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

by Augusta Theodosia Drane

Et en ille toutes antiquité auras.

Hucbald was famous as a poet, musician, and philosopher; but his colleague, Remigius, was great in grammar, and wrote comments on Priscian, Donatus, and Marcian Capella. He taught humane letters and theology, and was extraordinarily learned in Scripture and the Fathers. After the death of Fulk he proceeded to Paris, and opened the first public school which we know with any certainty to have been established in that city. This, according to the Paris historians, was the real germ of the university; at any rate it was the first of those celebrated schools out of which the university subsequently developed. Nevertheless, half a century earlier, in the midst of the great siege of Paris, there had been both schools and scholars, for Abbo of St. Germain apologises for the incomplete state of his poem before mentioned, “on account of the multitude of his pupils.” Whence we gather that even famine and massacre had never entirely extinguished the Parisian thirst for letters.

Remigius continued to teach at Paris for several years, pupils coming to him from all parts of France. Among them was one whose story deserves to be told a little more at length, inasmuch as it exhibits, in a striking manner, the utter ruin which had fallen on the monastic institute in the French provinces, and at the same time shows us that in the tenth century laymen were to be found who were possessed of a respectable education, and were capable of collecting libraries. There lived at that time, in the province of Maine, a certain noble named Abbo, who had been fortunate enough in his youth to find some school where he not only learnt how to sign his name, but acquired a great taste for reading. His reading, too, was of a solid kind, for his favourite studies were the histories of the ancients, and the “Novellæ” of Justinian, the latter of which he knew by heart, using his legal erudition when called on to dispense justice to his feudal subjects, and to act as umpire in the disputes which arose among his neighbours. The Gospels were always read aloud at his table, and on the Vigils of solemn feasts he and his family spent the night in prayer and watching. Nor are we to draw the hasty conclusion that Abbo’s household, and his way of life, was at all an extraordinary exception from the common rule. He had friends as learned and as holy as himself, such as Duke William of Aquitaine, whose religious habits earned him the surname of “the Pious,” while his love of letters gained him that of “the Grammarian.” This good prince had a number of books in his castle, and during the long winter evenings he amused himself by reading them, never leaving his studies till fairly overcome by sleep. Abbo had one son named Odo, born in 879, and whilst yet an infant, his father going to see him in his cradle, by a devout impulse took him in his arms and offered him to St. Martin. As he grew up he was given in charge to a priest to be taught his letters, but it does not appear that there was any idea of bringing him up to the ecclesiastical state: on the contrary, his father placed him in the household of Duke William, that he might acquire the martial exercises becoming a knight. Odo, however, had no taste for these pursuits, and the chase and the tilt-yard were insupportably wearisome to him. Praying to Our Lady that he might be guided in the choice of a state of life, he was for three years attacked by inveterate headaches, which obliged him to return home, and which obstinately resisted every remedy. His father at last became persuaded that it was not the will of God that his son should pursue a secular calling. Remembering his former promise to St. Martin, and finding that Odo’s own wishes pointed in the same direction, he took him to Tours, and placed him, in his nineteenth year, among the canons of that city. There was a very solemn reception of the noble postulant, and among those who assisted at the ceremony was the brave Count Fulk of Anjou, the same who has before been mentioned as himself holding a canon’s stall, and scandalising king Louis by his proficiency in music.

No sooner did Odo find himself in quiet possession of his new retreat than he applied himself to his books with an ardour that quite astounded his brother canons. They perpetually asked him what he meant by all this reading, and where could possibly be the good of it. Odo let them talk as they would, and made no change in his habits. He often spent the whole day in study, and the whole night in prayer. He finished his course of grammar, and was about to commence Virgil, when he was deterred by a vision, in which he seemed to see a beautiful vessel filled with serpents, which he understood to indicate the poison to be found in the charms of profane literature. Putting it aside, therefore, he devoted himself exclusively to the study of the Scriptures, and to obtain the more freedom from interruption, he shut himself up in a little cell which Count Fulk had given him, and distributing all his money to the poor, lived on the moderate daily allowance of half a pound of bread and a handful of beans. However, he soon became desirous of better teaching than he had as yet been able to procure, so he set out for Paris, and entered at the school of Remigius of Auxerre. That master made him go through a course of the liberal arts, and gave him to study the treatises of Marcian Capella, and the “Dialectics” of St. Augustine.[130]

On his return to Tours he applied himself to the study of St. Gregory’s “Morals,” in which he took such delight that he wrote an abridgment of it, which is still preserved. His love of letters may be gathered from the fact that he gradually procured himself a library of a hundred volumes—a very large collection in those days for any private individual. Among them were some “Lives of the Holy Fathers,” and the “Rule” of St. Benedict, the constant study of which filled Odo with an intense desire to embrace the monastic state. In this he was encouraged by the intimate friendship he formed about this time with a knight named Adegrim, one of the household of the good Count Fulk. At last Adegrim threw up his military employments and came to live with the young canon at Tours. The talk of the two friends was ever of monks and of monasteries, and they made many journeys into different parts of France to seek out the sites of those once famous abbeys of which they had read, and to discover if perchance one yet survived in its ancient state of discipline. But these expeditions invariably ended in disappointment. For more than sixty years the monastic institute in France had been utterly ruined. Most of the houses so renowned in the last century were now nothing but heaps of blackened ruins. The monks had either been slain or driven out as wanderers. Sometimes they were to be met with in the guise of poor vagrants; sometimes in places far from public resort you might come upon a miserable hut, where the remnants of what had once been a flourishing community were gathered together in the wilderness, striving to keep their Rule as best they might. This is not a fancy picture. It was about this very time that William Longsword, duke of Normandy, was induced to restore the abbey of Jumièges, having when hunting in the forest come upon two poor monks who were trying to construct a cell for themselves out of the ruins of the abbey. All the refreshments they could offer him were some barley bread and some water; and the spectacle of their poverty, together with the remembrance that the desolation he witnessed had been the work of his own Norman forefathers, induced the duke to undertake the work of restoration. Abbo and Adegrim, however, were not to be discouraged in their plan. Finding no house in France where they could embrace the life to which they longed to devote themselves, they resolved to carry on their search in Italy, and Adegrim accordingly set out, intending to make the pilgrimage to Rome. But as he passed through Burgundy he accidentally found his way to La Baume, a small monastery which had been recently founded by the abbot Berno, and in which the Rule of St. Benedict was strictly observed, together with the reformed Constitutions of St. Benedict d’Anian. Adegrim at once wrote to his friend, bidding him come without delay, and bring all his books with him; and Odo lost no time in obeying the summons. In the year 909 he began his noviciate, being then exactly thirty years of age. Adegrim, after three years of penitential exercises, begged leave to retire to a little cave about two miles distant from the monastery, where he spent the rest of his life as a hermit. But a very different course awaited his friend Odo. His books pointed him out to be the right sort of man for a schoolmaster, and he was therefore charged with the education of the children brought up in the monastery, and the younger monks. He had much to suffer from the jealousy of some of his brethren; but Berno, rightly appreciating both his talents and his humility, sent him to Turpion, Bishop of Limoges, to be ordained priest.

The reformed monastery of La Baume soon became the mother-house of other foundations. Those who deplored the decay of learning and religion were eager to provide for the restoration of both, by erecting houses in which the Rule and spirit of St. Benedict might be revived in their ancient vigour. Abbo’s old friend, Duke William of Aquitaine, was of the number of those who desired to take part in the good work, and he invited Berno to choose a site for a new foundation in any part of his dominions. Berno selected a beautiful solitude, about four miles from Macon, on the confines of Burgundy, where the river Grosne, after passing the village of Bonnay, winds down to the Seine from the mountains of Beaujolais, through a valley girt in by high hills covered with forests. It was exactly suited for the purposes of a religious retreat, but the duke hesitated when Berno named it, for it was his favourite hunting ground, and was at that time occupied by his kennel of dogs. “Well, sir,” said Berno, when the duke had explained his difficulty, “it is only to turn out the dogs, and to turn in the monks.” This recommendation was accordingly followed, and in course of time there arose among those wooded hills the stately abbey of Cluny, the church of which was inferior in size to none save St. Peter’s of Rome.

On the death of Berno in 927, the bishops of the province obliged St. Odo to accept the government of Cluny and two of the other five houses which had sprung under the reformed Rule. Not content with this, they likewise forced upon him the most odious and difficult of all imaginable enterprises; that, namely, of restoring monastic discipline in a vast number of other houses both in France and Italy, which had fallen into the hands of a dissolute set of men, who sometimes opposed the entrance of the abbot, sword in hand. Odo entered on this work in obedience, and accomplished it in the spirit of meekness. There is no courage like that of gentle souls, and the history of this great reformer exhibits him to us forsaken by his terrified attendants, and riding up on his ass to the gates of Fleury, where a band of armed men were awaiting his coming, having sworn to kill him if he dared set foot among them. But Odo’s meekness gained the day, and among the seventeen abbeys which accepted the Cluniac reform, that of Fleury became one of the most flourishing.

