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ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES

ant)

BY
H. P. LIDDON, D.D., LL.D., D.C.L

I.ATK CANON AND CHANCELLOR OP ST. PAUL'S

LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16x11 STREET
1892

U8952
MJ61 7 1992

ADVERTISEMENT

fTlHE four Lectures with which this volume com
mences were delivered by Dr. Liddon on Tuesday
evenings in St. Paul's Cathedral ; those on Buddhism
in the year 1873, those on St. Paul in 1874. The
three papers which complete the volume were pre
pared for and read to the Oxford Dante Society.
The difference of occasion and audience will readily
explain the marked change of method in the two
parts of the book. For most valuable and kindly
help in the preparation of the Dante papers the
Editors are indebted to the Rev. Dr. Moore, Principal
of St. Edmund HalL They have also to acknowledge
gratefully the assistance and warm encouragement of
the Rev. Dr. G. U. Pope, of Balliol College, in connec
tion with the lectures on Buddhism.

CONTENTS

PAOK

LECTURES ON BUDDHISM.

1. TIIK LIKE OF THE FOUNDER, . . . 1

2. COMPARISON BKTWEEN BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY, 31

LECTURES ON THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

1. THE PREPARATION, . . . . .Go

2. THE MISSIONARY, THE CHURCH RULER, AND THE

MARTYR, . . . . . yo

PAPERS ON DANTE.

1. DANTE AND AQUINAS. PARTI., . . .121

2. DANTE AND AQUINAS. PART n., . . . 140

3. DANTE AND THE FRANCISCANS, . . .178

JESUS CHRIST AND BUDDHA.

L THE LIFE OF BUDDHA.1

TT7HEN I propose on this and next Tuesday even-
' ^ ing to discuss with you the origin and charac
teristics of Buddhism, while keeping an eye on
Christianity, it may, I fear, be thought at first that
such a subject is somewhat needlessly remote from the
practical interests of our country and our generation.
But, not to insist upon the advantages of an intel
lectual change of air, the subject is not so removed
from practical interests as we may suppose. What
ever we English may think about ourselves, the
aspect in which England presents herself to the
imagination of Europe and of the world is that of
the power which has won, and still holds, the empire
of India. No man who believes in a Providence can
suppose that we, the inhabitants of a small island
in the remote West, have been introduced to these
high destinies for nothing, or only for commercial
or political ends; and as soon as the eye catches
sight of any higher horizons than those which might

> Lecture delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral, on Tuesday evening,
January ai, 1873.

A

JESUS CHRIST AND BUDDHA.

I. THE LIFE OF BUDDHA.1

YITHEN I propose on this and next Tuesday even
ing to discuss with you the origin and charac
teristics of Buddhism, while keeping an eye on
Christianity, it may, I fear, be thought at first that
such a subject is somewhat needlessly remote from the
practical interests of our country and our generation.
But, not to insist upon the advantages of an intel
lectual change of air, the subject is not so removed
from practical interests as we may suppose. What
ever wo English may think about ourselves, the
aspect in which England presents herself to the
imagination of Europe and of the world is that of
the power which has won, and still holds, the empire
of India. No man who believes in a Providence can
suppose that we, the inhabitants of a small island
in the remote West, have been introduced to these
high destinies for nothing, or only for commercial
or political ends; and as soon as the eye catches
sight of any higher horizons than those which might

1 Lecture delivered iu 8t. Paul's Cathedral, on Tuesday evening,
January ai, 1873.

A

JESUS CHRIST AND BUDDHA.

I. THE LIFE OF BUDDHA.1

TTTHEN I propose on this and next Tuesday even-
' * ing to discuss with you the origin and charac
teristics of Buddhism, while keeping an eye on
Christianity, it may, I fear, be thought at first that
such a subject is somewhat needlessly remote from the
practical interests of our country and our generation.
But, not to insist upon the advantages of an intel
lectual change of air, the subject is not so removed
from practical interests as we may suppose. What
ever wo English may think about ourselves, the
aspect in which England presents herself to the
imagination of Europe and of the world is that of
the power which has won, and still holds, the empire
of India. No man who believes in a Providence can
suppose that we, the inhabitants of a small island
in the remote West, have been introduced to these
high destinies for nothing, or only for commercial
or political ends; and as soon as the eye catches
sight of any higher horizons than those which might

» Lecture delivered in St. Paul'* Cathedral, on Tuesday evening,
January 21, 1873.

A

Jesus Christ and Buddha.

have satisfied a Phoenician or a Roman conqueror, it
is at once felt that the greatest interest must attach
to the mental and religious history of the highly-
gifted races with which we are now so closely
connected. And Buddha was an Indian prince.
Buddhism was for two centuries an exclusively Indian
religion. Although driven from Central India five
centuries since, it still lingers in the north, beneath
the shadow of the Himalayas in Nepaul, and further
north-west, in Cashmere; it is still vigorous to the
south in our own island of Ceylon. It does not
simply fringe the Indian peninsula; to the north
and east it dominates in those dense populations
which are so impervious to European ideas and
European enterprise: Burmah and Siam, Tonquin
and Cochin-China, are Buddhist. Buddhism domi
nates throughout a great part of China and Japan;
it is the religion of Thibet ; it is still found in Tartary
and Mongolia. In short, we cannot move in the East
without encountering it, wellnigh on all sides of us ;
and if it did not thus appeal to our political instincts
as Englishmen, it would still appeal, at least as
powerfully to our human, not to speak of our Chris
tian, interests. A religion which has lived on for
four-and-twenty centuries, and which, it is probable,
counts more votaries at this moment than any other
on the face of the globe, — probably not less than a
third of its inhabitants, — is a subject of study to which

Jesus Christ and Buddha.

thoughtful men need not be coaxed by any merely
national interest, at least if it still holds that to be
a man is to deem nothing human strange. Besides
which Buddhism, side by side with differences of the
most vital and fundamental character that can be
conceived, presents some singular points of resem
blance to Christianity, — in its ethical teaching, in its
law of self-propagation, and notably in the character
of some of its institutions; so that, if it were only
possible to do no more than glance at a subject so rich
in interest, we need not fear disappointment. As it
is, our danger lies in the difficulty of honestly treat
ing a vast subject within very limited space, without
stripping all the flesh from the skeleton, without
reducing a story, which says so much to feeling and
to thought, to the form and proportions of an index
or a dictionary.

Buddhism was an attempted reform of, it was a
revolt against, Brahminism, — an older historical re
ligion which had been for many centuries in possession
of India, — as even now, although exposed to more
or less rapid decomposition under the influence of
European thought, it holds much of its ancient
ground. What were the circumstances of Brahmin-
ism at the date of the foundation of Buddhism ?

Jesus Christ and Buddha.

It is only within the last hundred years that it
has been at all possible to answer a question like
this. The knowledge of ancient India which was
derived from the early Jesuit missionaries was in
evitably vague and inaccurate; and for the rest,
Indian thought was studied either in the sparse
notices of the ancient Greek classical writers, or in
the prejudiced pages or mutilated translations of
the Mohammedans. Commentaries on the Vedas —
the ancient religious Indo- Aryan poetry — were read in
translations from Persian translations of the Sanskrit
originals; there were Arabian versions, which were
distrusted in Europe, as likely, for more reasons than
one, to misrepresent Indian manners and theology.
A change came with the establishment of our Indian
empire, and the accompanying necessity of studying
fundamentally the languages and ideas of our new
subjects. Sir William Jones — whose statue faces me
— gave the first great impulse to those investigations ;
but the name which is most prominently associated
with the discovery to Europe (for it was nothing less)
of the philosophy and religion of the great Aryan
race was that of Colebrooke. The formation of the
Asiatic Society of Calcutta, and the study of Sanskrit,
the literary and sacred language of ancient India,
were the two great steps in this direction; and the
labours of scholars like the late Professor Wilson,
Eugene Burnouf, and Professor Max Miiller have

Jesus Christ and Buddha.

carried us onwards to our present — still advancing
and still imperfect — knowledge of an antiquity which,
from its bearing on the languages and civilisation of
the Indo-Germanic races in Europe, as well as from
its relations to the Eastern world, has an interest all
its own.

These studies reveal to us a world of thought and
activity which is the produce of centuries. Here is a
sacred literature with its religious code, its several
systems of philosophy, its pious legends, its practical
commentaries designed for edification, its cherished
historical traditions, its liturgies, its religious instruc
tions, its sacred epics. But these are merely so many
incrustations, accumulated during centuries upon
primitive texts which had become more sacred with
the lapse of ages. Beyond, before, above all else, in
the Indian literature stand the Vedas, — books, as the
word signifies, presumably at least, of the highest
knowledge. They embody the earliest traditions of
the Aryan race ; they are poems of the most primi
tive type, which were written out upon palm-leaves
some twelve or more centuries before the coming of
our Lord. At least this description would apply to
the Rig- Veda, the most ancient and the most vene
rated of the four Vedas : it gives us a picture of the
family life of India in the earliest period known to
history. It must have been composed in the Punj-
aub, the country of the seven rivers which form tho

Jesus Christ and Buddha.

Indus, and at a period when as yet caste did not exist
in India. It is a collection of hymns for family wor
ship conducted upon the green turf, under the blue
vault of heaven, accompanied by sacrifices of the
rudest and most domestic description ; hymns, such
as a primitive, highly-gifted race, itself inheriting
echoes of a Divine tradition, would compose when
face to face with the natural features of north
western Hindustan. All the beauty of nature, all
its rigour, its productiveness, as well as its surprises
and disappointments, icy cold and tropical heat, the
equinoctial gales and the outburst of spring life, come
before us in these poems. They rarely if ever con
tain practical or moral precepts ; they are passionate
invocations to the power which, under various names
and conceptions, is believed to rule the natural world ;
prayers that He would make it a fit and serviceable
house for His faithful worshippers. If any creed can
be here detected, it is perhaps a monotheism, un
tainted as yet by the pantheism of a later age ; but
constantly tending by its realistic invocations of the
various powers of nature to become a polytheism.
Fire is invoked as Agni; the sun, as one of the
greatest benefactors of humanity, as Surya; the
atmosphere penetrated by sunlight as Indra; the
vault of heaven as Varuna; earth in its robe of
beauty as Prithivi ; the terrific mountain blasts which
sweep the forests as Rudra. Each aspect of nature

Jesus Christ and Buddha.

is individualised ; each is a Deva, or luminous spirit,
to the primitive Aryan. But the Veda is also full of
human passion; there is no attempt to conceal the
hatred and contempt for the Dasyu or primitive race,
which the Aryan conquerors of the Punjaub had
driven southwards. The Dasyu is a brigand ; he has
neither law nor faith; he despises heaven; he is
vowed to execration; heaven is invoked to blast, to
destroy him. For himself the worshipper prays for
increase of goods, for flocks, for horses — later for
gold ; always for something material, for victory, for
fortune, for happiness — immediate and complete.

How Brahminism — an elaborate system of poly
theism, priesthood, and caste — superseded this primi
tive Indian life and religion, we can as yet rather
guess than say. But we see the beginnings of the
process in the Vedas themselves. Criticism has re
marked three distinct stages or types of thought in
the process before us ; ( i ) the most ancient, and the
purest, original in form, monotheistic in creed, dwell
ing on the most obvious features of the world of
nature; (2) a second, with more of speculation and
IMS of fresh feeling, elaborating and dwelling more
intensely upon the nature-powers around man, making
a step thus towards polytheism ; (3) a third, in which
later speculation has got the upper hand of early feel
ing, in which abstraction is piled upon abstraction, till
all becomes indistinct, and men are willing to recover

8 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

definiteness at any cost, though it be such only as
Brahininism could give. How the family became
lost hi the tribe; how the solemn sacrifice of the
horse was substituted for the simpler sacrifices and
libations of the Rig- Veda ; how the family poets were
transformed into a sacrificing class for the whole tribe,
guarding their entire literary inheritance as a sacred
literature ; how prayer, personified as Brahma, became
itself an object of worship, and the starting-point for a
construction or reconstruction of the Hindu Pantheon;
how finally this gradual change or development of a
faith expressed itself politically in the growth of caste —
these are points which can here and now only be glanced
at. £y the seventh century before Christ, the Hindu
Trimurti, or Triad, of Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu, was
well established in the popular faith ; there was a vast
collection of lower deities; the ancient vedas were
used, but overlaid by commentaries, which appro
priated them to Brahrninical purposes ; the Brahmin
caste had, after a struggle, conquered the warriors and
the statesmen, and placed itself in the forefront of
society and thought.

As masters of the religious literature and ideas of
the country, the Brahmin caste controlled its political
rulers, the immense number of petty sovereigns who
ruled ancient India. But in questions of government, of
peace and war, the kingly and governing class still held
its own ; it formed a second caste, that of the warriors

Jesus Christ and Buddha.

or kshatriyas. The people, engaged in agriculture
and commerce, formed a third caste, the vai9yas:
and below this was a fourth, the sowing-class or
sudras, probably the relics of more ancient conquered
populations. Not that they were the lowest base of
ancient Indian society; they were honourable com
pared with the mongrel race, as it was deemed, which
resulted from incidental connection between the higher
castes, and which formed a refuse population, the
colluvies of all the caste-impurity of the land.

Now Buddhism stood towards this earlier system
of life and thought in the relation of a revolt. It was
a social and a doctrinal rebellion against Brahminism.
Socially, it rebelled against the system of caste ; it
protested in the name of Justice that all had a
right to the knowledge and the privileges which
were monopolised by the Brahmins. Doctrinally, it
attempted to provide an escape for the human soul
from the miseries of transmigration to another body
after death which the Brahminical creed insisted on ;
and it did this not by denying transmigration alto
gether, but by pointing to the possibility of self-
annihilation, through contemplation and virtue, in
the Nirvana. Upon this subject more hereafter.
Enough has been said to show that Buddhism was
no more an original religion than Mohammedanism ;
that it took a great deal of Brahminism for granted
while endeavouring to improve on it; that it pre-

io Jesus Christ and Buddha.

supposes Brahininism, and is a modified continuation
of it, although at deadly feud with its later represen
tations; and we may now turn to the life of the
remarkable man to whom the new religion owes its
origin.

II.

Here, perhaps, it may be well to say a word as to
some of our sources of information. First among
these must be placed the French translation of The
Lotus of the Good Law, as the work is named, by M.
Eugene Burnouf, with his accompanying dissertations ;
as well as his Introduction to the History of Indian
Buddhism. Then several papers in the Transactions
of the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Journal of the
Asiatic Society of Bengal, especially the sketch of
Buddhism from the Nepalese Sutras in the second
volume of the former series, may be mentioned. Mr.
Hodgson was for many years British Resident at
Nepaul, and to his enterprise, his scholarship, and his
unbounded liberality, Europe is mainly indebted for
its present knowledge of the subject before us.

Not to go further into particulars on this matter,
much fuller information will be found in Professor
Max Miiller's article on " Buddhism " in the first
volume of his collected Essays, an article which shows
at once the vastness of the subject, the caution with
which almost any conclusions must be received in

Jesus Christ and Buddha. \ i

our present state of knowledge, and the rich crop
of information which may be expected from future
investigations.

There is some difficulty in fixing the date at which
the founder of Buddhism appeared in history. The
earliest of the fourteen dates assigned to him in Thibet
is 2422 B.C. In China, Mongolia, and Japan he is
generally placed at 950 or 940 B.C.: among the
southern Buddhists of Siam, Burmah, and Ceylon at
543 B.C. The latter would seem to be the probable
date; to omit other considerations, the earlier dates
do not leave sufficient room for the extraordinary
development of Brahminism, itself the work of very
many centuries, which Buddhism presupposes. The
scene of his birth was at the town of Kapilavatthu,
capital of a small kingdom at the north of the modern
Oude, and at the foot of the range which divides it
from NepauL His father, Suddhodana, was head of
the family of the Sakyas, and king of the territory.
Buddha was thus of the warrior, and not of the
Brahmin caste, a point of much significance. His
mother's beauty, her intelligence, her virtue, are cele
brated in the most glowing terms in the Buddhist
sutra — the Lalita-vistara. She retired, to give him
birth, to the beautiful park or gardens of TAimbini,
some twenty miles north-east of Kapilavatthu: she
died seven days after her labour. Her child's personal
name was Siddhatthu, but he is more generally known

1 2 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

as Sakya-mouni, i.e. the solitary or monk of the Sakya
family. He is also the Samana Gotama, or ascetic
of the sun-descended race of the Gotamides; the
Sougata, or saviour of men ; the Bhagavat, the blessed
or fortunate one, the name commonly given him in
the writings of Nepaul ; the Arhat, or Venerable One,
a title which he shares with his most distinguished
disciples ; the Bodhisatta, one who by science and
virtue is in a fair way to become Buddha ; the Tatha-
gata, — the title which he gave himself, — one who had
gone as his predecessors, the earlier Buddhas : above
all, the Buddha, which means the Man of Science, the
Enlightened, the Awakened One. This indeed, his
most famous, is not a proper or personal name; it
describes a quality ; others became Buddha ; the
Prince of Kapilavatthu was the Buddha, par excel
lence : but this, as well as the other titles, excepting
his personal and family names, did not originally
belong to him, but were given or assumed, in the
course of years.

The infant was consigned to the care of his maternal
aunt, Mahapajapati Gotami, who became one of his
most attached converts in later years; he was pro
nounced by the eminent Brahmin Asita to have the
thirty-two principal signs and the eighty secondary
marks of the great man ; he was soon able, as a boy,
to learn all that his teachers had to tell him. In his
earliest years he was disinclined for amusements, pen-

Jesus Christ and Buddha. \ 3

sive, fond of retirement. The king's advisers insisted
on his marriage, in order to defeat a Brahminical
prophecy that he would abdicate the throne to become
an ascetic. After taking time for reflection, the boy of
sixteen years consented; if only his wife had high
personal qualities, she might, he said, be of any caste
of the people, or even of the enslaved race, as well as
of the Brahmins or the warriors. A commission of
old men made a selection of women in Kapilavatthu,
from among whom Siddhatthu had to choose : but, at
her father's demand, he was not allowed to win his
bride until he had proved himself, in Indian learning
as well as in athletic exercises, the best man of his
day. It is right to add that all this has been treated
by Professor Wilson as an allegory, indicating the
philosophical position of Buddhism; his contention
being that we know almost nothing of the founder of
Buddhism. But this fervid scepticism is checked by
the journals of the Chinese pilgrims who visited the
sites and verified the traditions of the early Buddhist
writings some centuries afterwards.

Buddha lived until the age of twenty-eight in the
three palaces which his father had built for him, sur
rounded with all that wealth, luxury, and affection
could yield; but he was not happy. To him the
world, or rather the universe, for he included the
Indian deities in his melancholy estimate, appeared
to labour under the threefold misery of ignorance,

14 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

desire, and existence. He believed that he could
attain to that higher intelligence of " the Good Law,"
the communication of which to others would put an
end to human misery ; by which the highest know
ledge would be attained ; by which desire and passion
would be extinguish ad ; by which the miseries of exist
ence, of death, which leads only to transmigration,
would be escaped in the self-accomplished annihilation
of Nirvana. His father's suspicions were aroused, and
every effort was made to detain him. But the sights
which met him in every direction only matured his
resolution. On his way to the gardens of Lumbini
he encounters a decrepit old man : he reflects that he
too will become old ; what right has he to enjoy him
self? He turns his carriage in thoughtful sorrow
back to the royal palace. On another similar occasion
he meets a sick man, in great suffering and want, in
an advanced stage of illness, and breathing with diffi
culty. "Health," he cries, "is but a dream; who,
having seen this, would think of enjoying himself?"
Again he turns homeward in disquiet and humiliation.
On another side of the city, and on a third occasion,
he meets a funeral ; the dead is followed by a long pro
cession of mourners, whose grief is shown in all the
demonstrative forms of Eastern vehemence. He again
utters a few passionate words on the misery of life :
" Let us go back," he exclaims : " I will try to effect
a deliverance." Once more he meets a bhikshu or

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 1 5

mendicant ascetic, with a collected, disciplined appear
ance, with downcast eyes and subdued gait On his
inquiry as to who it was, " This man," replies the ser
vant in attendance, " is a bhikshu ; he has renounced
all the pleasures of desire and leads now an austere
life ; he is engaged in crushing out self and has be
come a mendicant. Without passion, without desire,
he goes about asking alms."

Siddhatthu's resolution was taken : it was now only
a question of opportunity. He opened his design to
his wife, who in vain endeavoured to dissuade him.
He then told his Royal father. " 1\Vhat can I do for
thee, my son," cried the long, in tears, " to make thee
change thy purpose ? Myself, this palace, these ser
vants, this realm — all is thine." " Four things,"
replied Siddhatthu, " I ask : and if thou canst grant
them I will remain with thee. That old age may
never come to me: that I may for ever enjoy the
beauty of youth : that illness may never assail me :
that my life may know no limits, no decline." " Thou
askest for the impossible, my child," cried the king in
agony. " At least," replied the prince, " if thou canst
not grant me these four things, deign to grant me one,
one only. Let it be that, when I go hence, I may
escape tho vicissitudes of transmigration."

An Indian would have thought it just as reasonable
to ask that the sun's course might be changed.
Algument was no longer possible: the prince must

1 6 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

be prevented, if possible, by force from taking flight.
The family of Sakyas was convoked : the palace was
surrounded with guards ; the king himself super
intended in person the efforts of his officers. But it
was to no purpose. With the aid of a trusted con
fidant the prince escaped from the palace of Kapila-
vatthu at midnight; his heart for a moment sank
within him, as he turned to cast a last look upon the
home which he was leaving, it might be for ever.
" Never again," he said, " will I enter the town of
Kapila till I have secured the supreme dwelling, the
pure intelligence, which makes free from old age and
death." He rode hard all night ; he passed the
frontier of his father's realm : and when the morning
broke he dismounted, stripped himself of his pearls
and of his royal ornaments, and sent back his horse
and servant; cut off with his sword the long hair
which marked him as belonging to the warrior-caste,
and changed his robe, made of the finest silk of
Benares, with a huntsman who was dressed in deer
skins. In this guise he then crossed to the southern side
of the Ganges, to the kingdom of Magadha. Some of
the most celebrated Brahmin solitaries lived on a
mountain near the capital town of this State ; and the
prince became a disciple- of two famous teachers,
Alata and Rudraka, who, however, failed to satisfy
him. The Brahmin doctrines, as explained by their
highest representatives, did not, he said, " create

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 1 7

indifference for the things of the world; did not secure
enfranchisement from passion; provided no insur
ance against the vicissitudes of existence; did not
lead to peace of soul — to the Nirvana." Siddhatthu
withdrew publicly from the class of Rudraka, five of
whose disciples accompanied him ; and for six years
he devoted himself to the practice of the severest
austerities in the retreat of Uruvela. At the end of
that period he became persuaded that asceticism does
not lead the soul to the supremo knowledge; and
accordingly, while still remaining in the hermitage of
Uruvela, he took abundant food, while yet continuing
his meditations. This was considered by his five
disciples as a fall which ought to forfeit their respect
and confidence ; and they left him for one of the great
Brahminical establishments in Benares. It was in the
solitude of the later period of his retreat that Sid
dhatthu would appear to have finally determined the
principles of his system, and the rules of life which he
meant to propose to his followers. Here, too, his
deerskin dress fell to pieces, and by way of marking
his progress in asceticism, as understood in India, he
dressed himself hi the rags of a winding-sheet which
had been thrown round a corpse in a neighbouring
cemetery, and which was disinterred for the purpose.
But he was still short of the object of his efforts.
" By all that I have acquired," ho said, " I have far
surpassed human law ; but I have not yet succeeded

B

1 8 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

in clearly distinguishing the really venerable wisdom.
Not yet have I reached the true way of understand
ing. My present attainments do not really put an
end to old age, to sickness, to death."

However, the moment of the ecstasy in which
Siddhatthu believed that he did thus attain to the
supreme intelligence was at hand. The place is marked
with special particularity in the Buddhist literature ; it
shares their importance with Uruvela, the scene of
his six years' retirement, and Kusinara, the scene
of his death. It is termed Bodhimanda, the seat of
understanding : and all the details of the ecstasy are
preserved with scrupulous care. We are told how
the future Buddha met a man who was cutting down
herbs, and asked him for sufficient to make a carpet
with; which he carefully arranged with the foliage
downwards and the root upwards, under a species of
fig-tree, which, as the Bodhidrouma or tree of intel
ligence, became an object of Buddhist veneration, and
was visited ten centuries later by the Chinese pilgrims.
Here he remained motionless for a day and a night,
plunged hi contemplation, until at last the perfect
and absolute science (Bodhi) came to him, illuminated
him, changed him into the Buddha. Just at the
breaking of the dawn, when they beat the drums, the
triple science was reached by him. He rose, with the
energy of a profound conviction that he had mastered
the remedy for human pain: he rose the sincere

Jesus C/irist and Buddha. \ 9

founder of a now and powerful religion, albeit a
miserably false one.

He was now thirty-six years old, and he spent nine
teen years from this date in propagating his religion
in Central and Eastern India. He had to pass through
a new period of hesitation and anguish. Was it not
enough to have discovered for himself the secret of
human deliverance : must he encounter the opposi
tion which would follow any attempt to announce it
to others ? Three times he was on the point of yield
ing to this passing weakness ; he overcame it by u
reflection which, while it seriously limits the claims
which were advanced on his behalf, is illustrative of
the great common sense which accompanied his
singular reveries. " All living beings," said he, " may
be ranged hi three classes: one-third lives in false
hood, and may be expected to remain there ; another
third lives in truth ; another in uncertainty. Whether
I teach or not, they who are fixed in falsehood will
not know the law, and they who are in the truth will
know it But they who are in uncertainty depend
upon my efforts : they will know the law if I teach it,
they will remain ignorant if I am silent." An ad
mirable reflection for any man who proposes on what
ever scale to do good to his fellow-creatures. There
are many who do not need, and many who cannot
profit by his efforts; but there is an intermediate
class, within and for which he works, and which will

2O Jesus Christ and Buddha.

depend altogether upon his activity and determina
tion.

The Buddha (for such he now was) bethought him
self of teaching his new knowledge to his old friends,
the Brahmins Uddaka and Alara. They, however,
were both dead — beyond the reach of his specific for
escaping transmigration, so he determined to seek
his fugitive disciples at Benares. He turned his face
northward, towards the Ganges : he found his disciples
in a wood near the great city Benares. They were
still angry, and agreed, as he approached, that they
would not show him any mark of respect, or touch
his mendicant vestment, or his box for alms, or give
him aught to drink, or offer him a carpet, or rise
from their seats at his approach. " But as he came
on," says the Sutra, " a resistless instinct overcame
them in spite of themselves. One after another they
rose; they lavished upon him successively all the
marks of hospitality and consideration which they
had just forbidden themselves ; and he in turn an
nounced to them that he was now the Buddha, who
knew all, saw all, understood all, and only waited to
instruct them in the secret of existence, in the way
lo arrive at Nirvana." They were from that moment
devoted to him ; and, as the scene of his first public
preaching, Benares became more sacred in the eyes of
Buddhists than it had already been for ages in those
of Brahmins. Of his work at Benares we know little ;

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 2 1

for here the Lalita-vistara fails us; and no other
Sutra accessible to Europeans enters so fully into the
details of his life. His remaining years were passed
in incessant preaching. Some of his disciples followed
him in his wanderings ; others retired to woods and
solitudes to practise the contemplations by which
they might attain the wished-for rest of Nirvana. He
was protected by powerful monarchs on either bank
of the Ganges, especially by Bimbasara, the friend of
his early years, and, after an interval of estrangement
and persecution, by his son : the former offered him
a residence near his capital, where the Buddha lived
for a long period and made his most considerable
converts. The king of Sravasti was equally hospitable ;
and at last he won his own family to his convictions.
His father, the aged king of Kapilavatthu, came after
a parting of twelve years' duration to visit a son, the
reputation of whose sanctity and knowledge was
spreading through Northern Hindustan ; and the visit
was solemnly returned : the race of the Sakyas fur
nished converts to the new creed, especially Ananda,
nephew of the Buddha, whose name enters largely
into the literature of his life.

Of his struggles with the angry Brahmins we know
little; but there can be no doubt that his success
roused their fears and wounded their vanity. The
later legends describe a species of religious tourna
ment, in which, before a kiner and an assembled

2 2 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

people, the Buddha defeated his Brahmin oppon
ents; the Chinese pilgrims collected traditions to
the effect that the Brahmins menaced and nearly
took his life. The wonder is that they did not take
it; there can be no doubt what they would have
done, could they have seen its importance in the
light of later centuries.

Buddha died at the ripe age of eighty, surrounded
by an enormous crowd of disciples and mendicants, and
attended by his devoted relative, Ananda. He knew
that his end was near. He crossed the Ganges for
the last time; paid a last visit to the sacred city
Benares; and, in his quality of Arhat, bestowed a
religious commission on several mendicants, specially
on Soubhadra. It was in a wood near the town
of Kusinara that he breathed his last, believing
himself, believed by his followers, to have attained
the supreme bliss of ecstatic annihilation. The de
tails of his funeral have been scrupulously described.
His body was burned eight days after his decease;
the struggles for the ashes threatened even blood
shed. The ashes were enclosed in a golden urn, and
carried to the public hall of the town, where, during
seven days, feasts were celebrated in his honour. The
relics were then divided into eight parts, and distri
buted among eight towns, each of which built a shrine
(tochaitya) for their reception.

The founder of the new religion was dead, but his

Jesus Christ and Buddha.

followers assembled in a species of synod to systema
tise his teaching. The first meeting lasted for seven
months. The result was that the teaching of the
master was drawn up under the threefold heads of
precepts, discipline, and philosophy; but a century
later abuses hi discipline made a second assembly
or synod necessary. It sat for eight months. It
decided, inter alia, that salt might not be kept for
more than ten days; that nothing might be eaten
after mid-day; that no act might be undertaken
without permission; that milk might not be taken
after a repast ; that splendid carpets were not to be
purchased for sitting on ; that jewels set in gold and
silver might not be worn. The schisms which grew
up after this second synod led to a third, under the
King Asoka, — the Constantino, as he has been called,
of Buddhism, — about 246 years before Christ. Asoka,
after being a vehement partisan of Brahminism, was
a passionate convert to the rival religion; and at
his instigation, during a sitting of nine months, the
Buddhist sacred books were digested and collected.
A fourth synod was held in Cashmere, during the
very time that our Lord was in Palestine, between
the years 10 and 30 of the Christian era. The occasion
was the claim of a certain mendicant of Cashmere to
be an incarnation of Mara, the god of death. At this
JMOrnbly the doctrines and the sacred writings of
Buddhism received their definitive form; and although

24 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

its authority was not acknowledged by the southern
Buddhists, it completed, for all practical purposes, and
for the great bulk of Buddhist believers, the work
which had begun five centuries and a half before.

