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

by Augusta Theodosia Drane

We have the satisfaction of knowing that the frugal and laborious training of Henry’s early life was the means of forming a manly and Christian character. Nor is the portrait less pleasing which the biographer of Budæus has left us of the domestic life of that great man, who, though he had visited the court of Leo X., in quality of ambassador of France, and was the chief lion of the French world of letters, retained to his dying day those simple tastes and habits, which we are assured resulted from no affectation of laconic manners, but a certain genuine sentiment of humility.[314] His secretary and constant fellow-labourer was his wife, who sat in his study, found out passages in his books of reference, copied his papers, and withal did not forget his domestic comfort. Budæus needed some such good angel by his side, for he belonged to that class of scholars who are more familiar with the Latin As than with the value of louis d’ors. His mind was in his books, and whilst busy with the doings of the Greeks and Romans he could not always call home his absent thoughts. It is to be regretted, that with a character in many respects so amiable, Budæus should have permitted his love of Greek to lead him to take part with the Humanists in the ferocious onslaughts which they directed against the adherents of the mediæval learning. It was surely possible to revive the study of Homer and Cicero with rejecting the philosophy of St. Thomas, nor did there seem any reason why the lovers of polite literature should seek to establish their fame as scholars by savage and unseemly pasquinades on their literary rivals. And here it may be remarked that the title of Humanists, applied to the rising school, was one of their own choosing. By it they intended at one and the same time to indicate themselves as the only cultivators of “humane” letters, and to imply that the professors of the old school were barbarians. They were not content with advocating good Latin, and reviving the study of Greek; no one could join their camp who was not ready to rail at monks and schoolmen as offensive idiots. The former, in the choice vocabulary of Luther, were “locusts, caterpillars, frogs, and lice,” the latter, in the more polished phraseology of Budæus, “prating sophists,” and “divines of the Sorbonian Lake,” “Monks,” says Erasmus (himself an apostate canon[315]), “are only acceptable to silly women, bigots, and blockheads.” The Dominicans had the audacity to protest against the freedoms he had taken with the Latin Vulgate, and to complain of his version as that of a poet and orator rather than of a divine. “Most men who know anything of the value of a poet,” replies Erasmus, “think you to be swine rather than men, when they hear your stupid raving. Poetry is so little known to you, that you cannot even spell its name;[316] but let me tell you, it would be easier to cut two Thomists out of a log of wood, than one tolerable orator.” No matter what were a man’s talents, or how reasonable were his arguments, the moment he opened his mouth in opposition to these writers, he was placarded as a dunce. Erasmus, in his new Version of the Greek Testament, had given just cause of complaint by his use of a phraseology more elegant than theological. A certain Franciscan friar ventured to object in particular to his rendering of the Magnificat, whereupon Erasmus vented his spleen in a Colloquy, and branded the critic as “a pig and a donkey; more of a donkey than all donkeys put together;” and proceeded to justify his translation by quoting the comedies of Terence. Standish, Bishop of St. Asaph, took exception to another blot in the new version, the substitution, namely, of the word Sermo, for that of Verbum, in the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel; and Erasmus and his friends considered that they sufficiently vindicated their good Latin by nicknaming the objector, the Bishop of St. Ass. In the same style of wit, Vincent the Dominican was Bucentum the ox-driver, and the Carmelites were commonly designated the Camelites. “I have hopes of Cochlæus,” writes Luther, speaking of some of his adversaries, “he is only an idiot; as for the other two, they belong to the devil.” This was the ordinary style of the humanist controversialists; their puns and sarcasms being, in most cases, accompanied with a shower of mud.

With these, however, we need not more particularly concern ourselves, but turn our glance on Louvain, where, in the early part of the century, a new university had arisen, under Duke John of Brabant, which received its first diploma from Pope Martin V. in 1425, the theological faculty being erected six years later by Eugenius IV. The latter Pontiff had the satisfaction of receiving the firmest support from the Louvain doctors during the troublous times of the Council of Basle; and during the following century Louvain continued to be not merely the chief seat of learning in Flanders, but one of the soundest nurseries of the faith. She held stoutly to scholasticism, and was distinguished by her resolute opposition to the Lutheran heretics; yet it was in vain that her enemies attempted to charge her with retrogression, for even Erasmus owns in his letters, that the schools of Louvain were considered second only to those of Paris.

It is not difficult to explain the hostility which the Louvain scholars had to encounter on the part of the partisans of the new learning. Louvain, from the first, consecrated herself to the defence of the scholastic theology. Immediately on the erection of the theological faculty in 1431, the Dominicans arrived at Louvain, and opened a school whence they sent forth fourteen doctors in the space of twenty years. In 1447 they were formally admitted to all the rights of the university, and obtained chairs of theology, and the other privileges formerly granted to them at Paris and Bologna. Their brethren were frequently aggregated to the college of the strict faculty, and one of their order was always a member of the council strictæ facultatis. From this period the studium generale of the order at Louvain ranked as one of the highest character in the order, and the influence of the Dominican doctors made itself powerfully felt throughout the whole university. St. Thomas of Aquin was the doctor, par excellence, of the Louvain schools, and in 1637 was chosen by the faculty of theology their perpetual patron and protector. It is needless to say that this determined Thomism was not more agreeable to the humanists and their partisans than the Scotism of the Paris theologians; and they sought, with very poor success, to squib down the university by representing it as nothing but a nest of friars.

The University of Louvain enjoyed some advantages in which the more ancient academies had been wanting. Not having grown up out of accidental circumstances, like so many of her elder sisters, but having been begun at a time when the principles necessary for governing such institutions had been made manifest by long experience, her founders were careful to provide her, from the first, with a body of statutes sagaciously drawn up, so as to ensure the preservation of regular discipline; and a well-organised collegiate system protected the students from those disorders which had disgraced the beginnings of Paris and Oxford.

