After a while Hildebert passes on to consider what is man, and wherein consists his welfare:
"To any one carefully considering what man is, nothing will seem more probable than that he is a divine animal, distinguished by a certain share of divinity (numinis). By bone and flesh he smacks of the earth. By reason his affinity to God is shown. Moses, inspired, certifies that by this prerogative man was created in the image of God. Whence it also follows for man, that he should through reason recognize and love his true good. Now reason teaches that what pertains to virtue is the true good, and that it is within us. The things we temporally possess are good only by opinion (opinione, i.e. not ratione), and these are about us. What is about us is not within our jus but another's (alterius juris sunt). Chance directs them; they neither come nor stand under our arbitrament. For us they are at the lender's will (precaria), like a slave belonging to another.[1] Through such, true felicity is neither had nor lost. Indeed no one is happy, no one is wretched by reason of what is another's. It is his own that makes a man's good or ill, and whatever is not within him is not his own."
Then Hildebert speaks of dignities, of wife and child, of the fruits of the earth and riches—bona vaga, bona sunt pennata haec omnia. Men quarrel and struggle about all these things—ecce vides quanta mundus laboret insania.[2]
No one need point out how much more natural this reasoning would have been from the lips of Seneca than from those of an archiepiscopal contemporary of St. Bernard. One may, however, comment on the patent fact that this reflection of the antique in Hildebert's ethical consolation reflects a manner of reasoning rather than an emotional mood, and in this it is an instance of the general fact that mediaeval methods of reasoning consciously or unconsciously followed the antique; while the emotion, the love and yearning, of mediaeval religion was more largely the gift of Christianity.
- ↑ A technical illustration from Roman law.
- ↑ Hildeberti, Ep. ii. 12 (Migne 171, col. 172-177). Compare Ep. i, 17, consoling a friend on loss of place and dignities. Hildebert's works are in vol. 171 of Migne's Pat. Lat. A number of his poems are more carefully edited by Hauréau in Notices et extraits des MSS., etc., vol. 28, ii. p. 289 sqq.; and some of them in vol. 29, ii. p. 231 sqq. of the same series. The matter is more conveniently given by Hauréau in his Mélanges poétiques d'Hildebert de Lavardin. On the man and his writings see De servillers, Hildebert et son temps (Paris, 1876); Hebert Duperron, De Venerabilis Hildeberti vita et scriptis (Bajocis, 1855); also vol. xi. of Hist. lit. de la France; and (best of all) Dieudonné, Hildebert de Lavardin, sa vie, ses lettres, etc. (Paris, 1898).
