Perhaps from the teaching of his own life Alfred knew, as well as Boëthius, the toil and sadness of power: “Though their false hope and imagination lead fools to believe that power and wealth are the highest good, yet it is quite otherwise.” And again, speaking of friendship, he says that Nature unites friends in love, “but by means of these worldly goods and the wealth of this life we oftener make foes than friends,” which doubtless Alfred had discovered, as well as Marcus Aurelius. Perhaps the Saxon king knew wherein lay peace, as he makes Wisdom say: “When I rise aloft with these my servants, we look down upon the storms of this world, even as the eagle does when he soars in stormy weather above the clouds, where no storm can harm him.” The king was thinking of man’s peace with God.[226]

III

Christianity came to the cities of Provincia and the chief Roman colonies of Gaul (Lyons, Trèves, Cologne) in the course of the original dissemination of the Faith. There were Roman, Greek, or Syrian Christians in these towns before the end of the second century. Early Gallic Christianity spoke Greek and Latin, and its rather slow advance was due partly to the tenacity of Celtic speech even in the cities; while outside of them heathen speech and practices were scarcely touched. Through Gaul and along the Rhine, the country in the main continued heathen in religion and Celtic or Germanic in speech during the fifth century.[227] The complete Latinizing of Gaul and the conversion of its rural population proceeded from the urban churches, and from the labours and miracles of anchorites and monks. In contrast with the decay of the municipal governments, the urban churches continued living institutions. Their bishops usually were men of energy. The episcopal office was elective, yet likely to remain in the same influential family, and the bishop, the leading man in the town, might be its virtual ruler. He represented Christianity and Latin culture, and when Roman officials yielded to Teutonic conquerors, the bishop was left as the spokesman of the Gallo-Roman population. Thus the Gallic churches, far from succumbing before the barbarian invasions, rescued and appropriated the derelict functions of government, and emerged aggrandized from the political and racial revolution. In the year 400 the city of Trèves was Latin in speech and Roman in government; in the year 500 the Roman government had been overthrown, and a German-speaking population predominated in what was left of the city, but the church went on unchanged in constitution and in language.

There was constant intercourse between Teutons and Romans along the northern boundaries of the Empire. In the Danube regions many of the former were converted. The Goths, through the labours of Ulfilas and others in the fourth century, became Arian Christians; their conversion was of moment to themselves and others, but destiny severed the continuity of its import for history. In the provinces of Rhaetia, Vindelicia, and Noricum there were Christians, some of them Teutons, as early as the time of Constantine. For the next century, when disruption of the Empire was in full progress, the Life of St. Severinus by Eugippius, his disciple, gives the picture.[228] Bits and fragments of Roman government endured; letters were not quite quenched; but Alemanni and Rugii moved as they would, marauding, besieging, and destroying. Everywhere there was uncertainty and confusion, and yet civilized Roman provincials still clung to a driven life. Through this mountain land, the monk Severinus went here and there, barefoot even in ice and snow, austere, commanding. He encouraged the townspeople to maintain decency and courage; he turned the barbarians from ruthlessness. Clear-seeing, capable, his energies shielded the land. He was an ascetic who took nothing for himself, and won men to the Faith by this guarantee of disinterestedness. So he shepherded his harrowed flocks, and more than once averted their destruction. But his arm was too feeble; after his death even his cell was plundered, while the confusion swept on.

Such were fifth-century conditions on the northern boundary of what had been the Empire, conditions amid which the culture and doctrine germane to Christianity went down, although the Faith still glimmered here and there. Farther to the west, the Burgundians had gained a domicile in a land sparsely tenanted by Roman and Catholic provincials. Here on the left bank of the Rhine, in the neighbourhood of Worms, this people accepted the Christianity which they found. Afterwards, in the year 430, their heathen kin on the right bank were baptized as a people; for they hoped, through aid from fellow-Christians, to ward off the destruction threatening from the Huns. Yet five years later they were overthrown by those savage riders—an overthrow out of which was to rise the Nibelungenlied. The Burgundian remnants found a new home by the Rhone.

The Christianity of Burgundians and Goths was subject to the vicissitudes of their fortunes. The permanent conversion to Catholicism of the great masses of the Germans commenced somewhat later, when the turmoil of fifth-century migration was settling into contests for homes destined to prove more lasting. Its beginning may be dated from the baptism of Clovis as a Catholic on Christmas Day in the year 496. His retainers followed him into the consecrated water. By reason of the king’s genius for war and politics, this event was the beginning of the final triumph of Catholicism.[229]

The baptism of Clovis and his followers was typical of early Teutonic conversions. King and tribal following acted as a unit. Christ gave victory; He was the mightier God: such was the crude form of the motive. Its larger scope was grasped by the far-seeing king. Believing in supernatural aid, he desired it from the mightiest source, which, he was persuaded, was the Christian God. It was to be obtained by such homage to Christ as heretofore the king had paid to Wuotan. Any doubt as to the sincerity of his belief presupposes a point of view impossible for a fifth-century barbarian. But to this sincere expectation of Christ’s aid, to be gained through baptism, Clovis joined careful consideration of the political situation. Catholic Christianity was the religion of the Gallo-Roman population forming the greater part of the Frankish king’s subjects. He knew of Arian peoples; probably attempts had been made to draw him to their side. They constituted the great Teutonic powers at the time; for Theodoric was the monarch of Italy, and Arian Teutons ruled in southern France, in Spain, and Africa. Nevertheless, it was of paramount importance for the establishment of his kingdom that there should be no schism between the Franks and the Gallo-Roman people who exceeded them in number and in wealth and culture. Catholic influences surrounded Clovis; Catholic interests represented the wealth and prosperity of his dominions, and when he decided to be baptized he did not waver between the Catholic and the Arian belief. Thus the king attached to himself the civilized population of his realm. A common Catholic faith quickly obliterated racial antagonism within its boundaries and gained him the support of Catholic church and people in the kingdoms of his Arian rivals.

