Note 432 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The literary power of the whole is great, and may be recommended to the general reader as comparing often with that shown in the satirical and social-didactic poems of Burns, though without much of the breath of poetry. Particularly noteworthy, in the historic retrospect, is the assimilization of the ancient Stoic philosophy of “living according to Nature,” set forth in the name of a “Reason” who is notably free from theological prepossessions. It is from this standpoint that Jean de Meung assails the mendicant friars and the monks in general: he would have men recognize the natural laws of life; and he carries the principle to the length of insisting on the artificial nature of aristocracy and monarchy, which are justifiable only as far as they subserve the common good. Thus he rises above the medieval literary prejudice against the common people, whose merit he recognizes as Montaigne did later. On the side of science, he expressly denies432 that comets carry any such message as was commonly ascribed to them alike by popular superstition and by theology—a stretch of freethinking perhaps traceable to Seneca, but nonetheless centuries in advance of the Christendom of the time.433 On the side of religion, again, he is one of the first to vindicate the lay conception of Christian excellence as against the ecclesiastical. His Naturalism, so far, worked consistently in making him at once anti-ascetic and anti-supernaturalist.