For nearly three centuries Buddhism was confined
to the districts of India which gave it birth. It was
only after the third synod, held in the year 246 B.C.,
that it became a missionary power. It was then re
solved to make a great effort for the conversion of
other races ; and although the stories of the successes
achieved by the Buddhist ascetics can hardly be
regarded as trustworthy, it seems clear that they
penetrated with success into Cabul, Cashmere, even
the Caucasus ; that they came into contact with the
Syro- Greek civilisation of Western Asia, and were
heard even in Macedonia. Asoka did much to organise
and sustain these efforts; his own son, Mahinda,
undertook the conversion of Ceylon, in B.C. 245. He
was accompanied by four disciples, and the young
monarch of the island assigned them a garden for
their public conferences. Here Mahinda preached
for twenty-six days, and at the end of that period
received the adhesion of the king and a great part
of his people to the Buddhist doctrines. Ceylon was
endowed with two of the greatest Buddhist relics —
the alms-box which Sakya-Mouni had carried as a
mendicant, and a branch of the tree under which he
had, in ecstasy, become the Buddha. When the king

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 25

of the island sent an embassy to the Roman Emperor
Claudius, it must have been entirely Buddhist.
Pliny probably means Buddha when he says that the
inhabitants of Taprobana adored Hercules — an odd
kind of equivalent to Buddha no doubt, but the best
Pliny could think of. When the Chinese pilgrim
Fa-Hien visited the island at the beginning of the
fifth century of the Christian era, he found in it a
much more intense and fervid Buddhism than that
on the Indian continent. A long line of kings of
Ceylon, with few exceptions, were devoted Buddhists ;
Ceylon alone produced a copious and rich Buddhist
literature. From it the new religion spread to the
countries east of the Ganges — to Burmah, Siam, the
whole western and central portion of the Burmese pen
insula; the eastern side, Cochin-China and Tonquin,
would seem to have been Buddhised — if I may coin
the word — from China. Into China Buddhism was
introduced first after the third synod — two centuries
and a half before our Lord — but with poor success. It
was in the year A.D. 65 that the reigning Emperor sent
a commission of inquiry into India, which resulted in
the return of some eminent Buddhist ascetics, and the
building of a magnificent convent in Lo-yang. The
Indian books (the Lalita-vistara, in particular) were
translated into Chinese; the new religion made its
way in the imperial family ; it profited by the division
of the empire after the fall of the Han dynasty ; it

26 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

profited by the restored unity of the empire under
the Tsui dynasty. Then began that wonderful inter
course of pilgrimages between China and India, some
records of which poured such a flood of light about
fifteen years ago upon Buddhist history, and which
deepened and consolidated Buddhism in what is now,
perhaps, the chief seat of its power.

The Buddhist propaganda in Central and West
Central Asia was earlier hi point of time. The mis
sionaries of Buddhism were preaching in Bactriana
at least sixty years before the Incarnation of our
Lord; Alexander Polyhistor refers to them as the
Samaneans. St. Clement of Alexandria was much
interested in what he heard of them in the second
century of the Christian era. The powerful prince
Kanichka, — whose empire at the beginning of the
Christian era included Cabul and part of India, while
it extended to the banks of the Oxus, — became a fervid
Buddhist, and threw the whole weight of his political
influence into the cause of this creed. From Bactriana,
Buddhism penetrated northward, and into the western
kingdoms of Central Asia, the region of Khotan,
Yarkand, and Kashgar, with the actual condition of
which the English public has been recently made
familiar by the highly interesting and instructive work
of Mr. Commissioner Shaw. From these countries of
Western Turkestan Buddhism was driven by the great
Mussulman invasion of the twelfth century. It does

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 2 7

not seem to have reached Thibet until the seventh
century of the Christian era. The reigning monarch
sent his prime minister, Tuomi, with sixteen others,
into India, in the year A.D. 632, to study the Buddhist
doctrines and bring back the sacred books. On his
return, the king built the great Buddhist temple of
Lhassa, and married two princesses, — one a Nepalese
and the other a Chinese, both of whom had been
brought up as Buddhists. They came with an
immense assortment of Buddhist books and images;
but the first Grand Lama, Tischeu, who also came
from India, was not established before the middle of
the ninth century. He was made administrator of
the kingdom by the reigning king, and thus his
successors became sovereigns of the country, after
the reform of the Lamas in the fourteenth century—
a singular institution, which is no essential part of
the Buddhist hierarchy, but is profoundly inspired by
the spirit of Buddhism.

Buddhism, while achieving these conquests beyond
the Himalayas, was losing ground in the country
which gave it birth. The great struggle with Brah-
minisin appears to have already begun in the second
century of the Christian era. Buddhism was not
finally beaten and expelled from Bengal until the
fourteenth century. Of the details of the struggle we
know little, although it is not difficult to understand
its motives. The persecuted Buddhists took refuge

28 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

in Nepaul at the southern foot of the Himalayas, or
they passed into China and Thibet ; and at this date
nothing remains to attest their ancient power in large
districts of India but the deserted stoupas, which, like
Druidical stones in this country, witness to the power
of a religion that has passed away.

It is, as it appears to me, impossible not to recognise
in the founder of Buddhism one of the most interesting
and beautiful figures which are to be found hi the
annals of Paganism. Here is a young man, born in a
happy tune, born of a just and generous father and
a loving mother, cradled in wealth and luxury, wel
comed to life by all that it has best to offer in the
way of outward advantages, the heir of a noble name,
the heir of a throne. He is virtuous; he is intel
lectual; he is good-looking; he is popular; he marries
a young wife who is also pre-eminently beautiful and
good ; life opens on him, as far as outward blessings
go, with all the glow and splendour of an Eastern
morning. But his happiness is poisoned by the
spectacle of sufferings around him, which are too
great, too many, too rooted in the fixed conditions of
human life, to admit of his relieving them ; and his
sense of these sufferings is heightened by his inherited
belief in the transmigration of souls from body to
body, a doctrine which, while making existence a
curse, makes escape from it, if possible, a blessing.
His thoughts, his studies, his enthusiasms are thus

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 29

grounded in a most unselfish and generous impulse ;
and when he renounces his home and his crown, his
wealth and his power, to become a beggar and a soli-
tary, to meditate, amid self-imposed hardships, upon
the ultimate secrets of human destiny, we do better
perhaps in admiring the loftiness of his motive than
in wondering at the results of his career. Clearly
his was a character to which power over the outward
circumstances of his fellows was of little account in
comparison with power to elevate, perhaps to govern,
hearts and minds ; he belonged to that higher order
of men who think more of the charities of life than of
its outward advantages ; more of independence of con
science than of the lore of easy circumstances ; more of
the happiness of multitudes than of personal privileges
and position ; more of the future destinies of man than
of the splendid but transient present. If in his efforts
to admit all to the knowledge which Brahrninism re
served for a favoured few, and to modify the con
sequences of a doctrine which, perhaps inevitably, he
never thought of questioning, he became the victim
of a self-deluding and stupefying ecstasy, and the
author of a creed which is a thinly disguised atheism,
this must not blind us to his real titles to respectful
sympathy. If we measure his failure in the light of
a revelation of absolute Truth which he never heard
of, we must admit that his love of such truth as he
hoped to win, and the sacrifices ho so cheerfully and

30 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

unflinchingly made in order to attain it, are Christian
at least as well as Pagan virtues, and that it may be
impossible for honest Christians to think over the
career of this heathen prince without some keen feel
ings of humiliation and shame.

In truth, from age to age, Tyre and Sidon are
rebuking the indifference of Capernaum to its awful
privileges; and Sakya-Mouni is not the last Pagan
who might read a useful lesson to the children of
the Church.

I have not suggested, except indirectly, the com
parison or contrast between Christianity and Buddhism
which it was proposed to institute. But much will
have occurred to you incidentally, almost inevitably, in
what has been said. And why Buddhism succeeded
as it did, and how in its conceptions of heaven, of
life, of destiny, of conduct, it contrasts with the Faith
which dates from Calvary and Pentecost, will be the
subject of another lecture.

JESUS CHRIST AND BUDDHA.

II. COMPARISON BETWEEN BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY.1

review of the life of Buddha, and of the his
torical development of Buddhism, which engaged
our attention last Tuesday will probably have sug
gested a question that, in one form or another, presses
heavily upon the thought of the present generation.
That question is, whether Christianity is or is not
ESSENTIALLY different from this and the other great
religions of the world ; whether it is, so to speak, in
the same line with them, the product of a race, the
product of the intellectual and moral circumstances of
an epoch ; or whether it has that in it which makes
it altogether distinct, so that while they are the
shadow, it is the reality, — while they are the human
and the relative, it is the absolute and the Divine ?

This question belongs to our present state of know
ledge rather than to that of former centuries. When
men knew little of the great Eastern religions, witli
the one exception of Mohammedanism, it never oc
curred to them to compare Buddhism or Parseeisin or

1 Lecture delivered in 8t Paul's Cathedral, oil Tuesday evening,
January a8, 1873.

n

Jesus Christ and Buddha.

Confucianism with Christianity in this way. They
lived, like the Tyrolese peasantry in their beautiful
valleys, in an intellectual world whose horizons were
sharply bounded on this side and on that ; and they
never thought of asking themselves the question,
what was the aspect, what the relative beauty, of the
plains which stretched away beyond the mountains
which limited their view. It is far otherwise now.
And although it will be quite impossible to give a full
answer to so grave a question as that before us, we
may do well to keep it in view during the course of
the ensuing discussion.

(a) Here it is natural to reflect that a true and
a false religion, the most absolutely true and the
most certainly and irretrievably false, must, from the
nature of the case, have much in common. They
must have many common elements, and especially for
this reason: both religions, the true and the false,
have to make themselves at home among men; to
provide for their recognition, their permanence, — if it
may be, their empire ; and in order to do this, they
have, in varying degrees, to accommodate themselves
to certain fixed, unchanging conditions of thought,
life, feeling, social organisation. The human intellect
is the same thing in Thibet and in Europe ; the human
heart is under the empire of the same attractions and

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 33

repulsions in one continent as in another ; the ultimate
laws of social organisation and the conditions of its
modification are everywhere the same. Every religion,
be it true or false, has to take these things into account,
at least to a certain extent ; and in its outward exhi
bition of itself every religion is influenced by them.
Human nature, in short, reflects, or inflicts, a common
human element on all religions, true and false alike.
No religion can ignore the laws of association in
a common conviction; the laws of propagating a
common conviction; the necessity of expressing a
common conviction in language, in the outward cir
cumstances, habits, surroundings of life. And the
result, let me repeat, is that all religions, the truest
and the most false, have, from the nature of the case,
certain elements in common; they have that in
common which is imposed on them from without by
the laws of that society and life with which they deal
And these common features are often so numerous
and so complex, they say so much to the eye and to
the imagination, that men, forgetting the underlying
and ineffaceable distinctness, are tempted to exclaim,
" Surely these religions are merely different forms of
the same thing ; plants, both of them, of human growth,
with only such differences as are imposed on them
respectively by their date, their country, their circum
stances." And yet such a judgment is irrational, since
it confuses the accidental with the essential not less

34 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

completely than would a naturalist who should mis
take like influences of climate or training on the colour
or habits of two distinct animals for specific identity
of type.

Now Buddhism undoubtedly presents some resem
blance to particular features of the Christian Church,
or to matters common to all Christian Churches,
which have been largely insisted on by a certain
school of modern writers. Thus the Buddhist insti
tutions for leading a common life, under somewhat
severe rule, have often been compared with Christian
monasticisin.

The mendicants or monks, who copied Buddha's
life more exactly, and who aimed at a higher standard
than that of ordinary Buddhists, were under rules of
exceptional severity. Like the Buddha, they were
ordered to wear rags dug up from a cemetery and
covered only by a yellow linen overcoat. None might
possess more than three sets of such rags. They were
to live only on what could be procured by begging
alms from house to house, in a wooden box. While
doing this they were to preserve the strictest silence :
nothing might induce them to break it. A single
meal in the day was all that they might take. They
were never to eat after noon on any pretence. Except
in the rainy season, when they might live in the
viharas or convents, they were to live and sleep in the
woods or open fields : they might come into the towns

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 35

only to beg. They were to cover themselves at night,
if at all, with the leaves of trees ; to rest, if at all,
against the trunks of trees; to go to sleep sitting, and not
lying down ; not to rearrange their carpet, when it had
once been spread. Once a month every Buddhist men
dicant was to repair to a cemetery, to meditate amongst
the dead on the instability of human things. He was
to expel covetousness by renouncing property : he was
to crush sensuality by leading a single life. He was
to keep before him as the six transcendental virtues,
which, in Buddhist language, " carry man over to the
other bank," almsgiving, poverty, patience, courage,
contemplation, knowledge of the law. This was the
general rule of life for men — the bhikshus, or Bud
dhist mendicants. Sakya-Mouni's aunt and nurse
became the founder of a similar method of life for
women. When these mendicants lived together, others
who wished to live according to the stricter Buddhist
life, and yet not to bind themselves to all the obliga
tions of a religious order, were associated with the
regular mendicants as a kind of lay brethren. At this
moment the soil of China and Thibet is covered with
Buddhist convents of this description.

Profound as are differences both in the object and
spirit of these institutions and those in Christendom,
the great general resemblance is undeniable ; and the
same observation has been extended to the details of
t!i' I Uiddhist ritual and hierarchy. When MM. Hue

36 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

and Gabet, the Roman Catholic missionaries, published
their well-known Travels in Thibet, they described all
the Buddhist ceremonials in the usual language of the
Roman Catholic Church. " It is impossible," says the
Abb6 Hue, " not to be struck with the resemblance to
Catholicism." He then enumerates a long list of cor
respondences in matters of order and ceremonial : he
describes the proceedings of the Lamas in the regular
terms of the Roman Pontifical. He had, in fact, no
other language at command to describe what he saw :
but his book was stupidly put upon the Index, as if it
were intended to imply that Roman Catholicism and
Buddhism were substantially identical In the same
manner a comparison has been drawn between the
Grand Lama of Thibet and the Pope, and between
such Buddhist monarchs on the other side of the
Himalayas as Asoka and his successors and the Con-
stantinopolitan Emperors, or the Czars of Russia, or
Henry vm. and the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns of
this country, in their relations to particular sections
of the Christian Church. Such resemblances are
due, not to any essential correspondence between the
Buddhist and Christian religions, but to the general
laws which govern the self-presentation and activities
of any religion in this human world, at particular
social epochs, and under certain recurring circum
stances.

Again, to take points which concern all Christians

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 37

equally, the Buddhist missionaries are undeniably
more like missionaries of the Christian Church than
are the propagators of any other known religion.

Contrast them with the apostles of Islam. Moham
medanism too aimed at the conversion of the world,
but its instrument was, not preaching, but the sword.
The followers of the Prophet, encouraged to believe
that Paradise, peopled with beautiful houris, would
open its gates immediately to the Moslem who had
died fighting for the sacred cause, swept through
Western Asia and Northern Africa, with the cry,
"Death or Conversion!" The Buddhist prince,
Mahinda, who converted Ceylon, addressed himself to
his work just as any quiet Christian missionary would
do at the present day : he succeeded in getting the
government to allow him a fair hearing, and he made
the most of it. So far as its method went, the con
version of Ceylon was in no way distinguishable from
St. Paul's labours at Philippi and Thessalonica ; it was
a work of moral and spiritual influence, as distinct
from violence or compulsion of any kind. Again, the
process whereby the Buddhist Councils formulated
their common stock of doctrines, and defined what,
for want of a better name, we must call the canon of
their sacred books, cannot but remind us of what took
place in the early centuries of Christendom. Any one
who will read such accessible and entirely trustworthy
manuals as Professor Westcott's History of the Canon

38 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

of ike New Testament, or his Bible in the Church, will
see what I mean, in observing how, gradually, and
in some cases only after very grave hesitation, the
Church of Christ too arrived at the recognition of her
Scriptures. These admissions, I must repeat, prove
nothing as to the worth of the teaching of the Bud
dhist missionary, or as to the truths of the Buddhist
sacred books, still less as to the human origin or
authority of Christian Doctrine or the Christian Scrip
tures. The undeniable resemblance is to be referred
to the operation of those general laws which govern
the expression and propagation of religious thought,
whatever be its real claims upon our faith and obedi
ence.

(@) A second reflection which must be made is this.
No religion, however false, is so false as not to con
tain some elements of truth. The fetich-worship of
the lowest savage affirms this great truth, that man
must look out of, beyond, above himself, for a worthy
object of his intellectual and moral aspirations. And
the truth which is imbedded in a false religion is its
element of permanency and strength : the false creed
lives on and spreads, if it does live and spread, because,
amid all the falsehood which it teaches, it teaches also
truth, and so justifies itself to the deepest instincts of
the human conscience. The conscience cannot gene
rally analyse the food which is offered to the soul at
the moment of reception, and it is coaxed into receiv-

Jesus Christ and Buddlia. 39

ing an immense conglomerate of truths and lies, by its
profound affinity for the truths which make the lies
tolerable, or even welcome. Who shall deny, for
instance, the splendour of the truth upon which
Mohammedanism traded, and which it still puts for
ward, the truth of the Divine Unity ? " There is no
God but God : " it is a glorious confession, if only it
could be divorced from the ambition of an impostor,
and from a theory of heaven which would make the
Divine Presence the scene of a sensual revel.

Now, the strength, the invigorating element of
truth in Buddhism, lies especially in its moral teach
ing. On this head there is, so far as I am aware, no
room for controversy. "Taken by itself," says Pro- \
fessor Max Miiller, " the moral code of Buddhism is I
one of the most perfect that the world has ever/
known."1 " A collection might be made from the pre
cepts of a single Buddhist work, The FooMcps of the
Law," says Mr. Spence Hardy, the Wesleyan missionary,
"which in the purity of its ethics could hardly bo
equalled in any other heathen author." 2 " It is diffi
cult," says M. Laboulaye, " to comprehend how men
not assisted by Revelation could have soared so high
and approached so near the truth." 3 This language
may appear to be exaggerated, and it certainly cannot
be adopted without some reserve ; but let us consider
what the moral teaching of Buddhism is. Every

1 Chiptfrom a German Workshop, i. p. 221. * 76. * /&.

40 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

Buddhist, be his home in Ceylon, in Burmah, in China,
in Thibet, or in Cashmere, has to be well acquainted
with the four Sublime Truths, as they are called.
They form his creed. These truths are (i) the exist
ence of pain, in some shape or other, in every human
life. This truth is the base of the rest. (2) The cause
of pain. This is traced to passion, to indulged desire.
(3) The remedy for pain : man, according to Bud
dhism, may escape from it in the Nirvana, the highest
object and reward of his efforts. (4) The means of
arriving at this cessation of pain, the method which
leads to the Nirvana. In this method there are eight
parts or stages : each is a condition of ultimate suc
cess. First, the Buddhist must have a right belief.
Next, he must have a good, clear, unhesitating judg
ment. Thirdly — and here we reach what I am anxious
to insist upon — he must be perfectly veracious : he
must hate a lie. Fourthly, in all that he does he must
aim at a pure and straightforward object which shall
govern his actions throughout. Fifthly, he must
engage in no profession to gain his livelihood that is
tainted by moral laxity, i.e. practically he ought to be
a Buddhist mendicant. Sixthly, he must give his
mind to understanding the precepts of the law.
Seventhly, he must keep an honest memory of all his
past actions. Lastly, he must meditate earnestly, if
he would raise his understanding from this lower
world to the quiet of the Nirvana.

Jesus Christ and Buddka. 4 1

It was in understanding these truths, say the Bud
dhists, that Sakya-Mouni became the Buddha, after
six years of austerity and meditation at Uruvela.
They formed the main feature in his popular teaching
during the later years of his life. They were the
weapon which he wielded with most effect against the
Brahmins. They occupied the attention, almost to
the exclusion of other matter, of the first Buddhist
synod. They are the subject of the earliest treatises
or Sutras. A stanza, which is often found under the
statues of Buddha, and which all Buddhists know by
heart, embodies them. Besides these there were five
dissuasive precepts, of universal obligation: Not to
kill ; not to steal ; not to be unchaste ; not to lie ; and
not to get drunk. Five other precepts run thus:
Take no food between meals ; keep away from dances
and theatres ; use no perfumes ; do not sleep in a mag
nificent high bed ; do not take any gold or silver. The
elements of the highest wisdom, when the Buddhist
has only one step to make to enter Nirvana, are said
to be: (i) Reflection; (2) Study; (3) Perseverance;
(4) Inward joy; (5) Confidence; (6) Entire self-
control ; (7) Indifference to the opinion of the world.

We shall best understand the working of the
Buddhist morality by one or two stories, selected
from the Sutras by Saint-Hilaire, which, whatever
their exact historical value, have an indisputable
beauty, as teaching what Buddhism was meant to

42 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

be in actual life, and what it probably has been in
very many lives.

The first shows us the undeniable charity and
courage of the Buddhist missionary. Powma was a
self-made man, the son of a slave who, by application
to business, had realised a large fortune. He fell in
with some merchants of Sravasti during one of his
voyages, and was much attracted by their prayers and
hymns. Sakya-Mouni was working there at the time ;
Powma was presented to him; and Sakya-Mouni
instructed the neophyte in the law. Powma then
became anxious to convert to the Buddhist faith a
neighbouring tribe of peculiar ferocity, but Sakya-
Mouni endeavoured to dissuade him. " The men of
Sronaparanta," said he, " where thou wouldest fix thy
abode, are violent, cruel, insolent, ferocious. What
wilt thou think, 0 Powma, when these men address
thee in insolent and abusive language, as they will ? "

"If," replied Powma, "the men of Sronaparanta
abuse me to my face in gross and insolent language,
1 shall think to myself, Certainly these men of Srona
paranta are sweet-tempered and excellent people,
since they neither beat me with their hands nor
wound me with stones."

" But," replied Sakya-Mouni, " if the men of Srona
paranta should beat thee with their hands, or wound
thee with stones, what wouldest thou think of it ? "

" I should think," said he, " that they are good and

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 43

gentle, because they at least do not use sticks or
swords."

" But if they did use sticks or swords, what then ? "

" Then," replied Powma, " I should say to myself
still, These men are good and gentle, since they do
not take my life."

"But if they do take thy life," rejoined Sakya-
Mouni, " what then ? "

" I shall reflect," said Powma, " that the men of
Sronaparanta are good and gentle, for delivering me
so easily from this body, which is filled with cor
ruption."

"Good, O Powma," replied Sakya-Mouni. "Thou
mayest, if thou wilt, fix thy abode in the country of
the Sronaparantakas. Go then ; and as thou art
delivered from pain, save others : as thou hast gained
the further bank, help others over : as thou art con
soled, be the consolation of others: as thou hast
reached the true Nirvana, make others reach it
too."

Powma obeyed; and by his dauntless resignation
he won the hearts of the savages, and taught them
the Buddhist religion and law.

A second narrative may exhibit the power of bearing
wrong and forgiving its authors, which the Buddhist
morality insisted on.

Kunala was the son of Asoka, the Indian monarch
of the third century before Christ, whose conversion

44 Jesiis Christ and Buddha.

to Buddhism did so much for its extension in India
and beyond. Kunala was governor of a province,
and was extremely popular among his subjects. One
day an order arrived from the capital that Kunala's
eyes were to be put out ; the order was signed with
the royal signet. The fact was that Rishya-Rakshita,
one of the wives of Asoka, had tempted Kunala's
virtue; and when he resisted her wicked advances,
she had determined to punish him, and had possessed
herself surreptitiously of the royal signet, after the
fashion of Jezebel in the matter of Naboth, in order
to do so. When the order arrived, the people at first
refused to carry it out. But the young prince, recog
nising his father's seal, said that it would be right to
submit. A deformed leper was the only person who
could be found to carry out the cruel mandate.

" It was to prepare me for this misery," said
Kunala, while they were waiting, " that the wise men
who knew the truth said to me, So all this world
perishes; no man remains what he was for ever.
Those virtuous friends, those high-minded sages, who
are free from all passions, told me then the truth.
My eyes, too, are perishable : when I think of this, I
do not tremble at the threatened pain. Let my eyes,
then, be taken out or left, just as the king likes.
They have already done me all the service they can :
they have taught me that all here perishes." Then
addressing himself to the executioner, "Now," said

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 45

he, "take out one eye, and give it me in my
hand."

In spite of the cries of the multitude the man
carried out the order ; and the young prince, taking
his one eye in his hand, said, "Why dost thou, O
vile lump of flesh, no longer see forms around thee,
as just now? How foolish are they who can so
attach themselves to thee, as to say, It is my very
self."

Then the second eye was cut out. Kunala cried,
"The eyes of the flesh have been taken out, but I
have gained the vision of wisdom. If the king for
sakes me, I become the son of the King of the Law
(he means Buddha). If I have fallen from the royal
dignity which brings in its train so much pain and
disappointment, I have acquired the sovereignty of
the law, which destroys pain and grief."

Some time afterwards Kunala was told that he
had been the victim of Rishya-Rakshita's intrigue.
" May she long enjoy happiness, life, and power," ho
cried, " for having done me in this way so great a
service." He wandered about India, led by the hand
of his young wife, and at last they reached the palace
of Asoka. Asoka was shocked at what had happened,
and especially at the wickedness of Rishya-Rakshita,
whom he determined to put to death. Kunula
begged for her life, and saved it Ho assured his
father that he believed his misfortune to bo a just

46 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

punishment for some crime which he had committed
in a previous state of existence.

Other histories of the same kind might be quoted
from the Sutras, — one in particular which illustrates
the union of chastity and charity to which some
Buddhists attained. It describes a young merchant's
resistance to the advances of a very famous courtesan
who at last committed a murder, and was punished
by having all her limbs cut oft' and being left to die
hi a cemetery. Then, and not till then, the young
man visited her ; and she, hi her agony, expressed her
surprise at seeing him. He had come, he said, not to
reproach, but, if he could, to console her : now she
might know, as he did, how all on earth is perishing ;
he would help her to learn something of the law of
Buddha before she died. She died, it is added, con
soled and in peace.

It is plain that a system which could teach a
morality like this had in it an element of enormous
power. The human conscience could not but love
these sublime and gentle virtues — this heroism, this
patience, this purity, this charity, this forgivingness,
this wealth of passive endurance. There is nothing
like it hi Mohammedanism, which, whatever it may
teach in other ways, consecrates on a great scale im
purity and cruelty. There is nothing like it even in
the old Roman Stoicism, which in some ways ap
proached the revealed morality of the Church so

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 47

remarkably: the Stoic was always at bottom hard
and proud; he never reached the humility, the
sublime patience of the Buddhist. The religion of
Jesus Christ, and it alone, equals and surpasses this
side of the Buddhist morality. But we can hardly
wonder at the success of the Buddhist missionaries.
They had quite truth enough in their mouths and in
their hands to account for it ; and as men listened to
the precepts and to the histories of the Sutras, they
did not inquire very closely into what there was
beyond. If its doctrine of the Unity of God made
the fortune of Islam, the beauty of its passive morality
made that of the religion of Buddha,

II.

What is it, then, which differentiates Christianity,
which makes it impossible for us Christians to admit
that Christianity and Buddhism are two different
forms of some one universal religion of humanity ? •
In order to answer this we must ask three questions, I
which are the measure of the value of any religion. [
Religion being the bond which unites the human
soul to God, it always must be considered, in the case
of a particular religion, (i) What does it say about
God ? (2) What does it say about man ? (.3) What
about the person and authority of its originator?

48 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

(a) Let us begin with the last. What does
Buddhism say about the person of its founder ? The
hynms hi the Lalita-vistara, which probably belongs
to the period of the second Buddhist Council — hi its
Sanskrit form — give some answer to this. One hymn
celebrates his praises as the embodiment of purity
and of science. Another reminds him of his pro
mises of protection towards his servants. A third
asks him to free his servants from the empire of
passion and the empire of pain. A fourth describes
him, in his earlier transformations, as a king, a
Brahmin, an antelope, a parrot: the Buddha had
sought the good of all. Many of the hymns in this
Sutra are connected with particular events in Sakya-
Mouni's life; they celebrate the despair of his wife
at his leaving Kapilavatthu ; his answer to the king
of Magadha, and the like. But they chiefly express
the overflowing gratitude and reverence of his followers
for himself. There is a hymn which sings of him as
the guide of men and the joy of the world. There is
one which addresses him as the learned physician of
men, as more helpful to man than either Indra or
Brahma. Another hymn describes the melody of his
voice, the glory of his footsteps which made the very
dust radiant. Another celebrates his victory over
evil spirits; another his triumph over the tempta
tion to ambition ; another his resistance to the temp
tation of earthly beauty. In another, he is entreated

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 49

to arise from his indifference ; to instruct men and
make them share his glory. In another he is saluted,
all but adored, by the purest of the pure, by the
spirits of the dead, by the devas or gods, and by
men, as the teacher of the Law.

No doubt, when St. Clement of Alexandria spoke
of Buddha as being treated as a god, he must have
formed his opinion from the report of such hymns as
these, which were then four or five centuries old.
Nothing less than Buddha's divinity would have
been implied, if the writers of these hymns had ever
known what God is from such a revelation as that
of Sinai.

When St. Paul speaks of Jesus Christ as of Pro
vidence, Who guides his steps and controls his actions,
we know what he must mean, even if he did not, as
he does, go so far as to say that our holy Redeemer
is "over all, God blessed for ever."1 When St. John
pictures the adoration of the Lamb slain and imma
culate in the midst of the Throne of Heaven,2 no
words would be too severe for the implied blasphemy
in the eyes of believers in the Unity of God, unless
the doctrine that the Son is of One Substance with
the Father was literally true. But the yerj^Jdea of
God was unknown t.n t.l^e Tm%n hymn-writers.
The Buddhist hymn- writers had the later Brali in in
hymns running in their heads, ^vhich ascribed the

» Rom. ix. 5. • Rev. v. 6-13.

D

50 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

\ highest Divine attributes -with equal readiness and
profusion to all the inferior spirits and deities of the
Indian Pantheon; so that when Buddha is said to
have been adored by those who are themselves adored,
nothing is intended beyond an exuberant compliment,
such as might be lavished with entire Brahminical
propriety on a very exalted teacher.

Saint-Hilaire appears to be strictly accurate in say
ing that Sakya-Mouni has never been deified by his
followers. His relics have been worshipped; his
image (the hand raised as if in teaching, the legs
crossed) is everywhere in his temples ; but he him
self is gone the way of ecstatic annihilation : he has
achieved the triumph of escaping from existence.
He is invoked in passionate apostrophes, which, upon
serious thought, cannot be supposed to reach his ear.
Certainly, his entry upon life is described in terms
by the Lalita-vistara which might befit the conception
of a Divine Incarnation. But the idea of his pre-
existence was not peculiar to himself or to Buddhist
theology; the notion of transmigration belonged to
the common stock of Indian ideas ; and the enrich
ment of this fundamental conception by the presumed
debate in the Indian Olympus as to the time, the
continent, the country, and the family in which the
Buddha should be born twelve years before his birth
in no way implies belief in his being more than an
exalted man. He is a social reformer with philoso-

Jesus Christ and Buddlia. 5 1

phical tendencies, who has taught some beautiful
things about morality, and a great deal of nonsense
on other subjects ; he never says anything to imply
that he is himself more than a religious discoverer,
who has, in his own opinion, succeeded, and who is
entitled to the veneration of his followers. He dies
like every one else ; and it is difficult to say whether
his presumed blessedness is not the exact measure of
his felt impotence to aid his worshippers.

Contrast this with the claims of Jesus Christ. He
does not, like Buddha, arrive at His Gospel after long
struggles: He brings it from heaven. He does not
tell men to deliver themselves from pain and death.
He says, " I am the Resurrection and the Life ; who
soever believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet
shall he live."1 He does not leave them to guess,
in after ages, what is His own eternal relation to
the Uncreated Being. He says, " He that hath seen
Me hath seen the Father."2 " I and the Father are
One/'1

(ft) What does Buddhism say of man ? what does
it offer to do for man ? It echoes much which belongs
to the common stock of Indian thought, which it
accepted from Brahminism without revision. "The
idea of transmigration," says Professor Max Muller,
" the belief in the continuing effects of our good and
bad actions, extending from our former to our present

i St. John XL 25. * lb. xiv. 9. • Ib. x. 30.

5 2 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

and from our present to our future lives, the sense
that life is a dream or a burden, the admission of
the uselessness of religious observances after the at
tainment of the highest knowledge, all these belong,
so to say, to the national philosophy of India. We
meet with these ideas everywhere, in the poetry, the
philosophy, the religion of the Hindus." 1

Buddhism, then, in common with Brahminism,
regards existence as miserable; and here, up to a
certain point, these Indian religions are in accord
with Christianity. "The whole creation," says St.
Paul, " groaneth and travaileth in pain together until
now ; and not only they, but ourselves also, which
have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves
groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to
wit, the redemption of our bodies."2 The Apostle is
in agreement with Buddha as to the fact, but not
as to either its importance or its remedy. _In the
Buddhist Sutras, physical pain is the leading feature
of human misery; in the New Testament, moral error
is its leading feature. Man's first business here is to
escape from physical misery. Buddhism makes no
sharp distinction between physical and moral evil —
the disease of the body and the disease of the soul ;
for in truth the deeper distinction of soul and body,
with which we Christians are so familiar, is, says a
great scholar, really unknown to the Sutras. Cer-

1 Chips from a German Workshop, i. p. 227. 2 Rom. viii. 22, 23.

Jesus Christ and Buddlia. 53

tainly, Buddhism affirms the great law everywhere
traceable in man's natural conscience, and so nobly
recognised in the earliest poetry and thought of
Greece, that man's physical misery is a consequence
of moral wrong. \\\\\ of the sense of sin as the con
tradiction of God, and the disfigurement and ruin of
the personal spirit in man, of the sense of sin as
Christians understand it; — of the chasm which it opens
between the sinner and the Perfect Being, of the
resulting need of a propitiation for the past, and
of reconciliation and supernatural strength for the
future — Buddhism knows nothing. Man may work
out his own deliverance from pain by a prescribed
discipline; his moral faults have not destroyed his
moral power. The public confessions of faults which
Sakya-Mouni encouraged, and which became at one
time a regular institution in parts of India, do not
imply a sense of guilt, or more than an effort to arrive
ut virtue through the acknowledgmenl_o^_failura
And thus while Christians look forward to relief from
pain in heaven only as an incidental result of a far
greater blessing — enfranchisement from sin through
union with God in and through His Blessed Son, —
Buddhism would escape from sin and pain by a
single effort, — from pain anyhow, — by the self-
achieved annihilation of the Nirvana.

What is the Nirvana? Buddha himself would
seem to have left the exact meaning of this — the

54 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

goal of all his efforts — in obscurity ; and it has had
to be interpreted by his followers. But there is no
doubt about the meaning of the word: it means
blowing out. extinction. Certainly, many of the
modern Buddhists, especially in the south of Asia,
limit this extinction to old age, disease, and death.
Nirvana for them is only the eternal youth and
health and life of heaven. But Saint-Hilaire appears
to have shown that, at any rate originally, and gene
rally now, M^yana^means the extinction of being,,
Unless this be granted, it is impossible to explain
the contrast which was felt to exist between Buddhism
and Brahminism, which last proposed an escape from
pain through absorption into the Primal Being. It
is, indeed, a thought of unspeakable misery that
millions of human beings should have lived and died
in the hope, not of immortality, but of annihilation.
Yet the fact is beyond question : the Buddhist's
doctrine of human nature amounts to saying that
the best thing it can do is to cease to be.

Need I contrast this with the teaching of our own
Apostle hi the Epistle to the Komans? He fixes
his eye, not on the universality of pain but on the
universality of sin, which has fatally disturbed man's
right relationship to God;1 — man is not flattered by
Christianity; but, when humbled, he is not left to
his own resources. By a true union with Christ, re-

1 Rom. iii. 21.

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 55

ceived by the hand of faith, the lost relationship is
restored; and "there is no condemnation for them
which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the
flesh, but after the Spirit."1 The mighty invigorating
force of hope is thus given to fallen humanity ; none
need perish, says the Gospel, though all have fallen ;
and he may rise who will

(7) What does Buddhism say about God ? In the
sense in which we use that word — nothing, absolutely
nothing. Of the One Self-Existent Being, Whose power,
wisdom, and goodness know no bounds, Whose sanc
tity, providence, mercy, and justice are the constant
objects of a Christian's thought, Buddhism is utterly
ignorant. It does not recognise Him so far as to deny
His existence : it ignores Him. This unreal world, in
which Buddha sees nothing which is not perishable
and deceptive, does not imply to his apprehension any
counter -reality, any Absolute Being as its Creator.
Certainly the existing Indian divinities are not re
pudiated by Buddha. But he owes nothing to them ;
he owes everything to his own efforts and virtue ; and
they are merely so much old ornamental furniture
which he does not care to get rid of, and handles
respectfully. In the Buddhist temples the only
objects of veneration are the imago of Buddha
himself, and the relics of Buddha and others. The
stoupas or tumuli which are found about India, such

i Rom. viii. x.

56 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

as the Manikyala stoupa in the Punjaub, do but
recall the memory and preserve the remains of a
great teacher. Humanity is confronted with the
placid image, the tranquil self-confidence, the un
deniable virtue of Sakya-Mouni ; but if man looks
higher — above the chair of the human teacher — all
is dark and void.

A religion without God ! It is a contradiction in
terms ; and yet the absence of God from Buddhist
thought is concealed by the immense mass of religious
observances and activities which fill up the foreground.
And thus Buddhism is not a religion, properly speak
ing ; it is a philosophy of life, trying to do the work of
a religion. Of that virtue which includes and invigor
ates all other virtues, and whose object is God, — of that
tender and sublime passion which sways the soul with
imperious control, while it leads it ever onwards and
upwards, Buddhism is really ignorant. And this being
so, can we wonder at the results of the system upon
the vast populations which are brought within its
influence, and which attest the splendour of its his
torical triumph ? What are the moral characteristics
of China ? That easy indifference to life ; that light-
hearted carelessness as to duty; that timid pusillan
imity in presence of threatened pain; that general
depression — which is not really relieved by outbursts
of levity — depression at having to live in a world
where nothing is real — depression at having to pre-

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 57

pare for annihilation within the four walls of a
sepulchre ; that selfishness which is alternately violent
and petty; that all-embracing scepticism which leaves
nothing really worth thought or effort : much of this
is the work of Buddhism. True, Sakya-Mouni did not
intend it all, and would have condemned much of it;
just as Hegel in modern Germany, whose fundamental
thought is probably interpreted most accurately by
Strauss, most certainly did not mean to abjure the
name of Christian, and to deny the existence of a
God, and would have been shocked at the disciple
whose dreary scepticism has at last reached these
conclusions. But the truth is, teachers pass away,
while principles remain. Whatever Sakya-Mouni was
and meant, his system contained within itself the
forces which would necessarily in the long-run ener-
vate and degrade its adherents. Beautiful as was
much of his morality, it was impotent, because, besides
being incomplete, it had no base on which to rest. If
the living and personal Author, Measure, End of moral
truth is ignored, morals cease to be anything but the
poetry of a man or of a nation: they soon have nothing
to do with practice.

Among the many lessons to bo learnt, even from
that fragment of this great subject which it has been
possible to consider, this only will I venture to re
commend to you. The experiences of Eastern Asia in

58 Jesus Christ and Buddha.

bygone centuries may not be without their use at the
present day to England, — to Europe.

For what do we see around us at the present hour ?
Two distinct and powerful tendencies. On the one
hand an impatience of ancient and primitive Chris
tian doctrines, however attested, — an impatience which
readily welcomes any supposed lessening of the
authority of Scripture, any chance of mutilating or
disusing an ancient Creed. On the other hand,
we see an increasing conviction, in all the more
thoughtful minds, that without clear moral con
victions society must go to pieces; and a conse
quent anxiety on the part of unbelievers to rest
moral truths upon some basis, intuitional or experi
mental, physical or social, independent of a belief in
a Personal God. Depend upon it, gentlemen, that
Buddhism here supplies us with a lesson which may
save us from many a rude experience. It may be
true enough that God reflects His Will sometimes in
the deepest instincts of our nature, sometimes in the
organic requirements of human society, which, indeed,
is not less His work than are the body and soul of
man; but unless moral precepts be rested on belief
in Him, ay, and let me add, on what He has told us
about Himself and His Will, they will not really con
trol conduct and life in the long-run. A society which
is losing or which has lost those masculine beliefs,
those energetic soul-controlling convictions, which

Jesus Christ and Buddha. 59

purify and invigorate the heart and will, cannot re
cover its vital forces by a talismanic repetition of
beautiful moral sentiments or by a picturesque de
lineation of their practical effect.

To have a faith in the Unseen, clear, definite,
strong, is to have the nerve of moral life ; to be with
out such a faith, or to mistake for it some procession
of shifting mists, or the ever-changing views of a
kaleidoscope, is in the end to forfeit moral life. The
energy of a founder of a new system ; the enthusiasm
of a literary or philosophical school which is feeling
its way towards influence and empire, may for a while
keep these extreme consequences at bay ; but in the
long-run the law will operate — ay, irresistibly — in the
case whether of a man or of a society. To believe
this thoroughly is, in the highest sense of the word,
worth a great deal ; and if no other conviction should
have been left upon your minds by this effort to trace
some sides of a vast and deeply interesting subject,
the effort will not have been made in vain.

THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

I. THE PREPARATION.1

nnHERE is little reason, you will feel, for anything
•*- in the way of explanation or apology for choos
ing the Life of St. Paul as the subject for this and
the next Lecture. At this season of the year this
Apostle might almost seem to preside over the
services of the Christian Church, the Epiphany or
Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles being more
directly identified in history with his enterprise and
devotion than with that of any other human being.
And in this great building, which stands on a site that
has been for some fourteen centuries identified with
the love and honour that the Church of Christ has
ever felt for one of the first and greatest of her Master's
servants, it is impossible not to recognise, if we can
recognise them anywhere, the great claims of his life
and character upon every student, not merely of the
history of Christendom, but of the life and progress of
the human race. St. Paul's is a name which occupies

i Lecture delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral on Tuesday evening, January
13. l874-

7' he Life of St. Paul : the Preparation. 61

so commanding a place in the New Testament, and
therefore in the teaching of the Church, that it is diffi
cult to dissociate him from the method and tone of an
ordinary sermon. Nor would I on any account what
ever be supposed to imply either that the real historical
Paul of Tarsus is a different being from the Apostle
who has so high a place in the heart of the Church
of Christ, or that a more intimate acquaintance with
the reality must in this, as in some cases it must,
strip his aureole from the head of the object of our
early reverence. It is because with St. Paul the very
reverse is so eminently the case that we do well to look
at the Apostle's life from a slightly different point of
view from that in which it is commonly presented to us,
and to attempt to weigh, within very restricted limits,
some parts of its moral and historical significance.

Every noble life, every conspicuous career, implies
a period of preparation and development, more or
less traceable. This is one of the reasons which
make biographies always so popular a branch of
literature: they enable us not merely to recognise
excellence, but to trace it, or attempt to trace
it, to its source. Few men have their lives written
who have not done something noteworthy: and
the interesting question for all of us is how they
came to do it ; what were the circumstances without,
what the impulses and lines of thought within, that
led them on step by step until they reached the point

62 The Life of St. Paul:

of triumph or of excellence. Some of us perhaps have
been reading lately a book which in more ways than
one will have recalled, across however great an interval,
the memory of St. Paul, — I mean Miss Yonge's life of
the devoted missionary Bishop Patteson. A great
deal of that book relates only what might be found in
very ordinary lives, in the lives of some among our
selves. But everything, even the most trivial details
of home, and school, and college, and friendships, and
correspondence, is more or less interesting, because
everything is from the first regarded as leading up to
a life-work of singular devotion, crowned by a singu
larly noble death. In all such cases the catastrophe or
the victory reflects a splendour not its own upon each
trivial detail that may have preceded it.

Here it would be logically natural to say what the
Apostle of the Gentiles was in himself, to Christendom,
and to humanity. But there are obvious reasons for
addressing ourselves to our work historically, and I
must therefore assume you to be more or less familiar
with much on which I shall hereafter insist somewhat
at length, while I ask, How did St. Paul come to be
what he was at the beginning of his apostolical or
missionary life ?

There are, as a rule, three elements, I might
almost say three periods, to be distinguished in the
preparatory life of every man who achieves much
or anything considerable in life. There is the raw

the Preparation. 63

material of personal character, developed, moulded, '
invigorated by education — in short, the man's original
outfit for life. There is, secondly, some new influence
or influences, which give, or may give, a decisive turn to
hopes and aims, — which raise, or may raise, the whole
level of life to a higher atmosphere. Lastly, there is,
as a rule, a period in which these two earlier elements
are fused and consolidated; a period of reflection,
when the true work of life is already more or less
clearly in view, and when the intellect is being cleared
and the will braced until the decisive moment arrives
for undertaking it. I do not say that these periods
can always be made out with chronological precision,
or that they always preserve, so to speak, their due
perspectives ; but in their elements they will always
be found to exist wherever a man's life embodies any
thing morally remarkable. Let us see how they apply
to the case before us, the case of Saul of Tarsus.

I.

Education is the work partly of teachers, partly, in
some cases mainly, of circumstances. We shall best
appreciate what it must have done for St. Paul if wo
briefly remind ourselves of the history of his early
years,— of his life up to the date of the death of St
Stephen.

It is difficult to fix the year of St Paul's birth;
he was a young man when St Stephen was martyred.

64 The Life of St. Paul :

He would probably have been born in the later years
of Herod, or early in the short reign of Archelaus,
when, under the sway of the Emperor Augustus, the
Roman world was at peace, and when the wickedness
of the imperial despotism had not yet fully developed
itself. The pirates who had infested the eastern Medi
terranean had been sternly suppressed; the Jewish
people was still enjoying everywhere ample toleration
under the Roman laws ; and a Jewish family like St.
Paul's, settled at Tarsus in Cilicia, would have been
in sufficiently comfortable circumstances. Tarsus was
a " free city " of the Empire, — that is to say, it was
governed by its own magistrates, and was exempted
from the annoyance of a Roman garrison ; but it was
not a "colony" like Philippi in Macedonia, and the
freedom of Rome, which St. Paul says he had at his
birth, would probably have been earned by some
services rendered by his father during the civil wars
to some one of the contending parties. It is at least
probable, from the expression, "an Hebrew of the
Hebrews," which St. Paul applied to himself, that
his parents were originally emigrants from Palestine.
We know that they were of the tribe of Benjamin,
and strict members of the Pharisee sect. Probably
his father was engaged in the Mediterranean trade.
To his mother — it is a remarkable circumstance—
there is not one reference in his writings ; he had a
sister, whose son lived in later years at Jerusalem, and

the Preparation. 65

who would have been his playmate at Tarsus. The
Talmud says that a father's duty towards his boy is
" to circumcise him, to teach him the law, and to teach
him a trade." We know from the Epistle to the
Philippians that the first of these precepts was ac
curately complied with on the eighth day after the
child's birth. The second would probably have been
obeyed by sending the boy, not to one of the Greek
schools in which Tarsus abounded, but to a Jewish
school attached to the synagogue, where after the
age of five he would have learnt the Hebrew Scrip
tures, at ten years those floating maxims of the great
Jewish doctors which were afterwards collected in
the Mishnah, so as at thirteen to become what was
called a "subject of the Precept," after a ceremony
which was a kind of shadow of Christian Confirmation.
The third requirement was complied with by setting
him to make tents out of the hair-cloth which was sup
plied by the goats which abounded on the slopes of the
neighbouring mountains of the Taurus, and which was
a chief article in the trade of the port — tents which to
this day are, it is said, used largely by the peasantry of
south-eastern Asia Minor during the harvest-time.

At or soon after thirteen Saul would have been
sent from home, probably in a trading vessel bound
from the port of Tarsus for Qesarea, on his way to
Jerusalem. Already as a boy the Holy City must
have poliOMod for him an interest surpassing that

!

66 The Life of St. Paul:

which could be raised by any other place on earth.
Every great festival would have been followed by the
return of one or more of his countrymen to Tarsus,
full of the inspiration of the sacred sites, of the
splendour of the new Temple, of the fame and learn
ing of the great doctors of the law. Especially he
would have heard much of the two rival schools of
Hillel and Shammai; of which the former exalted
tradition above the letter of the law, while the latter
preferred the law to tradition when they clashed.
Of these, the school of Hillel was the more in
fluential: and when St. Paul was a boy and a young
man its greatest ornament was Gamaliel. Gamaliel,
we are told in the Acts, was "had in reputation of
all the people, " he was evidently one of those men
whose candour, wisdom, and consistent elevation of
character would have secured him influence in any
society or age of the world. He was named by his
countrymen the "Beauty of the Law;" and the
Talmud declares that since his death the "glory
of the law " has ceased. It was at the feet of
Gamaliel, St. Paul tells us, that he was brought up.
This expression exactly recalls to us the manner in
which the Rabbinical "assemblies of the wise," as
they were termed, were held. The teacher sat on a
raised platform ; the pupils on low seats, or on the
floor beneath. At these meetings some passage of
the Hebrew Law was taken as a thesis ; it was then

the Preparation. 67

paraphrased in the current Syro-Chaldee dialect;
various explanations and aphorisms and opinions
were quoted; the teacher said what he had to say,
and then he was cross-questioned by his hearers.
And although, especially in the school of Hillel, there
must have been a large mass of legendary and even
absurd matter in these lectures and conferences, such
as we may still read in the Talmud, there must also
have been much of the highest doctrinal and moral
value, — integral elements of Divine Revelation, — read,
marked, learnt, and inwardly digested during those
long and earnest discussions. This, at any rate, was
the educational process by which Paul of Tarsus was
" taught according to the perfect manner of the law
of the fathers." There side by side with Onkelos, also
a pupil of Gamaliel and subsequently the famous
author of the Targum, which bears his name, he would
have learnt all that the highest minds of his day had
to say about the creed of his fathers ; and if, looking
back from the riper experience of later life, he would
himself have said that in those years a veil was upon
his heart, this profound spiritual blindness would not
at all have interfered with the intellectual value of
this part of his education. The culture of the mind,
we all know, is one thing, the growth of the soul is
another. A modern University abounds in men of
the highest mental culture who make, and would wish
to make, no sort of claim to being religious men : but

68 The Life of St. Paul:

their intellectual vigour is not therefore stunted or
impaired Paul, indeed, was religious, although in a
mistaken way ; and his first creed, with all its short
comings, was the mam instrument of his mental
education.

At this period of St. Paul's life we are to a certain
extent in the region of conjecture ; but it is scarcely
doubtful that he would have returned to Tarsus in the
prime of manhood before he reappeared in Jerusalem
as a member of the synagogue which was connected
with or maintained by the Jews of Cilicia. This visit
would have completed his acquaintance with the
language, and to a certain limited extent with the
literature of Greece. The commercial and educated
classes in Tarsus, like similar classes everywhere on
the seaboard of the Levant, would then certainly have
spoken Greek ; and as a little boy, Paul, whenever he
got out of the narrow circle of his family and of the
persons whom he met on Sabbaths at the synagogue,
— whenever he played or entered into conversation on
the wharves which lined the banks of the Cydnus,
would have had to speak it too. His later use of the
language, although never quite detached from Jewish
idioms and forms of thought, is, upon the whole, that
of a man who had used it from childhood ; and his
use of the Greek poets, of metaphors which a Greek
would understand, and in some places of distinctly
Greek modes of argument, in not a few places, of

the Preparation. 69

abstract terms on which Greek thought had conferred
their meaning and their power, shows that his early
education, if mainly rabbinical, was by no means
exclusively so. It would seem to be at least pro
bable, that, to omit any other conjectures, he had
read portions of the Republic of Plato. Of the three
classes of metaphors which are commonly used by him
in his later writings, — the architectural, the agricul-
tural, an«l tin: theatrical, - tin: lavish inniiorirs <>|
Tarsus probably supplied the material. He had there
gated, with a curiosity which docs not repeat itself in
later life, upon temples, some of them in the process
of construction, which ho never entered ; they supplied
his language about the " edification " of the Christian
Church. He had watched the cultivation of the rich
meadow-land at the base of the Taurus. Was he not
thinking of this when he wrote, " I have planted,
A polios watered ; but God gave the increase" ? Above
all, he had heard much of the Greek games— he may
have witnessed some local sports which imitated the
world-famed originals — games which he describes with
such vivid appreciation when writing to the Corin
thians. If we except one expression in the £pistlo to
the Colossians, which seems to refer to the destruction
of the piratical strongholds in Cilicia by the Itomaii
forces some years before, his military metaphors, liko
the famous passage in the Epistle to the Ephcsians,
are due to his contact with Roman rather than with

70 The Life of St. Paul:

Greek life — to the rude experiences of Philippi, of
Jerusalem, of Csesarea, of the first imprisonment at
Rome. But at Tarsus the Greek literature and society
did, if not its best, yet certainly much for him. That
gifted and extraordinary race, which was to the ancient
world even more than France has hitherto been to
Europe — the type and mistress of its outward civi
lisation — must be understood in that age by any man
who had great duties in the future towards the world,
towards humanity. At this time in his life, too, St.
Paul would probably have become familiar with that
large section of the Jews of the Dispersion whose
centre was Alexandria, who in everything but religion
were nearly Greeks, and whose religion was taking
more and more of the Greek dress every day. The
great Alexandrian version of the Old Testament, the
Septuagint, as it is called, — which the Apostle so often
quotes, while yet he treats it so freely, — would have
been already familiar to him ; and the philosophical
writer Philo-Judaeus, whose efforts to establish har
monious relations between the Old Testament revela
tion and the Platonic philosophy have had such large
results for the highest good and, it must be added,
for considerable evil upon the history of religious
belief, would have been often in his hands, although
as yet he little knew that such vast consequences
were to result from the study.

This education was moulding and developing a

the Preparation. 7 1

character which, not to dwell here on its subordinate
features, may be described by one single word — inten
sity. There was much besides, — sensitiveness, impetu
osity, courage, independence. But in all that he did,
Paul of Tarsus, before his conversion, as well as after
it, threw his whole i energy^_whe_ther of thought or
resolution, into his work. And, as might be expected
in a character of this mould, objects of thought and
aims of action took their place in his soul according
to the real, and not according to any fictitious, order
of precedence. The central problems of thought and
faith, the ultimate and supreme aims of life, disengaged
themselves from all that was merely accessory and
subordinate, and were pursued with a concentration
of purpose which carried all before it. We may be
sure that this was the case, so far as was possible in
such a subject-matter, when the, young student was
still grappling with the accumulated traditions of
Rabbinism : we know that it was so when, in the ripe
ness of his early manhood, the young rabbi returned
to the chief scene of his education to take part in a
struggle whose issue would form the turning-point of
his career.

How mysterious is the thought that there are now
living in places, and with names unknown to us, some
who will hereafter profoundly influence at least some
of our lives. True this is of all human beings: of
Paul of Tarsus it was true in a sense which perhaps

72 The Life of St. Paul:

never has been repeated. Did he ever, we ask
naturally, during his student life, come into contact
with One Who was to exert so great an influence on
his later career ? They must have been at the same
festivals; they must often have gazed on the same
buildings, the same faces ; the opportunity of seeing
the Prophet of Nazareth, as He was called, must have
often presented itself. Yet there is no proof, no
intimation, that they ever met, as man meets man,
on the surface of this planet. "The knowledge of
Christ after the flesh,"1 of which mention is made
in an Epistle, refers to no personal experience of St.
Paul's, but to a mistaken mood of feeling in his
Corinthian readers. The question, " Have I not seen
Jesus Christ our Lord ? " 2 refers to that sight which
made St. Paul the peer of Peter and of John, but
which occurred after the Ascension. His first known
contact with Christianity and with Christ was that of
a determined foe.

When Paul of Tarsus reappeared at Jerusalem, not
long before St. Stephen's martyrdom, he was standing,
as it were, on the frontier of two worlds, the Jewish
or Semitic on the one side, and the Greek on the
other. He was probably among the opponents of St.
Stephen hi the Cilician synagogue ; and, notwith
standing his earnestness and accomplishments, he was
"not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit with

1 2 Cor. v. 16. a i Cor. ix. i.

the Preparation. 73

which Stephen spake." He was checked by the sense
of a stronger power than any ho could wield : there
was something that could do more in and for the
human soul than even the learned dialectics of
Gamaliel. He must have witnessed the arrest before
the Sanhedrim, and have listened to, probably he
reported from memory, the great apology in which
the martyr justifies the spiritual worship of the
Church by a review of the whole past of Jewish
history ; and for the rest, we have his own bitter self-
accusing words of a later date, " When the blood of
Thy martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by
and consenting unto his death, and kept the raiment
of them that slew him." l

The fact was that the death of Stephen was, in
Paul's eyes, a logical consequence of his Jewish creed,
and he was not the man to shrink from it. He too,
as he witnessed the violence of the brutal mob, the
upturned face of the martyr (it was an angel gaze into
the depths of heaven), and then stood by outside the
eastern gate, at a spot certainly not far from the
scene of the Great Agony, and heard the thuds of the
falling stones which one after another were crushing
out the life of the man who had beaten him in argu
ment, he must have had, wo think, some human
sympathy with the object of the Sanhedrim's venge
ance. We know that there was an undercurrent of

1 Act* xxii. 20.

i

74 The Life of St. Paul :

sucli sympathy, but it might have been silenced or
crushed out for ever, as completely as was the passing
remorse with which the eye of his murdered master
is said for a moment to have filled even such a
soul as Cromwell's when it followed him from the
canvas of Vandyck. For the present a tempest of
logically directed passion swept over the mind of Paul,
and silenced or buried all else. The death of St.
Stephen was ibllowed by a general and sharp persecu
tion of the Christians. The Koman procurator was
probably absent, — if he was not glad of the opportunity
of showing his profound contempt for the theological
disputes of an Eastern province ; so the Sanhedrim and
the people had their way. The Sanhedrim was mainly
composed of leading Sadducees, a sect which, believing
little about the next world, naturally made the most_
of this, and whose leading members, generally persons
of considerable eminence as rulers, were among the
foremost personages of the hierarchy. These men
knew well how to encourage, for political and worldly
ends, the sectarian passions whose motives they
regarded with entire contempt ; but for the moment
the passions of the ignorant people and the policy of
these highly-placed sceptics practically coincided.
It is at least doubtful whether Paul was actually a
member of the Sanhedrim (a single expression has
perhaps been overstrained to support the inference) :
yet he was certainly acting under its sanction and

the Preparation. 75

authority. Although this dread tribunal had been
deprived of its old power of life and death, it seems
at this period to have exercised it anarchically, and
other martyrdoms followed that of Stephen. Paul
can have had little enough in common with the high
priest under whose commission he was acting ; for the
moment, as may often be witnessed, sceptical poli
ticians and sincere fanatics were making common
cause against what they agreed to consider the new
superstition. In many a synagogue Christians were
arrested, scourged, compelled publicly to curse the
Name of Jesus : women especially, it is noted more
than once, were the objects of the violence of the
persecution. At length the work was done, as it
seemed, effectually. The little community was broken
up and dispersed, and the Sanhedrim, which claimed
to exercise jurisdiction over a large part of the Jews
of the Dispersion, turned its eyes upon the Church
which had grown up in the important city ot
Damascus. That had better be crushed out too;
and if the work was to be done, who would do it
better than the young Pharisee, whoso accomplish
ments were notorious, and whose unflinching devotion
to the synagogue had been proved by his activity as
a persecutor ? Paul was appointed a special commis
sioner to destroy the Church of Christ in Damascus,
and he left Jerusalem on this errand accordingly.

76 The Life of St. Paul :

II.

It was while he was on this journey that the new
influence which was to make him what he is to
Christendom was brought to bear upon his life.

There are many men for whom the phenomena of
the spiritual world simply do not exist. It is im
possible within the compass of this lecture to make
any attempt to demonstrate their reality ; it is neces
sary to content ourselves with observing that they
can be shown to be just as real as the facts and laws
of what we call nature. In both spheres we are in
the region of mystery; we know just as little of the
nature of matter as we know of the nature of spirit;
we only touch what we call matter from without, we
know not what it is in itself. If we cannot deny, with
some philosophers, any reality at all to matter, we are
at least safe in saying that spirit is at least as real,
and that the world of spiritual experiences is as true
objectively — that is, whether we recognise its exist
ence or not — as is the world of matter. Grace with
its operations is as much a substantial certainty as
the law of gravitation ; and the facts which burst on
the consciousness of Paul during that eventful journey
are philosophically just as much entitled to respectful
consideration as the last eclipse which was observed
and registered at Greenwich.

the Preparation. 77

Paul had nearly completed his journey, — some six
weary days it was at the least from Jerusalem to
Damascus. He had traversed the burning plains
and uplands of Gaulonitis and Itursea, and was now
in the beautiful valley watered by the streams of the
Abana and the Pharpar, about a mile and a half, it
seems probable, from Damascus. Behind him was
the great dome of Mount Hermon, capped with snow ;
on his right the Hauran; on his left the spurs of Anti-
Libanus; before him the city which contained his
destined victims, its white buildings just rising above
the trees and gardens which lined his road. It is
one of the choicest spots on the surface of our globe,
that approach to Damascus, beautiful in itself, more
beautiful from its sharp contrast to the arid desert
which encircles it. It is, as has been said, a very
wilderness of gardens, in which flowers and fruit are
interwined in careless profusion, in which the prune,
the apricot, the olive, festooned by the vine, grow on
this side and on that in rich luxuriance, while every
where the channels that are distributed for the pur
poses of irrigation over the plain cool the air with
the clear fresh streams that run from the base of
Anti-Libanus, and maintain this wealth of vegeta
tion under that burning sun. Its situation alone
explains the fact that Damascus is the oldest of
known cities ; and that while Tyre, Babylon, Palmyra,
each of these more modern than itself, have long since

7 8 The Life of St. Paul:

perished utterly, Damascus is still a place of beauty,
and even of importance.

It was at noon, when all is hushed in those southern
climes, even to the very birds upon the trees, that
the event occurred which turned the whole current
of the life of Saul of Tarsus. Suddenly there was a
light from heaven above the brightness of the sun,
shining round about Paul and them that journeyed
with him. The stupefied companions of the perse
cutor fell to the ground ; they only rose to hear that
a voice was being uttered which they could not
understand. The vision was not meant for them,
and although the narrative makes it certain that it
was not merely something internal to the soul or
mind of St. Paul, but, on the contrary, a strictly
independent or, as we should say, objective pheno
menon, it was not intended for them, and they saw
and heard only enough to know that it was in pro
gress. Paul heard what they did not hear, he saw
what they did not see. He heard in the tones of
that voice, in the words of that language, which had
fallen on the ears of Peter and John, "Saul, Saul,
why persecutest thou Me ? it is hard for thee to kick
against the goads." He had, it is plain, felt the plead
ing of St. Stephen before the Sanhedrim, the death of
St. Stephen outside the city walls, the constant, ener
getic, though sternly repressed, working of his own
conscience reviewing the facts of his own career ; they

the Preparation. 79

were a cause of much secret distress to him, and here
there was an evidence from without, confirming what
had been already whispered within. The religion
which he had argued against, fought against, perse
cuted, was true. It made people in every way inferior
to himself somehow, yet unmistakably, his moral
superiors — that he had already felt; and now here
was the countersign of that feeling revealed from the
very clouds of heaven. He asked submissively what
he was to do, and he was told to arise and go into
the city, and there it would be told him what he was
ordained to do. The burning light of the vision had
blinded him ; and he entered Damascus, not at the
head of his cavalcade, bent on schemes of violence
and persecution, but led by the hand, as if ho were
himself a prisoner, to the house of Judas. There for
three days he fasted and prayed — he passed seventy-
two hours in silence — in darkness alone with God.

The shock of the occurrence passed ; its meaning,
its consequences, its ineffaceable consequences, re
mained and unfolded themselves before his mind's
eye. The world was another world to him, life
was for him another order of existence. He had
given his will, his inmost self, to the Being Who
spoke to him from heaven. The strength and secret
of his new life was this : that ho henceforth belonged
not to himself; he had abandoned himself without
reserve to a perfectly Holy Will. That was tha

8o The Life of St. Paul :

determining fact of his new life. In the train of that
act of self-surrender all else followed. The old had
passed away, all things had become new. He was
restored to sight at the entrance of Ananias — a
humble minister of Christ in Damascus — and was re
ceived into the Church by the sacrament of Baptism.

The conversion of St. Paul was the subject of one
of the most celebrated pieces of apologetic literature
which appeared in England during the last century.
The Lord Lyttelton of that day had felt the force of
the Deistic objections to Christianity which were
so eagerly urged by a large and cultivated school of
writers, and he would seem to have recovered his
faith mainly by concentrating his attention upon the
significance of St. Paul's conversion. We are now
concerned certainly less with the evidential force of
this event than with its real character; but its real
character does undoubtedly invest it with a high
evidential value.

