clumsy, is animated by religious enthusiasm in its descriptions of battles, we detect the poet's effort to employ the machinery of the ancient epic poems. He gives lists of troops in the manner of Homer's and Virgil's catalogues, and makes his personages deliver long, artificial speeches. He uses the names of the Roman deities, Phoebus and Titan, for the sun, and calls God Tonans or Astripotens rector. Objects are designated by the same names as in classical poetry: the wounded standard-bearer of the Pisans is healed with Pæonian herbs, and the shield is called septemplex tergum or septena terga. And scattered among these, we find again the names of Christ and of the saints, the captivity of the Christians among the Mussulmans is compared with that of the Jews in Egypt, and so on. The simple fact is that the author did not put a heathen construction on the classical images and designations; they were empty forms, mere poetical ornaments, which could be employed for every object, and which appeared indispensable in poetry, because the models for all poetry, the works of the ancients, contained them. Especially remarkable in this respect is the close of the sixth book. Here is related how the souls of the slain Saracens descend to hell, and this (the Christian) hell is peopled with the personages of the classical lower world. In it Cerberus converses with Pluto, Æacus and Rhadamanthus call on the king of the shades to receive the new arrivals worthily with his punishments, and the tortures conceived by the Christian imagination. such as heat and cold, food of vipers and toads, and poisonous potions, are joined to those invented by the classics, such as the unquenched thirst of Tantalus. This transference of figures of the Pagan Tartarus to demons of the Christian hell became general; we find it adopted also in later visions of the other world, and finally, in the most splendid manner and with a deeper meaning, in Dante's "Commedia."

In the eleventh century theological and philosophical studies, till then neglected, came into great favour among the Italians, who, for a short period, even surpassed the other nations that had hitherto been in advance of them in these branches. The great movement in the Church which was due to Hildebrand, the fierce struggles for and against his innovations that raged round the investitures and the

supremacy of the spiritual power, finally the freshly kindled disputes with the Greek Church concerning the dogma of the Procession of the Holy Ghost, impelled men to study closely the questions of faith and the institutions of the Church and its history, thus producing learned theological writings, such as those of Alberic, of Monte Cassino, of S. Anselm, Bishop of Lucca, of S. Bruno, Bishop of Segni, of the Archbishop Grossolanus of Milan, and of the Archbishop Peter of Amalfi.

The man who by his sermons and writings gave the most effectual support to Hildebrand in his work of reform was S. Peter Damian, born at Ravenna in the year 1006 or 1007. First teacher of the liberal arts and of jurisprudence at Parma, then recluse in the hermitage of Fonte Avellana, 4 near Gubbio, he was, in 1057, raised to the dignity of cardinal by Pope Stephen IX., against his will and after strenuous opposition, and was employed by him, and his successors in the most difficult missions for putting an end to the disorders and for settling the disputes of the Church, till his death, which occurred at Faenza in 1072. Peter Damian is the most zealous representative of the new ascetic tendency which had emanated from the Abbey of Cluny, after a period of secularisation, and had been introduced into Italy especially by S. Romualdus. The goal it strove to attain was the conversion of erring humanity, but chiefly the purification of the profaned Church. S. Damian is a preacher of penance, a pitiless accuser and judge of vice, which he depicted in terrible colours. The ideas of medieval asceticism find in him their gloomiest expression. He believes the appearance of the Antichrist and the Day of the Last Judgment to be not far distant, and recognises this through the growing depravity of mankind. "As in a tempest," he says with powerful imagery, "the high sea is more calm and less dangerous, but along the coast the breakers dash up, so human corruption, now that the end of this world is drawing up near, is boiling up more wildly against its banks and making the waves of lust and pride tower on high ("Epist.” i. 15). In his sermons enjoining penance, in his letters and treatises he struggles unceasingly against the same enemies that Pope Gregory wished to root out, namely simony and the marriage and illicit intercourse of the priesthood. The

negligent he endeavours to terrify through tales of sinners who died suddenly and terribly, without having time for repentance, or by accounts of visions of the other world and of apparitions of the dead, which he repeats with devout faith. The remedy against moral corruption is, in his eyes, the mortification of the flesh; he defends and praises physical penance, such as fasting, keeping silence, genuflexions, and above all, flagellation, in praise of which he composed a special treatise, and the practice of which he endeavoured to spread among the monasteries. The hermit's life, which is entirely made up of these exercises, prayer and pious contemplation, he takes to be the highest state of perfection for mankind, the state in which the soul, freed from all earthly impurity, becomes again more like its original imageGod.

