Chapter XXIV (3)

On his journey through Gaul we are told by Jocelin that he turned out of his road in order to pay a farewell visit to “his nurse and teacher,” St. Germanus, who furnished him with a welcome supply of chalices, priestly vestments, and books. The same writer adds that he was accompanied into Ireland by twenty Roman clerics, but it appears probable that his companions were chiefly gathered in Gaul and Britain, and Lanigan mercilessly reduces their number from twenty to two. Passing over the circumstances of his first arrival on the Irish coast, and his ineffectual efforts to convert his old master Milcho, we next find the saint in the neighbourhood of Down Patrick, where he instructed, baptized, and tonsured a young disciple named Mochoe, to whom he also taught the Roman alphabet. This last-named incident is one of very frequent recurrence in the life of St. Patrick. Nennius indeed affirms that he wrote no less than 365 alphabets;[40] but, as Bishop Lloyd quaintly remarks, “the writers of those times, when they were upon the pin of multiplying, used generally to say that things were as many as the days of the year.” It is quite certain, however, that this teaching of the Roman alphabet, the first step necessary for acquiring a knowledge of Latin, formed a very common item in the instruction of the Irish converts. We are not to conclude from this with the Bollandists, that previous to the arrival of St. Patrick the Irish possessed no knowledge of written characters, but it is at least clear that the apostle of Ireland considered it a part of his office to diffuse among the people committed to his pastoral care a knowledge of the letters, as well as of the faith of Rome. He also received into his company a number of young disciples, who, after being instructed in the faith, were gradually admitted to holy orders, and given the care of the newly-formed congregation. Thus, on his road to the great festival of Tara, which fills so conspicuous a place in the history of the saint, he preached the faith to a certain man whose young son Benan, or Benignus, fell at his feet weeping, and desiring ever to be in his company; and the saint, with the consent of his parents, received him as his disciple, or, as he is elsewhere called, his _alumnus_. This event took place on Good Friday; on the following Easter Sunday, when St. Patrick was invited to Tara to hold a conference with the pagan priests in presence of the king, the young neophyte, robed in white, carried the book of the gospels before his master, who advanced with his clergy in solemn procession, chanting an Irish hymn which he had composed for the occasion.

At another time a pious mother brought him her son Lananus, whom St. Patrick delivered to St. Cassan to be instructed in all good learning; and such was the ardour with which the boy applied himself to study, that in fifteen days he had learned the entire Psalter.[41] Again, Enda of Westmeath is represented entrusting his son Cormac to the care of the saint, to be educated by him; and he himself, in his confession, alludes to the sons of the kings who journeyed about with him (_qui mecum ambulant_). For this first seminary was not fixed in any college or monastery, but, as the above words imply, was formed of those who accompanied the apostle of Ireland in his ceaseless wanderings over the country. Popular accounts, indeed, generally represent him as founding at least a hundred monasteries, and even those who consider that the greater number of the Irish colleges were raised by his followers after his death, admit the fact of his having established an episcopal monastery and school at Armagh, where he and his clergy carried out the same rule of life that he had seen followed in the churches of Gaul. The government of this monastery was committed in the first instance to Benignus, who afterwards succeeded St. Patrick in the primacy.

The school, which formed a portion of the Cathedral establishment, soon rose in importance. Gildas taught here for some years before joining St. Cadoc at Llancarvan; and in process of time the number of students, both native and foreign, so increased that the university, as we may justly call it, was divided into three parts, one of which was devoted entirely to students of the Anglo-Saxon race. Grants for the support of the schools were made by the Irish kings in the eighth century; and all through the troublous times of the ninth and tenth centuries, when Ireland was overrun by the Danes, and so many of her sanctuaries were given to the flames, the succession of divinity professors at Armagh remained unbroken, and has been carefully traced by Usher. We need not stop to determine how many other establishments similar to those of Armagh were really founded in the lifetime of St. Patrick. In any case the rapid extension of the monastic institute in Ireland, and the extraordinary ardour with which the Irish cœnobites applied themselves to the cultivation of letters remain undisputed facts. “Within a century after the death of St. Patrick,” says Bishop Nicholson, “the Irish seminaries had so increased that most parts of Europe sent their children to be educated here, and drew thence their bishops and teachers.” The whole country for miles round Leighlin was denominated the “land of saints and scholars.” By the ninth century Armagh could boast of 7000 students, and the schools of Cashel, Dindaleathglass, and Lismore vied with it in renown. This extraordinary multiplication of monastic seminaries and scholars may be explained partly by the constant immigration of British refugees who brought with them the learning and religious observances of their native cloisters, and partly by that sacred and irresistible impulse which animates a newly converted people to heroic acts of sacrifice. In Ireland the infant church was not, as elsewhere, watered with the blood of martyrs; it was, perhaps, the only European country in which Christianity was firmly established without the faithful having to pass through the crucible of persecution. And hence the burning devotion which elsewhere swelled the white-robed army of martyrs, but which here found no such vent, sent its thousands to people the deserts and the rocky islands of the west, and filled the newly raised cloisters of Ireland with a countless throng who gave themselves to the slower martyrdom of penance and love. The bards, who were to be found in great numbers among the early converts of St. Patrick, had also a considerable share in directing the energies of their countrymen to intellectual labour. They formed the learned class, and on their conversion to Christianity were readily disposed to devote themselves to the culture of sacred letters. At the Easter festival at Tara, already alluded to, the first convert gained by St. Patrick was Dubtach, the arch-priest and poet of the country. His conversion took place in 433, and after that time he devoted his talents to the service of the faith, and taught whatever science he possessed to a school of Christian disciples.

