Christian Schools and Scholars / or, Sketches of Education from the Christian Era to the Council of Trent

by Augusta Theodosia Drane

The biographer of Gerard has told the story of his conversion briefly enough, and compressed the arguments of the orator into one brief sentence, Quid hic stas, vanis intentus? Alius homo fieri debes. And another man Gerard indeed became. He flung the world behind his back, and entered on a life of penance with no less ardour than that with which he had applied himself awhile before to the business of the schools. For three years he retired among the Carthusians and wholly disappeared from the world; and when he returned there was little of the old Gerard about him. He at once devoted himself to the work of preaching, and generally preached twice a day, his sermons being seldom less than three hours in length. But it was difficult to weary a German congregation of that enthusiastic period, and no complaints appear to have been made of Gerard’s prolixity. During his retirement he had placed himself under the direction of Ruysbroek, and appears to have caught much of his tone and spirit. He had made the Scriptures his only study, and these, expounded with simple eloquence from earnest lips, drew him crowds of hearers, “clergy and laity, men and women, little and great, learned and unlearned, lawyers and magistrates, bond and free, rich and poor, beggars and pilgrims.” He laid the axe to the root of the tree, and like St. John Baptist, called on all men to do worthy works of penance. In short, he gave the age what it wanted, and though he met with many contradictions, he also effected many practical reforms.

Gerard the Great, as he was called, soon reckoned a considerable number of disciples, whom he made it his chief object to ground in the spiritual life; and in spite of his renown as one of the most learned doctors of his time, he thoroughly inculcated the lesson of intellectual humility. Out of the ranks of his followers was gradually formed a sort of fraternity or congregation; and he had conceived the design of founding for their reception certain monasteries under the rule of the Canons Regular, in which purpose he was greatly encouraged by Ruysbroek. Gerard died before he was able to put his plans into execution, but they were carried out by his disciples, and specially by Master Florentius Radewyns, a canon of Utrecht, a former student at the university of Prague. The new religious assumed the title of “Brethren of the Common Life;” their mother-house was at Deventer, they lived like monks, though without at first taking the religious vows, and their employment was the correction and transcription of books, which formed their principal source of revenue. Gerard, in the rule he had drawn up for his own guidance, had prohibited all profane studies. He desired that his children should exclusively addict themselves to the reading of the Scriptures and the Fathers, not wasting their time over “such vanities as geometry, arithmetic, rhetoric, logic, grammar, lyric poetry, and judicial astrology.” In the rigorism of these views we detect the spirit of one who has tasted of a poisoned cup, and knows no other security than a rule of total abstinence. He specially forbids all gainful studies, which obscure and obliquify the human reason, and do not tend to God; and he roundly asserts that very few persons who follow the pursuits of law or medicine are ever found who live a just, honest, and quiet life. No doubt his principles were extreme, and it is some consolation to find that he admitted of certain dispensations. The wiser of the Gentile philosophers, such as Plato and Socrates, might, he admitted, be read with profit. Seneca also was to be tolerated, and with an amiable inconsistency we find him, even in his rule of life, slipping in, half unconsciously, a quotation from Virgil.

All this was exactly what might have been expected from a converted man of the world; but Florentius had gone through a different kind of experience, and one which made his views less austere and exclusive. He had passed the ordeal of a university career unscathed, and his biographer expends an entire chapter in bringing forward proofs why the name he bore was specially appropriate to one whose life from childhood had been so holy and unspotted. Not only was he himself a flower of all perfection, but he was also destined to make the houses he governed flower-beds from which spiritual bees were to suck the honey of wisdom; his brethren were to give out to a naughty world the sweet odour of virtue, according to that of the Spouse in the Canticles, “The flowers have appeared in our land.” Florentius was the model of a good scholar, kind to his equals, respectful to his superiors, a proficient in the liberal arts, but keeping his heart for the Divine law, which he loved and studied far more diligently than he did the book of the Gentiles.

Under his superiority the labours of the brethren were made to embrace a larger sphere of usefulness, and to include the education of youth. The prohibition against profane learning speedily disappeared, and the schools of Deventer attained high celebrity; and there, in 1393, a little scholar, Thomas Hammerlein by name, was admitted under the roof of Florentius, becoming afterwards the biographer of his revered master, and the reputed author of the “Following of Christ.”

