CHAPTER XXXV FORMS OF SELF-EXPRESSION: THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY ACHIEVEMENT We have frequently spoken of expression as the completed form of the thought and emotion of which it is the utterance. And more than once we have remarked that the effect and influence, the efficient content, of the past passes on to succeeding periods in modes of expression. These constitute the enabling forms and substance through which the later time largely will express itself. But since the latter has thoughts and experience of its own, it will modify, and perhaps expand, the expressions which it has received, and may create forms of expression for itself. The thought and feeling of the sixteenth century culminated in forms of expression, some of which have never been superseded or surpassed. If we would see them in their relationships to whatever made them possible, it were well to note the high points of the achievements of the past. These also manifested themselves as mighty forms of expression, in language as well as in stone and marble and the materials of civilization. Thus they transmitted themselves and their effect to the sixteenth century, and to the century in which we live. Greece was a primal font of expression. The Greek achievement lived and moved and passed onward as a consummate presentation of valid human thought and human feeling, in beautiful and imperishable forms. They begin with Homer. They continue through lyric poets, Archilochus, Sappho, Pindar; through the great Athenian dramatists. Greek thinking reaches admirable form and expression with the philosophers: Heracleitus, Democritus, Socrates. It receives its perfect coronal in Plato. No less effectively Aristotle brought his logic and his metaphysics to forms destined to remote and lasting dominance. The Stoics and the Epicureans set their adjustments with life in statements constantly recurring. to future men. Besides these modes of speech, there had come into being a beautiful and consummate expression of Greek thought and feeling in religious and civic statuary and architecture. Under Greek influence, the Romans reached literary and rhetorical expression imitatively or derivatively. Out of their own genius, they found their calling in methods of government, diplomacy and war. In the domain of private law, they expressed their very selves imperishably. Living in the Roman Empire, but spiritually apart, the Jew essentially expressed himself in his religion. Its commands had been promulgated by law-givers in legal and ceremonial detail. Prophets and psalmists rendered its universal significance and its abysms of emotion. Out of Israel came Jesus and Paul: Jesus the Gospel, the ineffable expression, of God's wisdom for man, and of divine and human love; Paul, the impregnable formulation of the reconcilement, or spiritual supersession, of the Law. There followed the great endeavor (analogous to that of Paul) of the Graeco-Roman, ostensibly converted, world to re-express Paul and the Gospel, through terms of Greek philosophy and Roman law, in creeds and supporting dogmas. That also was a great achievement in expression. We pass over the period of transition to the Middle Ages, and the continuous effort of the early mediaeval centuries to learn and understand, and make their own, their patristic and classical heritages. These lessons. learned, this appropriation partially accomplished, the time of articulate mediaeval expression opens with the coming of the twelfth century. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Middle Ages attain the forms of their self-expression. The language of the past, its expressional achievements, when they do not directly enter and mould, or even constitute, the mediaeval forms, have at least enabled them to be. These final mediaeval achieve ments represent both an advance upon the immediate mediaeval past and a larger appropriation of the greater antique past which lay behind all the mediaeval centuries. The basis of these mediaeval expressions was the Latin language. That had grown, and to some extent had been artfully constructed, to correspond with the needs of Latin civilization as broadened and enlightened by the✓ infusion of Greek culture. It was a full-grown language, exact and logical and stately in its literature, looser and easier as spoken in the town and camp and province. It proved ample for the ethical philosophy of Rome, and exactly suited to jurisprudence, the ordered and even philosophical expression of legal principles and more special rules. It had been rendered elegant, even beautiful, in classical Roman poetry, history and oratory. Its structure had been loosened a little, somewhat declassicized, by the new Christian demands upon it for the expression of Christian thoughts. But still it held itself true Latin, rational and adequate, imposing and resonant, and so offered itself to half-barbaric, incipiently mediaeval, scholars. Sufficiently adaptable to new modes and sequences of thought, it proved a wonderful vehicle for scholastic theology and philosophy, while constraining them to logical exactitude in conception and expression. Its popularly spoken forms, its vernacular, were gradually to grow or change into the Romance tongues, Italian, Spanish, Provençal, and the marked varieties of old French. The first expressions of scholastic thought were drawn from a Christian Augustine imbued with Neo-platonism; from the Latin version of the Timaeus, with its grand cosmic imaginings; and from the simpler logical treatises in Aristotle's Organon. The matter was worked over and re-set by the Scholastics, with a gradually clearer understanding of their problems of arrangement and restatement. Their special problem of "universals " was taken bodily from its expression in Porphyry's Introduction to the Aristotelian Categories, all in the Latin of Boëthius. Through the latter half of the twelfth cen 1 See The Mediaeval Mind, Vol. II, chap. XXXVII (p. 369). tury the more elaborate treatises of the Organon advanced the discipline, and complicated the modes, of logical expression in the schools. And still through these decades, and through the next century, Augustinian Platonism gave form and body to the devotional and constructive thought of such great Franciscans as Saint Bona ventura. But the mightiest, and finally representative achievement of the Schools, was the work of Aquinas, set upon the labors of his master Albert. It consisted in the synthetic incorporation in the Christian scheme of the substantial philosophy of Aristotle. This was taken from those forms and statements in which it was expressed. Aquinas's recasting of it in his Christian scheme was the ultimate complete expression of scholastic Christianity. It was the summit of the mediaeval achievement in the catholic expression of its masterfully appropriated thought. Before Aquinas died, it was attacked, and afterwards frequently impugned. But it has not been superseded in Roman Catholicism to our day. Another province in which the Latin culture afforded mental discipline to the Middle Ages, and even more directly transmitted a terminology, was the Civil Law. The whole story of the mastering of the contents of Justinian's Digest by the Bologna School of commentators is a story of the appropriation of advanced legal concepts adequately expressed, and of the acquisition of the intellectual strength to apply them.2 Thus far the mediaeval achievements in the Latin expression of philosophy, theology and law were largely a re-expression of old thoughts, systematically rearranged, but otherwise often preserving the transmitted form. Mediaeval thinking had not yet reached beyond the antique and patristic categories, and scarcely needed new forms of expression to convey novel intellectual contents. But mediaeval feeling, and especially the religious emotion emanating from the Christian faith, had developed in modes unexperienced and unknown in ancient Greece or Rome, and not attained by the first 2 See The Mediaeval Mind, Vol. II, chap. XXXIV. Christian centuries, when Christian thought was formulated by the Church Fathers. Through the early Middle Ages, Christian emotion gathers force; and before the vernacular languages were adequate to its expression, it found its voice, its many voices, in mediaeval Latin, prose and verse. By the twelfth century, mediaeval devotion has adapted Latin to its faculties and needs; can pour forth its devout passion - its holy detestations, its fears of the Judgment, and above all its love of Him who had drawn men from the jaws of hell. Devout voices no longer re-express what Hilary or Jerome or Augustine had said or thought. There has come a mediaeval soul, and it has found its tongue,- in Peter Damiani declaring his horror of the filthy world and his devotion to the hermit life, with greater power and beauty in St. Bernard thundering forth the terrors of the Judgment Day, or, with subdued passion, whispering his love of Jesus. His sermons on Canticles have attained a noble adequacy of language, an almost rhyming sonorousness, indicating their affinities with the Mediaeval Latin Hymn. As the feeling, for instance, in the sermons of St. Bernard was largely of mediaeval growth, so not only the feeling of the mediaeval hymn, but the verse forms in which it was brought to such moving and beautiful expression, were mediaeval in their development. The Dies Irae, or the Stabat Mater, or the hymns of Adam of St. Victor, have no antecedent, either in feeling or verse form, among the Church Fathers or in the classical Latin or Greek literatures. These verses sprang from the mediaeval need to sing its faith; and, as utterances of religious emotion, have not been outdone.3 If we turn from all things written, and even from those uttered with intent and art, to acts and to words which fitted them, we find the life and sayings (for they are all one) of Francis of Assisi to have been a consummate devotional poem, and an expression of the love of God and man. By reason of the vehicle, sometimes because of the matter, less originality might come to expression in the 3 See The Mediaeval Mind, chap. XXXIII. |