It would be impossible, within the limits of a single chapter, to notice even the names of all the Irish seats of learning, or of their most celebrated teachers, every one of whom has his own legend in which sacred and poetic beauties are to be found blended together. One of the earliest monastic schools was that erected by Enda, prince of Orgiel, in that western island called from the wild flowers which even still cover its rocky soil, Aran-of-the-Flowers, a name it afterwards exchanged for that of _Ara-na-naomh_, or Aran-of-the Saints. There may yet be seen the rude stone church of the sixth century within which rest the bodies of the 127 saints of Aran, and at no great distance the remains of small beehive houses which served as the abode of the monks. According to Lanigan, who is seldom disposed to assign a very early date to the monastic establishments of Ireland, the foundation of Enda cannot be fixed later than the year 480. It became the nursery of some of the greatest Irish teachers, and was also the resort of students from beyond the sea. Hither came St. Carthag the elder, St. Kieran, and St. Brendan. Here too St. Fursey spent many years in solitude before going forth to found his monasteries in England and France, and here he at last returned from his splendid cloisters of Lagne on the Marne to end his days and be laid to rest in the rude sanctuary of the “Four beautiful Saints.” Nor does the holy soil of Aran fail to cherish a remembrance of St. Columba the Great. He came here before undertaking his mission to North Britain, and his admiration for the Isle of Saints is commemorated in verses wherein he declares that to sleep on the dust of Aran and within the sound of her church-bells is as desirable as to be laid to rest on the threshold of the Apostles.

A little later St. Finian founded his great school of Clonard, whence, says Usher, issued forth a stream of saints and doctors, like the Greek warriors from the wooden horse. Finian was baptized and instructed by one of the immediate disciples of St. Patrick, and after studying under various Irish masters he passed over into Britain, and there formed an intimate friendship with St. David, St. Gildas, and St. Cadoc. He remained for several years in Britain, and on returning to his own country founded several religious houses, in one of which he lectured on the Holy Scriptures for seven years. At last, about the year 530, he fixed his residence in the desert of Clonard in Westmeath, which had up to that time been the resort of a huge wild boar. This desolate wilderness was soon peopled by his disciples, who are said to have numbered 3000, of whom the twelve most eminent are often termed the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. Finian himself is commonly spoken of as the Master of Saints, and is esteemed, next to St. Patrick, as the greatest doctor of the Irish Church. “He was,” says the writer of his life, “replenished with all science as a learned scribe to teach the law of God; and he was most compassionate and charitable, weeping with those that wept and mildly healing the bodies and souls of all who applied to him. He slept on the bare ground with a stone under his head, and ate nothing but bread and herbs,” and his disciples followed the same severe manner of life. Among them none were more famous than St. Columba, St. Kieran, and St. Brendan. The first of these is known to every English reader as the founder of Iona; and Kieran, the carpenter’s son, as he is called, is scarcely less renowned among his own countrymen. Some anecdotes are told of the school life of these two great men, in which the youthful infirmities[42] so frankly recorded of both will certainly not prejudice our opinion of their future sanctity. A school in those days was not exactly arranged after the fashion of Eton or Rugby: the scholars worked for their own maintenance and that of the house; and under monastic masters this initiation into the holy law of labour was never spared even to those of princely blood. The prince and the peasant were accustomed to work and study side by side; and so it was in the school of Clonard. Columba was of royal extraction, while Kieran was of humble birth. The first task assigned the young prince was to sift the corn that was to serve for next day’s provision, and to the surprise of his more plebeian associates he accomplished it so neatly and with such rapidity that they all declared he must have been helped by an angel. Royal and noble scholars, however, are seldom popular in public schools, and Columba had not a little to endure from his companions on the score of his gentle blood. He exacted a deference from them which Kieran in particular would not submit to, and the result was a continual bickering. But at last, says the old legend, an angel appeared to Kieran, and laying before him a carpenter’s rule and other instruments of his trade, said to him, “Behold what thou hast renounced in giving up the world, but Columba has forsaken a royal sceptre.” The good heart of the carpenter’s son was touched with this reproach, and from that time he and Columba only contended in the generous rivalry of the saints.

Of St. Columba’s apostolic mission to North Britain we shall presently have occasion to speak; but first we must trace the fortunes of his schoolfellow, Kieran, who became the founder of another of the most renowned schools of Ireland. Kieran’s future sanctity had been detected by the quick eye of St. Finian before he left Clonard. One day as he was studying St. Matthew’s Gospel, having come upon the sentence, “All things that ye would that men should do unto you, do ye to them also,” he closed the book, saying, “This is enough for me.” One of his comrades, jesting with him, observed, “Then we shall call you not Kieran, but _Leth-Matha_ (half-Matthew), for you have stopped in the middle of the Gospel.” “No,” said Finian, who overheard the remark, “call him rather _Leth-Nerion_ (half-Ireland), for one-half of this island shall be his,”--a prophecy which was fulfilled when half the Irish monasteries accepted his rule. After leaving Clonard, Kieran, having received his master’s blessing and license, repaired to an island in the lake of Erne, where he spent some time studying under St. Nennidius, another of the Clonard scholars. At last he found his way to Aran, where Enda, who was still living, received him joyfully, and employed him during the intervals of study in threshing out the corn for the use of the other monks. After remaining there seven years he founded two great monasteries, one of which was situated on the west bank of the Shannon, at a spot called Cluain-Mac-Nois,[43] or the Retreat of the Sons of the Noble. This foundation took place about the year 548, and thence the austere rule or law of Kieran spread into a vast number of other religious houses.