Not to enter into the vexed question whether he were indeed the author, or only the transcriber, of that first of uninspired books, it is yet satisfactory to know that the Thomas à Kempis, whom from infancy we have been used to revere, is not reduced by the investigations of ruthless critics to a mere mythical existence. He really lived, wrote, taught, and prayed. In the college of Deventer he studied grammar and plain-chant under Florentius, and tells us how, when present in choir with his schoolfellows, he loved stealthily to watch his master, because of his devout aspect, being cautious, however, that his pious curiosity was not perceived, inasmuch as the good rector could make himself feared as well as loved. He takes us into the school, too, and shows us the master setting copies, and praising the flexible fingers of a little disciple, whom, with the blessing of God, he hopes to form into a good writer. Or we enter the cell of the devout brother, Gerard of Zutphen, whose whole consolation lay in holy books, and who was liable to get so absorbed in the study of them, that a charitable brother had to come and warn him when the bell had rung for dinner. He was the librarian, and had a passing great care for his books; but as for himself and his corporeal wants, if superiors and companions had not seen to them better than he did himself, he would have fared but poorly. He thought so highly of the benefits to be derived from useful reading, that he lent his books to ecclesiastics out of doors, to win them from idle and frivolous amusements. “Books,” he would say, “preach better than we can do.” And therefore he held them in great reverence, read them lovingly, and copied them with the utmost diligence. Nor must we omit to mention the pious cook, John Ketel, the saint of the community, as all, by common consent, seem to have regarded him. Florentius knew his merit, and to increase it never gave him a civil word; but his humility and sweetness were proof against every trial. Or that devout clerk, Arnold Schoonhove, a schoolfellow of Thomas, who never played in the streets with other idle boys, and when he sat in school with them heeded not their childish pranks, but steadily wrote down the master’s words on paper, and got a chosen comrade (who was probably Thomas himself) to read over the lesson to him, or hear him repeat it. “It was God whom he chiefly sought in his studies,” says his friend, “and what he liked best was to get into a quiet corner and pray.” After seven years’ study among the Brethren of Common Life, Thomas took the habit of the Canons Regular in the monastery of St. Agnes, at Zwoll, where he lived till his ninety-second year, engaged in useful labours, transcribing and composing pious books, which earned for him the sobriquet of the Hammer of Hearts. He has left us memorials of his monastery and his college-life, written with a sweet simplicity which reminds us of Bede. Of his own life we know but little, yet that little has a character of its own. His world was his cell; he was never quite happy out of it, and if sometimes induced by his brethren to go abroad and take a little air, he would soon contrive to get away, with the transparent excuse, that “Some one was waiting for him in his chamber.” The others would smile, knowing well Who He was of Whom he spoke, even the Beloved, of Whom it is written that He stands at the door and knocks. In all the books that he transcribed he wrote his favourite motto, “Everywhere I sought for rest, but I found it nowhere save in a little corner, with a little book.” And a certain old and much-defaced picture was long preserved, which represented his effigies surrounded with the legend, which must here be added in its original phraseology:—“In omnibus requiem quæsivi, sed non inveni, nisi in Hoexkins ende Boexkins.”

In process of time the Brethren of Common Life spread over Flanders, France, and Germany, and the schools they founded multiplied and flourished. They were introduced into the University of Paris by John Standonch, a doctor of the Sorbonne, who gave into their direction the College de Montaigu, of which he was the principal, and established them in Cambray, Valenciennes, Mechlin, and Louvain. He drew up statutes for their use, which are supposed by Du Boulay to have furnished St. Ignatius with the first notions of his rule, an idea which receives some corroboration from the fact that the saint studied at the College de Montaigu during his residence at the University of Paris. Standonch himself received the habit of the Poor Clerks, as they were now often called, and had the satisfaction of seeing more than 300 good scholars issue from his schools, many of whom undertook the direction or reform of other academies. In 1430 the Institute numbered forty-five houses, and thirty years later the numbers were increased threefold. The Deventer brethren were far from being mere mystics and transcribers of books. The aim of their foundation was doubtless to supply a system of education which should revive something of the old monastic discipline, but they cultivated all the higher branches of learning, and their schools were among the first of those north of the Alps which introduced the revived study of classical literature. One of their most illustrious scholars was Nicholas of Cusa, or Cusanus, the son of a poor fisherman, who won his doctor’s cap at Padua, and became renowned for his Greek, Hebrew, and mathematical learning. Eugenius IV. appointed him his legate, and Nicholas V. created him Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen, in the Tyrol. His personal character won him the veneration of his people, but, according to Tennemann, his love of mathematics led him into many theological extravagances. He was strongly inclined to the views of the Neo-Platonists; he considered, moreover, that all human knowledge was contained in the ideas of numbers, and attempted to explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity on mathematical principles. He was undoubtedly a distinguished man of science, and was the first among moderns to revive the Pythagorean hypothesis of the motion of the earth round the sun. Cusanus had studied at most of the great universities, but held none of them in great esteem, for he professed a sovereign contempt for the scholastic philosophy which still held its ground in those academies. At his death he left his wealth to an hospital which he had founded in his native village, and to which he attached a magnificent library. Deventer could boast indeed of being the fruitful mother of great scholars, such as Hegius, Langius, and Dringeberg, all of whom afterwards took part in the restoration of letters. The brethren, moreover, displayed extraordinary zeal in promoting the new art of printing, and one of the earliest Flemish presses was set up in their college. And in 1475, when Alexander Hegius became rector of the schools, he made the first bold experiment of printing Greek.

