Chapter XXIV (16)

He was subjected to a severe noviciate. For three years, it is said, he kept a rigorous silence, and was tested by every kind of humiliation. Once, when reading aloud in the refectory, the prior corrected his Latin accent, and desired him to pronounce the _e_ in _docere_ short. This was probably a hard trial to the humility of the Bolognese professor, who must have regarded his Norman companions as little better than barbarians; but Lanfranc complied without hesitation, judging, says his biographer, that an act of disobedience was a greater evil than a false quantity in Latin. After he had passed through his probation, the abbot, who had learnt to value both his learning and his sincere humility, finding him unfit for manual labour, desired him to begin to teach, and thus were founded the famous schools of Bec. Their renown soon eclipsed that of every other existing academy. “Before that time,” says Odericus, “in the reigns of six dukes of Normandy, scarce any Norman applied himself to regular studies, nor had any doctor arisen among them till, by the Providence of God, Lanfranc appeared in their province.” But now a new era was inaugurated. Priests and monks came to Bec in multitudes, in order to place themselves under a master who was pronounced the best Latinist, the best theologian, and the best dialectician of his time; there were never fewer than a hundred pupils; the Norman nobles, and even the Dukes themselves, sent their sons thither for education, and made enormous grants of land to the favoured abbey.

It is not to be supposed that the fame of this new academy was long in reaching the ears of Berengarius, whose chagrin at finding his own renown eclipsed by his former rival was hard to endure. Up to that time he had addicted himself exclusively to dialectics, and had given very little study to the Scriptures, a circumstance sufficiently illustrative of the wide chasm which separated the rising school of teachers from that which immediately preceded them. But now, to support his failing credit, Berengarius began to lecture on a subject he had never studied, and to explain the Scriptures, not according to the traditions of the Fathers, but after the whims of his own imagination. His first errors were on questions connected with marriage and infant baptism, but it was not long before he broached his grand heresy, and attacked the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence in the Most Holy Eucharist, reviving all the arguments and sophistries of Scotus Erigena. The scandal spread from Tours through France and Germany. His old friend Adelman, at that time scholasticus of Liège, heard the news and wrote to him in moving terms, conjuring him to retract his fatal errors. “I have been wont to call you my foster brother,” he says, “calling to mind the happy days we passed together at the school of Chartres (though you were younger than I), under that venerable Socrates, Fulbert. Remember the conversation he used to hold with us in his garden near the chapel, how tenderly he used to speak to us, his voice sometimes choked with tears, conjuring us not to depart from the old paths, but to keep firm to the traditions of the Fathers. And now they tell me that you have separated from the unity of the Church, teaching that what we daily offer on the altar is not the true body and blood of Jesus Christ, but only a figure! God help you, my brother! let me implore you by the mercy of God, and the memory of the Blessed Fulbert, not thus to trouble the peace of our Holy Mother the Church, for whose faith so many millions of doctors and martyrs have constantly contended.”

Adelman’s entreaties produced no effect on him to whom they were addressed, and a controversy began in which Lanfranc took a distinguished part, assisting at the councils of Rheims, Rome and Vercelli. In all these Berengarius was successively condemned, and required to abjure his errors. But he obeyed with the lips only. As he continued to propagate his heresies in spite of repeated abjurations, Pope Victor II., in 1054, summoned two other Councils, at Florence and Tours, at the last of which Berengarius signed a solemn retractation with his own hand. But so soon as he left the presence of the assembled fathers, he set himself secretly to disseminate his former doctrines. At a second Council held at Tours, attended by 113 bishops, he again appeared, signed a profession of Catholic doctrine, and threw all his own writings into the fire, and the same farce was repeated at three other Councils, followed by the same result. It was not until 1079 that Lanfranc, then Archbishop of Canterbury, published his famous treatise “On the Body of Our Lord,” and about the same time his scholar Guitmond, afterwards Bishop of Aversa, wrote an equally celebrated treatise, bearing the same title, in which he traces the errors of Berengarius to the fatal root of vanity. “Even when a youth at school,” he says, “according to the account of those who then knew him, he made little account of the teaching of his master, held as nothing the opinions of his companions, and despised the books on liberal arts. He could not himself attain to the profounder parts of philosophy, for he was not of a very penetrating mind, and therefore tried to gain a learned reputation by new and unheard-of verbal definitions.” There is something mournfully significant in this account, and the grievous termination of a career, the very dawn of which was marked by such prognostics, makes the character and history of Berengarius one which scholars of all ages would do well to set before them as a warning beacon. The writings of Lanfranc and Guitmond seem at last to have opened his eyes to the truth; at any rate from that time he kept silence, and is said to have spent the remaining eight years of his life in retirement and sincere penitence. William of Malmsbury says that his dying words betrayed his consciousness of the irreparable evils he had inflicted on the Church, and the terror with which he was filled at the thought of the souls whom he might have ruined. “This day will my Lord Jesus Christ appear to call me, either to glory, by His mercy, on my repentance, or, as I fear, on account of the loss of other souls, to my punishment.” Yet his followers were neither numerous nor of any weight or character. We find in the letter written by Gozechinus of Liège to a brother scholastic, that every one of the great masters of the time, such as those who presided over the schools of Rheims, Paris, Spires, and Bamberg joined heart and soul with Lanfranc in condemning his doctrines.[148] Malmsbury says he had in all but three hundred disciples, while on the other hand the united voice of Christendom, and especially of the monastic order, was raised against him, and never was any heresy more universally condemned.

Meanwhile the schools of Bec grew and prospered, and the convent was soon found too small to contain its scholars. There were gathered together students of all ranks and conditions, “profound sophists,” as Oderic Vitalis calls them, and a long list of ecclesiastics destined to become the shining lights of the Church. Among these were Ivo of Chartres, Fulk of Beauvais, Gundulph, afterwards bishop of Rochester, Anselm de Bagio, afterwards Pope Alexander II., and a great number of the Anglo-Norman abbots. Alexander II., in after years, gave a memorable sign of the respect with which he regarded his old preceptor. When Lanfranc visited Rome as Archbishop of Canterbury, and was introduced into the presence of the Pontiff, the latter, contrary to the usual custom, rose, and advanced to meet him. “I show this mark of respect,” he said, turning to the surrounding prelates, “not to the archbishop, but to the man at whose feet I sat as a disciple in the schools of Bec.” Besides these there was Guitmond, already named, the courageous monk, who, entreated by the Conqueror to accept high ecclesiastical promotion in England, not only refused the offer, but accompanied his refusal with a letter of reproof which probably spoke plainer truths to William of Normandy than he had ever before had an opportunity of hearing. Oderic calls him devout and deeply learned, and in his book on the Sacrament of the Altar, the good monk recalls with affection the teaching he had received at Bec, which he styles “that great and famous school of literature.” But by far the greatest disciple of this school was a countryman of Lanfranc’s, destined to surpass him in renown both as a saint and a doctor. Anselm, a native of Aosta, in Lombardy, abandoning his native land, had after three years of study in Burgundy, established himself at Avranches, where he seems to have taught for some time in the school formerly directed by Lanfranc. But in 1059, being then but twenty-five years of age, he found his way to Bec, and soon distinguished himself as the first of all the noble crowd of scholars. For a while he continued there, studying and teaching by turns, but erelong the desire of religious perfection mastered that of intellectual progress. He resolved to take the monastic habit, but was unable to determine whether it should be at Cluny or at Bec. At Cluny indeed his vast acquirements would be of small profit; at Bec the superiority of Lanfranc would, he believed, almost equally eclipse him. But what of that? it was eclipse and nothingness that he was in search of, rather than fame and distinction. He opened his heart to his master, who, reluctant to decide a point in which his own feelings would naturally colour his advice, referred him to Maurillus, Archbishop of Rouen, and the result was that Anselm remained at Bec. His profession took place in 1060, and three years later Lanfranc, being appointed by Duke William abbot of his newly-founded monastery of St. Stephen at Caen, Anselm succeeded him in the office of prior. Some of the monks murmured at this appointment, but he overcame their ill-will by the sweetness of his charity. One young monk, named Osbern, who had shown the greatest opposition to the new prior, became at last his favourite disciple, won over by the patient long-suffering of a master who showed him a mother’s tenderness, mingled with a father’s care. At first he gained his good-will by encouraging his talents, overlooking his childish sallies of temper, and granting him many favours; but when his confidence was secured he accustomed him to severer discipline, and showed his satisfaction at his pupil’s progress by requiring him to accept very humiliating penances. He trusted to have found in this youth one destined to achieve great things for God, but Osbern was carried off by a sudden sickness, and left none to replace him in the affections of the prior.

Anselm’s life at Bec was one of continual labour. Whilst directing the studies of his pupils he did not neglect his own. His deeply philosophic mind was one of those which is incapable of desisting from a course of reasoning on any subject which it has once grasped, till the final solution is reached. His genius possessed a certain metaphysical subtlety, which engaged him in speculative questions, to resolve which he gave up, not merely whole days, but whole nights also. His studies were accompanied with rigorous austerities, which were, however, very far from diminishing that sweetness of disposition which rendered him dear to God and man. To his other labours were added those entailed on him as librarian to the monastery. Lanfranc had commenced the formation of the library, and his work was carried on by his successor with unwearied zeal. The Bec library was afterwards enlarged by the donations of Philip of Harcourt, Bishop of Bayeux, and besides a rich collection of the Fathers and the Latin classics, contained the Institutes of Quinctilian and the Hortensius of Cicero, of which latter work no copy is now known to exist. The great destruction of books which had taken place during the barbaric invasions rendered them now both rare and costly. Superiors of the different religious houses were therefore glad to establish friendly relations one with another, and to make agreements by which each supplied what they possessed, and what was wanting to the others. “We are ready to give you a pledge of our affection,” writes Durandus, abbot of La Chaise Dieu, to St. Anselm, “and in return we will ask one of you. Choose what you will that we possess; as to us, our choice is the Epistles of St. Paul.” Anselm was not content with collecting books; he spared no pains to correct them, and spent a good part of his nights in this employment. The multifarious duties which fell on him devoured so large a portion of his day that he could only supply the requisite time for his literary labours by defrauding himself of sleep; and he would have resigned his office in order more exclusively to give himself up to meditation and study had he not been withheld by the prohibition of Maurillus.

The subject which most frequently engaged his thoughts was the Being and Attributes of God. The first work which he wrote was his _Monologion_, in which he endeavoured to state the metaphysical arguments by which the existence of God might be proved even according to mere natural reason. The work was written at the request of some of the monks, but before publishing it he sent it to Lanfranc, desiring him to correct, and even to suppress, whatever he judged proper. After producing some other philosophical treatises, the thought occurred to him to try and discover whether it were possible, by following any single course of reasoning, to prove that which in his _Monologion_ he had supported by a variety of arguments. The idea took possession of his mind: sometimes he thought he had found what he was seeking for, and then again it escaped him. So utterly was he absorbed by the subject that he lost sleep and appetite, and even his attention at the Divine Office became distracted. Dreading lest it should be some dark temptation, he tried to banish the whole matter from his mind, but it was in vain; the more he fled from his own thoughts the more constantly did they pursue him. At last one night every link in the chain being complete, he seized some waxen tablets and wrote the argument as it stood clear and distinct in his mind. A copy was made on parchment by his monks, and this new work formed his _Proslogion_, which, at the desire of the legate Hugh, Archbishop of Lyons, was published with his name attached. The argument of this celebrated book is thus analysed by M. Rémusat, in his life of the saint. “He who believes in God believes that there is Something so great that a greater cannot be conceived. Does such a nature really exist? The infidel who denies it nevertheless understands what is meant by the idea, and this idea exists in his understanding, if it exist nowhere else. The mere idea of an object does not necessarily imply the belief in its existence. A painter has an _idea_ of a picture which he knows does not as yet exist. But this Something which is better and greater than anything of which we can conceive cannot exist merely in our minds; for if it did exist only in our minds, we should be able to imagine it as existing in reality, that is to say, we should be able to conceive of it as being yet greater, a thing which according to our original supposition was not to be allowed as possible. Therefore, that which is so great that nothing can be greater must exist, not only in the mind, but in fact. Were the Being which is supposed to be above all that can be imagined, to be regarded as having no real existence, He would no longer be greater than we could conceive. To make Him so, He must have existence. The contradiction is evident. There is then really and truly a Being above Whom nothing can be conceived, and Who therefore cannot be thought of as though it were possible that He should not exist. And this Being, it is Thou, O my God! _Et hoc es tu, Domine Deus noster!_”[149] Many were found both in his own and later times who took alarm at reasoning so bold and original, but Anselm defended his arguments in an Apology, which established his fame as the greatest metaphysician who had appeared in the Latin Church since the days of St. Augustine.[150]

As we are here engaged rather with the history of schools than with that of literature, this passing glance at St. Anselm’s studies will suffice to indicate the new direction which the awakening intellect of Europe was about to follow. Hitherto ecclesiastical writers had for the most part been content to gather up and reproduce the traditionary wisdom of the Fathers; but now, when those traditions had become firmly established, a scientific superstructure was to be raised on that broad foundation, and the theology of the Church was to be built up into a compact and well-ordered system. This was the work of the scholastic theologians, of whom St. Anselm may be considered as the first.

It is pleasant to trace in the system of education followed by so profound a thinker, the same paternal sweetness which characterised the older monastic teachers. Intellectual depth is often enough deficient in tenderness, and it would scarcely have been matter of surprise had we found the metaphysical mind of Anselm incapable of adapting itself to the simplicity and waywardness of childhood. But the problems, which intellect alone is powerless to resolve, are quickly unlocked by the key of charity. Anselm would have been no saint had not his heart been far larger than his intellect; and his heart it was that communicated to him those three graces which one of our own poets has so beautifully described as bearing up the little world of education--Love, Hope, and Patience.[151] One day he was visited by the abbot of a neighbouring monastery, who came to consult him on the proper manner of bringing up the children committed to his care. Those whom he had hitherto trained were, he said, most perverse and incorrigible. “We do our best to correct them,” he added; “we beat them from morning till night, but I own I can see no improvement.” “And how do they grow up?” inquired Anselm. “Just as dull and stupid as so many beasts,” was the reply. “A famous system of education truly,” observed the abbot of Bec, “which changes men into beasts. Now tell me, what would be the result, if, after having planted a tree in your garden you were to compress it so tightly that it should have no room to extend its branches? These poor children were given to you that you might help them to grow, and be fruitful in good thoughts; but if you allow them no liberty their minds will grow crooked. Finding no kindness on your part, they will give you no confidence, and never having been brought up to know the meaning of love and charity, they will see everything around them in a distorted aspect. You beat them, you tell me? But is a beautiful statue of gold or silver formed only by blows? The weak must be treated with gentleness, and won with love; you must invite a soul to virtue with cheerfulness, and charitably bear with its defects.” He then explained his own method of education, till at last the other cast himself at his feet, owning his imprudence, and promising in future to abandon his excessive severity.