It is indeed worthy of note that all the great masters of the Irish schools were followers of the most severe monastic discipline. The nurseries of science were often enough the rude cave, or forest hut of some holy hermit, such as St. Fintan, the founder of Cluain-Ednech, or the Ivy Cave, near Mount Bladin in Queen’s County; whose disciples lived on herbs and roots, laboured in the fields, and, like the monks of Menevia, renounced the assistance of cattle. Yet Abbot Fintan was a polished scholar, and particularly noted for his skill as a logician; and learned men came in crowds to the Ivy Cave to perfect themselves in sacred science and the rules of a holy life. One of Fintan’s most celebrated scholars was St. Comgall, who in 559 became the founder of Benchor, near the bay of Carrickfergus. The fame of this great school of learning and religion has been celebrated by St. Bernard, who, in his “Life of St. Malachi,” speaks of the swarm of saints who came forth from Benchor, and spread themselves like an inundation into foreign lands. In the Latin hymn of its old Antiphonary it is extolled as the ship beaten with the waves, the house founded on the rock, the true vine transplanted out of Egypt whose rule is at once holy and learned, _simplex simul atque docta_. The most famous of its scholars was St. Columbanus, the founder of Luxeuil in Burgundy and of Bobbio in Italy, whose rule spread over most European countries, and promised at one time to rival that of St. Benedict. The letters of Columbanus prove him to have been “a man of three tongues,” to use the ordinary term applied in old times to one who added to his Greek, Hebrew. His acquaintance with the Latin poets is evident in his letter to Hunaldus, and his familiarity with those of Greece in his poetical epistle to Fedolius. And as he was fifty years of age before he left his native land, it is certain that his learning must have been entirely gained in her native seminaries. Another of the Benchor scholars was Molua, or Luanus, as he is called by St. Bernard, who tells us that he founded at least a hundred monasteries. The story of his first introduction to St. Comgall has been often told, but is one of those that can scarcely be told too often. He was keeping his flocks on the mountain-side, when Comgall, attracted by his appearance, wrote out the alphabet for him on a slate, and seeing his eagerness to learn, took him to Benchor and placed him in the school. Luanus conceived such a thirst for the waters of science that he prayed night and day that he might become learned. The prudent abbot, while he admired the zeal of his new scholar, was not without some anxiety lest his craving after human learning might sully the purity of his soul. One day he beheld the boy seated at the feet of an angel, who was showing him his letters and encouraging him to study. Calling Luanus to him, he said, “My child, thou hast asked a perilous gift from God; many, out of undue love of knowledge, have made shipwreck of their souls.” “My father,” replied Luanus, with the utmost humility, “if I learn to know God I shall never offend Him, for those only offend Him who know him not.” “Go, my son,” said the abbot, charmed with his reply, “remain firm in the faith, and the true science shall conduct thee on the road to heaven.”

Luanus was the founder of the monastery of Clonfert, in Leinster, and the author of another religious rule highly prized by his countrymen. The no less celebrated school of Clonfert, in Connaught, owed its foundation to St. Brendan, the fellow-student of Kieran and Columba. Having passed some years under the direction of St. Jarlath at Tuam, and St. Finian at Clonard, and become as familiar with Greek as he was with Latin, he is declared by his historians to have set sail on a voyage in search of the Land of Promise, which lasted seven years. In the course of these wanderings by sea he discovered a vast tract of land lying far to the west of Ireland, where he beheld wonderful birds, and trees of unknown foliage, which gave forth the perfumes of such excellent spices, that the fragrance thereof still clung to the garments of the travellers when they returned to their native shores.

