Such a petition, so just, so modest, and so free from the least tinge of insubordination might have been thought capable of touching the hardest heart, but, says Rudolf his biographer, “he sang to a stone.” The building grievance at last grew to such a pitch, that the monks in despair appealed to Charlemagne, who summoned Ratgar to court to answer their charges, and appointed a commission of bishops and abbots to inquire into the whole matter. Their decision allayed the discord for a time, and so long as the emperor lived, Ratgar showed his monks some consideration. But no sooner was he dead than the persecution recommenced, and Rabanus, again deprived of his books and papers, seems to have consoled himself by making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He describes the unhappy state of Fulda at this time, in some very doleful verses addressed to one of the exiled monks; for, not content with overwhelming his brethren with fresh labours, Ratgar had turned many out of the monastery, chiefly the aged ones, whose temperate remonstrances annoyed him. We have in these verses a touching account of the farewell visit paid by the exiles before their departure to the tomb of St. Boniface, whom they conjured to intercede in their favour. Some of them did not rest content with a course of passive submission, but repaired once more to court and implored the Emperor Louis to apply some remedy to the abuses, which threatened to end in the disruption of the first religious house in his dominions. A new commission was therefore appointed, and the result was that Ratgar was deposed from office and banished from the monastery, while in his place was elected the holy and gentle St. Eigil, a disciple of St. Sturm, whose government presented a singular contrast to that of the harsh and haughty Ratgar. He did nothing without consulting his brethren, and made it his aim to heal the wounds which a long course of ill-treatment had opened in the community. To set his children an example of humility and paternal concord, he often served them at table, and especially during the feast of Christmas. In his overflowing love and charity, he petitioned, as a personal favour, that they would consent to the recall of poor Ratgar, and on his return it appeared that his humiliation had not been without a beneficial effect. He showed no disposition to disturb the peace of the community again, but as the twofold desire of commanding and of building was not wholly eradicted from his soul, they let him satisfy it in moderation, by constructing a small monastery on an adjoining hill, to which he afterwards removed himself. He seems to have made a good end, asking pardon of all those whom he had offended, and Fulda very soon recovered its former flourishing condition. Rabanus was restored to his books and his school immediately on the election of St. Eigil, and in 822, on the death of the good abbot, whose life was written by the monk Candidus, Rabanus was chosen his successor. To him this was a very sorrowful business, for, with the government of a community of one hundred and fifty monks on his hands, he was necessarily obliged to give up his scholars. He resigned them to the care of Candidus, in all that concerned the humane letters, reserving to himself, however, the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. Singularly enough, however, the man whose whole life had been passed in literary labour, evinced a talent for business not always found united to great scholarship. He kept up regular discipline, and put all the offices of the abbey in a state of thorough efficiency, completing many of the half-finished buildings of Ratgar, and enriching his treasury with a vast quantity of holy relics. He also looked so well after the farms and dependencies of the abbey as greatly to increase its revenues. Still the school was not neglected, and the lectures he delivered there were destined to be the seeds of a work important in the history of ecclesiastical literature. His pupils had been accustomed from time to time to ask him questions on the chief duties of ecclesiastics and their signification, and the proper manner of administering the Rites of Holy Church. His answers they noted down on their tablets, without, however, observing much method, and as the matter constantly increased in bulk and value, they begged him at length to revise their notes and arrange them in better order. The result was his celebrated Treatise De Institutione Clericorum, an invaluable monument of the faith and practice of the Church in the ninth century. It treats in three books of the Sacraments, the Divine office, the feasts and fasts of the Church, and the learning necessary for ecclesiastics, concluding with instructions and rules for the guidance of preachers. On the last subject he observes that three things are necessary in order to become a good preacher; first, to be a good man yourself, that you may be able to teach others to be so; secondly, to be skilled in the Holy Scriptures and the interpretations of the Fathers; thirdly, and above all, to prepare for the work of preaching by that of prayer. As to the studies proper to ecclesiastics, he distinctly requires them to be learned not only in the Scriptures, but also in the seven liberal arts, provided only that these are treated as the handmaids of theology, and he explains his views on this subject much in the same way as Bede had done before him. For the rest, he was an enemy to anything like narrowness of intellectual training. His own works, in prose and verse, embraced a large variety of subjects, some of them belonging to mystic theology, such as his book on the Vision of God and his poem on the Holy Cross, which, in spite of its inaccurate prosody, still raises the admiration of the reader from the elevation of its sentiments. He is also commonly reputed the author of the “Veni Creator.”
