All this information was the common property of the period; Richard of Berbezilh, for instance, an "aesthetic" troubadour, tells us that--like a still-born lion's cub which was only brought to life by the roaring of its dam--he was awakened to life by his mistress. (He does not say whether it was by her roaring.) Conrad of Würzburg compares the Holy Virgin to a lioness who brings her dead cubs, _i.e._, mankind, to life with loud roaring. Bartolomé Zorgi, another troubadour of the same period, likens his lady to a snake, for--he explains--"she flees from the nude poet and her courage only returns with his clothes." During the whole mediaeval period the unicorn was a well-known symbol of virginity, more especially of the virginity of Mary. The _Golden Smithy_ of the German minnesinger, afterwards monk Conrad of Würzburg, contains a rather abstruse poem which begins:
The hunt began; The heavenly unicorn Was chased into the thicket Of this alien world, And sought, imperial maid, Within thine arms a sanctuary.... etc.
Natural history was in a parlous state, and geographical knowledge was equally spurious. The Church was averse to natural research, for the only problem in the world was the salvation of man from everlasting damnation. Not only Tertullian, but several Fathers of the Church, regarded physical research as superfluous and absurd, and even as godless. "What happiness shall be mine if I know where the Nile has its source, or what the physicists fable of heaven?" asked Lactantius. And, "Should we not be regarded as insane if we pretended to have knowledge of matters of which we can know nothing? How much more, then, are they to be regarded as raving madmen who imagine that they know the secrets of nature, which will never be revealed to human inquisitiveness?" Here one is reminded of a remark made in "Phædros" by _the wisest of all Greeks_, who refused to leave town because "what could Socrates learn from trees and grass?" And Julius Cæsar wrote an account of his wars to while away the time when he was crossing the Alps.
Very likely the system of the Church would have been less rigid had it not largely been occupied in dealing with ignorant barbarians. In the case of Celts and Teutons, a complete and unassailable form of dogmatics with its corollary of hieratical intolerance was the only possible system. The traditions of these peoples were far too foreign to Christianity to allow Christian germs to flourish in their soil. And the new nations, accepting what Rome offered to them, were completely unproductive in their adolescence. The achievement of this fatal first millenary might be formulated as follows: "The civilised world of Western Europe was united under the government of the Church of Rome; on all nations it had been impressed in the same combination of words and similes that they were living in a sinful world; they knew when this world had been created and when its Saviour had appeared; they knew that its end would come together with the bodily resurrection of the dead and the terrible day of the Last Judgment; they knew that demons were lurking everywhere, seeking to destroy man's soul, and that the Church alone could save him. All these facts were as unalterable as the return of the seasons."