But it is time to speak of the Irish monastic patriot, whose name is known in our own time, as it was probably revered in his own, beyond any of those that have hitherto been mentioned. It was in the year 563 that St. Columba,[44] after founding the monasteries of Doire-Calgaich and Dair-magh in his native land, and incurring the enmity of one of the Irish kings, determined on crossing over into Scotland in order to preach the faith to the Northern Picts. Accompanied by twelve companions, he passed the Channel in a rude wicker boat covered with skins, and landed at Port-na Currachan, on a spot now marked by a heap of huge conical stones. Conall, king of the Albanian Scots, granted him the island of I, Hi, or Ai, hitherto occupied by the Druids, and there he erected the monastery which, in time, became the mother of three hundred religious houses. If Johnson felt his piety grow warmer amid the ruins of Iona, we surely cannot be indifferent while contemplating the site of that missionary college which educated so many of our early apostles, and diffused the light of faith from Lindisfarne to the Hebrides. The life led by its inmates was at once apostolic and contemplative. If at one time the monks of Iona were to be met with travelling through the islands and highlands of Scotland, preaching the faith and administering baptism where no Christian missionaries had hitherto penetrated, at others they were to be seen tilling the soil, teaching in their schools, and transcribing manuscripts. In whatever labours they engaged, Columba himself was the first to lead the way. “He suffered no space of time,” says Adamnan, “no, not an hour, to pass in which he was not employed either in prayer, or in reading, or writing, or manual work. And so unwearied was his labour both by day and night, that it seemed as if the weight of every particular work of his seemed to exceed the power of man.” He penetrated into the Hebrides, and twice revisited his native shores, but on his return from such expeditions he loved to take part in the agricultural or scholastic pursuits of his brethren. He would hear them read or himself read to them, and overlook their work in the Scriptorium, where he required the most scrupulous exactitude. He himself was a skilful penman, and the magnificent Codex of Kells, still preserved in the library of Trinity College, is known to have been written by his hand. Iona, or I-Colum-kil, as it was called by the Irish, came to be looked on as the chief seat of learning, not only in Britain, but in the whole Western world. “Thither, as from a nest,” says Odonellus, playing on the Latin name of the founder, “these sacred doves took their flight to every quarter.” They studied the classics, the mechanical arts, law, history, and physic. They improved the arts of husbandry and horticulture, supplied the rude people whom they had undertaken to civilise with ploughshares and other utensils of labour, and taught them the use of the forge, in the mysteries of which every Irish monk was instructed from his boyhood. They transferred to their new homes all the learning of Armagh or Clonard. Of St. Munn, one of the pupils of Columba, it is said that he spent eighteen years in uninterrupted study, yet this devotion to intellectual pursuits was accompanied by a singular simplicity and love of poverty. Wherever the apostles of Iona appeared, they carried with them the reputation of frugality and self-devotion. Thus Bede remarks on the extreme simplicity of life observed by Bishop Colman and his disciples, how they were content with the simple fare, “because it was the study of their teachers to feed the soul rather than the body.” “And for that reason,” he continues, “the religious habit was then held in great veneration, and wherever any monk appeared, he was joyfully received as God’s servant; and if men chanced to meet him on the way they ran to him bowing, glad to be signed with his hand and blessed by his mouth. And when a priest came to any village the inhabitants immediately flocked to hear from him the Word of Life, for they went about on no other account than to preach, baptize, visit the sick, and take care of souls.”

In every college of Irish origin, by whomsoever they were founded or on whatever soil they flourished, we thus see study blended with the duties of the missionary and the cœnobite. They were religious houses, no doubt, in which the celebration of the Church office was often kept up without intermission by day and night; but they were also seminaries of learning, wherein sacred and profane studies were cultivated with equal success. Not only their own monasteries but those of every European country were enriched with their manuscripts, and the researches of modern bibliopolists are continually disinterring from German or Italian libraries a Horace, or an Ovid, or a Sacred Codex whose Irish gloss betrays the hand which traced its delicate letters. The Hibernian scholars were remarkable for combining acuteness of the reasoning powers with the gifts of the musician and the poet. There were no more accurate mathematicians and no keener logicians than the sons of Erin, whose love of syllogism is spoken of in the ninth century by St. Benedict of Anian. They are admitted to have been the precursors of the mediæval schoolmen, and to have been the first to apply the subtleties of Greek philosophy to Christian dogma. Their love of Greek was, perhaps, excessive, for they evinced it by Hellenising their Latin, and occasionally writing even their Latin missals in the Greek character. In the disputes that arose on the subject of the Paschal computation, they astonished their adversaries with their arithmetical science and their linguistic erudition. St. Cummian, in the Paschal epistle wherein he so ably defends the Roman system, examines all the various cycles in use among the Jews, Greeks, Latins, and Egyptians; quotes passages from Greek and Latin fathers, and manifestly proves how well the libraries of Ireland were furnished, and how competent her scholars were to use them. Nor whilst cultivating the exact sciences did they abandon the muses. Both St. Columbia and St. Columbanus enjoyed a reputation as poets. St. Ængus, the martyrologist, began life as a professional bard, and did not lay aside his harp when he assumed the cowl of the cœnobite; while Ruman, the son of Colman, was called “the Virgil of Ireland,” and is described as an “adept in chronology, history, and poetry.” Rhyme, if not invented in Ireland, was at least adopted by her versifiers so generally, and at so early a period, as sometimes to be designated “the art of the Irish;” and, as Moore observes, the peculiar structure of their verse shows that it belonged to a people of strong musical feeling. Hence they soon became famous for their skill in psalmody, and were esteemed both at home and abroad as first-rate choir-masters; and the legends of the Irish saints are full of passages which describe the kind of ecstasy produced in the minds of this people, so susceptible to the beautiful in every form, by the melody of the ecclesiastical chant. We will give one of these stories, because it introduces us to the founder of the school of Lismore, the last of the great Irish seminaries which we shall notice in this place. Though said to be of noble extraction, Mochuda was employed by a chief in the humble capacity of swineherd. One day as he tended his herd by the banks of the river Mang, he was rapt out of himself by a sight and a sound of beauty altogether new to him. It was the holy bishop St. Carthag the elder, accompanied by a procession of his clergy, who as they went along made the hills of Kerry re-echo to the Psalm-tones, ever ancient and ever new, of the Gregorian chant. St. Augustine has confessed to their power over his heart, and the poor Irish swineherd was not less enraptured by their beauty than the African rhetorician had been. Drawn along, as it were, by the charm of the melody, he left his herd in the fields and followed the singers to their monastery. All night he remained outside the gates, catching at intervals the distant sound of the night office, till when morning dawned he was found there by his master Moelthuili, who desired to know why he had not returned home in the evening as was usual. “Because I was charmed with the holy songs of the servants of God,” replied Mochuda, “and I desire nothing else on earth than that I also may learn to sing those songs.” Moelthuili, who loved the boy, made him large promises of favour if he would remain in his service, but finding his words unheeded, he at last took him to the bishop and begged him to receive the youth among his disciples. St. Carthag bestowed his own name upon him, and admitted him among his scholars, and in process of time the fame of the pupil surpassed even that of his master. In 630 St. Carthag the younger, as he is called, became the founder of Lismore, the fame of whose schools extended into Italy.

