What an earnest loyalty to God breathes forth in these words! What a deep conviction of the oneness of philosophy with divine dogma! What a majesty of resolve in his determination to make the manifestation of Catholic truth the “duty of his life,” and how rare a picture of lifelong purpose nobly achieved when we compare these expressions with his dying words!—“Sumo Te pretium redemptionis animæ meæ, sumo Te viaticum peregrinationis animæ meæ; pro cujus amore studui, vigilavi et laboravi, prædicavi et docui; nihil unquam contra Te dixi; sed si quid dixi ignorans, non sum pertinax in sensu meo. Totum relinquô correctioni Sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ, in cujus obedientia nunc transeo ex hac vita.”[213]
The reconciliation of revealed truth and philosophy to which St. Thomas devoted his life must doubtless be regarded as the great intellectual triumph of the thirteenth century; and when we contemplate the group of illustrious men who took part in that work, it is impossible not to render homage to the good providence of God, who, in the hour of need, supplies His Church with fit instruments with which to effect His own purposes. The Friar Minors shared with the Friar Preachers the toils and glory of this great enterprise. Their order had not, indeed, been founded with the same express view of cultivating sacred science; but they were required to labour for the salvation of souls, and as souls could only be saved at this crisis by the vigorous defence of Catholic dogma, the humble sons of St. Francis scrupled not to enter the university schools, and soon gave to the Church a long line of doctors. The seraphic St. Bonaventure was bound to St. Thomas in the ties of friendship, and intimately associated with him in his work; and his teaching regarding the office of the human intellect, and the source of its illumination, is homogeneous with his. “All illumination descends to man,” he says, “from God, the Fontal Light: all human science emanates, as from its source, from the Divine light.” This light, he goes on to say, is fourfold—there is the inferior, the exterior, the interior, and the superior light. The first gives us the knowledge of those things manifested by the senses. The second illuminates us in respect of artificial forms, and includes a knowledge of the useful and ornamental arts, even those of the loom and the needle.[214] The third is the light of philosophical knowledge, and its object is intelligible truth; and this is threefold, for there are three kinds of verities—truth of language, truth of things, and truth of morals. Lastly, superior truth is that of grace and holy Scripture, and illuminates us in respect of saving truth. “Thus, the fourfold light descending from above has yet six differences, which set forth so many degrees of human science. There is the light of sensitive knowledge, the light of the mechanical arts, the light of rational philosophy, of natural philosophy, and of moral philosophy, and lastly, the light of grace and holy Scripture. And so there are six illuminations in this life of ours, and they have a setting, because all this knowledge shall be destroyed. And therefore there succeedeth to them the seventh day of rest, which hath no setting, and that is the illumination of glory.”[215]
It is obviously beyond our present purpose to attempt anything like an account of the Dominican theologians who succeeded St. Thomas, and were formed in his school; and I shall content myself, therefore, with noticing a few of those friars of the thirteenth century, whose influence may be said to have told on education rather than on theology. And the first who claims our attention as having distinguished himself in this line, is, naturally, the librarian of the good king St. Louis, and the tutor of his children, Vincent of Beauvais. He devoted a great part of his life to a gigantic undertaking, the very conception of which attests the colossal scale on which men of those days thought and laboured for futurity. He desired to facilitate the pursuit of learning by collecting into one work everything useful to be known. The plan was not a new one; many such Encyclopædias had already been produced, as that of St. Isidore, and their value was great in an age when the scarcity of books rendered it next to impossible for any ordinary student to procure all the authors he would require to consult, if he desired to perfect himself in various sciences. But it is also possible that a more profound motive than that of mere convenience induced so many of the Christian writers to spend their labours on these encyclopædiac collections. They desired to present to the student the idea of knowledge as a whole, the parts of which were intimately connected, and could not be dissevered from one another without mutual injury. By philosophy, they understood a knowledge of truth in all its parts; and hence the student, according to the old established system, was steadily led through his trivium and quadrivium, those seven liberal arts selected as representing the chief divisions of philosophy, properly so called. The scholastics of Abelard’s stamp had revolutionised this system, and, as we have seen, had all but banished the arts from the school, and made philosophy to consist in little more than the science of reasoning. And this was one point on which Hugo of St. Victor attacked them. Bred up in the old school of monastic students, he contended that their philosophy was no philosophy at all, and that the seven liberal arts cohered one with another, so that, if one were wanting, philosophy, which consisted in a comprehensive knowledge of all science,—rational, physical, and moral,—must necessarily be imperfect.[216] The same teaching is implied in the passage from St. Bonaventure, quoted above; and it seems probable that this sound view of the intimate connection of all parts of human knowledge flowing, as separate streams, from One Fontal source, prompted Vincent of Beauvais to undertake his gigantic work, that so the great edifice of science should be once more presented with all its halls and porticoes forming one harmonious whole, domed over, if we may so express ourselves, with Theology, and surmounted by the Cross.
