走进课堂 | Thomas Rendall:中世纪欧洲思想的世俗化

博雅哥说

本学期Rendall教授的“欧洲文学选读”课程刚刚过半。在《埃涅阿斯纪》结尾，埃涅阿斯手起刀落，了结了图努斯的性命，而这篇宏大史诗也戛然而止，留下耐人寻味的结局。在屋大维平息内外战乱，缔造罗马帝国的繁盛图景之时，维吉尔写下这篇史诗，追溯罗马人的开国伟业。时过境迁，在1300年后，同样还是亚平宁半岛，罗马帝国早已分崩离析，奥古斯都式的强势统治不复存在，大大小小的城邦分立，其中佛罗伦萨成为后来欧洲文艺复兴的中心。在下半学期的课程中，Rendall教授将把目光转向中世纪晚期的佛罗伦萨，带领大家阅读佛罗伦萨人但丁的《神曲》。

本文聚焦中世纪欧洲思想史，展现彼时知识阶层流行的思想观念。在这个基础上，我们可以看到中世纪的文学是如何生发出来，又如何逃离思想史传统的。基督教统摄中世纪思想，在凡俗世界之上，是真正重要的属灵世界。人类所在尘世的方方面面，最终都与更高层面的宗教相关联。透过哥特式教堂高耸入云的尖塔，我们可以看到彼时的人们对上帝的希求。

Thomas Rendall本学期开设有通识核心课程“欧洲文学选读”，欢迎大家选修和关注！

受微信公众号文章长度限制，文章结尾部分采用图片形式。

Vol.821.2

走进课堂

COMMONPLACES OF MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN THOUGHT

Thomas Rendall

School of Foreign Languages, Peking University

The ideas to be presented in this lecture form part of the cultural background for a study of Dante and Chaucer—they are not historical or sociological backgrounds. Neither are they ideas that are original or peculiar to Dante or Chaucer. What I want to discuss here are those ideas and attitudes that would have been shared, to a large extent, by most reasonably well-educated people of fourteenth century Europe, by those people, that is, who would have been the audience of works of literature.

I do not deny that there were people, in some instances Dante and Chaucer among them, who felt uneasy with these "habits of mind." In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the feudal/ ecclesiastical/ communal system of Western Europe was in the process of being replaced by the capitalist/ secular/ individualist society of which we in the twenty-first century are still members.  As Charles Muscatine and others have stressed (Poetry and Crisis), the fourteenth century was a time of wide-ranging change, and the new views were necessarily embodied in its literature. Nevertheless, the power of the older ideas was still strong, and a modern reader of Dante or Chaucer needs to have some familiarity with them in order to appreciate the context of the  achievement of these authors both in embodying the dominating attitudes of their  time and in departing from them.

We will begin our discussion of medieval attitudes，in true medieval manner，with a "text"—a passage from ancient written authority that serves as the theme of an ensuing discourse. Our text comes from the writings of the fourth century father of the church，St. Augustine：

"Quid est enim fides, nisi credere quod non vides?"

"What then is faith, if not to believe in that which you don't see?"

 (In Ioannis Evangelium, CXXIV, 4)

Augustine in this statement is obviously thinking of Paul's famous definition, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen"

(Hebrews 11:1)

And what Paul said in apostolic times and Augustine stressed at the beginning of the Middle Ages was still the dominating attitude of the fourteenth century: that the important world, the one that underlay all the events of the world of everyday was a spiritual one, an invisible one, one for which the only evidence was faith. Everything in the human world was seen as ordered by and related to the invisible world of God, the Virgin, the angels, and the saints, and it was this spiritual world that gave earthly events their direction and significance.

This pervasive medieval attitude is well illustrated by the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. Completed in 1320, this spire soars 404 feet (or 123 meters)；it’s the highest spire in England, the second highest in all of Europe. It represents the most extreme example of the English "vertical style" of Gothic architecture.

Salisbury Cathedral

The city of Salisbury is situated in the middle of the Salisbury plain (a landscape of wheat fields that bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the Canadian prairies)，and the church itself is not lost in a jumble of functional, modern architecture, as is the case with most of the other great cathedrals. Rather, Salisbury Cathedral rises from the center of a large "cathedral close," which is as flat as a billiard table. The setting, then, makes the reach of the spire towards the dome of the sky that much more impressive--even to us, who are used to modem skyscrapers and such monstrosities as the CN Tower.1

As was the case with many of the great cathedrals, the building of Salisbury was a piecemeal affair, extending over more than a century, and the gargantuan tower was not anticipated by the original architects. Almost as soon as the tower was in place, the foundation began shifting, threatening a collapse. Today, the spire has a declination (1/2 degree) to the S.W.  By sighting the transept columns against the window sides, the lean of the whole structure can be discerned. The flexing of the pillars under the transept in the interior of the church is also clearly visible.

st bavo cathedral

What did the medieval architects do to safeguard their tower?  In the fifteenth century some bracing, including a magnificent set of inverted arches in the transept were added. But, probably more importantly for the builders, upon completion of the spire, they placed a relic (a fragment of cloth) of the Virgin's robe in a lead casket, and ceremoniously enclosed the casket in the capstone-- the highest point-- of the spire.

