Thus much may suffice as to the state of letters in England and Normandy in the time of Lanfranc and Anselm; the scholars who arose after them were not unworthy to be the disciples of a school founded by these two illustrious archbishops; and it will be seen that the University of Paris, which was soon to efface by the splendour of its fame that of every other lesser academy, owed its renown in no small degree to the learning of its English professors.
CHAPTER XII.
THE RISE OF SCHOLASTICISM.
A.D. 1049 TO 1200.
We are sometimes disposed to think and speak of the Middle Ages, as though by that term was to be understood a period including several centuries, during the whole of which society was governed by the same laws, and made but little progress. In point of fact, however, men seldom lived faster, if such an expression be admissible, than during the five centuries to which the term mediæval is most strictly applied. There was then, as now, a continual expansion and development going on, and then, as now, the development was partly good, and partly evil. During the hundred years that elapsed from the accession of Hugh Capet in 996, to the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, Christendom assumed an entirely new aspect. The institutions of feudalism and chivalry were becoming firmly established; the barbaric invasions had ceased, and the Crusades directed the arms of the Christians against a common enemy, and so put an end to the civil wars which had raged under the Carlovingian dynasty. If these changes cannot be said to have ushered in a period of absolute peace, they at least tended to consolidate civil government; and the comparative state of security and order which ensued, naturally encouraged greater intellectual activity. On the other hand, the Saxon emperors of Germany had been replaced by the house of Franconia, and that grievous contest had begun between the temporal and spiritual powers which, for centuries, formed the great political question of Europe; while the convulsions of the last century had let loose on the Church a flood of corruption which probably makes this period one of the saddest in her history.
The chronicles of a semi-barbarous age, however, possess one charm which does not attach in an equal degree to those of more civilised periods. Full as they are of crimes and scandals, they depict a state of society more keenly susceptible than our own to the influence of master-minds. Hence they are often enough the records of heroes, whereas our tamer annals deal less in the acts and words of great men, than in changes of ministry. The eleventh century groaned under the threefold scourge of simony, sensuality, and temporal usurpation. It had the peculiar infelicity of being an age of transition, when the children of the Church were growing weary of submitting to the canonical discipline of ancient times, whilst nothing had yet been established as its substitute. It was, therefore, a time of wild license and feeble restraint. Three men, however, arose to rule and reform their age. The first was of royal blood, a descendant of Charlemagne and Witikind, whom we first find studying at Toul about the year 1018, along with other princely and ducal cousins, for Toul was always celebrated for its noble students. Bruno of Dachsburg was the handsomest man of his time, the idol of his family, graceful, eloquent, and learned, and a skilled musician. The world was already predicting his success at the court of his imperial cousin Conrad, when a trifling accident changed his whole career. One day, the young student, after a hard morning’s work, threw himself on the grass at his father’s castle in Alsace, and fell asleep. An insect stung his face, and the result was a malignant fever which brought him to the gates of death. He rose from his sick bed to renounce all that the world had to offer, and to embrace the monastic state. In 1026 he became Bishop of Toul, and for two-and-twenty years devoted his energies to the reformation of manners and the revival of discipline. At the end of that time he was elected Pope, and, as St. Leo IX., struggled for five years more against simony, the Berengarian heresy, and the Greek schism. But, in the midst of his other labours, he did not neglect letters and the arts. He caused good studies to flourish at Rome, reformed her school of chant, and employed as his legates learned men, such as his old schoolfellow, Cardinal Humbert, who had acquired at Toul that Greek erudition which he used so ably against the Photians.
On the day when Pope Leo entered Rome barefoot to take possession of the Apostolic throne, he was accompanied by a Cluniac monk, whom he had met on his journey into Italy, and well-nigh compelled to join his train. Rome was no new scene to the monk Hildebrand; it was there, in St. Mary’s Abbey on the Aventine Mount,[154] that the poor carpenter’s son had received his education. But he returned thither now to fill a very different station, for Leo created him cardinal, and abbot of St. Paul’s; and from that time up to the day of his death, thirty-six years later, the life of Hildebrand forms the history of his times. The name of him whom the Church reveres as St. Gregory VII. must suffice in this place, there remains to be noticed a third Christian hero, a friend of both those illustrious pontiffs, who struggled with them in the same cause, and against the same enemies. Born at Ravenna towards the close of the tenth century, the youngest of a large family, who only saw in him another to divide their slender inheritance, Peter Damian was all but abandoned in his infancy, and on the death of his parents was maintained by a brother, who treated him as a slave, and employed him to keep swine. The poor farm-drudge grew up without friends and without education; but the soul that was within him had instincts and aspirations which no ill-usage could stifle. One day he chanced to find a piece of money lying on the ground; it was the first time his hands had ever touched silver, and for a moment the thoughts which might occur to other boys flashed through his brain. He would purchase food, or clothes, or give himself an hour’s brief enjoyment. But then came another thought: “When the food is eaten, and the enjoyment past, what will remain to me of my money? Better give it to the parish priest and have a mass said for my father’s soul.” The second