(4) He describes himself as deriving from ‘the divine law’ truths to which Plato had been guided ‘by the impulse (instinctus) of truth herself’.7
On the other hand:
(1) When he draws on the Old Testament, instead of calling it ‘the sacred writings’, he usually says merely that he is following the Hebraei.8
(2) As witnesses to the benefits we mortals have received from good daemons he summons ‘all Greeks, Latins and barbarians’ (cuncta Graecia, omne Latium, omnisque Barbaria).9 This is a sharp contrast with St Augustine’s10 view that all the daemons of Paganism were evil—were ‘demons’ in the later sense of the word.
(3) In one place he treats the divine inspiration of Moses as something open to doubt (ut ferunt).11
(4) He cites Homer, Hesiod, and Empedocles as if they were no less to be taken into account than the sacred writers.
(5) He describes Providence as Nous (Mind), a being which holds the second place after the summus deus by whom it is perfected as it perfects all other things.12 This is very much more like the neo-Platonic Trinity than the Christian.
(6) He discusses at great length whether silva (matter) is inherently evil,13 without once mentioning the Christian doctrine that God made all things and pronounced them very good.
(7) He wholly rejects the anthropocentric cosmology of Genesis in which the heavenly bodies were made ‘to give light upon the earth’. He holds it would be absurd to suppose that the ‘blessed and eternal’ things above the Moon were ordered for the sake of the perishable things below.14
The two last items are less evidential than we might at first suppose. Though Christians were logically bound to admit the goodness of matter that doctrine was not heartily relished; then, and for centuries, the language of some spiritual writers was hardly to be reconciled with it. And I think that there remained throughout the Middle Ages an unresolved discord between those elements in their religion which tended to an anthropocentric view and those in the Model which made man a marginal—almost, as we shall see, a suburban—creature.
For the rest, I think Chalcidius is a Christian, writing philosophically. What he accepted as matters of faith were excluded, as matters of faith, from his thesis. Biblical writers might therefore appear in his work as eminent authors to be taken into account like any other eminent authors, but not treated as the ‘oracles of God’. That would have been contrary to the rules of his art: he could be a methodological purist, as we shall see later. Of the deep discrepancy between his neo-Platonic Trinity and the fully Christian doctrine I believe him to have been unaware.
By translating so much of the Timaeus and thus transmitting it to centuries in which little else of Plato was known, Chalcidius determined what the name of Plato should chiefly stand for throughout the Middle Ages. The Timaeus has none of the erotic mysticism we find in the Symposium or the Phaedrus, and almost nothing about politics. And though the Ideas (or Forms) are mentioned, their real place in Plato’s theory of knowledge is not displayed. For Chalcidius they become ‘ideas’ almost in the modern sense; thoughts in the mind of God.15 It thus came about that, for the Middle Ages, Plato was not the logician, nor the philosopher of love, nor the author of the Republic. He was, next to Moses, the great monotheistic cosmogonist, the philosopher of creation; hence, paradoxically, the philosopher of that Nature which the real Plato so often disparaged. To that extent, Chalcidius unconsciously supplied a corrective for the contemptus mundi inherent in neo-Platonism and early Christianity alike. It was later to prove fruitful.
As his choice of the Timaeus was momentous, so was the fashion in which he treated it. His admitted principle of interpretation was one which makes an author more liable to be misrepresented the more he is revered. In hard places, he holds, we must always attribute to Plato whatever sense appears ‘worthiest the wisdom of so great an authority’;16 which inevitably means that all the dominant ideas of the commentator’s own age will be read into him.