The names of Lanfranc and St. Anselm have, of course, a special interest to English readers, although it is rather as abbots of Bec than as Archbishops of Canterbury that they find a place in these pages. The Norman Conquest, which placed Lanfranc on the episcopal throne of St. Augustine, must, however, be regarded as an important era in the scholastic history of England, from the total revolution which it effected in the ecclesiastical administration of that country. Whatever may be thought of the manner in which the change was carried out, there can be little doubt that the substitution of an Anglo-Norman for an Anglo-Saxon hierarchy was on the whole beneficial to the cause both of religion and learning. Most of the ecclesiastics promoted by William were men of high character, and this was indeed one of the few consolatory thoughts which presented themselves to his mind when he lay upon his bed of death. His choice of Lanfranc for the primacy filled that prelate with dismay, nor was it until Cardinal Hubert laid on him the commands of the Apostolic See, that he could be induced to accept a charge so begirt with difficulty. His letter to his old pupil Pope Alexander II., shortly after his arrival in England, expresses the distress of his mind, at the hard heartedness, cupidity, and corruption which everywhere met his eye, and which, together with the barbarism, as he deemed it, of the inhabitants, and his total ignorance of their language, moved him to implore that he might resign the onerous dignity. As, however, this could not be permitted, he applied himself to the reform of the church of Canterbury, and the restoration in it of the monastic rule, which, since the martyrdom of St. Elphege, had fallen into utter decay. In spite of the pressing difficulties of the times, he contrived also to do something for the encouragement of letters, though far less than he would have effected under more favourable circumstances.

The schools of Peterborough and Evesham are likewise noticed as famous during the reign of the Confessor, who was himself a lover of learning, and, among his other laws, decreed that the person of a schoolmaster should be regarded as equally inviolable with that of a clerk. Winchcombe, always devoted to letters, whose scholars had been famous since the days of St. Kenelm, was still known as a place of study, and kept up its reputation so late as the fifteenth century. Old Ramsey, too, retained its celebrity, and scholars still wandered under the trees planted by St. Ethelwold, and kept up the arts which he had introduced into its scriptorium. In 1047 a certain monk of St. Edmundsbury became abbot there, whose skill in all gold and silver work was a sort of marvel. One of his monks, named Oswald, refused a bishopric on the simple ground that he could not tear himself from his books. “He chose rather,” says the chronicler, “to cherish the placid cultivation of letters in the bosom of his mother, the church of Ramsey. We have still in our archives a certain versified book of his, bearing evidence of his multifarious knowledge and perspicacious wit.” Nor must we forget the holy Wulstan, the last of our Anglo-Saxon saints. He had been educated in the minster school of Peterborough by the monk Ervene, who coaxed him to learn his letters by choosing for his lesson-book a fine Psalter, illuminated by his own hands. After he became prior and scholasticus of Worcester, Wulstan devoted himself to study with such ardour as often to spend two or three days in reading without so much as breaking his fast. His long night-watches seriously injured his health, and in the morning he was often found in the church fast asleep, with his worn-out head resting on the book he had been studying.

It will be seen, therefore, that the love of letters was not quite extinct in the cloisters of Saxon England; and the coming of Lanfranc blew the embers into a flame. He set himself to restore a great number of cathedral and monastic schools that had fallen into decay, and during his leisure hours liked to hear some poor scholars hold disputations in his presence on learned subjects, rewarding them with liberal gifts.

But besides his encouragement of learned men, Lanfranc did good service to the cause of letters in other ways. He often interposed his kind offices to save the ancient English foundations from the vengeance of the Conqueror. Thus, having succeeded in averting the threatened destruction of St. Alban’s Abbey, which William had doomed in consequence of the brave resistance he had met with from its abbot, Frithric, Lanfranc conferred it on a relative and pupil of his own named Paulinus, who has fallen under the lash of Matthew Paris, but who nevertheless proved an excellent abbot. He introduced the “Constitutions,” published by Lanfranc for the government of the English Benedictines, reformed a host of irregularities, and, with the help of subsidies liberally granted by the archbishop, built several useful offices, and established the first scriptorium attached to the abbey.

I know not what my readers will say when they hear that the mill, the bakehouse, and the scriptorium erected by Paulinus were all built out of the tiles and stones of the ancient Verulam, collected by his Saxon predecessors Ealdred and Eadmer, who had made some very curious excavations among the ruins of the Roman city, and had laid open a palace with its baths and its atrium. Moreover, they had dug up a number of books in good preservation, one of which was in a tongue unknown to all, and proved at last to be a British history of the “Acts of St. Alban.” The other books were in Latin, and, relating to heathen worship, were committed to the flames. This sounds barbarous to antiquarian ears, but there is worse to tell. Eadmer ordered that all the altars, urns, coins, and glass vessels discovered by the workmen should be destroyed. The day had not yet come when relics of paganism were deemed safe or fit objects for good Christians to collect in their museums, and the Vatican collection itself would probably have fared but badly in the hands of Alcuin or St. Boniface. However, the monks of St. Alban’s, though destroyers of the Verulam antiquities, were very active in setting up their scriptorium. Paulinus furnished it with twenty-eight “notable volumes,” and many others were presented by Lanfranc. There is, moreover, a distinct notice of the existence of the abbey school. Abbot Richard, who succeeded Paulinus (after the Red King had contrived to keep the abbacy vacant for five years), showed a great interest in the success of this school, and invited over from Maine a certain master named Geoffrey de Gorham, to take on him its direction. Gorham however, was rather dilatory, and by the time he arrived in England the office had been given to another. So he removed to Dunstable, and there read lectures for some time, and whilst so occupied, invented a miracle-play, said to be the first that is noticed in history, the subject being the martyrdom of St. Katherine. These sacred dramas were used as means of popular instruction, and often contained a fine vein of poetry. As time went on, and they fell out of the hands of the ecclesiastics into those of a class of writers and actors whose object it was to please, rather than to instruct the multitude, they became debased by the introduction of coarse jests and buffoonery, which abound in the specimens best known to English readers, but of which there is not the slightest trace in the earlier religious dramas. The dress and getting up of the pieces, in which there was a wonderful amount of ingenuity displayed, and even of stage trickery,[152] of course enhanced their success; and Gorham borrowed from the sacristan of St. Alban’s the choral copes of the abbey, to be used in the first representation of his play. Unfortunately, the very next night his house caught fire, and the borrowed copes, together with his own books, were all destroyed. It was a great disaster; and in atonement for his carelessness he assumed the monastic habit at St. Alban’s; and this was the reason, says Matthew Paris, that when he became abbot he was so careful to provide the choir with new rich copes.