“One-half of this holy city,” says an ancient writer, “is a sanctuary into which no woman may enter; it is full of cells and monasteries, and religious men resort thither from all parts of Ireland and England.”[45] One of the most famous masters of Lismore was St. Cathal or Cataldus, the patron saint of Tarentum in Italy, and his numerous biographies in prose and verse never fail to commemorate the glories of his Alma Mater.

Whatever exaggeration may have been committed by the national annalists when they speak of the foreign students who resorted to the Irish schools, it is impossible to doubt that they were eagerly sought by nations of the most distant lands, who, in an age when the rest of Europe was sunk in illiterate barbarism, found in the cloisters of Armagh, Lismore, Clonard, and Clonmacnois, masters of philosophy and sacred science whose learning had passed into a proverb. Camden remarks how common a thing it is to read in the lives of our English saints that they were sent to study in Ireland, and the same expression occurs quite as frequently in the Gallican histories. The prodigious Litany of the Saints, composed in the eighth century by St. Ængus, includes the names not only of Britons, Picts, and Saxons, but also of Gauls, Germans, Romans, and Egyptians, all buried in Ireland. The tomb of the “Seven Romans” may still be seen in the churchyard of St. Brecan in the Isle of Aran, and a church at Meath was commonly known as the Greek Church, so called from having been served by Greek ecclesiastics. Even in the eleventh century the fame of the Irish schools was undiminished, and Sulgenus, bishop of St. David’s, spent ten years studying under their best masters.

Great as was the learning of the Irish scholars, it had in it a certain character of its own. Their theology was deeply tinged with a metaphysical spirit, and in their grammar, no less than their poetry, they displayed a taste for the mystic and the obscure. This is partly to be attributed to the influence of the Toulouse academicians, with whom the Irish scholars eagerly fraternised. They seem to have found something unspeakably attractive in the bizarre language of the twelve Latinities and the novelties of the Toulouse prosody. The strange jargon in which some of their professors were accustomed to indulge occasionally steals into the Hibernian hymns and antiphons; and the Anglo-Saxons who flocked in such multitudes to the Irish seminaries, were not slow in catching the infection. They soon learnt to disfigure their pages with a jumble of Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon syllables, and to expend their patience and ingenuity over compositions in which the great achievement was to produce fifteen consecutive words beginning with a P.

If Ireland gave hospitality in these remote ages to men of all tongues and races, she in her turn sent forth her swarms of saints who have left their traces in countless churches founded by them in Gaul, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. The children of St. Columbanus reformed the Austrasian clergy, and were the first apostles of the Rhetian wildernesses. At Fiesole, in Tuscany, we find the Irish St. Donatus, compelled by the people to accept the office of bishop, and restoring, at one and the same time, sacred studies and ecclesiastical discipline. The myrtle bowers of Ausonia, however, did not make him forget his native land, for in some Latin verses which Moore has thought worthy of translation, he dwells like a true patriot on the praises of that remote western island, so rich in gems and precious metals, where the fields flow with milk and honey, and the lowing herds and golden harvests supply all the wants of man. At Lucca the English traveller is still startled to find the relics of his own Anglo-Saxon countrymen, St. Richard and St. Winibald, preserved and venerated in a church dedicated to the Irish bishop, St. Frigidian. And whilst the southern shores of Italy were welcoming the coming of St. Cataldus, Iceland and the distant Orcades were receiving missionaries of the same Celtic race.[46]

Hereafter we shall see the scholars of Ireland taking part in the Carlovingian revival of learning, and making it their boast that the two first universities of Europe, those of Paris and Pavia, owed their foundation in no small degree to Hibernian professors. But before that era dawned, they had found rivals, both in their literary and apostolic labours, in the Anglo-Saxon race. The “sea-dragons of Germany,” who had extinguished faith and civilisation in the British provinces which they had overrun and conquered, had received anew those precious gifts from the hands of a great pope, whose instinctive genius led him to transfer to this remote corner of the world the sciences which were fast dying out of the Italian and Gallican schools. The story has been often told, but the course of our history obliges us to tell it over again in the following chapter.

_CHAPTER III._

THE ANGLO-SAXON SCHOOLS.

A.D. 590 TO 875.