Damian is familiar with the secular learning of his time, quotes the classical poets, historians and philosophers, and employs the dialectics of the schools in his polemical writings. However, this is, in his eyes, strictly subservient to a higher knowledge, and he wrote the famous words that philosophy should be the handmaiden of theology: "Human science," he says, "when it is employed in treating sacred subjects, must not presume to play the part of the teacher, but must serve its mistress readily like a handmaiden, so as not to go astray by wishing to be in advance" ("De Divina Omnipotentia," cap. 5). Worldly knowledge is, in his eyes, only a means to the end, a preparation for the better understanding of things eternal, and, when comparing divine and secular wisdom, he sets small value on the latter, at times even despises it, and inveighs against those who cultivate it for its own sake, blaming those monks who "slighting the precepts of Benedict, rather occupy themselves with those of Donatus " ("De Perfectione Monachorum," cap. 11). this respect, therefore, Damian is opposed to the classical studies of the time, which he allows to be only limited in value, though he takes part in them in no small degree. His true learning is in the dogmas, the Fathers of the Church, and the Holy Scripture. Here he has few equals. He shows great skill in that allegorical and mystical interpretation of passages of the Bible, practised since Ambrosius, which connects them with moral doctrines or with the destiny of the

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human soul; of this his sermons and letters are full. Damian adopted this tropological or spiritual interpretation not alone for the Bible, but also for the fabulous medieval natural history of animals, devoting to this subject a special treatise, dedicated to the monks of Monte Cassino ("De bono religiosi status ex variorum animantium tropologia"), which is accordingly nothing more or less than one of the older allegorised bestiaries. For the theologian, nature transforms herself into a teacher of morals; in Damian's eyes, God gave each animal its powers and properties merely with a view to enabling mankind, by dint of contemplating and interpreting them, to derive precepts for the salvation of their own souls.

What Damian has to say on the relations between the spiritual and temporal power is important; he is the first to formulate more precisely the idea that they are mutually independent of each other, and that the two spheres of authority are to be kept apart. "One cannot do without the other; the priesthood is protected by the power of the State, and the State is supported by the sanctity of the sacerdotal office. The King is girded with the sword, so that he may oppose in arms the enemies of the Church; the priest devotes himself to prayer, so as to make God propitious to the King and to the people. The former must weigh earthly matters in the scales of justice, the latter offer the water of God's word to those that thirst." These words he wrote to the young Emperor, Henry IV., at the same time exhorting him to put aside the anti-Pope Honorius ("Epist.," vii. 3). Here Damian does not hold quite the same views as Hildebrand; he was not endowed with that rigid consistency and inflexibility, which he admired in his great friend, when he compared him with the north wind, and called him a “holy Satan." He himself is more inclined to invoke the aid of the Empire in the settlement of ecclesiastical disputes, and the precedence which he certainly wishes to secure for the Pope, is only that of respect. But it must be remembered that he did not live to see the most violent phase of the struggle, and considered possible the close union of the two powers, which were together to guide the human race, each in its own way. Just as the offices of priest and king were united in Christ, so, too, it is to happen, through the bond

of mutual love, with the exalted persons of the spiritual and temporal ruler, "that the King is to be contained in the Pope, as the Pope in the King, but without prejudice to the prerogatives of the Pope... He, as the father, is always to maintain the precedence, according to paternal right, and the King, as the only son, is to rest in the embraces of his love" ("Disceptatio Synodalis," conclusion). This independence and union of Church and Empire remained the ever unattainable ideal of the Middle Ages.

Damian's ecstatic religiousness sought to express itself also in poetic form; in his hymns he adopts with ease and skill the ancient metres, but more frequently he employs rhythmical measures, and in those cases approaches the popular tone also by the simple way in which he expresses his feelings. Some of these songs are of real poetical beauty, especially the hymn "De Gloria Paradisi," which depicts the joys of the blessed in sonorous verses, and with rich and warm colours, such as the popular imagination derives from the choicest things on earth.

Two other Italians of this period, whose names belong to the most celebrated in medieval science, Lanfranc and S. Anselm of Canterbury, spent all the later part of their lives in a foreign country, and it was not till they resided away from Italy that they began to occupy themselves with and to write on theology and philosophy. Lanfranc was born in Pavia about the year 1005, of noble family, studied the liberal arts and law in Bologna, acquired an unusually wide knowledge in these branches, and then crossed the Alps, in order to show his skill as lawyer and dialectician among other nations. He came to Avranches in Normandy, where a misfortune occurred to him that induced him to change his career. One day, on the road from Avranches to Rouen, he was robbed by highwaymen, and bound to a tree; in this desperate position, with death before his eyes, he vowed to devote his life to God. Having been liberated on the following morning by travellers, he entered the monastery of Le Bec, where he underwent the severest privations and castigations (1042). But he was recognised as the great scholar; he opened a school (1046), which soon became famous, and to which those eager for knowledge repaired in large numbers from all parts, so that the