Since the whole tower, characteristically of Gothic architecture generally, is an attempt to deny the material and assert the spiritual, defying the weight of stone as it soars towards the infinite, it seemed reasonable that the chief safeguard for the structure would be the powers of the spiritual，invisible world. And since the whole cathedral was dedicated to Mary, what better protection for the spire than the Queen of Heaven? In the nineteenth century, a sign of more secular times, the casket with its piece of linen was removed and placed in the cathedral museum. At the same time, iron bracing and lightning arresters were added to the spire.2

In the following lecture, four medieval habits of mind will be discussed：1. the medieval conception of authority, 2. the medieval conception of order, 3. the medieval conception of humanity, and 4. the medieval conception of love.

Ⅰ

The Medieval Conception of Authority

博雅哥导读

这一部分主要谈中世纪认识论领域的权威。正如之前所说，基督教是中世纪思想的统摄力量，而彼时的认识论，也以基督教神学为基石。虽然中世纪也有对自然世界的探索，但对物质领域的解释依然指向宗教。正如教堂尖塔起于累土却遥指天际，物理世界的现象最终都要联系到属灵的层面。与当今世界的实证科学不同，中世纪的学术不以新知为追求，不以实验为途径，而是回溯圣经与其他基督教经典，以信仰印证真理。经院哲学在神学讨论中发展出来，在阿奎那《神学大全》里繁复的逻辑证明中，我们可以窥见由理性开悟的道路。乔叟的《坎特伯雷故事》便受到经院哲学的影响，却也对繁杂的神学论证不无戏谑。

For our own culture, the most important means to knowledge is the method of science--observation and experiment--a method firmly based in the visible world. Some modern philosophers, like A. J. Ayers, assert that the only statements that can be said to have any meaning at all are those that can be verified through observation of the physical world.

In the middle ages, by contrast, there were two means to knowledge. First, there was study of the visible world, sometimes referred to as the "book of nature," in which truth was indirectly revealed through the operation of the divine will in creation. And second, there was study of the truths of the more important world of the spirit, the invisible world revealed by faith, which was revealed by God to humanity directly in the Bible, and which was expounded by such less authoritative sources as the early Christian theologians known as the Fathers of the Church,3 and by some Greek and Roman authors such as Aristotle, Virgil, and Cicero. A well known anecdote relates the example of some monks who were debating the number of teeth possessed by the horse, and who were amazed and scandalized by the younger brother who went into the courtyard of the monastery to open a horse's mouth. This story is almost certainly apocryphal, but the point it makes is revealing of establishment medieval attitudes. It is a recorded historical fact, for instance, that the principal professor of philosophy at the University of Padua simply refused to look through Galileo's telescope, because this new invention provided disturbing observational contradiction of some of the main tenets of the traditional cosmology.4

The usual medieval idea of a contribution to knowledge, then, rather than consisting of a set of original observations or experiments, was a commentary on some previously existing written authority, the older, the better.

The chief authority was the Bible itself: of course, because it was thought to represent God's direct revelation to humankind of the truths of the invisible world. In medieval gospel manuscripts, there are often illuminations of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There the gospel writer sits, usually at a kind of high desk, goose quill in hand, scribing down the story of the Savior’s teachings and miracles. But one detail strikes the modern viewer as odd: there is often a bird sitting on the evangelist’s shoulder, and it seems to be pecking at something in his ear. This bird, after a little iconographical research, is discovered to be a dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, third person of the Christian Trinity. And this bird is whispering into the ear of the evangelist everything that he writes. The gospel author is，as it were，only taking dictation from God himself (see illustration below，where the symbolic meaning of the bird is made unmistakable by being held in a hand that is thrust down from the top of the illumination). The Old Testament as well as the New was considered by people of the Middle Ages to be the result of divine inspiration--of God's revelation of spiritual truths to such important religious figures as Moses, supposed author of the Old Testament's first five books.

St. John the Evangelist

 Gospel book of Abbot Wedricus

(12th century)

Since the Scriptures were the principal source of truth about the invisible world, they were the subject of innumerable explanations or commentaries during the middle ages. These grew to such an extent that by the ninth century a German monk named Walafrid Strabo could compile a gargantuan anthology entitled the Glossa Ordinaria which gives the opinions of at least four or five commentators on every verse, almost every word of the entire Bible. The works of the two most influential medieval thinkers, St. Augustine (354-430) and St. Thomas Aquinas (?1225-1274), consist almost entirely of commentaries, on the Bible, on Aristotle, or on the works of earlier theologians.