In fact, the character of St. Odo had nothing of that stern austerity which we commonly associate with the notion of a reformer. Its force was its amiability. He used to tell his monks that cripples and beggars were the door-keepers of heaven, and would not endure that they should be spoken to with harshness. If he heard the porter giving a gruff answer to the crowds of poor who thronged his gate, he would go out to them and say, “My friends, when that brother comes to the gates of Paradise, answer him as he has just answered you, and see whether he will like it.” On his journeys, if he met any children, he always stopped, and desired them to sing or repeat something to him, and he did this, says his biographer, that he might have an excuse for giving them something. And if he met an old woman or a cripple, nothing would prevent his getting off his beast and mounting them in his place, when he would desire his servants to hold them securely in the saddle, while he himself led them on their way. This excess of goodness made him so dear to his monks, that they would often steal behind him and indulge their affection and respect by secretly pressing to their lips the hem of his garment.

St. Odo died in 942, and in 965 Maieul or Majolus, a former canon of Macon, was elected abbot. His life, like that of his predecessor, affords an illustration of the two features in the century which I am most solicitous to bring before the reader’s notice; the disordered state of society, consequent on the barbaric invasions, and the fact that in spite of such disorders, men were not wholly indifferent to letters, though they were often sadly at a loss to find the means of acquiring them. Maieul made his studies at Lyons, which his biographer, Odilo, declares was then regarded as the nurse and mother of philosophy, under a rather celebrated teacher named Anthony de l’Isle Barbe. He learnt both kinds of literature, says the monk Syrus, who also wrote his life, the divine and human, and attained to whatever was most sublime in the one, and most difficult in the other. The approach of the Saracens obliged him to leave Avignon, his native city, and retire to Macon, where he was chosen first canon and then archdeacon. But as he found that the clergy and people had it in their mind to procure his further promotion to the bishopric of Besançon, he fled to Cluny, where he was received with great affection, and in process of time was appointed schoolmaster, librarian, and syndic of the house. In this combination of the intellectual and the temporal government he managed to make himself greatly beloved, and in 948, with the consent of the whole community, Aimard, the successor of Odo, whom Syrus styles a son of innocence and simplicity, surrendered the government of the abbey and all its dependencies into his hands. Both as scholasticus and coadjutor to the abbot, Maieul superintended the studies of his monks, and it is remarkable that he had to use the bridle rather than the spur. He was obliged to exert his authority to discourage their excessive study of the profane poets, especially Virgil; not that he disapproved of a moderate use of humane literature; on the contrary, he advocated the principle that we should get all the good out of it that we can; but he would have preferred to see his monks learned in the Scriptures, the reading of which formed his own delight. Whether he walked or rode, the Sacred volume was never out of his hands, and when he travelled into distant countries he always took with him a portable library. These journeys were very frequent, for Maieul extended the Cluniac reform into a great number of abbeys, and made many pilgrimages to Rome. Returning from that city in 973, he was attacked, whilst crossing the Alps, by the Saracens of Frassinet, and carried off, together with all his retinue. His captors chained him hand and foot, and confined him in a cave among the mountains, plundering him of all his baggage, and among other things of his books. The saint recommended himself to God in the spirit of martyrdom, and then lay down on the floor of the cavern to take what rest he might. On awakening he was surprised to find lying on his breast one of his lost books, which appeared to have been overlooked by the plunderers. He opened it, and found it was a treatise on the Assumption of Our Lady, and counting the days, he found that there remained exactly twenty-four to the Feast of the Assumption; so he began to pray that through the intercession of the Queen of Heaven, he might perhaps be permitted to keep that Feast among Christians. After a while the Saracens began to treat him more kindly. They allowed him to write a letter to his brethren directing them to send the money for his ransom, and seeing that he did not eat the meat which they set before him, one man took a shield, and baring his arms, he proceeded to knead some meal in this strange dish, and produced a cake which the prisoner gratefully accepted. Another time a Saracen, wishing to clean his lance, set his foot on the great Bible which formed part of the abbot’s library. Pained at the irreverence, the saint gently remonstrated with him, but without effect, and a few days afterwards the man quarrelling with his companions, they cut off the very foot that had been set on the Sacred Volume. At last the ransom arrived, and the prisoners were liberated, and Maieul spent the Feast of the Assumption among Christians, as he had prayed. Not long afterwards the Saracens were driven from Frassinet by Duke William of Arles, and the books of St. Maieul being found among their baggage, were sent back to him at Cluny to his very great joy.