He had some special facilities for carrying out his design which were not at the command of ordinary students. He was able to make free use of that noble library collected by St. Louis, and attached by him to the Sainte Chapelle. It was thence that he drew the materials of his work, and nature had endowed him with exactly the kind of genius which his task demanded. Antoine Poissevin says of him that he was a man who was never tired of reading, writing, teaching, and learning; the most gigantic labours did not alarm him; neither work, watching, nor fasting was ever known to cause him fatigue; and after devoting one-half of his life to reading the royal library, and every other collection of books that came within his reach, he did not shrink from employing the other in producing a compendium of all he had read. He limited himself to no one subject, or section of subjects; but resolved to embrace all arts and all sciences, whatever he found that was beautiful and true in the physical or in the moral world; whatever could make known the wonders of nature, or the yet greater wonders of grace; all that poets, philosophers, historians, or divines had said that was worth remembering—all this he determined to set before his reader in orderly arrangement; and undismayed at the magnitude of his enterprise, he laboured at it day and night till it was accomplished. “The Great Mirror,” as he calls his work, is divided into three parts, in which are treated separately, Nature, Doctrine, and History. All his scientific and philosophic views are not, of course, original, for he proposed rather to give to the world the cream of other men’s thoughts than of his own. But for this very reason the statements contained in his book are of greater value, as they show the shallowness of those charges so continually brought against the science of the Middle Ages, by writers who have probably concerned themselves very little to ascertain in what that science consisted. Vincent did not write to support new theories or explain away vulgar errors; he aimed only at presenting, in a compendious form, the commonly-received views of his own time, and of times anterior to his own, occasionally illustrating his subject with a sagacious remark, derived from reflection or personal observation. And what a host of misconceptions and traditional calumnies fall to pieces, as we glance through such an analysis of his pages as is given by Rohrbacher![217] How then, we exclaim, did not the mediæval savants oscillate between the opinion that the earth was a flat plane, and that other equally luminous view, that it was a cube? Is it possible that they knew anything of the principle of the attraction of gravitation, and stranger still, that they explained the spherical form of the earth by reasoning drawn from that very principle? Are we to believe our eyes when we read that Vincent of Beauvais illustrates this part of his subject by reminding us of the globular form of the rain drops, which he says, in language which reads like an anticipation of the verses of Montgomery, are so formed by the very same law as that which regulates the shape of the earth?