The Donatist heresy was still raging in Africa; the Arians were triumphant in Spain and Northern Italy; a miserable schism arising out of the affair of the Three Chapters was vexing the Istrian provinces; France was torn by intestine wars, and the imperial power which nominally held rule in Italy was fast crumbling to pieces; the almost civilised dominion of the Ostrogoths had been exchanged for the wild barbarism of the half pagan, half Arian Lombards; floods, plague, and famine were rapidly depopulating the southern peninsula, when, in the year 590, St. Gregory the Great was placed in the chair of St. Peter, and received into his hands the destinies of the Western world.

“There are,” says the German philosopher, Frederic Schlegel, “grand and pregnant epochs in the history of the world, in which all existing relations assume a new and unexpected form. At such junctures, God Himself seems, as it were, to interfere, and establish a theocracy.” Such was the epoch of which we speak. All the power of human government had come to nought, and while men’s hearts were failing them for fear, the reins were falling into the hands of a frail and feeble monk, worn out with sickness and austerity, and so little conscious of possessing in himself the capacity of ruling, that, when the unanimous voice of clergy and people raised him to the pontifical dignity, he fled in terror to the woods, and was brought back weeping, and giving vent to his anguish in accents almost of despair. It will suffice very briefly to remind the reader what kind of pontificate it was that was thus begun. During the fourteen years that St. Gregory governed the Church, he achieved greatness enough to furnish fame to a dozen autocrats. He defended Rome from the Lombards, and the Lombards themselves from the treachery of the Eastern emperors; he won them from Arianism, extirpated Donatism from Africa, and put an end to the Istrian schism. Whilst providing for the necessities of the Italian provinces, desolated by the cruel calamities of the times, he firmly resisted the exactions of the Byzantine court, and maintained the independence of the Church against the Cæsars. From the effete civilisation of the corrupt East, he turned to the new and semi-barbarous races of the West,--taught the Frankish kings the duties of Christian sovereignty, and urged their bishops to wage war against ecclesiastical abuses. His prodigious correspondence carried his paternal care into the most distant provinces. He condemned slavery, defended the peasants, and protected even the Jews. And in the midst of these multifarious labours, he found time to preach and write for future ages also. Thirty-five books of “Morals,” thirteen volumes of Epistles, forty Homilies on the gospels, twenty-two on the prophet Ezechiel, an immortal treatise on the Pastoral care, four books of Dialogues, and the reformation of the Sacramentary or ritual of the Church, are the chief works left us by the Fourth Latin Doctor. Nevertheless, as most readers must be aware, there exists a certain tradition which represents this great pope as the enemy of learning, a tradition elaborated out of the rebuke administered by him to Didier, Bishop of Vienne, on occasion of that prelate having delivered lectures on the profane poets, and the supposed fact of his having burnt the Palatine Library, a fact which, however, remained without record until six centuries had elapsed.[47] We need not pause to examine charges which, however often refuted or explained, will always find credence among a certain class of writers and readers, who cling to a time-honoured _mumpsimus_. But it was necessary to recognise the existence of this view of his character before presenting the supposed destroyer of the Palatine Library as the undoubted founder of a Palatine school. And first we will hear how his biographer, John the Deacon, describes his manner of life. After naming several of the ecclesiastics, whom he chose as his chief councillors, among whom occur the names of Paul the Deacon, and our English apostles, Augustine and Mellitus, he goes on to relate how, in company with these, St. Gregory contrived to carry out monastical perfection within the walls of his own palace. “Learned clerks and religious monks,” he says, “lived there in common with their pontiff, so that the same rule was exhibited in Rome in the time of St. Gregory as St. Luke describes as existing in Jerusalem under the Apostles, and Philo records as established by St. Mark at Alexandria.”

These clerks assisted St. Gregory in his learned labours. Some were notaries, who wrote out his Homilies under his direction; and Paul the Deacon is introduced as the interlocutor in his Dialogues. And the historian goes on to tell us, that out of the canonical life established in the pontifical palace, there sprang a school. “Then did wisdom visibly fabricate to herself a temple,” he continues, “supporting the porticoes of the apostolic see by the seven liberal arts as by columns formed of the most precious stones. In the family of the pontiff, no one from the least to the greatest, dared utter a barbarous word; the purest Latinity, such as had been spoken in the time of the best Roman writers, was alone permitted to find another Latium in his palace. There, the study of all the liberal arts once more flourished, and he who was conscious to himself that he was wanting either in holiness or learning, dared not show his face in presence of the pontiff.” He goes on to speak of the number of learned men constantly to be found in the company of the pope, who encouraged poor philosophy rather than rich idleness. But he confesses that one thing was wanting: the “Cecropian muse” was absent; in other words, there was no one skilful in the interpretation of Greek.

