ENGLISH DOOR

THE DIVINE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST

CHAPTER II.

THE FIFTH CENTURY.

Before entering upon a study of the barbarous epoch, we must know in what the wealth of the human mind consisted at the moment of the invasions; how much of it was to perish in that great catastrophe, as an empty ornament buried in the grave of antiquity ; and how much was to survive as the heritage of the modern nations. We shall start from the death of Theodosius at the dawn of the fifth century, and, leaving aside the East as exercising but a remote influence on the period, confine ourselves to the destinies of humanity as worked out in the provinces of the West.

At the moment when all civilization seemed doomed to extinction, we find two forms of it, one pagan, the other Christian, confronting each other with their re­spective doctrines, laws, and literature, disputing for the possession of the fresh races who were pressing upon the threshold of the Empire. Paganism, indeed, had taken no speedy flight before the laws of the Christian emperors and the progress of philosophy. At the close of the sixty years during which the edicts of Constantius, renewed by Theodosius, had been pressing hard upon the superstitions of idolatry, in the West at least the temples were still open, and the sacrificial flames still unextinguished. When Honorius came to Rome in 404 for the celebration of his sixth consulate, the shrines of Jove, of Concord, and of Minerva still crowned the Capitol, and the statues of the old deities on their pediments were still presiding over the Eternal City. Votive altars covered with inscriptions testified that the blood of bulls and goats had not ceased to flow, and to the middle of the fifth century the sacred fowls were fed whose presages governed Rome and the World. The pagan festivals and their appropriate games were still marked in the calendars. We hardly realize antiquity in its nature-worship, which, amidst the songs of poets and the apologies of sages, resulted in the celebration of the two great mysteries of life by religious prostitution and human sacrifice, or how in the theatre and amphitheatre dedicated as temples to Bacchus and Sol, the gods were honoured by mysterious rites, comprising nameless horrors which outraged the plainest laws of modesty, or by the mutual massacre of myriads of gladiators rush­ing to death amidst the applause of earth’s most polished race. It was lust and bloodshed which in despite of imperial edicts kept the crowd spell-bound at the altars of their idols.

Philosophy had done no more towards redeeming the higher minds of the ruling class, the heirs of the old senatorial families. The prodigious labours of the Alexandrian philosophers, however admirable for erudition, subtlety, and boldness, had only tended to revive Paganism, by lending to the worship which the Roman aristocracy could only defend as a State insti­tution the gloss of a refined interpretation. The old system was to fall by the hand of Christianity, before the spiritual weapons of controversy and charity, preaching and martyrdom. We shall glance at the learned discussions in which St. Augustine exhausted his zeal and eloquence to attract the choice intellect of a Volusian, a Longinian, or a Licentius, but will mark more closely the rise of that instruction which was devoted to the ignorant and the insignificant, to whom Paganism had never preached, enter the families in which war, as it were, was levied against some idolatrous parent till he was brought a happy cap­tive to the waters of Baptism, and listen to the shouts of the circus when the monk Telemachus threw him­self between the fighting gladiators and died under the stones of the spectators to seal by his blood the aboli­tion of those detestable games.

But error yielded slowly, like night leaving its mists behind. The Pantheism of Alexandria was destined to a new birth, to carry its temerity into the very chairs of the Scholastic philosophy. In the full blaze of classic antiquity in the schools of Jamblichus, of Maximus of Ephesus, and the last pagan philo­sophers, flourished magic and astrology and the occult sciences, supposed to have been spawned in the dark­ness of the Middle Age. Moreover, the ignorant country-folk (pagani) shrunk from parting with a religion which appealed to their passions. The pilgrims from the North wondered in the eighth century at seeing the squares of Rome still profaned by pagan dances. The Councils of Gaul and Spain long pursued with anathema the sacrilegious art of the diviners, and the idolatrous practices of the Calends of January. Latin superstitions joined hands with those of Germany to make a last stand against conquering Christianity. Everything pagan in character, however, did not deserve to perish, for even in a false religion there is a meritorious craving for commerce with Heaven, of fixing it in times and places, and under definite symbols. The Church had the faculty of appreciat­ing this want, which is a right of human nature. She spared the evangelized nations useless violence, and re­conciled art and nature to Christ by dedicating to Him the temples and festivals, flowers and perfumes, hitherto lavished on false divinities. The heretic Vigilantius was scandalized at this wise economy, but St. Jerome undertook to justify it, and in his reply we see the germ of that tender policy which inspired St. Gregory to instruct the English missioners to leave to the newly made Christians their rustic festivals, innocent banquets, and earthly joys, that they might be the more willing to taste of spiritual consolations. Thus the whole of the Church’s struggle against Roman polytheism was but an apprenticeship to another conflict which she was destined to wage against the Paganism of the barbarians, and in her last efforts to convert the ancient world we foresee the genius and patience she was to display in the education of the new nations.