It is not to be supposed that such a revolution as that which was brought about in the world of letters by the new invention could fail of producing events of a mixed character of good and evil. Whatever was fermenting in the minds of the people now found expression through the press, and Hallam notices “the incredible host of popular religious tracts poured forth” before the close of the fifteenth century, most of them of a character hostile to the faith. The first censorship of printed books appears to have been established in 1480, by Berthold, Archbishop of Mentz, who explained his reasons for taking this step in a mandate, wherein he complains of the abuse of the “divine art” of printing, whereby perverse men have turned that to the injury of mankind which was designed for their instruction. Specially he alludes to those unauthorised and faulty translations into the vulgar tongue of the Scriptures, and even the canons of the Church, wherein men of no learning or experience have taken on them to invent new words or use old ones in erroneous senses, in order to express the meaning of the original, “a thing most dangerous in the Sacred Scriptures.” He therefore forbids any such translations to be thenceforward published without being approved by four doctors, under pain of excommunication, desiring that the art which was first of all discovered in his city, “not without divine aid,” should be maintained in all its honour.

This mandate was only directed against the faulty translations of the Holy Scriptures. No opposition was offered to the multiplication of correct versions, both of the Latin Vulgate and its various translations. The Cologne Bible, printed in 1479, had before this appeared, with the formal approbation of the university. The very first book printed by Gutenburg and Fust in 1453, was the Latin Bible, and among the twenty-four books printed in Germany before the year 1470 we find five Latin and two German editions of the Bible. Translations of the Holy Scriptures into various modern tongues were among the very first books issued from the press; as the Bohemian version in 1475, Italian in 1471—which ran through eleven editions before the close of the century, the Dutch in 1477, and the French in the same year. The admirers of Luther have therefore fallen into a strange error, when they represent him as the first to unlock the Scriptures to the people, for twenty-four editions of the German Bible alone had been printed and published before his time.

It was in the year 1476 that a little choir-boy of Utrecht entered the college of Deventer, and gave such signs of genius and industry as to draw from his masters the prediction that he would one day be the light of his age. He was a namesake of the founder, but, after the fashion of the day, adopted a Latin and Greek version of his Flemish name of Gerard, and was to be known to posterity as Desiderius Erasmus. Like Thomas à Kempis, he passed from the schools of Deventer to the cloisters of the Canons Regular, a step which, he assures us, was forced on him by his guardians, and never had his own assent. A happy accident enabled him to visit Rome in the suite of the Bishop of Cambray and once released from the wearisome discipline of convent life, he never returned to it, but spent the rest of his life wandering from one to another of the capitals of France, Italy, and England, teaching for a livelihood, courted by all the literary and religious parties of the day, and satirising them all by turns, indisputably the literary Coryphæus of his age, but penetrated through and through with its scoffing and presumptuous spirit. It was an age fruitful in pedants and humanists, whose destiny it was to help on the revolution in faith by a revolution in letters. Schools and professors multiplied throughout Germany. At the very time when Hegius was teaching the elements of Greek to Erasmus, his old comrades Langius and Dringeberg were presiding over the schools of Munster and Schelstadt. Rodolph Langius exerted himself strenuously in the cause of polite letters, and whilst superintending his classes occupied spare moments in correcting the text of almost every Latin work which at that time issued from the press, and in making deadly war on the scholastic philosophy. His rejection of the old-fashioned school-books and his innovations on time-honoured abuses raised against him the friars of Cologne, and a controversy ensued in which Langius won so much success as enabled him to affix the stigma of barbarism on his opponents. His friend and namesake Rodolph Agricola, who had studied at Ferrara under Theodore of Gaza, and was held by his admirers superior in erudition to Politian himself, at this time presided over the school of Groningen. Besides his skill in the learned tongues he was a poet, a painter, a musician, an orator, and a philosopher. Such a multitude of accomplishments won him an invitation to the court of the Elector Palatine at Heidelberg, where a certain learned academy had been founded, called the Rhenish Society, for the encouragement of Greek and Hebrew literature, the members of which, says Hallam, “did not scorn to relax their minds with feasting and dancing, not forgetting the ancient German attachment to the flowing cup.” This is a polite way of rendering a very ugly passage, which in the original tells us plainly that the Rhenish academicians were addicted to excessive inebriety and other disgraceful vices. It is somewhat remarkable, however, that Agricola, who died three years after his removal to Heidelberg, received on his death-bed the habit of those very friars whom, during life, he and his friend Langius had done their best to hold up to popular contempt.