In the midst of his many cares and anxieties, Lanfranc found time to devote to literary toils. They were useful ones, well worthy of a monk and a bishop. He corrected the text of the entire Bible, and of several of the Fathers. He never forgot Bec, and sent several youths, and among others his own nephew and namesake, there for education; and much of his correspondence with St. Anselm turns on the progress of these young men in their studies. Anselm, on his part, frankly confesses that he gets very weary of continually teaching the younger boys their declensions; and lets us know that he required his pupils to compose often in Latin, and rather in prose than in verse; that he recommended them to read Virgil and the other classics, and to be diligent in copying manuscripts. At other times his letters, treating of literary subjects, and accompanying presents of precious books to the Canterbury scriptorium, introduce allusions to the health of his scholars, evincing that paternal tenderness which was so remarkable a feature in his character.

Anselm, who had been elected abbot of Bec on the death of Herluin, during his visits to England became personally known to the Conqueror, whose furious passions were restrained in presence of the gentle saint, who won both his love and his reverence. It was whilst at Canterbury, on a visit to his friend Lanfranc, that the abbot of Bec made his first acquaintance with his future biographer, the young Saxon Eadmer. This was the time when he so sweetly defended the memory of the Anglo-Saxon saints from the contempt with which Lanfranc was disposed to regard them; and possibly this circumstance may have had some share in securing him the confidence and affection of Eadmer, who then held the office of precentor in the cathedral of Canterbury.

Lanfranc died in 1089, having survived the great Conqueror nearly two years. The events which, four years later, placed St. Anselm on the archiepiscopal throne of Canterbury, and his heroic struggles against the usurpations of the temporal power in the reigns of William Rufus and Henry I., scarcely fall within our present subject, though they form not the least important chapter in our national Church history. But the succession to the primacy of another great scholar was an event which made itself felt in the world of letters, and kindled extraordinary ardour for learned pursuits among the English clergy. This spirit was certainly encouraged by the Norman kings, who, ferocious tyrants as they were, all more or less exhibited a taste for letters. The Conqueror took special care of the education of his children. Henry Beauclerk was educated at Abingdon Abbey, under the care of Faricius, an Italian monk of Malmsbury. The proficiency of the young prince as displayed by his version of Æsop’s fables, is commonly said to have earned him his learned sobriquet; but Mr. Wright, in his “Biographia Britannica,” calls his authorship in question. Both his sisters, and his two queens, Matilda of Scotland and Adeliza of Louvaine, were patrons of letters. Some epistles from Matilda to St. Anselm are preserved, which display no mean degree of scholarship, if they were really the production of her own pen. The encouragement of these two princesses quickened the imagination of a host of versifiers, who began to neglect the composition of hexameters in limping Latin, and to substitute in their room songs and romances in Norman-French. The Anglo-Saxon tongue was, of course, never heard at court; and some writers, like William of Malmsbury, went so far as to omit the Saxon names of men and places, through an over-delicate fear of distressing refined organs by such barbarous sounds. A new literature meanwhile sprang up, bearing the impress of an age of knight-errantry. Alexander, Arthur, and Charlemagne found themselves transformed from historic personages into heroes of quaint and extravagant fictions, full of hippogrifs, dragons, and enchanted castles, where distressed damsels were held captive by wicked magicians, in order to be delivered by the prowess of doughty knights--a style of composition to which we give a name borrowed from the language used by the narrators, that, namely, of the _Romance_ dialect of France. Among the accumulation of rubbish written in this dialect, which was about this time poured forth into the world, one book of a higher character appears, the production of Prior Guichard of Beaulieu. It is a sermon in verse on the vices of the age, and appears to have been written to be actually recited, for he begins by telling his hearers that he is going to talk to them, not in Latin, but in the vernacular, that every one may understand what he says. De la Rue, who notices this curious poem, observes that the mention of a sermon in verse need not cause surprise, as at that epoch it was a common thing for the Anglo-Norman clergy to read to the people on Sundays and holy-days the lives of the saints in French verse. Nine such versified lives are still preserved, the production of Boson, nephew to Pope Alexander II. The mediæval preachers had sometimes recourse to strange expedients in order to rouse the slumbering attention of their hearers. Vincent of Beauvais tells us that in his time it was a common thing to lighten a dull subject by introducing one of Æsop’s fables, a practice which he does not absolutely condemn, but recommends to be used sparingly.

