Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/87



the attempt of John Scotus to change Christianity into a philosophy failed to make an impression upon the succeeding age, it is the less surprising when we consider that he failed in company with all the wise men of the ninth century. Their religions and their philosophical aims were alike forgotten, the practices and beliefs they combated won a gradual acceptance. In the interval between the decline of the Carolingian house and the reformation of the eleventh century, Christendom sank into a grosser view of religion, into an abasement of morals that pervaded the clergy equally with the laity, into an ignorance all but universal. In this Dark Age, as it is well described, it is a thankless task to seek for the elements of enlightenment of which the vestiges are so scanty. Their existence, however, is proved by the life they manifested as soon as the spirit of religion was reäwakened. It was the divorce between religion and learning, between religion and morality, that signalised the time; a divorce that, just as in the seventh century, was conditioned by the helpless confusion of the external order, its effect in turn reäcting upon itself.

Yet to speak of the age as consciously reverting to paganism, is to misread its character. When the church surrendered her charge of intellectual things, she assimilated herself no doubt to the returning barbarism of the civil state; and in this process she absorbed a variety of pagan elements which came to be identified with the