Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/24

6 to orthodoxy: Tertullian's famous saying, a Haereticorum patriarchae philosophi, expresses but a portion of the truth. The entire classical tradition, all learning in its large sense, was treated not merely as irrelevant to the studies of the Christian, but as a snare from which he was taught to flee as from a temptation of the evil one. Such an antagonism inevitably tended to limit the aims and to narrow the character of the Christian church. It is not necessary here to trace its immediate result upon her doctrine and ceremonial; the fact by itself suffices to show that as Christianity extended its sway among the nations that had overwhelmed the empire, it could not bring with it those refining influences by which it would have been attended, had it absorbed and purified the culture of Rome. As it was, the church was built upon the ruins of a subjugated society; its fabric was but a step less barbarous than that of the Teutonic civilisation by which it was confronted.

If we confine our view to the literary aspect of the question, the marks of retrogression are clear and unmistakeable. Among the few who still cultivated learning oratory degenerated into panegyric, poetry occupied itself with mean or trivial subjects. With the rest the Latin language itself lost its nerve; idiom and even syntax were forgotten: it was enough if a writer could make himself understood at all. If down to the fifth century we find rare examples of an opposite tendency, the hostility of the church towards classical letters is thenceforth strongly marked. In the sixth century indeed Cassiodorus labours to prove that secular learning is good and profitable, utilis et non refugienda cognitio, and anxiously supports his argument by a catalogue of learned men downwards from Moses to the fathers: but the apology itself implies the discredit into which