Besides the disciples reared in our native schools, a large number of English scholars were to be found, who mingled with the graver pursuits of learning something of that spirit of knight-errantry and wild adventure which characterised the times. Arabic Spain was just then regarded as the fountain-head of science. The Moorish sovereigns of Cordova had collected an immense library in their capital, and are reported to have had seventy others in different parts of their dominions. Thither, then, wandered many an English student, attracted rather than repelled by the tales of glamour associated with a Moslem land. One of these scholar adventurers was Athelhard of Bath, the greatest man of science who appeared in England before the time of Roger Bacon. In the reign of the Red King he had left his own country to study at Tours and Laon, in which latter place he opened a school. Thence he proceeded to Salerno, Greece, Asia Minor, and Spain, increasing his stock of learning, and returned at last, after a long absence, in the reign of Henry I. After this he opened a school in Normandy, where he taught the Arabic sciences, in spite of the prejudices which many felt against learning acquired from so suspicious a source. Among those who so objected was Athelhard’s own nephew; and in defence of his favourite studies the English master wrote a book, in which he reminds his nephew of an agreement formerly made between them, that one should gather all the learning taught by the Arabs, while the other should, in like manner, study the wisdom of the Franks. This book is written in the form of a colloquy, in which the nephew is made to appear as the champion of the old system of education, and the uncle of the new.

I do not know whether we should conclude that Athelhard gained very much from his Arabic masters; for if he studied at Cordova the causes of earthquakes, eclipses, and tides, we find from his _Quæstiones_ that he had also devoted a considerable portion of his time to investigating the reason why plants cannot be produced in fire, why the nose is made to hang over the mouth, why the human forehead is not furnished with horns, whether the stars are animals, whether on that hypothesis they have any appetite, with other equally singular and puerile questions. In spite of these eccentricities, however, Athelhard was a really learned man. He translated Euclid and other mathematical works out of the Arabic, and is styled by Vincent of Beauvais, “the Philosopher of England.” A few years later we find another Englishman, named Robert de Retines, studying at Evora in company with a certain Hermann of Dalmatia, who is called a most acute and erudite scholar. Robert had travelled in search of learning through France, Italy, Dalmatia, Greece, and Asia Minor, and finally made his way into Spain, where Peter of Cluny found the two friends studying astrology at Evora. Peter’s journey into Spain was undertaken with the view of obtaining more exact information as to the Mohammedan doctrines and writings, and he induced the two scholars to give up their unprofitable pursuits, and employ their knowledge of Arabic in translating the Koran. This they did in 1143. Robert afterwards became archdeacon of Pampeluna; he did not, however, entirely forsake his own country, but returning thither, wrote a translation of the Saxon Chronicle, which is preserved in the Bodleian library, and which is dedicated to Peter of Cluny. His friend Hermann, who is styled “a most acute and profound scholastic,” produced a translation of Ptolemy’s “Planisphere,” which he addressed to his old Spanish preceptor Theodoricus, and from the preface to this book we find that the school at which they studied was not Arabic, but Christian, a fact of some importance, as it is very generally stated that the Spanish academies resorted to at this time by European students were those of the Arabic masters, who are represented as alone possessing any knowledge of the mathematical sciences. It is clear however that now, as in the time of Gerbert, there existed Christian schools in Spain, no less efficient than those of the Moors, and that it was to these that many of the French and English scholars resorted for the purposes of study.

To the names of these learned Englishmen I must add that of Odericus Vitalis, the course of whose education is best given in his own words in that short summary of his life with which he concludes his history. “I was baptized,” he says, “at Attingham, a village in England, which stands on the bank of the great river Severn. There, by the ministry of Odericus the priest, Thou didst regenerate me with water and the Holy Ghost. When I was five years old I was sent to school at Shrewsbury, and offered Thee my services in the lowest order of the clergy in the Church of SS. Peter and Paul. While there, Siward, a priest of great eminence, instructed me for five years in the letters of Carmenta Nicostrata,[153] and taught me psalms and hymns, with other necessary learning. I was ten years old when I crossed the British sea, and arrived in Normandy, an exile, unknown to all, and knowing no one. But supported by Thy goodness, I found the utmost kindness and attention from these foreigners. I was professed a monk in the monastery of St. Evroult, by the venerable abbot Mainier, in the eleventh year of my age, and he gave me the name of Vitalis, in place of that which I received in England, and which seemed barbarous to the ears of the Normans. In this monastery, through Thy goodness, I have lived fifty-six years, loved and honoured by my brethren far more than I have deserved. Bearing the heat and burden of the day in a strange land, I have laboured among Thy servants, and as Thou art faithful, I fear not but I shall receive the penny which Thou hast promised.”