So under Clovis and his successors the Gallic Church became the Frankish Church, and flourished exceedingly. Tithes were paid it, and gifts were made by princes and nobles. Its lands increased, carrying their dependent population, until the Church became the largest landholder in the Merovingian realm. It was governed by Roman law, but the clergy were subject to the penal jurisdiction of the king.[230] It was he that summoned councils, although he did not vote, and left ecclesiastical matters to the bishops, who were his liegemen and appointees.[231] They recognized the king’s virtually unlimited authority, which they patterned on the absolute power of the Roman Emperors and the prerogatives of David and Solomon. In fine, the Merovingian Church was a national church, subject to the king. Until the seventh century it was quite independent of the Bishop of Rome.[232]

It is common knowledge—especially vivid with readers of the famous Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours—that ethically viewed, the conduct of the Merovingian house was cruel, treacherous, and abominable; and likewise the conduct of their vassals. Frankish kings and nobles appear as men no longer bound by the ethics of the heathenism which they had foresworn, and as yet untouched by the moral precepts of the Christian code. Not Christianity, however, but contact with decadent civilization, and rapid increase of power and wealth, had loosened their heathen standards. Merovingian history leaves a unique impression of a line of rulers and dependents among whom mercy and truth and chastity were unknown. The elements of sixth-century Christianity which the Franks made their own were its rites, its magic, and its miracles, and its expectation of the aid of a God and His saints duly solicited. Here the customs of heathenism were a preparation, or themselves passed into Frankish Christianity. Nevertheless, the general character of Christian observances—baptism, the mass, prayer, the sign of the cross, the rites at marriage, sickness, and death—could not fail to impress a certain tone and demeanour upon the people, and impart some sense of human sinfulness. The general conviction that patent and outrageous crime would bring divine vengeance gained point and power from the terrific doctrine of the Day of Wrath, and the system of penances imposed by the clergy proved an excellent discipline with these rough Christians. Many bishops and priests were little better than the nobles, yet the Church preserved Christian belief and did something to improve morality. Everywhere the monk was the most striking object-lesson, with his austerities, his terror-stricken sense of sinfulness, and conviction of the peril of the world. No martial, grasping bishop, no dissolute and treacherous priest denied that the monk’s was the ideal Christian life; and the laity stood in awe, or expectation, of the wonder-working power of his asceticism. Indeed monasticism was becoming popular, and the Merovingian period witnessed the foundation of numberless cloisters.

In the fifth and through part of the sixth century the Gallic monastery of Lerins, on an island in the Mediterranean, near Fréjus, was a chief source of ascetic and Christian influence for Gaul. Its monks took their precepts from Syria and Egypt, and some of the zeal of St. Martin of Tours had fallen on their shoulders. As the energy of this community declined, Columban’s monastery at Luxeuil succeeded to the work. The example of Columbanus, his precepts and severe monastic discipline, proved a source of ascetic and missionary zeal. With him or following in his steps came other Irishmen; and heathen German lands soon looked upon the walls of many an Irish monastery. But Columbanus failed, and all the Irish failed, in obedience, order, and effective organization. His own monastic regula, with all its rigour, contained no provisions for the government of the monasteries. Without due ordering, bands of monks dwelling in heathen communities would waver in their practices and even show a lack of doctrinal stability. Sooner or later they were certain to become confused in habit and contaminated with the manners of the surrounding people. These Irish monasteries omitted to educate a native priesthood to perpetuate their Christian teaching. The best of them, St. Gall (founded by Columbanus’s disciple Gallus), might be a citadel of culture, and convert the people about it, through the talents and character of its founder and his successors. But other monasteries, farther to the east, were tainted with heathen practices. In fine, it was not for the Irish to convert the great heathen German land, or effect a lasting reform of existing churches there or in Gaul.

The labours of Anglo-Saxons were fraught with more enduring results. Through their abilities and zeal, their faculty of organization and capacity of submitting to authority, through their consequent harmony with Rome and the support given them by the Frankish monarchy, these Anglo-Saxons converted many German tribes, established permanent churches among them, reorganized the heterogeneous Christianity which they found in certain German lands, and were a moving factor in the reform of the Frankish Church. The most striking features of their work on the Continent were diocesan organization, the training of a native clergy, the establishment of monasteries under the Benedictine constitution, union with Rome, obedience to her commands, strenuous conformity to her law, and insistence on like conformity in others. Their presentation of Christianity was orthodox, regular, and authoritative.

Some of these features appear in the work of the Saxon Willibrord among the Frisians, but are more largely illustrated in the career of St. Boniface-Winfried. Willibrord moved under the authority of Rome; the varying fortunes of his labours were connected with the enterprises of Pippin of Heristal, the father of Charles Martel. They advanced with the power of that Frankish potentate. But after his death, during the strife between Neustria and Austrasia, the heathen Frisian king Radbod drove back Christianity as he enlarged his dominion at the expense of the divided Franks. Later, Charles Martel conquered him, and the Frankish power reached (718) to the Zuyder Zee. Under its protection Willibrord at last founded the bishopric of Utrecht (734). He succeeded in educating a native clergy; and his labours had lasting result among the Frisians who were subject to the Franks, but not among the free Frisians and the Danes.

