The Middle Ages - Sketches and Fragments E-Book

Thomas J. Shahan

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 387

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The historical sketches and fragments that are here submitted to the reader deal only with a few phases of the rich and varied life of the period known as the Middle Ages and are intended to arouse a wider interest in that thousand years of Christian history that opens with Clovis and closes with the discovery of the New World. Both in Church and State the life of today is rooted in those ten marvelous centuries of transition, during which the Catholic Church was mother and nurse to the infant nations of the West, a prop and consolation to the Christians of the Orient. Our modern institutions and habits of thought, our ideals and the great lines of our history are not intelligible apart from a sufficient understanding of what men thought, hoped, attempted, suffered and founded in the days when there was but one Christian faith from Otranto to Drontheim. The problems that now agitate us and seem to threaten our inherited social order were problems for the medieval man. The conflicts and difficulties that make up the sum of political history for the last five centuries are only the last chapters of a story of surpassing interest that opens with the formal establishment of Christian thought as the basis and norm of social existence and development. The titles of the essays are : "Gregory the Great and the Barbarian World", "Justinian the Great", "The Religion of Islam", "Catholicism in the Middle Ages", "The Christians of St. Thomas", "The Medieval Teacher", "The Book of a Medieval Mother", "German Schools in the Sixteenth Century", "Baths and Bathing in the Middle Ages", "Clergy and People in Medieval England", "The Cathedral Builders of Mediæval Europe", "The Results of the Crusades on the Italian Renaissance."

Leseprobe

The Middle Ages

Sketches & Fragments

THOMAS JOSEPH SHAHAN

The Middle Ages, T. J. Shahan

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849664039

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

PREFACE.. 1

GREGORY THE GREAT AND THE BARBARIAN WORLD.2

JUSTINIAN THE GREAT (A.D. 527-565).13

THE RELIGION OF ISLAM.42

CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES.51

THE CHRISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS.87

THE MEDIEVAL TEACHER.91

THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER.95

GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY.102

BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES.115

CLERGY AND PEOPLE IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND.120

THE CATHEDRAL-BUILDERS OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE.127

THE RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES.145

ON THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE.161

PREFACE

The historical sketches and fragments that are here submitted to the general reader deal only with a few phases of the rich and varied life of the period known usually as the Middle Ages. The writer will be amply rewarded if they serve to arouse a wider interest in that thousand years of Christian history that opens with Clovis and closes with the discovery of the New World. Both in Church and State the life of to-day is rooted in those ten marvellous centuries of transition, during which the Catholic Church was mother and nurse to the infant nations of the West, a prop and consolation to the Christians of the Orient. Our modern institutions and habits of thought, our ideals and the great lines of our history, are not intelligible apart from a sufficient understanding of what men thought, hoped, attempted, suffered and founded in the days when there was but one Christian faith from Otranto to Trondheim. The problems that now agitate us and seem to threaten our inherited social order were problems for the medieval man. The conflicts and difficulties that make up the sum of political history for the last four centuries are only the last chapters in a story of surpassing interest that opens with the formal establishment of Christian thought as the basis and norm of social existence and development. If anything seems distinctive of the modern mind as against the medieval temperament, it is the sense of law, an even, constant, inerrant working of forces and principles that brook no interference from without and are supremely equitable in their operations. If we compare medieval with modern history, we shall learn with certainty that in both there is dominant this reign of law, a consistent inexorable unity of purpose, a progressive social formation. In both there are divine and human elements that occupy, in varying prominence, the foreground of the great world-stage, tending always to create a higher type of mankind, to nurse the dormant idealism of the race, and to lift it gradually toward the goal of all human endeavor — the flawless life of the spirit chastened and transformed and deified by the imitation of the God-man.

The essays and papers included in this volume have appeared elsewhere at intervals. For the courteous permission to reprint them I desire to express my thanks to the Catholic World, the American Catholic Quarterly Review, the Catholic Times, the Ave Maria and the Catholic University Bulletin.

GREGORY THE GREAT AND THE BARBARIAN WORLD.

The latter part of the sixth century of our era offers to the student of human institutions a fascinating and momentous spectacle — the simultaneous transition over a great extent of space from an ancient and refined civilization to a new and uncouth barbarism of manners, speech, civil polity, and culture. It was then that the great mass of the Roman Empire, which generations of soldiers, statesmen, and administrators had consolidated at such frightful expense of human blood and rights, was irrevocably broken by the savage hordes whom it had in turn attempted to resist or to assimilate.