He elsewhere tells us that his master in this abbey was John of Rheims, a disciple of the famous school of that city, who was an author of no mean fame, and composed a great number of works both in prose and verse. It does not appear that he ever studied in any other academy, but whatever learning he afterwards attained must have been acquired within the walls of his own monastery, and he could scarcely have found his way to a better school. In the eleventh century there was no branch of learning which was not cultivated among the monks of St. Evroult; music, medicine, poetry, painting, and the mechanical arts, all found there able professors. The history of Odericus leaves us in no doubt as to the extent of his literary attainments. He quotes most of the ancient classical writers, and many of the Fathers of the Church, and the intelligence of his mind is displayed by the way in which he collected the materials of his work. Nothing escaped his notice, and from the lips of some wandering Crusader or passing pilgrim he gathered up the tales and episodes with which he enlivened his pages, giving them in many parts the lively colouring of a romance. One day a monk of Winchester who stopped at the abbey for a few hours chanced to show him a life of St. William, copies of which were then rare in Normandy. Odericus, in raptures at the sight of the treasure, longed to copy it, but the traveller was in haste, and the fingers of Odericus were benumbed with cold, for it was the depth of winter. However, the opportunity was not to be lost, and seizing his tablets he with great difficulty took such notes from the manuscript as enabled him afterwards, at his leisure, to compose a life of the founder of St. Gellone. His “Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy,” which occupied twenty years in its compilation, is the only work he has left to posterity.

Thus much may suffice as to the state of letters in England and Normandy in the time of Lanfranc and Anselm; the scholars who arose after them were not unworthy to be the disciples of a school founded by these two illustrious archbishops; and it will be seen that the University of Paris, which was soon to efface by the splendour of its fame that of every other lesser academy, owed its renown in no small degree to the learning of its English professors.

_CHAPTER XII._

THE RISE OF SCHOLASTICISM.

A.D. 1049 TO 1200.

We are sometimes disposed to think and speak of the Middle Ages, as though by that term was to be understood a period including several centuries, during the whole of which society was governed by the same laws, and made but little progress. In point of fact, however, men seldom lived faster, if such an expression be admissible, than during the five centuries to which the term mediæval is most strictly applied. There was then, as now, a continual expansion and development going on, and then, as now, the development was partly good, and partly evil. During the hundred years that elapsed from the accession of Hugh Capet in 996, to the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, Christendom assumed an entirely new aspect. The institutions of feudalism and chivalry were becoming firmly established; the barbaric invasions had ceased, and the Crusades directed the arms of the Christians against a common enemy, and so put an end to the civil wars which had raged under the Carlovingian dynasty. If these changes cannot be said to have ushered in a period of absolute peace, they at least tended to consolidate civil government; and the comparative state of security and order which ensued, naturally encouraged greater intellectual activity. On the other hand, the Saxon emperors of Germany had been replaced by the house of Franconia, and that grievous contest had begun between the temporal and spiritual powers which, for centuries, formed the great political question of Europe; while the convulsions of the last century had let loose on the Church a flood of corruption which probably makes this period one of the saddest in her history.

The chronicles of a semi-barbarous age, however, possess one charm which does not attach in an equal degree to those of more civilised periods. Full as they are of crimes and scandals, they depict a state of society more keenly susceptible than our own to the influence of master-minds. Hence they are often enough the records of heroes, whereas our tamer annals deal less in the acts and words of great men, than in changes of ministry. The eleventh century groaned under the threefold scourge of simony, sensuality, and temporal usurpation. It had the peculiar infelicity of being an age of transition, when the children of the Church were growing weary of submitting to the canonical discipline of ancient times, whilst nothing had yet been established as its substitute. It was, therefore, a time of wild license and feeble restraint. Three men, however, arose to rule and reform their age. The first was of royal blood, a descendant of Charlemagne and Witikind, whom we first find studying at Toul about the year 1018, along with other princely and ducal cousins, for Toul was always celebrated for its noble students. Bruno of Dachsburg was the handsomest man of his time, the idol of his family, graceful, eloquent, and learned, and a skilled musician. The world was already predicting his success at the court of his imperial cousin Conrad, when a trifling accident changed his whole career. One day, the young student, after a hard morning’s work, threw himself on the grass at his father’s castle in Alsace, and fell asleep. An insect stung his face, and the result was a malignant fever which brought him to the gates of death. He rose from his sick bed to renounce all that the world had to offer, and to embrace the monastic state. In 1026 he became Bishop of Toul, and for two-and-twenty years devoted his energies to the reformation of manners and the revival of discipline. At the end of that time he was elected Pope, and, as St. Leo IX., struggled for five years more against simony, the Berengarian heresy, and the Greek schism. But, in the midst of his other labours, he did not neglect letters and the arts. He caused good studies to flourish at Rome, reformed her school of chant, and employed as his legates learned men, such as his old schoolfellow, Cardinal Humbert, who had acquired at Toul that Greek erudition which he used so ably against the Photians.

