LATIN LITERATURE
BY
J. W. MACKAIL
III
THE EMPIRE.
VI.
EARLY LATIN CHRISTIANITY: MINUCIUS FELIX, TERTULLIAN, LACTANTIUS.
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Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius, a name eminent among patristic
authors, and not inconsiderable in humane letters, had, like Cyprian,
been a professor of rhetoric, and embraced Christianity in mature life.
That he was a pupil of Arnobius is established by the testimony of
Jerome; his African birth is only a doubtful inference from this fact.
Towards the end of the third century he established a school at
Nicomedia, which had practically become the seat of empire under the rule
of Diocletian; and from there he was summoned to the court of Gaul to
superintend the education of Crispus, the ill-fated son of Constantine.
The new religion had passed through its last and sharpest persecution
under Diocletian; now, of the two joint Emperors Constantine openly
favoured the Christians, and Licinius had been forced to relax the
hostility towards them which he had at first shown. As it permeated the
court and saw the reins of government almost within its grasp, the Church
naturally dropped some of the anathematising spirit in which it had
regarded art and literature in the days of its earlier struggles.
Lactantius brought to its service a taste trained in the best literary
tradition; and while some doubt was cast on his dogmatic orthodoxy as
regards the precise definition of the Persons of the Trinity, his pure
and elegant diction was accepted as a model for later writers. His
greatest work, the seven books of the "Institutes of Divinity", was
published a few years before the victory of Constantine over Maxentius
outside the walls of Rome, which was the turning-point in the contest
between the two religions. It is an able exposition of Christian doctrine
in a style which, for eloquence, copiousness, and refinement, is in the
most striking contrast to the wretched prose produced by contemporary
pagan writers. The influence of Cicero is obvious and avowed throughout;
but the references in the work show the author to have been familiar with
the whole range of the Latin classics, poets as well as prose writers.
Ennius, the comedians and satirists, Virgil and Horace, are cited by him
freely; he even dares to praise Ovid. In his treatise "On Gods
Workmanship" -- "De Opificio Dei" -- the arguments are often borrowed with
the language from Cicero, but Lucretius is also quoted and combated. The
more fanatical side of the new religion appears in the curious work, "De
Mortibus Persecutorum", written after Constantine had definitely thrown
in his lot with Christianity. It is famous as containing the earliest
record of the vision of Constantine before the battle of the Mulvian
Bridge; and its highly coloured account of the tragical fates of the
persecuting Emperors, from Nero to Diocletian, had a large effect in
fixing the tradition of the later Empire as viewed throughout the Middle
Ages. The long passionate protest of the Church against heathen tyranny
breaks out here into equally passionate exultation; the Roman Empire is
already seen, as it was later by St. Augustine, fading and crumbling away
with the growth of the new and imperial City of God.
Besides the large and continuous volume of its prose production, the
Latin Church of the third century also made its first essays in poetry.
They are both rude and scanty; it was not till late in the fourth century
that Christian poetry reached its full development in the hymns of
Ambrose and Prudentius, and the hexameter poems of Paulinus of Nola. The
province of Africa, fertile as it was in prose writers, never produced a
poet of any eminence. The pieces in verse -- they can hardly be called
poems -- ascribed to Tertullian and Cyprian are forgeries of a late period.
But contemporary with them is an African verse-writer of curious
linguistic interest, Commodianus. A bishop of Marseilles, who wrote, late
in the fifth century, a continuation of St. Jerome's catalogue of
ecclesiastical writers, mentions his work in a very singular phrase:
"After his conversion," he says, "Commodianus wrote a treatise against
the pagans in an intermediate language approximating to verse," "mediocri
sermone quasi versu". This treatise, the "Carmen Apologeticum adversus
Iudaeos et Gentes", is extant, together with other pieces by the same
author. It is a poem of over a thousand lines, which the allusions to the
Gothic war and the Decian persecution fix as having been written in or
very near the year 250. It is written in hexameters, composed on a system
which wavers between the quantitative and accentual treatment. These are
almost evenly balanced. The poem is thus a document of great importance
in the history of the development of mediaeval out of classical poetry.
Though not, of course, without his barbarisms, Commodianus was obviously
neither ignorant nor careless of the rules of classical versification,
some of which -- for instance, the strong caesura in the middle of the
third foot -- he retains with great strictness. His peculiar prosody is
plainly deliberate. Only a very few lines are wholly quantitative, and
none are wholly accentual, except where accent and quantity happen to
coincide. Much of the pronunciation of modern Italian may be traced in
his remarkable accentuation of some words; like Italian, he both throws
back the accent off a long syllable and slides it forward upon a short
one. Assonance is used freely, but there is not more rhyming than is
usual in the poetry of the late empire. Not only in pronunciation, but in
grammatical inflexion, the beginnings of Italian here and there appear.
The case-forms of the different declensions are beginning to run into one
another: the plural, for example, of "insignis" is no longer "insignes",
but, as in Italian, "insigni"; and the case-inflexions themselves are
dwindling away before the free use of prepositions, which was already
beginning to show itself in the "Pervigilium Veneris".
Popular poetry was now definitely asserting itself alongside of book-
poetry formed on the classical model. But authors who kept up a high
literary standard in prose continued to do so in verse also. The poem "De
Ave Phoenice", found in early mediaeval collections under the name of
Lactantius, and accepted as his by recent critics, is written in accurate
and graceful elegiac couplets, which are quite in accordance with the
admiration Lactantius, in his work "On the Wrath of God", expresses for
Ovid. It is perhaps the earliest instance outside the field of prose of
the truce or coalition which was slowly forming itself between the new
religion and the old culture. Beyond a certain faint and almost
impalpable mysticism, which hints at the legend of the Phoenix as
symbolical of the doctrine of the Resurrection, there is nothing in the
poem which is distinctively Christian. Phoebus and the lyre of Cyllene
are invoked, as they might be by a pagan poet. But the language is from
beginning to end full of Christian or, at least, scriptural
reminiscences, which could only be possible to a writer familiar with the
Psalter. The description with which the poem opens of the Earthly
Paradise, a "land east of the sun," where the bird has its home, has
mingled touches of the Elysium of Homer and Virgil, and the New Jerusalem
of the Revelation; as in the Psalms, the sun is a bridegroom coming out
of his chamber, and night and day are full of a language that is not
speech.
In the literary revival of the latter half of the fourth century these
tendencies have developed themselves, and taken a more mature but a less
interesting form. After Christianity had become formally and irrevocably
the State religion, it took over what was left of Latin culture as part
of the chaotic inheritance which it had to accept as the price for civil
establishment. A heavy price was paid on both sides when Constantine, in
Dante's luminous phrase, "turned the eagle." The Empire definitively
parted with the splendid administrative and political tradition founded
on the classical training and the Stoic philosophy; though shattered as
it had been in the anarchy of the third century, that was perhaps in any
case irrecoverable. The Church, on its side, drew away in the persons of
its leaders from its earlier tradition, with all that it involved in the
growth of a wholly new thought and art, and armed or hampered itself with
that classicalism from which it never again got quite free. It is in the
century before Constantine, therefore, when old and new were in the
sharpest antagonism, and yet were both full of a strange ferment -- the
ferment of dissolution in the one case, in the other that of quickening --
that the end of the ancient world, and with it the end of Latin
literature as such, might reasonably be placed. But the first result of
the alliance between the Empire and the Church was to give added dignity
to the latter and renewed energy to the former. The partial revival of
letters in the fourth century may induce us to extend our survey so far
as to include Ausonius and Claudian as legitimate, though remote,
successors of the Augustan poets.
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