In addition to this Palatine academy, if I should not rather say in connection with it, St. Gregory founded a school destined to have a more world-wide influence and more lasting fame. The extraordinary diligence bestowed by the holy pontiff on the reformation of the ecclesiastical chant gave rise in after times to a graceful legend, which represented him as visited in his sleep by a tenth Muse, who appeared to him with her mantle covered with the mystic notes and neumas, and inspired him with that skill in science of sacred melody, which he ever afterwards possessed. The legend, like most legends, only embalms and beautifies a fact. The Church was the real Muse who inspired her pontiff to give to her order of sacred chant the same perfection he had already bestowed upon her Liturgy. Other popes and prelates had laboured before him at the same work, and indeed the very name of _Centon_, which is given to his Antiphonary, shows that it was a compilation of those ancient melodies which passed from the Temple to the Church, and which may be traced through St. Mark at Alexandria, and through St. Ignatius at Antioch, up to St. Peter himself.[48] In process of time the Eastern churches introduced a more pompous and florid style, but in Africa, thanks to the exertions of St. Athanasius, the ancient severity was preserved, and made matter of reproach against the Catholics by the Donatist heretics, who attributed it to the natural heaviness and stupidity of the African character. Baronius observes that, according to the most ancient monuments, the Roman Church appears to have taken the middle course, between the extreme simplicity of the Africans and the florid ornamentation of the Orientals, and thus united gravity with sweetness.

St. Ambrose, who introduced the chant into Milan, permitted women to join in the chanting of the Psalms, a custom which degenerated in some churches into the establishment of female choirs; though this abuse was prohibited by many popes and councils. Everywhere the bishops encouraged the cultivation of the chant, and Fortunatus describes St. Germanus of Paris presiding in the apse of the Golden Church, and directing the singing of his two choirs. But, as St. Augustine remarks in one of his letters, no uniformity existed among the different churches, and both variations and corruptions were introduced according to the genius of different nations. Hence, the reformation of the Cantus, and the establishment of some uniform standard based on the ancient models, had engaged the attention of several popes before the time of St. Gregory, and particularly of St. Gelasius and St. Damasus. St. Gregory completed their work: he collected in his Centon, or Antiphonary, all the ancient fragments still existing, corrected and arranged them with his own pen, and added some original compositions, bearing the same character of majestic simplicity with the venerable melodies on which they were formed. And finally, to secure the permanence of these reforms, and to extend the use of the ecclesiastical chant throughout the Church, he founded a school which, three centuries later, still survived and flourished. “After the manner of a wise Solomon,” says John the Deacon, “being touched by the sweetness of music, he carefully compiled his _Centon_ or Antiphonary of chants, and established a school of those chants which had hitherto been sung in the Roman Church, and built for this purpose two houses, one attached to the Church of St. Peter the Apostle, and the other near the Lateran Patriarchium, where, up to this day, are preserved, with becoming veneration, the couch whereon he was accustomed to rest when singing, and the rod with which he was wont to threaten the boys, together with the authentic copy of his Antiphonary.”

The important place which the Roman school of chant occupied in the history of Christian education will be seen in the following pages. Its value in our own day can hardly be appreciated, for the training of Christendom has long since ceased to be liturgical. But an era was about to open on the world during which the human intellect was no longer to receive its shape and colouring from the forms, however beautiful, of pagan antiquity, but from that Christian Muse whom our English poet has invoked. St. Gregory lived at a time when the old empire, with its letters and civilisation, was fast passing away. The little stone had struck the statue, and the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, had been carried away by the wind, and become as the chaff on the summer’s threshing-floor. He beheld new races rising out of the dust of fallen empires. What now are Homer and Horace to the grim Goth or savage Lombard who has spent his life in beating to pieces with his battle-axe the fairest monuments of Greece and Rome? To him no inspiration will flow from Castaly or Parnassus.

The mossy fountains and the sylvan shades,
The dreams of Pindus and the Aonian maids
Delight no more,

and the name of Woden is far more venerable in his eyes than that of Apollo. But there is _One_ Power that has caught him in its golden nets and holds his soul a willing captive. When the waters of baptism flowed over his brow he was brought face to face with that mighty Mother from whose hands he was to receive the knowledge of letters, and a far vaster education than the knowledge of letters alone can ever give. Heart, will, imagination, and understanding, all found their teacher in the Church of the Living God. Her sacred offices appealed to his soul through a thousand avenues, by their inspired ceremonial, their matchless poetry, their solemn melody, and their pictured art. The following pages will sadly fail of their main object if they do not succeed in conveying to the reader a faint notion of that marvellous education which the Church supplied to countless populations who, it may be, never learnt to read. Her Liturgy became the class-book of the barbaric races: it was to them all, and far more than all, that Homer or Ossian had been to the children of a darker age. What wonder, then, that the study of its musical language should be erected by them into a liberal art, and that those who were receiving their civilisation from the Rome, not of the Cæsars, but of the Popes, should welcome among them the teachers of the Roman music with as great enthusiasm as ever Florence in the fifteenth century, welcomed her professors of Greek?

The importance of St. Gregory’s foundation regarded from this point of view will readily appear. It was in some sort the mother of those grand liturgical schools which were afterwards to cover the face of Europe, the erection of which in any country serves as an epoch to mark the introduction or restoration of Christian letters. Henceforth, for nine centuries at least, grammar and the Cantus, the Latin tongue and the Roman music, were to take their places side by side as the two indispensables of education. Up to this time even the Christian learning had been coloured by a civilisation of pagan growth; but a new era had now begun: the Holy Scriptures and the Liturgy of the Church were to become to Christian Europe what the profane poets had been to the ancient world--the fountains of inspiration and the intellectual moulds wherein a new generation was to be cast; and though scholars were far from abandoning Virgil, yet for long ages the Muse of Solyma was to hold the mastery in the schools.

