These extracts require no comment. They prove something more than the solid nature of the studies pursued in the convent school of Gandersheim. How skilfully had the teachers of Hroswitha contrived, whilst directing her intellectual labours, to preserve her womanly modesty, her almost childish naïveté, and her deep religious humility! Better things were included in their scheme of education than a mere knowledge of the liberal arts; the wisdom “whose beginning is the desire of discipline,” and into which “no defiled thing cometh.” Under their training the genius of the young poetess was guarded by the cloak of humility from the cunning moth of pride; and whilst we are amazed at her learned attainments, her modesty and candour at the same time conquer our hearts.
And with this agreeable picture we will close our present chapter, trusting that the nun of Gandersheim may be allowed to have shed something of beauty and fragrance over the rugged annals of the Iron Age.[145]
CHAPTER XI.
THE SCHOOLS OF BEC.
A.D. 1000 TO 1135.
With the close of the tenth century we may be said to have taken our last farewell of the Dark Ages. Already on the horizon we have seen the dawn of a period of greater intellectual light, which ere long is to usher in the blaze of a splendid era. And yet it must be owned, it is with something of regret that we take our leave of those remote centuries, and with the wish of the poet in our hearts that “their good darkness were our light.” The approaching sunrise puts out the quiet stars; and in the bustle of intellectual life into which we are about to enter, our heart misgives us lest something of the charm which has hitherto hung round the history of the Christian Schools may perchance be lost. Already a new element has appeared in our studies, more easily felt than described. The career of Gerbert, however brilliant, does not leave on the mind the same impression as that of Bede; we feel a predominance of the scholastic, over the religious character; and we think of him less as a monk than as a mathematician. This element will now be far more frequently met with, and what is worse, it will in many cases be found accompanied by the ugly shapes of pride, love of novelty, and self-interest, too often finding their final result in heresy and open unbelief. The design of these pages is not to paint a series of fancy pictures, but to study past ages so as to establish in our mind a true standard of Christian Scholarship; to distinguish the precious from the vile, the false lights of the intellect from those kindled at the altar fire; and it will therefore be necessary to put forth some of these unhappy examples in a broad and honest daylight, that we may better see what those principles are, the forgetfulness of which renders intellectual culture dangerous to faith.
Hitherto we have heard but little of the perils of the intellect. Learning, in the eyes of the old monastics, was the twin sister of prayer. They would almost as soon have thought of apprehending danger in their Psalter as in their grammar, and indeed the end for which they used them both was substantially the same. Among the characters named in the foregoing pages, how few appear disfigured with the stains of vanity or self-interest! Scotus Erigena indeed, is a notable example of the self-sufficient rationalist, and Otheric of Magdeburg is said to have died of disappointment at not obtaining a bishopric; but such instances are rare exceptions; and though others doubtless existed, they do not appear on the surface of history, and give no character to the scholastic profession. As a class, the pedagogues of the Dark Ages were the most disinterested of men. Poverty was recognised, not as the accident of a student’s life, but as one of its most honourable features, and it was reckoned as something monstrous and disgraceful for a man to sell his learning for gold. This, of course, arose from the religious light in which learned pursuits were regarded; they were spiritual wares, the sale of which was held almost as simoniacal as the sale of a benefice. If instances occasionally occur of any such sordid practices, they are named by historians with a kind of horror; and Launoy quotes the reproof addressed by the abbot Baldric to a certain scholar of Angers, who had gone over to England to teach grammar for the sake of “cursed gold,” and whose sudden death was believed by his acquaintances to have been sent in just punishment of his sin. This tradition survived, in theory at least, for many centuries, and in 1362 the Professors of Paris University are found pleading their inability to pay the expenses of a lawsuit then pending, “it being their profession as scholars to have no wealth.” In Spain there was a proverb which described a scholar as rich in letters, and ragged in everything else, and Chaucer only produced the current type of a student when he represented his Clerk of Oxenford as “full hollow and threadbare.”