It cannot be explained by the temperament or
character of the Apostle. He was not a visionary or
a person of weak intellect; his whole conduct and
the arguments which he employs prove that he was
by nature a critic and dialectician, quick at detecting
objections, not merely in the case of an opponent, but
in his own, and inclined by mental temperament to
see to the bottom of such objections before laying
them aside. Had he been of the facile and impres-

the Preparation. 81

siblo temper which is assumed by the older Deists,
and in a slight reconstruction of their arguments by
M. Kenan, he might have been expected to have given
at least one further proof of it, in an opposite or re
actionary direction, at one of the many opportunities
which presented themselves in his later life. But
there is nothing afterwards in the way of change;
the converted Paul ceased once for all to be a Jew, in his
conduct, his feelings, his inclinations, his prejudices.
If his conversion was not what it is represented in
the Scripture narrative, the natural explanation of
it is at least as difficult as the supernatural. The
mental conditions which will explain the vision in
the heavens above the brightness of the sun, the con
versation with a heavenly Being, the guidance by the
hand into Damascus, the blindness, the instruction,
the recovery of sight, the total change of thought,
feeling, conviction, purpose which followed, would
amount to a psychological miracle at least as striking
as that which really took place.

Nor can the conversion bo explained by the sup
position that the account was forged What motive
had St. Paul for inventing it ? Was it some private
pique or annoyance with the Jews that led him to
change his religious profession, and to account for the
change in this kind of way ? But there is no trace of
any personal feeling of this kind ; it would have been
a sin against natural feeling, since the Jewish people

r

8 2 The Life of St. Paul :

had singled Paul out for a place of confidence and
honour ; and as a matter of fact, when the Jews were
persecuting him to death, he expresses, in more ways
than one, his love for his countrymen. He deplores
their blindness; he excuses their conduct so far as
he can ; and even if in one place he paints it in dark
colours, he would, he says, gladly be accursed, were it
possible, in their place. Was it the spirit of sensitive
independence, which will sometimes lead men to assert
their own importance at the cost of their party or
their principles? That, again, is inconsistent with
his earnest and consistent advocacy of the duty of
subjection to existing authorities, in terms and to a
degree which has exposed him to fierce criticism from
the advocates of social and political change. Was it,
then, a refined self-interest ? Did the young Jew see
in the rising sect a prospect of bettering himself?
But Christianity was being persecuted, as it seemed,
to the very verge of actual extermination : it had been
crushed out by the established hierarchy in Jerusalem
itself; it was doomed to destruction, every intelligent
Jew would have thought, as well by the might of the
forces brought against it as by its intrinsic absurdity.
It had nothing to offer in the way of social eminence
or literary attraction ; it was, as yet, in the main, the
religion of the very poor and of the very illiterate.
On the contrary, the young Pharisee had, if any
man, brilliant prospects before him if he remained

the Preparation. 83

loyal to the Synagogue: the reputation of his great
master, his own learning and acuteness, his great
practical ability, would have commanded success. If
his object was really a selfish one, no man ever made
a greater or a more stupid mistake to all appearance ;
for no Jew could have anticipated for a convert to
Christianity, within a few years of the Crucifixion,
such a reputation as that which surrounds the name of
St . Paul. Yet, at the same time, there is no reason to
suppose that the power which effected this immense
change in the purpose and life of Saul of Tarsus
operated irresistibly upon his intellect and his will.
When ho tells Agrippa, " I was not disobedient to the
heavenly vision," he implies that ho was perfectly free
to disobey. There is no such thing as irresistible
grace in the moral world: If^tFer^were, man in

it would exchange his t'nr<l«>m as ji moral

agent for the passive obedience of a vegetable to the

law of its kind. Paul might have persuaded himself

th. if tin; vision was an hallucination; that his own

brain had formulated the words of Jesus; that the
blindness was solely due to physical causes ; that the
scruples about the blood of Stephen and the martyrs
were of the nature of a foolish superstition; and when
the shock was over he would have carried out the
purpose which brought him to Damascus, and have
entered the synagogues to arrest a fresh batch of
victims for the Sanhedrim in Jerusalem. If he did

84 The Life of St. Paul:

not do this, it was because lie was looking out for truth,
and disposed to make the most of it when it came.
Many a man in his circumstances would have acted
otherwise. St. Paul could say, " By the grace of God
I am what I am, and His grace which was showered
upon me was not in vain."

In this case of St. Paul's, the new influence which
remoulded his life belonged to a sphere which is above
nature. But a kindred influence, scarcely, if at all,
less powerful in its results, may be exerted by persons
or causes which are strictly within our range of obser
vation. The character of a friend, a startling occur
rence, a new book, may form the frontier line between
the past and a future which has little in common with
it ; and, it must be remembered, susceptibility to such
influences is not a mark of feminine weakness. On the
contrary, the most masculine natures, if true to the
higher promptings of conscience and the higher sides
of existence, are peculiarly open to them ; and, even
when they fall far short of involving a "translation from
darkness unto light, and from the power of Satan unto
God," the}7- still form that decisive turn in the affairs of
men, which taken at the tide leads on to excellence.

III.

It was natural that in the first fervour of conver
sion St. Paul should wish to make others sharers in
his illumination and his joy. He appeared without

the Preparation. 85

delay in the synagogues of Damascus. His appear
ance had been expected as that of the accomplished
Pharisee who was commissioned by the high priest
Theophilus to exterminate the Christian heresy in
the ancient Syrian capital He would bring the most
recent and ripest learning of Jerusalem to confute the
nascent error ; he would use force if necessary — with
prudence, but with unflinching determination. What
must have been the blank astonishment of his old
co-religionists when he " straightway preached, in the
synagogues, that Jesus was the Son of God " ! What
must have been their indignation when the first
stupor of surprise had passed ! And how great must
have been — we know that it was great — the thankful
wonder of the trembling Christians when their declared
enemy thus publicly, and at the imminent peril of
his life, owned himself a disciple and preacher of the
Faith which he had so recently persecuted to the
death ! The higher interests of human life are liable
to surprises, but few that ever happened can have
rivalled this !

It would seem that this first effort at missionary
work was of brief duration. It was an anachronism,
dictated by profound spiritual impulse, but at variance
with the orderly development of his life. After a
great change of conviction, nature, as well as some
thing higher than nature, tells us that a long period
of retirement and silence is fitting, if not necessary.

86 The Life of St. Paul:

The three days in the house of Judas were not enough
in which to sound the heights and depths of newly
recognised truth, or the strength and weakness of the
soul which was to own and to proclaim it. They
were to be followed by three years — I must not enter
upon the chronological reasons for insisting on the
literal value of the expression — three years passed in
the deserts of Arabia. It has indeed been thought
that this retirement was dictated by a wish to preach
the Gospel to the wandering Bedouin tribes or to the
settled Arabs at Petra. And there is no doubt that
Arabia was among the Ancients a very wide and in
clusive geographical term. It might have included
Damascus itself. It might have even taken in regions
far to the north, extending to the very borders of
Cilicia. But these are less usual uses of the word:
nor can it be supposed that emphasis would have been
laid on this retirement if all that had been meant had
been a journey of a few miles into the desert beyond
the walls of Damascus. Something may be said for
the supposition of a retreat to Petra, the ancient
capital of Edom, which had its synagogue in Jeru-
f salem ; but the probabilities are that under the pro-
| found and awful inspiration of the hour, Paul sought
! to tread in the footsteps of Moses and of Elijah at the
| base of Sinai. There is a reference to the dialect of
the district in the Epistle to the Galatians1 which

* Gal. iv. 25.

the Preparation. 87

makes this at least probable for other than spiritual
reasons; the spiritual attractions of such a course
must have been to a man with his character and ante
cedents not less than overwhelming. There, where
the Jewish Law had been given, he was led to ask
what it really meant ; what were its sanctions ; what
its obligations; what were the limits of its moral
capacity ; what the criterion of its weakness. There
he must have felt the inspiration of a life like
Elijah's, the great representative of a persecuted
religious minority, the preacher of unpopular truth
against vulgar but intolerant error. Would not the
still small voice which had spoken to the Prophet, —
or rather, did it not,— speak again and again, whis
pering those deep truths which are missed or for
gotten or lost amid the bustle of active life, to the
new convert ? They were precious years, depend upon
it, for a man whose whole later life was to be passed
in action.

The value of such retirement, if circumstances
admit of it or suggest it, before entering on the de
cisive work of life, can hardly be exaggerated. Many
a young man whose education is complete, as the
phrase goes, and who knows, or thinks that he knows,
what to do for himself or for his fellow-creatures, is
often painfully disappointed when his plans for imme
diate exertion suddenly break down, and ho has to
remain for a while in comparative obscurity and inac-

88 The Life of St. Paul :

tion. It seems to him to be a loss of time, with little
or nothing to redeem the disadvantage ; he is wasting,
he says, his best years hi idleness. He may, of
course, so act as to make that phrase justifiable;
but it need be nothing of the kind. A prudent
no less than a religious man will thankfully avail
himself of such an opportunity for consolidating his
acquirements, for reviewing the bearings of his govern
ing convictions, for estimating more accurately the
resources at his disposal, for extending or contracting
his plans — at least for reconsidering them : a religious
man will, above all else, seize such an opportunity for
testing and strengthening his motives, and cultivating
an increased intimacy with those means and sources
of effective strength which he will need so much here
after. St. Paul, we may be sure, used the opportunity.
It is not improbable that the argument of his Epistles
to the Romans and the Galatians, although provoked
by later circumstances arising in the bosom of the
Christian Church, was the fruit of his meditation in
the silence of the desert. In any case, in those dreary
wastes his spirit would have been free from the pre
occupations of sense ; free to measure the import and
exigency of his recent vision and change; free to
review the past years which had been a gain to him,
but which henceforth, so far as their proper aim was
concerned, he accounted loss ; free to prepare for the
life of work and suffering whose dim outlines may

the Preparation. 89

already have sketched themselves before his eyes, in
a strength which would alone sustain him.

There we must leave him this evening. The pre
paration for that life is complete : we have to consider
in another lecture what were its results to the Church
and to humanity.

THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL.

II. THE MISSIONARY — THE CHURCH RULER —
THE MARTYR.1

A LIFE like that of St. Paul yields sufficient material
-£*- for at least ten lectures such as those which we
can give in this Cathedral ; and I therefore can
make no pretension whatever to deal with its main
features exhaustively in one. It suggests too, as
some at least of my hearers will know, questions
of great extent and intricacy, which have created
little less than entire literatures hi the course of their
discussion, and upon some of which no very positive
opinion can be arrived at. If these are passed by, or
only glanced at incidentally, or referred to as settled
in this way or in that, without giving further reasons,
it cannot be helped. All that can be done within
such limits as ours is to suggest a few salient points
of the general subject; to furnish the outlines, which
may be filled up by further and private study ; above
all, to stimulate interest, if it might be, in a great
character — a great Saint and Doctor — who on so
many grounds is so entitled to command it.

1 Lecture delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral on Tuesday evening,
January 20,1874.
00

The Life of St. Paul : the Missionary. 91

The life of man is made up of action and of endur
ance, — of the efforts which he puts forth, of the pain,
discomfort, inconvenience which he undergoes. And
human life is noble and fruitful in the ratio in which
it is laid out in vigorous action, consecrated by a noble
aim; and in suffering, deliberately submitted to or em
braced from a generous motive. Nor do lives passed
in speculative thought or hi religious contemplation
really lie outside this division. Such thought is, or
ought to be, an energetic, although undemonstrative,
variety of action ; the thinker who is not dreaming,
the contemplative whose soul is really engaged upon
the unseen realities which interest him, is hard at
work with the organ which beyond all others is
capable of immense exertion and of distressing
fatigue.

To pass life in an aimless indolence, to shrink from
endurance as well as from exertion, to exist but in a
state of moral coma, — this is really degrading. Life
is always and only ennobled by effort and by suffer
ing. It is necessary to admit this — as an axiom, as a
truth fairly beyond discussion — if we are to under
stand St. Paul at all.

St Paul's life became what it was under the influ
ence of an overpowering conviction. He was certain

92 The Life of St. Paul :

that he was in possession of truth, of which mankind
were almost universally ignorant, and which it was of
the utmost practical importance for them to know.
This certainty rested upon two or three converging
lines of evidence : the report of his moral sense or con
science as to the Christian character, the evidence of
his bodily as well as of his spiritual senses on the
road to Damascus, and the remarkable correspond
ence between the conclusion thus reached and the
fair meaning of the sacred documents which he had
from his earliest years regarded as of Divine authority.
This certainty came to him at that decisive moment
of his life which we partly discussed last Tuesday ;
but the practical conclusion, from the nature of the
case, only gradually shaped itself. To use his own
words, he was a debtor to the human race, " to the
Greeks -and to the barbarians ; " he owed it a share in
that truth which he had, he felt, no right to mono
polise. How should he, how did he, discharge the
obligation ?

St. Paul's missionary life extended altogether over
a period of nearly thirty years. For hi one sense he
was a missionary from his conversion. His early
efforts in Damascus provoked the hostility of the
Jews ; and not long after his return from Arabia he
was obliged to escape for his life from an officer of
king Aretas, who in these unsettled times was com
manding in Damascus, and acting apparently under

the Missionary. 93

Jewish influence. He fled to Jerusalem. To visit
Peter was, he says, a leading motive for going there.
The Christians in Jerusalem were naturally afraid of
a person who had been so conspicuous a persecutor,
and their confidence was only won by the good offices
of Barnabas, who assured them of the facts and
reality of St. Paul's conversion and of his work for
the true Faith in Damascus. He lived for a fort
night on terms of intimacy with St. Peter and St.
James, — our Lord's first cousin, and the first Bishop
of Jerusalem ; and some part of this time he spent in
arguments with the Hellenistic or Alexandrian Jews,
for which his education peculiarly fitted him. He
thus excited the greatest hostility, and was obliged to
take flight by way of Caesarea to his birthplace Tarsus.
Of his life at Tarsus during the next four years we
know nothing, except that it must have been by no
means a period of inactivity. Making his father's home
his headquarters, he seems to have preached in the
city and its neighbourhood, as well as on the Syrian
coast on the opposite side of the bay ; and several of
the dangers and trials to which he refers in his second
letter to the Corinthians probably belong to this
period, especially his three shipwrecks and his being
publicly scourged by the Jewish and Roman autho
rities. In the year 44, Barnabas, who was working at
Antioch, came to Tarsus to secure the co-operation of
St. Paul. The Church at Antioch had been founded

94 The Life of St. Paul:

eight years before by refugees from Jerusalem, who
were flying from the persecution which Paul himself
had directed; it had contained from the first a number
of Gentile converts, and it was to superintend this new
state of things that Barnabas had been sent, with
apostolic authority, from Jerusalem. Barnabas and
Paul worked together for a year, in teaching the
heathen and organising the Church, and at the end of
this period they took a considerable sum of money to
Jerusalem to meet the wants of the poor Christians in
that city during the famine which occurred at the time
of Herod Agrippa's death. They returned to Antioch
with St. Mark, a nephew of St. Barnabas, and the
Church of Antioch rapidly became, for the time, the
most central spot hi Christendom. The political and
commercial importance of this city, as well as its
position, made it the natural starting-point for a great
scheme of Church extension, while the presence of a
great many Gentile converts irresistibly suggested it.
If the Gospel had come to Antioch — to men of heathen
birth in Antioch — could it be meant to stop there ?
Was it not, by its very terms, a message of health
and deliverance to the whole human race, and was
not Antioch, with its half-Jewish half-Gentile Church,
the natural scene for originating such an enterprise ?
So it was that the Church of Antioch was taught, by
the silent movement of the Holy Spirit within men's
minds, to make a great effort for the faith in the Gentile

the Missionary. 95

world, and to give her greatest teachers to the work.
The decisive conviction came while the Liturgy or
Holy Communion — such is the apparent force of the
original word1 — was being celebrated, and the two
friends with the nephew of Barnabas set forth on
their mission.

Up to this time St. Paul had worked as a subordi
nate—a kind of curate — to Barnabas. Like all really
great men, he was profoundly indifferent to any mere
questions of personal or professional precedence, pro
vided that sacred principles were safe and that true
work was done. He left Antioch, still the second to
Barnabas ; but after the conversion of Sergius Paulus,
the proconsul at Cyprus, the author of the Acts of
the Apostles no longer writes Barnabas and Saul,
but Paul and Barnabas. Not only is the order of
the names inverted, but the Jewish name, Saul, is
dropped, and the Roman name, Paulus, which the
apostle had probably possessed from his birth, was
exclusively adopted, with a view, no doubt, to con
ciliating Gentile prejudices.

It is at this point that St. Paul's missionary life, in its
complete form, begins. Between his leaving Antioch
hi the year 48, and his arrest at Jerusalem in the
summer of the year 58, he achieved what are popularly
known as his three missionary journeys. They do
not bear traces of any fixed plan. What plan there

» Ar.U xiii. a.

96 The Life of St. Paul :

was was disturbed sometimes by circumstances ; some
times it was set aside by a higher Guidance under
which the Apostle acted. They rather remind us —
to draw an illustration from a very different field of
exertion — of those efforts which the discovery of the
New World, and the hope of finding the imagined
El Dorado, provoked at the hands of English and
Spanish adventurers alike in the days of Philip and
Elizabeth. It was the spirit of enterprise, only in
St. Paul's case it was consecrated by a purely unself
ish and noble motive; and enterprise is necessarily
governed by circumstances, and can never be mapped
out very systematically. St. Paul's journeys were in
their way like the expeditions of Sir Walter Raleigh in
theirs ; — the creations of a noble impulse which must
be doing something — raids, conducted on no very
obvious plan, upon the dark domains of heathendom.
And yet, looking back upon these journeys, we may
see that they do bear a certain relation to each other.
The first was tentative; it was what military men
would call a reconnaissance of the forces of the
heathen enemy. It extended no further than to the
northern side of that line of mountains upon which
Paul had gazed in his childish days: it began with
a great success ; it well-nigh closed in the Apostle's
martyrdom. In Cyprus he converts the Roman pro
consul, and punishes the magician Elymas. Crossing
to the mainland, he makes a great impression at

the Missionary. 97

Antioch in Pisidia, which provokes an outbreak of
Jewish hostility; at Iconium the scenes of Antioch
am repeated ; at Lystra and Derbe he is among un
civilised Pagans, who are ready to pay him Divine
honours in one mood of feeling and to stone him to
death in another. Jewish hostility was at the bottom of
the incident at Lystra ; the Apostle turned homeward
by the way he came, making as sure of his work as
he could by leaving presbyters in every town, and at
last embarked at Attalia direct for the Syrian Antioch.
This was in 49, and the next year, 50, was marked
by the visit to the Apostolic Council at Jerusalem.
In 51 St. Paul set out on his second missionary
circuit He would not take St. Barnabas' nephew, who
had shown a want of apostolic resolution, and this led
to a separation from Barnabas himself. Silas, or
Silvanus, took the vacant place. This second journey
is on the whole the most important; it is certainly
the richest in incident and the boldest in its range.
Again the missionaries started from Antioch. They
passed through Syria and Cilicia. They revisited the
old scenes of Derbe and Lystra, where Timothy was
circumcised and taken into the Apostle's company.
The Galatian mission followed, of which we know
little from the Acts, but much from the Letter to
the Galatian churches. St. Paul was detained in the
«li-trict by some bodily ailment, whether weakness of
the eyes, or, as is on the whole more probable, epilepsy;

98 The Life of St. Paul:

but this did not prevent his working as an Evangelist,
and he probably founded at least three churches in
the three chief towns of this central district of Asia
Minor, amid an amount of exuberant enthusiasm
characteristic of a people of Celtic origin, and soon to
be followed by a serious reaction. He then intended
to work on the western coast of Asia Minor, and sub
sequently on the north-east coast in Bithynia. He
was prevented by Divine intimations, and finally was
guided by a vision to cross from Troas into Macedonia.
This decisive moment marked the entrance of the
Gospel into Europe. Accompanied by St. Luke, who
joined him at Troas, he crossed, touching at Sainothrace,
to Neapolis. Then follow a series of incidents to which
the greatest prominence is assigned in the narrative
of the Acts, and with which we are all familiar. The
Koman colony Philippi is the scene of the conver
sion of Lydia, the exorcism of the slave-girl, the
scourging and imprisonment of the Apostles, the
conversion of the jailer. At the purely Greek city of
Thessalonica, the successful preaching on three Sab
baths is followed by an attack on the house of Jason,
and his arrest, the Apostles escaping by night. At
Berea the resident Jews are capable of a more
generous bearing, and there are many converts, and
yet the Apostle had to be privately removed to secure
his safety. At Athens he is face to face with the
great traditions of the past of Greece, with the scorn

the Missionary. 99

and yet the curiosity of Epicureans and Stoics, with an
anxious idolatry that would leave no possible object
of superstition unvenerated. Corinth, famous even in
Pagan days for its gross impurity, is his residence
rbr a year and a half; it witnesses the conversion of
Crispus the ruler of the synagogue, the formal seces
sion from the synagogue to the house of Justus, the
failure of the Jewish appeal to Galiio ; and then follows,
in the spring of 54, his return, by way of Cenchrea
and Ephesus, to Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost.
St. Paul's third journey is clearly intended to sup
plement and to confirm the work of his second. He
had not yet laboured at Ephesus, the capital of Asia
Minor, and one of the great centres of the ancient
world. Ephesus, JLo which a famous temple and
commercial interests drew together men of many
races and tongues, had a natural charm for the heart
of an Apostle. He spent three years in Ephesus, so
great was his sense of its importance to the future of
the Faith. The progress of his work was marked by
his secession from the synagogue to the lecture-room
of Tyrannus, then by his triumph over the professors
of magic, lastly by the groat riot organised by the
discontented silversmiths, who made shrines for the
great temple of Artemis or Diana, and were afraid
of losing their business. The other noteworthy point
in this circuit is his visit to Corinth, which, as wo
know from his two Epistles to that Church (one of

ioo The Life of St. Paul:

them written from Ephesus, the other while he was
travelling through Macedonia), urgently required his
presence. On his way he passed the frontiers of
Illyricum. He remained in Corinth three months,
wrote his Epistles to the Romans and to the
Galatians, and in the spring of 58 returned, by way of
Philippi and Miletus. At Miletus he took leave of
the presbyters of Ephesus, and with presentiments of
coming trouble strongly upon him, he reached Jeru
salem for the feast of Pentecost.

The remaining ten years of his life, from 58 to 68,
were still, although in a less active sense, missionary.
True, he still works on, but more hi chains. He is
less in synagogues, more in law-courts, in guard
houses, in dungeons. His arrest at Jerusalem in the
summer of 58 was followed by his long imprisonment
at Caesarea ; he was only sent to Rome by Festus in
the late autumn of 60, and reached it in the spring of
61. But he misses no opportunity of doing what can
yet be done. Speaking before Felix or Agrippa, he
turns a legal argument into a religious apology.
Whether on board the vessel which is carrying him
to Rome, or when shipwrecked at Malta, or when
chained to a soldier near the Praetorian camp in Rome,
he is still a missionary. His two years' imprisonment
at Rome is devoted to work — first among his own
countrymen, then among the Gentiles; and on his
acquittal he seems to have spent four years, first in

the Missionary. 101

Macedonia and Asia Minor ; then probably a year or a
year and a half in Spain ; then again he is in the East,
— at Ephesus and at Nicopolis. Even in his second
imprisonment, when his work was all but done, he
could influence such persons as Linus, who was to be
Bishop of Rome; or Pudens, the son of a senator;
or Claudia, a British princess. But, speaking broadly,
the last ten years of his life were spent more in ad
ministering and governing the Church than in enlarg
ing her frontiers. Before, however, we pass to this
side of his work, it is natural to ask the question,
What were the qualities which made St. Paul the
first of missionaries ?

In answering this question, I do not forget his
apostolic prerogatives. Ho could work miracles, and
command an inspiration, which might well seem to
place him outside and above the category of all
ordinary Christian missionaries. And yet his success,
we may be bold to say, was largely duo to qualities
which any who tread in his steps, at however great
a distance, may share.

There are, among others, four points to be re
marked here.

( i ) St, Paul never for one moment forgets that he
is uttering a Divine Message,— that he is preaching a
Creed, not commenting on a philosophy. His Creed
was, indeed, as he told the Corinthians, the truest
philosophy ; but then it came, ho believed, out of no

IO2 The Life of St. Paul:

human brain, but from the Mind and Heart of God.
Accordingly, he proclaims it, simply, unhesitatingly,
uncompromisingly, as a man would do who had no
doubt about its inherent power and its ultimate
success. St. Paul, in fact, was what would now be
called a dogmatist. Dogmatism is very unbecoming
in those who can appeal only to human authority
for what they say, and who ought to know that
they may very possibly be mistaken. But a man
who believes himself to be charged with a message
from God to his fellow-men must be clear, positive,
straightforward in his assertions ; a dogmatic dress is
simply due to the character of what such a man
professes to have to say. Men who object to dog
matism in Christian teachers on account of the claim
which it implies would smile at the claim to bring
a message from heaven in the mouth of a declaimer
against dogma. If St. Paul had preached Christianity
as if he was half ashamed of its mysteries, and
thoroughly afraid of offending Jewish or heathen
opinion, he might have got through life more easily,
but he would not have made half-a-dozen converts
or roused the jealousies of a single synagogue.

(2) St. Paul is disinterested. He sought not what
his converts could give him; he sought themselves.
And disinterestedness is power, hi whatever cause it
may be enlisted. The Corinthians and the Galatians
knew perfectly well that their great teacher had

the Missionary. 103

nothing to get by them; they knew in their better
moments that he had given them all that was worth
having in life and in death.

(3) But side by side with this sincere and un
affected accent of certainty, and this lofty independ
ence of motive, St. Paul is capable of the greatest
consideration for the difficulties and prejudices of
those whom he is anxious to win. Strong men, like
strong systems, can afford to be generous; while
the uncertain or the timid are almost necessarily
suspicious and unsympathetic. Their own hold on
truth they instinctively feel is so precarious that
they cannot venture to take liberties; they will be
suspected of vacillation or disloyalty if they appear
to enter into the difficulties of others. St Paul knew
that no weight of human authority, and no ingenuity
or strength of human argument, could touch a truth
which ho had received, neither of man nor by man,
but from God and His Divine Son. But for this very
reason he could become all things to all men, that he
might by all means win some. To the Jews he became
as ft Jew, that he might save the Jews. Nothing in
his whole life illustrates this quality of the tenderness
of strength which St Paul so remarkably possessed
more strikingly than his circumcision of Timothy.
It was in his second missionary journey, when he
was carrying with him, and distributing to the Gentile
converts that decree of the Council at Jerusalem

1 04 The L ife of St. Paul :

which proclaimed their freedom from the Mosaic
law. Timothy's father was a Greek, his mother a
Jewish woman; and St. Paul felt that to be accom
panied by one who was half a Jew, and who professed
the Jewish faith, yet was uncircumcised, would be a
cause of great offence in every synagogue he entered.
He therefore took and circumcised Timothy. How
inconsistent, men might exclaim, how illogical, how
wanting in adherence to principle ! The real question
always is, when principle is and when it is not at stake.
Paul could resist the pressure of opinion at Jerusalem
when the circumcision of the Gentile Titus was said
to be necessary. He could withstand even St. Peter
to the face, when deference to narrow Jewish pre
judices was compromising the Faith. A man of real
principle is not afraid that his generosity will be
mistaken, or that, if it is mistaken for the moment,
he will in the end be misunderstood.

(4) Once more, St. Paul is eager to recognise the
truth which is already admitted by those whom -he
wishes to convince or convert. When he makes war
upon the strongholds of religious error he is not an
indiscriminate destroyer. Truth — the truth which is
mingled with it — being the strength of all error, the
Apostle recognises such truth as truth ; he makes the
most of it ; he shows how, rightly understood, it leads
on to the full, uncorrupted, unmutilated truth which
he is himself recommending. Thus his method on

the Missionary. 105

reaching a town is always to begin work at the
synagogue, because the synagogue furnished him
with the premises of his argument, — with people who
already believed what ought to lead them on to
agreement with himself. He had rights in the
synagogue, too, which were not yet formally can
celled, and he made the most of them. In the
synagogue he and his hearers were united in a
common reverence for the Old Testament Scriptures.
Read his sermon in the synagogue at Antioch in
Pisidia as a sample of his method. During the whole
of the earlier part of the sermon every Jew present
must have followed him entirely. He solemnly
acknowledges the God of this people Israel. Ho
traces God's Hand in Israel's history down to the
days of David — the great days upon which every
Jew looked back with enthusiastic interest. Then
he enlarges on David — a name so close to the
sympathies of his audience, — and then, at last, he
names Jesus, as David's promised Son. Ho justifies
this by referring to the ministry of the Baptist and
to the facts of our Lord's life. The rulers who
crucified Jesus, he says, did not really know the
Jewish prophets, or they would have acted other
wise. The Resurrection of Jesus was the fulfilment
of God's promises to the fathers of Israel. It was the
God of Israel, then, Who proclaimed true righteous
ness and forgiveness of sins through Jesus ; and the

io6 The Life of St. Paul:

sermon closes with a warning against unbelief which
is carefully conveyed in the familiar language of the
Jewish prophets. The effect of such a sermon was
to say, "You suppose Christianity to be altogether
hostile to the old faith of Israel: on the contrary,
Christianity is its legitimate and necessary develop
ment; it completes that unveiling of the Divine
Mind which the Jewish Law began."

Or take the most modern, as it has been called, of
St. Paul's sermons, that which he pronounced from
the Areopagus in Athens. Here he does not quote
Jewish Scriptures, of which his hearers knew nothing.
He had observed, he says, that the Athenians were
particularly religious, and that, in order to be quite
safe, they even erected an altar to some " Unknown
God." He is able, he says, to tell them something
about that God. They had heard of One Being Who
was the Source and Sustainer of Universal Life. They
had been taught to look at human history as an
education and discipline for some higher truth not
yet mastered. So far, they have gone with the
preacher; now he passes the frontier of their sym
pathies. That all men of all nations were of one
blood, or that there was One Who stood in a uni
versal relation to all, Who would judge all, Who had
risen from death to attest this His mission — this
was beyond them. Still, how skilfully is this further
step introduced, how tenderly does the Apostle feel his

the Missionary. 107

way from the admitted to the unknown ; and it was,
we may be sure, but a sample of his usual method

Yes! beyond all controversy, Paul the Apostle is
the first of Christian missionaries. All the great
labourers for the extension of Christ's kingdom in
later ages — Boniface and Augustine, Patrick and
Columba, Xavier and Martyn — have breathed his
enthusiasm, have lived his life, have accepted in
varying degrees his methods, have trodden his steps.
Peter, indeed, was first at work; Peter, in his own
single person, was the rock on whose personal exertions
the Church was to be built; Peter laid its founda
tions. And, as we gather from somewhat dim
traditions, the other Apostles of Christ had each
their appropriate fields of work ; they can have been
no common efforts by which the earliest Syrian
Churches were founded on or beyond the frontier
of the Empire. But as compared with St. Paul's
"more abundant labours," everything else in the
apostolic age pales and fades away. He it is who
is the typical missionary, — the man who, still almost
before our very eyes, with truth on his lips, and a
burning love of his fellow-men and of his God in
his heart, goes forth to win a reluctant world to a
mysterious and exacting Creed — to the only Creed
which could bring with it the great gifts of peace
and righteousness. His example is as energetic as
over, and he has yet work to do before the end.

io8 The Life of St. Paul:

II.

St. Paul was not only a missionary, who laboured
for the extension of Christianity ; he was also a great
ruler and administrator of the Christian Church. He
had to tend, support, guide, govern the churches
which sprang into being as he passed on his way.
" The care of all the churches " — " that which cometh
upon me daily"1 — he represents as the climax of his
trials. As an Apostle, he had responsibilities towards
the whole Church ; there was no restriction of such
responsibility to particular cities or districts as was
afterwards, e.g., the case with bishops at the close of
the Apostolic age. Certainly there was a general
arrangement between himself and the three Apostles
who were called the " pillars of the Church," that they
should work among the Jews and he among the
heathen nations; but his own activity on his visits
to Jerusalem, and the later labours of St. Peter and
St. John in heathen lands, show that this was not
understood to interfere with the inherent rights of
each member of the Apostolic College.

As a great ruler in the Church, St. Paul had to
pronounce decisions on very various questions affect
ing Christian duty; and as he deals with them we
must be struck by the strength and tenderness of
that sympathy which was his characteristic gift. The

i 2 Cor. xi. 28.

the Church Ruler. 109

Church of Corinth was divided into parties, one of
which made free use of his own name: he remonstrates
tenderly but firmly.1 The Corinthian women were
agitated by a discussion as to what sort of head-dress
they should wear at public worship : he goes into this
seemingly trivial question with the greatest patience,
and decides, for very weighty reasons, which he gives,
that their heads are to be properly covered.2 A
Christian is guilty of an odious incest : St. Paul cuts
him off from the communion of the Church.8 The
man repents: St. Paul orders his restoration to Church-
communion.4 Might people, it was asked, eat meat
which had been offered for the purpose of sacrifice in
heathen temples ? It entirely depends, St. Paul says,
upon whether offence is thereby given to weak Chris
tians or not6 Is it well for Christians to marry again,
or to marry at all ? St. Paul enters into these questions
with the utmost minuteness.6 Two Philippian ladies,
Euodias and Synt}Tche, have a private quarrel, while
St Paul is in prison at Rome: he hears of it and
sends them a special message, desiring them to make
it up.7 Onesimus, a converted slave, wishes to return
to his master Philemon, whom ho had injured and
deserted : St. Paul gives him a letter of recommen
dation, full of the most delicate consideration for
Philemon's own feelings and position, as well as for

1 1 Cor. L 10-17. * /*• *'• 5 i> * /*' *• i-S- * » Cor. ii. 10.
• i Cor. Ttii. 1-13. • lb. ril. 1-40. ' Phil. I?. 2.

1 1 o The Life of St. Paul :

that of his own later convert.1 The Holy Communion
was profaned at Corinth through the proceedings at
a love-feast which preceded it : St. Paul uses language
of stern severity, and adjourns the discussion of details
until his arrival.2 The last chapter of the Epistle to
the Romans has sometimes been described as a " mere
list of names." Its value and interest are of the
highest order ; it shows how true and discriminating
was the Apostle's care even of the individual members
of the several flocks that were under his jurisdiction.

Besides these questions of conduct, St. Paul had a
great deal of purely ecclesiastical business on his
hands. In the Epistles to Timothy and Titus we see
him organising the Christian clergy, making rules for
then: lives and provision for their sustenance, insist
ing too that their wives are to be persons of ascer
tained Christian character. He gives Timothy full
instructions for creating an order of widows, devoted
to charitable works. Indeed, nothing was nearer his
heart than making Christian faith useful and fruitful
for the purpose of relieving human want and suffer
ing. If the Body was one, he argued, its members
had duties towards each other. One of the persistent
efforts of his life, again and again referred to, was to
raise money among the wealthier Christians of Gentile
or Hellenistic origin, in order to support the poverty-
stricken populations in and about Jerusalem.

J Philera. 10-21. 2 i Cor. xi. 20-34.

the Church Ruler. 1 1 1

But the duties of the Apostle towards the faith and
knowledge of the infant Church were even more
exacting than his duties towards its organisation and
conduct. Everywhere there were sides of truth to be
elucidated or insisted on; misapprehensions to be
removed; errors to be rebuked. Each church, it
might almost be said, had its particular misapprehen
sion of the Apostle's teaching. At Thessalonica what
St. Paul had said about Christ's second coming was
exaggerated into a reason for neglecting all ordinary
duties. In the Galatian churches some false teachers
were persuading the majority that it was necessary to
observe the Jewish festivals and fasts, to be circum
cised, and in fact to be good Jews as well as or before
being good Christians. At Corinth the cardinal doc
trine of the Resurrection was denied because of the
difficulty of giving an adequate physical explanation
of it At Colossse a strange mixture of Jewish
cabbalistic rules and of Greek modes of thinking
had produced a theosophy which, while retaining
Christian phraseology, dethroned Christ in the Chris
tian heart At Ephesus, hi the later apostolic age,
there must have been some of those attempts to
make capital out of Christianity with a view to
framing theories about the universe and human life
which, under the name of Gnosticism, abounded so
largely in the following century, and the germs of
which are so plainly discoverable in this. At Alex-

H2 The Life of St. Paul :

andria — if, as is probable, the Epistle to the Hebrews
was addressed, at St. Paul's instance or dictation, to
Christians in that city — there was a disposition to fall
back altogether to Judaism.

It is in St. Paul's Epistles that we see him at work in
this vast field of labour; and if they had not a far
higher claim upon our attention, the purely literary
interest of these Epistles would be simply exhaustless.
They are probably only a portion of the Letters which
he actually wrote, — preserved, because instinctively
received by the Apostolical Church into the Sacred
Canon, while the others have perished. They were
written amid the distractions of a life of ceaseless
effort and ceaseless struggle. It was in the midst of
the mission at Corinth in 52 and 53, where Jewish
passion and heathen impurity gave him so much to
think about, that he wrote the two Letters to the
Thessalonians. It was at the close of his three years'
sojourn in Ephesus — so rich in its results, so serious in
the proof it had given of the vehemence of popular pas
sions — that he wrote his first Letter to the Corinthians.
It was while travelling through Macedonia that he
wrote the second Letter to Corinth ; at Corinth, hi the
midst of absorbing preoccupations, he found time to
write the great Epistle to the Romans — in itself a
great doctrinal treatise — and the brief, vivid remon
strance to the Galatians. A prisoner at Rome, he
seized the opportunity of writing not merely the

the Church Ruler. 1 1 3

circular Epistle to the Church of Ephesus and some
other churches, but also those to the Colossians and
Philemon, and later — the tenderest of all his Epistles
—that to the Philippians. He was again engaged in
missions when he wrote to Titus and the first time to
Timothy ; when he wrote his last Letter to Timothy
he was in prison, and in full view of the now inevit
able end.

While the division of our Bibles into chapters and
verses has great practical recommendations, it has also
some drawbacks, and they are nowhere more obvious
than in reading the Epistles of St. Paul. Unlike St.
John, his style does not always lend itself readily to
this minute subdivision, and each of his Epistles is, as
a rule, like its several paragraphs, an organically con
nected whole. In order to enjoy, if not to understand
him, it is well occasionally, after reminding ourselves
of the CMf""™^-*^^ under which an

written, to read it through at a sitting. In this way
the force and relative subordinationof the arguments,
the drift of the incidental observations, the varied
play of exhortation, remonstrance, irony, aftectionate-
ness, become obvious ; we are no longer dealing with
disconnected fragments, but with a complete composi
tion which speaks for itself.

Amid all the distractions of our own day, it is
almost consolatory to reflect that the Apostolic
Church itself was disturbed by serious controversies,

ii

1 14 The Life of St. Paul :

controversies which ran up into offensive personalities,
and which were at times, as at Corinth and in Galatia,
conducted with much bitterness.

The greatest controversy in which St. Paul was
engaged within the Church turned upon the question
whether the Jewish observances, circumcision in par
ticular, were necessary. A large party of Christians,
whose centre was Jerusalem, who were probably in
fluenced by the current opinions in the school of
Shammai, and who made free use of the names of
the Apostles Peter, James, and John, maintained that
they were. To these men St. Paul's work appeared
radically revolutionary: and when they could, they
went over, as in Galatia, the ground he had evangelised,
insisting that if the Gentile converts would be really
good Christians they must be circumcised. St. Paul
maintained that while, if a man happened to be circum
cised, it did him no harm, to insist upon circumcision
as necessary was to deny fundamental Christian truth.
For there were two questions of the gravest import
ance which really were involved in this apparent trifle,
(i) Was the Work of Christ, as the Restorer of man
to a state of righteousness before God, complete in itself,
or was it merely a supplement to the Jewish Creed ?
Was the system of the Jewish law really able to make
men righteous ; and if it was, where was the need of
the Work of Christ ? If this were the case, moreover,
was it conceivable that Christ was greater than Moses

the Church Ruler. 1 1 5

and the Prophets, in His Essential Nature? The
Judaising theory that the law was still obligatory
meant at bottom that Christ's Work was not really
complete, and so that His Person was in reality only
human. (2) And a second question was, Was Chris
tianity meant to be the religion of mankind, or only
of a small subdivision of the Jewish world ? Was it,
in later language, to be merely national, or was it to
be catholic ? If Christianity was serious in claiming
to be the true, the absolute religion, it could not but
also claim to be universal ; the two claims, men
instinctively felt, went together. In resisting cir
cumcision, then, St. Paul was contending not merely
for the Divine dignity of his Master, but for the
world-embracing character of the new kingdom, in
which there was to be " neither Jew nor Gentile, bar
barian nor Scythian, bond nor free," but all were to
be one.

St. Paul has indeed been said by a distinguished
writer against Christianity to have been its real author ;
to have changed it from a moral sentiment to a dog
matic creed; to have invested the Person of its
Founder with a rank which He never would have
claimed : and to have given the new religion a world
wide extension which was not at all contemplated by
the Prophet of Nazareth. It is instructive to compare
this idea of St Paul's work with that which, proceed
ing from the same school, represents it as practically

1 1 6 The Life of St. Paul :

a failure; the Judaising tendency having, it is con
tended, successfully asserted itself in the second
century, in the ordinances of the Christian Church, and
the prevalent conception of the Christian life. The
two ideas might be well left to neutralise each other.
In fact, St. Paul taught what Christ had taught, only in
different terms, and with application to new circum
stances. Our Lord had said that in the coming time
the Father would be worshipped neither on the
Samaritan mountain nor in Jerusalem. He had
ruled that man is not denied by what he eats ; He had
called Himself Master of the Sabbath, — an unpardon
able assumption in Jewish eyes. The Lord made claims
upon the love, trust, obedience, reverence of men,
which could only be justified if He was what St. Paul
taught. He had told his followers to preach among
and baptize, not Jews only, but all the nations. St.
Paul insisted on these features of our Lord's teaching
at a critical point in the history of the Apostolic
Church, — that was all Nor was his work in vain. The
greatest minds hi Christendom are his direct creations.
It is from Paul that Augustine learns the doctrines of
grace of which he was so great a master. It is from
Paul that Chrysostom imbibes his vivid sense of the
range and applicability of Christian morals. It is at
the feet of St. Paul, not less than at those of St. John,
that Athanasius discerns what was really meant by
the Incarnation of the Son of God.

the Martyr. 1 1 7

He was caricatured by Marcion ; he has been abun
dantly misrepresented by modern antinomian systems
of divinity ; but these teachers pass, and are forgotten
— St. Paul remains. If, as at the first, there are in
his writings not a few " things hard to be understood,
which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest to
their destruction,"1 this does not obscure the glory of
the Apostle of the Nations, or render him responsible
for inferences from or paraphrases of his words which
he would have eagerly disavowed.

III.

In all ages Truth has demanded sacrifices. And
no man ever lived who understood better than St.
Paul the power and fruitfulness of sacrifice as a means
of advancing the cause whether of truth or goodness.
He must therefore have seen from the first that his
martyrdom lay in the nature of things, — a sufficient
presentiment of the end. In the course of discharging
his duties he was again and again close to death. He
gives the Corinthians a list of the dangers which, even
before the year 57, ho had had to encounter ; and he
explains to the Philippians, when imprisoned for the first
time in Rome, that he already looked upon death as
gain. It would seem that he must have been arrested
at Nicopolis late in the autumn of 67, and sent, pro-

» a St. Peter iii. 16.

1 1 8 The Life of St. Paul :

bably by the decemvirs, to Rome for trial as soon as
it was safe to cross the Adriatic. For since St. Paul's
release in 63, events had occurred which made a Chris
tian's position much more insecure. After the great
fire in Rome in the summer of 64 the Emperor Nero
endeavoured to divert the popular indignation of
which he was the object, by turning it upon the Chris
tians. The Pagan historian Tacitus has described the
atrocities of this first persecution of the Church, — how
some Christians were crucified, some dressed in the
skins of wild beasts and hunted to death with dogs,
some clothed in dresses of inflammable materials and
set on fire at night to illuminate the Imperial gardens.
This was three years before the arrest. St. Paul was
well out of the way when it happened, but the name
of so noted a leader of the Christians would now have
been known to the Roman police, and they would
have been on the look-out for him. Probably he
reached Rome by way of Brundusium early in 68, and
his case would have soon come on for trial before the
city Prefect, to whom the Emperor delegated causes
of this kind : he would have been tried in one of the
great basilicas or law-courts which abutted on the
Forum. The tragic interest of the Second Epistle to
Timothy consists in its belonging to these the closing
months of his life. It was written when his case had
been brought into court for the first time, and he had
been acquitted on the first charge against him, — very

the Martyr. 1 1 9

probably that of being concerned in the burning of
Rome. He says that on that occasion no one stood
by him, whether as patron or as advocate : he had to
plead his cause alone. And yet he was not alone ; he
was more than ever conscious of the strengthening
presence of our Lord : — but for this, the isolation of
those last months would have been unbearable. Demas
had forsaken him for worldly motives: Crescens,
for some unnamed reason, had gone into Galatia : even
Titus — we cannot suppose through cowardice — had
left for Dalmatia : only Luke remained. He longed
to see Timothy once more before he died: but ho
knew that the end was near, and it is impossible to
siiy whether his wish was granted. The second charge
against him, probably that of introducing a religion
unrecognised by the State, would no doubt have gone
against him; but he could die as a Roman citizen.
There is no serious critical reason for rejecting the
ordinary account of his martyrdom : he was beheaded
outside the gate of Rome which looks towards the
port at the mouth of the Tiber, and which is now
called the Gate of St. Paul A splendid church, first
erected by the Emperor Constantino, and lately rebuilt
after the great fire of 1824, marks the neighbourhood,
at any rate, of the spot on which Paul of Tarsus
pMBed to receive, as he believed, a crown of right
eousness. But his enduring monument at this
moment, and to the end of time, will be his great un-

I2O T/ie Life of St. Paul: the Martyr.

rivalled place in the Sacred Canon, and the gratitude
of millions of hearts, to whom he is the incessant
minister of a Truth whereby the two deepest longings
of the human soul may be satisfied, — the longing to be
inwardly righteous, and the longing for a true inward
peace.

DANTE AND AQUINAS.1

PART I.

more distinguished Christian writers of post-
apostolic date who have contributed to the
Commedia of Dante, with very varying result, are
easily enumerated. The East, so rich in speculative
thought, is mainly and oddly represented by the
fifth-century author who passes as Dionysius the
Areopagite; the West, by St. Augustine, by St.
Gregory the Great, by the accomplished and unfor
tunate Boethius ; in a less degree, and in times nearer
to Dante, by Isidore of Seville, by the Venerable Bede,
by Rabanus Maurus. Among literary and moral in
fluences yet more recent and more powerful were
St. Anselm, Peter Lombard, the two St. Victors, and
eminently St. Bernard. The opening fourteenth
century contributes nothing; we seek in vain for
distinct traces of Roger Bacon, of Duns Scotus, of
Occam. But in the very foreground of Dante's view
are two figures of commanding prominence, each of
whom represented a philosophical as well as a religious
tendency, each of whom was the typical man of a
monastic order in the early days of its fresh, creative and

1 Thin Paper was read before the Oxford Dante Society, June 7, 1881.

121

122 Dante and Aquinas.

reforming power. These are the Platonising Franciscan
St. Bonaventure, and the Aristotelian Dominican St.
Thomas Aquinas. The former might well engage our
attention, but our present concern is with the latter.

Thomas Aquinas was born at the Castle of Rocca
Secca, which belonged to his family, and in the year
1226. His father was Landulph, Count of Aquino,
and Lord of Loretto and Belcastro. His grandfather,
Thomas of Aquino, had married Francesca, sister of
the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa ; his mother was a
Norman princess. Whether the alleged predictions
of his greatness before his birth were or were not
an afterthought begotten of the enthusiasm of his
biographer, it is certain that he gave early proof of
high mental powers and of commanding character.
When five years of age he was sent to the Benedictine
School at Monte-Cassino, and his master there passed
him on in the course of a year or two to the University
of Naples, which had been founded by Frederic n.
just eight years before. At Naples, Aquinas remained
until 1 243, when his studies were approaching com
pletion, and at the age of seventeen he suddenly
entered the Order of St. Dominic.

The Dominican Order was just twenty-six years
old; its founder — born 1170, died 1221 — had been
canonised nine years before by Gregory ix.,1 and its

1 " 1' amoroso drudo
Delia fede cristiana, il santo atleta,
Benigno ai suoi, ed ai nemici crudo." — Par. xii. 55-57.

Dante and Aqu inas. 123

third General, Raimond de Pennafort, had quite
recently, in 1238, given it its final form as a monastic
and preaching institute. Still, it was struggling for
a position which its earlier success had seemed to
bring within its reach ; and, as was perhaps almost
inevitable, its then rulers have been accused of making
undue efforts to enlist in its ranks a young student
of noble birth and high intellectual promise. Thomas
was hardly the man to do or leave undone anything
of this kind under mere pressure from others. His
course was probably determined, partly by a desire
to escape from the ordinary civil life of Italy, corrupted
as it had been by the wars of Frederic n., and partly
by the high moral standard of the Order in these
days of its first enthusiasm.

" Io fui degli agni della santa greggia,
Che Domenico mcna per cammino,
U' ben s'impingua so non si vaneggia."1

But it may also be conjectured that a mind like
that of Thomas would have been especially attracted
by the great German Dominican, Albrecht von
Lauingen, the fame of whose knowledge had reached
every University in Europe some years before. Albert
was now fifty years of age, and at the height of his
reputation. Sixteen years hence he will be forced by
Pope Alexander iv. to accept the bishopric of Kegens-

1 Par. x. 94-96.

124 Dante and Aquinas.

burg, only to resign it after the proved discomforts of
a two years' incumbency, and then to spend eighteen
years more in his beloved Cologne, before his death
in 1280. Dante, it will be remembered, places this
great teacher in the fourth heaven — in that wreath
of blessed spirits to which Albert's pupil Aquinas
also belonged, — a position which would not have been
refused him, at any rate by Neander, always equitable
in his treatment of the scholastics, if not always
profound. " The great mind of Albert," says Neander,
" grasped the whole compass of human knowledge as
it existed in his time. He abounded in profound,
suggestive ideas, with which he fertilised the minds
of his contemporaries, and hi far-reaching anticipa
tions of truth." l The best modern authority on the
scholastic philosophy goes still further, and complains
of the injustice of posterity in having connected the
name of Thomas rather than that of Albert with the
distinctive teaching of the Dominican school.2

But whatever the governing attraction, Thomas had
made up his mind. His mother wished to see him
before he left her for life ; but the interview was pre
vented, probably from a fear lest recent resolutions
should yield to the stress of natural feeling. But
Thomas's soldier-brothers, who were highly-placed
officers in Frederic's army, made themselves masters

1 Kirchen-Geschichte, Periode 5, § 4.

* Haur^au, De la Philosophic Scholastique, p. 104.

Dante and Aquinas. 1 2 5

of his person, and, in the hope of breaking his will,
they shut him up in a castle for two years. He spent
his confinement in studying the Bible and the Master
of the Sentences ; and his mother, at last convinced
that he must follow what he believed to be the
Will of God, herself assisted him to escape. The
Dominicans sent him first to Paris, on his road to
Cologne ; and there, under the guidance of Albert, he
entered upon the full range of those studies which
made him what he has been to Western Christendom
His silent habits gained him, from his German
companions, the nickname of the "dumb ox;" but
Albert early ventured the famous prediction, " We call
him a dumb ox, but he will turn out a teacher whose
voice will be heard throughout the whole world."
His lectures on the Categories and the Sentences were
received with the greatest enthusiasm. Albert him
self was at times rhetorical; he enjoyed the swing
and pomp of abounding language: Thomas was
rigidly severe and simple, never uttering a word
which was not wanted to complete his meaning.
It was at this early period of his career — probably
in disputes with the more enterprising Franciscans —
that Thomas brought his logic to such perfection.
None of his contemporaries could propose a dilemma
or arrange the terms of a syllogism with such decisive
effect But at the bottom, both of his language and
of his logic, was an intellectual caution, which Danto

126 Dante and Aquinas.

makes him enforce, after resolving his own doubts,
in the 1 3th Canto of the Paradiso : —

" E questo ti sia sempre piombo ai piedi,
Per farti mover lento, com' uom lasso ;
Ed al si ed al no, che tu non vedi ;
Che quegli e tra gli stolti bene abbasso,
Che senza distinzion afferma o nega,
Nell' un cosl come nell' altro passo."

And then he gives the characteristic reason : —

" Perch' egl' incontra che piu volte piega
L' opinion corrente in falsa parte,
E poi 1' affetto lo intelletto lega. " l

Thomas spent his time between Cologne and
Paris, lecturing to crowded audiences of applauding
students, and, like some modern German professors,
being drawn by his reputation away from his studies
into the vortex of contemporary politics. The well-
known story of his behaviour at the table of Louis ix.
belongs to a later period of his life, while he was
engaged upon the Summa. The king set much
store on his opinion respecting affairs of state, and
had asked him as well as the prior to dinner. For
getting where he was, and absorbed in his own world
of thought, Thomas suddenly struck with his fist on
the royal table, exclaiming, "Then the Manichoeans
are done for ! " The prior, who sat by, was shocked,
and seized his arm, and Thomas at once made a pro
fuse apology to the king for his unintended rudeness.

1 Par. xiii. 113-120.

Dante and Aquinas. 127

Louis, however, was much edified, and forthwith sent
for a scribe, who took down from Thomas's mouth
all that had been passing through his mind. But
Thomas's aptitude for public affairs did not always
help him in other matters. The Dominicans naturally
enlisted his services to plead the cause of the Order
at Rome; and as the feeling of the University of
Paris against the mendicant friars was exceedingly
strong, Thomas, notwithstanding his conspicuous ac
complishments, was for some time refused his doctor's
degree. It was granted him in 1256.

In the eighteen years which followed, and which
were spent mainly in Italy, Thomas produced all his
great works — the Summa, the apologetical work
Contra Gentiles, the Commentary on the Sentences,
the Commentary on St. Paul's Epistles, and several
of the Opuscwla. Notwithstanding his lectures, his
sermons, his relations with public men, his journeys
between Paris and the south of Italy, he found time
to produce works which are remarkable less for their
vast extent1 than for their compressed thought;
and his biographer, William of Thoco, observes with
justice, "Unum videtur Deus in dicto doctore dum
viveret manifestum ostendisso miraculum, ut tarn
modico tempore, forte in viginti annis, qui inter
magisterium ejus et obitum in vita fluxerunt, bis

1 In the last edition, published at Parma, 1852-1873, they fill twenty
five volumes quarto.

128 Dante and Aquinas.

eundo Parisios et in Italiam redeundo, tot potuerit
libros per suos scriptores in scriptis redigere." l Like
the late Dr. Neale, he could dictate on different
subjects to three or four amanuenses at once; and
the terseness of his style makes this feat, hi any
case remarkable, simply astonishing.

It was shortly after his doctorate that Thomas com
posed his Summa contra Gentiles, at the desire of
the General of his Order, Raimond de Pennafort,
who in his old age was almost exclusively interested
in the conversion of the Jews and Moors in Spain.
While this work is less generally known, except to
divines, than his Summa Theologice, it is at once,
owing to its method, pleasanter reading, and far
more likely to interest a modern reader. The nature
of his task obliged the writer to fall back upon
premises which would be admitted by those who
had least in common with his faith ; and the sentence,
" Unde necesse est ad naturalem rationem recurrere
cui omnes assentire coguntur," which might have
been written by Toland or Chubb, is the key-note
of the most striking part of this great work. Of
course, he is careful to state that there are truths
internal to Revelation which Reason could never have
reached separately, though she can marshal and do
justice to the presumptions which warrant us in
receiving Revelation as a whole; and accordingly

Dante and Aquinas. 1 29

while he undertakes to demonstrate, by proofs which
appeal to reason, the Being and the Unity of God,
he contents himself with showing that "veritates
rationem excedentes," such as the doctrine of the
Trinity, are not contrary to, though they are above,
reason. Dante seems to be thinking of this part
of Aquinas's work when, at the foot of the Hill of
Purgatory, Virgil comments on the fact that only
Dante's body casts a shadow :—

" Matto e chi spera che nostra ragione
Possa trascorrer la infinita via,
Che ticne una sustanzia in trc persone.
State contenti, umana gente, al quia ;
Che, se potuto aveste veder tutto,
Meatier non era partorir Maria." l

In 1261, Thomas was summoned to Rome by
Urban iv., who was anxious to make him a Cardinal.
Thomas escaped from this splendid infliction by con
senting to be Master of the Palace, — a position which
involved less ecclesiastical dignity, while it had the
practical advantage of giving him access at pleasure
to the Pope's presence. He had now reached the
busiest period of his life, since to his literary labours,
which do not seem to have been interrupted or even
lessened, was superadded a new mass of work con
nected with his Order, with the Church at large, and
with contemporary politics. Thus we find him assist
ing at the General Chapter of the Order in 1263,

1 Purg. iii. 34-39 ; cf. Pwrg. xxxiiL 85.

I

130 Dante and Aquinas.

and engaged in a great effort to re-establish the
discipline, the loss of which Dante makes him
deplore. Already the flock of St. Dominic was
wandering to a great distance from the spirit and
institute of its Shepherd : —

" Ma il suo peculio di nuova vivanda

E fatto ghiotto si, ch' esser non puote
Che per diversi salti non si spanda ;
E quanto le sue pecore remote
E vagabonde piu da esso vanno,
Piil tornano all' ovil di latte vote."

In what follows Dante may be thinking of the con
dition of things half a century later : —

" Ben son di quelle che temono il danno,
E stringonsi al pastor ; ma son si poche,
Che le cappe f ornisce poco panno. " l

Urban iv. died in 1264; but Thomas appears to have
been on the same terms of confidence and intimacy
with his successor Clement iv. Clement named him
to the Archbishopric of Naples; the Bull of his
appointment was made out, but, at the last moment,
in deference to the distress which Thomas experi
enced, when resistance was impossible, it was with
drawn. Thomas now gave himself to his most
extensive work, the Summa Theologian \ from 1265
until his death in 1 274, he devoted all his spare time
to it. He had already completed his well-known

1 Par. xi. 124-132.

Dante and Aquinas. 1 3 1

Catena Aurea, — as to which De Thoco makes the
entirely incredible assertion that he dictated all the
passages from the Fathers from memory; the office
for the new festival of Corpus Christi and the work
on the Eastern Church, Contra errores Grcecorum,
both undertaken at the desire of Urban iv. ;' his
interesting book against the Averroistic conception
of the soul,1 and his voluminous commentaries upon
Aristotle. In 1266 we find him in Northern Italy;
in 1267 he is at Bologna, which, as containing the
tomb of St. Dominic (Nicolo Pisano had completed
his magnificent work some six years before), was in
some sense the centre of the Order. At Bologna he
appears, as at Paris and at Rome, as a preacher, and
as holding a University Chair ; he publishes the first
part of the Summa', he composes his famous work
(if indeed it be his) De regimine principum, addressed
to Hugh of Lusignan, king of Cyprus ; and then, after
three years, his superior orders him off again to Paris,
to assist at a General Chapter of the Order in 1 269.
Once more he is a professor in the convent St. Jacques;
once more he is the political confidant of St. Louis.
Here he writes several of his minor works, never for
getting the Summa, the second part of which is pub
lished on his return to Bologna in 1271. Upon this
it is not too much to say that he was scrambled for

1 Declaratio qaornndam articulorum contra Graecoa, Arm en on, Sarncenoa
(ad Cantorem Antiochcnum) ; De Unitate Intellect!!* contra Averroutaa.

132 Dante and Aqit inas.

by at least three Universities at once. The General
Chapter of the Order finally decided upon sending
him to Naples, probably in accordance with his own
wishes. After an absence of twenty-eight years he
returned to the home of his boyhood ; he was received
with popular demonstrations, in town and country, as
a public character whose transcendent merits and
glory as a teacher were now universally recognised.
But he hastily buried himself as before in his cloister,
to complete his commentary on the Prophets, his
explanation of the Epistles and Gospels, several
smaller works, — to say nothing of beginning a transla
tion of the works of Aristotle from the Greek text. He
had always consulted it in his earlier commentaries,
and must often have felt the need of a new transla
tion. Albert of Cologne only knew the Latin render
ing of Aristotle which had been distilled from the
Arabic: Roger Bacon complained of the miserable
versions with which alone he was acquainted. Thomas
determined to give to Europe, in a new and trust
worthy dress,

" il Maestro di color che sanno,"1

as the world, theological no less than lay, then
accounted Aristotle; and this without losing sight
of the work which had a high place in his heart, the
Sumvna, at which, in all leisure moments, he worked
unremittingly.

i Inf. iv. 132.

Dante and Aquinas. 133

But the end was now close at hand At the
close of 1273 he had frequent fainting-fits, which
his biographer probably mistook, at least in some
cases, for spiritual ecstasies. On the 6th of December
in that year he finished the 9Oth Question of the
third part of the Summa, "de Partibus Pcenitentiae
in generali." His strength was gone ; but Gregory x.
had convoked a Council to meet at Lyons on the ist
of May in the year following, and desired Thomas to
be present, since the relation between the Eastern and
Western Churches, on which he had thought and
written, was to be specially discussed. Ill as ho was,
Thomas obeyed. Near Naples ho stopped with a
married niece, in the castle of Magenza, the Countess
Francesca Cecano, and here his illness became aggra
vated, and his life was even despaired of. But he
rallied ; and, telling his niece that a monk ought not
to die in a secular house, he pushed on northward, in
the rude winter weather, towards Lyons. He reached
the Cistercian convent of Fossa Nuova in Campagna,
and De Thoco describes the enthusiasm with which
he was received ; but he insisted on being alone, per
suaded, as he was, that the end was near. Once more
the expiring flame of life flickered upwards; and, fancy
ing that there was a rally, the monks pressed round
his dying bed, and begged him to dictate to them n
commentary on the book which from its associations
with St. Bernard was the favourite of the Cistercians,

1 34 Dante and Aquinas.

the Song of Solomon. Thomas roused himself to
the effort ; but it was too late. He received the last
Sacraments, and passed away on March 7, 1 274, in the
forty-ninth year of his age.

Among those souls who are placed on the fifth
cornice in the Purgatory, Dante meets with Hugh
Capet, who describes his descendants on the French
throne, and in particular says that Charles of Anjou,
after putting Conradino to death in 1268, became
king of Naples —

"epoi
Ripinse al ciel Tommaso, per ammenda. " 1

Dante here seems to adopt an aggravated version of
the story which is mentioned by Villani, that Thomas,
" going to the Council at Lyons, was killed by a phy
sician of Charles I., king of Sicily, who put poison into
some sweetmeats, thinking to ingratiate himself with
king Charles, because Thomas was of the lineage of
the lords of Aquino, who had rebelled against the
king, and doubting whether he should be made
cardinal."2 Dante seems to have thought that the
physician acted, not on his own account, but by orders
from the king; and commentators of a later age
assign the various motives which, as they think,
would have determined the deed, and which are of
varying degrees of probability. Certain it is that De
Thoco and Ptolemy of Lucca, — who was Aquinas's con-

1 Purg. xx. 68, 69. a Villain, lib. ix. c. 218.

Dante and Aquinas. 135

fessor, and on terms of uninterrupted intimacy with
him, and who describes his death, — knew nothing
about it. The story may well have originated in the
Italian hatred of the French intruder whose misdeeds
would appear to make the author of the De regimine
pri'ncipum a natural victim of his jealous tyranny ;
and Dante would not have examined too closely a story
which his own political feeling would have easily
welcomed. Muratori doubts what credence should be
given to Dante in the matter ; and materials for dis
cussing the point are found in the elaborate note of
Scartazzini, and in Arrivabene.1

Dante was born hi 1265, while Aquinas and Bona-
venture both died nine years afterwards, in 1274, the
former in March, the latter in July. As a boy Dante
must have been able to understand something of what
was felt by his elders in that year, so deeply graven
in the memory of mediaeval Europe. Scholasticism
had then taken full possession of the whole thinking
and devotional life of the Church, and none could
escape a share in the outburst of enthusiasm and
pain which attended to the grave all that remained
of the men whom it accounted of foremost moral and
intellectual weight in Western Christendom.