thought was followed; and soon afterwards his elder brother Damian, the arch-priest of Ravenna, took pity on the boy, and sent him to school, first at Faenza, and then at Parma, which at that time possessed excellent masters. Peter, who in gratitude assumed his brother’s name in addition to his own, became not only a good scholar, but in time a professor, and his singular capacity in this office obtained him both scholars and wealth, for, as we have seen in the last chapter, the profession of scholasticus was beginning to be one of profit. But he had never forgotten his early experience, and the money that flowed in went to feed the poor, whilst he himself persevered in the practice of rigid poverty. One day he made the acquaintance of two poor hermits belonging to a community that had established itself at a spot called Fonte-Avellano, at the foot of the Umbrian Apennines. His biographer calls it a desert, but it was a desert only in the Italian sense of he word, a solitary valley, that is, shut in between mountains clothed with evergreen oaks, and chest nuts, and the silvery olive, its thickets bright with the blossoms of the Judas-tree and the oleander, and its grass, with the starry cyclamen. To this desert, then, Peter’s new friends conducted him, on a visit to their hermitage, which had been founded a few years previously by the Blessed Ludolf. He found there a community who took the same view of human life as himself. They regarded man as a being made up of two noble and immortal parts, that were to be served and cherished—the soul and the intellect; and of one base and perishable part, that was good only to be mortified—the body. Simple men as they were, they had conceived the idea of doing penance for the huge evil world that lay outside their wilderness. So they lived four days a week on bread and water, allowing themselves on the other three the indulgence of herbs, afflicted their flesh in many ways, and divided their time between psalmody and study. Peter embraced this life with hearty earnestness, and outstripped his companions alike in his austerities and in his application to sacred learning. But his light could not be hid; abbots entreated that he might be sent to instruct their religious; his own brethren elected him their superior; seven successive popes employed him in the service of the Church; and, in 1057, Stephen IX. created him cardinal bishop of Ostia. His life was spent in struggles to stem the corruption of his age and to reform the clergy. Fleury observes that we must not look in his writings for acuteness of reasoning; but he had to do with men sunk in rude gross vices, which were hardly to be remedied by metaphysics. The medicine which St. Peter Damian prescribed for the sick world was penance; and he preached it in a plain homely sort of way, which might possibly offend fastidious tastes, but which had this merit about it, that it was practical, and had results. He entered the profaned sanctuary, scourge in hand, to drive out the unclean animals, and to overthrow the tables of the money-changers. In the intervals between his incessant legations to reform churches and rebuke princes, he retired to his cell at Fonte-Avellano, and might be found there living on pulse and water, employed in making wooden spoons, or other coarse manual labour, and submitting, even to his eightieth year, to the same rule of life as the youngest novice. Yet this was the most elegant scholar of his time; nay, more, he was a poet. And we do not use the term as classing him among the crowd of versifiers who wrote their chronicles, and even their theological treatises in lines which, often enough as Hallam remarks, can only be rendered into hexameters “by careful nursing.” He imitated neither Virgil nor Horace, but wrote in those rhymed trochaics which many classical purists would brand as barbarisms. Yet where shall we see richness of imagery wedded to greater harmony of numbers than in those wonderful stanzas, De Paradisi Gloriâ, wherein Paradise is depicted under the form of all that is fairest and brightest to the poet’s eye? The sparkling of precious gems, the blossoming of early flowers, the glory of the autumn cornfields, and the long shining of a summer’s day, lit by a sun that knows no setting, are painted in words that sound like the echoes of a harpsichord. And from these sensible images of earthly beauty he rises to that which is above sense, and sets before us the ineffable joys of those who see the Divine Beauty face to face, and are filled from the fountains of Eternal charity. The joys of heaven formed, in fact, the constant subject of his meditation, and in one of his prose treatises, speaking on this exhaustless theme, he gives utterance to the sentiment felt by every poet, of the insufficiency of words to express the emotions of the heart. “There is always more in the thing itself than the mind conceives, and more in what the mind conceives than the tongue can utter.”
The reform of manners so vigorously set on foot by these saints and their many disciples was friendly to the growth of letters. Parma attained such celebrity as to be called Chrysopolis, or the golden city, in the days of the great Countess Matilda, who was herself, says Donizzo, her chaplain, more learned than many bishops, and was never without an abundance of books. At her instance Irnerius, the Lucerna Juris, as he was called, began to lecture at Bologna on Roman law about the year 1128. The cathedral schools were everywhere revived by St. Gregory VII., who required the bishops to found seminaries where such did not already exist, where boys should be educated for the priesthood free of cost, certain prebends being set apart for the support of the masters. This injunction was very generally obeyed, and many ancient schools were revived which had fallen into decay. Landulph tells us that at Milan, where things had been in a very bad state, but where the mingled zeal and gentleness of St. Peter Damian, and of St. Ariald, had effected a reform,[155] the schools of philosophy were held in the porch of the cathedral, where the clerics attended, the archbishop presiding in person. In fact, the Italians who, in the tenth century, are represented as having none to teach them the first rudimentary elements, had somehow contrived in the eleventh to possess themselves of academies which they considered the first in the whole world.