[52] I may venture to quote again the “locus classicus”:—
“Wel knew he the olde Esculapius, And Deiscorides, and eek Rufus, Old Ypocras, Haly, and Galien; Serapion, Razis, and Avicen; Averrois, Damascien, and Constantyn; Bernard, and Gatesden, and Gilbertyn.” Chaucer, C. T. Prol. 429-434 (Skeat’s Ed.).
[53] See pp. 24 and 28.
[54] As a school of thought; in fine art of course it was glorious.
[55] Ozanam (Doc. inédits, quoted by Rashdall, p. 78) says this early light was “une de ces nuits lumineuses où les dernières clartés du soir se prolongent jusqu’aux premières blancheurs du matin.”
[56] Albert—“nostri temporis stupor et miraculum!”—is an attractive figure, and deserves his renown as the greatest of the medieval sages. His endowments were richer and wider than those of the great Italian logician, his pupil, whose name has had a greater vogue, and whose doctrines are still the accepted discipline of the Church of Rome. Albert restored Aristotle, and in astronomy and chemistry sought for truth in nature. That St Thomas was a man of the highest intellectual power and attainments, an eminence which is claimed for him by many scholars, as by Mr Vernon in his edition of the Paradise, I cannot admit; unless it be to a critical scholar who has mastered the contents of his many folios, if such a scholar there be. For my part, after reading much of what is written of St Thomas, I have but done what was possible to me in other such cases; that is, I have run my eye over the titles of his books and chapters, and formed some rapid judgment here and there of the ways of his thought. Now I venture to assert that the ways of the thought of Aquinas, subtle and symmetrical as they are, lie wholly within the formulas of his age. He left science for logic, the stuff of thought for its instrument; satisfying himself with such tinkling cymbals as “Nihil potest per se operari, nisi quod per se subsistit; ... Impossibile est quod forma separetur a seipsa ... quod subsistens per se desinat esse” ... and so forth. Albert though a less symmetrical is a more original genius. To Aquinas indeed I should hesitate to attribute genius; to Albert it seems to me this title may be granted, if with some hesitation. “Vir famosus et erroneus” was Roger Bacon’s summary of Albert’s career, but Bacon was scarcely an indifferent witness.
[57] Among the MSS. in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, are letters of Innocent IV. to the Archdeacon of Canterbury (and others), “Ut (Episc. Linc.) nepotem suum Fredericum (of Lavagna) in canonicatum in ecclesia Lincolniensi, proximè vacaturum, inducat, et Resp. Episc. Linc. in quâ probat talem provisionem esse contra voluntatem et cultus Dei; ideoque negat se concessurum.” I see that the authenticity of some of these letters has been called in question by M. Charles Jourdain, but in any case they are contemporary, and consonant with Robert’s acts and character. Moreover, two years before, Innocent had suspended the bishop for refusing to induct an Italian, ignorant of English, to a rich benefice in his diocese. I find that Dr Luard, in 1880, had no doubts of the authenticity of these letters (Encycl. Brit. XI. 211). Mons. Charles Jourdain’s collected essays, in which he discusses their authenticity, were published posthumously in 1888; but his Editor makes the slovenly omission of the dates and places of the first publications of the several essays.
[58] There were three ways of access to the Greek texts of Aristotle: by the Arab-latin translations; by translations into Latin direct from the Greek; and by the use of the Greek text itself. These means were modified again by the chances of access to particular authors, and, as in the case of Aristotle for example, to particular treatises. To ascertain the dates of access to these new sources I have made some search; and herein I have found great help in the “Recherches critiques” of Amable Jourdain. We must remember that though the source of Western culture is not Latin, but Greek, yet its meagre channels in medieval Europe were Latin; its best tradition lay in Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil. The ill-starred Boetius was the last of the Grecians. Greek was driven East and West: West into Ireland, where in the ninth century a few Greek MSS. survived, and were read in the original by Erigena and his disciples; but this Irish Greek tradition was soon lost, and there were no teachers of Greek. Yet it seems certain that, in Oxford, Robert of Lincoln and Adam Marsh had at any rate learned assistance in the production of some Greco-latin translations of Aristotle, of the Ethics for example. Dr Jackson has pointed out to me a passage in Aquinas’ Commentary on the Ethics, where “the presentation of the right reading misspelt, and of a ludicrous etymology side by side with one which is very nearly right, seem to show that, whilst Aquinas had about him people who knew Greek, he himself had no substantial knowledge of it.” Grosseteste himself may have had some efficient knowledge of Greek; “vir in latino et in greco peritissimus,” says Matthew Paris. Dr Jackson (in a private letter) feels assured that “Roger Bacon was plainly a competent Greek scholar. Of this there is proof in the Opera inedita, edited by Brewer for the Master of the Rolls.” We know also that more than one scholar of the 11-12th centuries travelled in the East, though, as Dr Daremberg says, travellers to the East were more apt to bring back false relics than genuine manuscripts. There was a small Greek community and a Greek monastery at Auriol, near the old colony of Marseilles. Still, for lack of masters and materials, Greek then was a very rare accomplishment; and it is manifest, from much internal evidence, that Albert had no Greek; though he certainly possessed Greco-latin translations of some few Aristotelian treatises by other hands, of the De anima and of the Physics for example, whence he makes quotations without interspersion of Arabic titles, proper names, nouns and terms, such as he rather helplessly reproduces in his rendering of the ninth book of the De cælo and elsewhere. We know from other sources that a few treatises, such as the De anima, and the first two books of the Ethics, existed in Greco-latin rendering before the Arab-latin versions of Michael Scot and others (1220-1225). In later life Albert had the assistance of Aquinas to whom we have attributed some knowledge of Greek; for we find Aquinas, with the countenance of Urban the Fourth, not only searching Europe for Greek manuscripts, sending emissaries to Spain to make versions for him, and supervising the preparation of translations directly into Latin, but also personally comparing the Latin translations with the Greek texts of the Ethics and Politics, and recording variants; variants which Albert copied from his disciple. (It may be worthy of remark that even so late as 1586 there were no Greek types in Oxford, and that in 1599 Casaubon (Life by Pattison) could find no compositors for Greek in Lyons.) The great debt of the West to the Arabs was a new enthusiasm for learning, and for the “Princeps philosophorum”; not their travestied texts and unwieldy commentaries, which Roger Bacon, probably perceiving that his contemporaries swore by the Arab rather than by the Greek, wished he could burn.
[59] To wonder why Roger Bacon became a clerk and a Franciscan is to look upon the thirteenth century with the eyes of the nineteenth. The vision of St Francis had not grown dim; the strange beauty of his life held men captive still, and his cheerful natural religion still animated his disciples. None could have said more truly than St Francis
“While others fish with craft for great opinion, I with great truth catch mere simplicity.”