Plato clearly said (42b) that the souls of wicked men may be re-incarnated as women, and if that doesn’t cure them, finally as beasts. But we are not, says Chalcidius, to suppose that he meant it literally. He only means that, by indulging your passions, you will, in this present life, become more and more like an animal.17
In Timaeus 40d–41a Plato, after describing how God created the gods—not the mythological ones but those he really believed in, the animated stars—asks what is to be said about the popular pantheon. He first degrades them from the rank of gods to that of daemons. He then proceeds, in words almost certainly ironical, to decline any further discussion of them. It is, he says, ‘A task quite beyond me. We must accept what was said about them by our ancestors who, according to their own account, were actually their descendants. Surely they must have been well informed about their own progenitors! And who could disbelieve the children of gods?’ Chalcidius takes all this au pied de la lettre. By telling us to believe our forebears Plato is reminding us that credulitas must precede all instruction. And if he declines to discuss further the nature of daemons, this is not, for Chalcidius, because he thought the subject was not a philosopher’s business. What he suggests as the real reason reveals the vein of methodological pedantry which I have attributed to him. Plato, he says, is here writing as a natural philosopher and it would have been inconveniens, would have been a solecism, to say more about the daemons. Daemonology belongs to the higher discipline called epoptica (an epoptes was one who had been initiated into the mysteries).18
A very brief reference to dreams in the original (45e) leads to seven chapters on them in the commentary. These are of interest for two reasons. In the first place, they include19 a translation of Republic 571c, and thus hand on, ages before Freud, Plato’s ur-Freudian doctrine of the dream as the expression of a submerged wish. Banquo knows about it.20 In the second place, they throw light on a passage in Chaucer. Chalcidius lists the types of dream, and his list does not exactly agree with the better known classification of Macrobius. It includes, however, the revelatio, a type vouched for by Hebraica philosophia.21 It will be remembered that Chaucer in the Hous of Fame, though otherwise reproducing the classification of Macrobius, adds one more type, the revelacioun. He doubtless derived it, though perhaps indirectly, from Chalcidius.
Astronomy in Chalcidius has not yet fully settled down in its medieval form. Like everyone else, he declares that the Earth is infinitesimally small by cosmic standards,22 but the order of the planets is still open to dispute.23 Nor are their names yet irrevocably fixed. He gives (here agreeing with the Aristotelian De Mundo) Phaenon as an alternative to Saturn, Phaethon to Jupiter, Pyrois to Mars, Stilbon to Mercury, and either Lucifer or Hesperus to Venus. He also holds that ‘the diverse and multiple motion of the planets is the real source (auctoritatem dedit)24 of all the effects that now come to pass’. All that is suffered (cunctae passiones)25 in this mutable world below the Moon has its origin from them. But he is careful to add that such influence upon us is not in any sense the purpose for which they exist. It is a mere by-product. They run the course appropriate to their beatitude, and our contingent affairs imitate that felicity in such halting fashion as they can. Thus, for Chalcidius, the geocentric universe is not in the least anthropocentric. If we ask why, nevertheless, the Earth is central, he has a very unexpected answer. It is so placed in order that the celestial dance may have a centre to revolve about—in fact, as an aesthetic convenience for the celestial beings. It is perhaps because his universe is already so well and radiantly inhabited that Chalcidius, though he mentions26 the Pythagorean doctrine (which peopled the Moon and other planets with mortals), is not interested in it.
Nothing will seem stranger to a modern than the series of chapters which Chalcidius entitles ‘On the utility of Sight and Hearing’. The primary value of sight is not, for him, its ‘survival-value’. The important thing is that sight begets philosophy. For ‘no man would seek God nor aspire to piety unless he had first seen the sky and the stars’.27 God gave men eyes in o
rder that they might observe ‘the wheeling movements of mind and providence in the sky’ and then, in the movements of their own souls, try to imitate as nearly as they can that wisdom, serenity, and peace.28 This is all genuine Plato (from Timaeus 47b), though hardly the Plato we learn most of at a modern university. Similarly, hearing exists principally for the sake of music. The native operations of the soul are related to the rhythms and modes. But this relationship fades in the soul because of her union with the body, and therefore the souls of most men are out of tune. The remedy for this is music; ‘not that sort which delights the vulgar . . . but that divine music which never departs from understanding and reason’.29
Though Chalcidius had invented a reason for Plato’s reticence on the subject of daemons, he does not follow his example. His account of them differs in some respects from that given by Apuleius. He denies the Pythagorean or Empedoclean belief that dead men become daemons;30 all daemons are for him a distinct species, and he applies the name daemons to the aetherial as well as to the aerial creatures, the former being those whom ‘the Hebrews call holy angels’.31 But he is completely at one with Apuleius in affirming the Principle of Plenitude and that of the Triad. Aether and air, like Earth, must be populated ‘lest any region be left void’,32 ‘lest the perfection of the universe should anywhere go limping’.33 And since there exist divine, immortal, celestial, and stellar creatures and also temporal, mortal, earthly, and passible creatures, ‘it is inevitable that between these two there must exist some mean, to connect the extremes, as we see in harmony’.34 We need not doubt that the voice which issued prohibitions to Socrates came from God; but we may be equally sure that it was not the voice of God itself. Between the purely intelligible God and the earthily corporeal Socrates there would be no unmediated conciliatio. God spoke to him through some ‘mean’, some intermediate being.35 We may seem to be moving here in a world utterly alien to the Christian; but we shall find statements not unlike this of Chalcidius in authors whose Christianity has never been questioned.