It was whispered that the loss which the Church
had sustained by the death of Aquinas was made
known supernaturally and at the moment to his still

> Seoolo di DanU, lib. i. p. 14.

136 Dante and Aquinas.

surviving and aged master, Albert, at Cologne : " My
brother Thomas of Aquino," he suddenly exclaimed,
" my son hi Jesus Christ, who has been a light of the
Church, is dead ; God has revealed it to me." Mean
while Fossa Nuova became almost at once a place of
pilgrimage, and to the scandal of the Dominicans,
the Cistercian hosts of the dead theologian insisted on
retaining his body in their conventual church. In
spite of protests, frequent and vehement, they kept
their prize for ninety-four years; they only surrendered
it when, in 1368, Urban v. decided that it was the
rightful possession of the Dominican Order. Even
then the controversy was not closed; it raged yet
a while between the claims of rival Dominican con
vents ; in the event, while an arm was sent to Paris,
the body of St. Thomas was translated to the great
house of the Order at Toulouse, where it remained
until it was, as is said, scattered to the winds by the
great storm of the Revolution. It was afterwards
recovered, and is now in St. Sernin at Toulouse.

Aquinas was canonised by John xxn. at Avignon,
July 1 8, 1323, nearly two years after Dante's death in
September 1321. The process of canonisation, as it
is called, had already begun in 1319. John XXIL,
whatever else is to be said of him, was theologian
enough to understand the true place of Aquinas in
the world of Christian thought, even if he exaggerates
in saying that Thomas "plus illuminavit ecclesiam

Dante and Aquinas. \ 37

quam omnes alii doctores." 1 But Dante's genius had
more than anticipated the formal honours of the
Church ; and in the tenth and three following cantos
of the Paradiso we see what the highest minds of
his day thought of the greatest of the Dominicans.
Only two other men, perhaps, — since the time of the
Apostles, — Augustine and Calvin, have left so profound
an impress upon the after-thought of the Christian
world. If a great epic poet had written at the close
of the fifth century, a like honour might have been
done to St. Augustine. If Milton had written fifty
years earlier, and had put his strength into Paradise
Regained instead of Paradise Lost, a like honour
might have been assigned to Calvin. So far as dis
tinction in the heaven of literature goes, Thomas was
felix opportunitate mortis ; and if he had not secured
a foremost place among the giants of theology of all
ages, he would still have lived for ever in the pages
of the Commedia.

The Summa Theologies has many aspects, but it is,
before all things, an attempt to present theology as
the universal, all-comprehending science. And in this
it is somewhat akin to the Commedia, in which all the
facts of knowledge and experience are ranged, as a
layman would range them, under or as part of the
science of God, That such a marshalling of universal
truth is abstractedly possible no serious believer in

» De Thoco, xiii. 81.

138 Dante and Aquinas.

God can doubt; but the modern world knows too
much to allow itself to hope that, with our present
faculties, we can succeed in effecting it. Within the
precincts of theology itself are large detached frag
ments, so to call them, of truth which, as we now
know, cannot be brought, without intellectual violence,
under the unifying empire of theological system ; and
when we pass beyond these precincts the world of
human knowledge presents a spectacle which even
Aquinas would have felt to make his task impossible.
But the thirteenth century was not embarrassed by our
larger outlook, and the forms which were taken by
intellectual rebellion against the creed of the Church
made good men anxious to present the whole field of
knowledge after a fashion of which the work of
Aquinas is the most complete and splendid type. As
Dante ascends to the first heaven with Beatrice, his
difficulties may represent the mental unrest of his age,
upon which the Church's theology

" appresso d' un pio sospiro,
Gli occhi drizzo ver me con quel sembiante,
Che madre fa sopra figliuol deliro. " l

And then she explains how

" Le cose tutte e quante
Harm' ordine tra loro : e questo e forma
Che 1' universe a Dio fa simigliante.

1 Par. i. 100-102.

Dante and Aquinas. 139

Nell* online ch' io dico sono accline
Tutte nature, per diverse sorti,
Pih al principio loro, e men vicine. " l

But did Dante get this from Aquinas ?

It is perhaps more natural to think of Brunetto
Latini, who, though fifty-three years Dante's senior,
lived until Dante was twenty-nine — lived to the end
of Dante's life in his grateful memory :

" La cara e buona imagine paterna. "

For Brunetto too aimed at an encyclopaedic grasp of
the knowledge of the time. His Trdsor discusses
everything from the Divine Essence down to the
details of natural history and rhetoric ; and if Dante
was indebted to Aquinas for the completeness of some
of his conceptions, he may well have owed the first
impulse to Brunetto. For in this matter Brunetto
himself was a pupil of the Dominicans. During his
exile in France Brunetto would have met with the
Spemdum Majus of Vincent of Beauvais, who died in
1264, just a year before the birth of Dante, and whoso
work may not have been without its influence on the
project, if not on the execution, of the Summa. The
two works, hi fact, represent a ruling tradition of the
Dominican Order, which probably dates from its very
foundation, — the effort to subdue the intellectual revolt
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries against the
Church, by exhibiting the whole world of thought and

1 Par. L 103-105; 109-111.

140 Dante and Aquinas.

knowledge, as religious men then conceived of it, in
an unity so imposing as to overawe resistance. " Aqui
nas," says Ozanam, " rappelait Aristote, par 1'univer-
salite" de son savoir, par la gravite" pesante mais solide
de son caractere, par son talent d'analyse, et de clas
sification, par 1'extreme sobrie"t6 de son langage."1
This will hardly be thought exaggerated. It was, in
fact, Aquinas who really baptized Aristotelian thought,
and put an end to the suspicion with which the
Church had for ages regarded it. In his hands scho
lasticism struck its roots most deeply into the logic
and metaphysic of Aristotle, but then it moulded this
rich material by the double and simultaneous action
of a faith which certainly freed it from its one-sided
sensuousness, and of a lucid common-sense which, in
all questions that were conceived to be open, often
reviewed received conclusions with unrivalled and
fearless judgment. In discussing the nature of Being
Thomas preserves a wary mean, which has been repro
duced again and again in very unecclesiastical quarters,
between the nominalism of Abelard and the exagger
ated realism which had got into no less trouble with
the Church. He was, I suppose, what we should call
a very modified nominalist : he certainly did not be
lieve in the hypothesis of an universal substance. In
psychology he is thoroughly Aristotelian : the soul, so
far from being merely conscience, or merely thought,

1 Dante et la, Philosophic Catholique, p. 3, c. 3, p. 338.

Dante and A quinas. 1 4 1

is to the full ^vxn as well as Tn/eO/Lia: it comprises
the whole higher side of the animated body ; " princi-
pium vitae dicimus esse animam." In logic he keeps
close to Aristotle ; to the scepticism which would sug
gest that the forms of thought with which reason does
her work themselves are illusory, he replies that they
may be tested by experiment and evidence, and that
in taking this evidence reason satisfies herself of their
trustworthiness. In physics he is of very inferior
authority to Albert, his master: he is, of course,
governed by the crude suppositions and imperfect
knowledge of his day: he quotes Aristotle as an
ultimate authority, but when dealing with abstract
problems, such as the contributions of form and
matter respectively to the production of the individual,
he touches regions of thought with which recent dis
cussions have made us familiar, but in which it is
not easy even now to go beyond him. His ethics arc
perhaps the field in which we see him at his best ; his
resolute belief, on the one hand, that all true virtue
can be justified as virtue at the bar of reason, and, on
the other, that God, conceived of as the Absolute Good,
is the only adequate Goal of moral desire, invest this
district of his work with a form and an unity which
make it particularly attractive. In pure theology wo
see his temper in his rejection of the a priori argu
ment for God's existence which found favour with
St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, to the effect that to

142 Dante and Aquinas.

conceive of God is to conceive of Absolute Perfection,
but that God would be imperfect if He did not exist.
And he is at home in the old Peripatetic argument
which would demonstrate God's existence from the
necessity of a First Cause or Mover.

In all of these regions of mental work the influence
of Aquinas may, with more or less distinctness, be
traced in the Commedia, but to attempt this in
detail on the present occasion would be to trespass
on an indulgence which has been already too heavily
taxed. It must suffice to conclude by a single
example.

In the first circle of the Inferno, among those
who have lived virtuously, and have not to suffer for
great sins, but who, not being baptized, are shut out
from Paradise, are Avicenna, and

" Averrois, che il gran comento feo." l

Of these, Avicenna, Ibn-Sina, the greatest of Arabic
physicians, had been the real teacher of Albert, Thomas's
master, while Thomas himself had learned to com
ment upon Aristotle from the method of Averroes,
Ibn-Roschid. It is not impossible that Dante's judg
ment of these eminent men was associated with the
consciousness of intellectual indebtedness to them
which must have been felt by the leading Dominicans :
certainly it was much more lenient than that which

i Inf. iv. 144.

Dante and Aquinas. 1 43

was common in Christendom of that day. M. Renan
indeed seems to complain of Aquinas for regarding
Averroes with literary admiration, yet also with ortho
dox distrust.1 But the two views were equally natural,
perhaps equally inevitable. Christendom regarded
with dread the mass of negative and pantheistic spe
culation which had accumulated round the works of
Aristotle as they passed through the schools of
Morocco and Southern Spain ; and Aquinas selected,
as peculiarly dangerous, the theory of Averroes, of a
universal intellect, which was probably (though of this
I cannot speak) not peculiar to him among the Arab
teachers, and which seems to have had great attrac
tions for certain minds in Christendom. Thomas felt
that man's personality, and with it his moral respon
sibility, was at stake, and he recurs to the subject
again and again, not merely in his book De Unitate
InteUectus adversus Averroistas, but in his commen
taries on Aristotle and in his two Summas. Thomas
too was jealous for the honour of Aristotle. According
to Thomas, Averroes was " non tarn peripateticus quain
peripatetic® philosophise depravator." Of this convic
tion of Aquinas, and of the controversy it occasioned,
a controversy which was only closed centuries later
by a Bull of Leo x., there are not wanting traces
in the Commedia.
In the seventh cornice of Purgatory Statius is

1 Avcrrots et Faverrolsmc, p. 236.

144 Dante and Aquinas.

thought to refer to Averroes, when he tells Dante that,
in the development of unborn life,

"etalpunto

Che piu savio di te fe gia errante ;
SI che, per sua dottrina, fe disgiunto
Dall' anima il possibile intelletto
Perch& da lui non vide organo assunto." l

Averroes held that this universal intellect was within
the reach of all men ; that it was to be attained by
study, speculation, renunciation of the lower desires of
the soul ; that, in this sense, it was " possibile," that
it alone was imperishable, and that the ideas which
emanated from it only did not die. Here Dante seems
to be reflecting the feeling of Aquinas about Averroes,
as again he represents the faith of Aquinas in man's
indestructible personality when describing the soul's
departure from the body :

" E quando Lachesis non ha piu lino,
Solvesi dalla carne, ed in virtute
Ne porta seco e 1' umano e il diviuo.
L' altre potenze tutte quante mute,
Memoria, intelligenza, e volontade,
In atto molto piu che prima acute." *

The articles in the Summa, Part i. Questions 75-90,
form, in their way, a complete treatise on psychology,
and any one who would compare with them the well-
known passages in the Purgatory, ii. 85, describing
the meeting with Casella; xvi. 85 sqq. ; xxv. josqq.;

1 Purg. xxv. 62-66. 2 Purg. xxv. 79-84.

Dante and A qu inas. \ 4 5

Par. vil 140 sqq., will see how varied is the corre
spondence, with here and there a significant difference.
It is scarcely possible to pass into pure theology
without feeling Aquinas in almost every line. But, if
this is to be traced at all, it must be on a distinct
occasion: and to-day we take leave of him on the
threshold, if indeed it may be called the threshold, of
his work.

DANTE AND AQUINAS.1

PART II.

IN a former section of this paper it was pointed out
that Dante was, broadly speaking, a reflection, at
once literary and popular, of much of the mind of
St. Thomas Aquinas, as in turn Aquinas was a typical
embodiment of the theological and speculative activity
of the young Order of St. Dominic. This relation
between Dante and St. Thomas was a natural product
of the circumstances of his day. Dante's intellectual
manhood coincided with the period during which the
authority and methods of Aquinas were making then-
way to supremacy in the mind of the Western Church
at each of its chief centres of influence, and particularly
at Paris ; but Dante was beforehand with the Church
at large in the position which he assigns to Aquinas
in the Paradiso. Some years were yet to elapse before
the formal honours of canonisation were to be bestowed
on the great teacher; but Dante, with an original
audacity, to which it is difficult for us to-day to do en
tire justice, virtually anticipates the judgment of the
Papal Chan*, when he places Aquinas hi the wreath of

i This Paper was read before the Oxford Dante Society, November 19,
1883.

146

Dante and Aquinas. \ 47

twelve blessed spirits, in the fourth circle of his
Paradiso, making him the foremost, if not the highest,
interpreter of its glories.

Indeed, how high Dante places the authority of
Aquinas appears incidentally from the explanations
furnished by Beatrice in the ninth heaven, where the
poet beholds the nine choirs of angels.

On the question whether the angels were created
simultaneously with the rest of the universe, or at a
much earlier epoch, there were two opinions current
in the ancient Church.

The belief in their earlier creation was prominently
upheld by the authority of St. Gregory Nazianzen and
of St. Jerome. In his commentary on Titus, Jerome
observes that as yet our world has not lasted for six
thousand years; "but," he exclaims, "how many
previous eternities, spaces of time, beginnings of ages,
must we not think of, during which Angels, Thrones,
Powers, and Virtues have been serving God, and, with
out vicissitude or measure of time, have, by God's
bidding, stood steadfast."

On such a subject the most learned Biblical scholar
among the Latin Fathers would, until then, have been
generally considered a sufficient authority as to the
mind of Scripture ; but Dante makes Beatrice reject
the opinion, on the ground that it is at variance with

148 Dante and Aquinas.

the import of such passages as Genesis i. i and Ecclus.
xviii. i :

" Jeronimo vi scrisse lungo tratto
Di secoli, degli Angeli, creati
Anzi che 1* altro mondo fosse fatto ;
Ma questo vero e scritto in molti lati
Dagli scrittor dello Spirito Santo ;
E tu ten' avvedrai, se bene agguati." l

Nay, reason, Beatrice argues, supports the inference
which she draws from Scripture :

" Ed anche la ragione il vede alquanto,
Chfc non concederebbe che i motori
Senza sua perfezion fosser cotanto."2

The angels were created in order to administer the
material universe; and it was antecedently unlikely
that they would be brought into existence many ages
before that universe was made.

Here Dante is thinking of the discussion hi the
Summa, Pars prima, Qusest. Ixi. art. iii. Aquinas
recognises the double opinion in antiquity; he will
not allow that a doctrine supported by the high
authority of Gregory Nazianzen can be safely con
sidered erroneous ; the caution of the theologian is in
contrast with the brisk impetuosity of the poet. But
of the two opinions, he says, " ilia probabilior videtur,
quod angeli siinul cum creatura corporea sunt creati."
He argues that the angels are part of the universe ;
that they do not constitute an universe by themselves;

1 Par. xxix. 37-43. a Ib. 43-45.

Dante and Aquinas. 149

that apart from the rest of the universe, they could
not attain perfection. " Quod apparet ex ordine unius
creaturae ad aliam. Ordo enim rerum ad invicern est
bonum universi. Nulla autem pars perfecta est a suo
toto separata," Here we have the very expression of
Dante, who thus relies, in fact, not only on texts of
Scripture, but also, and mainly, on the reasoning of
Aquinas, as warranting a conclusion against the au
thority of the most learned of the four Latin Fathers.
It would be difficult to suggest a more telling illus
tration of the place which Aquinas held in the theo
logical thoughts of Dante.

This deference for St. Thomas may be traced hi
another department — Dante's reverence for Aristotle.
With Dante, Aristotle is the master of those who
know: and, like St. Thomas, the poet constantly
adopts his opinions with entire deference. Thus in
Virgil's discourse respecting love as the motive prin
ciple of action, free-will, and the source of morality,1
we feel Aristotle's treatise De Animd; and again,
Aristotle himself, and not even Aristotle as presented
by Aquinas. But it was mainly Aquinas's doing that
Dante deferred to Aristotle at all So late as 1209
the students of Paris were forbidden to read Aristotle.
The rapid and entire change in the position assigned
to Aristotle in the schools of Christendom before the
end of the thirteenth century was largely due to the

» Pury. xviii. 1-76.

1 50 Dante and Aquinas.

influence of three Popes — Gregory ix., Innocent iv.,
and Urban iv. Of these, Gregory enlisted the services
of Albert of Cologne; Urban those of St. Thomas.
The question was, how to distinguish the true Aris
totle from the counterfeit, real or presumed, which
had been presented by the Arabian commentators.
To do this, Albert and Thomas devoted the best years
of their lives. In the Summa, Aristotle is an
authority only inferior to the Bible. Not only his
Ethics, with their great generalisations respecting
human nature, which will always be true, but his
Physics, embodying the crudest guesses of an un
scientific age, are quoted as final authorities. When
Aristotle thus reigned in the Summa, it was natural
that he should reign in the Commedia. If the poet
could make any use of him — and there were plenty
of opportunities for doing so — he was now shielded
against suspicions which a century earlier would
assuredly have beset him, by the example of the
authoritative and cautious theologian.

Aquinas makes himself felt — probably, and as
would be natural — more in the Convito of Dante than
in the Commedia. But confining ourselves, as narrow
limits require, to the Commedia, let us observe that
its plan or structure is apparently less affected by
Aquinas than by St. Bonaventure. Practical life
shapes the plan of the poem in detail more than
theological form, — as, notoriously, in the arrangement

Dante and Aquinas. 1 5 1

of sins in the Inferno ; and St. Bonaventure, mystic
as he was, was before all things practical

Dante's love of Plato, and of the idealist and
mystical elements of his thought, would have power
fully drawn him to St. Bonaventure — the Plato of the
thirteenth century, as was St. Thomas its Aristotle.
Thus the order of the deadly sins followed in the
Pwrgatory 1 is that given by Aquinas,2 with the excep
tion that hi Aquinas avarice precedes sloth, accidia,
or, as he calls it, tristitia ; while in Dante sloth precedes
avarice. But Dante's order is exactly that of St.
Bonaventure,3 who explains the growth and develop
ment of deadly sin somewhat differently from St
Thomas, while both of them differ from the order of
St. Gregory the Great in the well-known passage of the
Magna Moralia* which is quoted by St. Thomas,6
and which has shaped the discussion of this district
of moral theology in the Western Church, — except
that the place of gluttony has generally been shifted
from fifth to third, as more nearly corresponding to
the average development of sin in human lives.

M. Ozanam observes that the idea of the Paradiso,
in which the poet journeys through the spheres of
heaven, each of which may bo more or less distinctly
associated with some form of excellence, until ho
reaches the Feet of the Most High, is probably sug-

1 Cunt, xiii.-xxvl * ia. ase, qu. 84, art. 4.

» Bremloquium, Pt ill c. 9, ed. Freiburg, 1881, p. 335.
17. • Ut fup.

152 Da nte and A qit inas.

gested by St. Bonaventure's beautiful Itinerarium
Mentis in Deum. Indeed, the influence of Bonaven-
ture is largely traceable in many ethical and practical
elements of the poem. Dante's characters are often a
dramatic exhibition of the popular instructions in
Christian life and morals to which the first Fran
ciscans devoted themselves. Such a pathetic account
of the occasion of her sin as that of Francesca da
Rimini —

" Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto

Di Lancilotto, come amor lo strinse " — x

is probably the dramatisation of a practical warning
which Dante associated with the memories of some
sermon at Santa Croce in Florence, or at the humbler
establishment of the Order in the centre of the city.

The influence of St. Thomas is less ethical than
philosophical and speculative, and it is less to be
traced in propositions distinctly characteristic of their
author than in the general logical and theological
apparatus of Dante's mind. Thomas is constantly
endeavouring to trace order and relation between the
abstract and the concrete, between the known and
the hypothetical, between causes and imperfectly
discerned effects. This characteristic of his intellect
is felt by Dante : " Dice Tommaso conoscer 1' ordine
di una cosa a un altra e proprio atto di ragione."2
Hence in the Paradiso Beatrice proclaims —

1 Inf. v. 127, 128. a Convito, iv. cap. 8.

Dante and Aquinas. 153

" Le cose tutte quante
Hann* ordine tra loro : e questo 6 forma
Che T uni verso a Dio fa simigliante."1

In the lower spheres of thought the desire to trace
this order is satisfied by the operations of natural
reason, by experience and demonstration: in the
higher by Revelation.2 The conversations which Dante
makes himself hold in each sphere of existence, as
with Virgil about the pains of hell,3 about the absence
of shadow, except in his own case, at the entrance of
Purgatory,4 and at the position of the sun on their
left,6 and about the way in which the dead are helped
by the prayers of the living,6 and respecting love in
its relation to human action ; 7 with Farinata respect-
big the range of knowledge in the lost ; 8 with Statius
respecting the mystery of birth in its relation to the
soul;9 with Beatrice respecting the Redemption;10
with Charles Martel of Hungary respecting the dif
ference between children and parents ; u with St
Thomas himself respecting varieties and imperfections
in nature,12 — not to cite others, — illustrate the pro
found intellectual sympathy of the poet with the
theologian. Dante is, like Thomas, a philosopher in
the sense that he must have a combining, governing,
harmonising theory for what he observes and thinks
piecemeal ; and the conversational form in which the

1 Par. i. 103-105. * Ib. ii. 61. * Ii\f. vi. sub fin. * Purg. Hi. 14 sqq.
• Purg. iv. 53 sqq. • Ib. vi. 1 1b. xvii., xviii. • Inf. x. 98 tqq.
9 Purg. xxr. » Par. vii. " Ib. viii. " Ib. xiiL

154 Dante and Aquinas.

sense of this mental necessity expresses itself belongs
to his art and craft as a poet, just as the questions and
articles of the Summa belong to that of the scholastic
theologian. The direct influence upon Dante of the
mind of St. Thomas may be traced in each of the
three spheres into which, speaking roughly and popu
larly, his great work as a theologian divides itself.

I. At the beginning of the Summa Thomas deals
largely with those ultimate and abstract ideas which
are part of the original furniture of the human mind,
and which, upon analysis, are seen to lead up to God
and His essential attributes. With St. Thomas the
science of Being is the science of God. Unity, the law
which underlies all existence; goodness, the true
object of all that lives and wills, and the privation of
which is evil ; truth, the object and satisfaction of all
spiritual existences, — these are sure to centre at last in
Him Whose essential attributes they are —

" Fecemi la divina potestate,
La somma sapienza e il primo amore." J

So frequent are the correspondences between these
early chapters of the Summa and the strictly theo
logical passages in the Divina Commedia that it is
difficult not to believe that the poet must have
studied them closely, or even learned them by heart.
When Dante is questioned by St. Peter as to his faith,
his answer is a condensation of Summ. Theol. Pt. L
qu. ii. art. 3 (utrum Deus sit) —

1 Inf. iii. 5, 6.

Dante and Aquinas. 1 55

" Io credo in uno Iddio
Solo ed eterno, che tutto il ciel move,
Non moto, con amore e con disio ;
Iv 1 ,-i t ;il creder non ho io pur prove
Fisice e metafisice, ma dalmi
Anco la verita che quinci piove
Per Moise, per profeti, e per salmi,
Per F Evangelic. " l

So Adam's saying to Dante that God

" fa di se pareglio all' altre cose,"3

boldly condenses Summ. Theol. L qu. 16, art. 5,"Deus
cum sit suum esse et intelligere, et mensura omnis
4M6 et intellcctus, in ipso non solum est veritas, sed
ipse summa et prima veritas est." God is said to make
Himself a representative of His creatures when He
makes His creatures in the image of Himself. (But
see the elaborate note of Blanc on this difficult pas
sage, 8.v. Pareglio).

So when St. Thomas, explaining the simplicity of
the Divine Essence, says that God " in uno actu vult
omnia in sua bonitate," s he is apparently echoed by
the eagle in Paradise —

" La prima volonta, ch' e per se buona,
Da se, che e sonimo ben, inai non si mosse."4

So the motives for creation, as stated in Par. xxix. 1 3,
recall Summ. Theol. L 19. 3, contr. Gentiles ii. 26.

And the profound thought of Aquinas, Summ.
Theol. i. qu. 34, art. 3, " Quia Deus uno actu et so et

1 Par. xxiv. 130-137. * /&. xxvi. 107.

• Summ. Theol. i. qu. 19, art. 5. * Par. xix. 86, 87.

156 Dante and Aquinas.

omnia intelligit, unicum verbum ejus est expressivum
non solum Patris sed etiam creaturarum," l reappears
in the beautiful lines —

" Ci6 che non more, e ci6 che pu6 morire,
Non e se non splendor di quella idea
Che partorisce, amando, il nostro Sire. " a

The verses which connect creation with an activity
arising out of the distinctive inter-relations of the
Persons of the Holy Trinity hi Par. x. i seem to be
based on Summ. Theol. i. qu. 45, art. 6. 2. Indeed, in
the region of pure theology Dante keeps close to St.
Thomas. Thomas, no doubt, on such a subject, has no
beliefs, scarcely any judgments — that are exclusively
his own ; he does but exhibit and arrange in his own
way the truths which in their entirety composed the
central object of the faith of the Church. But he has
his own way of approaching and exhibiting them, and
here Dante seems to cling to him with particular care:
he might perhaps feel more at liberty if he were more
at a distance from the heart of the creed of Christen
dom. When, as they are ascending towards the first
heaven, Beatrice answers Dante's second doubt as to
how they could rise above the light bodies around
them, her answer might have been given substan
tially (is it audacious to say so ?) hi other ways, but
the opportunity is seized to echo St. Thomas's way
of representing all life and nature tending, whether

1 Cf. Summ. Theol. i. qu. 15, art. a. 2 Par. xiii. 52-54.

Dante and Aquinas. 157

consciously or unconsciously, towards God, as the
Last End no less than the Source of its being —

" Nell' ordine ch' io dico sono accline
Tutte nature, per diverse aorti,
Piu al principle loro, e men vicine," *

which is a condensation of St. Thomas's statement
that "aliquid sua actione vel motu tendit ad finem
dupliciter : uno modo sicut seipsum ad finem movens,
sicut homo : alio modo, sicut ab alio motum ad finem
sicut sagitta. . . . Ilia ergo quae rationem habent
seipsa movent ad finem. . . . Ilia quae carent ratione,
tendunt in finem propter naturalem inclinationem,
quasi ab alio mota." 2

2. After the science of Absolute Being, which is that
of God, comes that of created existences detached
from matter, whether the disembodied souls of men,
or the a<T(t>iLaTa proper, the bodiless ones, as St. Chry-
sostom calls them, in their unfallen state as angels, or
in their misery and ruin as devils. This vast sphere
of being is traversed by St. Thomas with great par
ticularity ; he follows these unseen existences into the
various departments of their life and activity; he
investigates their duties, capacities, relations with each
other and with living men. And in all this he gives
no deliberate play to imagination, though the subject
might well be tempting : he pursues his course with
a cold, dry, severe adherence to premises which he

1 Par. i. 109-111. « Stunm. TheoL ii. qu. i, art. a.

158 Dante and Aquinas.

holds to be axiomatic, or at least authoritative, until a
vast world is spread out before the eyes of his readers.
Others there were in the Schools, no doubt, who ven
tured on these high themes ;

" perche in terra per le vostre scuole

fi. legge che 1'angelica natura
tal, che intende, e si ricorda, e vuole ;
Ancor dir6, perch e tu veggi pura
La veriti che laggiti. si confonde,
Equivocando in si fatta lettura." J

But in such lines as these Dante would not permit
himself to think of the teacher who is already
throned in Paradise among the wisest and the holiest.
No doubt Aquinas's discussions must sometimes seem
to us to pass beyond the limits of the ascertainable ;
and some who have since expounded him, like Suarez,
have extended his speculations not always, from any
point of view, with advantage ; and much which in
him was fresh and original and reverent, lost its charm
even in a few years when it had been bandied to and
fro in the Schools by men who only saw in it material
for exhibiting logical dexterity. But when all deduc
tions have been made, this part of the Summa remains
the great repertoriurn of systematised religious thought
on this subject among Western writers, and its remote
influence is traceable where we might least expect it,
and where scholasticism is vehemently denounced, —
as, e.g., even in the Institutes of Calvin.

1 Par. xxix. 70-75.

Dante and Aquinas. 1 59

Twice in his great work Aquinas is led to deal with
this subject. In his survey of creation, the angels,
their substance, their numbers, their distinctions, their
relation to the question of probation, their relations,
permanent and accidental, to the material world, their
relations to the category of space, the conditions and
limits of their intellectual life, their knowledge about
God, about the material world, about mankind, about
the Christian faith and means of grace, their degree
of liability to intellectual or moral error, their differ
ences in judgment and action arising from finiteness
of knowledge, their hideous transfiguration into devils,
are successively reviewed.1 And, at a later stage,
when he is considering, in its broadest aspects, the
influence of creatures over one another, he encounters
such questions as the power of one angel to affect the
intellect and will of another, their employment of any
thing corresponding to language in their intercourse,
the power of a third angel to follow what is passing
between two, the influence which is wielded as a con
sequence of the hierarchical distinctions between
angels revealed in Scripture, the nature and perman
ence of these distinctions, the corresponding question
of distinct orders and governing power among fallen
spirits, the power of good angels over material bodies,
the various influences which they exert on human
beings, on their wills, on their imaginations, on their

1 tfumm. Theol. i. Quattt. 5064.

160 Dante and Aquinas.

bodily senses; their ministries of grace and of justice;
their guardianship of souls, and the relationships thus
involved ; the nature, process, and reality of tempta
tion on the part of devils, their power of working lying
wonders, the limits of their influence on mankind,
and the like.1

Thus, we see, when Dante wrote there was a vast
body of authoritative language ready to his hand on
the subject which formed, if we may say so, the very
framework and staple of his poem. For from the
beginning of the Hell to the close of the Paradise he
is constantly dealing with these bodiless existences ;
and to be acquainted so far as was possible with what
might be said without presumption respecting their
life and movements was not less than essential to
him, if he was to write at all. He is at times so
fearless, so explicit, at times so reserved and vague ;
he is so altogether at ease and at home in this
world of mystery, because he has St. Thomas behind
him.

We have already seen that Dante keeps close to
Aquinas, and rejects the authority of St. Jerome and
the Greeks, in teaching that the angels were created
coincidently with the rest of the Universe.2 They
differ from men in that they consist of form without
matter ; but in their form and essence they are still
conceived of as distinct (as are capacity and act), and

i Summ. Theol. Pars i. Qusestt. 106-114. 2 Par. xxix. 37.

Dante and Aquinas. 161

herein they differ from God. So says St. Thomas,1
and Dante is thinking of him when Beatrice explains
that at their creation,

" Forma e materia congiunte e purette
Usciro ad esser che non avea fallo."2

Aquinas's striking a priori argument for the existence
of beings who should be more like their Creator than
any invested with material forms3 is glanced at in
Par. xxix. 16-19, and ms statement that it is reason
able that immaterial beings should exceed in multi
tude, beyond all comparison, beings clothed in matter,
shapes the lines —

" Questa natura si oltre s' ingrada

In numero, che mai non fu loquela,
Ne concetto mortal, che tanto vada.
E se tu guard! quel che si rivela
Per Daniel, vedrai che in sue migliaia
Determinate numero si cela."4

The intellectual life of the angels consists in an
uninterrupted sight of God. This sight includes
all else, near and remote, past, present, and future.
There is no division in thought, no succession of
thought, no room for memory—

" Queste sustan/ie, poiche fur gioconde
Delia faccia di Dio, non volser viso
Da essa, da cui nulla si nasconde :
Per6 non hanno vedere interciso
Da nuovo obbietto, e per6 non bisogna
Rimemorar per concetto diviso."0

And yet this knowledge of things in God varies in

•• • 9m\*\. Theol. L 50, art. a. a Par. xxix. 22, 23. » Pt i. 50, art. i.
4 Par. xxbc. 130-135 ; cf. Dan. vii. 10. 8 Par. xxix. 76-81.