And who would expect to find the librarian of St. Louis putting forth the argument which still does good service in our popular class-books, wherein the spherical form of the earth is demonstrated by the gradual disappearance below the horizon of the hull and sails of a receding ship, and their as gradual reappearance in a contrary order, on its approach towards us? Yet there it is, together with yet more learned things; such as the method for measuring an arc of the meridian as a means of obtaining the circumference of the earth, quoted from the writings of Gerbert. His treatment of the metaphysical questions which occupied so much attention at the time at which he wrote, is no less remarkable than his natural philosophy, and Rohrbacher, comparing his explanation of universal ideas with that of Bossuet, gives the preference in point of profundity to the mediæval friar. “Thus, then,” he continues, “by the middle of the thirteenth century, the religious of St. Dominic and St. Francis had resumed all Christian doctrine, the teaching of the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the Councils into a sum of theology; St. Thomas had examined in detail the pagan philosophy, had corrected it, and reconciled it with Christian truth. Roger Bacon, the Franciscan, not content with the ancient sciences catalogued by Aristotle, had begun to penetrate deeper into the secrets of nature, and the Dominican, Vincent of Beauvais, presented in his ‘Mirror’ an epitome of all that man, up to that time, knew in nature, science, art, philosophy, and history.”[218]
Even had the benefits conferred by the friars on the world of letters stopped here, they would have done very much to counteract that narrowing tendency which has been noticed in the last chapter and to restore the broader and truer theory of education which in the twelfth century had been gradually pushed out of place. But to complete our idea of the work achieved by the Dominicans, we must add that they largely encouraged the cultivation of Biblical studies, and of the Greek and Oriental tongues. The Cardinal Hugh de St. Cher claims the gratitude of students as the author of the first Biblical Concordance, a work which he commenced in the year 1236. The Chapter-General of the Order, which was that year held in Paris, entered with large liberality into so useful a design, and appointed a great number of the brethren to labour at it under his direction. Martene, in his Thesaurus Anecdotorum, gives an ordinance of the Chapter of Paris, directing that all copies of the Sacred Scriptures used in the Order should be revised, corrected, and punctuated according to the correction of the body of religious thus employed. This great work was begun under the generalship, and with the hearty concurrence, of Blessed Jordan of Saxony; his successor St. Raymund Pennafort, whose election had been mainly brought about through the exertions of Hugh de St. Cher, made yet more important provision for the encouragement of the Scriptural sciences. With a view of promoting the critical study of the Scriptures, and arming his brethren with weapons of controversy against the Jews and Mahometans, whose influence in this century was far more powerfully felt among Christians than it now is, he established Arabic and Hebrew studies in all the convents of Spain. Not content with this, he founded two colleges more expressly intended for the same purpose, attached to convents of the Order, one at Murcia, and the other at Tunis, filling them with religious whom he selected as best qualified to devote themselves to these pursuits. One of these was his celebrated namesake, Raymund Martin, the author of the Pugio Fidei, whom a learned French academician, M. Houtteville, has, by a singular blunder, numbered among the literary stars of the sixteenth century, unable, as it would seem, to credit the fact that so erudite a scholar could have flourished before the age of Francis the First. He was, however, a contemporary of St. Raymund, and is declared to have been as familiar with the Arabic, Hebrew, and Chaldaic tongues, as he was with Latin. The two last parts of his book are written in Hebrew, and he employed his last years in teaching the same language to a number of disciples, as well secular as religious.[219] The value of St Raymund’s labours in founding these schools, which won him the title of the Restorer of Oriental Studies, was publicly acknowledged in a Bull of Clement VIII., who declares that the revival of the Eastern languages in the Dominican schools has contributed to the glory both of Spain and of the entire Church, and has been the proximate cause of a vast number of conversions.[220] Ten thousand Saracens had already been won to the faith before the year 1236.
