occasion for triumph. The Church the fall of the schools of Neo-Platonism should awaken any victory no shout of triumph among Churchmen, as if they had succeeded in treading down a dangerous adversary; or lest philosophers should complain that some great and hideous injustice was committed, or some great loss sustained by the universe. There is no cause for shouting among Churchmen: first, because no true principle which Platonism had asserted could by possibility die, no vital distinction which it had proclaimed could be effaced, though all the statesmen and the Churchmen in the universe should conspire to produce such a result. There had been true principles asserted by Plato: if they were forgotten or buried under theological theories, theologians in later days would have to seek them again, and reassert them as the justification of the facts and promises of the Gospel. There were vital distinctions established by Platonism, the distinctions between the eternal and the temporal, the spiritual and the sensual, heaven and earth: if these were denied or made light of by Christian doctors, the humble members of the Christian Church would have to demand them again, that St. Paul and St. John might not be accused of deceiving them,-that they might not be robbed of treasures for which none that can be weighed in earthly balances are any compensation. And, such a shout of triumph over a fallen foe is most idle and uncalled for, because the confusions and perplexities of the Platonical school, and the phantasies and superstitions which overwhelmed it, belong to human nature. We shall have to trace the reappearance of them, under different forms, in all periods. The Christian doctor and priest is not more safe from them than another man. If he does not notice the forms which they have taken, and supposes that they belong to others, not to him, he will certainly fall into them. The fall of 28. But the philosophical dirge is as little reasonable as the no cause for ecclesiastical pean. The work which Platonism had to do in lamentation. the world, it had accomplished. If philosophers wish for a recognition of its worth from those whom they suppose are its enemies, the Christian literature of four centuries will supply it. If we compare Athanasius or Augustin with those who worshipped their names in later days, we shall know how, consciously or unconsciously, they were helped by Plato to do a work which their successors could not have done. And if this is not the kind of homage which the modern admirers of Plato would desire, they may trace through all the history of the time, indications how much the thoughts of which he was the utterer were at work in minds which knew nothing of him,how much Society was receiving its outward character and form from certain great spiritual principles that could only be expressed in language speaking of Being, of Unity, of a human and divine Ideal. If these principles present themselves in history not as abstract forms, but as living facts, this is certainly what Socrates and Plato would have expected. This explains why the former clung so tenaciously to the wood of the carpenter and the last of the shoemaker; why the latter could ask even a tyrant of Syracuse to find himan actual world in which he might work, that he might escape from the abstractions which he hated. could not as the 29. If indeed Plato had been the only teacher of the old Why Plato Greek world who had worked out important principles, or dis- continue to covered a valuable method,—if there was no region besides the be regarded one to which he pointed the way-there might be some reason in philosopher. the complaint that it could not last beyond the fifth or sixth century, and that a Church which had its foundation in Palestine, and received its lore from Semitic teachers, extinguished that which interfered with their supremacy. But we have always maintained that the field of thought in which Aristotle worked is one which requires and rewards cultivation, as well as that which his master tilled. Each, we have contended, in opposition to the pretensions of their respective schools, did what the other could not do. The disciples of Plato made him the systematiser which he was trying not to be, when they sought to bring the universe under his government. The great danger of Aristotle arose from the encyclopædic character of his mind, which made him suppose that he had comprehended all things because he had succeeded in discovering the formulas under which man conceives of all things. The proximate cause of the ruin of the Neo-Platonic school was that they fancied they could include Orpheus, Plato, Aristotle, in themselves,-that the universe had been in travail for nearly 5000 years only to bring them forth. If they were good Platonists, they could not be also good Aristotelians. They might honour Aristotle sincerely and profoundly, but it was mere arrogance to pretend that they could deal with the class of facts which he understood better than any man, upon their method. It was all very well for Cicero to unite the Academician and the Peripatetic. Mere artificial schools may always be accommodated, though they cannot be reconciled. But in the history of the world philosophies will either go for nothing, or they will prove their worth by connecting themselves with some distinct region of human experience which is demanding interpretation. We often hear of a tyranny Philosophiof Aristotle which succeeded to the tyranny of Plato. Such caltyrannies language may have an important truth in it which we shall have signify. to examine and to confess. But a tyranny does not establish itself for centuries upon an earth which is subject to an order, by mere accident. A man who has been in his grave a thousand -what they Aristot'e. years does not, in despite of a multitude of living obstacles, spring to a throne over the most thinking minds for a series of ages, merely because they have a mad propensity for being in bondage. It is not that propensity, but the desire for deliverance, for illumination, upon subjects on which darkness is intolerable and unsafe, which has led men to seek for one or another guide to their footsteps. We must understand through what path they were travelling, what the surrounding atmosphere was, before we can pronounce that they chose amiss. It may be that their temporary chief is the very one that has been appointed for them; that it would have been as perilous for them to have been without him, as it was to follow him, when they entered a new track which he had not trodden, or in which he had gone astray. Indications of a new epoch. Boethius, A. D. 470-524. The place assigned him by scholars. 