Philosophy,[121] in the first place, no longer stands for any active principle; all its old aspect of metaphysical and ethical inquiry has been lost. It is merely a container in which minor subjects are arranged in a comprehensive plan, and the only interest which it presents, as philosophy, is to be found in the question of what minor subjects are included and how they are grouped. Here Isidore is more inconsistent than usual. He gives three plans of the field of knowledge, all substantially differing from one another in details and all strikingly different from his own marshaling of all knowledge in the Etymologies. The only reflection of value suggested by the treatment of philosophy in Isidore’s works is that in being de-secularized it has completely lost its essential content. It can, therefore, no longer be a source of offence to any Christian.
The pagan philosophy, however, was a different thing. It was known to have been concerned with the same problems as was Christian theology. It had thus a certain right to exist and a certain value, but this terminated with the appearance of Christianity. As Isidore puts it, “the philosophers of this world certainly knew God, but the humility of Christ displeased them and they went astray”; “they fell in with wicked angels and the devil became their mediator for death as Christ became ours for life”.[122] After Christian theology had settled beyond the shadow of a doubt the problems that had occupied the pagan philosophers, these latter could cause only trouble. Pagan philosophy now stood only for a perversion of the wisdom which was found in its true form in the books of the Scriptural canon and the works of the church Fathers. Its “errors” were believed to be the source of the heresies in the church. “The same material is used and the same errors are embraced over and over again by philosophers and heretics”.[123]
Isidore’s idea of the function of poetry is a peculiar one. “It is the business of the poet,” he says, “to take veritable occurrences and gracefully change and transform them to other appearances by a figurative and indirect mode of speech”.[124] From this it might be inferred that he thought that the use of poetry was to furnish material for allegorical interpretation. He ranks the poets of pagan antiquity below the philosophers, and brings serious charges against them. He asserts that they have “disregarded the proper meanings of words under the compulsion of metre” and have thus been guilty of introducing a great amount of confusion into thought and language.[125] His most vigorous indictment of pagan poetry, however, is that it had its origin in the pagan religions, which he identifies with demon worship. He quotes Suetonius to establish this point: “When men ... first began to know themselves and their gods, they used for themselves a modest way of living and only necessary words, while for the worship of their gods they devised magnificence in each”. This “magnificence” of speech is alleged to have been poetry.[126] With such opinions, he naturally desired the ostracism of poetry. “The Christian is forbidden to read their lies.”[127]
Toward pagan philosophy and poetry, then, Isidore’s attitude is hostile, and it is very improbable that he ever wasted any time on them. But in the field of secular knowledge apart from these subjects he has, within limits, a use for the inheritance left by pagan Rome. It is his chief claim to recognition that he was not absolutely content with the de-secularized science that he found in Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine, but had the independence to go behind it and draw upon its original sources in Roman literature. The spirit in which he did this, however, was not the spirit of revolt, but apparently only a natural desire for more extended information. His critical faculty did not warn him that in seeking this information from pagan sources he was passing from one intellectual atmosphere to another; his mind was too literal and plodding and dwelt too much on details to notice when it was on dangerous ground. His resort to pagan science was not always happy in its result; but the many blunders which he made cannot affect the merit of his enterprise in going beyond the circle of Christian writers; and it must be said for his version of secular knowledge, as contained in his secular writings, that, poor as it was, it was one without which the middle ages would have been a great deal poorer.
As a matter of fact, Isidore did not leave the science of the Roman Empire in a state much worse than that in which he found it. It had been undergoing a process of decay for centuries. At their best the Roman men of science had been unable even to appropriate the more abstract parts of Greek science. They were governed throughout by a short-sighted practicality, as when, for instance, in the case of the mathematical sciences they tried to take over results without taking the method of reaching or verifying them. In the natural sciences their inferiority was only less marked. Here the absence of critical method permitted the incorporation of many superstitious notions. As has been pointed out, the Roman science was wholly a science of authority, and the greatest scientist was the greatest accumulator of previous authorities. Thus throughout its course in the Roman world science had been beating a retreat. By Isidore’s time these forces of short-sighted utilitarianism, the spirit of subservience to authority, and superstition, had brought it to a state of inoffensive feebleness such that it was more welcome to the Christian than was either poetry or philosophy.
This Roman pseudo-science could not, however, hold an important place in the thinking of the time: the fundamental conceptions that prevailed forbade it. The material world held a low place, as we have seen; on every side evidence can be found of an ascending scale of values from the material through the moral to the spiritual. Upon this idea is founded “the triple method of interpretation”[128] used in the Scriptures and elsewhere, and with it is connected the triple division of knowledge into natural science, ethics, and theology. There was not only an ascending scale of value for the different sorts of knowledge, but an ascending scale of validity. Spiritual truth and moral truth transcended the truth of material facts, whose stubbornness had been forgotten and had not yet been re-discovered. Yet, with all this depreciation of the material, it in some measure reasserted itself: as the literal meaning had to be grasped in the Scriptures before the higher meaning could be educed, so the material world had to be recognized before its higher meaning could be ascertained. This was the basis for science in the philosophy of the dark ages.
In this way Isidore’s pseudo-science was brought into harmony with religion. Natural science was, indeed, concerned with the lowest and faintest form of reality, namely, the material world; but even material things had their spiritual implications, and because of this were worthy of an orderly survey. The De Natura Rerum, in which each term is explained first as it relates to the natural world and then as to its higher meaning, shows how science played the subordinate part just indicated. It is of great interest at this point to notice that Isidore’s successor, Rabanus Maurus, in his comprehensive encyclopedia De Universo, which follows Isidore’s Etymologies closely, adds, however, the higher meanings which Isidore had left out in his work.[129] It is the importance of natural science from this point of view that Isidore has in mind in a passage in the Sententiae: “It does no harm to anyone if, because of simplicity, he has an inadequate idea of the elements, provided only he speaks the truth of God. For even though one may not be able to discuss the incorporeal and the corporeal natures, an upright life with faith makes him blessed.”[130]
He is far, however, from expressing complete approval of pagan science; the perversity of the pagan scientists forbids this. “The philosophers of the world are highly praised for the measuring of time, and the tracing of the course of the stars, and the analysis of the elements. Still, they had this only from God. Flying proudly through the air like birds, and plunging into the deep sea like fishes, and walking like dumb animals, they gained knowledge of the earth, but they would not seek with all their minds to know their Maker”.[131]
In judging the quality of Isidore’s science as science, we must remember that he is separated from Pliny, his great predecessor in the encyclopedic field, by nearly six centuries, and that those six centuries form a period of continuous intellectual decline; and, further, we must bear in mind the fact that Pliny himself sometimes copied what he did not understand, and was so little of a scientist as even to welcome the marvelous.[132] After this, what can be expected from Isidore? That he wrote what he did write, at the time he did, is in itself the astonishing fact. His work is the only symptom of intellectual life in two centuries of Western European history.
Isidore’s view of the past was as simple and dogmatic as his view of the universe at large; in fact it was conditioned by his world-view. The acceptance of Christianity and the new scale of values thus introduced had of necessity involved the projection of the new interests into the past. The legendary background of the new religion had accelerated the process. The past, as seen by writers of the pagan civilization and as reflecting the interests of that civilization, now became of no service, and, as a whole, was dropped. The pagan histories were regarded as written by men whose point of view was wholly false and mischievous, even though sometimes their facts might be correct. They were approached by the Christian re-adjusters of history in much the same spirit as that in which the modern historian goes to the medieval chronicle, though with an opposite aim: the modern historian is after what is social and human, while Augustine and Orosius were after illustrations of the ways of God to man.[133]