So far Chalcidius is on common ground with Apuleius. He then proceeds to another application of the Triad. The cosmic Triad can be envisaged not only as a harmony but as a polity, a triad of sovereign, executive and subjects; the stellar powers command, the angelic beings execute, and the terrestrials obey.36 Then, following the Timaeus (69c–72d) and the Republic (441d–442d), he finds the same triadic pattern repeated in the ideal state and in the human individual. In his imagined city Plato assigned the highest parts to his philosophical rulers who command. After them comes the warrior caste which carries out their orders. Finally, the common people obey. So in each man. The rational part lives in the body’s citadel (capitolium), that is, the head. In the camp or barracks (castra) of the chest, warrior-like, the ‘energy which resembles anger’, that which makes a man high-spirited, has its station. Appetite, which corresponds to the common people, is located in the abdomen below them both.37
It will be seen how faithfully their triadic conception of psychological health reflects either the Greek or the later medieval idea of the nurture proper to a freeman or a knight. Reason and appetite must not be left facing one another across a no-man’s-land. A trained sentiment of honour or chivalry must provide the ‘mean’ that unites them and integrates the civilised man. But it is equally important for its cosmic implications. These were fully drawn out, centuries later, in the magnificent passage where Alanus ab Insulis compares the sum of things to a city. In the central castle, in the Empyrean, the Emperor sits enthroned. In the lower heavens live the angelic knighthood. We, on Earth, are ‘outside the city wall’.38 How, we ask, can the Empyrean be the centre when it is not only on, but outside, the circumference of the whole universe? Because, as Dante was to say more clearly than anyone else, the spatial order is the opposite of the spiritual, and the material cosmos mirrors, hence reverses, the reality, so that what is truly the rim seems to us the hub.
The exquisite touch which denies our species even the tragic dignity of being outcasts by making us merely suburban, was added by Alanus. In other respects he reproduces Chalcidius’ outlook. We watch ‘the spectacle of the celestial dance’39 from its outskirts. Our highest privilege is to imitate it in such measure as we can. The Medieval Model is, if we may use the word, anthropoperipheral. We are creatures of the Margin.
Chalcidius handed on more than the Timaeus. He quotes, sometimes at moderate length, from the Crito, Epinomis, Laws, Parmenides, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic, Sophist, and Theaetetus. He knows Aristotle but has little of the later reverence for him. Aristotle had passed over all save one of the species of dreams ‘with his usual supercilious negligence’ (more quodam suo . . . fastidiosa incuria).40 He quotes and expands him, however, with more respect when arguing that matter, though not inherently evil, being the potentiality of all particular bodies, is doomed to (though logically distinct from) the privation (στέρησις, carentia) of Form.41 That is why matter craves her perfecting or embellishment (illustratio) as the female desires the male.42
The influence of Chalcidius produces its richest results in the twelfth-century Latin poets associated with the school of Chartres, who in their turn helped to inspire Jean de Meung and Chaucer. The Lady Natura, from Statius and Claudian, and the cosmogony of Chalcidius, might be said to be the parents of Bernardus Silvester’s De Mundi Universitate. Its feminine Noys (νοῦς, Providentia), so oddly introduced where we should expect the Second Person of the Christian Trinity, shows her lineage unmistakably: and perhaps owes her gender not so much to any Jungian archetype as to the gender of Providentia in Latin. In Chalcidius too we find the probable explanation of the mysterious garden called Granusion43 which Bernard’s Urania and Natura enter on descending to Earth. Chalcidius had distinguished not only aether from air but also upper air from lower, the lower, which men can breathe, being a moist substance, umecta substantia, ‘which the Greeks call hygran usian’.44 Bernard knew no Greek, and the (to him meaningless) hygranusian, perhaps in a bad text, has become the proper name Granusion. In Bernard’s successor, Alanus ab Insulis, we find an equally close linkage. In his Anticlaudian45 we are told that the soul is fastened to the body gumphis subtilibus, ‘with tiny little nails’. We may smile at the (almost ‘metaphysical’) quaintness of the image, which, if deliberate, would be quite characteristic of Alanus. In reality he is exactly following Chalcidius,46 who is exactly following Plato,47 and may not even know very clearly what a gumphus is. Such trifles deserve mention only as illustrations of the close discipleship that Chalcidius won from the poets of Chartres. The importance of that discipleship lies in the vigour, the gusto and sprightliness, of their response and the part it played in recommending certain images and attitudes to the vernacular authors.
