Albert, Roger, Thomas, combined, as did Aristotle and Descartes, the science of nature with the philosophy of thought; and, though we look back to the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon with wonder and admiration for his marvellous anticipatory guesses of modern science, we cannot doubt that Aquinas was truly the mightier intellect. Roger Bacon was, indeed, four centuries in advance of his age — on his own age and on succeeding ages he produced no influence at all. But Aquinas was ' the master of those who know ' for all Christian thinkers from his death, in 1274, until the age of Francis Bacon and Descartes. Roger Bacon, like Leonardo da Vinci, or Giordano Bruno, or Spinoza, belongs to the order of intellectual pioneers, who are too much in advance of their age and of its actual resources to promote civilisation as they might do, or even to make the most of their own extraordinary powers.
An age which united aspiring intellect, passionate devotion, and constructive power, naturally created a new type of sacred art. The pointed architecture, that we call Gothic, had its rise, its development, its highest splendour in the thirteenth century, to which we owe all that is most lovely in the churches of Chartres, Amiens, Reims, Paris, Bourges, Strasburg, Cologne, Burgos, Toledo, Westminster, Salisbury, and Lincoln.
It is true that there are some traces of the pointed style in France in the twelfth century, at St. Denis, at Sens, and at Laon; but the true glories of this noble art belong, in France, to the reigns of Philip Augustus and of St. Louis; in England, to those of Henry in. and Edward i. In these two countries we must seek the origin of this wonderful creation of human art, of which Chartres, Amiens, and Westminster are the central examples. These glorious fanes of the thirteenth century were far more than works of art: they were at once temples, national monuments, museums, schools sofia daily tours, musical academies, and parliament halls, where the whole people gathered to be trained in every form of art, in all kinds of knowledge, and in all modes of intellectual cultivation.
They were the outgrowth of the whole civilisation of their age, in a manner so complete and intense, that its like was never before seen, except on the Acropolis of Athens, in the age of Eschylus and Pericles. It is not enough to recall the names of the master masons — Robert de Luzarches, Robert de Coucy, Erwin of Steinbach, and Pierre de Montereau. These vast temples are the creation of generations of men and the embodiment of entire epochs; and he who would know the Middle Ages should study in detail every carved figure, every painted window, each . canopy, each relief, each portal in Amiens, or Chartres, Reims, Bourges, Lincoln, or Salisbury, and he will find revealed to him more than he can read 'in a thousand books.
Great age of architecture
Obviously the thirteenth century is the great age of architecture — the branch of art which of all the arts of form is at once the most social, the most comprehensive, and the most historic. Great buildings include sculpture, painting, and all the decorative arts together; they require the co-operation of an entire people; and they are, in a peculiar manner, characteristic of their age. The special arts of form are more associated with individual genius. These, as was natural, belong to centuries later than the thirteenth. But, even in the thirteenth, sculpture gave us the peopled portals and the exquisite canopies of our northern cathedrals, the early palaces of Venice, and the carvings of Nicolas and John of Pisa, which almost anticipate Ghiberti and Donatello. And in painting, Cimabue opens in this century the long roll of Italian masters, and Giotto was already a youth of glorious promise, before the century was closed.
The literature of the thirteenth century does not, in the strict sense of the term, stand forth with such special brilliancy as its art, its thought, and its political activity. As in most epochs of profound stirring of new ideas and of great efforts after practical objects, the energy of the age was not devoted to the composition of elaborate works. It was natural that Dante should be a century later than Barbarossa and Innocent, and that Petrarch of Vaucluse should be a century later than Francis of Assisi. But the thirteenth century was amply represented, both in poetry, romance, and prose history. All of these trace their fountain-heads to an earlier age, and all of them were fully developed in a later age.
But French prose may be said to have first taken form in the chronicle of Villehardouin at the opening of the century, and the chronicle of Join- ville at its close. The same century also added to the Catholic Hymnal some of the most powerful pieces in that glorious Anthology— the Dies Irce, the Stabat Mater; the grand hymns of Aquinas, of Bonaventura, and of Thomas of Celano. It produced also that rich repertory of devotional story, the Golden Legend of Voragine. It was, moreover, the thirteenth century which produced the main part of the Roman de la Rose, the favourite reading of the Middle Ages, some of the best forms of the Arthurian cycle, Ruteboeuf and the French lyrists, some of the most brilliant of the Troubadours, Sordello, Brunetto Latini, Guido Cavalcanti, and the precursors and associates of Dante.
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