CHAPTER XXXV.

MEDIEVAL LITERATURE.

TENDENCIES OF ANGLO-NORMAN LITERATURE. CONSTRUCTIVE CHARACTER OF PHILOSOPHY. ANSELM'S METAPHYSICS. INFLUENCES OF PHILOSOPHY ON RELIGION. CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY. CYCLE OF POLITICAL ROMANCES. GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH. DISCOVERY OF ARTHUR'S REMAINS. CHIVALROUS ROMANCES ABOUT ARTHUR. EXTENT AND DIFFUSION OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE.

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ITHIN a hundred years from the Norman conquest, four important literary movements inspired English thought with new energies, and diverted it into new channels. The study of the best Latin authors produced a classical renaissance, which may traced in the chroniclers of the time, who affect copious quotations from Ovid or Horace, contrast their heroes with Cæsar or Alexander, or embellish the narrative with fictitious speeches. Meanwhile, as in the dearth of experimental science, and under the influences of monastic life, the highest speculative thought of the times was concentrated on theology, the Christian Church, no longer threatened by paganism, began to remodel its philosophical creed, and to occupy itself with the doubts of sceptical believers and the polemics of Jewish writers.'

1 Anselm tells us, in the preface to his Monologium, that it was written at the request of his pupils,

who wanted an independent proof of Christianity. In the preface to his Cur Deus Homo, he says that

LITERATURE OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY.

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Although there were schoolmen before Anselm, they were few and far between, and we may fairly father on him the new philosophy, whose golden chain of disputants was unbroken thenceforward down to the fifteenth century. Men of more secular or more practical habits of mind occupied themselves with Roman law, and interwove it with English feudalism. For one who wrote like Glanville, or lectured like Vacarius,' we may be certain there were twenty educated men, like Roger of Salisbury or Becket, who studied law to fit themselves. for state business. It would scarcely be wonderful if the movements derived from Cæsar and Virgil, from Plato, and from Justinian, had absorbed the intellect of the age, and hindered the beginnings of a national literature. But the facts are otherwise. English history found a native poet in Layamon. Norman chivalry created that splendid romance-literature which has made Arthur an undying name, and whose thoughts and incidents are more than ever household words, at the end

his first book is an answer to the objections of infidels who reject Christianity as irrational. Giraldus Cambrensis gives incidentally three stories, one of a monk, two of teachers, who impugned the cardinal doctrines of Christianity. Gemma Eccles., dist. I. c. 51. In the romance of the Holy Graal, the introduction represents a monk who has doubts on the doctrine of the Trinity. Furnivall's Saynt Graal, Roxburghe Club, p. 7. Cf. pp. 84, 85, in which a heathen clerk is brought in arguing against it, and is only confuted by a miracle. Gilbert, abbot of Westminster and a contemporary of Anselm, wrote a Disputatio Judæi cum Christiano, the report of an actual discussion, which

seems to have converted a Jew present. Compare Malmesbury, lib. iv. p. 500, and the story of a knight in Joinville (p. 16, ed. Michel), who stops a controversy between Jews and Christians, "Car . . . avoit il séans grant foison de bons chrétiens qui s'en feussent parti touz miscréanz," &c.

1 Vacarius, a Lombard by birth, was brought over in Stephen's reign, by archbishop Theobald, to assist him in his contest with Henry of Winchester about their respective privileges. Vacarius took advantage of his stay in England to read lectures on Roman law in Oxford. At the suggestion of his scholars, he drew up a manual of legal practice. Chron. Norm., p. 983, A. 1148.

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MEDIEVAL WRITERS.

of six centuries. The songs, epigrams, and metrical stories, which formed, so to speak, the periodical press of the times, are in great measure lost to us. The chances were terribly against literary immortality when so many men could write, when the means of multiplying a good book were small, and when the publicity that enables the world to compare good with bad works was almost unattainable. The writings of Giraldus Cambrensis have come down to us in a single manuscript, and much that Roger Bacon wrote has perished. It is therefore remarkable that we should still be able to count up nearly two hundred Anglo-Norman writers who flourished between the reigns of the Conqueror and John. These are of very unequal merit; but the highest names among them include some of which any age might be proud. Anselm as a thinker may be placed by the side of Kant. The vivid style and descriptive power of Giraldus Cambrensis remind us, in his autobiography, of Montaigne; in his geographies, of Herodotus; and in his narratives, of Clarendon. Glanville is still a classical name in law. There is a want of artistic finish about Anglo-Norman poetry; but the main conception of the "Quest of the Sangréal," and the chief traits of the story, entitle its author, Walter de Mapes, to the rank of an epic poet. Had those romances ever been remodelled by a Dante, instead of

1 Phillipps, in his Eng. ReichsGeschichte, doubts whether Glanville was really the author of the Tractatus de Legibus, but admits its possibility. Band. i. s. 232. Mr. Hunter, in his preface to the Pedes Finium, vol. i. pp. xiv.-xvii., takes the same line even more strongly. Beamish, however, in the preface to

the Tractatus, advocates Glanville's claim, and Mr. Foss, in his Judges of England, vol. i. pp. 180-183, shows almost conclusive reason for believing that the work was written either from Glanville's dictation or under his direction and superintend

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MEDIEVAL FAITH AND CRITICISM.

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a Malory, the world would have judged the middle ages more truly.

The philosophy of Anselm is, in a certain sense, the key-note to all mediæval literature. To understand it, we must start from the circumstances of the times. Criticism was beginning to assail the fabric of religion, which a thousand years had built up. But criticism, unfurnished with philosophy or a knowledge of history, was reduced to à priori arguments on the nature of God and the world. Even such a man as Abelard, who collected contradictory passages in Scripture, and placed them in witness against one another, attached no importance to the difficulties he conjured up; they were rather exercises for logical subtlety than stumblingblocks to faith. In other words, the truths of Christianity, Scripture, and the Church, were so interwoven in the popular apprehension, that they stood or fell together the doubter was either a Deist or a Jew at heart. Now, in a contest between the faith and its opponents, the advantage in the twelfth century lay altogether with the defence. The Bible and St. Augustine only needed to be expounded by Anselm, in the century of the crusades, for the impotence of all scepticism to be exposed. But this strength of the Church gives the works of its advocates a constructive character. They aim not so much at demolishing an adversary, as at exhibiting their own theory in completeness and majesty. "I believe in order that I may understand," is the key-note of Anselm's philosophy.1 The truth, if it be but known, will speak for itself. Moreover, the true metaphysician is the poet of the

1 66 Neque enim quæro intelligere ut credam; sed credo ut intelligam." Proslog., c. 1.

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ANSELM'S PROOF OF GOD.

universe. The relations of the finite and the infinite, of God and the world, are the subject-matter of his art. Hence, if he be a thorough workman, he will never rest satisfied with barren dialectical victories: he demolishes on constraint, but he produces from the natural impulse to endow the world with something perfect which it wanted. His greatness and his failure lie in the effort to know and explain God as law.

In proving God's existence, Anselm commits the usual error of basing his proof on the facts of human consciousness. Assuming that there is some one point in which all desirable things agree, he arrives at the conception of absolute goodness which underlies them. Similarly the principle of existence, if it be not distinct in everything that exists, must be absolute. Now, as the cause of existence is the cause of the existence of good, the cause of all existence will be the highest good. Even if there be several supereminent natures, they must agree in some common point of excellence, and that sum of all goodness is deity.1 Again, the mere fact that there are certain ideas which by their nature transcend finite experience, the belief in an infinite Being, or in infinite goodness, is a proof that there is some existence independent of the mind, and yet underlying all consciousness. The mere thought of God is a proof that he exists.2 A tacit assumption that right reason and absolute truth coincide is the basis of all these arguments. Supposing them to be irrefragable, they only demonstrate that the conception of God is a necessity of human thought. This does not impair their practical

1 Monolog., cc. 1-7.

2 Proslog., cc. 2-15. Anselm distinguishes the capacity to comprehend the ideas of deity, from that

actual comprehension which follows faith. "Aliud est enim rem esse in intellectu; aliud intelligere rem esse.”