CHAPTER V
LATIN TRANSMITTERS OF ANTIQUE AND PATRISTIC THOUGHT
For the Latin West the creative patristic epoch closes with the death of Augustine. There follows a period marked by the cessation of intellectual originality. Men are engaged upon translations from the Greek; they are busy commenting upon older writings, or are expounding with a change of emphasis the systematic constructions of their predecessors. Epitomes and compendia appear, simplified and mechanical abstracts of the bare elements of inherited knowledge and current education. Compilations are made, put together of excerpts taken unshriven and unshorn into the compiler’s writing. Knowledge is brought down to a more barbaric level. Yet temperament lingers for a while, and still appears in the results.
The representatives of this post-patristic period of translation, comment, and compendium, and of re-expression with temperamental change of emphasis, are the two contemporaries, Boëthius and Cassiodorus; then Gregory the Great, who became pope soon after Cassiodorus closed his eyes at the age of ninety or more; and, lastly, Isidore, Archbishop of Seville, who died in 636, twenty-two years after Gregory. All these were Latin bred, and belonged to the Roman world rather than to those new peoples whose barbarism was hastening the disruption of a decadent order, but whose recently converted zeal was soon to help on the further diffusion of Latin Christianity. They appear as transmitters of antique and patristic thought; because, originating little, they put together matter congenial to their own lowering intellectual predilections, and therefore suitable mental pabulum for times of mingled decadence and barbarism, and also for the following periods of mediaeval re-emergence which continued to hark back to the obvious and the easy.
Instead of transmitters, a word indicating function, one might call these men intermediaries, and so indicate their position as well as rôle. Both words, however, should be taken relatively. For all the Fathers heretofore considered were in some sense transmitters or intermediaries, even though creative in their work of systematizing, adding to, or otherwise transforming their matter. Yet one would not dub Augustine a transmitter, because he was far more of a remaker or creator. But a dark refashioner indeed will Gregory the Great appear; while Boëthius, Cassiodorus, Isidore are rather sheer transmitters, or intermediaries, the last-named worthy destined to be the most popular of them all, through his unerring faculty of selecting for his compilations the foolish and the flat.
Among them, Boëthius alone was attached to the antique by affinity of sentiment and temper. Although doubtless a professing Christian, his sentiments were those of pagan philosophy. The De consolatione philosophiae, which comes to us as his very self, is a work of eclectic pagan moralizing, fused to a personal unity by the author’s artistic and emotional nature, then deeply stirred by his imprisonment and peril. He had enjoyed the favour of the great Ostrogoth, Theodoric, ruler of Italy, but now was fallen under suspicion, and had been put in prison, where he was executed in the year 525 at the age of forty-three. His book moves all readers by its controlled and noble pathos, rendered more appealing through the romantic interest surrounding its composition. It became par excellence the mediaeval source of such ethical precept and consolation as might be drawn from rational self-control and acquiescence in the ways of Providence. But at present we are concerned with the range of Boëthius’s intellectual interests and his labours for the transmission of learning. He was an antique-minded man, whose love of knowledge did not revolve around “salvation,” the patristic focus of intellectual effort. Rather he was moved by an ardent wish to place before his Latin contemporaries what was best in the classic education and philosophy. He is first of all a translator from Greek to Latin, and, secondly, a helpful commentator on the works which he translates.
He was little over twenty years of age when he wrote his first work, the De arithmetica.[94] It was a free translation of the Arithmetic of Nichomachus, a Neo-Pythagorean who flourished about the year 100. Boëthius’s work opens with a dedicatory Praefatio to his father-in-law Symmachus. In that and in the first chapter he evinces a broad conception of education, and shows that lovers of wisdom should not despise arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, the fourfold path or quadrivium, a word which he may have been the first to use in this sense.[95] With him arithmetic treats of quantity in and by itself; music, of quantity related to measure; geometry, of moveless, and astronomy, of moving, quantity. He was a better Greek scholar than mathematician; and his free translation ignores some of the finer points of Nichomachus’s work, which would have impressed one better versed in mathematics.[96]
The young scholar followed up his maiden work with a treatise on Music, showing a knowledge of Greek harmonics. Then came a De geometria, in which the writer draws from Euclid as well as from the practical knowledge of Roman surveyors.[97] He composed or translated other works on elementary branches of education, as appears from a royal letter written by Cassiodorus in the name of Theodoric: “In your translations Pythagoras the musician, Ptolemy the astronomer, Nichomachus the arithmetician, Euclid the geometer are read by Italians, while Plato the theologian and Aristotle the logician dispute in Roman voice; and you have given back the mechanician Archimedes in Latin to the Sicilians.”[98] Making all allowance for politeness, this letter indicates the large accomplishment of Boëthius, who was but twenty-five years old when it was written. We turn to the commentated Aristotelian translations which he now undertook.[99] “Although the duties of the consular office[100] prevent the bestowal of our time upon these studies, it still seems a proper part of our care for the Republic to instruct its citizens in the learning which is gained by the labours of the lamp. Since the valour of a bygone time brought dominion over other cities to this one Republic, I shall not merit ill of my countrymen if I shall have instructed the manners of our State with the arts of Greek wisdom.”[101] These sentences open the second book of Boëthius’s translation of the Categories of Aristotle. His plan of work enlarged, apparently, and grew more definite, as the years passed, each adding its quota of accomplishment. At all events, some time afterwards, when he may have been not far from thirty-five, he speaks in the flush of an intellectual anticipation which the many years of labour still to be counted on seemed to justify: