An outline of Jerome's life will help to indicate his place in history and also some of the influences to which he was subjected and which have left their mark on his biblical work. Much effort has been devoted to establishing his chronology, but as the evidence consists largely in the rather vague remarks contained in his writings the dates assigned are in part only approximate, and even today there is no complete agreement among scholars. The dates accepted here are those of F. Cavallera, except that the date of Jerome's death should perhaps be 420 and not 419, the date given by that biographer. The date of his birth is at the latest 347, and may have been a year or two earlier.

Jerome was born at Stridon on the borders of Pannonia and Dalmatia, not far from Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic. This place is mentioned nowhere except in the last section of Jerome's De Viris Illustribus; it was destroyed in an invasion of the Goths, and its very site is today a matter of speculation. His parents were Christian, but apparently not particularly zealous in their attachment to their religion. They were in easy circumstances, and after his early education in his native place they were able to send their son to Rome at the age of about twelve for further studies. Here he was fortunate enough to have the celebrated grammarian Donatus as his teacher. Under his tuition Jerome gave himself ardently to the study of the great classical writers.

In a letter written to Jerome in 403, Augustine mentioned that in Eoa (Tripoli) a bishop had caused a disturbance, and had nearly lost his flock, through reading a lesson from Jonah in Jerome's new Latin version. Jerome replied that the trouble was doubtless due to his improved rendering of the Hebrew qiqqayon (gourd), for which he had replaced the earlier cucurbita by hedera, itself admittedly not a perfect rendering. The incident is a fair example of perhaps the most formidable kind of opposition against which any revised or new translation of the Scriptures may have to struggle: if the student is to appreciate adequately the forces at play, it is essential for him to gain some insight into the minds of the laity as well as the scholars and theologians ranged for or against innovation. As for the case in point, we may remind ourselves of the widespread recognition in Jonah and his experiences of a type of Christ, and there are plentiful examples from the second century onwards of Jonah's frequent representation in early Christian iconography. These reflect the strength of the popular notion of the plant that shaded Jonah as a gourd, a notion too sturdy to give way before Jerome's proposed ivy—a point with which Rufinus, in castigating Jerome, makes sarcastic play. With one doubtful exception, the surviving monuments will have none of the ivy, tout simple; they show either the plain gourd, or compromise with a hybrid invention exhibiting features of both gourd and ivy.

Biblical illustration in the middle ages is a vast subject whose study is still very much in its infancy. It is, therefore, impossible to give more than a brief sketch of the variety of forms which it takes. By now it is clear that illustrations of the books of the Bible were already in use by the fourth century of our era and that certain Jewish communities also had access to representations of biblical subjects. This is indicated by the paintings in the synagogue at Doura Europos which date from the middle of the third century and have scenes from the stories of Moses, Elijah, Esther and the vision of Ezekiel. The Moses series at Doura suggests that these may occasionally have been fairly complete cycles. It is difficult to be certain whether the Jewish communities of this period possessed bible picture-books. Naturally the scrolls of the Law bore no decoration, and early illustrated Jewish books have not survived. Christians seem to have been less reluctant to illustrate their bibles, though the earliest examples are by no means lavish in their provision of pictures.

In this chapter an attempt will be made to indicate something of the various methods of providing bible pictures in manuscripts between about 600 and about 1450. If the material were to be confined to the Bible as a composite work this would produce an extremely incomplete picture, since some of the fullest series of illustrations are to be found in volumes devoted to a single book or a group of books such as the book of Genesis, the Pentateuch or the four Gospels.

THE TEXT

The aim and object of the textual critic is to deduce from all the available material what the original author wrote. None of the original manuscripts of the New Testament exists, and, until the age of printing began in the fifteenth century, all manuscripts were copied by hand. Mistakes arose inevitably in the process. The reader is challenged to copy out a page of the New Testament fairly rapidly without an error: mistakes were easier to make in the early days of the Church, when words were not separated in writing, and when punctuation and Greek breathings and accents were absent from the capital (uncial) letters employed. Alterations to the text during the process of transmission could be either accidental or intentional. By accident, words or lines were omitted by a scribe whose eye passed over one word or phrase to another similar to it (haplography) or they were written by him twice (dittography). The former error constantly occurred at the end of a sentence or a phrase, when the scribe's eye had left the original to concentrate on the copy, so that, of two phrases ending in a similar or identical way, one is omitted (homoioteleuton). Sometimes a scribe working in a scriptorium, and hearing the original text being read out, would be guilty of errors of ear rather than of eye; αi, εi, η are constantly confused; even ήμεĩs is written for υμεĩs, ‘we’ for ‘you’, cf. Col. i. 7. For the critic such errors have often a value, because, unless they are pure accidents that might happen to a number of scribes independently, they point to textual relationship: the more errors that one manuscript has in common with another, the greater is the probability of their affinity.

The Old Testament textualist is today more concerned with the story of the textual transmission up to the middle ages than ever before. It is from its manuscripts that he derives both the text itself and the variants for his apparatus criticus, and his interpretation of the medieval transmission controls, to a large extent, his choice of readings. Consequently, the relevance of the present survey of the medieval transmission lies not so much in providing information about textual activities but in an appraisal of their use in the contemporary textual situation. The topic as a whole falls into two fairly exclusive sections, namely the Hebrew (Massoretic) text, and the Versions.

THE HEBREW (MASSORETIC) TEXT

The traditional view of the Hebrew transmission was that the textual minutiae of the Law as the most significant part of the Scriptures were fixed for all time under the influence of Rabbi Aqiba (c. A.D. 55–137), and the standardization of the remainder followed soon afterwards, to produce the official Massoretic text. From that time onward all manuscripts were scrupulously transcribed according to the archetype, and scrutinized by official scribes, so that a correct transmission was assured. Rabbinic evidence, it was said, supported this reconstruction.

On four occasions in rabbinic writings we are told, with a few variations, that three scrolls of the Law, with minor textual divergences, were deposited in the Temple court, and in each case of divergence it was ruled that the majority reading was authoritative. The fact that the legend is set in the Temple area shows that discussion about text standardization goes back at least to the time before A.D. 70, the date of the sack of Jerusalem.

In the eyes of the biblical writers, the course of history seemed to be not only the training-ground of the human spirit but also a sphere in which were displayed the workings of the power of God. History might thus provide abundant examples of the faithfulness, or the perversity, with which mankind responds to the unshakeable ‘commandments and statutes and judgements of the Lord’, yet it is more than the ‘storehouse containing all the countless lessons of the past’, which Cicero held it to be, since it bears the majestic impress of the divine. The richly significant run of events is therefore to be valued, both for its own sake, as a story with a moral, and as offering intimations and symbols of a deeper truth: in the language of Sir Thomas Browne, ‘unspeakable mysteries are delivered in a vulgar and illustrative way’ because ‘while we are veiled in with mortality, truth must veil itself too, that it may the more fully converse with us’. The historical writings of the Old and New Testament serve to teach men the lessons which make them wise unto salvation, and also by their hints of ‘something far more deeply interfused’ propose limitless subjects for contemplation and reverence. Christian history teaches and suggests, and what applies to Christian history applies to Christian art as well.

The early painters and sculptors record biblical scenes in faithful and naïvely literal fashion; yet symbolism keeps breaking in, since the events acquire fuller dignity and importance as offering glimpses of supernatural truth. In other words, the picture is used to express something beyond that which is, or was at the time, immediately apparent, and to arouse in the spectator feelings and thoughts derived from the event which is actually portrayed. The earliest Christian art, that of the Roman catacombs, is symbolic through and through.

The nationalistic ideals of the nineteenth century were still unsatisfied at the beginning of the twentieth, not only in Austria-Hungary and in German and Russian Poland but also throughout the Balkan peninsula; indeed they could only be satisfied there at the expense both of the Dual Monarchy and the Turkish Empire. The latter, ruled by the notorious Abdul Hamid, although in retreat for many years, still dominated the Balkans as it did North Africa; in theory the Turks still ruled Bosnia and Bulgaria. The Greeks were desperately dissatisfied on account of turbulent Crete and because Macedonia was still under Turkey. Macedonia was the Gordian knot of the peninsula; it was inhabited by a confusion of races each claiming the mastery. In the south there were Greeks, in the west Serbs and Albanians, in the north some Rumanians, and there were Turks scattered here and there. The biggest single group of Macedonians was considered by Bulgarians to be Bulgarian, and, ever since the abortive Treaty of San Stefano in 1878, Bulgaria had considered Macedonia to belong to her by right. The most famous Macedonian nationalist body, the terroristic ‘Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation’ (I.M.R.O.), had been founded in 1893 to fight the Turks. In 1903 at Mürzsteg Austria-Hungary and Russia agreed to a programme for the administrative reform of Macedonia, and the other great powers supported them with the Turks.

When Lord Acton was planning The Cambridge Modern History in 1896 he wrote of the venture:

Acton projected the History as a work of universal history, ‘distinct from the combined history of all countries’.

Few historians today have Acton's confidence that universal history or ultimate history can yet be written. Indeed, Sir George Clark, in his ‘General Introduction’ to the New Cambridge Modern History, disclaimed for historians of his generation the belief that it would be possible to write ‘definitive history’. ‘This new issue of the Cambridge Modern History has been planned neither as a stepping-stone to definitive history, nor as an abstract or a scale-reduction of all our knowledge of the period, but as a coherent body of judgements true to the facts.’

Never had the British Empire been more unpopular in the world than it was when the nineteenth century passed over into the twentieth; never indeed had the idea of empire been more questionable in the eyes even of a number of the subjects of that empire; but never did the majority of Britons feel more justified in taking pride in the dominance which it exerted over so large a part of the earth's surface—its ‘dominion over palm and pine’. The extraordinary, the frightful happenings in South Africa, where for a few months the British army was so ubiquitously beaten by elusive bands of bearded farmers, gave delight to those Europeans who now saw perfidious Albion in decline and fall. But Albion, though puzzled and perturbed, did not think of decline and fall; it sighed over its generals, sent put others, accepted help from the colonies (‘the lion's cubs’, in the language of the time, ‘rallying to the dam’); and with tedious inevitability wore the farmers down. On 31 May 1902 the Boer leaders accepted the Peace of Vereeniging and British sovereignty. The readers of Kipling were reassured; the Union Jack, fluttering above the veld, marked the triumph of civilisation and efficiency; the way stood open for the pacifying efforts of Lord Milner's ‘kindergarten’, the young men from Oxford whose minds were suffused with the light of a liberal empire; and colonial Prime Ministers, like New Zealand's Richard John Seddon, released the ample folds of their homespun eloquence, congratulating and advising, upon a Mother Country that was both gratified and embarrassed.

There were so many changes in economic structure and relationships during the first half of the twentieth century, so many vicissitudes of fortune both for national communities and for social groups within them, that long before the outbreak of the second world war in 1939 it was clear that there could be no return to the theory and practice of international economic interdependence as both were understood in the world before the outbreak of the first world war in 1914. Although subsequent changes since 1939—and more particularly since 1950—have in some respects been even more drastic, there was such a sharp contrast in experience between the world before 1914 and the world after 1914 that contemporaries found it difficult to adapt themselves to new circumstances or to meet the challenge of new problems.

Before 1914, important economic changes, like the growth of the industrial power of the United States or the development of new technologies based on steel and electricity, took place within a system of specialisation which did not change as a whole: mutability in particulars seemed to be consistent with general stability. After 1918, serious maladjustments hi the internal economies of the European countries, along with boom and slump of unprecedented dimensions in the United States, involved such dislocations and shocks to the international economy that there was a tendency to idealise the state of affairs before the debacle. At the same time critics were emerging who pointed to serious limitations and shortcomings.

In 1909 Norman Angell published his polemic The Great Illusion, in which he argued that the increasingly international character of trade, commerce and finance had rendered wars between sovereign states not merely unprofitable, but positively harmful to victors and vanquished alike. A decade earlier had appeared a remarkable six-volume treatise entitled The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations by Ivan S. Bloch, a Warsaw banker. Bloch began on the sound tactical principle that firepower was bestowing ever greater strength to the defensive; so that in future wars infantry must take refuge in trenches or suffer fearful carnage. He envisaged wars of the future as enormous sieges, with famine as the final arbiter. Bloch, like Angell, concluded that war had become impossible—except at the price of suicide—since even the winners would suffer the destruction of their resources and risk social disintegration.

These and other warning voices made little impact on either soldiers or statesmen in the decade before 1914. The consolidation of the rival alliances, a succession of international crises, and the increasing likelihood of an explosion in the Balkans, were but the surface symptoms of a profound malaise. Politically these years provide a terrible indictment of the self-defeating quest for national security through secret diplomacy and armed might. Psychologically, too, nations were being conditioned for war: by propaganda; by the spurious application of the Darwinian struggle to the human species; by bitter class divisions; and not least by self-delusion as to the nature of war.

Philosophy is a continuing conversation. Its texture and structure, its methods and results, are closely similar to those of an evening's talk in a crowded room. Somebody who comes along afterwards to give you an account of what was said, whether he speaks as a direct ear-witness and participant or as a more or less ill-informed reporter, will present a picture that is distorted in one or more of a number of characteristic ways. It will oversimplify or overcomplicate, dramatise too much or too little; a monologue about a dialogue can never do full justice to its changes of key, pitch and tempo. Unless the history of philosophy is itself written as a conversation, it will not be likely to represent accurately the conversation that is philosophy.

Although philosophers from Socrates and Plato to Hegel and Wittgenstein have spoken of philosophy as dialectical, most philosophers, and nearly all non-philosophical readers and observers of philosophy, have failed to take seriously enough its dialectical, conversational character. Both in the conduct of philosophy itself, and in writing the history of philosophy, they have been too attached to political or even military analogies: to pictures of philosophers as forming parties or regiments, following leaders, firing at each other across gulfs, canyons or unbridgeable torrents, or shouting at each other across the floor of a House firmly held by stable coalitions, with only rare and abrupt changes of power.

By 1900 the two dynamic forces of nationalism and industrialism had radically altered the balance of power throughout the world. Accompanied by increasing state control, they had extended European sovereignty to nearly the whole of Africa, led to new rivalries in Asia, and contributed to the spectacular development in wealth and strength of two non-European states, the U.S.A. and Japan. A further result was that the great powers in Europe were becoming greater, the small powers relatively weaker. Although the principal ‘great powers’ were still European, their relations with the peoples of other continents were of growing importance and the issues that divided them often concerned regions far beyond the confines of Europe. As the means of communication had multiplied in number and celerity, so the area and sensitivity of political repercussion had strikingly increased. By 1900 international relations were world relations in a sense unknown in 1800 or at the dawn of any previous century.

During the 1890s these relations underwent notable modifications. Bismarck had kept the peace of Europe, excluding the Balkan peninsula, for the best part of twenty years and the pattern of European relations had appeared relatively stable. But his fall in 1890, the uncertain temper of the brilliant, impulsive and indiscreet young emperor, William II, who dismissed him, and the uncertain policy of the lesser men who succeeded him and who, partly out of consideration for England, failed to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, but did renew the Triple Alliance (6 May 1891), inaugurated a period of fundamental change.

At first Czechoslovakia was not seriously affected by the Great Depression: her finances were sound: she was fairly self-sufficient. The population, at any rate in Bohemia and Moravia, was reasonably well educated, and the constitution worked satisfactorily. Here in the 'twenties there seemed to be the new twentieth-century society freed of an alien aristocracy. Life in Prague competed with that in Berlin and Vienna; the intellectuals had the same strong bias to the left and their own special relationship with the Russians—life was less brilliant than in Berlin but a little saner, less isolated from its hinterland. An interesting figure of the day was Kafka's Milena. Before 1914 she had been a revolutionary Czech schoolgirl thirsting for national independence. Then there was Kafka and his early death; after translating his novels she became a literary journalist and a focus of Czech intellectual life. In the later ’twenties not only the Prague Jews but some of the other Bohemian Germans began to settle down to acceptance of the Czechoslovak Republic: Beneš's activities at the League of Nations —the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister presided over the Assembly of the League of Nations on the day of Germany's admission in September 1926 —added to its standing.

Their own circumstances and temperament made it difficult for the Czechs, whether Masaryk and Beneš or the general public, to grasp what began to happen all round them in the ’thirties. Stalin had chosen the path of despotism already in 1928.