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.