Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/90

72 Juvenal as infallible authorities; but we cannot draw too broad an inference from this assertion in an age which, we know from the example of Ratherius, was apt to consider the canons of the church and the forged decretals of Isidore as equally with the Bible and the fathers, the discipline of God. The patriotism of the Italian seduced him into an error possibly more innocuous than that which approved itself to the orthodoxy of the time. There was a mysterious sanction inherent in written documents which it did not occur to men to criticise or distinguish.

In the same way, if any of these scholastics chanced to engage in the controversies of the church, he was inevitably entangled in a motley confusion of sacred and profane. Eugenius Vulgarius exhausts his classical vocabulary, in language recalling the most servile rhetoric of the brazen age of the empire, to express the divinity of that pope whose pontificate is marked by the deepest ruin of order, the vilest abandonment of decency, that Rome ever witnessed. Yet he dismisses the claims of the apostolic see with a confidence worthy of Claudius of Turin or of a modern protestant, and maintains that a man can only obtain the authority of saint Peter by deserving it. The contradiction would be inconceivable but for the mixture of heterogeneous ideas which marks the barbarism of the age. The church refused to be