One will be struck with the apparently arid crudity of his intellectual processes. Crude they were, and of necessity; arid they were not, being an unavoidable stage in the progress of mediaeval thinking. Yet it is a touch of fate’s irony that such an interesting personality should have been afflicted with them. For Gerbert was the redeeming intellect of the last part of the tenth century. The cravings of his mind compassed the intellectual predilections of his contemporaries in their entirety. Secular and by no means priestly they appear in him; and it is clear that religious motives did not dominate this extraordinary individual who was reared among monks, became Abbot of Bobbio, Archbishop of Rheims, Archbishop of Ravenna, and pope at last.

He appears to have been born shortly before the year 950. From the ignorance in which we are left as to his parents and the exact place of his birth in Aquitaine, it may be inferred that his origin was humble. While still a boy he was received into the Benedictine monastery of St. Geraldus at Aurillac in Auvergne. There he studied grammar (in the extended mediaeval sense), under a monk named Raymund, and grew to love the classics. A loyal affectionateness was a life-long trait of Gerbert, and more than one letter in after life bears witness to the love which he never ceased to feel for the monks of Aurillac among whom his youthful years were passed, and especially for this brother Raymund from whom he received his first instruction.

Raymund afterwards became abbot of the convent. But it was his predecessor, Gerald, who had received the boy Gerbert, and was still to do something of moment in directing his career. A certain duke of the Spanish March came on a pilgrimage to Aurillac; and Gerald besought him to take Gerbert back with him to Spain for such further instruction as the convent did not afford. The duke departed, taking Gerbert, and placed him under the tuition of the Bishop of Vich, a town near Barcelona. Here he studied mathematics. The tradition that he travelled through Spain and learned from the Arabs lacks probability. But in the course of time the duke and bishop set forth to pray for sundry material objects at the fountainhead of Catholicism, and took their protégé with them to Rome.

In Rome, Gerbert’s destiny advanced apace. His patrons, doubtless proud of their young scholar, introduced him to the Pope, John XIII., who also was impressed by Gerbert’s personality and learning. John told his own protector, the great Otto, and informed him of Gerbert’s ability to teach mathematics; and the two kept Gerbert in Rome, when the Spanish duke and bishop returned to their country. Gerbert began to teach, and either at this time or later had among his pupils the young Augustus, Otto II. But he was more anxious to study logic than to teach mathematics, even under imperial favour. He persuaded the old emperor to let him go to Rheims with a certain archdeacon from that place, who was skilled in the science which he lacked. The emperor dismissed him, with a liberal hand. In his new home Gerbert rapidly mastered logic, and impressed all with his genius. He won the love of the archbishop, Adalberon, who shortly set the now triply accomplished scholar at the head of the episcopal school. Gerbert’s education was complete, in letters, in mathematics including music, and in logic. Thenceforth for ten years (972-982), the happiest of his life, he studied and also taught the whole range of academic knowledge.

Fortune, not altogether kind, bestowed on Gerbert the favour of three emperors. The graciousness of the first Otto had enabled him to proceed to Rheims. The second Otto listened to his teaching, admired the teacher, and early in the year 983 made him Abbot and Count of Bobbio. Long afterwards the third Otto made him Archbishop of Ravenna, and then pope.

Bobbio, the chief foundation of Columbanus, situated not far from Genoa, was powerful and rich; but its vast possessions, scattered throughout Italy, had been squandered by worthless abbots or seized by lawless nobles. The new count-abbot, eager to fulfil the ecclesiastical and feudal functions of his position, strove to reclaim the monastery’s property and bring back its monks to decency and learning. In vain. Now, as more than once in Gerbert’s later life, brute circumstances proved too strong. Otto died. Gerbert was unsupported. He struggled and wrote many letters which serve to set forth the situation for us, though they did not win the battle for their writer:

Within a year Gerbert gave up the struggle at Bobbio, and returned to Rheims to resume his duties as head of the school, and secretary and intimate adviser of Adalberon. Politically the time was one of uncertainty and turmoil. The Carolingian house was crumbling, and the house of Capet was scheming and struggling on to a royalty scarcely more considerable. In Germany intrigue and revolt threatened the rights of the child Otto III. Archbishop Adalberon, guided by Gerbert, was a powerful factor in the dynastic change in France; and the two were zealous for Otto. Throughout these troubles Gerbert constantly appears, directing projected measures and divining courses of events, yet somehow, in spite of his unmatched intelligence, failing to control them.

Time passed, and Adalberon died at the beginning of the year 989. His successor, Arnulf, a scion of the falling Carolingian house, was subsequently unseated for treason to the new-sprung house of Capet. In 991 Gerbert himself was made archbishop. But although seeming to reach his longed-for goal, troubles redoubled on his head. There was rage at the choice of one so lowly born for the princely dignity. The storm gathered around the new archbishop, and the See of Rome was moved to interfere, which it did gladly, since at Rome Gerbert was hated for the reproaches cast upon its ignorance and corruption by bishops at the council which elected him and deposed his predecessor. In that deposition and election Rome had not acquiesced; and we read the words of the papal legate:

The battle went against Gerbert. Interdicted from his archiepiscopal functions, he left France for the Court of Otto III., where his intellect at once dominated the aspirations of the young monarch. Otto and Gerbert went together to Italy, and the emperor made his friend Archbishop of Ravenna. The next year, 999, Gregory V. died, and the archbishop became Pope Sylvester II. For three short years the glorious young imperial dreamer and his peerless counsellor planned and wrought for a great united Empire and Papacy on earth. Then death took first the emperor and soon afterwards the pope-philosopher.