One moment it seemed as if the fortune of a Justinian and the genius of a Belisarius were about to regain all Italy, the sacred nucleus of conquest, and to proceed thence to a reconstitution of the Roman State in Western Europe. But it was only for a moment. Fresh multitudes of Teutonic tribesmen swarmed from out their deep forests along the Danube or the Elbe and overflowed Northern Italy so effectually as to efface the classic landmarks, and to fasten forever on the fairest plains of Europe their own barbarian cognomen. It is true that the bureaucracy of Constantinople, aided by the local pride of the cities of Southern Italy, by a highly-centralized military government, by the prestige and the influence of the Catholic bishops, as well as by the jealousy and disunion of the Lombard chiefs, maintained for two centuries the assertion of imperial rights, and a steadily diminishing authority in the peninsula and the islands of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. But, by the end of the sixth century, all serious hope of reorganizing the Western Empire was gone. Thenceforth (thanks to the Lombard) the Frank and the Visigoth, luckier than their congeners the Ostrogoth and the Vandal, might hope to live in peaceful enjoyment of the vast provinces of Spain and Gaul, and the fierce pirates of old Saxony could slowly lay the foundations of a new empire on the soil of abandoned and helpless Britain. In the West not only was the civil authority of Rome overthrown, but there went with it the venerable framework of its ancient administration, the Latin language — that masterful, majestic symbol of Roman right and strength — the Roman law, the municipal system, the great network of roads and of intercommercial relations, the peaceful cultivation of the soil, the schools, the literature, and, above all, that splendid unity and consolidarity of interests and ideals which were the true cement of the ancient Roman State, and which welded together its multitudinous parts more firmly than any bonds of race or blood or language.

Notwithstanding the transient splendor, the victories and conquests, of the reign of Justinian, the condition of the Orient was little, if any, better than that of the West. The Persian and the Avar harassed the frontiers, and occasionally bathed their horses in the sacred waters of the Bosporus. The populations groaned beneath the excessive taxes required for endless fortifications, ever recurring tributes, the pompous splendor of a great court, and the exigencies of a minute and numerous bureaucracy. Egypt and Syria, no longer dazzled by the prestige or protected by the strong arm of Rome, began to indulge in velleities of national pride and spirit, and, under the cover of heresy, to widen the political and social chasm that yawned between them and the great heart of the empire. The imperial consciousness, as powerful and energetic in the last of the Palaeologi as in a Trajan or a Constantine, was still vigorous enough, but it had no longer its ancient instruments of good fortune, wealth, prestige, and arms. The shrunken legions, the diminished territories, the dwindling commerce, foreshadowed the dissolution of the greatest political framework of antiquity; and in the quick succeeding plagues, famines, and earthquakes, men saw the ominous harbingers of destruction. The time of which I speak was, indeed, the close of a long, eventful century of transition. Already the political heirs of Rome and Byzantium were looming up, both East and West. In the East, fanatic, conquering Islam awaited impatiently the tocsin of its almost irresistible propaganda, and in the West the Frank was striding through war and anarchy and every moral enormity to the brilliant destiny of continental empire. We may imagine the problem's that beset at this moment the mind of a Boethius or a Cassiodorus. Would the fruits of a thousand years of Greek and Roman culture be utterly blotted out?

Would the gentleness and refinement that long centuries of external peace and world-wide commerce and widest domination had begotten be lost to the race of man? Would the teachings of Jesus Christ, the source of so much social betterment, be overlaid by some Oriental fanaticism or hopelessly degraded by the coarse naturalism of the Northern barbarians? Could it be that in this storm were about to be ingulfed the very highest conquests of man over nature and over himself, the delicate and difficult art of government, the most polished instruments of speech, the rarest embodiments of ideal thought in every art, that sweet spiritual amity, the fruit of religious faith and hope, that common Christian atmosphere in which all men moved and breathed and rejoiced?

We all know what it was that in these centuries of commotion and demolition saved from utter loss so much of the intellectual inheritance of the Graeco-Roman world, what power tamed and civilized the barbarian masters of the Western Empire, fixed them to the soil, codified and purified their laws, and insensibly and indirectly introduced among them no small share of that Roman civilization which they once so heartily hated, and which in their pagan days they looked on as utterly incompatible with Teutonic manhood and freedom. It was the Catholic hierarchy which took upon itself the burden and responsibility of civil order and progress at a time when absolute anarchy prevailed, and around which centred all those elements of the old classic world that were destined, under its aegis, to traverse the ages and go on forever, moulding the thought and life of humanity as long as men shall admire the beautiful, or reverence truth, or follow after order and justice and civil security. It was the bishops, monks, and priests of the Catholic Church who in those troublous days stood like a wall for the highest goods of society as well as for the rights of the soul; who resisted in person the oppression of the barbarian chief just emerged from his swamps and forests, as well as the avarice and unpatriotic greed of the Roman who preyed upon his country's ills; who roused the fainting citizens, repaired the broken walls, led men to battle, mounted guard upon the ramparts, and negotiated treaties. Indeed, there was no one else in the ruinous and tottering State to whom men could turn for protection from one another as well as from the barbarian. It seemed, for a long time, as if society were returning to its original elements, such as it had once been in the hands of its Architect, and that no one could better administer on its dislocated machinery than the men who directly represented that divine providence and love out of which human society had arisen.

