CENTRAL TOWER (LINCOLN)
XIV
SOME THIRTEENTH CENTURY PROSE.
It would be unpardonable to allow the notion to be entertained that it was only in poetry that the writers of the Thirteenth Century succeeded in creating works of enduring influence. Some of the prose writings of the time are deeply interesting for many reasons. Modern prose was in its formative period, and the evolution of style, as of other things in the making, is proverbially worthy of more serious study than even the developed result. The prose writings of the Thirteenth Century were mainly done in Latin, but that was not for lack of command over the vernacular tongues, as we shall see, but because this was practically a universal language. This century had among other advantages that subsequent ages have striven for unsuccessfully, our own most of all, a common medium of expression for all scholars at least. There are, however, the beginnings of Prose in all the modern languages and it is easy to understand that the Latin of the time had a great influence on the vernacular and that the modes of expression which had become familiar in the learned tongue, were naturally transferred to the vulgar speech, as it was called, whenever accuracy of thought and nicety of expression invited such transmutation.
With regard to the Latin of the period it is the custom of many presumably well-educated men to sniff a little and say deprecatingly, that after all much cannot be expected from the writers of the time, since they were dependent on medieval or scholastic Latin for the expression of their ideas. This criticism is supposed to do away with any idea of the possibility of there having been a praiseworthy prose style, at this time in the Middle Ages. In the chapter on the Latin Hymns, we call attention to the fact that this same mode of criticism was supposed to preclude all possibility of rhymed Latin, as worthy to occupy a prominent place in literature. The widespread [{222}] encouragement of this false impression has, as a matter of fact, led to a neglect of these wonderful poems, though they may in the opinion of competent critics, even be considered as representing the true genius of the Latin language and its powers of poetic expression better than the Greek poetic modes, which were adopted by the Romans, but which, with the possible exception of their two greatest poets, never seem to have acquired that spontaneity that would characterize a native outburst of lingual vitality.
As for the philosophic writers of the century that great period holds in this, as in other departments, the position of the palmiest time of the Middle Ages. To it belongs Alexander Hales, the Doctor Irrefragabilis who disputes with Aquinas the prize for the best example of the Summa Theologiae; Bonaventure the Mystic, and writer of beautiful hymns; Roger Bacon, the natural philosopher; Vincent of Beauvais, the encyclopedist. While of the four, greatest of all, Albertus Magnus, the "Dumb Ox of Cologne," was born seven years before its opening, his life lasted over four-fifths of it; that of Aquinas covered its second and third quarters; Occam himself, though his main exertions lie beyond this century, was probably born before Aquinas died; while John Duns Scotus hardly outlived the century's close by a decade. Raymond Lully, one of the most characteristic figures of Scholasticism and of the medieval period (with his "great art" of automatic philosophy), who died in 1315, was born as early as 1235. Peter the Spaniard, Pope and author of the Summulae Logicales, the grammar of formal logic for ages as well of several medieval treatises that have attracted renewed attention in our day, died in 1277.
With regard to what was accomplished in philosophic and theologic prose, examples will be found in the chapter on St. Thomas Aquinas, which prove beyond all doubt the utter simplicity, the directness, and the power of the prose of the Thirteenth Century. In the medical works of the time there was less directness, but always a simplicity that made them commendable. In general, university writers were influenced by the scholastic methods and we find it reflected constantly in their works. In the minds of many people this would be [{223}] enough at once to condemn it. It will usually be found, however, as we have noted before, that those who are readiest to condemn scholastic writing know nothing about it, or so little that their opinion is not worth considering. Usually they have whatever knowledge they think they possess, at second hand. Sometimes all that they have read of scholastic philosophy are some particularly obscure passages on abstruse subjects, selected by some prejudiced historian, in order to show how impossible was the philosophic writing of these centuries of the later Middle Ages.
There are other opinions, however, that are of quite different significance and value. We shall quote but one of them, written by Professor Saintsbury of the University of Edinburgh, who in his volume on the Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (the Twelfth and Thirteenth centuries) of his Periods of European Literature, has shown how sympathetically the prose writing of the Thirteenth Century may appeal even to a scholarly modern, whose main interests have been all his life in literature. Far from thinking that prose was spoiled by scholasticism. Prof. Saintsbury considers that scholasticism was the fortunate training school in which all the possibilities of modern prose were brought out and naturally introduced into the budding languages of the time. He says:
"However this may be" (whether the science of the Nineteenth Century after an equal interval will be of any more positive value, whether it will not have even less comparative interest than that which appertains to the scholasticism of the Thirteenth Century) "the claim modest, and even meager as it may seem to some, which has been here once more put forward for this scholasticism—the claim of a far-reaching educative influence in mere language, in mere system of arrangement and expression, will remain valid. If at the outset of the career of modern languages, men had thought with the looseness of modern thought, had indulged in the haphazard slovenliness of modern logic, had popularized theology and vulgarized rhetoric, as we have seen both popularized and vulgarized since, we should indeed have been in evil case. It used to be thought clever to moralize and to felicitate mankind over the rejection of the stays, the fetters, the prison in which its [{224}] thought was medievally kept. The justice or the injustice, the taste or the vulgarity of these moralizings, of these felicitations, may not concern us here. But in expression, as distinguished from thought, the value of the discipline to which these youthful languages was subjected is not likely now to be denied by any scholar who has paid attention to the subject. It would have been perhaps a pity if thought had not gone through other phases; it would certainly have been a pity if the tongues had been subjected to the fullest influence of Latin constraint. But that the more lawless of them benefited by that constraint there can be no doubt whatever. The influence of form which the best Latin hymns of the Middle Ages exercised in poetry, the influence in vocabulary and in logical arrangement which scholasticism exercised in prose are beyond dispute: and even those who will not pardon literature, whatever its historic and educative importance be, for being something less than masterly in itself, will find it difficult to maintain the exclusion of the Cur Deus Homo, and impossible to refuse admission to the Dies Irae."