L

1 62 Dante and Aquinas.

degree, according to the rank and capacity of the
angels ; l the angels do not know everything.2 Here
Dante has his eye throughout on the discussion in
Summ. Theol. i. qu. 57 and 58.

Dante's Lucifer necessarily suggests the familiar
comparison with Milton's ; and if he is artistically less
interesting, he is much more like the real Satan,
the Satan of Christian theology, whether Biblical or
Patristic ; though Milton, it will be remembered, para
phrases

" vidi tre facce alia sua testa ! "3
" his face,
Thrice changed with pale ire, envy, and despair."4

St. Thomas here as elsewhere steadies and chastens
the imagination of Dante ; often when the poet might
seem to be giving the utmost reins to fancy, he is in
reality following the divine. Take the vivid lines in
which the instantaneous character of the probation of
the angels is described : —

" Ne giugneriesi, numerando, al venti
Si tosto, come degli Angeli parte
Turb6 il suggetto dei vostri elementi."8
" Ere one had reckoned twenty, e'en so soon
Part of the angels fell ; and in their fall
Confusion to your elements ensued. "

But this is a result of St. Thomas's principle
that "est proprium naturae Angelicae quod natu-
ralem perfectionein non per discursum acquirat, sed
statim per naturam habeat."6 He allows of two

1 Par. i. 103 sqq. 2 76. xx. 70-72 ; xxi. 91-96. 3 Inf. xxxiv. 38.

4 Paradise Lost, iv. 144. 6 Par. xxix. 49-51. « Summ, Theol, i. 62. art. 5.

Dante and Aquinas. 163

instants (instantia), as implied in the distinctness of
probation from blessedness "secundum successionem in
actibus," as he says ; but that is all In one moment
Lucifer had in his pride chosen an end of action, " ad
quod naturae suae viribus potuit pcrvenire,"1 turning
away his desire from that supernatural blessedness
which comes of the grace of God, and thus —

" Principle del cader fu il maledetto
Superbir di colui, che tu vedesti
Da tutti i pesi del mondo costretto."8

Dante, like St. Thomas, knows of no dTroKardo-Taa-is
of the fallen angels, no possible lapse of the blessed.
Satan is

" quel nial volcr, che pur inal chiede,
Con 1' intelletto,"8

while the angels never turn their gaze from the Face
of God—

" non volser viso
Daewa,"4

since "Et voluntas bonorum angelorum confirmata
est in bono, et voluntas daemonum obstinata est in
malo." 5

While Beatrice is engaged in pointing out to Dante
the nine orders of angels, she pauses at the close of
the first three to decide the eager controversy as to
the formal cause of Blessedness. The Cherubim,
Seraphim, and Thrones all are blessed in that they
see deepest into the central and eternal Truth—

" in che »i queta ogn' intcllctto. " *

' Summ. Thfol I 63. art. 3, 5, 6. » Par. xxix. 55-57. • Pitrg. v. na.
« Par. xxix. 77. • Summ. Thcol. i. 64. art. a. • Par. xxviii 108.

164 Dante and Aquinas.

Hence may be seen

" come si fonda

L' esser beato nell' atto che vede,
Non in quel ch' ama, che poscia seconda.'' l

This is in deference to the somewhat strained reason
ing of St. Thomas, in a passage in which apparently the
schoolman gets the better of the mystic. "Blessed
ness," he says, " cannot consist in the action of the
will ; because the will is constantly directed towards
an absent object, and desire of such an object is clearly
not the attainment of an end but only a motion
towards an end. The will only experiences enjoy
ment when the end which it pursues is present to it ;
but an object does not become present because the
will takes pleasure in it. If then an end is to be pre
sent to the will, something else than the action of the
will must make it so; and an intellectual end does
become present to us by the action of the intellect
whereby the end itself thus becomes present to the
will. Thus the essence of blessedness consists at last
in an act of the intellect." This analysis is not easily
reconciled with the general experience that the essence
of happiness does reside in the free play or exercise of
affection upon a perfect object, or with the prominence
given to the Seraphim in the received angelology of
the Church ; but Dante is hi the hands of St. Thomas,
>and writes accordingly.2

1 Par. xxviii. 109-111. 2 Summ. Theol. Prima Secunda;, qu. 3, art. 4.

Dante and Aquinas. 165

3. Dante betrays the guiding influence of St.
Thomas very conspicuously when he touches upon
human nature (in the narrower sense of the term)
and on the human soul. Here again the Convito
supplies more illustrations than the Divina Corn-
media: but as regards the creation of each single
soul l (in opposition to the Traducianist hypothesis),
the function of apprehension —

•• ch' a ragion discorso ammanua,''2

the large experimental basis of our knowledge —
" Principium nostrae cognitionis est a sensu," 3 and, of
course, in such questions as the theology of the Fall,4
the two are in close accord. How closely Dante
keeps Aquinas in view in his allusions to the powers
of the human mind, — to memory,5 imagination,0
understanding,7 will,8 — is shown by Simonetti.9

But especially does Dante follow Aquinas in the
point of his psychology which Aquinas had, unques
tionably, most at heart. Like his great master
Albert, Aquinas viewed with alarm the progress which
was made by the Averroistic theory of the unity and

1 Pwrg. xxv. 65 tqq. ; Summ. Theol. i. 118. a.

• Purg. xxix. 49 ; Summ. Theol. i. 84. 5.
> fhimm. Theol. i. 84. 6 ; cf. Par. iv. 40.

4 Par. xxri. 114-117; Summ. Theol. aa aae, qu. 163, art. i.

• Par. L 4-12 ; Summ. Theol. i. qu. 78. 4.

• Pwrg. xvii. 13-16; cf. Summ. Theol. i. qu. in. 3.
7 Par. il 44 ; Summ. Theol. i. qu. 76.

• Par. ir. 109 ; Summ. Theol. i. qu. 63. i.

• Philotophia di Dante, pp. 164.192 (Naples, 1845).

166 Dante and Aquinas.

indivisibility, whether of the intellectus possibilis or
the intellectus agens in separation from the soul itself,
a theory which was, as he saw, irreconcilable with
the personal immortality of man. One sees how
carefully St. Thomas is on his guard against this
throughout the psychological parts of his work:1
"Omnes potentiae animae comparantur ad animam
solam sicut ad principium. Sed quaedam potentiae
comparantur ad animam solam sicut ad subjectum,
ut intellectus et voluntas: et hujusmodi potentiae
necesse est quod maneant in anima corpore destructo."
Here we see the meaning of Dante in Statius's
discourse, where the "piu savio di te errante"2 is
doubtless Averroes —

" che, per sua dottriua, fe disgiunto
Dall' anima il possibile intelletto,"3

even if it be true, as M. Kenan contends,4 that Aver
roes only meant the intellectus agens.

So the significant expression, " one single soul, which
lives and feels and revolves within itself,"

' ' un' alma sola
Che vive e sente, e s6 in s& rigira,"5

and the statement that when Lachesis has no more
thread, the soul looses itself from the flesh and bears
away with it both the human and the divine — what
belongs to natural character and to supernatural

i Summ. Theol. i. 79, art. 2 ; ib. i. 77, art. 8. 2 purg. xxv. 63.

3 Ib. 64, 65. * Averr. ii. 2. 8 Purg. xxv. 74, 75.

Dante and Aquinas. 167

grace — but also that while the other powers are
mute:

" Memoria, intelligenza, e volontade,
In atto molto piii che prima acute. " 1

Again, the passage at the opening of Purg. iv. 1-12
is in point, where he expressly notices "that error
which believes that one soul above another is en
kindled in us." When any one power of the soul
duly performs any of its functions, the soul cannot
be acted on by any other power ; it is for the time
being absorbed ; it heeds not the flight of time ; the
faculty, e.g., which listens is at large, that which keeps
the soul entire is bound. That two powers cannot
manifest themselves at once, as would be the case if
there were two souls, is expressly stated by Aquinas,
who considers the impossibility of two souls proved
"per hoc quod una operatic animae cum fuerit in-
tensa impedit aliam." 2

The guiding influence of St. Thomas is especially
observable hi Dante's references to the doctrine of
Grace. Thus he places Trajan and Ripheus —

"Ripheus justissimus unus
Qui fuit in Teucris et servantiasimus aeqai"*

— in the circle round the pupil of the Eagle in Para
dise. Trajan's case is, theologically speaking, more
disturbed by the tradition of the extraordinary power

1 Purg. xxv. 83, 84. * Summ. Theol. i. qu. 76, art 3.

> Virgil, A en. ii. 427.

1 68 Dante and Aquinas.

of the prayers of St. Gregory, but Kipheus is visited
by and corresponds with preventive grace, — which
led to his conversion to Christianity — centuries before
Christ had come —

" per grazia, che da si profonda
Fontana stilla, che mai creatura
Non pinse 1' occhio insino alia prim' onda,

Tutto BUG amor laggiti pose a drittura ;
Per che, di grazia in grazia, Dio gli aperse
L' occhio alia nostra redenzion futura :

Ond* ei credette in quella, e non sofferse
Da indi il puzzo piu del paganesmo,
E riprendeane le genti perverse."1

This is exactly Aquinas's teaching : " Deus facienti
quod est in se non denegat gratiam." Cornelius, he
says, is in point: he had implicit faith before the
Gospel truth was made clear to him.2 St. Augustine
means this when he speaks of " inchoationes fidei." 3
Aquinas indeed makes theological room for Dante's
account of Trajan's deliverance.4 The theory of con
gruous merit, extended to enable one man to win for
another the first grace in the order towards conversion,
is explained by a reference to Scripture language
respecting the friendship that exists between God and
souls in a state of grace : " Congruum est secundum
amicitiae proportionem, ut Deus impleat hominis
voluntatem in salvatione alterius."

We must omit to trace Thomas's influence in the
doctrines of the Atonement, of the Church, of the

» Par. xx. 118-126. 2 2a 2£B> qu. I0. art. 4.

3 Ad Simpl i. 2. § 2 (Ben. ed. vi. 89d). 4 ia 2Xi qu. II4> art. 6.

ERRATA.

Page 169, line 17, before " Lucy" add "who summoned.
Ibid, note 2, read "xxiii." for "xxii."
Ibid, note 3, add reference "Inf. n. 94 sqq."

Dante and Aquinas. \ 69

Sacraments, and of the Four Last Things, as referred
to by Dante.

II.

THE RESTRAINING INFLUENCE OF ST. THOMAS.

But there is one subject on which it may be said
without impropriety that poetry has done much to
mislead theology, in which we may trace not indis
tinctly the restraining influence of St. Thomas on the
mind of Dante. Speaking generally, both poet and
theologian are agreed in assigning a position of extra
ordinary glory to the Virgin Mother of our Lord.
The strongest thing that St. Thomas permits himself
to say is perhaps this. When treating of the Divine
Omnipotence, ho says that the Humanity of our
Lord and the Blessed Virgin "habent quandam
dignitatem infinitam ex bono infinite; quod est
Deus."1 In Dante she is the "donna del cielo,"-'
Lucy, who moved

" la tna Donna,
Quando chinavi a ruinar le ciglia. " 3

" Thy lady,
When on the edge of ruin closed thy eye."

And he makes St. Bernard say—

" Vergine madre, figlia del tuo Figlio,
Umile ed alta pifc che creatura,
Termine fisso d* eterno consiglio,
Tu sei colei che 1* umana natura
Nobilitaati il, che il suo Fattore
Xon dUdegn6 di farsi «ua fattura."4

t. Theol. i. qu. 25, art. 6. a /'or- xxii. 106.

3 Par. xxxii. 137. * /*• "»UL «•*•

170 Dante and Aquinas.

And Buonconte of Montefeltro, who fought on the
Ghibelline side, and was slain at Campaldino, tells
Dante how he repented in the act of dying —

" Quivi perdei la vista, e la parola
Nel nome di Maria finii,"1

while the demon complained to his guardian angel
that he had been robbed of a soul "per una lagri-
metta." In Purgatory again, they who had delayed
repentance sing the pathetic and mournful Salve
Regina on the green and on the flowers,2 while in the
ninth heaven, around Mary, the " coronata fiamma "
of the blessed chants, the Paschal antiphon —

" Regina caeli cantando si dolce,

Che mai da me non si parti il diletto."8

It is in this twenty-third canto of the Paradise
that the poet surrenders himself to an ecstasy of
refined enthusiasm at the feet of the Virgin Mother —

" Quivi e la rosa in che il Verbo Divino
Carne si fece."4

She bears —

1 ' II nome del bel fior, ch' io sempre invoco
E mane e sera,"8

and in the highest sphere —

" tutti gli altri lumi
Facean sonar lo nome di MARIA. " «

For, as St. John explains, she alone, like her Divine
Son, had carried her body into heaven

" Con le due stole nel beato chiostro
Son le due luci sole che saliro. " 7

i Purg. v. loo, 101. a /j. yii. 82. s par. xxiii. I28> I29
4 Par- "i"- 73, 74- B lb. 88, 89. 6 /ft. IIO( IIIt 7 /j. xxv. I2?> 128>

Dante and Aquinas. \ 7 1

And when Beatrice has returned to her throne, St
Bernard points to —

and to

" la Regina del cielo, ond* i' ardo
Tutto d' amor," 1

" il glorioso scanno
Delia Donna del cielo, " *

high between the saints of the Old and New Testa
ment, and he tells Dante that if he would indeed
penetrate what remains of the Vision of Heaven he
must unite with him in the supplication to ^fa^y —

" Regina, che puoi
Ci6che tu vuoli, che conservi sani,
Dopo tanto veder, gli affetti suoi,"3

and then the poet pierces to the inmost shrine, and
enjoys at least a glimpse of the Highest Existence.

Such is the position assigned to Mary : partly the
severe and inevitable result of serious belief in such a
doctrine as the Divine Incarnation, but partly also
the exaggeration and surplusage of popular fancy and
poetic ecstasy. This idea of Mary, arising in part out
of her relation to the economy of the Divine Redemp
tion, is supplemented in Dante by a special sense of
her personal and ethical beauty. It is from Mary
that the souls in Purgatory gain an example of each
of the virtues which are opposed to each of the deadly
sins. They who are expiating pride behold Mary at

i Par. xxxi. 100, 101. * 76. zjcziL 28. 29. » 75. zzziii 34 36.

1 72 Dante and Aquinas.

the Annunciation humbly accepting the Divine pur
pose —

" quella,

Che ad aprir 1' alto amor volse la chiave.
Ed avea in atto impressa esta favella,
EcceAncillaDei."1

Among- the voices of the unseen spirits which fall
upon the ear of the envious, the first recalls Mary's
care for others at the feast of Cana —

" La prima voce che pass6 volando,

Vinum non habent, altamente disse."2

The angry are confronted in vision with the scene
in the temple, after the disappearance of the Child
Jesus among the doctors, where

"in un tempio pin persone :
Ed una donna in sull' entrar con atto

Dolce di madre, dicer : Figliuol mio,

Perche hai tu cosl verso noi fatto ?
Ecco, dolenti, lo tuo padre ed io

Ti cercavamo. E come qui si tacque,

Gi6, che pareva prima, dispario." 3

And when, in the fourth circle, the mighty crowd
of the slothful overtake Dante —

" due dinanzi gridavan piangendo :
Maria corse con fretta alia montagna," 4

—referring to the Visitation.

And before Hugh Capet describes the miseries
which avarice had brought upon the royal house of

1 Pur9' *• 41-44- 2 Ib. xiii. 28, 29.

» lb. xv. 87-93. 4 rb. xviii. 09, ioo.

Dante and Aquinas. \ 73

France, he calls to mind the poverty which surrounded
the cradle of Him Who, when He was rich, for our
sakes became poor, that we, through His poverty,
might be rich —

" Dolce Maria :

Povera fosti tanto,

Quanto veder si pu6 per quell* ospizio,
Ove sponesti il tuo portato santo." '

Again, in the sixth circle, a voice from within the
leaves of the mysterious tree reminds the gluttonous,
as the unseen angel had reminded the envious, of
Mary at the feast of Cana, but now with another moral
object—

" Poi disse : Piii pensava Maria, onde
Fosser le nozze orrevoli ed intere,
Ch'allaBuabocca."'

Once more, as the spirits who are being cleansed
from sins of impurity sing the matin hymn, Summe
Deus Clementine in " the bosom of the great heart,"
they recall Mary's example at the Annunciation ere
they begin it again—

" Appresso il fine ch' a quell' inno fassi,
Gridavano alto : Kirum non coynotto ;
Indi ricominciavan 1' inno bawl." 3

This is no accident when Mary thus appears as
representing at each of these critical points of human
activity practical virtue in its ideal completeness us
confronted with the seven typical forms of sin. This
ethical glory of Mary runs parallel with that which

» Pvrg. xx. 19-35. « Ib. xiii. 142-144. ' /&• «*

1 74 Dante and Aquinas.

arises from her unique share in the Divine Incarna
tion : and the two currents of thought meet and inter
mingle in the Paradiso. In the Paradiso it might
seem again and again as if the poet must perforce
yield to the impulse and ecstasy which rules him, and
place the Virgin Mother altogether beyond the sphere
of sin by proclaiming her immaculate in her concep
tion. There are two or three points at which it might
have seemed natural, almost inevitable, had it been
possible, for him to give expression to this idea ; but
it is only of Mary's Son that Dante sings —

*' I'uom che nacque e visse senza pecca. " x

What was the restraining influence? A century
and a half had passed since the establishment of the
festival of the Conception by the Canons of Lyons and
the famous protest of St. Bernard. St. Bonaventure,
while shrinking from the full operation of the doctrine,
goes very near asserting it.2 Before Dante died, Duns
Scotus, a young student from Northumberland, had,
within the newly-built walls of Merton, shaped the
speculations which undoubtedly gave a most powerful
impulse to the dogma throughout the West. The
restraining influence was beyond question that of St.
Thomas : and that St. Thomas should have hesitated
as he did is remarkable, because his principle that a
solemnity sanctioned by the Church — and this was

» li\f. xsxiv. 115. 2 Comm. in Lib. Hi. Sent.

Dante and Aquinas. 175

already the case with the festival of the Conception-
implies the sanctity of its object, must have inclined
him in an opposite direction. He is governed, how
ever, by two considerations, one of which he gets from
Scripture and one from St. Augustine. According to
Augustine the ordinary laws of human birth involve
conception in a transmitted original sin. According
to Scripture, God the Son is the Saviour of all men,1
and therefore, argues Thomas, of Mary, and therefore
there was something in Mary from which she needed
to be saved. The attitude of St. Thomas on this
question obliged and enabled his Order for six hundred
years to resist, first Franciscans, then Jesuits,— a
religious world perpetually in arms around them : —
their resistance has only ceased in our own day. And
not the least of the first results of that attitude was
this, that in the Divina Commedia Mary is everything
else, — but she is not conceived immaculate.

On the other hand, in the sphere of politics, more
perhaps than elsewhere, the poet is independent of the
divine. Aquinas, who looked at politics in the light
of abstract truth, even to a great extent in his De re-
gimine principum, was practically what would have
been called now-a-days a liberal. He held that the
will of the people was, at any rate, one channel through
which the Divine Will respecting governmentexpreffled
itself, and after considering the Scriptural passages

i i Tim. iv. 10.

1 76 Dante and Aquinas.

which were used so largely by our Caroline divines for
a doctrine of absolute non-resistance, he concludes
that " principibus saecularibus in tantum homo obedire
tenetur, in quantum ordo justitiae requirit. Et ideo
si non habeant jus turn principatum sed usurpatum,
vel si injusta praecipiant, non tenentur eis subditi
obedire: nisi forte per accidens, propter vitandum
scandalum vel periculuin." l Kindred doctrines were
no doubt carried forward to sanction terrible conse
quences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
by the Jesuit theologians. But we cannot imagine
Aquinas placing Brutus, the slayer of Caesar, in the
jaws of Lucifer, in the lowest depth of hell. Aquinas
would have approached the question as a theologian ;
he would have held probably that the act of Brutus
made it impossible to entertain the hope that there
was in his case such correspondence with prevenient
i^race as he would have allowed in some Pagans.
But if hell, like heaven, has many mansions, the
man of general lofty integrity, who was also the
emancipator of Rome, even though the emancipation
was attempted by a deadly crime, would not have
been placed in the lowest and the last. In Dante the
passions of Ghibelline politics invest the murder of
Caesar with the darkest forms of inhuman atrocity,
and Landino in vain endeavours to save the judg-

« Summ. Theol. 2a 2ce, qu. 104, art. 6. Utrum Christiani tenentur saecu
laribus pottttatibus obedire.

Dante and Aquinas. 177

ment of the great poet at the expense of the obvious
meaning of the text.

These are but fragments of a vast subject, upon
which a few dashing generalisations, perhaps less
accurate than bold, would have been more welcome.
But the truth is that a really faithful treatment of
such a theme would rather lie in a close study of the
texts of Dante and St. Thomas respectively within
some very narrow and clearly marked out depart
ment, whether of philosophy or theology. I have only
recognised this when it was too late to act upon it.
As it is, perhaps enough has been said to show that,
if it is inaccurate to call Aquinas the most poetical of
theologians, since though he could write good hymns,
his theological methods were severely prosaic, it is
true, however, that Dante, besides being much else,
is, upon the whole, the most theological of Christian
poets.

DANTE AND THE FEANCISCANS.1

TN two former papers I made an attempt to trace,
•*- within narrow limits, and only in a fragmentary
manner within those limits, the relation of Dante's
mind, as we know it in the Divina Commedia, to the
thought, but more particularly to the theological
thought, of St. Thomas Aquinas. It is not, perhaps,
too much to say that Dante holds St. Thomas,
beyond any other religious teacher, as his master;
and that hi this we have, if it were needed, a new
proof of his own insight and genius, as anticipating
in a remarkable degree the slowly-reached but de
liberate verdict of a later day. For although Aquinas
enjoyed immense authority among his contemporaries,
yet it was disputed, and in Dante's own lifetime, by
some very considerable writers, such as Harry of
Ghent, a monk of Aquinas's own order, whose reputa
tion as a teacher in Paris earned for him the title of
Doctor Solemnis, and who died in 1 293, at the age of
seventy-six, as Archdeacon of Tournay. Even before
his death St. Thomas was accused not only of bad
philosophy but of bad theology. As we know from

1 This Paper was read before the Oxford Dante Society on May 19,
173

^Dante and the Franciscans. 179

the only treatise of his in which his habitual im-
passiveness is laid aside for the finer irony of an
unwilling controversialist,1 he was accused of denying
the doctrine of the Creation, because he insisted that
it did not admit of scientific demonstration. His
reply silenced his opponents; but he was no sooner
laid in his grave in 1274, than his critics resumed
their attacks. Dante can scarcely have failed to
know that in 1276, within two years of the death of
St Thomas, a Board of Doctors of Divinity in the
University of Paris, presided over by Stephen Teiii-
pier, who was from 1 268 to 1 279 bishop of the diocese,
solemnly condemned as heretical three propositions
extracted from St. Thomas, and excommunicated any
who should maintain them. It ought in justice
to be remembered that this sentence was not only
approved by the theological faculty of the University
of Oxford,— then, it would seem, as in later days,
somewhat given to follow the lead of rival seats of
learning, — but the Oxford doctors, guided by the then
Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Kilwarby,2 himself,
strange to say, a Dominican, succeeded in saving their
own character for originality in this department of
research by extracting and condemning a fourth
heretical proposition from the writings of St Thomas.

lOptiBcnlum de JSternitate mundi contra murniuratores.

« Robert Ktlwarby, Primate from 1273 to 1279, when be resigned the
See on being made Cardinal of Oporto, and WM succovded by '
-Collier, Ecd. Hi*, ii. 546.

1 80 Dante and the Franciscans.

Whether Dante knew of these controversial enter
prises or not, he was entirely unaffected by them.
He certainly detected in the mind of the greatest
teacher of the thirteenth century those elements
which command the attentive respect of men when
the changes of thought and feeling which come with
time have had their full range of influence. When the
Council of Trent met in the Church of Santa Maria
Maggiore in that city, the Summa of Aquinas was
placed side by side with the Bible in the midst of the
assembled bishops, and on the other hand he, and
with one exception he alone among the schoolmen, has
outlived the influence of the Keformation on its own
ground. To take two of our own divines : Hooker is
under great, though it must be added too often unac
knowledged, obligations to him ; Sanderson owes hhr
scarcely less a debt, which he is not afraid to acknow
ledge. And when the conventional contempt for
scholasticism — a literary fashion which was in the
main the product of ignorance endeavouring to make
itself respectable by taking shelter partly under the
true but misapplied doctrines of the Novum Organum,
partly under the forms of the philosophy of Locke —
when this had spent itself, and men had begun to
suspect that they had been turning their backs on
one of the most interesting chapters in the history of
the human mind, Aquinas emerges from the clouds
as still the teacher who beyond all others attracts and

Dante and tJie Franciscans. \ 8 1

repays the modern student who would learn what the
extraordinary mental activity of the thirteenth century,
exercised as it was on very imperfect materials, has
still to teach him. And the triumphs of Aquinas,
ancient and modern, are the triumphs of Dante.

But it is impossible to forget that side by side with
Aquinas and the Order of St. Dominic — of whoso learn
ing and method Aquinas was the highest expression
— there was another rival Order, with teachers and a
temper of its own, which could not but arrest the
attention, if it did not equally control the mind, of
the poet. What was the mental attitude of Dante
towards the Order of St. Francis and those of the
earlier teachers of whom he knew or might have
known something ?

Here it must be remembered that Dante reflects
an unquestioned belief of religious people in his day,
that the establishment of the Dominican and Fran
ciscan Orders was a signal illustration of Christ's
providential care of His Church. It was

«' La provvidcnza, che goveroa il mondo

Con quel consiglio ncl quale ogni Mpetto
Create fc vinto pria cho vada al fondo." '

It was this Providence which ordained two princes
(Dominic and Francis) for the Church's benefit, to be

i Par. xi. 28-30.

1 82 Dante and the Franciscans.

on this and that side of the Church's path a guide
to her —

" Due Principi ordin6 in suo favore,
Che quinci e quindi le fosser per guida. " l

This view, which is placed by Dante in the mouth
of St. Thomas, is echoed with greater detail by St.
Bonaventure. The Christian army, he says, was
moving slowly after its standards ; it was sadly need
ing confidence and discipline —

" dietro all' insegna
Si movea tardo, sospeccioso e raro " 2

— doubtful about the faith and reduced in numbers.
Then it was that the heavenly Emperor provided two
champions, who by word and action would rally the
wandering host —

" lo imperador che sempre regna,
Provvide alia milizia, ch' era in forse. " 3

He raised up

" due campioni, al cui fare, al cui dire
Lo popol disviato si raccorse."4

There was no question with Dante that each founder
was conspicuous in sanctity, or that each Order was
necessary to the Church—

" com' elli ad una militaro,-
Cos! la gloria loro insieme luca. "8

And yet there was a broad distinction between the
two Orders, observable in their respective founders,

» Par. xi. 35, 36. *Ib. xii. 38, 39. s /j. 4Oj 4X.

« Ib. 44, 45. o Ib. 35, 36.

Dante and the Franciscans. 183

and in the main adhering to them. Francis was a
man of practice, Dominic a man of speech —

" Al cui fare, al cui dire."

Francis would restore the life of the Church ; Dominic
its faith. Francis had his eye chiefly on the bad lives
of average Christians ; Dominic was anxious about the
influence of the Arab philosophy and the progress of
the Albigenses. The instrument by which Francis
made his way was fervour; the weapon of Dominic
was religious philosophy. Both seemed angels to the
contemporary Church ; but Dominic was a cherub,
Francis was a seraph.

" L' un fu tutto serafico in ardore,
L' altro per sapienza in terra fue
Di chenibicn luce uno splendore." '

Thus, in the first instance at any rate, the Domini
cans addressed themselves to the educated; the
Franciscans to the people. The architecture of a
Dominican church, with its large nave, and as few
chapels or side-altars or intercepting columns as
might be, shows the hand of an Order which set
store on making the most of public teaching. Tho
Franciscan churches, which, as a rule, were broken
up by many screens and many altars into a collection
of associated but practically separate chapels and
oratories, show the temper of an Order which, in its

i far. xi. 37-39-

1 84 Dante and the Franciscans.

great effort to raise the life of the people to a higher
moral level, would follow the people's instincts, — with
more of sympathy perhaps than of effort at guidance,
—in the whole cycle of acceptable devotions or super
stitions.

Not that any such contrasts between men or
societies are ever unmodified by a certain interchange
of distinctive characteristics. The family of St. Francis,
if not Francis himself, found their way into the
chairs of the Universities — at one time Oxford was
practically in their hands, — and they made some great
contributions to theology; while Dominic, no less than
Francis, as Dante is careful to tell,

" Poi con dottrina e con volere insieme
Con 1'offizio apostolico si mosse. " 1

And, indeed, if faith, not poverty, was the virtue
which, on the whole, Dominic particularly espoused,
yet the first desire which was manifest in him was
towards the first counsel of Christ, the counsel to
" sell that thou hast and give to the poor " —

" il primo amor che in lui fu manifesto,
Fu al primo consiglio che die Cristo. " 2

In this " root of the matter " — as the thirteenth
century would have deemed it — he was at one with
St. Francis.

It was natural that Dante's moral and intellectual
temper would have inclined towards the Dominican

1 Par. xii. 97, 98. 2 zb. 74, 75.

Dante and the Franciscans. \ 85

ideal Dante's anxious interest in the problems of
the time, his reserve, his distant, proud, austere
severity, not to speak of other characteristics, would
have attracted him to the less popular Order and its
founder —

" I'amoroso drndo
Defla fede cristiana, il sauto atleta,
Benigno ai suoi, ed ai nemici crudo.' '

For Dante, St. Dominic is the " husbandman, whom
Christ chose to place in His garden, to aid Him,"*
nay, he is " messo e famigliar di Cristo," s " Christ's
messenger and companion." Colleague of Francis, ho
yet was worthy to guide the bark of Peter :

"degno

Collega fu a mantcner la barca
Di Pietro in alto mar per dritto segno."4

With all Dominic's love for knowledge and thought,
he was not, Dante saw, to be classed with the pedants
who paraded ponderous learning, and had no higher
aim beyond, — with Cardinal Henry of Ostia, the com
mentator on the Decretals, or with Taddeo Alderotti
of Bologna, the translator of the Ethics into Italian.
St. Dominic's love of learning was a department of
his love of an object beyond, —

" per amor della verace manna,
In picciol tempo gran dottor si feo ; " •

his business was to look after the vino which God

i Par. xii. 55-57. « 76. 7», 7« ' /b- 73-

* Ib. xi. n8-iao. 5 /b. xii. 84, 85.

1 86 Dante and the Franciscans.

had planted among the nations, and the whitening
leaves of which betrayed the secret disease which was

killing it :

" si tnise a circuir la vigna,
Che tosto imbianca, se il vigiiaio 6 reo. " *

All that he asked of the Pope was leave to fight
against an erring world;2 where the resistance to
error was stoutest, there his blows were most felt ; he
and his were a fountain of thought and eloquence by
which the garden of the Church was watered.

