It is with a solemn interest that we turn to the fragments of that work to which Ozanam devoted his life and [{777}] energies, and we find it to be the history of modern Europe. He himself lays down the three elements of history. "First, chronology, which preserves the general succession of events; then legend, which gives them life and color; and then philosophy, which fills them, as it were, with soul and intelligence."
In the childhood of the world, when the desire of knowledge was fresh and strong, all pagan histories began with the siege of Troy, and all Christian histories from Adam and Eve. Authors gained fame by chronicles of all past events, because it satisfied the natural curiosity of man to know the antecedents of his country or race. As time went on, history became the expression of popular feelings; and what took place generally may be inferred from what we know of our own country. The British monk, Geoffrey of Monmouth, wrote of Arthur, the champion of the faith and the model of chivalry; and the Venerable Bede wrote of the saints among his own Saxon countrymen; then came, with the evils of the reformation, a reverence for what was ancient, and Stow wrote of Catholic England with a fidelity which ranked him among the benefactors of his country. But then also egotism began. Each must think for himself, and appropriate the results of former labors; each must analyze, or generalize, or criticise; and perhaps it is true that the original writer is he who gives to the world his own view of things, and not the things themselves. If he is unselfish and loves truth for itself, he is a poet; if he subjects truth to his own views, he writes of history, but he does not write history; facts become subservient to theories, and he mentions only a few, as necessary illustrations of his own system. The reader yawns over the succession of kings and events, and chooses for his guide the infidel Hume, the philanthropic Mackintosh, or the Hanoverian Macaulay. The fashion of the present day is the idolization of nature. This has made art pre-Raphaelite, and poetry euphuistic. History, too, is perhaps becoming a laborious restoration of the past. With a taste for detail which is truly Gothic, the popular historian must reproduce his characters with their own features, costume, and entourage, and the long forgotten personages, as if restored to life by the genius of Sir Walter Scott, must walk about the stage in mediaeval garb. History has gone through nearly the same phases on the continent until the period of the reformation. Then in Catholic countries—as France, Spain, and Italy—arose a more reasoning but a grave and instructive school of history, which preserved past events as a deposit of the ages of faith; and latterly, since excitement is become necessary to all, and the speculations of German literature have taught almost all to think, the French and German historians have adopted the philosophy of history. The German school takes a naked problem and proves it by a series of abstractions. We read Schlegel and Guizot, and we find, instead of facts or dates or persons, a sort of allegorical personification of civilization, liberty, progress, etc. This is rather declamation than narration, and those among the learned who value antiquity have found the art of realizing not the externals but the spirit of the past. Thus when Ozanam, as the professor of foreign literature at Paris, writes of the middle ages, the persons whom he names are, for the moment, living, not petrified, as in the stereoscope, but thinking, speaking, and acting, as if the writer could open a bright glimpse into the eternal world, where St. Denys, St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas still contemplate the author and giver of all they knew. And when he speaks of the succession of events, it seems as if we passed from the midst of a crowded procession, jostling along the dusty highway, to an eminence from which we see the points of its departure and arrival, the distinguished persons, the great objects, and the direction of the march, and that we [{778}] not only see but understand and sympathize with the spirit of the undertaking. The thought is from above, but it becomes our own. For he not only classifies and generalizes, but he christianizes his glimpses into history. His pictures are indeed only illustrative of his principles; but when he introduces a person or a fact, he speaks of them with such intimacy of knowledge that it creates a keen curiosity as well as a consciousness of ignorance in the reader. But the reader of Ozanam must be already a historian before he can appreciate the benefit of having his knowledge classified and animated by a living principle, as well as vivified and rendered distinct, as the objects in a dull landscape by a beam of sunshine.
The mission of Ozanam seems to be the destruction of those errors as to the value of the knowledge possessed in the middle ages, which have existed since the renaissance.