The preparation for the future amidst the ruins of the past, the conjunction of perishable elements with an immortal principle, which affords so strong a contrast in the history of religion, is more manifest in that of Law, which in the fifth century the emperors organized by giving force to the writings of the old jurisconsults, and codifying the decisions of Christian princes. The lawyers of the classic age had never abjured the law of the Twelve Tables, and all the efforts of the school had failed in obliterating the pagan character impressed on the constitution of the State and of the family.

The pagan doctrine was to deify the City, to make an apotheosis of public power, to render it sovereign in the conscience without any further appeal to abstract justice. The Emperor had inherited a divine right over the goods, the persons, and the souls of men. He was above the law, which was the creature of his will; as depositary of military power (imperium) he was master of every life, as Vicar of the rights of the Roman people he was strictly the only proprietor of the soil of the provinces, of which the natives had but a precarious possession. It was not surprising that he should extract the taxes by exhausting the one and torturing the other; and there was no excess of persecution or of exaction that did not find principles to justify it.

The iniquity of the public law had descended into that of civil life. The father, as representative of Jove, surrounded by his tutelary gods, the images of his ancestors who lent him their majesty, exercised right of life and death over his wife, could expose his children or crucify his slaves. Philosophers admired this family constitution, with its priestly and military power installed at every hearth, as a domestic empire on the model of which was framed the empire of the World.

But the violence of authority had provoked a resurrection of liberty. The human conscience, outraged in its last refuge, began a memorable resistance by opposing to the civil law that of the tribes and the praetorial edicts, the responsa of the jurisconsults and the constitutions of princes to the Code of the Twelve Tables, lastly succeeding in introducing into the imperial councils such firm and subtle minds as those of Gaius, Ulpian, and Papinian, who tempered the severity of the old legislation. But the struggle lasted for eight centuries, and the victory of equity could only be effected by the triumph of Christianity. A new faith was necessary to deal its death-blow to the respect for the old laws, embolden Constantine to decree the civil emancipation of woman, the penalty of death against the murderer of a son or of a slave, to elicit from Valentinian III and Theodosius IV the noble declaration that the prince is bound by the laws—a short speech, but marking the greatest of all political revolutions, causing the temporal power to descend to a lower but securer place, and inaugurating the constitutional principle of modern society. The Roman law, as reformed by Christian emperors, survived the crash of the empire, penetrated gradually the barbarian mind, and earned Bossuet’s panegyric, “that good sense, the master of human life, reigned throughout it, and that a more beautiful application of natural equity had never been seen.”

But the crown of pagan society, and its incomparable lustre, was derived from its literature. Rome doubtless knew no longer the inspiration of her great centuries, yet the reigns of Constantine and of his successors, so often accused of hastening the Decline, seemed for a space to give a new flight to the eagles, a fresh burst to the genius of Rome. Ammianus Marcellinus composed history with the dash and bluff sincerity of a soldier. Vegetius, in his “Treatise on the Military Art,” gathered up the precepts of the science before it passed away to the Goths and the Franks, and the contemporaries of Symmachus rank him with Pliny in the exquisite urbanity of his correspondence, and the elegance of his panegyric. Among the poets, three may be distinguished as worthily sustaining the old age of the Pagan Muse.