In 847, Rabanus was raised to the archiepiscopal see of Mentz, in which office he was called on to examine the errors of Gotteschalk, a man who, beginning life as a monk of Fulda, had quitted that monastery in disgust, and subsequently led a wandering and not very reputable life, though he appears to have considered himself attached to the monastery of Orbais. The opinions he broached on the subject of predestination being condemned by the council of Mentz, Rabanus sent him to his own metropolitan, Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims. The severity with which he was treated was disapproved even by many who condemned his doctrines, and a warm controversy arose, in the course of which Hincmar, who was far more a man of action than of the pen, bethought himself of employing on his side of the argument the genius of Scotus Erigena, then at the head of the Palatine school. Erigena was as yet only known to the learned world as a Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic scholar, and a man of surpassing wit and power of argument. His heterodox tendencies were not even suspected, and Hincmar congratulated himself on having engaged the services of one confessedly without a rival in the arena of letters. But his choice of an ally proved most unfortunate. Erigena opened fire on the opposite party with the assertion, characteristic enough of the self-sufficient sophist, that every question, on every imaginable subject, was capable of solution when submitted to the four philosophic rules of division, definition, demonstration, and analysis. To work he went, therefore, with his four rules, and while combating the ultra-predestination of Gottischalk, gave utterance to such free opinions on the subject of Divine Grace as raised against him all the theologians of France. Among these were St. Prudentius of Troyes, Amolan, Archbishop of Lyons, a Hebrew scholar whose wise and moderate manner of dealing with the subject aimed at refuting the errors of both the opposite partisans, and his successor, St. Remigius. The opinions put forth by Scotus had increased the difficulties of the question, and writers thickened on both sides. It is needless to say that neither Rabanus nor Hincmar were any way responsible for the errors broached by Scotus; nevertheless, the line of argument which they took did not satisfy the theologians of Valence and Lyons, and in the course of the controversy which troubled his declining years, Rabanus found himself opposed by his former pupil, Lupus of Ferrières. He died in 856, leaving his books to be equally divided between the abbeys of Fulda and St. Alban’s, of Mentz.
Meanwhile, Lupus of Ferrières had become abbot of his monastery, for Sigulf in his old age resigned his dignity, and chose to become the disciple of his former pupil. Lupus continued after his promotion to carry on his labours in the monastic school. The favour with which he was regarded by Charles the Bald was the occasion of much trouble to the poor scholar, who was constantly summoned to act as royal ambassador, and sometimes even to join the army and take part in active war. His monastery happened to be one of those which owed the king military service, and in an action fought in Angoumois between Charles and his nephew Pepin, Lupus, who had no taste at all for the life of a soldier, lost all his baggage and found himself a prisoner. So soon as he recovered his liberty he addressed a moving letter to the king, imploring him to set him free henceforth from his military engagements at any price. “Most willingly,” he says, “will I resume the office of professor in my monastery, for I desire nothing better than all my life to teach what I have learnt.” Charles appears to have seen that by persisting in his feudal claims he would only be making a very bad soldier out of an admirable scholar, so he suffered him to return to Ferrières, where he set about collecting a noble library, as well sacred as profane. As he wrote himself to Einard, he never grew weary of books; he took extraordinary pains in seeking for his treasures even in distant countries, in causing them to be transcribed, and sometimes in lovingly transcribing them himself. His interesting correspondence contains frequent allusions to these Bibliographical researches. At one time he asks a friend to bring him the “Wars of Catiline and of Jugurtha” by Sallust, and the “Verrines of Cicero.” At another, he writes to Pope Benedict III., begging him to send by two of his monks, about to journey to Rome, certain books which he could not obtain in his own country, and which he promises to have speedily copied and faithfully returned. They are, the “Commentaries of St. Jerome on Jeremias,” “Cicero de Oratore,” the twelve books of Quinctilian’s Institutes, and the “Commentary of Donatus on Terence.” With all his taste for the classics, however, Lupus had too much good sense not to see the importance of cultivating the barbarous dialects, and sent his nephew with two other noble youths to Prom, to learn the Tudesque idiom.[92] In his school he made it his chief aim to train his pupils, not only in grammar and rhetoric, but also in the higher art of a holy life. The monastic seminaries were proverbially schools of good living as well as good learning, recte faciendi et bene dicendi, as Mabillon expresses it; and there was nothing that Lupus had more at heart than the inculcation of this principle, that the cultivation of head and heart must go together. “We too often seek in study,” he writes in his epistle to the monk Ebradus, “nothing but ornament of style; few are found who desire to acquire by its means purity of manners, which is of far greater value. We are very much afraid of vices of language, and use every effort to correct them, but we regard with indifference the vices of the heart.” His favourite Cicero had before his time lifted a warning voice against the capital error of disjoining mental from moral culture, and in the Christian system of the earlier centuries they were never regarded apart.
Lupus was not too great a scholar to condescend to labour for beginners, and drew up, for the benefit of his pupils, an abridgment of Roman history, in which he proposes the characters of Traian and Theodosius for the study of Christian princes. He was wont to boast of his double descent from Alcuin, as being a pupil of Sigulf and Rabanus, both of them disciples of the great master. His own favourite scholar Heiric, or Henry of Auxerre, indulged in a similar morsel of scholastic pride. He had studied under both Lupus and Haimo of Halberstadt, the former school-fellow of Rabanus, at St. Martin of Tours. Haimo seems to have lectured for some time at Ferrières, and Heiric tells us in some not inelegant verses that it was the custom of the two pedagogues to give their pupils a very pleasant sort of recreation, relating to them whatever they had found in the course of their reading that was worthy of remembrance, whether in Christian or Pagan authors. Heiric, who was somewhat of an intellectual glutton, and had a craving for learning of all sorts and on all imaginable subjects, made for himself a little book, in which he diligently noted down every scrap that fell from the lips of his masters. This book he subsequently published, and dedicated to Hildebold, Bishop of Auxerre. Heiric himself afterwards became a man of letters; he was appointed scholasticus of St. Germain’s of Auxerre, and was intrusted with the education of Lothaire, son of Charles the Bald, as we learn from the epistle addressed to that monarch which he prefixed to his life of St. Germanus, in which he speaks of the young prince, recently dead, as in years a boy, but in mind a philosopher. Another of his pupils was the famous Remigius of Auxerre, who, towards the end of the ninth century, was summoned to Rheims by Archbishop Fulk, to re-establish sacred studies in that city, and worked there in concert with his former schoolfellow, Hucbald of St. Amand, who attained a curious sort of reputation by his poem on bald men, each line of which began with the letter C, the whole being intended as a compliment to Charles the Bald. Fulk himself became their first pupil, and after thoroughly restoring the school of Rheims, Remigius passed on to Paris, where we shall have occasion to notice him among the teachers of the tenth century. From his time the schools of Paris continued to increase in reputation and importance, till they developed into the great university which may thus be distinctly traced through a pedigree of learned men up to the great Alcuin himself. This genealogy of pedagogues is of no small interest, as showing the efforts made in the worst of times to keep alive the spark of science and the persistence with which, in spite of civil wars and Norman invasions, the scholastic traditions of Alcuin were maintained.
We must not take leave of abbot Lupus without noticing one other pupil of his, more celebrated than any yet named, the great St. Ado of Vienne. He studied in the school of Ferrières under Sigulf, Aldric and Lupus, and from his school life his masters predicted his future sanctity. The jealousy of his companions obliging him to leave Ferrières, he removed to Prom, and placed himself under the discipline of the good abbot Marcward, and there taught the sacred sciences for some years, after which he found himself able to return to Ferrières. During the course of a journey into Italy he met with an ancient martyrology, which served as the basis on which he compiled his own, which was published in 858. Two years later he became Archbishop of Vienne, and in that office did much for the promotion of letters. The scholars of these dark ages were often bound together in ties of very close friendship, founded on mutual tastes, the recollection of early school days spent together under some wise and well-loved master, and the exchange of good offices in the shape of manuscripts lent and borrowed. If Ado’s intellectual superiority had made him enemies among a few of the more churlish spirits of Ferrières, his sweet and amiable disposition elsewhere earned him many friends. Among these was the Deacon Wandalbert, a monk of Prom, and the learned Florus of Lyons. When Ado left Prom, Wandalbert succeeded him as scholasticus, and a famous one he made. His peculiar line was natural philosophy, and in pursuing it he was not content with gathering up other men’s ideas, but observed and experimentalised for himself. He greatly excelled in poetry, and produced a martyrology written in verse, in which, besides hymns in honour of the different saints whom he commemorates, he contrives to introduce short poems descriptive of the seasons, the different rustic labours proper to each month, the beauties of nature under her different aspects, seed-time and harvest, the vintage and the chase; together with other more learned subjects, such as the movements of the heavenly bodies by which we regulate our time. He gives rules for telling the time by the length of shadow cast by the sun, though he is careful to remind the reader that these rules will not be the same in all countries, inasmuch as in those that lie more to the south the shadows will necessarily be shorter, the earth being then more directly under the solar rays.
We must now turn to the great abbey of Old Corby, where, as we have already seen, Adalhard, a Palatine scholar, and a prince of the blood-royal, had retired from the perils of a courtier’s life, and become abbot. Unusual importance attached to its monastic school, from the circumstance of its having been chosen by Charlemagne as the academy to which the youth of Saxony were sent for education, in order that on their return to their own country they might assist in planting the Church on a solid foundation. The master chosen for the task of rearing these future missionaries was Paschasius Radpert, one of the most remarkable men of his time. Originally of very humble birth, he owed his education to the charity of the nuns of Soissons, who first received the desolate child into their own out-quarters, and then sent him to some monks in the same city, under whose tuition he acquired a fair amount of learning, and addicted himself to the study of Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and Terence. He never forgot the kindness of his early benefactresses, and in after years dedicated his Treatise on the Virginity of the Blessed Virgin to the good nuns, styling himself therein their alumnus, or foster-son. The deep humility of this great scholar is spoken of by all his biographers as his characteristic virtue, and is apparent in a passage which occurs in his exposition of the 44th Psalm, which he dedicates to these same nuns. In it he refers to the fact of his having received the clerical tonsure in their Church, and, as it would seem, in their presence. After expressing the reverence he feels for those whose names are written in heaven, and whom he regards not only as the spouses of Christ, but as the choicest flowers in the garden of the Church, he goes on to say: “When I behold you I sigh bitterly to think that this sacred crown, which as a boy I received before the holy altar of the Mother of God, in the midst of your prayers and offices of praise, I lost long ago, exiled in the world’s wilderness, and stained by many worldly actions.... I pray you, therefore, when you lift up your hearts on high, be mindful of me also, and implore for me the divine grace, that the most clement Judge may restore to me my lost crown.” In fact, after receiving the tonsure in early youth, Paschasius, whose tastes for Terence and Cicero rather predominated at that time over his relish for more sacred studies, abandoned his first inclination for the cloister, and lived for some years a secular life. Touched at last by divine grace, he entered the abbey of Old Corby, and there made his profession under the abbot Adalhard. All the ardour he had previously shown in the pursuit of profane literature he now applied to the study of the Divine Scriptures. Yet he only devoted to study of any kind those “furtive hours,” as he calls