B. MACROBIUS
Macrobius lived at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth centuries. His religion also has been doubted, but there seems no solid reason for supposing that it was other than Paganism. He belonged, however, to a circle in which Christian and Pagan could freely mingle. The Christian Albinus and that great Pagan champion the elder Symmachus were among his friends. Of his two works, the Saturnalia, a long, learned, urbane, and rambling conversation-piece, does not concern us. Our business is with his commentary48 on the Somnium Scipionis. This, and the text which accompanied it, saved that part of Cicero’s Republic for us. Nearly fifty manuscripts survive; it was a work of immense reputation and long-lasting influence.
On geography Macrobius repeats Cicero’s doctrine of the five zones. It is reasonable to suppose that the Southern Temperate Zone is, like ours, inhabited, ‘but we never have had, and shall never have, the possibility of discovering by whom’. Macrobius finds it still necessary (it would not have been in the Middle Ages) to remove a childish misunderstanding of what we call gravitation. There is no danger lest the inhabitants of the southern hemisphere should fall off into the nether sky; the Earth’s surface is ‘down’ for them as it is for us (II, v). The Ocean covers most of the T
orrid Zone; two great branches from it in the East, and two in the West, flow North and South, to meet at the Poles. From the meeting of their currents the tides result. The dry land thus falls into four main divisions. The great land-mass of Europe, Asia, and Africa is doubtless one of these four (II, ix). A diagrammatically simplified version of this lay-out survives in the later ‘wheel-maps’. As we are cut off, in space, from the Antipodes, so we are almost cut off, in time, from most of the past. Nearly the whole human race has frequently been destroyed by great global catastrophes; nearly, for there has always been a remnant. Egypt has never been destroyed; that is why Egyptian records remount to an antiquity elsewhere unknown (II, x). The idea goes back to Plato’s Timaeus (21e–23b) which in its turn may have been suggested by the delightful story in Herodotus (II, 143): Hecataeus the historian, visiting Egyptian Thebes, boasted that he was descended from a god in the sixteenth generation—which would take him safely back to a period before any continuous Greek records. Then the priests took him into a hall where stood the statues of those who had held the hereditary priesthood, and traced the line back, son to father, son to father; when they had reached the 145th generation they had still not come within sight of a god or even a demigod. This reflects the real difference between Greek and Egyptian history.
Thus, though civilisation in most parts of the Earth is always comparatively recent, the universe has always existed (II, x). If Macrobius describes its formation in terms which imply time, this must be taken merely as a convenience of discourse. Whatever was purest and most limpid (liquidissimum) rose to the highest place and was called aether. That which had less purity and some small degree of weight became air and sank to the second level. That which had still some fluidity but was gross (corpulentum) enough to offer tactual resistance, was gathered together into the stream of water. Finally, out of the whole tumult of matter all that was irreclaimable (vastum) was scraped off and cleansed from the (other) elements (ex defaecatis abrasum elementis), and sank down and settled at the lowest point, plunged in binding and unending cold (I, xxii). Earth is in fact the ‘offscourings of creation’, the cosmic dust-bin. This passage may also throw light on one in Milton. In Paradise Lost, VII, the Son has just marked out the spherical area of the Universe with His golden compasses (225). Then the spirit of God