In the middle ages 105

ern student of art by the logic of their plan. To

make the edifice a mirror of nature, of the moral

world, and of history, architecture calls to its aid

sculpture, painting, and stained glass. Immense

shrines populate themselves with statues, with fig-

ures of animals, plants, and foliage, with designs of

every kind. The visible world was a veritable re-

flection of the thought of God for the mediaeval

artists ; hence they thought that all creatures might

find a place in the cathedral. Likewise, the cathe-

dral is the mirror of science, and, in fact, all kinds-

of knowledge, even the humblest, such as fitted men*

for manual labor and for the making of calendars,

and also the highest, such as liberal arts, philosophy,

and theology, were given plastic form. Thus the

cathedral could readily serve as a visible catechism,

where the man of the thirteenth century could find

in simple outline all that he needed to believe and to

know. The highest was made accessible to the low-

est. Architecture has never been more social and

popular at any other period of history.

As for literature, while the productions of the

thirteenth century do not rank with their monu-

ments of stone, nevertheless they represent great en-

deavor. A work like the Ro7nan de la Rose is a

sort of encyclopedia of everything that a cultured

layman of the middle of the thirteenth century

ought to know. The Divine Comedy, a work which

has not been imitated and which is inimitable, is a

symphony of the whole time. Dante's stage is the

106 PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION

universe; he is a citizen of the world, and he in-

forms us that he writes "the sacred poem to which

heaven and earth put their hands."*

While the artists were thus giving birth to new

life in art, the intellectual classes were hungering

and thirsting to know all, to assemble everything

within the domain of knowledge, and, after having

completed the collection, to submit all to order.

There are different levels in that effort toward

order. At the lower level the encyclopaedists ex-

press the desire of the time for an inventory of all

that can be known. Thus Jacopo de Voragine, in

the Golden Legend, gathers together the legends

of the lives of the saints; William the bishop

of Mende collects all that has been said about the

Catholic liturgy. There are compilers like Bar-

tholomeus Anglicus, author of a treatise De Pro-

prietatibus. Above all there is Vincent of Beau-

vais, who wrote an enormous Speculum Quadru-

ples, a veritable Encyclopedia Britannica of the

thirteenth century. Vincent calls attention to the

brevitas temporum which is at the disposal of his

contemporaries and to the multitudo librorum

which they must read, in order to excuse himself

for giving his ideas on all possible subjects.^ Much

the same may be said of the work of the jurists of

Bologna and of the canonists — although doctrine

i Divina Commedia, Paradise, XXV,

^Speculum hintorinJo, cip. I (vol. I incunablc, ed. Mcntellini,

1473-6).