By the later middle ages a method, as important for medieval thinkers as the scientific method is for us today, had been developed for evaluating the truth of written authorities. Pioneered by such theologians as Abelard (1079-1142) and Peter Lombard (?1100-1160), this method, sometimes called the scholastic method, was perfected by Aquinas in his Summa Theologica, a work that should at least be glanced into by everyone interested in medieval attitudes.5 Thomas's procedure is to ask a question and then to list a number of answers, which he held to be mistaken, given by various earlier writers. He then goes on to briefly state the arguments for each of these answers. Then comes the resounding sed contra, "on the contrary," after which a counter-authority is given in support of the position that Thomas himself holds. After an extended presentation of his own argument, the final section of each quaestio takes up once again the rejected answers, and Thomas tries to show that the mistaken authorities weren't really mistaken, but were only misapplied or misunderstood. In fact, rightly considered, they all support the position that Aquinas has reached by rational analysis.

This may seem to be getting rather far from Dante and Chaucer, but the scholastic method of argumentation is employed again and again by both authors. It is used in humorous contexts, such as the debate between Chauntecleer and Pertelote in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale concerning the validity of Chauntecleer's dream, in which Aquinas's sed contra comes in the cock’s lines：

"Madame," quod he, "graunt mercy of youre loore,

But nathelees, as touchyng daun Catoun,

That hath of wysdom swich a greet renoun,

Though that he bad no dremes for to drede,

By God, man may in olde books rede

Of many a man moore of auctorite

Than ever Caton was, so moot I thee.

. . .

Oon of the gretteste auctour that men rede

Seith thus. . . ."

And so forth，in an argument that runs to almost two hundred lines (Nun’s Priests’ Tale 4160-4346). The scholastic method can also be used in deadly earnest, as in the Pardoner's sermonette against gluttony, in which a classical authority (Seneca) is supplemented by references to almost every section of the Bible--Old Testament, Gospels, and Epistles. An understanding of the medieval penchant for arguing from authority is also necessary to appreciate the revolutionary nature of the Wife of Bath's assertion, which comes leaping combatively into the complacent world of masculine scholarship in the opening lines of her Prologue：

Experience, though noon auctoritee

Were in this world, is right ynogh for me. . .

(1-2)

The middle ages, then, as C. S. Lewis says, was an extremely bookish period (The Discarded Image). And this was no less true of imaginative literature than of theology, philosophy, and science. Originality of technique, form, and plot was almost unknown in the middle ages. Nearly all of Chaucer’s works are based on previously existing forms, techniques, and stories.

For the most part, he stays within the existing genres：the romance，fabliau，miracle story，beast fable，saint’s life, sermon, and so forth. The same was true of techniques; the great Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, as well as such medieval handbook writers as the Nun's Priest's beloved Geoffrey de Vinsauf (Nun's Priest's Tale 4537-4541) had codified the devices of amplifying a story or subject, such as descriptio, exclamatio, conformatio, interpretatio, circuitio, and those (much less frequently used) of abbreviation, such as occupatio.6 As well, almost all of Chaucer's tales in the Canterbury collection are based upon previously existing stories; Chaucer touches up Ovid and Boccaccio in the same way as the Beowulf poet had earlier touched up some old stories about monsters and in the same way Shakespeare would  later touch up Holinshed and Plutarch, and Milton the Book of Genesis. Chaucer's French contemporary, Eustache Deschamps, calls him a "grant translateur," and on more than one occasion, Chaucer humbly refers to his own artistic activity as simply that of a literary ambassador.

Medieval people were bookish, then, extremely bookish. So much so that Lewis remarks that the modem invention they would have most admired is not the automobile, not the spaceship--had not Chaucer himself been transported in The House of Fame through all the spheres of the heavens and found them pretty much as Ptolemy had described them? The modem invention that medieval people would have most admired, says Lewis, is the library card catalogue.

And this brings us to another important medieval attitude.

Ⅱ

The Medieval Conception of Order

博雅哥导读

这一部分关乎中世纪对秩序的认识，以C. S. Lewis著名的中世纪文学论著《The Discarded Image》起题，讨论中世纪人们对物质、时间与形而上学诸领域秩序的认识。在托勒密的宇宙图景中，我们可以看到中世纪欧洲人对秩序的追求。虽然根据广为流传的地心说，人类所在的地球处于宇宙架构的中心位置，但这并不意味着人类是造物的核心。相反，人们相信在有限的物理宇宙之外，还有上帝所处的天界，而这圣所与人类相距甚远。在时间维度上，历史亦是上帝意旨的体现，对圣经历史的解读便体现了这一点。在早期基督教会神学中，喻象法（allegory）指出旧约对新约的隐蕴，预表法（typology）则体现了不同时间发生的历史事件间的关系。事件并非偶然因缘而成，而是有宗教意义的必然。在形而上学领域，人们对世间万物的认识基于一种宏大的秩序感，即蒲柏诗中“存在之链”（The Great Chain of Being）的概念。从上帝天使到一尘一沙，万事万物有一个一以贯之的格局与秩序。

“There was nothing”, writes C. S. Lewis, “Which medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index. This impulse is equally at work in what seem to us their silliest pedantries and in their most sublime achievements. In the latter, we see the tranquil, indefatigable, exultant energy of passionately systematic minds bringing huge masses of heterogeneous material into unity. The perfect examples are the Summa of Aquinas and Dante’s Divine Comedy; as unified and ordered as the Parthenon or the Oedipus Rex, as crowded and varied as a London terminus on a bank holiday. But there is a third work which we can, I think, set beside these two. This is the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organization of their theology, science, and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental Model of the Universe. . . .In speaking of the perfected Model as a work to be set beside the Summa and the Comedy, I [mean] that it is capable of giving a similar satisfaction to the mind, and for some of the same reasons. Like them it is vast in scale, but limited and intelligible. Its sublimity is not the sort that depends on anything vague or obscure. . . .Its contents, however rich and various, are in harmony. We see how everything links up with everything else; at one, not in flat equality, but in a hierarchical ladder. It might be supposed that this beauty of the Model [is] apparent chiefly to us who, no longer accepting it as true, are free to regard it. . . as if it were a work of art. But I believe this is not so. I think there is abundant evidence that it gave profound satisfaction while it was still believed in. I hope to persuade the reader that this Model of the Universe is not only a supreme medieval work of art but that it is in a sense the central work, that in which most particular works were embedded, to which they constantly referred, from which they drew a great deal of their strength.”7

What I propose to do now is simply to expand on these remarks, dealing briefly with the medieval conception of physical, temporal, and metaphysical order.  

1

Physical Order

I will confine myself to only three remarks about the medieval conception of the cosmos, a generalized diagram of which is presented above. This scheme is usually referred to as the Ptolemaic system, although the actual scheme of Ptolemy was much more complex than is usually presented in background lectures such as this.8 In this earlier view of the universe, with which most of you are already familiar, the earth is surrounded by seven heavenly spheres, each bearing a luminous body or planet. Beyond the spheres of the planets is that of the stellatum, the “fixed” stars. Beyond that is the ninth sphere, invisible to human beings, which by its motion causes all those within to revolve: the first mover or primum mobile. Beyond the ninth sphere is, physically, nothing, because the empyrean, the abode of God and the blessed, is not in space; in talking about it, space has no meaning.

For me, the most delightful thing about the medieval view of the cosmos is that it was thought to be filled with light. We know today that the universe is, with local exceptions, pervasively dark, that is, that the night sky gives the truest picture of the actual state of things. For people of the Middle Ages, just the opposite seemed true. The only reason the universe looks dark to an observer of the night sky, they thought, was because he or she is looking into a narrow cone of the earth’s shadow, a shadow which Dante thought extended only as far as the sphere of Venus (see illustration above). Everywhere else is filled with blinding light. The medieval universe was also filled with music, the harmony of the spheres, but that you probably know about.9

Medieval thinkers conceived their universe as physically much smaller than we conceive of ours, but the naiveté of their ideas in this regard was not as great as we might suppose. In the South English Legendary (a popular collection of saints’ lives), we are told that if Adam had set off on the day of his creation, traveling straight upward at the rate of forty miles a day, he would not yet have reached the outmost sphere.10 Since when Dante meets Adam in Paradiso XXVI, Adam tells him that he had to wait in Limbo 4,302 years for his deliverance by Christ in the Harrowing, and since Adam lived on earth for 938 years, a complicated mathematical operation yields the result that Adam would have started his trip in the year 5,199 B.C.11 Now, the South English Legendary was written in the late thirteenth century, so, doing the multiplication, we arrive at the following distance for the sphere of the primum mobile: more than 93,424,400 miles.12

Medieval people knew that universe was large; in fact, given the limitations of the human imagination, 93 million miles is just about as inconceivably large as however far the latest telescopes have managed to penetrate into the universe that we know (or don’t know) today. The medieval cosmos was large, then, but it was finite: that is the important difference from our view today. The universe had an end; it didn’t just stretch out forever or only curve in on itself in some non-Euclidean way that even mathematicians find hard to visualize.

Physical Order

Now that I’ve told you something you didn’t know about the medieval conception of the physical universe, I’ll tell you something you did know but which is easy to forget. While the term geocentric does describe the medieval cosmos, anthropocentric does not describe the medieval attitude towards humanity’s place in it. Medieval people did not believe that the cosmos was made for the benefit of man (this “litel spot of erthe” that Troilus looks down upon from the eighth sphere in Chaucer’s poem, of course, was, but more of that in a moment).13 Nor was the human being thought to be the part of creation that was dearest to God; it seemed natural to Dante, for example, that the angels are dearer to God that the rest of creation. Moreover, the human position in the physical center of the universe was not regarded as so enviable as might at first seem from contemplation of a diagram of the Ptolemaic model. For the most central location of the universe is hell, and at the center of hell is that most unenviable of all creatures, Satan. Satan, turning away from his true nature by an act of free will, exiled himself from God’s presence, from the empyreal heaven. In Dante’s sublime conception, the fiend plummeted down through the spheres to that part of the universe which is the farthest from the good which he rebelled against. As he crashed into the earth like some tremendous meteor, he ploughed through it to the center, where he remains transfixed forever.

So, another way of looking at the centrality of humankind’s home is to see it as being the farthest point from God, the farthest point from the “very heaven”, the caelum ipsum, which is beyond the outermost sphere. In a lecture which the young Galileo gave to the Florentine Academy on the size and shape of Dante’s Inferno, the mathematician agreed with the poet that God had put the earth in the center of the cosmos in order “to have it as far as possible from the sight of the blessed residents of heaven lest they be offended by its grossness.”13a  The medieval view of the cosmos was thus not anthropocentric but theocentric. God was at the center, and Dante expresses this idea in the final cantos of Paradiso by describing how, once he passes into the realm beyond space, the realm of the beatific vision, the cosmos is suddenly seen in perspective.14 God appears as a point of intensely bright light at the center of nine whirling circles of fire. These represent the nine orders of angels, part of whose task is to control the perfect motion of the nine celestial spheres. In this higher, truer, view of the universe, the earth itself is not to be seen anywhere. In the medieval conception, then, the earth and humankind are not really at the center at all, but at the outermost periphery of the true center, which is God.

Enough about the physical order of the universe.

2

Temporal Order

Just as medieval people believed that God’s creation was ordered and harmonious physically, so also they believe that history was filled with significance and direction. Just as God has a plan for the cosmos, so he has a plan for time, and this plan was called providence. “History”, said Augustine, “is like a book which God has written and which we are slowly reading.”15 The well constructed plot of God’s book can be discerned in such a momentous event as the foundation of the Roman empire and the establishment of the pax romana, which, as described by Dante, was a necessary cradle for the birth of the church (Inferno XII). God’s plan can also be seen in the comparatively minor situation of the suffering of the English peasantry in the reign of King Stephen, which, according to the Peterborough Chronicle, was a punishment for the people’s sins.16 The subject of divine providence, like the subject of the physical order of the universe, is a large one, and I’ll only be able to touch upon a few aspects of it here.

The first thing to say after one has pointed out that people of the middle ages held that history was the result of divine plan is of course that, despite this, the medieval view of history was not deterministic. While the grand outlines, the overall direction of history, are the result of God’s plan, and while all events are foreseen in his eternal wisdom, his providence does not determine the course of individual human lives, because human beings, like the angels, possess free will. The freedom of the will, says Dante, is the greatest gift of God, the one which he prizes most, and the one which makes human beings and the angels, of all creatures, most like God himself (Paradiso V). Free will is one reason why the medieval idea of history was not deterministic; another important reason was the common conviction that all earthly things are under the immediate control of the power of fortune. Fortune or Fortuna was thought of by Dante as the divinely appointed “intelligence” or controller of the sublunary sphere, just as the spheres of the planets and stars also had angelic intelligences which controlled their motions.

In these respects, then, one of the patterns which medieval people saw in personal, civic, and national history was a built-in lack of pattern. This unpredictability resulted from the free choices of individuals, which could lead them as easily—or more easily—counter to the divine tendency of things as with it. It also resulted from the ever-changing whim of fortune as she bestowed her gifts now on one person or group and now upon another. In the larger view, however, even this lack of pattern fit, because human freedom of the will was thought to be essential to God’s design for humanity and because the changeableness of fortune was thought to teach humankind the ephemerality of happiness which is based in things of this world.

“History is like a book which God has written and which we are slowly reading.” Given this view of history, we should be no more surprised to find symbolic meaning and the foreshadowing of later occurrences in the events of history than we are to find these things in a carefully constructed work of literature. It is not by chance, for example, that Aschenbach, arriving in Venice in Thomas Mann’s short story, should be struck by the similarity between the gondola that takes him to his hotel and a coffin. Likewise, a person who has read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness knows that it is not by chance that one of the characters on the deck of the boat on which the story is told is passing the time by fooling around with some dominoes, or, as Conrad so forebodingly put it, “toying with the bones.”17

Temporal Order

The kind of significance and foreshadowings that the middle ages found in history were, characteristically, more optimistic. For the most important event of history, in the medieval view, to which all events lead up and away from, was the coming of God to earth in the birth, life, passion, and resurrection of the Savior.  According to medieval thinkers, humanity’s enjoyment of paradise had been brief (only six hours according to Dante, Paradiso XXVI), and the story of humankind from the expulsion from paradise to the Incarnation was a very dark one. The ten commandments were written on stone, people thought, in order to symbolize just how strict the relationship between man and God was in Old Testament times, under the Old Law. The New Law, the New Covenant, as taught by Christ and as made possible in some way (there were different theories) by his suffering and death, held out the promise of mercy and forgiveness, by which human beings could hope to assume once again their rightful place in the scheme of things. The beginning, the turning-point, and the denouement of the divine book were thus clear, although human beings, with their limited powers, can never hope to fathom the significance of all the details of the plot. For Dante, the ultimate meaning of things, like the bottom of the ocean, is only visible to human eyes near the shore, not in the deeper water (Paradiso XIX).

One part of human history, however, was particularly clear, and that was the history of God’s chosen people, the Israelites. Two main approaches to the interpretation of Old Testament events were developed by the early Church, one called (somewhat confusingly) the allegorical and the other the figural or typological. The allegorical approach held that Old Testament events embodied, in shadowy fashion, the doctrines of the New Covenant.18 The Exodus, for example, signified the passing of the soul from sin into a state of grace, and Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac signified the necessary obedience of the individual soul to the will of God. The typological approach to the interpretation of Old Testament history, on the other hand, saw the events of the Old Testament as foreshadowings of specific New Testament events. In this approach, the significance of the Exodus is as a prefiguration of the Harrowing of Hell and the significance of Abraham’s Sacrifice is as a pre-figuration of the Crucifixion. Events in the history of the chosen people were considered, therefore, either as allegories, teaching a useful lesson, or as foreshadowing of later, more important events. Or they were considered to be both at once. They were, as Dante puts it, “footprints” of the divine goodness which are to be seen throughout human history,19

3

 Metaphysical Order

The prefect order of the physical cosmos and of God’s plan for human history is mirrored, or should be mirrored, in the rest of creation also, because, for medieval thinkers, all created things took their place on a great hierarchy which defined their nature, their “being”. This hierarchy was thought to stretch from the angels down to unformed “primal” matter, and all things were thought to find their proper place in it according to the principle of soul (for animate things) or form (for inanimate things) with which they had been endowed by God..20 This hierarchy is referred to by various names: the system of degree, the scale or ladder of creation (scala naturae). But most often it is referred to by the name given it by Pope in the “Essay of Man”: the great chain of being21. Most of you have heard enough, and probably more than enough, about the great chain of being, and so I’ll again confine myself to a few brief remarks.

First of all, there is the matter of the position of God, who is often regarded as being at the “top” of the chain, or is regarded this way by students and by some writers and professors who let slip such phrases as “the chain stretches down from God to unformed matter.” Although it might seem from the illustration above that I, too, have put God at the top of the chain, you will notice upon more careful perusal of the diagram that there is a line, a curved line, significantly, a segment of a circle, in my mind’s eye, a perfect circle, which sets him off from the rest of the hierarchy. Since God exists, has being, he must be represented in a diagram of the chain of being. But he must also be set off from the chain because God is. . . what? He is the Absolute Being, the Prime Mover, the Alpha and Omega, Pure Actuality, or even, as a former philosopher colleague of mine put it in the title of a book later, mercifully, changed at the insistence of his editor, “the unconditioned condition.” Ego sum qui sum, he told Moses: “I am he who is” or “I am who is” (Exod. iii, 14). It is difficult to say, of course, what God actually is, and people of the middle ages knew this very well, if from no other source, from an author with the wonderful name of Pseudo-Dionysius.22 It is much easier to say what God is not, and in relation to the chain of being, the important thing to remember is that he is not really a part of the chain. To regard God as at the top the chain, as different in rank but similar in nature to the rest of the hierarchy, is Satan’s argument in Book I of Paradise Lost that God was ruling in heaven and that Satan merely attempted a coup d’etat against a stronger opponent whom he could aspire to supplant. God is certainly not a tyrant, as Milton’s Satan pictures him, someone who rules by arbitrary power over his equals, but neither is he a king. Although the metaphor of God as monarch was common in medieval art and literature, educated people knew that God didn’t rule over the universe at all, in any usual sense of the word. Rather he was considered the creator and continual sustainer of everything, the only being in the universe who exists independently and from whom everything else derives its existence. There’s no more sense in putting him at the top of the chain of being than in putting a cabinet maker at the top of a list of tables. The cabinet maker is of course superior to the tables he’s made, but he’s also of an essentially different nature: there is no real basis for comparison. As Pseudo-Dionysius writes of God in The Divine Names, “It is not that he is this and not that, but that he is all, because he is the cause of all.”23

Despite the hierarchical attitude expressed in the concept of the chain of being, our modern democratic preferences can find some consolation in the fact that although each link in the chain except that of the angels was rigidly inferior to the higher ranks,  each was also thought to have its own particular excellencies, which it could claim in advantage over the ranks above it. The excellence of primal matter was its almost unlimited potential: uncreated, it could be divinely made into anything except a spiritual substance. The excellence of the elements and inanimate things was thought to be their ability to endure—the hardness of the diamond, the incorruptibility of gold (witness the jewelry of the Sutton Hoo discovery: after being shined up, it looks as good as it ever did). The excellence of the plants is their ability to reproduce and grow. Anyone who has Creeping Charlie in his or her lawn knows more than enough about this first aspect of the plant’s excellence. The size which plants attain was also clear to medieval people, although they didn’t know about the California sequoia trees, which are the largest living things.24 An excellence of the animals is the keenness of their senses: the sense of smell of a bloodhound, the sight of hawk. A further excellence of animals is their swiftness: the greyhound, the cheetah.

Metaphysical Order

The human being, what could he or she possibly claim as an advantage over the angels? This is where, in my opinion, the idea becomes really sublime, for the human beings’s excellence is the ability to learn. Although the angels don’t know everything, since there are depths of the divine nature and purpose that even they cannot penetrate, what they are capable of knowing, they know immediately and completely. Being human, it’s difficult to think of a good example of this kind of intuitive knowledge, but it’s something like the way we know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. So, the excellence of humanity near the top of the chain is on the spiritual level the same excellence as that of bottom-ranking matter on the material level: potential.

One final remark: through a system of parallels or correspondences, each link in the chain contains its own hierarchy or hierarchies which mirror the hierarchies of the other links. And the hierarchies of all the links, of course, mirror the order and harmony of the great scale of God’s creation itself. Since prime matter has no form, it’s an exception in this case and cannot be said to possess an internal hierarchy. The elements, however, do have a hierarchy, fire being the noblest, next in order comes air, then water, and finally earth. Of inanimate things, the diamond is the noblest stone, gold the noblest metal (a relic of the old system is present when a modern chemist speaks of base metals and noble gases). Among plants, the oak is the highest ranking tree and the rose the noblest of flowers. In the animal “kingdom,” the lion is king of beasts, the eagle the noblest of birds, and the dolphin (sometimes whale) the foremost of fishes. The angels, as might be expected, have a very carefully arranged hierarchy, with the seraphim, cherubim, and thrones being the closest to God and being occupied entirely by contemplation of him; the middle-ranking dominations, powers, and virtues are also contemplative. It is only the principalities, archangels, and angels that fulfill the etymological nature of angels (Gk. angelos: “messenger”). And it is only members of this lowest triad with whom living people ever come into contact. It was with regard to humanity’s link in the chain that the internal hierarchies were most complex. Parallel hierarchies (as outlined in the illustration) existed for human society in both the religious and secular “realms.” These social hierarchies are paralleled in the hierarchies of the family and the within the individual human being, the microcosm or “little world” himself.

Ⅲ

The Medieval Conception of Humanity

博雅哥导读

上文勾画了存在之链的宏大图景，而这一部分将焦点放到人类自身，讨论中世纪人对人的认识。在存在之链上，人是极其独特的存在。由于上帝按自己的模样创造人类，人类便也天生具有属灵的天性、理性的灵魂，在这个层面上是不朽的。但人类又生于尘土、归于尘土，亦具有物质的躯体，所以又是有死的。人类的双重属性是独一无二的，却又是许多问题的根源。在《坎特伯雷故事》等文学作品中，理性与感性、灵魂与肉体的冲突，是亘古不变的主题。

You have made him a little lower than the angels,

And You have crowned him with glory and honor.

(Ps. 8:5-6)

For people of the middle ages, although humanity was created from dust, and although part of human nature would return to dust, men and women were created in the image of God and were endowed with a spiritual nature, the rational soul, which, like the natures of the angels and of God himself, is immortal. The human being is thus unique：as the lowest of the beings possessing intellect, he is, as the Psalmist says，only a little lower than the angels；as the highest of the material beings，he is just above the highest animal. No other intellectual being possesses a body, and no other material being possesses an immortal soul. (The animals have soul, and even the plants, as we have seen. But their souls die with the death of their physical bodies.25) Humanity thus occupies the crucial transitional position on in the hierarchy of creation (see illustration in section 2, above). The human being is the "great Amphibian" as Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici 39) was to call him in seventeenth century, straddling the realms of matter and spirit like a frog straddles the realms of water and land.

The human being is the great amphibian, but also, because he contains within his nature both matter and spirit like the universe itself, he is the microcosm, or "little world." Jean de Meun has Nature address the human being thus：

Companion he to creatures everywhere

And sharer of the blessings they enjoy--

Being he owns in common with the stones；

Life he enjoys in common with the herbs；

Feeling he has in common the beasts；

Thinking in common with the angel host.

. . .

He is a microcosm in himself.

(Romance of the Rose 88.19-28)

Humanity's place in the hierarchy of being was held by thinkers of the middle ages to be both its glory as well as the cause of most of its troubles. Like the angels, the human being can know universal truths and is free to choose between good and evil; like the animals he is, with rare exceptions, confined to the world of the senses and is subject to sensuous appetites. His spiritual nature draws him up, and his material nature draws him down. This conflict within the dual nature of humanity is a pervasive theme of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

As the Roman de la Rose passage cited above makes clear, human nature unifies the powers of the vegetative，sensitive，and rational souls (nutrition, growth, and reproduction; sensation; intellect).  

The sensitive and rational souls involve awareness of the world outside the individual and interaction with that world. This awareness and interaction involves two types of power or faculty: cognition, that is, acquisition of knowledge, and appetition, that is the stimulus to act that follows cognition.

In the sensitive soul, the cognitive faculty is sensation--the information about the outside world received by touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, and seeing. The appetitive faculty of the sensitive soul is emotion--the stimulus to move towards the object of sensation if it is accompanied by pleasure, or to move away from it if it is accompanied by pain. This kind of automatic behavior characterizes those beings, the animals, whose highest type of soul is the sensitive. Animals make no conscious choices between alternatives：if confronted with a sensation accompanied by pleasure，like the sight of food, they move towards the source of the sensation. If confronted with a sensation accompanied by pain, like the sight of a hypodermic needle, they move away from the source of the sensation.

The rational soul, possessed by human beings, also possesses powers of cognition and appetition. The cognitive faculty of the rational soul, also known as intellect,  transcends sensation because it is able to move beyond particular sense impressions, such as the hypodermic needle, to more abstract knowledge, such as the fact that inoculation provides immunity to serious illness. In the same way, the appetitive power of the rational soul, called the will, is not automatic, but free and deliberate. Memory, foresight, the ability to generalize and compare--all powers of the rational soul--mean that human beings have the capacity of intelligent choice. The needle is painful now, one naturally inclines to avoid it, but it will prevent greater suffering in the future, one therefore is willing to submit to the injection.

This presentation of human psychology, called faculty psychology because of its emphasis on the powers or “faculties” of human nature, accounts both for the spontaneity of human emotions and for the fact that, as rational creatures, men and women are able, in a way in which animals are not, to accept or reject a movement of the sensitive appetite, judged by its relation to some higher good. For the sensitive and rational souls are related--as with all things in the traditional world-view--by a hierarchy. And, if all is well in the personality, the impulses of the sensitive soul are evaluated and controlled by the decisions of the rational soul. When the will chooses to give control of the personality over to the emotions or when the will itself determines to choose the lesser over the greater good, a violation of the divine order, or sin, occurs. Moreover the first man and woman's decision to sin (as related in Genesis) has transmitted to all their posterity an inclination in this direction (Original Sin).

The human personality is thus unique. So also is human life, which is divided into two large segments (see illustration in section 2, above)：the time of mercy，in which sins may be forgiven，and the time of judgment, when mercy will no longer be available  and when each person's fate will be determined by a strict and impartial weighing of the good against the bad actions of his or her earthly life. In medieval art the symbol of the balance is common, and a reference to this image occurs in the Parson's Tale, the final section of the Canterbury collection.26 In the morality play Everyman the strict assessment of the time of judgment is symbolized by entry of Everyman's good and bad deeds in an actual account book that he carries around with him on the stage. Failure to make use of the opportunity afforded by the time of mercy was thought to result in damnation, the soul's eternal exile from God, the source of all happiness.

Because sin was so easy to fall into and its consequences so serious, the middle ages placed great stress on the process by which sins could be forgiven，the process known as repentance，penitence，or penance. The concept of penance，which at first seems a particularly foreign, "medieval" idea to modem readers，is central to an understanding of both The Divine Comedy and The Canterbury Tales. A modern analogy may help clarify the concept.

Consider the process in a court of law. After the guilt of a defendant has been established, the judge has to decide on the sentence. In this decision, several factors are important. Does the guilty party show remorse for what he has done? Is he willing to acknowledge his crime? Is he willing to make amends to the victim？If the answer to these questions is "yes," then judge may decide to forgive the crime. Instead of condemning the criminal to imprisonment, he may sentence him to a period of community service, by which his essentially good nature can be rehabilitated. That is, the criminal has to show good will by an attempting to compensate, by amends to the victim, or, if that is not possible, through service to others, for the crime that he has committed.

The requirements listed above for clemency in a law court correspond to the three steps of the sacrament of penance27 as defined by the medieval church: the first step was contrition, true sorrow for sin; the second step was confession; acknowledgment of sin, usually by means of formal oral admission of the sin to a priest; and the last step was satisfaction. Satisfaction entailed restitution to the victim of the sin, if that was possible. Sometimes such restitution was not possible, as in the case of bodily injury or a sin against God himself. In any case, all sins involve a violation of divine order and thus are offenses to God, even ones (such as theft) for which restitution to the human victim is possible. Therefore, some other concrete act of good will was necessary. This could take many forms; depriving oneself of some pleasure (such as the eating of meat) practicing charity by giving alms, saying a certain number of prayers, and so forth.

The fourth Lateran Council of 1215 required all Christians to formally perform the steps of penance each spring before the receiving communion at Easter. Making a religious pilgrimage was one of the possible acts of satisfaction, and at least a part of the reason for the springtime journey to Canterbury taken by Chaucer’s characters has to be understood in this context. The importance of the sacrament of penance for the later middle ages also helps explain why the last piece in The Canterbury Tales is a treatise on this subject.

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