The work is an alternation of verse and prose: Boethius, in his own person, speaks in prose, while Philosophy answers in verse. There is a certain resemblance to Dante, who was no doubt influenced by him in the Vita Nuova.
The Consolations, which Gibbon rightly calls a “golden volume,” begins by the statement that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are the true philosophers; Stoics, Epicureans, and the rest are usurpers, whom the profane multitude mistook for the friends of philosophy. Boethius says he obeyed the Pythagorean command to “follow God” (not the Christian command). Happiness, which is the same thing as blessedness, is the good, not pleasure. Friendship is a “most sacred thing.” There is much morality that agrees closely with Stoic doctrine, and is in fact largely taken from Seneca. There is a summary, in verse, of the beginning of the Timaeus. This is followed by a great deal of purely Platonic metaphysics. Imperfection, we are told, is a lack, implying the existence of a perfect pattern. He adopts the privative theory of evil. He then passes on to a pantheism which should have shocked Christians, but for some reason did not. Blessedness and God, he says, are both the chiefest good, and are therefore identical. “Men are made happy by the obtaining of divinity.” “They who obtain divinity become gods. Wherefore every one that is happy is a god, but by nature there is only one God, but there may be many by participation.” “The sum, origin, and cause of all that is sought after is rightly thought to be goodness.” “The substance of God consisteth in nothing else but in goodness.” Can God do evil? No. Therefore evil is nothing, since God can do everything. Virtuous men are always powerful, and bad men always weak; for both desire the good, but only the virtuous get it. The wicked are more unfortunate if they escape punishment than if they suffer it. (Note that this could not be said of punishment in hell.) “In wise men there is no place for hatred.”
The tone of the book is more like that of Plato than that of Plotinus. There is no trace of the superstition or morbidness of the age, no obsession with sin, no excessive straining after the unattainable. There is perfect philosophic calm—so much that, if the book had been written in prosperity, it might almost have been called smug. Written when it was, in prison under sentence of death, it is as admirable as the last moments of the Platonic Socrates.
One does not find a similar outlook until after Newton. I will quote in extenso one poem from the book, which, in its philosophy, is not unlike Pope’s Essay on Man.
If Thou wouldst see
God’s laws with purest mind,
Thy sight on heaven must fixed be,
Whose settled course the stars in peace doth bind.
The sun’s bright fire
Stops not his sister’s team,
Nor doth the northern bear desire
Within the ocean’s wave to hide her beam.
Though she behold
The other stars there couching,
Yet she incessantly is rolled
About high heaven, the ocean never touching.
The evening light
With certain course doth show
The coming of the shady night,
And Lucifer before the day doth go.
This mutual love
Courses eternal makes,
And from the starry spheres above
All cause of war and dangerous discord takes.
This sweet consent
In equal bands doth tie
The nature of each element
So that the moist things yield unto the dry.
The piercing cold
With flames doth friendship heap
The trembling fire the highest place doth hold,
And the gross earth sinks down into the deep.
The flowery year
Breathes odours in the spring,
The scorching summer corn doth bear
The autumn fruit from laden trees doth bring.
The falling rain
Doth winter’s moisture give.
These rules thus nourish and maintain
All creatures which we see on earth to live.
And when they die,
These bring them to their end,
While their Creator sits on high,
Whose hand the reins of the whole world doth bend.
He as their king
Rules them with lordly might.
From Him they rise, flourish, and spring,
He as their law and judge decides their right.
Those things whose course
Most swiftly glides away
His might doth often backward force,
And suddenly their wandering motion stay.
Unless his strength
Their violence should bound,
And them which else would run at length,
Should bring within the compass of a round,
That firm decree
Which now doth all adorn
Would soon destroyed and broken be,
Things being far from their beginning borne.
This powerful love
Is common unto all.
Which for desire of good do move
Back to the springs from whence they first did fall.
No worldly thing
Can a continuance have
Unless love back again it bring
Unto the cause which first the essence gave.
Boethius was, until the end, a friend of Theodoric. His father was consul, he was consul, and so were his two sons. His father-in-law Symmachus (probably grandson of the one who had a controversy with Ambrose about the statue of Victory) was an important man in the court of the Gothic king. Theodoric employed Boethius to reform the coinage, and to astonish less sophisticated barbarian kings with such devices as sun-dials and water-clocks. It may be that his freedom from superstition was not so exceptional in Roman aristocratic families as elsewhere; but its combination with great learning and zeal for the public good was unique in that age. During the two centuries before his time and the ten centuries after it, I cannot think of any European man of learning so free from superstition and fanaticism. Nor are his merits merely negative; his survey is lofty, disinterested, and sublime. He would have been remarkable in any age; in the age in which he lived, he is utterly amazing.
The medieval reputation of Boethius was partly due to his being regarded as a martyr to Arian persecution—a view which began two or three hundred years after his death. In Pavia, he was regarded as a saint, but in fact he was not canonized. Though Cyril was a saint, Boethius was not.
