Chapter LXXIX: Book II: gives ample extracts from the Common and State Laws on (4)

We see how erroneous is the opinion that attributes to the epoch between the middle of the fifteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries the revival of letters and the arts. Letters were not revived; they still existed and enlightened the world. "The great agitation of the Reformation is often represented as having contributed to literary and scientific development," says M. A. Maury, a writer not suspected of partiality to the middle ages. "This is not absolutely true. {618} The contests to which it gave rise retarded for a time the diffusion of knowledge; many monasteries, libraries, and schools were suppressed, which had been, up to that time, the _great sources of light_." Christian historians were the first to become suspicious of error and to point it out. Hurter, the great German historian, says: "Only superficial minds that disdain the study of documents and are blinded by the pretended superiority of our epoch, or by systematic hatred, dare accuse the church of having favored ignorance." [Footnote 267] All truly learned men soon became of the same mind. One of them, who has made the middle ages his study for twenty years, cannot restrain his indignation: "Our historians, even those who are considered the best, dwelling on the grossest conjectures and influenced by obsolete prejudices, without thinking of verifying, still less of rectifying, old assertions, have summed up the whole history of the first part of the middle ages in these two words, _ignorance and superstition_; but it is to themselves," he adds severely, "and not to the ages they have misunderstood and calumniated, that these two words should be applied." [Footnote 268] "The idea of progress is not a pagan idea," says Ozanam. [Footnote 269]

[Footnote 267: _History of Innocent III_., book xxi.]

[Footnote 268: Daremberg, _Cours of 1867_; and to the
support of his opinions he brings Guizot, Dom Pitra, Ozanam,
Heeren, etc.]

[Footnote 269: _Histoire de la Civilisation an cinquième
siècle_, chap. iv.]

The doctrine of progress is as old as the gospel; and the author of _Les Etudes sur les Barbares et le Moyen Age_ confirms this: "The people of the middle ages felt the necessity of knowledge; they studied and labored conscientiously and energetically, and marked each age by important developments." The more carefully we examine those ages, the better shall we understand the extent of knowledge in the church. The most eminent men of those times--who does not know them?--are bishops, monks, and popes: Gerbert, St. Bernard, Innocent III., and St. Thomas Aquinas, who can only be compared to Aristotle; the most original writers--who does not forget it?--are priests: Froissart, Petrarch, and later, Calderon, Lope de Vega, and Tirso de Molina; the greatest poet of the middle ages, Dante, was he not a theologian? Cimabue, who revived the art of painting, was he not reared among the Dominicans of Florence? Was not the first press in Paris set up at the Sorbonne? The best informed class of men were so incontestably the clergy that the names of priest and savant were confounded. The word _clergie_ in the middle ages signified learned. [Footnote 270] The church takes the highest rank in the world of science. It does not acquire knowledge for itself alone, but to diffuse everywhere, that the whole earth may be enlightened. Like the sun, it is a great centre diffusing the light it derives from God--its eternal source!

[Footnote 270: J. de Maistre, _Du Pape_, ii. 16.]

----------

{619}

From The French Of Erckmann And Chatrian.

The Invasion; Or, Yegof The Fool.