Of these Claudian stood first. Born in Egypt, he had early drunk deep at the sources of Alexandrian learning, from which the great poets of the Augustan era had drawn, and had found a stray chord of that Latin lyre broken on the day on which Lucan caused his veins to be opened. Since the “ Pharsalia,” Rome had heard nothing comparable to the songs which told of the disgrace of Eutropius or the victories of Stilicho. But Claudian was so steeped in pagan memories that he could only move in a cloud of fables, so to speak, out of sight of his Christian age, out of hearing of the voices of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine thundering at Milan and Hippo, not even thinking of defending the menaced altars of his gods. He was singing of the Rape of Proserpine as the cultus of the Virgin Mary was taking possession of the Temple of Ceres at Catania, and was inviting the Graces, the Nymphs, and the Hours to deck with their garlands Serena, the lovely wife of Stilicho, who in her hatred of idolatry had torn the necklace from the image of Cybele to adorn her own neck. He dared to introduce the Christian princes into Olympus, and bring upon the scene Theo­dosius, Jupiter’s greatest foe, talking familiarly with Jove himself. Rutilius Numatianus, though also a pagan, wrote under less illusion, and with a more accurate feeling as to the spirit of his age. He was no mere poet by profession, but a statesman, a prefect of Rome, though on leaving the city in 418 to revisit his native Gaul, then under the ravages of the bar­barians, he wrote of his journey in verses so graceful as to deceive the ear into a remembrance of Ovid. The ardour of his patriotism, his passionate worship of Rome, as the greatest deity of antiquity, saved him from illusion, and raised him high above his literary contemporaries.

“ Hear me, listen, 0 Rome, ever beauteous Queen of a world that is for ever thine own : thou who art one amongst the Olympians, hearken, Mother of men and of gods; when we pray in thy temples we are not far from heaven. For thee the sun doth turn on his course, he rises upon thy domains, and in their seas doth he plunge his chariot. From so many diverse nations thou hast moulded one sole country; from that which was a world hast thou made a city (Urbem fecisti quod prius orbis erat). He who can count thy trophies can tell the number of the stars. Thy gleaming temples dazzle the eye. Shall I sing of the rivers, that the vaults of air bring to thee—the entire lakes that feed thy baths? Shall I tell of the forests imprisoned beneath thy ceilings, and peopled with melodious birds? Thy year is but an eternal spring, and vanquished Winter respects thy pleasures. Raise the laurel from thy brow, that the sacred foliage may bud forth anew around thy hoary head! It is thy children’s tradition to hope in danger, like the stars which set but to rise again. Extend, extend thy laws, they will live through centuries become Roman perforce, and alone among things of earth dread not thou the shuttle of the Fates.”

Finely and truly drawn. The old Roman magistrate, with a lawyer’s insight, foresaw that Rome, betrayed by her arms, would still reign by her laws; and, pagan as it was, his faith in his country did not deceive him.

Sidonius Apollinaris was pagan neither in creed or in name, but he was in education and in habit of mind. Christian, like Ausonius, but like him reared in the schools of the grammarians and rhetoricians of Gaul, he could not construct an hexameter or hang together dactyls or spondees without stirring up every mythological association. Whether he was composing the panegyric of the Emperor Avitus, or that of Majorian after the deposition of Avitus, or that of Anthemius after the fall of Majorian, he treated always of the same deities, who were never weary of taking part in the triumph of the victor. Happily, his panegyrics failed before the complaisance of the gods, for Sidonius was converted, became a bishop, and was destined to become a saint. But though he mastered his passions he could not stifle his recollections. M. Ampere has ably shown the struggles of that mind divided between victorious faith and mythology, which still so thoroughly possessed it, that in writing to St. Patientius, Bishop of Lyons, in praise of a distribution of corn to the poor, he could find no higher congratulation possible than in calling him a second Triptolemus.