" Di lui si fecer poi diversi rivi,
Onde P orto cattolico si riga,
Si che i suoi arbuscelli stan pid vivi. " 3

Dante's language about St. Dominic places him, on
the whole, higher than St. Francis. And his disap
pointment at the failure of the Dominicans of his own
lifetime to realise their ideal is greater than his dis
appointment at a parallel failure on the part of the
Franciscans. St. Thomas is made to make larger
admissions as to the degeneracy of his brethren than
are made by St. Bonaventure. Those who were true
to their founder among the Dominicans were so few
that a little cloth would furnish their cowls ;

"son si poche,
Che le cappe fornisce poco panno."4

Dante's deepest sympathies were with Dominic;
but he had too keen an eye for moral beauty, and,
it may be added, was too well furnished with the

1 Par. xii. 86, 87. 2 Ib. 94. 3 Ib. 103-105. * Ib. xi. 131, 132.

Dante and the Franciscans. 187

instincts of a statesman not to be able to do justice to
St. Francis. His quick and wide observation of all
that touches the life of humanity, — of all that pro
motes individual wellbeing, as well as of all that moves
the world, — however secret the influence, however
humble the agency, would have made him alive to
the importance of an Order so wide in its influence, so
penetrating and sympathetic in its practical temper.
If in the Commedia Dominic must be allowed to rank
higher than Francis, yet more is said about Francis
than about Dominic. To a student of humanity like
Dante, the more popular Order was necessarily of more
account, whatever might be his individual preference.
As we read the panegyric on St. Francis which
Dante has placed in the mouth of St. Thomas Aquinas,
it is impossible not to feel the way in which the poet
had caught the mood of popular devotion to the
" poverel di Dio " — God's own poor man.1 The affec
tionate and elaborate description of the situation of
Assisi ; the popular play upon the name, when once
Francis had been recognised as the sun of the con
temporary Church, to describe his rising (Assisi);1
then the choice of poverty, described as a fair lady,
for whose sake Francis braved his father's displeasure,
and whom he wooed and won with the passionate
ardour of a devoted lover,

" PoacU di dl in <1i 1' «m/> piti forte," •
i Par. xiii. 33. * /«• xi. 5*. S3- ' lb- **• 6>

1 88 Dante and the Franciscans.

is all popular language of the time, reminding us of
the beauties of the "fioretti di San Francesco" —
language dear to the heart of the poor because it
sheds, as St. Francis shed in an eminent degree, the
glory of moral beauty as well as the glory of poetry
over their hard lot. Poverty, voluntarily accepted for
the good of others, had as much right to be personified
as any other virtue, or mode, or choice of life ; and
Francis, knowing that the heart of the people will
never care much for an abstraction, but is easily won
by a concrete presentation of the abstract, made his
way not least by this characteristic mode of thought
and speech.

" Francesco e Poverta per quest! amanti
Prendi oramai nel mio parlar diffuse.

La lor concordia e i lor lieti sembianti,
Amore e maraviglia e dolce sguardo
Facean esser cagion de pensier santi. " 1

And thus it was that the wealthy, like Bernard of
Quintavalle, and Giles, and the priest Silvester, sold
their possessions and followed this ideal and idealising
bridegroom, who had won so fair a bride —

"Dietro allo sposo ; si la sposa piace."2

For Poverty appealed to them not only as a fair, but
as an undeservedly neglected lady. She had had her
day of high recognition and honour. She had even,

i Par. xi. 74-78. 2 2b. xi. 84.

Dante and tlic Franciscans. \ 89

on the most solemn of all occasions, been assigned a
higher place than the Virgin Mother :

" dove Maria rimase giuso,
Ella con Criato pianse in sulla croce."1

But since then how different had been her lot!
Who can doubt that scores of the early Franciscan
sermons, burning with suppressed fire, are compressed
into the lines in which poverty is represented as
leading a widowed and neglected life in the Church
during the eleven centuries and more that had passed
between the Redemption and the appearance of St
Francis —

" Questa, privata del primo Marito,

Mille cent1 anni e phi <li«|>etui e Bcura
Fino a coatui si Btette senza invito."2

Dante feels it to be due to his own literary and
cultured self to decorate his reproduction of popular
Franciscan language by a reference to Lucan's account
of Caesar's visit to the hovel of the fisherman
Amyclas,3 but ho is not the less really, for the time,
controlled by the enthusiasm which ho describes.
The two sanctions of the Order by Rome (ftigiUo
a ma reliyione)* accorded by Innocent in. and
Honorius in., though not without hesitation; tho
thirst for martyrdom which leads Francis to join the
crusading host before Dainietta, and then to make a

i Par. xi 71, 7*

• Pkan. T. 504 J Aw- «i- «•

1 90 Dante and the Franciscans.

mission into the camp of the Sultan ; his reception of
the Stigmata — when

" Nel crudo sasso, intra Tevero ed Arno,
Da Cristo prese 1' ultimo sigillo,
Che le sue membra due anni portarno ; " *

and finally his death, when he commended his dear
est lady Poverty to the care of his brethren whom he
was leaving, need not be dwelt on at greater length,
though each incident is pregnant with interest.
Dante expresses his judgment on Francis when he
classes him with St. Benedict, and even St. Augus
tine ; 2 and when he makes St. Benedict range Francis
as a moral workman with himself and even St. Peter,

" Pier cominci6 senz' oro e senza argento,
Ed io con ora/ioni e con digiuno,
E Francesco umilmente il suo convento," 3

it is implied that the Church of St. Peter was very
wealthy; that the Benedictines did not fast and pray;
that the Franciscans were no longer humble. But this
does not affect the position which is assigned to Francis.
Perhaps the most characteristic notice of St.
Francis in the Gommedia is his momentary appearance
after death as the friend of Guido da Montefeltro.
Guido had hoped to make amends for a rude soldier's
life by entering the Order of St. Francis :

*' Io fui uom d' arme, e poi fui cordelliero,
Credendomi, si cinto, fare ammenda. " 4

* Par. xi 106-8. 3 Ib. xxxii. 35. 8 Ib. xxii. 88-90. < Inf. xxvii. 67, 68.

Dante and the Franciscans. \ 9 1

But Boniface vm. hod asked his advice as to
the best method of dealing with his enemies of the
Colonna family in Rome, and Guido, after hesitation,
had recommended large promise with small intention
of keeping it :

" Lunga promessa con 1' attender corto." *

Boniface gave Guido absolution by anticipation ; and
upon Guide's death St. Francis came to claim a soul
which had in life been a member of his Order. But
Francis had to yield it to " one of the black cherubin,"
who insisted that, in consequence of Guide's fraudulent
counsel, the soul of Guido rightly belonged to him,
and that, since Guido could not have repented of that
which he meant to do, Boniface's absolution was
worthless. The position already assigned to Francis
in the other world, as a friend of sinners who had
become Franciscans, belongs to Dante's recognition of
the power of the popular creed and of the popular
Order. The victory of the demon, who here has moral
right and fact on his side, is not merely a humiliation
for Pope Boniface; it vindicates Dante's own moral
attitude towards a monastic conception which so
easily admitted of such largo abuse, and may be more
particularly intended to mark his sense of a wider
danger to which popular Orders arc likely to bo
exposed.
The decline which Dante attributes to the Fran-

i Inf. xxrii. no.

192 Dante and t lie Franciscans.

ciscans after their founder's death had two distinct
phases, each of which is apparently noticed by Dante.
The first he describes by two metaphors which run
into each other. Like a revolving wheel, the Order
has deserted the orbit which the highest part of its
circumference had reached : like bad wine, it deposits
mould, not crust, in the cask : —

" Ma P orbita, che fe la parte somma
Di sua circonferenza, 6 derelitta,
SI ch' k. la muffa dov' era la gromma." ]

Dante mentions no names ; perhaps the subject was
too delicate, but history supplies the omission.

One of the more perplexing characters in the
Church history of the period is Elias, the first General
of the Franciscan Order after the founder's death.
He entered it in 1211, fifteen years before the death
of St. Francis, and became Provincial of Etruria in
1216. His preaching won many adherents; among
others Cesarius of Spires, who afterwards opposed
him so vehemently. Even within the lifetime of St.
Francis there was a great division of opinion within
the Order as to the degree of poverty which was
obligatory upon its members. The stricter opinion
was that such poverty should be absolute, like that of
St. Francis ; but a laxer opinion maintained that this
was impossible for all but a small number of elect
souls, and that certain goods might be possessed, and

1 Par. xii. 112-114.

Dante and the Franciscans. \ 93

certain relations with the world maintained, without
disloyalty to the spirit of the Order. Of this view
Elias was the champion ; he was apparently, in fact, a
refined man of the world, who had heart and piety
enough to admire a life like that of Francis, but who
could not think that it was necessary that every monk
should lead it. A good sort of man, he had made a
mistake in being a monk, — at any rate, a monk of the
Order of St. Francis, whose concentration and intensity
of purpose were wholly unwelcome to him.

Thus it came to pass that Elias was a trouble to
St. Francis during the last eight years of his life.
Elias contrived to win over Cardinal Ugolino, after
wards Gregory IX., and to induce him to use his
authority to urge St. Francis to soften the rigour of
the rule of poverty, and to govern the Order through
a council of wise brethren. Francis refused ; and yet
such were the practical qualities of Elias that, when
Francis left Italy for Egypt, he made Elias his Vicar-
General. Elias seized the opportunity to promote a
general relaxation of discipline, and St. Francis returned
to depose him from his office in 1220. In 1221, Elias
was again reinstated; in 1223, he was again at war
with St. Francis about a new rule; and when St.
Francis sickened for death, Elias was still in such a
position that the whole practical direction of the
Order fell into his hands.

Thus when Francis was gone, and the chapter of
N

1 94 Dante and the Franciscans.

the Order, held in 1227 at Rome, had to elect a
General, they elected Elias. He pleaded that his
health would not allow him to walk on foot, and to
submit to other privations enjoined by the rule.
" Very well," cried the monks, " eat gold and ride on
horseback." The administration of the Order by Elias
was, from his own point of view, brilliant. Many
learned men were attracted to the Order; it filled
professorships at the universities ; the splendid church
at Assisi, decorated by Giotto, was prepared as a worthy
resting-place for the body of St. Francis ; money was
collected, under Papal sanction, and, despite of the
rule, in all the provinces of the Order. Elias himself
had a well-furnished cell, rode a splendid charger, and
was followed by a train of servants. At last the
stricter party in the Order could bear it no longer ; in
the chapter of 1230, under the guidance of St. Antony
of Padua (not to be confounded with the St. Antony
of Par. xxix. 124, with his pig), and of Adam de
Marisco, they protested against this extreme viola
tion of the rule. Gregory ix., now Pope, was obliged
to side with them, and Elias, notwithstanding an
ingenious defence of his proceedings, was deposed.
In 1236 his partisans were strong enough to elect him
again; again the old luxury and laxity recurred;
again, through the influence of his most distinguished
convert, Cesarius of Spires,1 he was deposed in 1239.

1 Cesarius was murdered in gaol.

Dante and the Franciscans. 195

He then became intimate with the Emperor Frederic
II., who was alive to his practical abilities ; and, after
a chequered life, he was excommunicated as a
partisan of the Emperor, and stripped of his cowl and
his clerical privileges. Before his death in 1253 he
was reconciled with the Church, but was not re
admitted to the Order; although, as he understood it,
it had to the end a first place in his heart, and his
last years were occupied with building a line church
at Cortona for the Minorites.

The general result of the influence of Klias was to
introduce into the Order a standard of life and dis
cipline much below that which was contemplated by St.
Francis. Connected with, but distinct from, this feature
of the decline were the controversies within the Order
on the nature and obligations of poverty. To discuss
these controversies would take us much too fur ; in
fact they only reached a Hnal climax at a date be
yond the lifetime of Dante. Hut Dante must have
been well aware of the influence of the writings of
the Abbot Joachim, and the history of the generalship
of John of Parma, 12501260. He must have heard a
great deal of the Zelatores or Xelantes, who appealed
to the authority of the now canonised St. Antony of
Padua, and who were the spiritual ancestors of the
Fraticelli of the next half century. But he selects
two contemporary names to represent a long and
intricate controversy. Two prominent figures of the

1 96 Dante and the Franciscans.

time were the easy-going Cardinal Matthew of Acqua-
sparta, General of the Order, who according to Wadding
was a patron of laxity in general; and the austere
Ubertino da Casale, the pupil of Peter John Olivi, the
head of the spiritual or zealous party in the Order,
the author of the Arbor vitae Crucifixae and the
Opus de Septem Statibus Ecclesiae.1 Ubertino finally
broke away from the Franciscans. He asked permis
sion from Pope John xxn. to live in a separate com
munity with those who agreed with him, and he was
refused. In 1317 he obtained permission to join the
Benedictines, and at a later date the Carthusians.
He took a prominent part in the controversy about
the poverty of Christ and His Apostles. When
pressed by John xxn. he would admit that it
was right to say that, spiritually, Christ possessed
something hi common with the Apostles; but he
thought it heretical to say, as did the conventual
Franciscans, that He and His Apostles possessed
singly or in common any worldly goods whatever.2

Dante holds a middle course between what he
deems opposite exaggerations. According to him
the true Franciscan may still find the genuine tradi
tion of the life of the saintly founder —

" Io mi son quel ch' io soglio."3

1 Wadding's Annal. Franc, tom. iii. ad ann. 1321.

2 See for this Responsio circa quaestionem de paupertate Christi et
Apostolorum ; Wadding's Anna!, iii. ad ann. 1321; Baluzius, Misccll.
torn. i. pp. 293-307. a pftr. xjj. I23.

Dante and the Franciscatis. 197

But neither the laxity of Cardinal Acquasparta nor
the morbid rigorism of Ubertino da Casalo will fur-
nish this —

" Ma non fia da Caaal, no d' Acqiia*|»arta,
L;\ onde vegnon tali alia scrittura,
Che 1' un la f ugge, e 1' altro la coart*. " '

Dante has immortalised four of the immediate
companions of St. Francis, — Bernard of Quintavalle,
his first convert, wealthy and venerable, who after
doubting the wisdom or the sincerity of Francis, at last
surrendered himself to the moral fascination of his
character, sold his property, and embraced the Fran
ciscan rule ; (Pietro, the second adherent of St. Francis,
is not mentioned by Dante;) Egidio or (tiles, another
well-to-do layman, the author of the Verlm A urea,
who lived even so late as 1272;* Illuminato and
Agostino —

" Che fur dei primi scal/i poverelli,
Che nel capestro a Dio si fero ami- i. "

Illuminato of Rieti, who accompanied St. Francis into
Egypt ; Agostino, who according to the story, died in
time to keep St. Francis company on his \vuy t<>
heaven,— these owe their immortality in human
memories to Dante. But there is one Franciscan who
occupies a high place in the Commedia, and who
would have certainly lived in the history of the
Church if Dante had never sung.

> Par. xii. 124-126. « 76. li. 83. • /* •«• «3». «3*

1 98 Dante and the Franciscans.

Bonaventure of Bagnoregio or Bagnarea, a village
on the Lake of Bolsena and not far from Orvieto, was
born in 1221. At the age of twenty- two he entered
the Order of St. Francis; became a pupil of the
English monk Alexander of Hales at Paris; and in
a short time a professor of theology in that University.
He there wrote his most considerable work, — a Com
mentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard ; but he
had not been more than three years at work when^
notwithstanding his youth, he was made General
of his Order; — the troublesome controversies which
divided it required a ruler with no ordinary gifts. His
gifts, indeed, were of a kind to mark him out in early
life for a high position in the Church. Only by the
most earnest entreaties could he prevail on Clement
iv. not to insist on his becoming Archbishop of York.
With Gregory x. he was less successful, and by the com
mand of that pontiff he became Cardinal and Bishop
of Albano. He was throughout his life an unworldly
and disinterested character, and his shade has a right,
to say that he ever postponed riches and honour,
which, according to the language of the Proverbs, are
in the keeping of the left hand,1 to that true wisdom
which is guarded by the right —

" Io son la vita di Bonaventura

Da Bagnoregio, che nei grand! offici
Sempre posposi la sinistra cura. " 2

1 /You. iii. 16. a Par. xii. 127-129.

Dante and the Franciscans. \ >

He died at the Council of Lyons on .July 15, 1274,
four months after the death of St Thomas.

This coincidence of the date of the disapj>earance
from the scene of two men of such commanding titles
to the attention of the Church may have had more
than anything else to do with the position assigned
to Bonaventure in the Paradi*o. For Dante, St.
Honaventure is the representative Franciscan, just
as St. Thomas is the representative Dominican. In
Dante's conception, what Thomas is to Dominic, that
Bonaventure is to Francis. Historically speaking, St
Dominic is eclipsed l>y St. Thomas, while St. Francis
is most assuredly not eclipsed by St. Bonaventure.
But the real proportions of minds and characters are
rarely quite understood even by their greatest Con
temporaries ; and if St. Bonaventure could not rank
with the great Dominican, he was the greatest Fran
ciscan who was exactly contemporary with St. Thomas.
So he is chosen to interchange the courtesies which in
those early times, as to this day, disguise a certain
rivalry between the Orders: and as St. Thomas is the
eulogist of St. Francis and the critic who In-wails the
degeneracy of his own Dominicans, so St. Bonaven
ture is the eulogist of St. Dominic, and he corre
spondingly deplores the decline of his brethren, the
children of St. Francis.

Comparing Bonaventure with Aquinas, it must l»e at
once said that as a Christian thinker he is greatly his

2OO Dante and the Franciscans.

inferior. Indeed, they do not easily admit of being
compared, as Bonaventure is a natural Platonist
just as Thomas is a natural Aristotelian. But as
the original modes and forms of their thought are
different, so in point of vigour and fibre Bonaventure
bears no comparison to Thomas. It is enough to say,
further, that he never heard the lectures of Albert,
and that he knew little or nothing of Aristotle.

On the mystical or devotional side the case is very
different. Thomas could write prayers and hymns,
as we know, of great beauty, and which will always
live ; but such works as The Soul's Journey to God
(Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum) and Meditations on
the Life of Christ, place Bonaventure at the head of
the masters of Christian devotion m the thirteenth
century. In his case, as in that of Aquinas, Dante
anticipated the official judgment of the Church by
placing him among the saints.

Perhaps even more remarkable than his allusions
to great Franciscans are Dante's omissions to allude to
them. There are at least three names, of all of whom
Dante must have known something, of some probably
a great deal, but who find no place in the poem which
leaves so little unnoticed that could interest the
thought or heart of the world in the thirteenth
century. And it may be added, they are all three
the names of Englishmen.

(a) Alexander of Hales, Doctor Irrefragabilis, so

Dante and tlu Franciscans. 20 1

called from the Gloucestershire convent in which he
went to school, completed his studies, as did so many
young Englishmen of the time, at Paris, and hail
already become a professor and doctor of philosophy of
that University when in 1222 he entered the Order of
St. Francis. He seems to have been entreated to do so
by a poor Franciscan, so that the young Order might
gain in his person the attraction and authority of
learning and culture. Certainly he brought these, then
rare, gifts with him when he took the vow of poverty.
In him the Franciscans appear in a capacity which
lies outside the scope of their founder's activity : — in
him they made the first, and that a very great
step, towards the conquest of the universities
of Europe. If Alexander was not the author of the
first Summa of theology, his was the first which com
manded general attention, and was prescribed by
Papal authority for general use in the theological
schools of Europe, until it was superseded by the
works of the great Dominicans, Albert and Thomas.
The specialty of Alexander was that he led the way
in resistance to the attacks upon the Faith of the
Church which had been made by writers like David
of Dinant, who took as their basis of operations the Arab
philosophy,— then recently dirt used throughout Euro|>e,
and read with the greatest avidity. Alexander studied
the Arabians thoroughly, as he studied Aristotle, and
made both Aristotle and Avicenna furnish defensive

2O2 Dante and the Franciscans.

weapons to orthodoxy. In this effort he was after
wards surpassed by Albert, whose work was in turn
extended and completed by Aquinas; but it was
Alexander — it was a Franciscan — who had led the way.
His greatest work, as was usual in that age, was a
Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard ; but,
in fact, this was the conventional form into which a
theologian of that time threw whatever he had to say
that was independent and original. Among his many
pupils the greatest was St. Bonaventure. Alexander
died in 1245.

We might have expected that the master of Bona
venture would have been noticed by Dante, just as
Dante notices Albert, the master of Thomas. Aver-
roes and Avicenna1 too might have suggested the
teacher who taught the Church to make them the
servants and not the masters of her thought : but, for
some reason, Alexander is not named. Englishman
as he was, he passed his life in Paris, and Dante
knew Paris, and what it had been to Thomas, and
what it was to the world of the thirteenth cen
tury. Was it his prolixity, or his innovation on the
Franciscan ideal of life, or his claim to laurels which
the poet may have thought the monopoly of his own
Dominicans, that have excluded this eminent man
from a line of recognition in the great poem ? We can
only ask, we cannot answer the question.

i Inf. iv. 143, 144.

Dante and the Franciscans. 203

(#) Roger Bacon, Doctor Mirabilis, is so near a
neighbour, and such a familiar name to Oxford
residents that they may be tempted to overlook his
real importance. He was a contemporary both of St.
Thomas and Dante, born as he was in 1214, and dying
in 1292. «A Somersetshire lad, of good family, he
came to Oxford, made the friendship of Grostete, after
wards Bishop of Lincoln, and got into trouble, political
and other, which led him to seek a change in France.
When he visited Paris, Scholasticism was at the height
of its activity. But instead of listening to the discus
sions which filled the air in every school and convent,
— instead of resorting to any of the teachers whose
names were then repeated throughout Europe, Roger
Bacon sought a tutor whom he does not name, and who
was strongly unlike the rest of the world about him.
This unnamed instructor had no taste for metaphysics,
cared nothing about the nature of universals, or for
discussions which turned on the meaning of words.
While these were going on, he lived in a little litlmra-
tory, a dominus experimentorum, as men called him,
testing and fusing metals, inventing new weapons of
war, new implements of husbandry, new tools for
artisans ; learning mathematics, optics, medicine,
alchemy ; learning something too of Eastern languages,
Hebrew and Arabic, as well as Greek. The influence
of this odd tutor upon an apt pupil was to give to
Bacon's mind what was then an original, what wo

204 Dante and the Franciscans.

should now call a very modern direction;— to teach him
to observe everything, to think nothing unworthy of
notice, to use his hands and his eyes as well as his
brain, to distrust the abstract, to distrust both logic
and rhetoric, and to make the results of sensible
observation the main, if not the only, basis of know
ledge. As far as his habits of thought went, Roger
Bacon might as well have lived in the full bloom of
the Renaissance; or he might have been his great
namesake of the seventeenth century. But, in fact,
he did live in the thirteenth, and, for some reason
unknown to us, he became a Franciscan. Back he
went to Oxford, to spend some six years in the Fran
ciscan house close to Paradise Square, — or in the
tower on Folly Bridge, — to pursue his experiments
and studies, to gain an ever-increasing reputation in
the University, and finally to come into hopeless con
flict with his superiors. St. Bonaventure, then General
of the Order, was not the sort of person to understand
Bacon ; and he was ordered to Paris —to spend ten
years in quite unspeakable discomfort, with the Fran
ciscans in that city. The history of his troubles would
detain us too long. He was forbidden to possess
books, to write, or to teach, and was put upon short
commons and shut up when he broke these orders.
He was delivered from this thraldom when Guy de
Foulques, Cardinal-Legate of the Pope in England,
ascended' the Papal throne hi 1265 as Clement iv.

Dante and the Franciscans. 205

The Pope wrote Bacon a letter, which still exist*,
relieving him from the silence to which he was con
demned, and desiring him to compose a work setting
forth his ideas on controverted matters and send it
to Rome. The Paris Franciscans were indignant,
but they had to submit, contenting themselves with
making it, by a variety of ingenious regulations, as
difficult as they could to Bacon to write his book.
At last it appeared in 1 267, the Opus M«jwt followed
by an appendix, the Opus Minus, and even by an
Opus Tertium in which, under the disguise of a dedi
catory letter, Bacon relates to the Pope at length all
the annoyances to which he has been exposed by his
brethren. Shielded by the Papal protection, Bacon
could return to Oxford. But in 1 268 Clement died.
Bacon was again face to face with his opponents, and
in 1278 Jerome of Ascoli, the General, convoked a
chapter of the Order of St. Francis, and condemned
Bacon. No doubt the friar was irritating: he dis
liked his Order and everything about him; he
sneered at the great doctor Alexander of Hales; he
made the utmost fun of the Dominicans Albert and
Thomas ; he condemned as sterile and worthless four-
fifths of the teaching of his brother professors. " But
he was also condemned," says Wadding, the historian
of the Order, " propter quasdam novitates susjxictaa."
Of these the most serious probably was that ho be
lieved, with the Arab astronomer Albuinozar, and

206 Dante and the Franciscans.

Averroes, that there was a real connection between
the conjunction of the planets and the appearance of
new religions on the earth.

Bacon passed fourteen years in obscurity, probably
in prison, and only regained his liberty in old age,
just before his death. As the apostle of experimental-
ism and observation, against Schoolmen and Fathers,
even against the Bible, as being, in his own words,
" badly translated ; " — ot observation, as more fruitful
than any interpretation of texts or abstract reasoning ;
of observation, " domina scientiarum omnium, et finis
totius speculationis," — Bacon in that age stands alone.
Dante can hardly have failed to hear of so original
and so public a career. What did he think of it ?
If Bacon could not be introduced into the Commedia
as the authority for some physical statement, might
he not have had a message sent him like that from
Mahomet to Era Dolcino,1 — or have been grouped in
punishment with the Arabs who misled him,2 — or have
been pitied by the exiled poet, who had been treated
by his fellow-citizens after a fashion not altogether
dissimilar to the treatment of Bacon at the hands of
the Oxford and Paris Franciscans ?

(7) The third, and by far the greatest, Franciscan
name that falls within the period of Dante's lifetime
is Duns Scotus, " the Subtle Doctor " in the language
of the schools. I say the greatest, for although Bacon

i Inf. xxviii. 55-62. 2 Inf. iv. 143, 144.

Dante and the Franciscans: 207

has attracted more notice on account of the modern
character of his interests and his method, he cannot
compare, for grasp or penetration of thought, with the
only schoolman who really or nearly takes rank with
Aquinas.

Duns Scotus was probably born (though this is a
matter of controversy) in 1274, the year in which
Aquinas and St. Bonaventure died. A Northumbrian
lad, as it would seem, he came up early to Oxford and
spent all his short life here, with the exception of the
last four years. It is doubtful when he entered the
Order of St. Francis, but he was already a Franciscan
when, at the age of twenty-three, ho succeeded his
master, William Varron or Ware, as a professor of
philosophy in the Order. The legend of thirty thou
sand students is connected with the lectures of Duns
Scotus, but it is certain that the bulk of his vast lite
rary work was done at Oxford. In the Lyons edition
of his works, 1639, no less than tive out of the twelve
folio volumes are taken up with his most celebrated
treatise, which is, of course, his Commentary on Peter
Lombard: it is generally referred to as Script urn
Oxonien»e. His other works are apparently all
philosophical, and such 'as would have been suggested
by his lectures and the controversies of the time. In
1304 he was sent by his sujHjriors to Paris, where ho
taught in the University for four years with ever
increasing brilliancy and success, and took part in a

208 Dante and the Franciscans.

disputation which has become historical, on the ques
tion of the Immaculate Conception. In 1 308 he was
sent by the General of the Order to Cologne, but had
hardly made himself at home there when he died on
November 8, in his thirty-fourth year.

Certainly Duns Scotus, as a writer, has neither the
grace of St. Bonaventure nor the clearness of St.
Thomas. He is more careful about his matter than
about his style, which is often pulverised into obscurity
by his exaggerated passion for distinctions. He
attacks St. Thomas all along the line : sometimes his
method, nrore rarely his premises, very often his con
clusions. His weapon is his inexhaustible facility in
projecting distinctions, which he drives like a wedge
into the heart of the opposing argument. There can
be no doubt that while his contemporaries warmly
admired his originality and his boldness, the general
result of his influence in the next generation was to
pave the way for the downfall of scholasticism. To
many minds he must have even appeared to have
unsettled those bases of certainty beyond the precincts
of Revelation, which had been elaborated, or rather
exhibited, with such laborious completeness by Albert
of Cologne and St. Thomas. On two points, at least,
he went near coming into conflict not merely with the
distinctive methods of the Thomist theologians, but
with the general sense and doctrine of the Church.
His exaggerated realism, as applied to universals, led

Dante and the Franciscans. 209

him to ascribe to each of the Divine Attributes an
objectively distinct existence,— a doctrine which it
might be difficult to reconcile with that aTrXonj? of
the Divine Nature which is only one way of expressing
the Essential Unity of God. This passionate anxiety
to assert the freedom of the Divine Will led him into
the exaggeration of treating the moral laws of Clod as
arbitrary, as depending on His Will, apart from any
intrinsic necessity of His Nature, so that although
what He commands is obligatory, He might have just
as well sanctioned adultery as conjugal fidelity, or
murder as the love of our neighbour. Duns Scotus
probably would have got into trouble with the Church
if he had not, in perfect good faith, thrown the shield
of his great ability over popular devotions or sii|>er-
stitions which were struggling for recognition among
the less gifted members of his Order: just as in our
own day we have seen powerful intellects pass from
the higher spheres of audacious speculation to fondle
some odd detail of popular practice or belief, as if in
the very spirit of paradox. Thus it was with the
Immaculate Conception. Discountenanced by St
Bernard in the twelfth century, — deliberately rejected
by St. Thomas in the Summa, — repudiated in the
Franciscan Order by St. Ikmaventure, it was first
raised from the rank of a scarcely recognised opinion
to that of a doctrine claiming formal sanction by tho
dialectical resources of Duns Scotus and when, in

2 1 o Dante and the Franciscans.

the year 1854, this doctrine was declared to be defide
in the Bull Ineffabilis, the rnind which really
triumphed, five hundred and fifty years after it had
passed from this earthly scene, was that of the Oxford
Franciscan.

It was natural that the Franciscans welcomed a man
who at once relieved them from the sense of intellec
tual inferiority to the family of St. Dominic. Hence
forth, as every Dominican theologian was a Thomist,
so every Franciscan was a Scotist. Sometimes, as was
the case of the distinguished Spaniard Antonio
Andrea, the theologians of the Order did not disguise
from themselves that they shut their eyes when they
were compelled " jurare in verba magistri." But they
were not deceived as to the rank of their Subtle Doctor
among minds which have at any time devoted them
selves to studies in philosophy or theology.1 When
the Renaissance first, and then the Reformation, had
swept over the mind of Europe, and Dominicans and
Franciscans alike had fallen into relative insignificance,
to make way within the Roman Church for a more
powerful organisation, demanded, as it was thought, by
the necessities of the times, the first of Jesuit theo
logians — the first, he may well be thought, of Roman
Catholic theologians since Aquinas — shows us what he

1 Our own Hooker quotes Scotus only once, but approvingly, and as
against the opinion of St. Thomas. E. P. vi. vi. 9, On the nature of
Sacramental Grace.

Dante and the Franciscans. 2 1 1

thought of the place and weight of Duns Scotus. In
the course of his vast survey of the field of theology,
Francis Suarez constantly contrasts the judgments of
Duns Scotus and Thomas, and, where his decision is
not controlled by the present authority of the lliurch,
he generally inclines to take part with the former.

Had Dante been merely a man of the world, indif
ferent to what theology is in itself, and to its vast
significance for the life of human beings, ho might
have missed the significance of such a career as that
of Scotus — so brilliant, so pregnant with consequences,
so pathetically short. But it is impossible to think
this of the author of the eleventh and twelfth and
thirteenth cantos of the Paradise; and Scotus
reached the climax of his life in Paris, and ho died—
twelve years before Dante's death. Why is he un
noticed ? Did Dante resent here also an apparition
which threatened so altogether to destroy the historic
and poetic contrast between the Orders as being
respectively Intellect and Benevolence * Did he
detect in the thought of Duns Scotus elements of un
certain character : did ho fear whither this new and
fearless analyst might not have been tending / Or
is it the Italian in Dante which still measures the
world from the standpoint of the Old Empire, and
cannot understand how Normans and Saxons, who
had come from remote Britain, should challenge com
parison with men of Latin blood like St Thomas and

2 1 2 Dante and the Franciscans.

St. Bonaventure ? We cannot say ; but his silence
is even more remarkable in the case of Scotus than
in the cases of Bacon or Alexander of Hales. As
we read the great poem we feel that its reserves
may not be less full of meaning than its allusions, and
that currents of thought and currents of feeling —
which may some day be explored — may be the secret
of a silence which, for the present, is so interesting
because we are so entirely unable to account for it.

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty,
at the Edinburgh University Press.

1892
iddon, Henry Par

BR 85 L53 1892 TRIM

Liddon, Henry Parry,

Essays and addresses 138952