them, which he was able to steal from the duties of regular discipline, and was never seen so happy as when engaged in the choral office or the meaner occupations of community life. Such, then, was the master chosen by Adalhard for the responsible office of scholasticus, and a very minute account is left us of his manner of discharging its duties. Every day he delivered lectures on the sacred sciences, besides preaching to the monks on Sundays and Festivals. His thorough familiarity with the best Latin authors appears from the frequent allusions to them which occur in his writings. Quotations from the classic poets drop from his pen, as it were, half unconsciously, and we are told that he continued to keep up his acquaintance with them, so far as was necessary for teaching others. But his own study was now chiefly confined to the Holy Scriptures and the Fathers;[93] and among the latter, his favourites were St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, St. John Chrysostom, St. Bede, and St. Gregory the Great. “He did not approve,” says his biographer, “of the diligence displayed by some men of the time in explaining and meditating on profane authors.” In a passage which occurs in the preface to his exposition of St. Matthew’s Gospel, he blames those lovers of secular learning, “who seek various and divers expounders, that so they may attain to the understanding of beautiful lies concerning shameful things, and who will not pass over—I do not say a single page, but a single line or syllable, without thoroughly investigating it, with the utmost labour and vigilance, while at the same time they utterly neglect the Sacred Scriptures. I wonder,” he continues, “that the Divine words can be so distasteful to them, and that they can refuse to scrutinise the mysteries of God with the same diligence they so unweariedly bestow on the follies of profane tragedies and the foolish fables of the poets. Who can doubt that such labour is altogether thrown away, being bestowed on a thing undeserving of reward?” This was not the utterance of a narrow-minded bigot, who condemned pursuits and tastes to which he was himself a stranger. Few were more keenly alive than he to the charms of polite literature, neither did he at all condemn its use within proper limits, even among cloistered students. It would, indeed, have been a difficult matter to have eradicated the love of the beautiful from the heart of Paschasius. He possessed it in every shape, and was not merely a poet, but a musician also. In one of his writings he lets fall an observation which might be taken for a prose rendering of a verse of Shelley’s, although the Christian scholar goes beyond the infidel poet, and does not merely describe the sentiment which all have felt, but traces it to its proper source. Shelley complains that—
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Paschasius explains the mystery: “There is no song to be found,” he says, “without a tone of sadness in it; even as here below there are no joys without a mixture of sorrow; for songs of pure joy belong only to the heavenly Sion, but lamentation is the property of our earthly pilgrimage.” His musical tastes were perfectly shared and understood by his master St. Adalhard, whose sensibility to the influence of melodious sounds is spoken of by his biographer Gerard. Even during his residence at the court of Charlemagne, it is said of him that “he was always so full of a sweet intention towards God, that if while assisting at the royal council he heard the sound of some chance melody, he had it not in his power to refrain from tears, for all sweet music seemed to remind him of his heavenly country.” The importance attached to the study of music by the Christian scholastics of these times is not a little remarkable. They inherited the traditions of the ancients, and with them regarded music as a science intimately associated with the knowledge of divine things. They were the true descendants of those holy fathers of old, who, as the son of Sirach tells us, “sought out musical tunes and published canticles, and were rich in virtue, studying beautifulness, and living at peace in their houses.” The narratives of our early English schools will sufficiently have illustrated the fact that music held a very prominent place in the system of education which held sway in the early centuries; and the theory on which this high esteem was based will nowhere be found better explained than in the writings of Rabanus. “Musical discipline,” he says, “is so noble and useful a thing, that without it no one can properly discharge the ecclesiastical office. For whatsoever in reading is correctly pronounced, and whatsoever in chanting is sweetly modulated, is regulated by a knowledge of this discipline; and by it we not only learn how to read and sing in the church, but also rightly perform every rite in the divine service. Moreover, the discipline of music is diffused through all the acts of our life. For when we keep the commandments of God, and observe His law, it is certain that our words and acts are associated by musical rhythm with the virtues of harmony. If we observe a good conversation, we prove ourselves associated with this discipline; but when we act sinfully, we have in us no music.”[94]