Two years after the execution of Boethius, Theodoric died. In the next year, Justinian became Emperor. He reigned until 565, and in this long time managed to do much harm and some good. He is of course chiefly famous for his Digest. But I shall not venture on this topic, which is one for the lawyers. He was a man of deep piety, which he signalized, two years after his accession, by closing the schools of philosophy in Athens, where paganism still reigned. The dispossessed philosophers betook themselves to Persia, where the king received them kindly. But they were shocked—more so, says Gibbon, than became philosophers—by the Persian practices of polygamy and incest, so they returned home again, and faded into obscurity. Three years after this exploit (532), Justinian embarked upon another, more worthy of praise—the building of St. Sophia. I have never seen St. Sophia, but I have seen the beautiful contemporary mosaics at Ravenna, including portraits of Justinian and his empress Theodora. Both were very pious, though Theodora was a lady of easy virtue whom he had picked up in the circus. What is even worse, she was inclined to be a Monophysite.
But enough of scandal. The Emperor himself, I am happy to say, was of impeccable orthodoxy, except in the matter of the “Three Chapters.” This was a vexatious controversy. The Council of Chalcedon had pronounced orthodox three Fathers suspected of Nestorianism; Theodora, along with many others, accepted all the other decrees of the council, but not this one. The Western Church stood by everything decided by the Council, and the empress was driven to persecute the Pope. Justinian ado
red her, and after her death in 548, she became to him what the dead Prince Consort was to Queen Victoria. So in the end he lapsed into heresy. A contemporary historian (Evagrius) writes: “Having since the end of his life received the wages of his misdeeds, he has gone to seek the justice which was his due before the judgment-seat of hell.”
Justinian aspired to reconquer as much as possible of the Western Empire. In 535 he invaded Italy, and at first had quick success against the Goths. The Catholic population welcomed him, and he came as representing Rome against the barbarians. But the Goths rallied, and the war lasted eighteen years, during which Rome, and Italy generally, suffered far more than in the barbarian invasion.
Rome was five times captured, thrice by Byzantines, twice by Goths, and sank to a small town. The same sort of thing happened in Africa, which Justinian also more or less reconquered. At first his armies were welcomed; then it was found that Byzantine administration was corrupt and Byzantine taxes were ruinous. In the end, many people wished the Goths and Vandals back. The Church, however, until his last years, was steadily on the side of the Emperor, because of his orthodoxy. He did not attempt the reconquest of Gaul, partly because of distance, but partly also because the Franks were orthodox.
In 568, three years after Justinian’s death, Italy was invaded by a new and very fierce German tribe, the Lombards. Wars between them and the Byzantines continued intermittently for two hundred years, until nearly the time of Charlemagne. The Byzantines held gradually less and less of Italy; in the South, they had also to face the Saracens. Rome remained nominally subject to them, and the popes treated the Eastern emperors with deference. But in most parts of Italy the emperors, after the coming of the Lombards, had very little authority or even none at all. It was this period that ruined Italian civilization. It was refugees from the Lombards who founded Venice, not, as tradition avers, fugitives from Attila.
CHAPTER VI
Saint Benedict and Gregory the Great
IN the general decay of civilization that came about during the incessant wars of the sixth and succeeding centuries, it was above all the Church that preserved whatever survived of the culture of ancient Rome. The Church performed this work very imperfectly, because fanaticism and superstition prevailed among even the greatest ecclesiastics of the time, and secular learning was thought wicked. Nevertheless, ecclesiastical institutions created a solid framework, within which, in later times, a revival of learning and civilized arts became possible.
In the period with which we are concerned, three of the activities of the Church call for special notice: first, the monastic movement; second, the influence of the papacy, especially under Gregory the Great; third, the conversion of the heathen barbarians by means of missions. I will say something about each of these in succession.
The monastic movement began simultaneously in Egypt and Syria about the beginning of the fourth century. It had two forms, that of solitary hermits, and that of monasteries. Saint Anthony, the first of the hermits, was born in Egypt about 250, and withdrew from the world about 270. For fifteen years he lived alone in a hut near his home; then, for twenty years, in remote solitude in the desert. But his fame spread, and multitudes longed to hear him preach. Accordingly, about 305, he came forth to teach, and to encourage the hermit’s life. He practised extreme austerities, reducing food, drink, and sleep to the minimum required to support life. The devil constantly assailed him with lustful visions, but he manfully withstood the malign diligence of Satan. By the end of his life, the Thebaid* was full of hermits who had been inspired by his example and his precepts.
A few years later—about 315 or 320—another Egyptian, Pachomius, founded the first monastery. Here the monks had a common life, without private property, with communal meals and communal religious observations. It was in this form, rather than in that of Saint Anthony, that monasticism conquered the Christian world. In the monasteries derived from Pachomius, the monks did much work, chiefly agricultural, instead of spending the whole of their time in resisting the temptations of the flesh.
At about the same time, monasticism sprang up in Syria and Mesopotamia. Here asceticism was carried to even greater lengths than in Egypt. Saint Simeon Stylites and the other pillar hermits were Syrian. It was from the East that monasticism came to Greek-speaking countries, chiefly owing to Saint Basil (about 360). His monasteries were less ascetic; they had orphanages, and schools for boys (not only for such as intended to become monks).
At first, monasticism was a spontaneous movement, quite outside Church organization. It was Saint Athanasius who reconciled ecclesiastics to it. Partly as a result of his influence, it came to be the rule that monks should be priests. It was he also, while he was in Rome in 339, who introduced the movement into the West. Saint Jerome did much to promote it, and Saint Augustine introduced it into Africa. Saint Martin of Tours inaugurated monasteries in Gaul, Saint Patrick in Ireland. The monastery of Iona was founded by Saint Columba in 566. In early days, before monks had been fitted into the ecclesiastical organization, they had been a source of disorder. To begin with, there was no way of discriminating between genuine ascetics and men who, being destitute, found monastic establishments comparatively luxurious. Then again there was the difficulty that the monks gave a turbulent support to their favourite bishop, causing synods (and almost causing councils) to fall into heresy. The synod (not the council) of Ephesus, which decided for the Monophysites, was under a monkish reign of terror. But for the resistance of the Pope, the victory of the Monophysites might have been permanent. In later time, such disorders no longer occurred.
There seem to have been nuns before there were monks—as early as the middle of the third century. Some shut themselves up in tombs.
Cleanliness was viewed with abhorrence. Lice were called “pearls of God,” and were a mark of saintliness. Saints, male and female, would boast that water had never touched their feet except when they had to cross rivers. In later centuries, monks served many useful purposes: they were skilled agriculturists, and some of them kept alive or revived learning. But in the beginning, especially in the eremitic section, there was none of this. Most monks did no work, never read anything except what religion prescribed, and conceived virtue in an entirely negative manner, as abstention from sin, especially the sins of the flesh. Saint Jerome, it is true, took his library with him into the desert, but he came to think that this had been a sin.
In Western monasticism, the most important name is that of Saint Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine Order. He was born about 480, near Spoleto, of a noble Umbrian family; at the age of twenty, he fled from the luxuries and pleasures of Rome to the solitude of a cave, where he lived for three years. After this period, his life was less solitary, and about the year 520 he founded the famous monastery of Monte Cassino, for which he drew up the “Benedictine rule.” This was adapted to Western climates, and demanded less austerity than had been common among Egyptian and Syrian monks. There had been an unedifying competition in ascetic extravagance, the most extreme practitioner being considered the most holy. To this Saint Benedict put an end, decreeing that austerities going beyond the rule could only be practised by permission of the abbot. The abbot was given great power; he was elected for life, and had (within the Rule and the limits of orthodoxy) an almost despotic control over his monks, who were no longer allowed, as previously, to leave their monastery for another if they felt so inclined. In later times. Benedictines have been remarkable for learning, but at first all their reading was devotional.
Organizations have a life of their own, independent of the intentions of their founders. Of this fact, the most striking example is the Catholic Church, which would astonish Jesus, and even Paul. The Benedictine Order is a lesser example. The monks take a vow of poverty, obedience, and chastity. As to this, Gibbon remarks: “I have somewhere heard or read the frank confession of a Benedictine abbot: ‘My vow of poverty has given me an hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sov
ereign prince.’ I forget the consequences of his vow of chastity.”* The departures of the Order from the founder’s intentions were, however, by no means all regrettable. This is true, in particular, of learning. The library of Monte Cassino is famous, and in various ways the world is much indebted to the scholarly tastes of later Benedictines.
Saint Benedict lived at Monte Cassino from its foundation until his death in 543. The monastery was sacked by the Lombards, shortly before Gregory the Great, himself a Benedictine, became Pope. The monks fled to Rome; but when the fury of the Lombards had abated, they returned to Monte Cassino.
From the dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great, written in 593, we learn much about Saint Benedict. He was “brought up at Rome in the study of humanity. But forasmuch as he saw many by the reason of such learning to fall to dissolute and lewd life, he drew back his foot, which he had as it were now set forth into the world, lest, entering too far in acquaintance therewith, he likewise might have fallen into that dangerous and godless gulf: wherefore, giving over his book, and forsaking his father’s house and wealth, with a resolute mind only to serve God, he sought for some place, where he might attain to the desire of his holy purpose: and in this sort he departed, instructed with learned ignorance, and furnished with unlearned wisdom.”
He immediately acquired the power to work miracles. The first of these was the mending of a broken sieve by means of prayer. The townsmen hung the sieve over the church door, and it “continued there many years after, even to these very troubles of the Lombards.” Abandoning the sieve, he went to his cave, unknown to all but one friend, who secretly supplied him with food let down by a rope, to which a bell was tied to let the saint know when his dinner had come. But Satan threw a stone at the rope, breaking both it and the bell. Nevertheless, the enemy of mankind was foiled in his hope of disrupting the Saint’s food-supply.
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