About the same time Reuchlin was studying at Paris, where, in 1458, Gregory of Tiferno had been appointed Greek professor. Reuchlin visited Rome, and translated a passage from Thucydides in the presence of Argyrophilus, with such success that the Greek exclaimed, in a transport of delight (and possibly of surprise, at such an achievement on the part of a Northern barbarian), “Our banished Greece has flown beyond the Alps!” Reuchlin was a Hebrew scholar, a circumstance which, in the end, proved his ruin; for, embracing the Cabalistic philosophy, he abandoned classics and good sense in the pursuit of that absurd mysticism. In this strange infatuation he had many companions. Not a few of those who had shown themselves foremost in deriding the scholastic philosophy, ended by substituting in its place either open scepticism or the philosophy of magic. A few years later, the wild theories of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Jerome Cardan, found eager adherents among those who conceived it a proof of good scholarship to despise St. Thomas as a Goth. Reuchlin, whilst pouring forth his bitter satires against the old theologians, was printing his treatise on the Cabala, entitled De Verbo Mirifico, wherein magic is declared to be the perfection of philosophy, which work was formally condemned at Rome. However, all the French savants of the Renaissance were not Cabalists, nor did all, when they introduced the study of Greek, forget that it was the language of the Gospels. The real restoration of Greek studies in France must be ascribed to Budæus, who made up, by the piety and indefatigable studies of his later years, for a youth of wild irregularity. He had studied under Lascaris, and though he had reached a very mature age before he devoted himself to letters, he soon became as familiar with the learned tongues as with his native idiom. His treatise on the Ancient Money first rendered his name famous, and secured him the friendship of Francis I. He profited from the favour shown him by that monarch, to solicit from him the foundation of the Royal College of France, for the cultivation of the three learned tongues, and thus fairly introduced the “Cecropian Muse” into the University of Paris. If we may credit the authority of a grave rector of that university, this momentous change was advantageous, not merely to the minds but also to the morals of her students. St. Jerome, as we know, imposed upon himself the study of Hebrew as an efficacious means of taming the passions; and Rollin affirms that many who, in former years, had been nothing but idle men of pleasure, when once they began to read the Greek authors flung their vices and follies to the winds, and led the simple and austere manner of life that becomes a scholar. He quotes a passage from the manuscript Memoirs of Henry de Mesmes, which gives a pleasant picture of the college life of those days, and may be taken as an example of the sort of labour imposed on a hard-working law student of the sixteenth century:—“My father,” he says, “gave me for a tutor John Maludan of Limoges, a pupil of the learned Durat, who was chosen for the innocence of his life and his suitable age to preside over my early years, till I should be old enough to govern myself. With him and my brother, John James de Mesmes, I was sent to the college of Burgundy, and was put into the third class and I afterwards spent almost a year in the first. My father said he had two motives for thus sending me to the college: the one was the cheerful and innocent conversation of the boys, and the other was the school discipline, by which he trusted that we should be weaned from the over-fondness that had been shown us at home, and purified, as it were, in fresh water. Those eighteen months I passed at college were of great service to me. I learnt to recite, to dispute, and to speak in public; and I became acquainted with several excellent men, many of whom are still living. I learned, moreover, the frugality of the scholar’s life, and how to portion out my day to advantage; so that, by the time I left, I had repeated, in public, abundance of Latin, and two thousand Greek verses, which I had written after the fashion of boys of my age, and I could repeat Homer from one end to the other. I was thus well received by the chief men of my time, to some of whom my tutor introduced me. In 1545, I was sent to Toulouse with my tutor and brother, to study law under an old grey-haired professor, who had travelled half over the world. There we remained for three years, studying severely, and under such strict rules as I fancy few persons nowadays would care to comply with. We rose at four, and, having said our prayers, went to lectures at five, with our great books under our arms, and our inkhorns and candlesticks in our hands. We attended all the lectures until ten o’clock, without intermission; then we went to dinner, after having hastily collated during half an hour what our master had written down. After dinner, by way of diversion, we read Sophocles, or Aristophanes, or Euripides, and sometimes Demosthenes, Tully, Virgil, and Horace. At one we were at our studies again, returning home at five to repeat and turn to the places quoted in our books till past six. Then came supper, after which we read some Greek or Latin author. On feast days we heard mass and vespers, and the rest of the day we were allowed a little music and walking. Sometimes we went to see our friends, who invited us much oftener than we were permitted to go. The rest of the day we spent in reading, and we generally had with us some learned men of that time.”