In course of time separate schools and colleges were established for the different faculties, one for medicine, eight for arts, and eight for mixed studies. Among the latter was Standonch’s college of poor scholars, and the celebrated Collegium Trilingue founded in 1516 by Jerome Busleiden, the friend of More and Erasmus, for the study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The idea of this academy had been suggested to the founder by a visit to Alcala, where Cardinal Ximenes was then completing the establishment of his university. Hallam tells us that its foundation was fiercely opposed by the monks and friars, “those unbeaten enemies of learning,” and it is true that the old professors did at first regard the new institution with some jealousy. They had been used to write and speak mediæval Latin, and grumbled sorely when required to turn Ciceronians. The college happened to be first opened in the fish-market, and hence arose the favourite bon-mot of the Louvain Conservatives, “We do not talk Fish-Market Latin.” In time, however, the fish-market Latin established its supremacy, and Louvain grew proud of her classical professors, such as Louis Vives and Conrad Goclen. The colleges gradually multiplied in number, and even at the present day the city is filled with splendid buildings, all of which owe their existence to the university of which they once formed part.

It was at Louvain that Pope Adrian VI. received his education, and from a poor scholar rose to fill the posts of professor and rector of the university. The son of a boat-builder of Utrecht, he was admitted among a certain number of poor boys whom the university bound itself to educate gratuitously, and endured rather more than his share of the hardships and privations to which scholars of that class are usually exposed. Seldom able to provide himself with the luxury of a lamp or a candle, he was accustomed to prosecute his studies after dark in the porch of some church, where a lamp was then usually suspended, or at the street corner, which supplied him with a feeble light. However, he seems sometimes to have been able to procure himself a better sort of light, for we read that, one cold winter’s night, Margaret, the widow of Duke Charles of Burgundy, then governess of the Netherlands, remarked a tiny ray that issued from one of the college windows at a very late hour, and bidding her chamberlain find out which of the students sat up so late in such intense cold, she was told that it was only “little Florentius” over his books. With a woman’s instinct of compassion, she sent him the next day three hundred florins for the purchase of books and firewood.

When he was afterwards raised to the head of the university, he exhibited the same zeal for the promotion of ecclesiastical discipline which afterwards won him so much unpopularity from his Roman subjects. In spite of their contemptuous strictures on his supposed barbarism, Adrian was revered in Louvain as a generous patron of letters. He erected and endowed one of the most magnificent colleges of which Louvain could boast, and in it was deposited the autograph copy of his works, which is still preserved in the great seminary of Mechlin.

A considerable number of other new universities sprang up in Germany about the beginning of the sixteenth century, all more or less stamped with the literary character of the age. Of these the most famous was Wittemberg, marked out by an evil destiny as the cradle of the Lutheran apostasy. It was founded in 1502 by Frederic, elector of Saxony, who commissioned Staupitz, the provincial of the Augustinians, to seek out men of learning and ability to fill its vacant professorships. Luther was invited hither in 1508 to teach the Aristotelian logic, and, four years later, after his return from Rome, received his doctor’s cap, and took the customary oaths to defend the faith against heresy to the last drop of his blood. In 1516 the professor was to be found waging open war against the philosophy he was engaged to teach, and drawing up ninety-nine theses against the scholastic theology, in which is clearly laid down the fundamental dogma of Lutheranism—the denial of free-will. They were published many years later with a preface by Melancthon, declaring them to contain the veritable sum of the reformed religion, which had thus been reduced to system a year before that quarrel with Tetzel, usually represented as the origin of Luther’s revolt.

Melancthon was given the chair of Greek in 1518, on the recommendation of his master Reuchlin, and was introduced to Wittemberg at the moment when Luther’s quarrel had been taken up by the students and professors. In him Luther gained a disciple whose learning and natural moderation of character were worthy of better things than to become the author of the Confession of Augsburg, and the colleague of Bucer. That horrible apostate, a renegade Dominican, who condescended to every one of the rival schools of heresy, provided only he was suffered to enjoy the license which first tempted him to abjure the faith, filled for twenty years the theological chair at Strasburg. Everywhere the reins of power had fallen into the hands of the pedagogues, and the Lutheran army was to be seen officered by humanists and university professors. The facilities offered by the numerous academies that had sprung up since the beginning of the century encouraged a rage for learning among all classes, and many a poor artisan’s son, like Wolfgang Musculus, or the notorious Henry Bullinger, scraped together a scanty pittance by street singing, which they afterwards spent in procuring the means of study at one or other of the universities. Musculus, indeed, found charitable patrons in the person of some Benedictine monks, who educated him, and gave him the habit; but he soon abandoned the cloister, and after a wild adventurous life, during which we find him working as a mason, and, during the scanty moments he could snatch from his toil, studying the Hebrew grammar, he became “Minister” of Strasburg, and theological professor in the Protestant University of Berne. About the same time the Greek professorship of Calvin’s college at Geneva was filled with another of these strange itinerant scholars, Sebastian Castillon, a native of Dauphiny, who studied the Oriental tongues in the early morning hours, before he went to his day labour in the fields. He afterwards quarrelled with Calvin, who accused him of theft, and went to teach Greek and Hebrew at Basle. Here he produced a Latin and French version of the Scriptures, and endeavoured to render the sacred books into the classical diction of profane authors. We can scarcely form any correct idea of the period of the Reformation without a glimpse at men of this stamp, who then swarmed in every part of Germany; restless, self-sufficient, often more than half self-taught, their minds untrained with the healthy discipline of the schools, disposed to run after every novelty, and to overvalue themselves and their attainments, they inevitably fell into the extravagances to which vanity commonly betrays her victims.