On the day when Pope Leo entered Rome barefoot to take possession of the Apostolic throne, he was accompanied by a Cluniac monk, whom he had met on his journey into Italy, and well-nigh compelled to join his train. Rome was no new scene to the monk Hildebrand; it was there, in St. Mary’s Abbey on the Aventine Mount,[154] that the poor carpenter’s son had received his education. But he returned thither now to fill a very different station, for Leo created him cardinal, and abbot of St. Paul’s; and from that time up to the day of his death, thirty-six years later, the life of Hildebrand forms the history of his times. The name of him whom the Church reveres as St. Gregory VII. must suffice in this place, there remains to be noticed a third Christian hero, a friend of both those illustrious pontiffs, who struggled with them in the same cause, and against the same enemies. Born at Ravenna towards the close of the tenth century, the youngest of a large family, who only saw in him another to divide their slender inheritance, Peter Damian was all but abandoned in his infancy, and on the death of his parents was maintained by a brother, who treated him as a slave, and employed him to keep swine. The poor farm-drudge grew up without friends and without education; but the soul that was within him had instincts and aspirations which no ill-usage could stifle. One day he chanced to find a piece of money lying on the ground; it was the first time his hands had ever touched silver, and for a moment the thoughts which might occur to other boys flashed through his brain. He would purchase food, or clothes, or give himself an hour’s brief enjoyment. But then came another thought: “When the food is eaten, and the enjoyment past, what will remain to me of my money? Better give it to the parish priest and have a mass said for my father’s soul.” The second thought was followed; and soon afterwards his elder brother Damian, the arch-priest of Ravenna, took pity on the boy, and sent him to school, first at Faenza, and then at Parma, which at that time possessed excellent masters. Peter, who in gratitude assumed his brother’s name in addition to his own, became not only a good scholar, but in time a professor, and his singular capacity in this office obtained him both scholars and wealth, for, as we have seen in the last chapter, the profession of scholasticus was beginning to be one of profit. But he had never forgotten his early experience, and the money that flowed in went to feed the poor, whilst he himself persevered in the practice of rigid poverty. One day he made the acquaintance of two poor hermits belonging to a community that had established itself at a spot called Fonte-Avellano, at the foot of the Umbrian Apennines. His biographer calls it a desert, but it was a desert only in the Italian sense of he word, a solitary valley, that is, shut in between mountains clothed with evergreen oaks, and chest nuts, and the silvery olive, its thickets bright with the blossoms of the Judas-tree and the oleander, and its grass, with the starry cyclamen. To this desert, then, Peter’s new friends conducted him, on a visit to their hermitage, which had been founded a few years previously by the Blessed Ludolf. He found there a community who took the same view of human life as himself. They regarded man as a being made up of two noble and immortal parts, that were to be served and cherished--the soul and the intellect; and of one base and perishable part, that was good only to be mortified--the body. Simple men as they were, they had conceived the idea of doing penance for the huge evil world that lay outside their wilderness. So they lived four days a week on bread and water, allowing themselves on the other three the indulgence of herbs, afflicted their flesh in many ways, and divided their time between psalmody and study. Peter embraced this life with hearty earnestness, and outstripped his companions alike in his austerities and in his application to sacred learning. But his light could not be hid; abbots entreated that he might be sent to instruct their religious; his own brethren elected him their superior; seven successive popes employed him in the service of the Church; and, in 1057, Stephen IX. created him cardinal bishop of Ostia. His life was spent in struggles to stem the corruption of his age and to reform the clergy. Fleury observes that we must not look in his writings for acuteness of reasoning; but he had to do with men sunk in rude gross vices, which were hardly to be remedied by metaphysics. The medicine which St. Peter Damian prescribed for the sick world was penance; and he preached it in a plain homely sort of way, which might possibly offend fastidious tastes, but which had this merit about it, that it was practical, and had results. He entered the profaned sanctuary, scourge in hand, to drive out the unclean animals, and to overthrow the tables of the money-changers. In the intervals between his incessant legations to reform churches and rebuke princes, he retired to his cell at Fonte-Avellano, and might be found there living on pulse and water, employed in making wooden spoons, or other coarse manual labour, and submitting, even to his eightieth year, to the same rule of life as the youngest novice. Yet this was the most elegant scholar of his time; nay, more, he was a poet. And we do not use the term as classing him among the crowd of versifiers who wrote their chronicles, and even their theological treatises in lines which, often enough as Hallam remarks, can only be rendered into hexameters “by careful nursing.” He imitated neither Virgil nor Horace, but wrote in those rhymed trochaics which many classical purists would brand as barbarisms. Yet where shall we see richness of imagery wedded to greater harmony of numbers than in those wonderful stanzas, _De Paradisi Gloriâ_, wherein Paradise is depicted under the form of all that is fairest and brightest to the poet’s eye? The sparkling of precious gems, the blossoming of early flowers, the glory of the autumn cornfields, and the long shining of a summer’s day, lit by a sun that knows no setting, are painted in words that sound like the echoes of a harpsichord. And from these sensible images of earthly beauty he rises to that which is above sense, and sets before us the ineffable joys of those who see the Divine Beauty face to face, and are filled from the fountains of Eternal charity. The joys of heaven formed, in fact, the constant subject of his meditation, and in one of his prose treatises, speaking on this exhaustless theme, he gives utterance to the sentiment felt by every poet, of the insufficiency of words to express the emotions of the heart. “There is always more in the thing itself than the mind conceives, and more in what the mind conceives than the tongue can utter.”