In what has hitherto been said of the universities, which in the thirteenth century had fairly established themselves as the great organs of education, it has not been possible to convey any just or satisfactory notion of the exact nature of those studies fostered within their schools. The reader will perhaps have gathered a general idea that a great change had been gradually effected since the days of St. Anselm; that humane letters were becoming neglected, and that scholastic philosophy and canon law had even threatened at one time to discourage the cultivation of Scriptural and patristic studies; that theology, on the other hand, had become digested into a scientific system by the great scholastic doctors, who had reinstated the study of the Scriptures and the Biblical tongues, but who had not done much to restore polite letters; and finally, that the physical sciences had made a certain sensible advance. This general statement has in it a fair amount of truth; nevertheless, general statements are such unsatisfactory things, that the desire rises to one’s mind that some scholar of our old universities could be put on his examination before a Royal Commission, and tell us with his own lips what he did, and what he did not, learn from his mediæval teachers. The wish is not so extravagant as it might appear. Fortunately for our purpose, one scholar existed who gathered in himself the learning of Padua, Bologna, Paris, and Oxford Universities, for he studied successively at them all, and has left the result in writings, which for six centuries have been submitted to close critical examination, and are still in our hands. A glance through their pages promises, therefore, to give us some information on the point in question.
It was probably some time in the reign of Edward I., that among the 30,000 students who crowded the inns and hostels of old Oxford, there appeared an Italian of middle age, of whose previous career at other universities we know no more, than that at Padua and Bologna he had addicted himself to moral and natural philosophy; that at Paris he was held to be a first-rate theologian; and that returning thither a second time, after political troubles had driven him into exile, he had held a disputation against fourteen opponents, had taken his bachelor’s degree, and was only prevented by an empty purse from graduating as master; and finally, that both at Paris and elsewhere he had evinced a marked predilection for the mystical interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. These are all the traces that he has left behind him in the schools, and yet how well we know him! The countenances of Shakespeare or Byron, or Sir Walter Scott, are not more familiar to us than the grand and melancholy features of Dante Alighieri, whom we claim as an Oxford student, on the authority of John de Serraville, Bishop of Fermo, a writer who, as he lived only a century later than the poet, may be supposed to have derived his information from contemporary sources.[260] Plain in dress, temperate in his habits, polished and dignified in his manners, which were, however, dashed with more than a touch of sarcasm,—a man of few words, given to long fits of abstraction, his form a little stooping, his sight early impaired by excessive application to his books; something of an artist, and such a lover of music that, as he tells us, it had power to soothe him even in the worst of times, an exquisite caligrapher, as they attest who have seen his writing, and describe it as magra e lunga, e molto corretta, a close and curious observer of nature, and above all, of the phenomena of the starry heavens, a perfect scholar, yet, withal, a soldier too, well skilled in all the martial exercises that became his rank—such was he whom we have ventured to select as the representative man of the Catholic universities as they existed before that new era of taste and literature which was ushered in by his countryman Petrarch.
Dante is acknowledged by all critics to have been the most learned of the poets, not excepting Milton, the character of whose genius so closely resembles his own. His learning was characteristic of his age: the extraordinary prominence given in his poem to the scholastic theology and philosophy tells us at once in what century it was composed. Aristotle, Christianised and interpreted by St. Thomas, is the master whom he follows;[261] yet perhaps he is not quite so exclusive an Aristotelian as most scholastics of his time, for it is evident that he had studied Plato with almost equal attention, specially the Timæus of that philosopher, to which he frequently refers. He, however, invariably gives the preference to Aristotle, whom he calls, “the master among the wise;” whereas Petrarch assigns the first place to Plato. But “Dante the Theologian,” as he is called in his epitaph, had other masters besides the Greeks. He who had won his bachelor’s degree in fair fight against fourteen opponents, a reminiscence to which he refers in his poem, had to be furnished with arms from the scholastic arsenal. Accordingly, when he describes himself as undergoing the questioning of the Apostles on the subject of Faith, Hope, and Charity, he gives his answers in the language of the Master of the Sentences, as well as of St. Denys the Areopagite, and St. Augustine. His diction is thickly sown with the phraseology of the schools, with “quiddities,” “syllogisms,” “propositions,” “demonstrations,” and the like; yet when he comes to make his profession of faith, how sublimely does he rise above these technicalities, and declare that his belief rests neither on physical nor metaphysical proof, but on the testimony of the Holy Ghost, on Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Gospels.[262] Elsewhere he appeals to the teaching of St. Jerome, St. Isidore, St. Gregory, St. Bernard, and most of the other Latin Fathers, and names with loving reverence not a few of those monastics and schoolmen with whom we have made acquaintance in the foregoing pages, such as Bede and Rabanus, St. Peter Damian, Peter Comestor, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, and Albert the Great. But above all these appear St. Thomas and St. Buonaventura, the former of whom is, beyond all doubt, the guide of Dante in philosophy and theology, and whom he introduces in the thirteenth canto of the Paradiso, speaking in his own person, and using the scientific phraseology of the schools.
The political opinions set forth by Dante are no less characteristic of the mediæval university student than his theological views. Born of a family attached to a party of the Guelphs, he himself kept aloof for some time from either faction, and, as Chief Prior of Florence, aimed at holding an even balance between them. This line of conduct gave little satisfaction to the Neri, as the Florentine Guelphs were called; and they accused him, as it would seem not without cause, of concealing, under the show of impartiality, a secret leaning towards the Ghibellines. On occasion of a popular insurrection, the Priors agreed to banish the leaders of both parties; on this the Guelphs leagued to call in the assistance of Charles of Valois, Captain-General to Pope Boniface VIII. This appeal to the protection of the hated lilies of France moved Dante to an act of severity which proved his own ruin. The banished chiefs of the Bianchi were recalled, while those of the Neri remained in exile. Driven to extremity, the Guelphs despatched an envoy to Rome, entreating the Pope to put the pacification of Florence into the hands of Charles of Valois. Dante hastened to Rome to oppose this demand, but in his absence another popular émeute broke out, the Neri triumphed, their exiles were recalled, and in their turn decreed banishment and loss of goods against their enemies. The original document is still preserved, in which, to the sentence of confiscation is added that of burning alive, decreed against Dante and fourteen other citizens, should they ever again set foot in Florence.[263]
It must be admitted that if the writings of Dante exhibit after this time all the bitterness of “Ghibelline bile,” there was some excuse to be made for him. Almost against his own will he had been thrown from his position of theoretic impartiality into the arms of the Ghibelline faction. Not that he ever entirely embraced their cause; he had good sense enough to admit that truth is seldom to be found in the ranks of party, and owned in after years that it was hard to say whether Guelph or Ghibelline were most to be blamed for the evils which their animosities had brought upon Italy.[264] He felt for the sufferings of his country scarcely less than for his own; and the only remedy which he saw for the miseries resulting from the rage of factions was the establishment of a firm monarchical government, such as was presented in the theory of the Holy Roman Empire. This fancy he dwelt on and idealised till he came to believe that Empire a thing of divine institution, applying to it the words of the Apostle, “There is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.” The extravagances into which he suffered himself to be led on this subject are not entirely to be referred to the influence of his university studies, yet it is certain that the principles current in all the great academies offered nothing to correct the absolutism of his political creed. Bologna had received her “Habita” from the Emperor Frederic II., in reward for the good services which her lawyers had rendered him in supporting his claims against the Italian Communi. Paris was on the very eve of supporting the sacrilegious enormities of Philip le Bel. At Oxford, the greatest law school north of the Alps, the imperial jurisprudence formed the favourite study; and though, with that happy inconsequence which is the national characteristic, the English would none of it for practical purposes, yet they learnt enough from their law studies to induce them to support a course of legislation, the ultimate result of which was the establishment of a royal supremacy.
In all these academies the supremacy of the temporal power was, in one form or other, the favourite political dogma, and the tendency of their teaching was, perhaps, more directly anti-Papal than that of the Italian poet, for Dante’s Ghibellinism, bitter and resentful as it was, never clouded the instincts of his faith. He regarded Boniface VIII. as his personal enemy, and attributed to his intervention the revolution that had driven him into exile. With the terrible anger of his silent nature which suppressed every outward demonstration of passion, he pursued and made war upon him with his pen; yet the hatred he felt for the man never blinded him as to the character of his office. When he comes to speak of the outrages committed against him at the instigation of Philip le Bel, he forgets that it is his enemy who is being thus dealt with, and gives expression to the deep religious sense of a child of Holy Church in lines for ever memorable. He beholds Christ once more mocked and derided in the person of His Vicar, he sees the gall and vinegar renewed, execrates the cruelty of the new Pilate and the new thieves, and weeps over the sufferings of the Church, whose woes are now, he says, the theme of every prayer.[265] Indeed, in all save his politics, Dante reflects the spirit of the ages of faith. The grim grotesqueness which mingles with his most terrible pictures breathes the identical character to be found in the illuminations and sculptures of the same period, evincing an intense sense of certain grave realities which the mediæval artists never shrank from picturing to the mind and eye. The liturgical spirit, too, is there, reminding us almost at every page that we are reading the words of one who lived when the office of the Church was still the Prayer Book of the faithful, and when university students, like St. Edmund, or Jordan of Saxony, were accustomed to rise at midnight and attend the singing of Matins in their parish church.[266] Some of the most exquisite passages of his poem owe their beauty to the skill with which he has woven into his verse passages and phrases from the Psalms, the Breviary Hymns, and other devotions of the Church. Yet Dante was very far from being exclusively a theologian and a scholastic. His writings offer sufficient evidence that the scholars of the thirteenth century were familiar with other Latin than that of Duns Scotus. He had closely studied all the Latin poets, and sometimes translates or paraphrases entire lines from Virgil. His mind was so steeped in the history and mythology of the ancients, that many of his pages, if translated, might be taken for quotations from Milton; for like him he possessed the art of stringing together a series of classic names and allusions, the melody of which makes us willing to pardon their pedantry. One example may suffice, which shall be given in its English dress, the better to convey the resemblance which it bears to kindred Miltonic passages. It is the poet Virgil who is speaking to Statius, and describing the state of the good heathen in limbo:—
There oft times,
We of that mount hold converse, on whose top
For aye our nurses live. We have the bard
Of Pella, and the Teian; Agatho,