It was natural that when the calamities of Europe were so far past as to permit the development of the intellectual faculties, men should be elated by their new powers, and undervalue the painful labors of men interrupted by violence and crime. Maitland, by the evidence of his own reading, saw the injustice of this, and said wittily, that "by the dark ages were meant the ages about which we are in the dark." But he could see only the outward face of mediaeval knowledge, and missed its vivifying spirit—the faith of the Church. Ozanam had the gift of faith, and traces with a firm hand the progress of human intellect, often concealed and limited, but always advancing, and often breaking out in power and glory when some sainted pope or doctor of the Church explained the principles of religion and philosophy.
But it would be presumptuous to anticipate Ozanam himself, whose own words as well as his very life itself have given a résumé of his great object. It is at the conclusion of a lecture that he thus addresses the students:
"It is not my intention to follow out into its minor details the literary history of the fifth century. I only seek in it that light which will clear up the obscurity of the following ages. Travellers tell us of rivers which flow underneath rocks, and which reappear at a distance from the place where they were lost to the view. I trace up the stream of these traditions above the point where it seems to be lost, and I shall endeavor to descend with the stream into the abyss, in order to assure myself that I really behold the same waters at their outlet. Historians have opened a chasm between antiquity and barbarism. I have attempted to replace the connections which Providence has never suffered to fail in time any more than in space, etc. I should not brave the difficulties of such a study, gentlemen, if I were not supported, nay, urged onwards, by you. I call to witness these walls, that if ever, at rare intervals, I have been visited by inspiration, it was within their circuit; whether they have given back some of the glorious echoes with which they have formerly rung, or whether I have felt myself carried away by your ardent sympathies. Perhaps my design is rash; but you must share the responsibility. You will make up the deficiency of my strength. I shall grow old and gray-haired in the labor, if God permits; but the coldness of age shall not gain upon me so far as that I shall not be able to return, as this day, in order to renew the young vigor of my heart in the warmth of your youthful days."
It is in his lecture on pagan empires that Ozanam lays down the principle on which his views of mediaeval history are based: "Each epoch has a ruin and a conquest—a decadence and a renaissance." The greatest epoch of the world's history is that when all that was given to man at his creation was exchanged for a better nature at his redemption. This truth of destruction and regeneration is repeated over and over again through all created things—the seed must die before the [{779}] new grain can live. As each individual must be changed from the excellence of what he is still by nature to a heavenly model, so nations must be changed, and institutions perish and revive, and the great republic of letters, founded before the flood and perfected in Greece and Rome, must die and be regenerated in the Christian Church. The first decadence is that of pagan Rome.
It is impossible to represent by quotations the grand but terrible picture which Ozanam draws of paganism, in its glory, its worldly splendor, and its spiritual darkness. He does full justice to the excellence of every art and science which the heathens attained; but he shows that while the court of Augustus was the model of refinement and civilization, the altars were smoking with incense to devils, who were the personifications of every vice, and the rites of the temples were incantations and abominations. An audience of Christian students could not bear the too revolting details.
His object was the same as that of the great author of "Callista"—to destroy the prestige which still invests all that is classical. Rome was in truth a majestic empire, and even St. Jerome trembled at its fall: "Elle est captive la cité qui mit en captivité le monde."
St. Augustin was not a Roman, and was less overpowered by the terror of its fall. In the midst of the outcries which accused Christianity as the cause of the ruin which involved the world by the evident vengeance of heaven, the saint wrote his "City of God," and developed from the creation of the world to the times in which he lived the great Christian law of progress. A new empire—that of conscience—was to rule all nations. In this new empire strength and courage were of no avail, and women were as powerful as men in converting the world. Clotilde converted the heathen Franks, and Theodolind the Arian Lombards. The holy bishop St. Patrick converted in his lifetime the whole Irish nation; and the holy monk St. Benedict founded in the desert of Cassino the monastic armies of the Church; while St. Gregory, from his bed of sickness, headed the battle of civilization against barbarism. The victory was complete, and every converted country sent forth its missionaries to form Christian colonies.