Such was the sequel of the old poetry, though Sidonius found one more disciple in the sixth century in the person of Fortunatus, and the writings of Claudian found copyists and imitators in the monasteries of ‘the Middle Age. But antiquity was to propound a harder lesson to the ages which followed. Rome in losing genius had still retained tradition, had formed a magistracy of instruction and provided the schools of the Capitol with thirty-one professors of jurisprudence, of rhetoric, and of grammar. The youth pressed into these schools with ardour and in such numbers, that an edict of Valentinian was necessary for a sort of police regulation of the studies. Gratian had desired that the provinces should enjoy the same benefit, and that every great town should possess public chairs with rich endowments. The favour of law multiplied these laborious grammarians, who made it their profession to explain and comment, and consequently religiously to preserve the classic texts. The learned Donatus, whose lectures St. Jerome had attended, fixed the principles of Latin grammar. Macrobius, in his commentary on the dream of Scipio, and in the seven books of the “Saturnalia,” brought all the memories of Alexandrian philosophy and of Greek poetry to elucidate the thought of Cicero and of Virgil. Lastly, Marcianus enveloped in a spirited and graceful allegory the seven liberal arts wherein all the learning of the ancients had just been comprised. We must not wonder that the science of antiquity could be compressed within the narrow compass of seven arts; upon that condition and under that form, the heritage of the human mind was destined to traverse the barbarous epoch, and the treatises and commentaries whose dryness we despise were to save Latin literature. The text­book of Martianus Capella was to become the classic summary of all secular instruction during the sixth and seventh centuries, to be multiplied under the pens of monks, and be translated into the first stammering utterances of the modern languages. Donatus became so popular that his name was a synonym of grammar in the schools of the Middle Age; no student was too poor to possess a Donatus, and there was a Provencal grammar under the name of Donatus Provincialis. The Middle Age was right in attaching itself to the masters who gave it that example of toil which is more necessary than genius, for genius is but a thing of the moment; and God, who never wastes it, seems to will that the world should know how to dispense with it. Yet He never lets labour fail, but distributes it with a liberal hand, as a punishment or as a blessing, effacing the distinction between ages and between men. Genius ravishes intelligence for a brief space, raising it, indeed, above the common condition of life, but work comes to recall it from its lofty forgetfulness and reduce it to the level of mortals. When we see Dante borne by the flight of his thought to the highest sphere of his Paradise, to the threshold of the infinite, we may well hesitate in our belief of the destined equality of all souls; but when in the intervals of his song we mark him exhausting his sweat in study, paling over the labour like the meanest scholar of his century, we take courage in finding equality re-established and humbler spirits avenged.

We see, then, that antiquity was not to be entirely buried beneath the ruins of the Roman Empire; we must now find the new principle which preserved it, how the Christianity which has been held so inimical to the old civilization laid upon it a hand which was beneficent though it might be severe, as upon the sick whom we treat with rigour and weaken but to save. The close of the fourth century still rang with the pathetic accents of the Fathers. M. Villemain has done justice to those masters of Christian eloquence in a work which can never be revised, and we must shrink from a subject which, in the words of one of old, he has made his possession for ever. The East we leave aside. The West had mourned the death of St. Ambrose in 393, and St. Jerome in his seclusion in the Holy Land only acted on events through the authority of his untiring correspondence. St. Augustine remained to fill with his presence the opening years of the fifth century, and with, his thought those which followed. This is not the place to relate his history, or to depict his tender but impetuous heart, or his soul tormented by its cravings after light and peace; and who, indeed, is ignorant of his career, his birth under the African sky, his education at Madaura and Carthage, his long aber­ration, and the Providential guidance which brought him to Milan and to the feet of St. Ambrose, the conflict of his will groaning under the strokes of grace, the voice which cried out to him, Tolle, lege! In the writings of this great mind we shall study that which is even greater—Christian metaphysics taking its first form, and Christianity defending itself with redoubled vigour, that it might remain what God had made it, namely, a religion, instead of being degraded by the sects to a philosophy or a mythology.

A thirst for God tormented the soul of St. Augustine like a malady depriving his day and night of their repose. This want had cast him into the assemblies of the Manichees, in which he had been promised an explanation of the origin of evil; had impelled him towards the Neoplatonic school, to learn the nature of the Supreme Goodness; and, lastly, had flung him upon his knees under the fig-tree in his garden to embrace Christianity, as he wetted the pages of St. Paul’s epistles with his tears. Henceforward his life was but one long struggle towards “the Beauty, ever ancient yet ever new, which to his reproach he had begun to love so late.” Shortly after his conversion, in the retreat that he had given to his tempest-tost mind under the shades of Cassiciacum, he wrote those “ Soliloquies” in which he supposes his reason to demand from him the aim of his knowledge. “ Two things,” he replied, “ namely, God and the soul.” But to what notion of Him did he aspire? Did it suffice to know God as he knew Alypius, his friend? Nay; for knowledge does not alone imply a grasping by means of the senses; a seeing, touching, or feeling. But would not the theology of Plato or Plotinus satisfy his curiosity? Assuming them to be true, Augustine wished to go beyond them. But mathematical truths are perfect in their clearness. Would he not be content at knowing the attributes of God as the properties of the circle or of the triangle are known? “I agree,” he replied, “ that the verities of mathematics are very clear, but, from the experience of God, I expect a different happi­ness and a different joy.”

Boldly, but with firm steps, he began his course on the road towards the knowledge of God. He deter­mined to leave Italy—that land of temptation—and it was while he was awaiting a favourable wind at Ostia, and leaning one day with his mother from the window of their house in contemplation of the sky, that he fell into that wonderful train of thought which has been handed down by him in the ninth book of his “ Con­fessions ”:—

“We were alone, talking with infinite sweetness, forgetful of the past looking beyond the future, of what the eternal life of the blest would be.... Raised towards God by the ardent aspiration of our souls, we traversed the whole sphere of things corporeal, and the sky also, in which the sun, moon, and stars spread abroad their light. And in our full admiration of thy works, 0 Lord, we mounted yet higher, and reached the region of the soul; then passed higher yet, to repose in that Wisdom, itself Uncreated, by whom all things were made, which has ever existed and will ever be; in whose Eternal Being is no past, present, or future. And as we spoke thus, with this thirst for the wisdom of God, for a moment, by an effort of the heart, we touched upon It, and then groaned as we left the first-fruits of our souls clinging there whilst we de­scended to earth at the sound of our voices.” Regret­fully do we abridge that wonderful narration. They are indeed happy who have had such experiences, with a mother like his ; who, with her, have found their God and never again lost sight of Him.

These few words comprise the whole of his metaphy­sical system. In them he introduces the novelty of his doctrine as compared with that of Plato or of Aristotle, the idea of Omnipotence, which, if not unknown to antiquity, was at least contradicted by the theory of an Eternal Matter, by refusing to the Supreme Worker the privilege of producing the clay which His hands were permitted to fashion. Philosophy of old had lived upon an equivocal axiom : Ex nihilo nihil. To estab­lish the counter-dogma of Creation, Augustine found it necessary to dive deep into the secrets of Nature, and thence to re-ascend to God (1) by the idea of Beauty, as shown in his work “De Musica;” (2) by the idea of Goodness, as in the “De Libero Arbitrio (3) by the idea of Truth, as in the treatise “ De Vera Religione.” M. l’Abbé Maret has thrown light upon the vast work which he pursued in spite of the demands of theolo­gical controversy, amidst a people whom he was called upon to instruct and to govern, in the presence of the Donatists and before the approach of the Vandals. The “ Theodicea ” of St. Augustine was, however, achieved, to be elaborated to the highest degree by St. Anselm, and finally enriched by the arrangement and additional corollaries of St. Thomas Aquinas. But the Bishop of Hippo was the acknowledged master of the generation of philosophers who filled the Middle Age with their discussions. Popular tradition gave testimony to this fact, and we read in the “ Golden Legend” how a monk in ecstasy on beholding the heaven and the hosts of the elect, wondering at not seeing St. Augustine, inquired for the holy doctor. “He is higher far,” it was answered; “gazing ever on the Holy Trinity, and discussing It throughout eternity.”

Mysteries, indeed, failed to discourage the genius of St. Augustine. From the time in which he uttered that great speech, Intellectum valde ama, he became of necessity the guide of all the theologians who, like St. Anselm, were willing to put faith in quest of intel­ligence. Fides quaerens intellectum—not the idea of God alone, but the whole cycle of Christian dogma, was embraced in his meditations. No depths were too obscure for his search, no controversy too perilous for his intellect. His age was endangered by two forms of heresy; one of pagan parentage, the other the offspring of the philosophic schools. On the one hand, the Manichees were restoring the doctrines of Persia and of India, the strife of the two principles, emanation and metempsychosis—errors which had power to fasci­nate even nobler minds, as in the case of St. Augustine himself for so many years, to seduce the vulgar and form in Rome a powerful sect which terrified St. Leo the Great by its orgies. Four hundred years of preach­ing and martyrdom thus seemed fated to result in a rehabilitation of pagan fables, and Christianity to dis­solve at the breath of Manes into a mere mythology.

On the other hand, the Arians, in denying Christ’s divinity, the Pelagians, in suppressing grace, severed the mysterious ties which linked man to God. The supernatural element disappeared, whilst the Platonic Demiurgus replaced the Con substantial Word, and the Faith was reduced to the level of a philosophy. St. Augustine prevented this issue, and as his early life had been spent in struggling free from the Manichaean net, so its later years were devoted to combating Arius and Pelagius. Like all the great servants of Providence, he fought less for his own time than for posterity. The moment was approaching wherein Arianism was to enter as a conqueror through all the breaches of the Empire, in the train of the Goths, Vandals, and Lombards; and in those days of terror bishops would have had little leisure to study by the light of conflagrations the disputed questions of Nicaea, had not Augustine kept watch over them. His fifteen' treatises on the Trinity comprised all the objections of the sectarians and all the arguments of the orthodox; and it was to him the victory was due in the con­ferences of Vienna and Toledo, when the Burgundians and Visigoths abjured their heresy. In later days, when the Manichaeism preserved in the East by the Paulicians had regained its sway in the West, when its disciples, under the names of Cathari or Albigenses, had mastered the half of Germany, of Italy, and of Southern France, and gravely imperilled Christian society, it was not the sword of Simon de Montfort which suppressed it—for fire and sword cannot conquer thought however false, (rather many noble hearts must have wavered at the sight of the violence which degraded the crusade, and was con­demned by Innocent III)—but the sound doctrine of St. Augustine, as expressed by his firm yet loving intellect, resettled their faith, and regained the Chris­tian world for orthodoxy. In that conflict, the excesses of which we must detest, but need not to exaggerate, victory was due to truth rather than to force.

Christianity must be the soul of a society which it fashions after its own image, and in the fifth century that great work seemed near its achievement. The Papacy, fully acknowledged in its authority since the time of St. Irenaeus and Tertullian, which had presided at Nicaea, and to which the Council of Sardica had referred all episcopal judgments, found in St. Leo the Great a mind capable alike of defending its rights and understanding its duties. While the Greek mind was divided between Nestorius and Eutyches, Leo intervened with the judicious force of a lawful authority, and caused the Council of Chalcedon to save the faith in the East. His more especial task lay in preserving Western civilization, by appeasing Genseric at the very gates of Rome, Attila at the passage of the Mincio, and by forming the monastic legions which were to execute the designs of the Papacy. Souls worn out by vice and public misfortune were driven into seclusion by the fame of the institutions of the deserts, and the popular histories of their saints written by St. Athanasius, St. Jerome, and Cassian. The wealthy but menaced cities of Rome, Milan, and Treves still possessed amphitheatres for the pleasure of the mob, but side by side with monasteries, in which were moulded a race better able to cope with the dangers of the future. The austere men, the enemies of light, as the pagan Rutilius disdainfully calls the monks whom he found in the islands which fringed the Italian coast, were soon to be the only guardians of enlightenment. The great abbeys of Lerins, of the island of Barba, of Marmontiers, were open a century before the time of Benedict, not to introduce the religious life into the West, but to perpetuate it, in tempering its rigour.

But as Christian people could not emigrate entirely into the cloister, we must mark how the new faith gradually took possession of the lay world, and, by correcting its laws and manners, formed a more gentle society than that of St. Augustine’s time, and equal to it in polish. We see in the clever letters of St. Jerome to the Roman matrons, who claimed descent from the Gracchi and Emilii, and spent their time in learning Hebrew, speculating on the mystic words of Isaiah, and diving into every controversy of their time, to what a pitch the Church had brought female education. It formed a better estimate of the sex which antiquity had condemned to spinning wool, in hopeless ignorance of things of divine or of political interest. St. Jerome never appeared more noble than in stooping to teach Laeta how to train her child, by putting letters of box-wood or ivory under its eyes, and rewarding its early efforts by a flower or a kiss. Of old it had been said, Maxima debetur puero reverentia, but the saintly doctor went further, and made Laeta’s daughter the angel of her house; and it was her task to begin, when a mere baby, the conversion of her grandfather, a priest of the old gods, by springing upon his knee and singing the Alleluia, in spite of his displeasure. Christianity did not, as men say, wait for the favouring times of barbarism, to build up in darkness the power of popes and monks, but laid the foundations of its edifice in the light of day, under the jealous gaze of the pagans. The approaching invasions seemed more fraught with danger than advantage to its interests. The Canon law, whose birth we have noticed, found an obstinate resistance from the passions of the bar­barians, and the Gospel had to devote more than twelve centuries to calming the violence of the conquerors, and reforming the evil instincts of their race, in restoring that clearness of intellect, that gentleness in the commerce of life, that tolerance towards the erring, and the many other virtues which throw over the society of the fifth century some of the charm of modern manners.

But Religion had not consummated her work as long as Literature resisted, and the century which saw the fall of so many altars beheld that of the Muses still surrounded by an adoring multitude. Yet Christianity shrank from condemning a veneration for the beautiful, and as it honoured the human mind and the arts it produced, so the persecution of the Apostate Julian, in which the study of the classics had been forbidden to the "faithful, was the severest of its trials. Literary history possesses no moment of greater interest than that which saw the School, with its profane traditions and texts, received into the Church. The Fathers, whose Christian austerity is our wonder, were passionate in their love for antiquity, which they covered, as it were, with their sacred vestments, and thus guaranteed to it the respect of the future. By their favour Virgil traversed the ages of iron without losing a page, and by right of his Fourth Eclogue took rank among the prophets and the sybils. St. Augustine would have blamed Paganism less if, in place of a temple to Cybele, it had raised a shrine to Plato, in which his works might have been publicly read. St. Jerome’s dream is well known, and the scourging inflicted upon him by angels for having loved Cicero too well; yet his repentance was but short-lived, since he caused the monks of the Mount of Olives to pass their nights in copying the Ciceronian dialogues, and did not shrink himself from expounding the lyric and comic poets to the children of Bethlehem.

While pagan eloquence, expelled from the Forum, could find no outlet but in the lecture-halls of the rhetoricians, or in the mouths of the mendacious panegyrists of the Caesars, a new form of oratory had founded its first chair in the Catacombs, and was drawing inspiration from the depths of the conscience. St. Ambrose organized it, and filled a chapter of his book, “De Officiis,” with precepts on the art of preaching, which St. Augustine developed, not fearing, in his treatise, “De Doctrina Christiana,” to borrow from the ancient rhetoric as much as was consistent with the gravity of the Gospel message. We may listen, in Peter Chrysologus, Gaudentius of Brescia, Maximus of Turin, to orators at once learned and popular, but their light was outshone by another preacher, who addressed himself not to some thousands of souls, but to the entire West. Amidst the confusion of the invasions, Salvian undertook the task of justifying the action of Providence. Eloquence never raised a more terrible cry than that which told from his lips the agony of the Roman world, pointing to the mockery which accompanied its fall, to its vain struggles beneath the hand of God, and His treatment of fire and sword which failed to effect its cure.                            Secamur urimur non sanamur.

The ancients, in writing history, had aimed at literary beauty, and thus loaded the narrative with ornament and declamation. The Christians only looked for truth, they wished for it in facts, and applied themselves to re-establishing order in time, which led to the dry but scrupulous chronicles of St. Jerome, of Prosper of Aquitaine, and the Spaniard Idatius. They sought for truth in the unravelling of causes, and, so to speak, made the Spirit of God to wander over the chaos of human events. The philosophy of history, so finely sketched by St. Augustine in his “City of God,” was developed by the pen of Paulus Orosius. He was the first to, condense the annals of the world into the formula Divina providentia agitur mundus et homo. His works became the type of the chronicles which multiplied in the Middle Age. Gregory of Tours could not treat of the Merovingian period without ascending to the origin of things ; and Otto of Freysingen, in his fine work, “De Mutatione Rerum,” continued the chain of history to which Bossuet was to add the last and most elaborate link.

Poetry, in the last place, was destined to surrender the language which had been lavished on the false gods to the praises of Christ. When the Empress Justina was threatening to deliver over the Basilica of Milan to the Arians, St. Ambrose, with the Catholic people, passed day and night in the sacred place, and, to wile away the tediousness of the vigils, introduced the hymn-tunes which had already found a place in the Eastern Church. The sweetness of the sacred, chant soon gained the ear of the West, and Christianity possessed a lyric poetry. Contemporaneously it beheld its epic take its rise in the verses of Sedulius and of Dracontius, and could even say with one of old, Nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade. Not that modern genius could hope to rival the match­less perfection of' the Homeric forms, but because humanity thus found the true and oecumenical epopee whereof every other was but a shadow, the themes of which were the Fall, Redemption, and Judgment, which was to traverse the ages, and culminate in Dante, Milton, and Klopstock.

Moreover, in the fifth century, two Christian poets rose above the crowd. One was St. Paulinus, who laid aside the honours of his rank and fortune to dwell at the tomb of St. Felix of Nola, and who celebrated the peace of his seclusion in verses which were already quite Italian in their grace. As he depicts the basilica of the Saint blazing with taper-light, its colonnades hung with white draperies, its flower-strewn court, with the troops of devout mountaineers from the mountains of the Abruzzi bringing their sick on litters, or driving their cattle before them to receive a blessing, we might fancy ourselves present at a pilgrimage of the Neapolitan peasantry at the present day. The other was the Spaniard Prudentius, who, at the end of a life full of honours, and long service to his duty, devoted to God the remnants of a tuneful voice and a dashing style. Beneath a method which the authors of the golden age would not have disowned, a modern cast of thought is apparent, whether the poet is borrowing the most genial accents of our Christmastides to invite the earth to wreathe its flowers round the cradle of the Saviour, or, as in the hymn of St. Laurence, is drawing the veil with a Dantean hardiness from the Christian destinies of Rome, or, as in his reply to Symmachus, makes a prayer to Honorius for the abolition of the gladiatorial shows the peroration of his invective against Paganism :—

Nullus in urbe cadat cujus sit poena voluptas!

Jam solis contenta feris infamis arena

Nulla cruentatis homicidia ludat in armis!

It is not sufficiently known, but we perhaps may learn, how the poetical vocation of the Middle Age was sus­tained by those writers who filled the libraries, shared with Virgil the honours of the “ Aeneid,” and moulded the best imaginations of the time, until the mind grew weary of the chaste beauty of a poetry that had no pages for expurgation.

Our work would be incomplete if, amongst these germs of future greatness, we should forget Christian art, Which had emerged from the Catacombs to produce in the light of day the basilicas of Constantine and Theodosius, the sepulchral bas-reliefs of Rome, of Ravenna, and of Arles, and the mosaics with which Pope Sixtus III embellished, in 433, the sanctuary of St. Mary Major. The cupola already swelled over the tomb of St. Constance, and the Latin cross extended its arms in St. Peter’s and in St. Paul’s. The empire was still standing, and its every type was to be found in that Romanesque and Byzantine architecture which was soon to cover with monuments the shores of the Loire, Seine, and Rhine, and which from the broken arch of its vault was to produce all the beauties of the Pointed Gothic.

We have thus traced the rise of the modern faith, of modern society, and of modern art, all of which were born before the inroad of the barbarians, and were destined to grow sometimes through their aid, Sometimes. in their despite. The Barbarian mission was not that of inaugurating a craving for the in­finite, a respect for women, or a sad-coloured poetry. They came to break with axe and lever the edifice of pagan society, in which Christian principles were cramped; yet their blows were not so crushing as to leave no remnants of the old ramparts, in which heathenism still might lurk. We shall find that half the vices attributed to the barbarians were those of the Roman Decline, and a share of the disorders charged upon nascent Christianity must be laid to the account of antiquity. In this category must be placed the vulgar superstitions, the occult sciences, the bloody laws put in force against magic, which do but repeat the old decrees of the Caesars; the fiscal system of the Merovingian kings, which was entirely borrowed from the imperial organization; the corruption, lastly, of taste and the decomposition of language, which already prognosticated the diversity of the new idioms. Beneath the common civilization which was destined to knit into one family all the races of the West, the national character of each struggles to the surface. In every province the Latin tongue found an obstinate resistance in native dialects, the genius of Rome in native manners. The distinctive elements in the three great Neo-Latin nations could already be recognized. Italy had statesmen in Symmachus and Leo the Great, and was soon to possess Gregory the Great, Gregory VII, and Innocent III. Spain claimed a majority among the poets, and gave them that dashing spirit which has never failed from Lucan to Lope de Vega. The “Psychomachia” of Prudentius was a prelude to the allegorical dramas, to the Autos Sacramentales of Calderon. Gaul, lastly, was the country of wits, of men gifted with repartee. We know the eloquence of Salvian, the play of words so dear to Sidonius Apollinaris, but that sage of the Decline was, moreover, full of the ancient heroism, when called upon to defend his episcopal see of Clermont from the assaults of the Visigoths. And these were the very features in which Cato summed up the Gallic character: Rem militarem et argute loqui.

Such is the plan of our course, for it is not necessary to follow out in detail the literary history of the fifth century, but only to seek light for the obscurity of the succeeding ages. As travellers tell of rivers which lose themselves amongst rocks, to appear again at some distance from their hiding-place, so we shall ascend above the point at which the stream of tradition seems to fail, and will attempt to descend with it into the gulf, that we may be certain that the issuing stream is indeed the same. As historians have opened a certain chasm between antiquity and barbarism, so let us undertake to re-establish the unfailing com­munication granted by Providence in time, as well as in space; for there is no study more fascinating than that of the ties which link the ages, which give to the illustrious dead disciples century after century down the future, and thus demonstrate the victory of thought over destruction.

CHAPTER III.

PAGANISM.