View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, Vol. 3

by Henry Hallam

The diffusion of literature is perfectly distinguishable from its advancement; and whatever obscurity we may find in explaining the variations of the one, there are a few simple causes which seem to account for the other. Knowledge will be spread over the surface of a nation in proportion to the facilities of education; to the free circulation of books; to the emoluments and distinctions which literary attainments are found to produce; and still more to the reward which they meet in the general respect and applause of society. This cheering incite ment, the genial sunshine of approbation, has at all times promoted the cultivation of literature in small republics rather than large empires, and in cities compared with the country. If these are the sources which nourish literature, we should naturally expect that they must have become scanty or dry when learning languishes or expires. Accordingly, in the later ages of the Roman empire a general indifference towards the cultivation of letters became the characteristic of its inhabitants. Laws were indeed enacted by Constantine, Julian, Theodosius, and other emperors, for the encouragement of learned men and the promotion of liberal education. But these laws, which would not perhaps have been thought necessary in better times, were unavailing to counteract the lethargy of ignorance in which even the native citizens of the empire were contented to repose. This alienation of men from their national literature may doubtless be imputed in some measure to its own demerits. A jargon of mystical philosophy, half fanaticism and half imposture, a barren and inflated eloquence, a frivolous philology, were not among those charms of wisdom by which man is to be diverted from pleasure or aroused from indolence.

In this temper of the public mind there was little probability that new compositions of excellence would be produced, and much doubt whether the old would be preserved. Since the invention of printing, the absolute extinction of any considerable work seems a danger too improbable for apprehension. The press pours forth in a few days a thousand volumes, which, scattered like seeds in the air over the republic of Europe, could hardly be destroyed without the extirpation of its inhabitants. But in the times of antiquity manuscripts were copied with cost, labour, and delay; and if the diffusion of knowledge be measured by the multiplication of books, no unfair standard, the most golden ages of ancient learning could never bear the least comparison with the three last centuries. The destruction of a few libraries by accidental fire, the desolation of a few provinces by unsparing and illiterate barbarians, might annihilate every vestige of an author, or leave a few scattered copies, which, from the public indifference, there was no inducement to multiply, exposed to similar casualties in succeeding times.

We are warranted by good authorities to assign, as a collateral cause of this irretrievable revolution the neglect of heathen literature by the Christian church. I am not versed enough in ecclesiastical writers to estimate the degree of this neglect; nor am I disposed to deny that the mischief was beyond recovery before the accession of Constantine. From the primitive ages, however, it seems that a dislike of pagan learning was pretty general among Christians. Many of the fathers undoubtedly were accomplished in liberal studies, and we are indebted to them for valuable fragments of authors whom we have lost. But the literary character of the church is not to be measured by that of its more illustrious leaders. Proscribed and persecuted, the early Christians had not perhaps access to the public schools, nor inclination to studies which seemed, very excusably, uncongenial to the character of their profession. Their prejudices, however, survived the establishment of Christianity. The fourth council of Carthage in 398 prohibited the reading of secular books by bishops. Jerome plainly condemns the study of them except for pious ends. All physical science especially was held in avowed contempt, as inconsistent with revealed truths. Nor do there appear to have been any canons made in favour of learning, or any restriction on the ordination of persons absolutely illiterate.[c] There was indeed abundance of what is called theological learning displayed in the controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries; and those who admire such disputations may consider the principal champions in them as contributing to the glory, or at least retarding the decline, of literature. But I believe rather that polemical disputes will be found not only to corrupt the genuine spirit of religion, but to degrade and contract the faculties. What keenness and subtlety these may sometimes acquire by such exercise is more like that worldly shrewdness we see in men whose trade it is to outwit their neighbours than the clear and calm discrimination of philosophy. However this may be, it cannot be doubted that the controversies agitated in the church during these two centuries must have diverted studious minds from profane literature, and narrowed more and more the circle of that knowledge which they were desirous to attain.