Nevertheless, no charge is more commonly brought against the scholars of the Middle Ages, than that of neglecting the study of the Greek and Oriental languages. Hallam, in his “Literary History,” with a great show of candour and painstaking research, notices certain examples of authors belonging to the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, who, he says, appear to have known a few words of Greek. Greek books, he admits, were to be found in the libraries of the eleventh century, and Greek lexicons were compiled by Benedictine abbots, which seems an odd waste of labour if no one ever dreamed of using them. In the “Philobiblon” of Richard of Bury, written in the fourteenth century, he gravely informs us that he has counted five words of Greek. As to the statement made in the same book to the effect that the learned author had caused Greek and Hebrew grammars to be drawn up for the use of students, he dismisses the passage with the comment that no other record of such grammars is to be found. Nor does the decree of the Council of Vienne, passed in 1311, ordering the establishment of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldaic professorships in the universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca, strike him as offering any evidence that these languages were really cultivated. The decree, he says (though he brings no authority in support of his words), “remained a dead letter.” He accounts for the occasional phenomenon which is to be met with, of a scholar acquainted with five words of Greek, by attributing it to the assistance of Greek priests who found their way into Europe; and observes, that after all, supposing anybody did really know the language, he only used it to read “some petty treatise of the Fathers, or apocryphal legend.” One is tempted to criticise the accuracy of a writer who begins by denying that any mediæval scholars in the West were acquainted with Greek, and then goes on to tell us what they did, and what they did not, read in that language. But there is a more serious fault in these statements than their bad logic. Having made an assertion of this nature on a subject which is certainly of no mean importance in the history of literature, he was bound to take some pains in investigating it. And it is difficult to understand how he can really have examined the literary history of the thirteenth century, without coming across some incidental proof of the ardour with which the Greek and Oriental languages were being at that time pursued in the Dominican schools. It was a fact of such world-wide notoriety that the motive which induced the university of Oxford to assign the Jews’ quarter of the town to the Friars Preachers, was their known familiarity with the learned tongues, by means of which it was hoped they might become efficient instruments for the conversion of their Jewish neighbours. General after General added to the ordinances made by his predecessors for keeping up these studies. Humbert de Romanis, the fifth General of the Order, to whom St. Raymund had communicated the success of his own efforts in Spain, at once determined to extend the ordinance, which had hitherto been partial in its operation, to all the convents of the order; and in 1256 he addressed a circular letter to the brethren, in which he invites all who feel themselves inspired by the grace of God to devote themselves to the study of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, to communicate with him, because the knowledge of these languages is most necessary in order to extend the light of the Gospel among the Greek schismatics and Moorish infidels.[221] F. Penna, auditor of the Rota to Clement VIII., assures us that it was the success of the colleges established by the Friars Preachers, and specially in Spain, that moved the Council of Vienne to issue the decree already quoted, and the same is repeated by other writers. The acts of that council are, however, by others attributed to the influence of the celebrated Franciscan Raymund Lully, the Illuminated Doctor, as he was called, who devoted many years and much labour to the endeavour to obtain the foundation of colleges for the study of these languages, in order to provide missionaries qualified to labour among the infidels. He himself was a profound Orientalist, and the legendary tales which multiplied in connection with his extraordinary life, represent the tree under which he constructed his mountain hut, as bearing on its very leaves the Greek, Arabic, and Chaldaic characters. At last he persuaded King James of Arragon to found a college in the island of Miraman for thirteen Franciscans who were to be given up to the study of the learned tongues. Pope Honorius IV. entered warmly into his views, but died before he was able to forward them; Philip le Bel acceded so far as to endow a college at Paris, and the Council of Vienne passed its decree confirming the erection of that college, and directing that similar establishments should be formed in the other chief European universities. Hallam, as we have seen, boldly asserts that the decree remained “a dead letter.” How generally it was carried out, or how long its provisions remained in force, may not be easy to determine; but there are precise documents to prove that it was at least put in force at Paris and Oxford. A letter is preserved, written in 1325, by Pope John XXII., to his legate in Paris, recommending him to watch the holders of the new professorships very closely, lest, under colour of the study of the Oriental tongues, they introduce any of the pernicious philosophical doctrines already condemned, and gathered out of the Gentile books.[222] The historic evidence of the bonâ fide existence of the professorships at Oxford is yet more circumstantial, and is thus referred to by Ayliffe in his history of that university. “I pass on,” he says, “to speak of the lectures founded by Pope Clement V. for the teaching of the Hebrew, Chaldaic, Arabic, and Greek languages, among which lectures John de Bristol, a converted Jew, read the Hebrew for many years at Oxford with great applause; and this year (1318), received a stipend settled on him by Walter Reynolds, Archbishop of Canterbury, and a tax of an halfpenny per mark from every ecclesiastical benefice throughout his province. This money was collected at the beginning of every Lent, and was lodged with the prior of the Holy Trinity.”[223] He goes on to notice some frauds committed in the collection of this tax in 1327, which, he says, is the last notice he finds concerning it. It is very probable that the professorships afterwards fell into abeyance, but the assertion that they were never founded is manifestly one of those made by a writer who draws his bow at a venture, and never cares to inquire into the fact.
Among those who took part in the deliberations of the Council of Vienne was Aymeric of Placentia, twelfth General of the Order of Preachers, who in the previous year had established a house of studies in every Province for the Greek and Oriental languages, requiring the Provincials to provide very learned teachers of the same, and if none such were to be found among the brethren, they were to engage the services of secular professors, to be paid out of the revenues of the Province,[224] a provision which certainly seems to imply that such professors were there to be found. This Aymeric, whom the chronicle of the Masters-General call “a learned man, and a great lover of letters,” did much also to promote the study of the Scriptures at other chapters of his Order. Echard tells us of the magnificent present bestowed by him on the convent of Bologna, in the shape of a Hebrew Pentateuch, which Bernard of Montfauçon describes as having himself seen. It contained an inscription, declaring the book to be the identical copy written by Esdras the scribe after the return from Babylon, and which he read in the ears of the people. After being preserved in various Jewish synagogues with the utmost veneration, Aymeric had obtained possession of it, and its authenticity was attested by several learned Jews. Though Echard hesitates to yield full credit to the tradition, he admits that the antiquity of the copy was not to be doubted.
The culture of Greek in the Order is no less distinctly proved than that of the Oriental tongues. William de Moerbeka made a number of translations from Plato, Galen, and Proclus of Tyre; and his translation of Aristotle was made directly from the original, at the request of St. Thomas, who himself understood the language well enough to criticise his friend’s version. Moerbeka was appointed Archbishop of Corinth in 1277, after being several times despatched as apostolic missionary to the East. Another fellow-student and intimate friend of St. Thomas, the cardinal Annibal Annibaldi,[225] is declared to have been learned both in Greek and Arabic philosophy. These examples of the linguistic erudition of the friars are but few out of many that might be given, and it is clear that their Greek reading was not limited to Apocryphal legends and petty treatises of the Fathers. It certainly included the Greek philosophy, both Plato and Aristotle having found translators among the Friars Preachers of the thirteenth century. But it is more than probable that the poets and historians of Greece were little known or cultivated, for the object of these studies was less literary than practical. The Friars had to contend with a false philosophy, drawn out of the books of the Gentiles, and to maintain controversies with Greek schismatics and Jewish and Moorish unbelievers; and they studied to arm themselves for the work in which they were engaged. Practical views predominated very generally in that wonderful thirteenth century, which we are so disposed to contemplate through a poetic medium; and so we may safely admit the likelihood that the Greek poetry was not much studied before the period of classic renaissance.
The influence of the Dominicans meanwhile extended to other universities besides those of Paris, Cologne, and Bologna, to which they were first affiliated. At Toulouse, the nursery of their Order, they naturally held a forward position, and led the struggle against the Albigensian errors, for the suppression of which the university had been mainly founded. At Orleans their convent was used as the place of assembly for the doctors, and the establishment of the university being for some reason regarded with disfavour by the citizens, they directed their spleen against the friars, regarding them as the main prop of the unpopular institution, and did their best to level the convent with the ground. But they always held their ground at Orleans, and their larger theories on the subject of education may have had something to do with the character which distinguished that university, for Orleans opposed itself to the rage for logic, and always upheld the study of the arts.