The keystone of this extraordinary episcopate was the papacy. The Bishop of Rome shared with all other bishops of the empire their influence over the municipal administration and finances, their quasi-control of the police, the prisons, and the public works, the right to sit as judge, not alone over clerics and in clerical cases, but in profane matters, and to receive the appeals of those who felt themselves wronged by the civil official. Like all other bishops of the sixth century, he was a legal and powerful check upon the rapacity, the ignorance, and the collusion of the great body of officials who directed the intricate mechanism of Byzantine administration. But over and above this the whole world knew that he was the successor of the most illustrious of the apostles, whose legacy of authority he had never suffered to dwindle; that he was the metropolitan of Italy, and the patriarch of the entire West, all of whose churches had been founded directly or indirectly by his see.

From the time of Constantine his authority in the West had been frequently acknowledged and confirmed by the State and the bishops. In deferring to his decision the incipient schism of the Donatists, the victor of the Milvian Bridge only accepted the situation such as it was outlined at Aries and Antioch and Sardica, such as Valentinian formally proclaimed it, and the Pragmatic Sanction of Justinian made the fundamental law of the State. Long before Constantine, the Bishop of Rome seemed to Decius and Aurelian the most prominent of the Christian bishops, and since then every succeeding pontificate raised him higher in the public esteem.

Occasionally a man of transcendent genius, like Leo the Great, broke the usual high level of superiority, and shone as the saviour of the State and the scourge of heresy; or again, skilful administrators like Gelasius and Hormisdas piloted happily the bark of Peter through ugly shoals and rapids. But, whatever their gifts or character, one identic consciousness survived through all of them — the sense of a supreme mission and of the most exalted responsibility in ecclesiastical matters. Did ever that serene consciousness of authority need to be intensified? What a world of suggestion and illustration lay about them in their very episcopal city, where at every step the monuments of universal domination met their gaze, where the very atmosphere was eloquent with the souvenirs of imperial mastery and the stubborn execution of the imperial will, where the local mementoes of their own steady upward growth yet confronted them, where they could stand in old St. Peter's, even then one of the most admired buildings of antiquity, over the bodies of Peter and Paul, surrounded by pilgrims from all parts of the world, and echo the words of the first Leo, that already the spiritual rule of the Roman pontiffs was wider than the temporal one of the Roman emperors had ever been!

It was to this office, and in the midst of such critical events as I have attempted to outline, that Gregory, whom after-ages have styled the Great, succeeded in 590 a.d. He could boast of the noblest blood of Rome, being born of one of the great senatorial families, a member of the gens Anicia, and destined from infancy to the highest political charges. His great-great-grandfather, Felix II. (483-492), had been Bishop of Rome, and he himself at an early age had held the office of praetor, and walked the streets of Rome in silken garments embroidered with shining gems and surrounded by a mob of clients and admirers. But he had been brought up in the strictest of Christian families, by a saintly mother; and in time the blank horror of public life, the emptiness of human things in general, and the grave concern for his soul so worked upon the young noble that he threw up his promising camera, and, after distributing his great fortune to the poor, turned his own home on the Coelian Hill into a monastery, and took up his residence therein. It was with deliberation, and after satisfactory experience of the world and life, that he made this choice. It was a most sincere one, and though he was never to know much of the monastic silence and the calm lone-dwelling of the soul with God, these things ever remained his ideal, and his correspondence is filled with cries of anguish, with piteous yearnings for solitude and retirement. On the papal throne, dealing as an equal with emperors and exarchs, holding with firm hand the tiller of the ship of state on the angriest of seas, corresponding with kings, and building up the fabric of papal greatness, his mighty spirit sighs for the lonely cell, the obedience of the monk, the mystic submersion of self in the placid ocean of love and contemplation. His austerities soon destroyed his health, and so he went through fourteen stormy years of government, broken in body and chafing in spirit, yet ever triumphant by the force of his superb, masterful will, and capable of dictating from his bed of pain the most successful of papal administrations, one which sums up at once the long centuries of organic development on classic soil and worthily opens the great drama of the Middle Ages.

In fact, it is as the first of the medieval popes that Gregory claims our especial attention. His title to a place among the benefactors of humanity reposes in great part upon enduring spiritual achievements which modified largely the history of the Western Empire, upon the firm assertion of principles which obtained without contradiction for nearly a thousand years, and upon his writings, which formed the heads and hearts of the best men in Church and State during the entire Middle Ages, and which, like a subtle indestructible aroma, are even yet operative in Christian society.