Evidently there was no sharp geographical boundary between Christianity and heathendom. Throughout broad territories, Christian and heathen practices mingled. This was true of the Frisian land. It was true in greater range and complexity of the still wider fields of Boniface’s career. This able man surrendered his high station in his native Wessex in order to serve Christ more perfectly as a missionary monk among the heathen. He went first to Frisia and worked with Willibrord, yet refused to be his bishop-coadjutor and successor, because planning to carry Christianity into Germany.

Strikingly his life exemplifies Anglo-Saxon faculties working under the directing power of Rome among heathen and partly Christian peoples. On his first visit to Rome he became imbued with the principles, and learned the ritual, of the Roman Church. He returned to enter into relations with Charles Martell, and to labour in Hesse and Thuringia, and again with Willibrord in Frisia. Not long afterwards, at his own solicitation, Gregory II. called him back to Rome (722), where he fed his passion for punctilious conformity by binding himself formally to obey the Pope, follow the practices of the Roman Church, and have no fellowship with bishops whose ways conflicted with them. Gregory made him bishop over Thuringia and Hesse, and sent him back there to reform Christian and heathen communities. Thus Gregory created a bishop within the bounds of the Frankish kingdom—an unprecedented act. Nevertheless, Charles, to whom Boniface came with a letter from Gregory, received him favourably and furnished him with a safe conduct, only exacting a recognition of his own authority.

Boniface set forth upon his mission. In Hesse he cut down the ancient heathen oak, and made a chapel of its timber; he preached and he organized—the land was not altogether heathen. Then he proceeded to Thuringia. That also was a partly Christian land; many Irish-Scottish preachers were labouring or dwelling there. Boniface set his face against their irregularities as firmly as against heathenism. Again he dominated and reorganized, yet continued unfailing in energetic preaching to the heathen. Gregory watched closely and zealously co-operated.

On the death of the second Gregory in 731, the third Gregory succeeded to the papacy and continued his predecessor’s support of the Anglo-Saxon apostle, making him archbishop with authority to ordain bishops. Many Anglo-Saxons, both men and holy women, came to aid their countryman, and brought their education and their nobler views of life to form centres of Christian culture in the German lands. Cloisters for nuns, cloisters for monks were founded. The year 744 witnessed the foundation of Fulda by Sturm under the direction of Boniface, and destined to be the very apple of his eye and the monastic model for Germany. It was placed under the authority of Rome, with the consent of Pippin, who then ruled. The reorganization rather than the conversion of Bavaria was Boniface’s next achievement. The land long before had been partially Romanized, and now was nominally Christian. Here again Boniface acted as representative of the Pope, and not of Charles, although Bavaria was part of the Frankish empire.

The year 738 brought Boniface to Rome for the third time. He was now yearning to leave the fields already tilled, and go as missionary to the heathen Saxons. But Gregory sent him back to complete the reorganization of the Bavarian Church, and to this large field of action he added also Alemannia with its diocesan centre at Speyer. Here he came in conflict with Frankish bishops, firm in their secular irregularities. Yet again he prevailed, reorganized the churches, and placed them under the authority of Rome. Evidently the two Gregories had in large measure turned the energies of Boniface from the mission-field to the labours of reform.

On the death of Charles in 741 (and in the same year died Gregory, to be succeeded by the lukewarm Zacharias) his sons Carloman and Pippin succeeded to his power. The following year Carloman in German-speaking Austrasia called a council of his church (Concilium Germanicum primum) under the primacy of Boniface. Its decrees confirmed the reforms for which the latter had struggled:

The council decreed that yearly synods should be held, that the possessions taken from the Church should be restored, and the false priests deprived of their emoluments and forced to do penance. The clergy were forbidden to bear arms, go to war, or hunt. Every priest should give yearly account of his stewardship to his bishop. Bishops, supported by the count in the diocese, should suppress heathen practices. Punishments were set for the fleshly sins of monks and nuns and clergy, and for the priestly offences of wearing secular garb or harbouring women. The Benedictine rule was appointed for monasteries. It was easier to make these decrees than carry them out against the opposition of such martial bishops as those of Mainz and Trèves, whose support was necessary to Carloman’s government; and military conditions rendered the restoration of Church lands impracticable. Yet the word was spoken, and something was done.

The next year in Neustria Pippin instituted like reforms. He was aided by Boniface, although the latter held no ecclesiastical office there. In 747 Carloman abdicated and retired to a monastery;[233] and Pippin became sole ruler, and at last formally king, anointed by Boniface under the direction of the Pope in 752. After this, Boniface, withdrawing from the direction of the Church, turned once more to satisfy his heart’s desire by going on a mission among the heathen Frisians, where he crowned a great life with a martyr’s death.

Thus authoritatively, supported by Rome and the Frankish monarchy, Christianity was presented to the Germans. It carried suggestions of a better order and some knowledge of Latin letters. The extension of Roman Catholic Christianity was the aim of Boniface first and last and always. But a Latin education was needed by the clergy to enable them to understand and set forth this some-what elaborated and learned scheme of salvation. Boniface and his coadjutors had no aversion to the literary means by which a serviceable Latin knowledge was to be obtained, and their missionary and reorganizing labours necessarily worked some diffusion of Latinity.

The Frankish secular power which had supported Boniface, advanced to violent action when Charlemagne’s sword bloodily constrained the Saxons to accept his rule and Christianity, the two inseverable objects which he tirelessly pursued. Nor could this ruler stay his mighty hand from the government of the Church within his realm. With his power to appoint bishops, he might, if he chose, control its councils. But apparently he chose to rule the Church directly; and his, and his predecessors’ and successors’ Capitularies (rather than Conciliar decrees) contain the chief ecclesiastical legislation for the Frankish realm.

