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

by Augusta Theodosia Drane

One other foundation must be named, which, though it in no way shares the brilliant historic fame of so many sister academies, is too illustrative of the position held by the Dominicans in the mediæval schools to be passed over in this place.

The ancient university of Dublin was founded in 1320 by Archbishop Bicknor, in virtue of a Bull from Pope Clement V., confirmed by Pope John XXII.; one of its first masters and doctors being an Irish Dominican, William De Hardite.[226] This university was established in connection with St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but from the troubles of the times and the want of funds, it very soon declined, and in the following century became all but extinct. To supply the means of academic education to the youth of Ireland, therefore, the Dominicans of Dublin made a noble effort. In 1428 they opened a gymnasium, or high school, on Usher’s Island, dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas, in which all branches of knowledge were taught, from grammar to theology, and to which all classes of students, whether ecclesiastical or secular, were admitted. Hither a great number of young men flocked to pursue their course of philosophy and theology. As the convent was on one side of the river, and the house of studies on the other, the friars, with that munificence which characterised the ancient regular orders, erected a stone bridge of four arches at their own expense, long known as the “Old Bridge,” which was not destroyed till 1802, and which for two centuries was the only bridge of the kind in Dublin. With the consent of the common council, a Dominican lay brother received the tolls paid by carriage passengers over the bridge, and sprinkled the passers-by from a font for holy water, which was erected there. “It is an interesting fact in the history of education in Ireland,” says Mr. Wyse,[227] “that the only stone bridge in the capital of the kingdom was built by one of the monastic orders as a communication between a convent and its college, a thoroughfare thrown across a dangerous river for teachers and scholars to frequent halls of learning, where the whole range of the sciences of the day was taught gratuitously.” But even this noble foundation did not satisfy the Irish Dominicans. In 1475, the four mendicant Orders, headed by the Friars Preachers, presented a memorial to Pope Sixtus IV., praying for canonical authority to erect their schools in Dublin into a university for the liberal arts and theology, which petition was granted, and a Brief[228] was issued the same year to that effect, granting the new academy the same rights and privileges that were enjoyed by the members of the university of Oxford. It appears certain that the proposed scheme was really carried into effect, for Campion, in his History of Ireland, written in 1570, before his conversion to the Catholic faith, declares that before the subversion of the monasteries, “divines were cherished” in them, “and open exercise maintained.” But whatever were the success or the failure of the scheme, it is equally worthy of our admiration that four mendicant Orders should thus unite, under the leadership of the children of St. Dominic, to supply an academic education to the youth of their country solely out of their own resources. They asked neither for royal charters nor state endowments, but, content with the authority of the Papal Brief, they offered to their countrymen, with more than princely munificence, a gratuitous university education.

The result of the Christian philosophy established in the schools by the labours of St. Thomas, and propagated by the brethren of his Order, spread far beyond the academic circles. That philosophy appeared in an age which was full of the force and passion of youth, and ready to find utterance in the language of the heart and the imagination. It spoke, not in the Summa alone, but in the poetry of Dante, in the paintings of Cimabue and Giotto, and in the minsters of Salisbury or Cologne. For in each and all of these we see in various ways the reflection of Christian dogma. If we may credit the voice of tradition, it was to the geometrical science, united to the profound Christian mysticism of Albert the Great, that the German architects were indebted for many of the secrets of their art. He is known to have consecrated, and is believed to have designed, more than one of those superb cathedrals which date their existence from the same century which witnessed the rise of the universities; and the choir of the Dominican convent at Cologne, which Rodolph tells us was rebuilt by the great master “according to the rules of geometry, and as a most skilful architect,” is said to have served as the model on which the cathedral itself was designed. Almost at the same time the two Dominican artists, Fra Sisto, and Fra Ristoro, were initiating an architectural reform in Italy, and it was the Greek paintings that decorated their beautiful church of Sta. Maria Novella, at Florence, that gave the first impulse to the genius of Cimabue. That great man, the father of Italian art, was a pupil of the Florentine Dominicans. The friars, “in order to carry out that portion of their rule which commands them to be useful,” says Marchese, “had opened a grammar school for the instruction of the Florentine youth, as well as for their own novices. The grammar master was sometimes one of the friars, and sometimes a secular; and in the latter case he received a fixed salary of a florin a month, with board and lodging.” At this time the office happened to be filled by an uncle of Cimabue, who numbered his own nephew among his scholars. The boy often escaped from his books in order to watch the painters at work in the church; and in school, instead of attending to his lessons, would sometimes employ himself in making rude pen-and-ink sketches. His masters discerned his rare gifts, and instead of punishing him for preferring his pencil to his grammar, they wisely determined to encourage his genius, and placed him under the tuition of the Greek artists, whom he soon surpassed, as he was himself surpassed by his own pupil Giotto. The latter also was largely indebted to the Dominican Order, for his first patron was Pope Benedict XI., a Friar Preacher, and a disciple of St. Thomas, who was gifted with that love of art which has ever been hereditary in the order. Giotto was the friend of Dante, and, like him, steeped in the essentially Christian ideas of the age. The hero of his pencil was St. Francis, and he has left his poems in honour of that hero painted on the walls of the church of Assisi.

We may judge how very powerfully the Christian philosophy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries told on the restoration of art by a glance at such documents as the statutes drawn up for the corporation of Siennese painters, in 1335. “We are called by the grace of God,” they say, “to manifest to rude and ignorant men who cannot read the miraculous things operated by the power of the holy faith. Now our faith chiefly consists in believing and adoring one eternal God—a God of infinite power, immense wisdom, and boundless love and goodness; and we are persuaded that nothing, however small it may be, can be begun or finished without three things—namely, power, wisdom, and will, with love.”[229] Who drew up these statutes, and whence were such ideas of art derived? We know not; yet the theological cast of the phraseology leads us to infer that their author must have been perfectly familiar with the writings of St. Thomas.[230]

To speak broadly, then, we may say that the victory achieved in the thirteenth century, through the labours of the scholastic theologians, was that which established the supremacy of dogma in the schools, and which made its power indirectly felt in every province of thought, art, and literature. The immediate result may be stated in the words wherein Rohrbacher sums up the ecclesiastical history of this period. “During the whole of this time,” he says, “in spite of the prodigious activity which we have seen taking possession of men’s minds in the West, moving them to embrace and examine every question of theology, philosophy, and other sciences, as well in general as in detail, not a single new heresy arose.”[231] Order had been introduced into the wild chaos of opinion, and the Christian schoolmen assumed the position as masters of thought, which had hitherto been held by pagans.

Before closing this chapter, we will anticipate an objection which has probably suggested itself to some who have accompanied us through the foregoing studies. Whilst freely acknowledging the services rendered to the faith by the scholastic theologians, they may be disposed to fear lest something of the elder tone of spirituality was lost when the lecture halls of university professors were substituted for the claustral schools of the Benedictines. There was doubtless more accurate science; but was there the old contemplative wisdom that fed itself in silent communing on God? Had the heart kept pace with the intellect, or had not the schools become more rich in dogma, and less full of love? And this kind of doubt as to the possibility of uniting things apparently so little in harmony as philosophic acuteness and unction of heart, is the more natural and excusable as we find that it actually prevailed to a very considerable extent among the religious students of the period, and gave rise to not a few disputes. Hence, in the early days of the order of Preachers, conscientious scruples were entertained by some among the friars themselves as to the lawfulness of cultivating philosophy and the liberal arts; and we find a decree passed, in consequence, at one of the first Chapters-General, declaring the use and necessity of such studies. So powerful, however, was the impulse felt in the order towards the contemplative life during the first century of its existence, that some still felt uneasiness lest the too great application to scholastic science should leave the heart dry and barren. But Humbert de Romanis severely condemned such scruples, comparing those who entertained them to the Philistines, who deprived the children of Israel of all smiths’ tools;[232] and declared the study of philosophy to be necessary on the part of Christian scholars, inasmuch as it was now employed by unbelievers as a weapon with which to attack the dogmas of the Church.

Dryness and spiritual barrenness, in fact, were the last faults which could be charged against the dogmatic theologians of the thirteenth century. It is remarkable that the Dominican convent most noted as a house of studies north of the Alps, and which was the nursery of all the greatest doctors of the order, was precisely that in which the brethren most eagerly devoted themselves to the contemplative life. All the first friars of Cologne, including Brother Henry, the first prior, distinguished themselves as contemplative writers.[233] Albert the Great—the greatest star of the Cologne school—displayed in his later writings the germs of that tender mysticism which afterwards appeared in the writings of Tauler and Suso. In the distinction he draws between Christian and pagan philosophy, he clearly shows that the studies then pursued in the order, whilst they illuminated the intellect, were far from drying up the heart. “The contemplation of the Catholic Christian is one thing,” he said, “and that of a pagan philosopher is another. The philosopher meditates for his own utility alone—his end is merely to learn and to know. But the Christian contemplates out of love for Him whom he contemplates—that is, God. Hence, not only has he a more perfect knowledge for his end, but he passes from knowledge into love.” And the very last of his works, written in his old age, and, as his biographer says, with the view of refreshing his mind when weary with the fatigues of teaching, bears the title De Adhærendo Deo, and opens with these touching words:—“Having desired to write something, in order, as far as possible, to end well our labours in this region of exile, we have proposed to ourselves to inquire how a man may best detach himself from all below, in order to attach himself solely, freely, and purely, to our Lord God. For the end of Christian perfection is love, and it is by love that we adhere to God.”[234]

To the same effect are the words of St. Thomas: “In the perfect contemplative life, divine truth is not merely seen, but loved.”[235] The soul, plunging itself in the contemplation of the Divine greatness, acquires a knowledge of God, not so much by means of light and cognition, as by an experimental union with Him; so that, through the affections thence derived, it knows and it contemplates. “Hence it comes to pass,” he continues, “that He is loved more than He is known, because He can be perfectly loved, even although He be not perfectly known.”[236]

His life corresponded to his teaching. Though not exhibiting to the ordinary observer that miraculous and extraordinary character which attaches to many of the saints, all his biographers agree in asserting that his union with God became at last wholly uninterrupted. “So entirely was his mind intent upon God,” says Flaminius, “that nothing was able to separate him from this contemplation.” “I have learnt more by prayer than by study,” were his own words to his familiar companion, Brother Reginald, and he often repeated the warning that, Wisdom being the gift of God, a man ought not to endeavour or hope to acquire it by dint of study, without humbly asking for it in prayer. From none of the writings of the saints could there be collected maxims of more tender piety than from St. Thomas; it was he who said that the measure of our love of God was to love Him without measure,[237] who called the Holy Scriptures the Heart of Christ,[238] and who confessed to one of his friends that there were two things he did not understand: how a religious could ever think or speak of anything, but God, and how a man who had committed mortal sin could ever smile. Divine science took in him its most attractive form, and, to use his own words in describing the truly wise man, it lifted him into a world beyond the moon where he enjoyed a perpetual serenity.[239] The violence and injustice to which he was exposed in the long and vexatious controversy with the Parisian doctors never had power to disturb him; and this sweet serenity of heart was so apparent on his countenance that he is said to have had a peculiar power of imparting the gift of spiritual joy to all who conversed with him.