This new era of letters may be said to commence with St. Gregory, for the schools of Christian origin which existed before his time were fast becoming extinct, and it was chiefly from the new foundation, planted by him on English soil, that the torch of science was relit. How truly was he termed the Great, this pontiff, prince, and tutor of a barbarous world! Yet to conceive aright of his greatness we must remember that his work was painfully wrought out in the midst of continual bodily sufferings and mental troubles yet harder to bear. He who may be said to have founded the temporal sovereignty of the Roman Pontiffs had his throne in the midst of ruins. He delivered his discourses on Ezechiel while the barbarous Lombards were marching against his capital. He had to witness the Roman nobles dragged off into slavery with ropes about their necks, to be sold like dogs in the markets of Gaul. Then came the news that Monte Cassino was in flames and its monks cast out as houseless wanderers. “Woe is me!” he exclaims, “all Europe is in the hands of the barbarians. Cities are cast down, villages in ruins, whole provinces depopulated; the land has no longer men to cultivate it; and the idolaters pursue us even to death.” Yet in this awful crisis his mind was bent on effecting new conquests for the faith, and he was planning the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons with the Lombards at his gates. Many writers have not hesitated to ascribe the pertinacity with which he carried out this, his favourite enterprise, to the profound sagacity of an ecclesiastical politician, who foresaw that the loyal devotion of the new converts to the Holy See would repair the losses inflicted by the barbarians on the rest of Christendom. But it may safely be affirmed that no mere natural acuteness could possibly have predicted anything favourable from the dispositions which had hitherto been manifested by the Anglo-Saxons. Ancient writers are unanimous in classing them among the most savage of the northern tribes. They slaughtered their captives taken in war, and drove a lucrative trade by the sale of their countrymen, and even of their own children, to foreign merchants. The courage which formed their solitary virtue too often degenerated into a brutal ferocity, and their notions of a future state were exceedingly faint. In Gaul they were regarded with terror as barbarians of uncouth speech and aspect, and strange stories were told of their reckless deeds of bloodshed and cruelty. Gregory himself would probably have found it difficult to explain the hold they had gained on his heart ever since he first beheld the blue-eyed and golden-haired Angles in the market-place of Rome. But from that moment the thought of them never left him; and though frustrated in his purpose of himself becoming their apostle, he made it a labour of love to provide for their conversion by other hands.

His first plan had been a sort of anticipation of the system since so successfully carried out by the Roman Propaganda. He conceived the idea of redeeming a certain number of the Anglo-Saxon youths annually brought into the slave-markets of Gaul, educating them in some monastery school, and then sending them back as missionaries to their own country. We are not told why this scheme was abandoned, but in 596 the English mission was at last opened, and a band of Roman monks, headed by St. Augustine, the former prior of St. Gregory’s monastery set out for the barbarous and unknown island. Never was any mission more amply cared for. St. Gregory had poured out his whole heart upon it; he multiplied letters to the bishops and Sovereigns of Gaul to secure his monks hospitality on the road; his letters cheered them on their way, and when the welcome tidings came that their work had begun under prosperous auspices, he sent them a reinforcement of labourers under the abbot Mellitus, bringing everything necessary for the celebration of the Divine offices--sacred vessels, vestments, church ornaments, holy relics, and “many books.”

A catalogue of the library which St. Augustine and his companions brought with them into England is preserved at Trinity College, Cambridge. It consisted of a Bible in two volumes, a Psalter and a book of the Gospels, a Martyrology, the Apocryphal Lives of the Apostles, and the Exposition of certain Epistles and Gospels. The brief catalogue closes with these words: “These are the foundation or beginning of the library of the whole English Church, A.D. 601.” These were the books sent to us by a Pope to be the beginning of our national library, and from them did St. Augustine and his companions begin to teach the English.

The manner of life to be adopted by the missionaries was plainly laid down by St. Gregory in his instructions to St. Augustine. “You, my brother,” he writes, “who have been brought up under monastic rules, are not to live apart from your clergy in the English Church; you are to follow that course of life which our forefathers did in the time of the primitive church, when none of them said that anything he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common.”[49] The ancient canonical life was to be the rule of the new clergy, and measures were at once taken for carrying this precept into effect. A monastery dedicated to SS. Peter and Paul was speedily founded at Canterbury. In after years it bore the title of St. Augustine’s, and obtained rare privileges as the first-born of our religious houses, being designated “the Roman Chapel in England.” The abbot took his place in general councils next to the abbot of Monte Cassino, and the monastery was recognised as under the immediate jurisdiction of the Holy See. Here, then, at one and the same time, began the apostolic and scholastic labours of the missionaries. It was not, indeed, until some years later, that the school of Canterbury attained its full celebrity under the abbot Adrian, but thirty years before his time it had become the model of other seminaries founded in different parts of England. When Sigebert, King of the East Angles, who had been baptized and instructed in France, wished to set up a school for youth to be instructed in literature, “after the good fashions he had seen in that country,” he sent to Canterbury for his schoolmaster, and obtained one in the person of Felix the Burgundian, who became the apostle of the East of England. At this time the liberal sciences are said to have been cultivated at Canterbury, and some writers persuade themselves that the school of Bishop Felix was the germ of Cambridge University.