In its temporalities and secular action the Church was the greatest and richest of all subjects; it possessed the rights of lay vassals and was affected with like duties.[234] But in ritual, doctrine, language and affiliation, the Frankish Church made part of the Roman Catholic Church. It used the Roman liturgy and the Latin tongue. The ordering of the clergy was Roman, and the regulation of the monasteries was Romanized by the adoption of the Benedictine regula. Within the Church Rome had triumphed. Prelates were vassals of the king who had now become Emperor; and the great corporate Church was subject to him. Nevertheless, this great corporate institution was Roman rather than Gallic or Frankish or German. It was Teuton only in those elements which represented ecclesiastical abuses, for example, the remaining irregularities of various kinds, the lay and martial habits of prelates, and even their appointment by the monarch. These were the elements which the Church in its logical Roman evolution was to eliminate. Charlemagne himself, as well as his lesser successors, strove just as zealously to bring the people into obedience to the Church as into obedience to the lay rulers. While the Carolingian rule was strong, its power was exerted on behalf of ecclesiastical authority and discipline; and when the royal administration weakened after Charlemagne’s death, the Church was not slow to revolt against its temporal subjection to the royal power.

But the Church, in spite of Latin and Roman affinities, strove also to come near the German peoples and speak to them in their own tongues. This is borne witness to by the many translations from Latin into Frankish, Saxon, or Alemannish dialects, made by the clergy. Christianity deeply affected the German language. Many of its words received German form, and the new thoughts forced old terms to take on novel and more spiritual meanings. To be sure these German dialects were there before Christianity came, and the capacities of the Germans acquired in heathen times are attested by the sufficiency of their language to express Christian thought. Likewise the German character was there, and proved its range and quality by the very transformation of which it showed itself capable under Christianity. And just as Christianity was given expression in the German language, which retained many of its former qualities, so many fundamental traits of German character remained in the converted people. Yet so earnestly did the Germans turn to Christianity, and such draughts of its spirit did they draw into their nature, that the early Germanic re-expression of it is sincere, heartfelt, and moving, and illumined with understanding of the Faith.

These qualities may be observed in the series of Christian documents in the German tongues commencing in the first years of Charlemagne’s reign. They consist of baptismal confessions of belief, the first of which (cir. 769) was composed for heathen Saxons just converted by the sword, and of catechisms presenting the elements of Christian precept and dogma. The earliest of the latter (cir. 789), coming from the monastery at Weissenburg in Alsace, contains the Lord’s Prayer, with explanations, an enumeration of the deadly sins according to the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, the Apostles’ Creed and the Athanasian. Further, one finds among these documents a translation of the De fide Catholica of Isidore of Seville, and of the Benedictine regula; also Charlemagne’s Exhortatio ad plebem Christianam, which was an admonition to the people to learn the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. There are likewise general confessions of sins. Less dependent on a Latin original is the so-called Muspilli, a spirited description in alliterative verse of the last times and the Day of Judgment.

German qualities, however, express themselves more fully in two Gospel versions, the first the famous Saxon Heliand (cir. 835), (which follows Tatian’s “Harmony”); the second the somewhat later Evangelienbuch of Otfrid the Frank. They were both composed in alliterative verse, though Otfrid also made use of rhyme.[235] The martial, Teutonic ring of the former is well known. Christ is the king, the disciples are His thanes whose duty is to stand by their lord to the death; He rewards them with the promised riches of heaven, excelling the earthly goods bestowed by other kings. In the “betrayal” they close around their Lord, saying: “Were it thy will, mighty Lord of ours, that we should set upon them with the spear, gladly would we strike and die for our Lord.” Out broke the wrath of the “ready swordsman” (snel suerdthegan)[236] Simon Peter; he could not speak for anguish to think that his lord should be bound. Angrily strode the bold knight before his lord, drew his weapon, the sword by his side, and smote the nearest foe with might of hands. Before his fury and the spurting blood the people fled fearing the sword’s bite.

The Heliand has also gentler qualities, as when it calls the infant Christ the fridubarn (peace-child), and pictures Mary watching over her “little man.” But German love of wife and child and home speak more clearly in Otfrid’s book. Although a learned monk, his pride of Frankish race rings in his oft-quoted reasons for writing theotisce, i.e. in German: Why shall not the Franks sing God’s praise in Frankish tongue? Forcible and logical it is, although not bound by grammar’s rules. Yes, why should the Franks be incapable? they are brave as Romans or Greeks; they are as good in field and wood; wide power is theirs, and ready are they with the sword. They are rich, and possess a good land, with honour. They can guard their own; what people is their equal in battle? Diligent are they also in the Word of God. Otfrid is quite moving in his sympathetic sense of the sorrow of the Last Judgment, when the mother from child shall be parted, the father from son, the lord from his faithful thane, friend from friend—all human kind. Deep is the mystic love and yearning with which he realizes Heaven as one’s own land: there is life without death, light without darkness, the angels and eternal bliss. We have left it—that must we bewail always, banished to a strange land, poor misled orphans. The antithesis between the fremidemo lant (fremdes land) of earth, and the heimat, the eigan lant of Heaven, which is home, real home, is the keynote strongly felt and movingly expressed.