30. Before the fifth century closed, there were very clear indications of the approach not of an Aristotelian school but of an Aristotelian epoch. We will point out in what direction these traces are to be sought. But when we have done our duty to chronology, by denoting the man who was to be the commencement of the new period, we shall reserve the consideration of his thoughts, which were to have so great an influence upon it, till it has actually commenced. Boethius is commonly spoken of as the swan from whose throat the dying notes of old classical eloquence proceeded; as the man who preserved the tradition of the age of Cicero, or at least of Pliny, in the days of the Ostrogoth. That honour may doubtless belong to him, and it is the one on which the scholar is most likely to dwell. The cruel sentence of the hitherto just ruler, upon the Roman Senator, the fact that he occupied his prison hours in writing the "Consolations of Philosophy," that, Christian as he was, he clung to that word as fondly as Augustin had done, the somewhat pedantical attachment with which he held by the old forms of the republic, like the Arnolds and Rienzis of after days, offer a sufficient excuse for that classification which connects him with the world that had been, rather than with that which was to be. But those who love to watch the birth more than the death of things-who welcome Theodoric's government as the sign that a modern Europe was bursting from a shell which it had taken 500 years to break-have a right to claim the honourable name of his victim as most properly belonging to them. As Englishmen we might insist that when Saxon and Roman wisdom first began to mingle and understand each other under the auspices of Alfred, the "Consolations of Philosophy" was chosen to express their union, or the transition from one to the other. But the student of the history of European philosophy is under a much stronger obligation not to treat Boethius as a mere relic of the past. THE END OF THE PERIOD. one in philo 139 The continual references to him in the Middle Ages are not He occupies chiefly to his ethics but much more to his logic. It is in his a different character as a logical writer that he shews what the tendencies sophical of the coming time were, with what kind of questions it would be history. occupied. Augustin, Latin as he was, is emphatically the Latin Platonist: his divinity, as much as his philosophy, is conversant with the eternal, and with man's relations to it. The forms in which men speak and reason are interesting to him only as he contemplates them from this higher ground. Böethius on the contrary is the Latin Aristotelian, and the one who showed how much more naturally the Latin mind, The Latin when left to itself, and out of the reach of Greek influences, Aristotelian. sympathises with the Aristotelian than with the Platonic temper. Under what modifications this is true, to what apparent and to what real exceptions it is liable, to what degree other influences besides the purely Latin were at work in the Middle Ages, how the Gothic, the Hebrew, the Arabic, the purely Christian influences conspired or counteracted each other, these are questions which we shall have to consider hereafter. And that we may consider them more satisfactorily, we hasten to conclude our narrative of the properly Greek school, by glancing at the events of the sixth century, which was to prepare the way for the future philosophy of Europe, though it may have supplied no names on which it behoves us to dwell. CHAPTER VI. THE SIXTH CENTURY. Sixth 1. WE said that no great philosophical names would cause us to The leading linger over the records of the Sixth Century. There are two men of the unphilosophical names which every one recollects who thinks of Century. it: perhaps we may have more to say of these than of many who have founded schools and composed systems. They are both of them far more memorable for what they did by themselves, or through others, than for what they thought; yet they have both, consciously or unconsciously, affected speculation as much as action. When they sought to hinder or direct its course, their movements were often feeble, sometimes mischievous, and ultimately led to results which they did not foresee and might have wished to avert. But a mightier power than their own was using them as instruments in building up the social and spiritual life of Christendom, as well as in preparing the way for its greatest disruption. We speak of the Emperor Justinian and the Pope Gregory I. and inward Justinian. 2. The life of Justinian is directly connected with our subject, inasmuch as it was his decree which closed for ever the lips of those Athenian teachers with whom we were so much occupied in the last chapter. But after the remarks which we made on the waning of Neo-Platonism even in its great representative, Proclus, and on the evident tokens which his writings furnished that it had fully delivered its message to mankind, this event, taken by itself, would not seem to be of any great importance. Romulus Augustulus stands as the representative of the death of an empire, and the moment of its extinction has a certain solemnity in it; but we feel that it was doomed, and only wonder that it lasted so long. To know exactly when the The outward last Platonist of the Empire fled from it to try his fortune in another region, is not uninteresting; but the interest is rather sentimental than practical. If, therefore, this had been a solitary act of the Emperor; if the rest of his doings, though apparently most unconnected with it, had not been a commentary upon it, and had not received illustration from it; we might have passed it by with a very casual notice. But there is no great transaction of this memorable reign; no proceeding of the monarch, however paltry as to the motive in which it originated, or its immediate object; no war that was waged with other nations; no striving in the Church, or the Circus of Constantinople; which has not a clear internal relation to this decree, and which is not, like this, an index to the moral and intellectual condition of a period. history of his reign connected. The legislator. Bows to Latin wisdom. 3. If we contemplate Justinian in that aspect in which his panegyrists would like best to exhibit him, as the man at whose bidding Tribonian and his associates compiled the Institutes, the Pandects, and the Code, we discover the character of his reign and the kind of influence which it was to exercise. Considering that this was the time in which Constantinople most pretended to dominion over the world,-most vindicated the design of its founder, by proving itself to be the Capital,—one cannot but be struck with the strange fact, that just then the Greek should have paid the profoundest and most permanent homage to the Latin wisdom. There is, no doubt, mixed in the Corpus a certain Greek element; but how weak and inconsiderable compared with the contributions of the old jurists of the Roman world; how clearly they prove their language to be the one that was fittest for expounding rights and obligations; the function of their race to be that of organising bodies of men, of ascertaining by what covenants and contracts they are held to each other, of fixing the method and limits of punishment! Justinian's compilation is the most frank and childlike confession of this superiority,-a declaration that Constantinople could only govern the world through the influences bequeathed to it |