Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/346

Rh 332 N E N N E O NENNIUS, the supposed author of a llistoria Britonum, which, commencing with a description of Britain, gives the mythical origin of the Britons and Scots and an account of the Roman occupation and of the reign of Vortigern, describes the successive settlements of the Saxons, and concludes with a narrative of the twelve battles in which King Arthur, in the 6th century, is said to have defeated the Saxons. The work is evidently the production of a Cymric or ancient Welsh writer; but the claim of Nennius to be regarded as the author is derived solely from two prologues, where he is described as the disciple of one Elvodugus or Elbotus, whom we may perhaps identify with Elbodus, bishop of North Wales, who died in 809, and whose notable innovation of the introduction of the Roman cycle in keeping Easter &quot; Nennius &quot; appears to have followed. Of the above prologues (which differ considerably) one is preserved in the MS. in the cathedral library at Durham, and in this it is stated that the History was written in the year 858, which year is also spoken of as being the twenty-fourth of the reign of Mervin, king of the Britons. But in the work itself (chap, xvi.) it is stated that between the arrival of the Saxons (assigned in chap. xxxi. to the year 447) and the fourth year of the reign of Mervin, four hundred and twenty-nine years elapsed. Thus the twenty-fourth year of Mervin becomes coincident with the year 896, or thirty-eight years later than the date assigned by the prologue. This discrepancy, taken in con junction with the following facts, viz., that both the above prologues are much superior in style and diction to the barbarous Latin of the llistoria itself, that the MSS. prior to the 13th century are either altogether silent respecting the authorship or ascribe it to Gildas, and that Henry of Huntingdon, in his llistoria Anglorum (chap, xviii.), after quoting verbatim the account above referred to of King Arthur s battles, expressly speaks of it as taken from Gildas, has led the most competent critics to con clude that the real author of the llistoria Britonum must be looked upon as unknown. The original text is likewise a matter of doubt, the work having evidently been sub jected to several recensions, in which the earliest version can no longer be traced. As an historical composition the llistoria Britonum lias but little value. M. de la Bonlerie lays it down as a canon that, when the work is found to contain an unsupported statement, which at the same time does not clash with the authority of Bede, Gildas, or any other received authority, such statement may, after due examination, be accepted ; but if at variance with those autho rities, it should be rejected. Much of the narrative, however, is evidently the offspring of invention and imagination ; while the Cymric superstition respecting the mysterious importance attaching to the number three and its multiples induces the writer habitually to represent the more striking events and phenomena as occurring in a succession of triads. The peculiar value of the Historia con sists in the illustration it affords of the Welsh mythology and those traditions of the race which took the place of history; it is in fact the earliest collection of those British legends which gave birth to the romances of Brut, Merlin, King Arthur, and the whole cycle of epics associated with the Knights of the Round Table. This element is discussed at some length by San Marte (A. Schulz) in the preface to his edition of Gildas and Xennius ( Berlin, 1844). The best edition of the text is that edited by the l!ev. Joseph Steven son for the English Historical Society (1838). The most recent criticism on both the work and the manuscript sources will be found in L Historia Britonum, by M. de la Borderie (Paris, 1883). NEOPHYTE (ved&amp;lt;uTcs, &quot;newly planted&quot;) was the designation applied to newly baptized persons in the ancient church. These usually wore the white garments which they received at their admission to the church (see BAPTISM, vol. iii. p. 351) during the whole of the following week, but the application of the name did not necessarily cease at the close of that period. A special employment of the word was to denote one who, not having duly passed through the inferior grades, was in view of 1 Tim. iii. 6 considered canonically unfit to be consecrated a bishop. NEOPLATONISM. Historical Position and Signifi cance. The political history of the ancient world closes with the formation, under Diocletian and Constantine, of a universal state bearing the cast of Oriental as well as Graco-Roman civilization. The history of ancient philo sophy ends in like manner with a universal philosophy which appropriated elements of almost all the earlier systems, and worked up the results of Eastern and Western culture. And, just as the Byzantine Roman empire was at once the supreme effort of the old world and the outcome of its exhaustion, so Neoplatonism is in one aspect the consummation, in another the collapse, of ancient philosophy. Never before in Greek or Roman speculation had the consciousness of man s dignity and superiority to nature found such adequate expression ; and never before had real science and pure knowledge been so undervalued and despised by the leaders of culture as they were by the Neoplatonists. Judged from the stand point of pure science, or the empirical investigation of the universe, philosophy passed its meridian in Plato and Aristotle, declined in the post-Aristotelian systems, and set in the darkness of Neoplatonism. But, from the religious and moral point of view, it must be affirmed that the ethical &quot; mood &quot; which Neoplatonism endeavoured to create and maintain is the highest and purest ever reached by antiquity. That this attainment should have been made at the expense of science was inevitable. On the level of the polytheistic nature-religions physical science must either subjugate and destroy religion, or be sub jugated and destroyed by it. Religion and morality, how ever, are found to be the stronger forces ; and philosophy, standing midway between these and physical science, may waver for a little, but ultimately it yields to the greater power. The conflict with empirical knowledge is ren dered inevitable by the fact that within the sphere of nature-religion the ethical is itself, without any misgiving, conceived as a higher order of the natural. The higher &quot;physics&quot; for as such we must here regard religious ethics must dislodge the lower, in order to maintain its own ground. Philosophy must cease to exist as science, in order that man s assertion of the supernatural value oi his person and his life may receive full recognition. It is a proof of the strength of the moral instincts of mankind that the only phase of culture which we can survey in all its stages from beginning to end culminated, not in materialism, but in the boldest idealism. This idealism, however, is also in its way a mark of intellectual bankruptcy. Contempt for reason and science leads in the end to barbarism, its necessary consequence being the rudest superstition, and sheer helplessness in the presence of all sorts of delusion. As a matter of fact, barbarism did break out after the flower had fallen from Neoplatonism. The philosophers themselves, no doubt, still lived on the knowledge they repudiated ; but the masses were trained to a superstition with which the Christian church, as the executor of Neoplatonism, had to reckon and contend. By a fortunate coincidence, at the very moment when this bankruptcy of the old culture its reversion to barbarism must have become apparent, the stage of history was occupied by barbaric peoples, with whom the work of the past thousand years went for nothing. This has obscured the fact, which is nevertheless obvious enough to a keener scrutiny, that the inner history of antiquity, ending as it did in despair of this world, must in any event have seen a recurrence of barbarism. The present world was a thing that men would neither enjoy nor master nor study. A new world was discovered, for the sake of which every thing else was abandoned; to make sure of that world insight and intelligence were freely sacrificed ; and, in the light that streamed from beyond, the abeurdities of the