BOOK II
THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

CHAPTER X

With the conversion of Teuton peoples and their introduction to the Latin culture accompanying the new religion, the factors of mediaeval development came at last into conjunction. The mediaeval development was to issue from their combined action, rather than from the singular nature of any one of them.[237] Taking up the introductory theme concerning the meeting of these forces, we followed the Latinizing of the West resulting from the expansion of the Roman Republic, which represents the political and social preparation of the field. Then we considered the antique pagan gospel of philosophy and letters, which had quickened this Latin civilization and was to form the spiritual environment of patristic Christianity. Next in order we observed the intellectual interests of the Latin Fathers, and then turned to the great Latin transmitters of the somewhat amalgamated antique and patristic material—Boëthius, Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great, and Isidore of Seville—who gathered what they might, and did much to reduce the same to decadent forms, suited to the barbaric understanding. Then the course of the barbaric disruption of the Empire was reviewed; and this led to a consideration of the qualities and circumstances of the Celts and Teutons, both those who to all appearances had been Latinized, and those who took active part in the barbarization and disruption of the Roman order. And finally we closed these introductory, though essential, chapters by tracing the ways in which Christianity, with the now humbled and degraded antique culture, was presented to this renewed and largely Teutonic barbarism.

Having now reached the epoch of conjunction of the various elements of the mediaeval evolution, it lies before us to consider the first stage in the action of true mediaeval conditions upon the two chief spiritual forces, the first stage, in other words, of the mediaeval appropriation of the patristic and antique material. The period is what is called Carlovingian or Carolingian, after the great ruler Charlemagne. Intellectually considered, it may be said to have begun when Charles palpably evinced his interest in sacred and liberal studies by calling Alcuin and other scholars to his Court about the year 781. Let us note the political and social situation.

The Merovingian kingdom created by Clovis and his house has been spoken of.[238] One may properly refer to it in the singular, although frequently, instead of one, there were several kingdoms, since upon the death of a Merovingian monarch his realm was divided among his sons. But no true son of the house could leave the others unconquered or unmurdered; and therefore if the Merovingian kingdom constantly was divided, it also tended to coalesce again, coerced to unity. Constituted both of Roman and Teutonic elements, it operated as a mediating power between Latin Christendom and barbaric heathendom. Its energies were great, and were not waning when its royal house was passing into insignificance before the power of the nobles and the chief personage among them who had become the major domus (“Mayor of the palace”) and virtual ruler. Moreover, experience, contact with Latin civilization, membership in the Roman Catholic Church, were informing the Merovingian energies. They were becoming just a little less barbarous and a little more instructed; in fine, were changing from Merovingian to Carolingian.

In the latter part of the seventh century, Pippin, called “of Heristal,” ruled as major domus (as one or more of his ancestors before him) in Austrasia, the eastern Frankish kingdom. Many were his wars, especially with the Neustrian or western Frankish kingdom, under its major domus, Ebroin. This somewhat unconquerable man at last was murdered, and one of the two Merovingian kings being murdered likewise, Pippin about the year 688 became princeps regiminis ac major domus for the now united realm. From this date the Merovingians are but shadow kings, whose names are not worth recording. Pippin’s rule marks the advent of his house to virtual sovereignty, and also the passing of the preponderance of power from Neustria to Austrasia. These two facts became clear after Pippin’s death (714), when his redoubtable son Charles in a five years’ struggle against great odds made himself sole major domus, and with his Austrasians overwhelmed the Neustrian army. Thenceforth this Charles, called Martell the Hammer, mightily prevailed, smiting Saxons, Bavarians, and Alemanni, and, after much warfare in the south with Saracens, at last vindicated the Cross against the Crescent at Tours in 732. Nine years longer he was to reign, increasing his power to the end, and supporting the establishment of Catholicism in Frisia, by the Anglo-Saxon Willibrord, and in heathen German lands by St. Boniface.[239] He died in 741, dividing what virtually was his realm between his sons Carloman and Pippin: the former receiving Austrasia, Alemannia, Thuringia; the latter, Neustria, Burgundy, Provence.

These two sons valiantly took up their task, reforming the Church under the inspiration of Boniface, and ruling their domains without conflict with each other until 747, when Carloman retired and became a monk, leaving the entire realm to Pippin. The latter in 751 at Soissons, with universal approval and the consent of the Pope, was crowned king, and anointed by the hand of Boniface. This able and energetic sovereign pursued the course of his father and grandfather, but on still larger scale; aiding the popes and reducing the Lombard power in Italy, carrying on wars around the borders of his realm, bringing Aquitania to full submission, and expelling the Saracens from Narbonne and other fortress towns. In 768 he died, again dividing his vast realm between his two sons Carloman and Charles.

These bore each other little love; but fortunately the former died (771) before an open breach occurred. So Charles was left to rule alone, and prove himself, all things considered, the greatest of mediaeval sovereigns. Having fought his many wars of conquest and subjugation against Saracens, Saxons, Avars, Bavarians, Slavs, Danes, Lombards; having conquered much of Italy and freed the Pope from neighbouring domination; having been crowned and anointed emperor in the year 800; having restored letters, uplifted the Church, issued much wise legislation, and Christianized with iron hand the stubborn heathen; and above all, having administered his vast realm with never-failing energy, he died in 814—just one hundred years after the time when his grandfather Charles was left to fight so doughtily for life and power.

Poetry and history have conspired to raise the fame of Charlemagne. In more than one chanson de geste, the old French épopée has put his name where that of Pippin, Charles Martell, or perhaps that of some Merovingian should have been.[240] Sober history has not thus falsified its matter, and yet has over-dramatized the incidents of its hero’s reign. For example, every schoolboy has been told of the embassy to Charlemagne from Harun al Raschid, Caliph of Bagdad. But not so many schoolboys know that Pippin had sent an embassy to a previous caliph, which was courteously entertained for three years in Bagdad;[241] and Pippin, like his son, received embassies from the Greek emperor. The careers of Charles Martell and Pippin have not been ignored; and yet historical convention has focused its attention and its phrases upon “the age of Charlemagne.” One should not forget that this exceedingly great man stood upon the shoulders of the great men to whose achievement he succeeded.

Neither politically, socially, intellectually, nor geographically[242] was there discontinuity or break or sudden change between the Merovingian and the Carolingian periods.[243] The character of the monarchy was scarcely affected by the substitution of the house of Pippin of Heristal for the house of Clovis. The baleful custom of dividing the realm upon a monarch’s death survived; but Fortune rendered it innocuous through one strong century, during which (719-814) the realm was free from internecine war, while the tossing streams of humanity were driven onward by three great successive rulers.

The Carolingian, like the Merovingian, realm included many different peoples who were destined never to become one nation; and the whole Carolingian system of government virtually had existed in the Merovingian period. Before, as well as after, the dynastic change, the government throughout the realm was administered by Counts. Likewise the famous missi dominici, or royal legates, are found in Merovingian times; but they were employed more effectively by Charles Martell, Pippin, and, finally, by Charlemagne, who enlarged their sphere of action. He elaborately defined their functions in a famous Capitulary of the year 802. It was set forth that the emperor had chosen these legates from among his best and greatest (ex optimatibus suis), and had authorized them to receive the new oaths of allegiance, and supervise the observance of the laws, the execution of justice, the maintenance of the military and fiscal rights of the emperor. They were given power to see that the permanent functionaries (the counts and their subordinates) duly administered the law as written or recognized. The missi had jurisdiction over ecclesiastical as well as lay officials; and many of them were entrusted with special powers and duties in the particular instance.

Thus Charlemagne developed the functions of these ancient officers. Likewise his Court and royal council, the synods and assemblies of his reign, the military service, modes of holding land, methods of collecting revenue, were not greatly changed from Merovingian prototypes. Yet the old institutions had been renewed and bettered. A vast misjoined and unrelated realm was galvanized into temporary unity. And, most impressive and portentous thing of all, an Empire—the Holy Roman Empire—was resurrected for a time in fact and verity: the same was destined to endure in endeavour and contemplation.

So there was no break politically or socially between the Carolingian Empire and its antecedents, which had made it possible. Likewise there was no discontinuity spiritually and intellectually between the earlier time and that epoch which begins with Charlemagne’s first endeavours to restore knowledge, and extends through the ninth and, if one will, even the tenth century.[244] Western Europe (except Scandinavia) had become nominally Christian, and had been made acquainted with Latin education to the extent indicated in the preceding chapter, the purpose of which was to tell how Christianity and the antique culture were brought to the northern peoples. The present chapter, on the other hand, seeks to describe how the eighth and ninth centuries proceeded to learn and consider and react upon this newly introduced Christianity and antique culture, out of which the spiritual destinies of the Middle Ages were to be forged. The task of Carolingian scholars was to learn what had been brought to them. They scarcely excelled even the later intermediaries through whom this knowledge had been transmitted. One need not look among them for better scholarship than was possessed by Bede, who died in 735, the birth year of Alcuin who drew so much from him, and was to be the chief luminary of the palace school of Charlemagne. Undoubtedly, Charlemagne’s exertions caused a revival of sacred and profane studies through the region of the present France and Rhenish Germany. His primary motive was the purification and extension of Catholic Christianity. Here Charles Martell and Pippin (with his brother Carloman) had done much, as their support of Boniface bears witness to. But Charlemagne’s efforts went beyond those of his predecessors. More clearly than they he understood the need of education, and he was himself intensely interested in knowledge. Hence his endeavours, primarily to uplift the Faith, brought a revival of learning and a literary productivity, consisting mostly in reproduction or rearrangement of old material, doctrinal or profane.[245]

Another preliminary consideration may help us to appreciate the intellectual qualities of the period before us. Charlemagne was primarily a ruler in the largest sense, conqueror, statesman, law-giver, one who realized the needs of the time, and met or forestalled them. His monarchy, with its powers inherited, as well as radiating from his own personality, provided an imperial government for western Europe. The chief activities of this ruler and his epoch were practical, to wit, political and military. In laws, in institutions, and in deeds, he and his Empire represent creativeness and progress; although, to be sure, that conglomerate empire of his had itself to fall in pieces before there could take place a more lasting and national evolution of States. And, of course, Carolingian political creativeness included the conservation of existing social, political, and, above all, ecclesiastical, institutions. In fine, this period was creative and progressive in its practical energies. The factors were the pressing needs and palpable opportunities, which were met or availed of. And to the same effective treatment of problems ecclesiastical and doctrinal was due the modicum of originality in the Carolingian literature. Aside from this, the period’s intellectual accomplishment, in religious as well as secular studies, shows merely a diligent learning and imitation of pagan letters, and a rehandling and arrangement of the work of the Church Fathers and their immediate successors. Its efforts were exhausted in rearranging the heritage of Christian teaching coming from the Church Fathers, or in endeavours to acquire the transmitted antique culture and imitate the antique in phrase and metre. The combined task, or occupation, absorbed the minds of men. The whole period was at school, where it needed to be: at school to the Church Fathers, at school to the transmitters of antique culture. Its task was one of adjustment of its materials to itself, and of itself to its materials.

The reinvigoration of studies marking the life-time of Charlemagne did not extend to Italy, where letters, although decayed, had never ceased, nor to Anglo-Saxon England, where Bede had taught and whence Alcuin had come. The revival radiated, one may say, from the palace school attached to the Court, which had its least intermittent domicile at Aix-la-Chapelle. It extended to the chief monastic centres of Gaul and Germany, and to cathedral schools where such existed. From many lands scholars were drawn by that great hand so generous in giving, so mighty to protect. Some came on invitation more or less compelling, and many of their own free will. The first and most famous of them all was the Anglo-Saxon, Alcuin of York. Charles first saw him at Parma in the year 781, and ever after kept him in his service as his most trusted teacher and director of studies. Love of home drew Alcuin back, once at least, to England. In 796 Charles permitted him to leave the Court, and entrusted him with the re-establishment of the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours and its schools. There he lived and laboured till his death in 804.

Another scholar was Peter of Pisa, a grammarian, who seems to have shared with Alcuin the honourable task of instructing the king. Of greater note was Paulus Diaconus, who, like Alcuin himself, was to sigh for the pious or scholarly quiet which the seething, half-barbarous, and loose-mannered Court did not afford. Paulus at last gained Charles’s consent to retire to Monte Cassino. He was of the Lombard race, like another favourite of Charles, Paulinus of Aquileia. From Spain, apparently, came Theodulphus, by descent a Goth, and reputed the most elegant Latin versifier of his time. Charles made him Bishop of Orleans. A little later, Einhart the Frank appears, who was to be the emperor’s secretary and biographer. Likewise came certain sons of Erin, among them such a problematic poet as he who styled himself “Hibernicus Exul”—not the first or last of his line!

These belonged to the generation about the emperor. Belonging to the next generation, and for the most part pupils of the older men, were Abbot Smaragdus, grammarian and didactic writer; the German, Rabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda and, against his will, Archbishop of Mainz, an encyclopaedic excerpter and educator, primus praeceptor Germaniae; his pupil was Walafrid Strabo, the cleverest putter-together of the excerpt commentary, and a pleasing poet. In Lorraine at the same time flourished the Irishman, Sedulius Scotus, and in the West that ardent classical scholar, Servatus Lupus, Abbot of Ferrières, and Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, a man practical and hard-headed, with whom one may couple Claudius, Bishop of Turin, the opponent of relic-worship. One might also mention those theological controversialists, Radbertus Paschasius and Ratramnus, Hincmar, the great Archbishop of Rheims, and Gottschalk, the unhappy monk, ever recalcitrant; at the end John Scotus Eriugena should stand, the somewhat too intellectual Neo-Platonic Irishman, translator of Pseudo-Dionysius, and announcer of various rationalizing propositions for which men were to look on him askance.

There will be occasion to speak more particularly of a number of these men. They were all scholars, and interested in the maintenance of elementary Latin education as well as in theology. They wished to write good Latin, and sometimes tried for a classical standard, as Einhart did in his Vita Caroli. Few of them refrained from verse, for they were addicted to metrical compositions made of borrowed classic phrase and often of reflected classic sentiment, sometimes prettily composed, but usually insipid, and in the mass, which was great, exceptionally uninspired. Such metrical effort, quite as much as Einhart’s consciously classicizing Latin prose, represents a survival of the antique excited to recrudescence in forms which, if they were not classical, at least had not become anything else. Stylistically, and perhaps temperamentally, it represented the ending of what had nearly passed away, rather than the beginning of the more organic development which was to come.[246]

Among these men, Alcuin and Rabanus broadly represent at once the intellectual interests of the period and the first stage in the process of the mediaeval appropriation of the patristic and antique material. The affectionate and sympathetic personality of the former[247] appears throughout his voluminous correspondence with Charles and others, which shows, among other matters, the interest of the time in elementary points of Latinity, and the alertness of the mind of the great king, who put so many questions to his genial instructor upon grammar, astronomy, and such like knowledge. An examination of the works of Alcuin will indicate the range and character of the educational and more usual intellectual interests of the epoch. In fact, they are outlined in a simple fashion suited to youthful minds in his treatise upon Grammar.[248] Its opening colloquy presents a sort of programme and justification of elementary secular studies.

“We have heard you saying,” begins Discipulus, “that philosophy is the teacher (magistra) of all virtues, and that she alone of secular riches has never left the possessor miserable. Lend a hand, good Master,”—and the pupil becomes self-deprecatory. “Flint has fire within, which comes out only when struck; so the light of knowledge exists by nature in human minds, but a teacher is needed to knock it out.”

“It is easy,” responds the Master, “to show you wisdom’s path, if only you will pursue it for the sake of God, for the sake of the soul’s purity and to learn the truth, and also for its own sake, and not for human praise and honour.”

We confess, answers little Discipulus, that we love happiness, but know not whether it can exist in this world. And the dialogue rambles on in discursive comment upon the superiority of the lasting over the transitory, with some feeble echoing of notes from Boëthius’s De consolatione. There is talk to show that man, a rational animal, the image of his Creator, and immortal in his better part, should seek what is truly of himself, and not what is alien, the abiding and not the fugitive. In fine, one should adorn the soul, which is eternal, with wisdom, the soul’s true lasting dignity. There is some coy demurring over the steepness of the way; but the pupil is ardent, and the Master confident that with the aid of Divine Grace they will ascend the seven grades of philosophy, by which philosophers have gained honour brighter than that of kings, and the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith have triumphed over all heresiarchs. “Through these paths, dearest son, let your youth run its daily course, until its completed years and strengthened mind shall attain to the heights of the Holy Scriptures upon which you and your like shall become armed defenders of the Faith and invincible assertors of its truth.” This means, of course, that the Liberal Arts are the proper preparation for the study of Scripture, that is, theology. But Alcuin’s discourse seems to tarry with those studies as if detained by some love of them for their own sake.

The body of this treatise is in form a disputation between two youthful pupils, a Frank and a Saxon. A Magister makes a third interlocutor, and sets the subject of the argument. These personae discuss letters and syllables in definitions taken from Donatus, Priscian, or Isidore; and whenever Alcuin permits any one of them to stray from the words of those authorities, the language shows at once his own confused ideas regarding the parts of speech. He uses terms without adequately comprehending them, and thus affords one of the myriad examples of how, under decadent or barbarized conditions, phrases may outlive an intelligent understanding of their meaning. “Grammar,” says the Magister, when solicited to define it, “is the science of letters, and the guardian of correct speech and writing. It rests on nature, reason, authority, and custom.” “In how many species is it divided?” “In twenty-six: words, letters, syllables, clauses, dictions, speeches, definitions, feet, accent, punctuation, signs, spelling, analogies, etymologies, glosses, differences, barbarism, solecism, faults, metaplasm, schemata, tropes, prose, metre, fables and histories.”[249] The actual treatise does not cover these twenty-six topics, but confines itself to the division of grammar commonly called Etymology.

Though the mental processes of an individual preserve a working harmony, some of them appear more rational than others. Such disparities may be glaring in men who enter upon the learning of a higher civilization without proper pilotage. How are they to discriminate between the valuable and the foolish? The common sense, which they apply to familiar matters, contrasts with their childlike lucubrations upon novel topics of education or philosophy. And if that higher culture to which such pupils are introduced be in part decadent, it will itself contain disparities between the stronger thinking held in the surviving writings of a prior time and the later degeneracies which are declining to the level, it may be, of these new learners.

There would naturally be disparities in the mental processes of an Anglo-Saxon like Alcuin introduced to the debris of Latin education and the writings of the Fathers; and his state would typify the character of the studies at the palace school of Charlemagne and at monastic schools through his northern realm. This newly stimulated scholarship held the same disparities that appear in the writings of Alcuin. He may seem to be adapting his teaching to barbaric needs, but it is evident that his matter accords with his own intellectual tastes, as, for example, when he introduces into his educational writings the habit of riddling in metaphors, so dear to the Anglo-Saxon.[250] The sound but very elementary portions of his teaching were needed by the ignorance of his scholars. For instance, no information regarding Latin orthography could come amiss in the eighth century. And Alcuin in his treatise on that subject[251] took many words commonly misspelled and contrasted them with those which sounded like them, but were quite different in meaning and derivation. One should not, for example, confuse habeo with abeo; or bibo and vivo. Such warnings were valuable. The use of the vulgar Romance-forms of Latin spoken through a large part of Charles’s dominions implied no knowledge of correct Latinity. Even among the clergy, there was almost universal ignorance of Latin orthography and grammar.

As a companion to his Grammar and Orthography, Alcuin composed a De rhetorica et virtutibus,[252] in the form of a dialogue between Charles and himself. The king desired such instruction to equip him for the civil disputes (civiles quaestiones) which were brought before him from all parts of his realm. And Alcuin proceeded to furnish him with a compend of the scientia bene dicendi, which is Rhetoric. This crude epitome was based chiefly on Cicero’s De inventione, but indicates a use of other of his oratorical writings, and has bits here and there which apparently have filtered through from the Rhetoric of Aristotle. Some illustrations are taken from Scripture. The work is most successful in showing the difference between Cicero and Alcuin. The genius, the spirit, the art of the great orator’s treatises are lost; a naked skeleton of statement remains. We have words, terms, definitions, even rules; and Alcuin is not conscious that beyond them there is the living spirit of discourse.

A more complete descent from substance to a clatter of words and definitions is exhibited by Alcuin’s De dialectica.[253] In logical studies facilis descensus! Others had illustrated this before him. His treatise is again a dialogue, with Charlemagne for questioner. Opening with the stock definitions and divisions of philosophy, it arrives at logic, which is composed (as Isidore and Cassiodorus said) of dialectic and rhetoric, “the shut and open fist,” a simile which had come down from Varro. Says Charles: “What are the species of dialectic?” Answers Alcuin: “Five principal ones: Isagogae, categories, forms of syllogisms and definitions, topics, periermeniae.” What a classification! Introductions, categories, syllogisms, topics, De interpretatione-s! It is not a classification but in reality an enumeration of the treatises which had served as sources for those men from whom Alcuin drew! Evidently this excerpter is not really thinking in the terms and categories of his subject. His work shows no intelligence beyond Isidore’s, from whose Etymologies it is largely taken. And the genius of our author for metaphysics may be perceived from the definition which he offers Charles of substance—substantia or usia (i.e. οὐσία): it is that which is discerned by corporeal sense; while accidens is that which changes frequently and is apprehended by the mind. Substantia is the underlying, the subjacens, in which the accidentia are said to be.[254] One observes the crassness and inconsistency of these statements.

There are illustrations of the knowledge and methods shown in the educational writings of the man who, next to Charles himself, was the guiding spirit of the intellectual revival. No mention has been made of those of his works that were representative of the chief intellectual labour of the period—that of exploiting the Patristic material. Here Alcuin contributed a compend of Augustine’s doctrines on the Trinity,[255] and a book on the Vices and Virtues, drawn chiefly from Augustine’s sermons.[256] Like most of his learned contemporaries, he also compiled Commentaries upon Scripture, the method of which is prettily told in a prefatory epistle placed by him before his Commentary on the Gospel of John, and addressed to two pious women: