History in English words

by Owen Barfield

It seems remarkable to us that, in spite of this active discouragement of independent thinking, the Dark and Middle Ages were, beyond dispute, the cradle of European philosophy. Perhaps this was because men did not yet feel the need for such independence. The leading quality of medieval thought was its receptiveness, and towards the end of its life it seems to have become almost conscious of this itself; for it is hardly possible to open a volume of Chaucer without lighting on some half-respectful, half-ironical reference to “olde clerkes” or “olde bokes”. But the profound respect in which the written word had been held throughout the Middle Ages survives in many other curious ways as well. We still use the word authority in its two separate meanings of ‘a quotation from a book’ and ‘the power of controlling’. Of these the first meaning is the older, and from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries it may almost be said to have included the latter within it. Again, our word glamour, a later form of gramarye, suggests an almost mystical reverence for the ‘grammar’ which—along with most of the other branches of medieval learning—was derived entirely from the works of Aristotle. The popularity and general use of term, which began life as a subtle technicality of Aristotelian logic, reminds us again of the universal study of that writer in the Middle Ages, and spice—a corrupted form of ‘species’—is but another indication of the way in which the jargon of classical philosophy crept into their everyday thought.

The change from Greek and Roman civilization to the civilization of modern Europe is often represented as having been more abrupt than it really was. We have deduced some of the intermediate stages in the alterations of feeling. In the world of thought there are actual written documents for our information, philosophical treatises and counter-treatises, which, by revealing to us the very moment of impact, enable us to trace more easily the reverberation of thought from mind to mind. Very soon after the break up of Rome, when the Empire was being partially re-organized under Teutonic dynasties and the defunct Latin Caesar rising again as the Germanic Kaiser, the great medieval “Schools”, of which the most famous was at Paris, began to arise out of the traditions of monastic learning. Their classical library apparently consisted of one Platonic dialogue and two or three works of Aristotle, all of them translated; but the authority of these translations was absolute. At first Plato was considered the greater “authority”, but from the beginning of the thirteenth century it seems to have been accepted almost as a matter of course that the one great object of all philosophy for all time was the harmonization of Aristotelian logic and Catholic dogma. But though the Aristotelian method (as they understood it) was all in all, the actual Platonic system, with the help of Neoplatonism and the Mystics, lingered in sufficient strength to divide medieval philosophy for several hundred years into two rival camps. The one party, known as “Realists”, held with Plato that “ideas”—now usually called universals—had existed before, and could exist quite apart from, things; while the “Nominalists” held that universals had no separate or previous existence. But as time passed, many of the Nominalists went farther still, maintaining that these universals did not exist at all, that they were mere intellectual abstractions or classifications made by the human mind—in fact “ideas” in the sense in which, owing to them, we use the word to-day. One of the reasons—perhaps the chief reason—why so many Schoolmen carried Aristotle beyond himself in this way is a particularly interesting one.

Reference has already been made to the wave of Arabic civilization which surged into Europe early in the Dark Ages. It was a civilization in every sense of the word; for in the ninth century learning had developed under the Caliphs of Baghdad to a degree unparalleled elsewhere in the world, and rapprochements between the two races and civilizations, which had already begun in the world of philosophy, were soon strengthened and increased by those great medieval experiments, the Crusades.[36] Now Arabic scholars were, if anything, more enthusiastic Aristotelians than the scholars of Europe. The curious word arabesque, and the fact that words like algebra, cipher, zero, and some others to be mentioned in the [next chapter] are among the few Arabic words which reached our language before the fourteenth century, are both symptomatic of a certain peculiarity of the Arabic mind which we may perhaps call the tendency to abstraction. The Arab seems to have possessed something of that combination of materialism on the one hand and excessive intellectual abstraction on the other which we have already noticed in the later stages of Roman mythology. Just as he made Mohammedanism out of the Jewish sacred traditions, so he made Nominalism out of Greek philosophy. The influence upon Christian thought of great Arabic philosophers like Averroes and Avicenna is one of the most astonishing chapters in its history. But it is not difficult to see how it occurred. The learning of the Middle Ages was founded entirely on translations, and this was an activity in which, as far as Aristotle’s works were concerned, the Arabs had got in first. According to Renan, some of the current versions of Aristotle were “Latin translations from a Hebrew translation of a Commentary of Averroes made on an Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of a Greek text”.

To the Popes and those who had the power and interest of the Church most at heart the problem appeared in quite a different light. It was a question of steering Christian dogma between the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of materialism and its logical conclusion, scepticism. Thus, throughout the history of Scholasticism we have to do with a sort of triangle of intellectual forces: Realism and Nominalism fighting a five hundred years’ war, and the Church, in its official capacity, anxiously endeavouring to hold the balance between them. One wonders whether the three parties to this ancient dispute may not have found symbolic expression in Tweedledum, Tweedledee, and the “Monstrous Crow” of nursery legend. But it is no disparagement of the intellects of that day to say that to us the chief interest of their polemics lies in the many new and accurate instruments of thought with which they provided us. The common word accident is an excellent example. We use it every day without realizing that it was only imported from Latin by the indefatigable efforts of the Schoolmen to reconcile the doctrine of Realism with the Catholic dogma of Transubstantiation. The accidents, when they first came into the English language, meant that part of the sacred bread and wine which remained after the substance had been transmuted into the body and blood of Christ.

On the whole it is a safe rule to assume that those who speak most contemptuously of such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus are the nearest modern representatives of their own idea of what these Schoolmen were; that is to say, they are those whose imaginations are most completely imprisoned within the intellectual horizon of the passing age. Much fun has been made of medieval philosophy for discussing such matters as how many angels can stand on the point of a needle, and whether Christ could have performed His cosmic mission equally well if He had been incarnated as a pea instead of as a man. The growth of a rudimentary historical sense has, it is true, made it fashionable lately to take these ancient thinkers a little more seriously, but it is still the rarest thing to find a philosopher or a psychologist who fully comprehends that he is consuming the fruits of this long, agonizing struggle to state the exact relation between spirit and matter, every time he uses such key-words of thought as absolute, actual, attribute, cause, concept, deduction, essence, existence, intellect, intelligence, intention, intuition, motive, potential, predicate, substance, tendency, transcend; abstract and concrete, entity and identity, matter and form, quality and quantity, objective and subjective, real and ideal, general, special, and species, particular, individual, and universal. ‘Free will’ is the translation of a Latin phrase first used by a Church Father, and ‘argumentum ad hominem’ is an example of a scholastic idiom which has remained untranslated. Many of these words, it is true, are in the first instance Latin translations of Greek terms introduced by pagan writers before the days of the Schoolmen; some, like quality and species, by Cicero himself, and others, like accident, actual, and essence, by later Latin writers such as Quintilian or Macrobius. But it must be remembered that, even in these cases, the words, as we use them to-day, are not mere translations. By their earnest and lengthy discussions the Schoolmen were all the time defining more strictly the meanings of these and of many other words already in use, and so adapting them to the European brain that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was an easy matter for the lawyers and for popular writers like Chaucer and Wyclif to stamp them with the authentic genius of the English language and turn them into current coin.[37] Nobody who understands the amount of pain and energy which go to the creation of new instruments of thought can feel anything but respect for the philosophy of the Middle Ages.

If the philosophy of the Middle Ages is based on the logic of Aristotle, their science can be traced rather to the Greek thought of pre-Aristotelian times. For authority it relied very largely on a single dialogue of Plato, to which may be added Latin translations of a small part of Hippocrates, and of his post-Christian successor and interpreter, Galen. But the way in which its terms have entered right into the heart of our language is proof enough that this medieval science arose, not merely from blind subservience to tradition, but also from an actual survival of the kind of feeling, the kind of outlook which, ages ago, had created the tradition. In spite of that strong and growing sense of the individual soul, man was not yet felt, either physically or psychically, to be isolated from his surroundings in the way that he is to-day. Conversely his mind and soul were not felt to be imprisoned within, and dependent upon, his body. Intellectual classifications were accordingly less dry and clear, and science—that general speculative activity which a later age has split up into such categories as astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, psychology, ...—was as yet almost an undivided whole. Common words like ascendant, aspect, atmosphere, choleric, common sense, complexion, consider, cordial, disaster, disposition, distemper, ether, hearty, humour, humorous, indisposed, influence, jovial, lunatic, melancholy, mercurial, phlegmatic, predominant, sanguine, saturnine, spirited, temper, temperament, with heart, liver, spleen, and stomach in their psychological sense, most of which retained their original and literal meanings down to the fourteenth century, give us more than a glimpse into the relations between body, soul, and cosmos, as they were felt by the medieval scientist.

Thus, the physical body was said to contain four humours (Latin ‘humor’, ‘moisture’)—blood, phlegm, bile or choler, and black bile (melancholy)—which last had its seat in the hypochondria. Not only diseases, or distempers, but qualities of character were intimately connected with the proper ‘mixture’ (Latin ‘temperamentum’) of these humours, just as modern medical theory sees a connection between the character and the glands. Thus, a man might be good humoured or bad humoured; he might have a good temper or a bad temper; and according to which humour predominated in his temperament or complexion, he was choleric, melancholy, phlegmatic, or sanguine. His character depended on other things as well; for the medieval scientist believed with Hippocrates that the arteries (Greek ‘aēr’, ‘air’) were ducts through which there flowed, not blood, but three different kinds of ether (Greek ‘aithēr’, ‘the upper air’) or spirits (Latin ‘spiritus’, ‘breath’, ‘life’), viz. the animal[38] (Latin ‘anima’, ‘soul’), the vital, and the natural. But the stars and the planets were also living bodies; they were composed of that ‘fifth essence’ or quintessence, which was likewise latent in all terrestrial things, so that the character and the fate of men were determined by the influences (Latin ‘influere’, ‘to flow in’) which came from them. The Earth had its atmosphere (a kind of breath which it exhaled from itself); the Moon, which was regarded as a planet, had a special connection with lunacy, and according as the planet Jupiter, or Saturn, or Mercury was predominant or in the ascendant in the general disposition of stars at a man’s birth, he would be jovial, saturnine, or mercurial. Finally, things or persons which were susceptible to the same influences, or which influenced each other in this occult way, were said to be in sympathy or sympathetic.

Test is an alchemist’s word, coming from the Latin ‘testa’, an earthen pot in which the alchemist made his alloys. The same word was once used as a slang term for ‘head’, and in its French form, ‘tête’, still retains that meaning. The phrase hermetically sealed reminds us that alchemy, known as the ‘hermetic art’, was traced back by its exponents to the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus, who himself took his name from the Greek messenger-god Hermes. Other alchemists’ words are amalgam, alcohol, alembic, alkali, arsenic, and tartar. The last five, together with the word alchemy itself, all come to us from Arabic, and are evidence of the fact that the Arabs of the Dark Ages, besides being philosophers, were the fathers of modern chemistry. It was, indeed, they who first joined the study of chemistry to the practice of medicine, and thus initiated a science of drugs. Moreover, that old ‘humoral’ pathology which has shaped so many of our conceptions of human character—in so far as it was based on ancient authority and tradition—came from Hippocrates to Europe, for the most part not directly, but by way of Baghdad and Spain.

The more intimate and indispensable such conceptions are, the more effort does it require from the twentieth-century imagination to realize how they have grown up. It is so difficult, even when we are reading contemporary literature, to blot out from our consciousness the different meanings which have since gathered round the words. If, however, we can succeed in doing this, we cannot but be struck by the odd nature of the change which they have all undergone. When we reflect on the history of such notions as humour, influence, melancholy, temper, and the rest, it seems for the moment as though some invisible sorcerer had been conjuring them all inside ourselves—sucking them away from the planets, away from the outside world, away from our own warm flesh and blood, down into the shadowy realm of thoughts and feelings. There they still repose; astrology has changed to astronomy; alchemy to chemistry; to-day the cold stars glitter unapproachable overhead, and with a naïve detachment mind watches matter moving incomprehensibly in the void. At last, after four centuries, thought has shaken herself free.