The torrent of irrational superstitions which carried all before it in the fifth century, and the progress of ascetic enthusiasm, had an influence still more decidedly inimical to learning. I cannot indeed conceive any state of society more adverse to the intellectual improvement of mankind than one which admitted of no middle line between gross dissoluteness and fanatical mortification. An equable tone of public morals, social and humane, verging neither to voluptuousness nor austerity, seems the most adapted to genius, or at least to letters, as it is to individual comfort and national prosperity. After the introduction of monkery and its unsocial theory of duties, the serious and reflecting part of mankind, on whom science most relies, were turned to habits which, in the most favourable view, could not quicken the intellectual energies; and it might be a difficult question whether the cultivators and admirers of useful literature were less likely to be found among the profligate citizens of Rome and their barbarian conquerors or the melancholy recluses of the wilderness.

Such therefore was the state of learning before the subversion of the Western Empire. And we may form some notion how little probability there was of its producing any excellent fruits, even if that revolution had never occurred, by considering what took place in Greece during the subsequent ages; where, although there was some attention shown to preserve the best monuments of antiquity, and diligence in compiling from them, yet no one original writer of any superior merit arose, and learning, though plunged but for a short period into mere darkness, may be said to have languished in a middle region of twilight for the greater part of a thousand years.

But not to delay ourselves in this speculation, the final settlement of barbarous nations in Gaul, Spain, and Italy consummated the ruin of literature. Their first irruptions were uniformly attended with devastation; and if some of the Gothic kings, after their establishment, proved humane and civilized sovereigns, yet the nation gloried in its original rudeness, and viewed with no unreasonable disdain arts which had neither preserved their cultivators from corruption nor raised them from servitude. Theodoric, the most famous of the Ostrogoth kings in Italy, could not write his name, and is said to have restrained his countrymen from attending those schools of learning by which he, or rather perhaps his minister Cassiodorus, endeavoured to revive the studies of his Italian subjects. Scarcely one of the barbarians, so long as they continued unconfused with the native inhabitants, acquired the slightest tincture of letters; and the praise of equal ignorance was soon aspired to and attained by the entire mass of the Roman laity. They, however, could hardly have divested themselves so completely of all acquaintance with even the elements of learning, if the language in which books were written had not ceased to be their natural dialect. This remarkable change in the speech of France, Spain, and Italy is most intimately connected with the extinction of learning; and there is enough of obscurity as well as of interest in the subject to deserve some discussion.

Corruption of the Latin language.

It is obvious, on the most cursory view of the French and Spanish languages, that they, as well as the Italian, are derived from one common source, the Latin. That must therefore have been at some period, and certainly not since the establishment of the barbarous nations in Spain and Gaul, substituted in ordinary use for the original dialects of those countries which are generally supposed to have been Celtic, not essentially differing from those which are spoken in Wales and Ireland. Rome, says Augustin, imposed not only her yoke, but her language, upon conquered nations. The success of such an attempt is indeed very remarkable. Though it is the natural effect of conquest, or even of commercial intercourse, to ingraft fresh words and foreign idioms on the stock of the original language, yet the entire disuse of the latter, and adoption of one radically different, scarcely takes place in the lapse of a far longer period than that of the Roman dominion in Gaul. Thus, in part of Britany the people speak a language which has perhaps sustained no essential alteration from the revolution of two thousand years; and we know how steadily another Celtic dialect has kept its ground in Wales, notwithstanding English, laws and government, and the long line of contiguous frontier which brings the natives of that principality into contact with Englishmen. Nor did the Romans ever establish their language (I know not whether they wished to do so) in this island, as we perceive by that stubborn British tongue which has survived two conquests.[d]

In Gaul and in Spain, however, they did succeed, as the present state of the French and peninsular languages renders undeniable, though by gradual changes, and not, as the Benedictine authors of the Histoire Littéraire de la France seem to imagine, by a sudden and arbitrary innovation.[e] This is neither possible in itself, nor agreeable to the testimony of Irenæus, bishop of Lyons at the end of the second century, who laments the necessity of learning Celtic.[f] But although the inhabitants of these provinces came at length to make use of Latin so completely as their mother tongue that few vestiges of their original Celtic could perhaps be discovered in their common speech, it does not follow that they spoke with the pure pronunciation of Italians, far less with that conformity to the written sounds which we assume to be essential to the expression of Latin words.

Ancient Latin pronunciation.