Gerbert was the first mind of his time, its greatest teacher, its most eager learner, and most universal scholar. His pregnant letters reflect a finished man who has mastered his acquired knowledge and transformed it into power. They also evince the authorship of one who had uniquely profited from the power and spirit of the great minds of the pagan past, had imbibed their sense of form and pertinency, and with them had become self-contained and self-controlled, master of himself and of all that had entered in and made him what he was. Notice how the personality of the writer, with his capacities, tastes, and temperament, is unfolded before us in a letter to a close friend, abbot of a monastery at Tours:

Gerbert’s letters are concise, even elliptical to the verge of obscurity. He discloses himself in a few words to his old friend Raymund at the monastery of Aurillac: “With what love we are bound to you, the Latins know and also the barbarians,[359] who share the fruit of our studies. Their vows demand your presence. Amid public cares philosophy is the sole solace; and from her study we have often been the gainer, when in this stormy time we have thus broken the attack of fortune raging grievously against others or ourselves....”[360]

Save for the language, one might fancy Cicero speaking to some friend, and not the future pope of the year 1000 to a monk. The sentiment is quite antique. And Gerbert not only uses antique phrase but is touched, like many a mediaeval man, with the antique spirit. In another letter he writes of friendship, and queries whether the divinity has given anything better to mortals. He refers to his prospects, and remarks: “sed involvit mundum caeca fortuna,” and he is not certain whither it will cast him.[361]

Doubtless such antique sentiments were a matter of mood with Gerbert; he can readily express others of a Christian colour, and turn again to still other topics very readily, as in the following letter—a curious one. It is to a monk:

When he wrote this letter, about the year 988, Gerbert was dangerously deep in politics, and great was the power of this low-born titular Abbot of Bobbio, head of the school at Rheims and secretary to the archbishop. The tortuous statecraft and startling many-sidedness of this “scholar in politics” must have disturbed his contemporaries, and may have roused the suspicions from which grew the stories, told by future men, that this scholar, statesman, and philosopher-pope was a magician who had learned from forbidden sources much that should be veiled. Withal, however, one may deem that the most veritable inner bit of Gerbert was his love of knowledge and of antique literature, and that the letters disclosing this are the subtlest revelation of the man who was ever transmuting his well-guarded knowledge into himself and his most personal moods.

So Gerbert wrote from Rheims, himself a chief intriguer in a city full of treason.

Gerbert was a power making for letters. The best scholars sat at his feet; he was an inspiration at the Courts of the second and third Ottos, who loved learning and died so young; and the great school of Chartres, under the headship of his pupil Fulbert, was the direct heir to his instruction. At Rheims, where he taught so many years, he left to others the elementary instruction in Latin. A pupil, Richer, who wrote his history, speaks of courses in rhetoric and literature, to which he introduced his pupils after instructing them in logic:

So Gerbert used the classic poets in teaching rhetoric, and doubtless the great prose writers too, with whom he was familiar. Following Cicero’s precept that the orator should be a proficient reasoner, he prepared his young rhetoricians by a course in logic, and completed their discipline with exercises in disputation.

Richer also speaks of Gerbert’s epoch-making mathematical knowledge.[367] In arithmetic he improved the current methods of computation; in geometry he taught the traditional methods of measurement descended from the Roman surveyors, and compiled a work from Boëthius and other sources. For astronomy he made spheres and other instruments, and in music his teaching was the best obtainable. In none of these provinces was he an original inventor; nor did he exhaust the knowledge had by men before him. He was, however, the embodiment of mediaeval progress, in that he drew intelligently upon the sources within his reach, and then taught with understanding and enthusiasm. Richer’s praise is unstinted:

The historian passes on to tell how Gerbert with ingenious devices showed on his sphere the imaginary circles called parallels, and on another the movements of the planets, and on still another marked the constellations of the heavens, so that even a beginner, upon having one constellation pointed out, could find the others.[368]

In the province of philosophy, Gerbert’s labours extended little beyond formal logic, philosophy’s instrument. He could do no more than understand and apply as much of Boëthius’s rendering of the Aristotelian Organon as he was acquainted with. Yet he appears to have used more of the Boëthian writings than any man before him, or for a hundred and fifty years after his death. Richer gives the list. Beyond this evidence, curious testimony is borne to the nature of Gerbert’s dialectic by Richer’s account of a notable debate. The year was 980, when the fame of the brilliant young scholasticus of Rheims had spread through Gaul and penetrated Germany. A certain master of repute at Magdeburg, named Otric, sent one of his pupils to report on Gerbert’s teaching, and especially as to his method of laying out the divisions of philosophy as “the science of things divine and human.” The pupil returned with notes of Gerbert’s classification, in which, by error or intention, it was made to appear that he subordinated physics to mathematics, as species to genus, whereas, in truth, he made them of equal rank. Otric thought to catch him tripping, and so managed that a disputation was held between them at a time when Adalberon and Gerbert were in Italy with the Emperor Otto II. It took place in Ravenna. The emperor, then nineteen years of age, presided, there being present many masters and dignitaries of the Church. Holding in his hand a tablet of Gerbert’s alleged division of the sciences, His Majesty opened the debate:

Then in answer to a demand from Otric for a more explicit statement of his classification, he said there could be no objection to dividing philosophy according to Vitruvius (Victorinus) and Boëthius; “for philosophy is the genus, of which the species are the practical and the theoretical: under the practical, as species again, come dispensativa, distributiva and civilis; under the theoretical fall phisica naturalis, mathematica intelligibilis, and theologia intellectibilis.”

Otric then wonders that Gerbert put mathematics immediately after physics, omitting physiology. To which Gerbert replies that physiology stands to physics as philology to philosophy, of which it is part. Otric changes his attack to a flank movement, and asks Gerbert what is the causa of philosophy. Gerbert asks whether he means the cause by which, or the cause for which, it is devised (inventa). Otric replies the latter. “Then,” says Gerbert, “since you make your question clear, I say that philosophy was devised that from it we might understand things divine and human.” “But why use so many words,” says Otric, “to designate the cause of one thing?” “Because one word may not suffice to designate a cause. Plato uses three to designate the cause of the creation of the world, to wit, the bona Dei voluntas. He could not have said voluntas simply.” “But,” says Otric, “he could have said more concisely Dei voluntas, for God’s will is always good, which he would not deny.”

This enigmatic phrase electrifies Otric, who cries: “You put the mortal under the rational? Who does not know that the rational is confined to God, angels, and mankind, while the mortal embraces everything mortal, a limitless mass?”

Evidently Richer’s account gives merely the captions of this disputation. There was not the slightest originality in any of the propositions stated by the disputants; everything is taken from Porphyry and Boëthius and the current Latin translation of Plato’s Timaeus. Yet the whole affair, the selection of the questions, the nature of the answers, the limitation of the matter to the bare poles of logical palestrics, is most illustrative of the mentality and intellectual interests of the late tenth century. The growth of the mediaeval intellect lay unavoidably through such courses of discipline. And just as early mediaeval Latin had to save itself from barbarism by cleaving to grammar, so the best intellect of this early period grasped at logic not only as the most obviously needed discipline and guide, but also with imperfect consciousness that this discipline and means did not contain the goal and plenitude of substantial knowledge. Grammar was then not simply a means but an end in the study of letters, and so was logic unconsciously. In the one case and the other, the palpable need of the disciplina and its difficulties kept the student from realizing that the instrument was but an instrument.

Moreover, upon Gerbert’s time pressed the specific need to consider just such questions as the disputation affords a sample of. An enormous mass of theology, philosophy, and science awaited mastering, the heritage from a greater past, antique and patristic. Perhaps a true instinct guided Gerbert and his contemporaries to problems of classification and method as a primary essential task. Had the Middle Ages been a period when knowledge, however crude, was perforce advancing through experience, investigation, and discovery, the problems of classification and method would not have presented themselves as preliminary. But mediaeval development lay through the study of what former men had won from nature or received from God. This was preserved in books which had to be studied and mastered. Hence classifications of knowledge were essential aids or sorely needed guides. With a true instinct the Middle Ages first of all looked within this mass of knowledge for guides to its mazes, seeking a plan or scheme by the aid of which universal knowledge might be unravelled, and then reconstructed in forms corresponding to even larger verities.[370]

II

The decades on either side of the year 1000 were cramped and dull. In Burgundy, to be sure, the energies of Cluny,[371] under its great abbots, were rousing the monastic world to a sense of religious and disciplinary decency. This reform, however, took little interest in culture. The monks of Cluny were commonly instructed in the rudiments of the Seven Arts. They had a little mathematics; bits of crude physical knowledge had unavoidably come to them; and just as unavoidably had they made use of extracts from the pagan poets in studying Latinity.[372] But they did not follow letters for their own sake, nor knowledge because they loved it and felt that love a holy one. Monastic principles hardly justified such a love, and Cluny’s abbots had enough to do in bringing the monastic world to decency, without dallying with inapplicable knowledge or the charms of pagan poetry.

Religious reforms in the ninth century had helped letters in the cathedral and monastic schools of Gaul. The latter soon fell back to ignorance; but among the cathedral schools, Chartres and Rheims continued to flourish. A moral ordering of life increases thoughtfulness and may stimulate study. Hence, in the latter part of the tenth century, the Cluniac reforms, like the earlier reforming movements, affected letters favourably in the monasteries. Here and there an exceptional man created an exceptional situation. Such a one was Abbo, Abbot of St. Benedict’s at Fleury on the Loire, who died the year after Gerbert. He was fortunate in his excellent pupil and biographer, Aimoin, who ascribes to him as liberal sentiments toward study as were consistent with a stern monasticism: