The third instance is given in the prohibition against taking interest. It is said in Deut. 23 : 19: "Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother." Ecclesiastical authorities took this as forbidding to take any interest in lending money, and they tried to impress this prohibition upon the minds of the Christian people. Here, again, Charlemagne gave his sanction to this ecclesiastical view and made the prohibition against taking interest a part of the public law. It is obvious that the economic life of the nation was deeply influenced by this compulsory adoption of Old Testament laws.
Justice, with the Germans, was to a large extent exercised by means of the ordeals. We scarcely realise the importance these proceedings had at that time. People believed in a divine power bringing out guilt and innocence by means of these curious trials. It was but natural that the Bible, representing the divine oracles, should be present at the ceremony, that both parties should revere and kiss it. But people did more; they made the Bible itself a means of deciding between guilty and innocent. They had a particular kind of ordeal which they called determining by means of the Gospels, and another which was called the ordeal of the Psalter, a copy of the Psalter being swung over the head of the suspected person.
I have referred to the palace school. This had its continuation in a graduate school, if we may so call a Bible circle among the theologians attending the court. These theologians, headed by Alcuin himself, were first-rate Bible scholars. They knew great parts of the Bible by heart; they had read all accessible commentaries of the fathers. They had ideas of their own, too, but they were traditionalists to such an extent that they would not say anything of their own unless it was said and supported by the fathers. When asked to write brief commentaries on Biblical books, because the patristic commentaries were too large and comprehensive for the students of this time, they simply gave extracts from the fathers and carefully avoided adding anything of their own. One went so far as to take even the connecting words from the works of Saint Augustine; another, whose mental energy was too strong to keep him within the boundaries of pure traditionalism, excuses himself whenever he introduces an interpretation of his own.
In these studies the ladies and gentlemen of the court took part. It is very interesting and often amusing to see what kind of questions they bring before Alcuin as the great oracle of learning. One lady reading her Psalter was puzzled by the words in Psalm 116, "All men are liars." How can babies be liars before they begin to speak, or dumb men? "The sun shall not smite thee by day nor the moon by night" (Psalm 121 : 6) seemed to be incompatible with the fact that the moon never burns. A scholar who had come from Greece troubled the court by putting the question: To whom was paid the price with which we were bought according to I Cor. 6 : 20; 7 : 23. Charlemagne himself has other questions. He is troubled by finding that the hymn sung by Christ and his disciples after the Last Supper has not been recorded by any of the Gospels. I wonder if he really was satisfied by Alcuin's answer. After a very learned explanation of the term hymn, Alcuin gives, first, three views of different interpreters: (1) That there was no special hymn, only a general praisegiving; (2) that they had sung the twenty-second Psalm; (3) that it was some Jewish prayer. Then he proceeds to establish his own solution: that it is, in fact, the prayer of Jesus, recorded in John 17, which was meant by the word hymn here. Incidentally, he makes some important remarks upon the harmony of the Gospels: "Although we see in the Gospels some things told similarly, others in a different way, we nevertheless believe that everything is true." That was the leading idea for the criticism of the fathers, and it was the same for nearly all the mediæval centuries. Historical criticism, directed upon the Gospels, would have seemed to show intolerable lack of piety or certain evidence of heretical views.
Theological thinking does not go beyond the limits of Biblical doctrine. Scarcely one or two men dare to think in their own way or speculate on such problems as darkness and nothing (that is, what was before the creation) or on the nature of miracle. There was hardly any attempt at scientific theories. And the best men, indeed, as, for instance, Alcuin, were proud of basing their theology entirely on Biblical ideas.
The one great event in the expansion of Christianity among the German nations is the mission of Saint Augustine to England. When Pope Gregory found some Anglo-Saxon youths at the slave market of Rome and perceived that in the North there was still a pagan nation to be baptised, he sent one of his monks to England, and this monk, who was Saint Augustine, took with him the Bible and introduced it to the Anglo-Saxons, and one of his followers brought with him from Rome pictures showing the Biblical history, and decorated the walls of the church in the monastery of Wearmouth. We do not enter here into the difficult question of the relations between this newly founded Anglo-Saxon church and the old Iro-Scottish church. Differences of Bible text had something to do with the pitiful struggles which arose between the churches and ended in the devastation of the older one. The one point which interests us here is the fact that both Iro-Scottish and Anglo-Saxon monks were driven into missionary work by the Bible. When, in the service, they heard read from the Old Testament or from the epistle to the Hebrews that Abraham and the patriarchs had all left their home, their parents, their native country, and had gone to a foreign land which they did not know, simply in order to please God, then they felt bound to do the same. When at the mass the Gospel was read, "And every one that hath left houses or brethren or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for my name's sake, shall receive a hundredfold and shall inherit eternal life," then they hurried away, not knowing where to go, looking only for a far-distant and desert place. It was this ascetic view of the Bible which drove the Iro-Scottish monks over the sea to France, Italy, Germany, which made them preach the gospel to the Germans who had not yet heard of it. It was this same motive which caused Willibrord and Boniface to cross the North Sea and come to preach among the Frisians and Saxons. Boniface is said to have received the deadly stroke from a pagan while holding his Bible over his head. They still show the copy at Fulda.
Again, it was the Bible which determined Charlemagne to use force against the Saxons in order to bring them to baptism and Christian faith. Saint Augustine had discovered the passage in the Lord's parable of the great supper, where the servant is told to go out into the highways and hedges and "constrain" them to come in. This coge intrare, he explained, might excuse the using of secular power for the purpose of bringing heretics back to the church or of causing pagans to join the church. Charlemagne knew no better than to suppose that this was the true meaning of the saying of our Lord, and so he felt in conscience bound to use military force and the full strength of the law in christianising the Saxons.
But it was the Bible itself and not Charlemagne's sharp sword and his cruel law which brought over the wild Saxon tribes into Christendom. They had among themselves a poet who had the gift of singing the gospel into their hearts. Charlemagne himself was fond of the national songs; he loved his German language as much as he esteemed Latin. He was convinced that a man ought to pray to God in his native tongue. There are not only three sacred languages, he says, in which to pray and to praise God—Hebrew, Greek, Latin—you may praise him in your German as well. Therefore he arranged that a priest should translate the Biblical lessons and the sermon to the people who did not understand Latin. He would probably have approved a German translation of the Bible; but the clergy were not prepared to do this. They took Latin as the basis of civilisation, and only a few of them had any regard for the uncultivated people. There are preserved some few attempts at translating parts of the Bible into German; they attest what might have come out of this Carolingian movement if the bigotry and narrowness of Charlemagne's son Louis had not stopped it. Among the Saxons a fresh and vigorous spirit was still alive. Having been introduced to Christianity by brute force of war, they embraced the gospel, trying to make it their own by putting it into the form of their national song. We do not know the name of the poet; he seems to have been a clergyman, instructed in the best commentaries of his time, such as were available at the monastery of Fulda. For the framework he used a Gospel harmony which is contained in the famous Codex Fuldensis of the Vulgate, originating at Capua (in south Italy) and brought probably by Boniface himself from England to Fulda. This Gospel harmony he translated freely into some six thousand Saxon verses. His poem is one of the finest assimilations of the Gospel history to national German feeling, to be compared only with Dürer's engravings and Eduard von Gebhardt's paintings. Christ is the heavenly king; the apostles are his loyal kinsmen; he wanders with them through the Saxon wood; he stops at a native spring; all Oriental character has gone, but the gospel has lost nothing. It is as fresh and as real as it ever had been. The fact our author detests most is Christ's betrayal by one of his own men; nothing is so bad as this according to the German mind. Christ on the cross is not suffering; he dies as a victorious warrior. When he says, "I thirst," he expresses by this the fact that he is thirsting after the souls of men, to bring them into paradise. It is wonderful how the gospel has penetrated the German soul in order to produce a harmony like this.
This "Heliand" by the anonymous Saxon poet we shall admire even more if we compare it with the other attempt at bringing the life of Christ into German poesy. It is by Otfried of Strassburg, whose "Christ" is a very learned elaboration, partly in German, partly in Latin, therefore undoubtedly much preferred in the literary circles of that time, but infinitely inferior to the "Heliand" in freshness and popular quality.