The popes of the sixth century were not unconscious of the fact that the greater part of the Western Empire had passed irrevocably into the hands of barbarian Teutons, nor were they entirely without relations with the new possessors of Roman soil; but their temporary subjection to an Arian king, the Gothic war, and the cruel trials of the city of Rome, the meteoric career of Justinian, as a rule deferential and favorable to the bishops of Rome, the painful episode of the Three Chapters, in which flamed up once more the smouldering embers of the great christological discussions, the uncertain relations with the new imperial office of the exarchate, as well as a clinging reverence for the empire and its institutions, kept their faces turned to the Golden Horn. They had welcomed Clovis into the church with a prophetic instinct of the role that his descendants were to play, and they kept an eye upon the Catholic Goths, on the Swabians of Northwestern Spain, and on the Irish Kelts. Individual and sporadic missionary efforts originated among their clergy, of which we would know more were it not for the almost complete destruction of their local annals and archives in the Gothic wars. But withal, one feels that these sixth-century popes belong yet to the old Graeco-Roman world, that they hesitate to acknowledge publicly that the imperial cause is lost in the West, that the splendid unity of the Roman and the Christian name is only a souvenir. On the other hand, the barbarian was too often a heretic, too often slippery, selfish, and treacherous, while the Roman was yet a man of refinement and culture, loath to go out among uncouth tribes who had destroyed whatever he held dear. In a word, he nourished toward the barbarian world at large that natural repulsion which he afterward reproached the British Kelt for entertaining toward the Saxon destroyer of his fireside and his independence.

Gregory inaugurated a larger policy. He was the first monk to sit on the Chair of Peter, and he brought to that redoubtable office a mind free from minor preoccupations and devoted to the real interests of the Roman Church. He had been praetor and nuncio, had moved much among the bishops and the aristocracy of the Catholic world, and was well aware of the inferior and painful situation that the New Rome was preparing for her elder predecessor. The careers of Silverius, Vigilius, and Pelagius were yet fresh in the minds of men, and it needed not much discernment to see that, under the new regime, the Byzantine court would never willingly tolerate the ancient independence and traditional boldness of the Roman bishops.

It was, therefore, high time to find a balance to the encroachments and sinister designs of those Greeks on the Bosporus, who were drifting ever further away from the Latin spirit and ideals; this the genius of Gregory discovered in the young barbarian nations of the West. It would be wrong, however, to see in his conduct only the cold calculations of a statesman. It was influenced simultaneously by the deep yearnings of the apostle, by the purest zeal for the salvation and betterment of the new races which lay about him like a whitening harvest, waiting for the sickle of the spiritual husbandman. While yet a simple monk he had extorted from Pelagius the permission to evangelize the Angles and the Saxons and had proceeded some distance when the Romans discovered their loss and insisted on his return. Were it not for their selfishness he would have reached the shores of Britain and gained perhaps a place in the charmed circle of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, who were during that century engaged in the losing conflict for independence which ended so disastrously at the Badonic Mount.

This is not the place to relate the details of the numerous relations which Gregory established on all sides with the barbarian peoples of Europe. The nearest to him were the Lombards, that resistless hammer of the Italo-Roman state, and one of the most arrogant and intractable of all the Teutonic tribes. His policy with them is peace at any price. Now he purchases it with Church gold, sorely needed elsewhere; and again he concludes a treaty with these iron dukes in the very teeth of the exarch. He takes their rule as an accomplished fact. He refuses to be an accomplice in the base, inhuman measures of the Byzantine governors. He rests not until he has converted their queen Theodelinda, and their king Agilulf; with a certain mixture of bitterness and joy he proclaims himself more a bishop of the Lombards than the Romans, so numerous were their campfires upon the Campagna, and so familiar the sight of their hirsute visages and the sound of their horrid gutturals among the delicate and high-bred denizens of Rome.

It was he who restrained this rugged and contemptuous race; who started among them a counter current against their brutal paganism and their cold, narrow, unsentimental Arianism; who left to them, in his own person and memory, the most exalted type of Christian manhood — at once fearless and gentle, aggressive and enduring, liberal and constant, loyal to a decaying, incapable empire, but shrewd and far-seeing for the interests of Western humanity, whose future renaissance he must have vaguely felt as well as an Augustine or a Salvian.

Beyond the Alps the descendants of Clovis had consolidated all of Gaul under Frankish rule. Though Catholics, they were too often purely natural barbarians, restrained with difficulty from the greatest excesses, and guilty in every reign of wanton oppression of Church and people. They sold the episcopal sees to the highest bidder, and they often intruded into these places of honor and influence their soldiers or their courtiers. With great tact and prudence Gregory dealt with these semi-Christian kings. In his correspondence he argues at length and explains the evils of a simoniacal episcopate; he pleads for a just and mild administration; he warns them not to exert their power to the utmost, but to temper justice with mercy, and to learn the art of self-control. In all the range of papal letters there is scarcely anything more noble than the correspondence of Gregory with the kings of Gaul, Spain, and England. This fine Roman patrician, this ex-praetor, recalls the palmy days of republican Rome, when her consuls and legates smoothed the way of success as much by their diplomacy as by their military skill. He speaks with dignity to these rugged kings, these ex-barbarian chieftains, yet with grave tenderness and sympathy. He recognizes their rank and authority, their prowess and their merits. He reminds them that they are but earthly instruments of the heavenly King, and that their office entails a grave responsibility, personal and official. At times he dares to insinuate a rebuke, but in sweet and well-chosen words. He ranks them with Constantine and Helen, the benefactors of the Roman see. His language is generally brief, but noble, courteous, earnest, penetrating, and admirably calculated to make an impression upon warlike and untutored men, who were delighted and flattered at such treatment from the uncrowned head of the Western civilization. Childebert and Brunehaut, Recared and Ethelbert and Bertha, became powerful allies in his apostolic designs, and opened that long and beneficent career of early medieval Christianity when the youthful nations grew strong and coalesced under the tutelage of the papacy, which healed their discords, knitted them together, arid transmitted to them the spirit, the laws, the tongues, the arts, and the culture of Greece and Rome — treasures that, in all probability, would otherwise have perished utterly.

We are in great measure the descendants of these ancient tribes, now become the nations of Europe, and we cannot disown the debt of gratitude that we owe to the memory of that Roman who first embraced, with an all-absorbing love, the Frank, the Lombard, and the Gael, the Ostrogoth and the Visigoth, the Schwab, the Wend, and the Low-Dutch pirates of the Elbe and the Weser. Hitherto their chiefs had esteemed the vicarious lieutenancy of Rome, so deep-rooted was their esteem for the genius of the empire. But they knew now what a profound transformation was worked in the West, and they began the career of independent nations, exulting in their strength. Politically they were forever lost to the central trunk of the empire, but they were saved for higher things, for the thousand influences of Roman thought and experience. They were made chosen vessels, not alone of religion, but of the arts and sciences, of philosophy and government, and of that delicate, refined idealism, that rare and precious bloom of long ages of sincere Christian life and conduct, which would surely have perished in a new atmosphere of simple naturalism.

No act of Gregory's eventful career has had such momentous consequences as the conversion of the Angles and the Saxons. They were, if possible, a more hopeless lot than the Lombards, revengeful, avaricious, and lustful, knowing only one vice — cowardice — and practising but one virtue — courage. Though distant, the fame of their brutality had reached the ends of the earth. Moreover, they had already nearly exterminated a flourishing Christianity, that of Keltic Britain. In a word, they were not so very unlike the Iroquois when Brébeuf and Lallemant undertook their evangelization. I need not go over the recital of their conversion. All his life Gregory cherished this act as the greatest of his life. He refers to it in his correspondence with the East, and it consoled him in the midst of failures and discouragements. His great soul shines out through the pages of Bede, who has left us a detailed narrative of this event — his boundless confidence in God, his use of purely spiritual weapons, his large and timely toleration. For these rude Saxons he would enlist all the sympathy of the Franks and the cooperation of the British clergy. He directs in minutest detail the progress of the mission and provides during life the men and means needed to carry it on. Truly he may be called the apostle of the English, for, though he never touched their soil, he burned with the desire to die among them and for them, he opened to them the gate of the heavenly kingdom and introduced them to the art and literature and culture of the great Christian body on the continent.

Henceforth the Saxon was no longer the Red Indian of the classic peoples, but a member of the world-wide Church. Quicker than Frank or Lombard he caught the spirit of Rome, and as long as he held the soil of England was unswervingly faithful to her. Through her came all his culture — the fine arts and music and the love of letters. His books came from her libraries, and she sent him his first architects and masons. From her, too, he received with the faith the principles of Roman law and procedure. When he went abroad, it was to her that he turned his footsteps; and when he wearied of life in his pleasant island home, he betook himself to Rome. to end his days beneath the shadow of St. Peter. In the long history of Christian Rome she never knew a more romantic and deep-set attachment on the part of any people than that of the Angles and the Saxons, who for centuries cast at her feet not only their faith and their hearts, but their lives, their crowns, and their very home itself. Surely there must have been something extraordinary in the character of their first apostle, a great well-spring of affection, a happy and sympathetic estimate of the national character, to call forth such an outpouring of gratitude, and such a devotion, not only to the Church of Rome, but to the civilization that she represented. To-day the English-speaking peoples are in the van of all human progress and culture, and the English tongue is likely to become at no distant date the chief vehicle of human thought and hope. Both these peoples and their tongue are to-day great composites, whose elements it would not be easy to segregate. But away back at their fountainhead, where they first issue from the twilight of history, there stands a great and noble figure who gave them their first impetus on the path of religion and refinement, and to whom must always belong a large share of the credit which they enjoy.

As pope and administrator of the succession of Peter, Gregory ranks among the greatest of that series. His personal sanctity, his influence as a preacher, his interest in the public worship, and his devotion to the poor, are only what we might expect from a zealous monastic bishop; but Gregory was eminent in all these, while surpassingly great in other things. No pope has ever exercised so much influence by his writings, on which the Middle Ages were largely formed as far as practical ethics and the discipline of life were concerned. They were m every monastery and were thumbed over by every cleric. Above all, his book of the " Pastoral Rule " fashioned the episcopate of the Middle Ages. By the rarest of compliments, this golden booklet was translated into Greek, and Alfred the Great put it into Anglo-Saxon. It was the vade-mecum of every good bishop throughout Europe, and a copy of it was given to everyone at his consecration. It was reckoned among the essential books that every priest was expected to own, and it would not be too much to say that, after the Bible, no work exercised so great an influence for a thousand years as this little manual of clerical duties and ideals. It filled the place which the " Imitation of Christ " has taken in later times; and in the direct, rugged Latin of its periods, in the stern, uncompromising doctrine of its author, in its practical active tendency, in its emphasis on the public social duties of the bishop, and in its blending of the heavenly and the earthly kingdoms, are to be found several of the distinctive traits of the medieval episcopate. He laid out the work for the medieval popes, and in his person and career was a worthy type of the bravest and the most politic among them. Though living in very critical times, he maintained the trust confided to him and handed it over increased to his successors. There is no finer model of the Latin Christian spirit; and some will like to think that he was put there, at the confines of the old and the new, between Romania and Gothia, to withstand the flood of Byzantinism, to save the Western barbarian for Latin influences, and to secure to Europe the transmission of the larger and more congenial Latin culture.

Yet he was, like all the Catholic bishops of that age, devoted to the ideal of the Christian Empire, and while he recognized the hand of Providence in the breaking up of the once proud system, he did not spare the expression and the proof of his loyalty to the emperors at Constantinople. Though virtually the founder of the temporal power of the papacy, he ever held his temporal estate for and under New Rome and was never happier than when he could safeguard or advance her interests. Like most men of his time, he believed that the last of the great empires was that of Rome, and that when it fell the end of the world was close at hand. Indeed, the well-known couplet (made famous by Anglo-Saxon pilgrims) belongs to his epoch, and strikingly conveys the popular feeling: —

"While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand;

When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall;

And when Rome falls, the world."

Long ages have gone by since he was gathered to his rest (604) in the portico of old St, Peter's, with Julius and Damasus, Leo and Gelasius, and all the long line of men who built up the spiritual greatness of Rome. Legends have gathered about his memory, like mosses and streamers on the venerable oak, and calumny has aimed some poisoned shafts at his secular fame. But history defends him from the unconscious transformation of the one, and the intentional malice of the other, which ever loves a shining mark. She shows to the admiring ages his portrait, high-niched in the temple of fame, among the benefactors of humanity, the protector of the poor and the feeble against titled wealth and legalized oppression, the apostle of nations once shrouded in darkness, now the foremost torch-bearers of humanity. He appeared to posterity as one of that very small number of men who, holding the highest authority, administer it without fault, lead unblemished lives, and find time and opportunity to heal, with voice and pen and hand, the ills of a suffering world, and advance its children on a path of unbroken progress, guided by the genius of pure religion, consoled, elevated, and purified by all that the noblest thought and the widest experience of the past can offer.

JUSTINIAN THE GREAT (A.D. 527-565).

Perhaps the most crucial period of Christian history, after the foundation century of Christ and the apostles, is the sixth century of our era. Then goes on a kind of clearing-house settlement of the long struggle between Christianity and paganism. It was no false instinct that made Dionysius the Little begin, shortly before the middle of that century, to date his chronology from the birth of Christ, for then disappeared from daily use the oldest symbols of that pagan civil power which had so strenuously disputed with the new religion every step of its progress. The annual consulship was then abolished or retained only by the emperor as an archaic title. That immemorial root of Roman magistracy, the thrice-holy symbol of the City's majestas, could rightly pass away when the City had fulfilled its mission and function in the ancient world. The Roman Senate, too, passed away at the same period — what calls itself the Roman Senate at a later time is a purely local and municipal institution. The old religion of Rome was finally no more than a memory. For the two preceding centuries it had gone on, sullenly shrinking from one level of society to another, until its last representatives were an individual here and there, hidden in the mighty multitudes of the Christian people of the empire. The schools of literature, philosophy, and rhetoric were no longer ensouled with the principles of Hellenism. Their last hope was buried when the Neoplatonists of Athens took the road of exile to beg from the Great King, that born enemy of the Roman name — the prophet of " Medism " — a shelter and support. In dress, in the system of names, in the popular literature, in the social institutes, in the spoken language, in the domestic and public architecture, in the spirit of the law, in legal procedure, in the character of city government, in the administration of the provinces, in the very concept of the State and of empire, there are so many signs that the old order passeth away and a new one even now standeth in its place. The symptoms of internal trouble, noted on all sides from the time of Marcus Aurelius and graphically diagnosed by St. Cyprian, had gone on multiplying. They did not portend that decay which is the forerunner of death, as many had thought while the ancient society was dissolving before their eyes, but that decay which is the agent of great and salutary changes. Their first phase, the long and eventful Wandering of the Nations, had broken up. East and West, the old framework of society as the Greek and Roman had inherited, created, or modified it. On the other hand, that most thorough of all known forces, the spirit of Jesus Christ, had been working for fifteen generations in the vitals of this ancient society, disturbing, cleansing, casting forth, healing, binding, renovating, a social and political organism that —

" Lay sick for many centuries in great error."

In such periods of history much depends on the ideals and character of the man or men who stand at the helm of a society that is working its way through the straits and shoals of transition. Was it not fortunate for Europe that a man. like Charlemagne arose on the last limits of the old classical world, with heart and brain and hand enough to plan and execute a political basis sufficiently strong to hold for centuries to come the new States of Western Christendom?

It is here that Justinian enters on the stage of history and claims a place higher than that of Charlemagne, second to that of no ruler who has affected for good the interests of his fellowmen. He is not, I admit, a very lovable figure. He stands too well within the limits of the Greco-Roman time to wear the illusive halo of Teutonic romance. But in the history of humankind those names shine longest and brightest which are associated with the most universal and permanent benefits. Is he a benefactor of society who makes two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before? Then what shall we say of one who established for all time the immortal principles of order and justice and equity, without which all human endeavor is uncertain and usually sinks to the lowest level?

I.

Justinian was born in 482 or 483, near Sardica, the modern Sophia and capital of the present kingdom of Bulgaria. The most brilliant of his historians says that he came of an obscure race of barbarians. Nevertheless, in an empire every soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack, and an uncle of Justinian was such a lucky soldier. Justin I. (518-527) may have been quite such another " paysan du Danube " as Lafontaine describes in one of his most perfect fables (XI. 6):

" Son menton nourriasait une barbe touffue.

Toute sa personne velue

Représentait un ours, mais un ours mal léché.

Sous un sourcil épais il avait I'oeil caché,

Le regard de travers, nez tortu, grosse lèvre:

Portait sayon de poil de chèvre,

Et ceinture de joncs marins."

He may have been not unlike the good Ursus in " Quo Vadis" or that uncouth Dacian in " Fabiola." Certain it is that in a long service of fifty years he rose from rank to rank and succeeded, with universal consent, to Anastasius when that hated "Manichaean" died childless. The peasants of Dacia were no longer butchered to make a Roman holiday — the land had long been Romanized, had even furnished the empire with a succession of strong and intelligent rulers, those Illyrian emperors whom Mr. Freeman has so magisterially described. Justin was an uneducated barbarian and cut his signature painfully through a gold stencil plate, as did his contemporary, the great Ostrogoth Theodoric, king of Italy. Yet he had the wisdom of experience, the accumulated treasures of the sordid Anastasius, the counsel of good civil officers, old and tried friends in many an Isaurian, many a Persian, campaign. Above all, he had the devotion of his youthful nephew, Justinian. Possible pretenders to the throne were removed without scruple — a principle that has always been prevalent by the Golden Horn. Before Justin died his nephew had reached the command of all the imperial forces, though never himself a warlike man. In 527, on the death of his uncle, he found himself, at the age of thirty-six, sole master of the Roman Empire. It was no poor or mean inheritance even then, after the drums and tramplings of a dozen conquests. The West, indeed, was gone — it seemed irretrievably. At Pavia and Ravenna the royal Ostrogoth governed an Italian State greater than history has seen since that time. At Toulouse and Barcelona the Visigoth yet disposed of Spain and Southern Gaul. At Paris and Orleans and Soissons the children of Clovis meditated vaguely an empire of the Franks. The Rhineland and the eternal hills of Plelvetia, where so much genuine Roman blood had been spilled, were again a prey to anarchy. Britain, that pearl of the empire, was the scene of triumphant piracy, the new home of a half dozen Low-Dutch sea tribes that had profited by the great State's hour of trial to steal one of her fairest provinces, and were obliterating in blood the faintest traces of her civilizing presence. Even in the Orient, where the empire stood rocklike, fixed amid the seething waters of the Bosporus, the Hellespont, and the Euxine, it knew no peace. The ambition of the Sassanids of Persia threatened the vast level plains of Mesopotamia, while a new and inexhaustible enemy lifted its savage head along the Danube frontier — a vague complexus of Hunnish and Slavonic tribes, terrible in their numbers and their indefiniteness, thirsting for gold, amenable to no civilization, rejoicing in rapine and murder and universal disorder. Justinian must have often felt, with Henry the Fourth, that the wet sea-boy, "cradled in the rude imperious surge," was happier than the king. Withal, the empire was yet the only Mediterranean State. It yet held Syria and Egypt. Asia Minor was faithful. The Balkan provinces, though much troubled, and poor harassed Greece were imperial lands.  The empire alone had navies and a regular army, drilled, equipped, officered. Alone as yet it had the paraphernalia of a well-appointed and ancient State — coinage, roads, transportation, justice, law, sure sanction, with arts and literature and all that is implied in the fair old Latin word humanitas. It stood yet for the thousand years of endeavor and progress that intervened from Herodotus to Justinian. And well it was for humanity that its destinies now passed into the hands of one who was penetrated with the keenest sense of responsibility to God and man. Though he reached the highest prize of life before his prime, it has been said of him that he was never young. The ashes of rebellion and insurrection had been smouldering in the royal city since, with the death of Marcian (457), the old, firm, Theodosian control had come to an end. The frightful political consequences of the great Monophysite heresy that was born with the Council of Chalcedon (451) were dawning on the minds of thoughtful men. The Semitic and Coptic Orient was creating that shibboleth which would serve it for a thousand years against Greek and Roman — a blind and irrational protest against the real oppressions and humiliations it once underwent. Of its own initiative the empire had abandoned, for good or for ill, its historical basis and seat — Old Rome. It had quitted the yellow Tiber for the Golden Horn, to be nearer the scene of Oriental conflict, to face the Sassanid with the sea at its back, to create a suitable forum for the government of the world, where Christian principles might prevail, and where a certain inappeasable nemesis of secular wrong and injustice would not haunt the imperial soul as on the Palatine. But in the change of capital one thing was left behind — perhaps it was irremovable — the soul of Old Rome, with all its stern and sober qualities, its practical cast and temper, its native horror of the shifty mysticism of the Orient and the unreality of the popular forms of Greek philosophy. There is something pathetic in that phrase of Gregory the Great, " The art of arts is the government of souls." It is like an echo of the sixth book of Vergil, " Tu vero, Romane, imperare memento." Perhaps this is the germ of solid truth in the legend that Constantine abandoned the civil authority at Rome to Pope Silvester. He certainly did abandon, to the oldest and most consistent power on earth, — a power long since admired by an Alexander Severus and dreaded by a Decius — that rich inheritarnce of prestige and authority which lay embedded in the walls and monuments of ancient Rome. Within a century something of this dawned on the politicians of Constantinople and lies at the bottom of the long struggle to help its bishop to the ecclesiastical control of the Orient. In history there are no steps backward, and we need not wonder that Dante, the last consistent, if romantic, prophet of the empire, was wont to shiver with indignation at the thought of the consequences of this act.

But if they lost the genuinely Roman soul of government, they gained a Greek soul. It was an old Greek city they took up — Byzantium. Its very atmosphere and soil were reeking with Hellenism, whose far-flung outpost it had long been. History, climate, commerce, industries, the sinuous ways of the sea, the absence of Roman men and families, the contempt for the pure Orientals, forced the emperors at Constantinople from the beginning into the hands of a genuine local Hellenism that might have shed its old and native religion, but could not shed its soul, its immortal spirit. Henceforth the world was governed from a Christianized Hellenic centre. This meant that government for the future was to be mingled in an ever increasing measure with metaphysics; that theory and unreality, the dream, the vision, the golden hope, all the fleeting elements of life, were to have a large share in the administration of things civil and ecclesiastical. Government was henceforth —

" Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

Cato, it is said, chased the Greek philosophers from Rome. They one day mounted the throne in their worst shape, the shape of the sophist, in the person of Marcus Aurelius; but, indeed, they had no proper place in Rome, where government has always tended to keep its head clear and calm, with eyes fixed on the actual interest, the average practical and attainable. Not so in the Greek Orient. With the triumph of the Christian religion the gods of Hellas fell from their rotten pedestals. But they were never the governing element, the principe générateur of the Greek life. That was the individual reflective mind, eternally busy with the reasons of things, seeking the why and the how and the wherefore, not for any definite purpose, but because this restless research was its life, its delight; because at bottom it was highly idealistic and despised the outer and visible world as an immense phenomenon, a proper and commensurate subject for the ruinous acidity of its criticism.

It is the metaphysical trend and spirit of these opmiosissimi homines of Greece which begat the great heresies of Arius, Macedonius, Nestorius, and Eutyches — all Greeks. They even partially conquered in their defeat, for they compelled, to some extent, a philosophical refutation of their own vagaries; they helped Plato, and later Aristotle, to their high seats in Christian schools. With sure instinct the earliest Christian historians of heresies set down among them certain phases of Greek philosophy. " Quid Academiae et Ecclesiae! " cries Tertullian in his book on Prescription, as though he smelled the battle from afar.

In the intense passion of the Arian and christological discussions the highest Greek gift, metaphysics, and the finest Greek training, dialectics, came to the front. In every city of the Greek world the most abstruse and fine-drawn reasoning was indulged in habitually by all classes. The heresy of Arius had surely its obscure origin among those third-century philosophers of Antioch who gave to that school its grammatico-literal and rationalizing trend. He appeared at Nicaea in the company of pagan philosophers, and when defeated carried his cause at once before the sailors and millers and wandering pedlers along the sea front at Alexandria. And for two centuries the shopkeepers and shoemakers of Constantinople and Alexandria would rather chop logic than attend to their customers. For the victories of the mind the burdens of the State were neglected or forgotten, or rather a metaphysical habit of thought was carried into the council chamber, to prevail therein very often to the detriment of the commonwealth. The great officers of the State were too often doubled with theologians. The emperor himself took on gradually the character of an apostolic power, with God-given authority to impose himself upon the churches, formulate creeds, decide the knottiest points of divinity, make and unmake bishops great and small, and generally to become, in all things, a visible providence of God on earth. This is what the Eastern world acquired by losing its Roman emperors and gaining a succession imbued with the spirit of Hellenic thought, and accustomed to the exercise of despotic power in a city that had no old and stormy republican traditions, being no more than the high golden seat of imperial authority from its foundation. Were it not for the magnificent resistance of Old Rome in her Leos and her Gregorys, the Oriental bishops would have allowed the cause of Christianity to become identified with the Caesaropapism of the emperors.