“Fortitude is to hold the mind above the dread of danger, to fear nothing save the base, and bravely bear adversity and prosperity. Supported by this virtue, it is difficult to say how brave he was in repelling the plots of enemies and how patient in enduring them. You might observe in him this very privilege of patience; to those who injured him, as another David he repaid the grace of benefit, and toward those who hated him, he preserved a stronger benevolence.” [Again the Christian turn of thought.]
“Temperance, last in the catalogue of the aforesaid virtues, according to its definition maintains moderation and order in whatever is to be said or done. Here he was so mighty as to hold to moderation and observe propriety (ordinem) in all his actions and commands, and show a wonderful discretion. Following the blessed Jerome, he tempered fasting to the golden mean, according to the weakness or strength of the body, thus avoiding fanaticism and preserving continency. Neither elegance nor squalor was noticeable in his dress. He tempered gravity of conduct with gaiety of countenance. He was severe in the correction of vice as the occasion demanded, gracious in pardoning, in both balancing an impartial scale.”[377]
III
A friend of Odilo was Gerbert’s pupil Fulbert, Bishop of Chartres from 1006 to 1028. His name is joined forever with that chief cathedral school of early mediaeval France, which he so firmly and so broadly re-established as to earn a founder’s fame. It will be interesting to notice its range of studies. Chartres was an ancient home of letters. Caesar[378] speaks of the land of the Carnuti as the centre of Druidism in Gaul; and under the Empire, liberal studies quickly sprang up in the Gallo-Roman city. They did not quite cease even in Merovingian times, and revived with the Carolingian revival. Thenceforth they were pursued continuously at the convent school of St. Peter, if not at the school attached to the cathedral. For some years before he was made bishop, the grave and kindly Fulbert had been the head of this cathedral school, where he did not cease to teach until his death. As bishop, widely esteemed and influential, he rebuilt the cathedral, aided by the kings of France and Denmark, the dukes of Aquitaine and Normandy, the counts of Champagne and Blois. His vast crypt still endures, a shadowy goal for thousands of pilgrim knees, and an ample support for the great edifice above it. Admiring tradition has ascribed to him even this glory of a later time.
From near and far, pious students came to benefit by the instruction of the school, of which Fulbert was the head and inspiration. Close was their intercourse with their “Venerable Socrates” in the small school buildings near the cathedral. From the accounts, we can almost see him moving among them, stopping to correct one here, or looking over the shoulder of another engaged upon a geometric figure, and putting some new problem. Among the pupils there might be rivalry, quarrels, breaches of decorum; but there was the master, ever grave and steadfast, always ready to encourage with his sympathy, but prepared also to reprove, either silently by withdrawing his confidence, or in words, as when he forbade an instructor to joke when explaining Donatus: “spectaculum factus es omnibus; cave.”
Some of these scholars became men of sanctity and renown—Berengar of Tours gained an unhappy fame. A fellow-student wrote to him in later years addressing him as foster-brother:
“I have called thee foster-brother because of that sweetest common life led by us while youths in the Academy of Chartres under our venerable Socrates. Well we proved his saving doctrine and holy living, and now that he is with God we should hope to be aided by his prayers. Surely he is mindful of us, cherishing us even more than when he moved a pilgrim in the body of this death, and drew us to him by vows and tacit prayer, entreating us in those evening colloquies (vespertina colloquia) in the garden by the chapel, that we should tread the royal way, and cleave to the footprints of the holy fathers.”[379]
The cathedral school included youths receiving their first lessons, as well as older scholars and instructors. They lived together under rules, and together celebrated the services of the cathedral, chanting the matins, the hours, and the mass. The Trivium and Quadrivium made the basis of their studies. Text-books and courses were already some centuries old.
The first branch of the Trivium was Grammar, which included literature by way of illustration; and he who held the chair had the title of grammaticus. For the beginners, Donatus was the text-book, and Priscianus for the more advanced.[380] Nor was Martianus Capella neglected. The student annotated these works with citations from the Etymologies of Isidore. Divers mnemotechnic processes assisted him to commit the contents to memory. The grammatical course included the writing of compositions in prose and verse, according to rule, and the reading of classic authors. For their school verses in metre the pupils used Bede’s De arte metrica, an encyclopaedia of metrical forms. They also wrote accentual and rhymed Latin verse. Of profane authors the Library appears to have contained Livy, Valerius Maximus, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Statius, Servius the commentator on Virgil; and of writers who were Christian Classics in the Middle Ages, Orosius, Gregory of Tours, Fortunatus, Sedulius, Arator, Prudentius, and Boëthius, the last named being the most important single source of early mediaeval education. Rhetoric, the second branch of the Trivium, bore that vague relationship to grammar which it bears in modern parlance. The rules of the rhetoricians were learned; the works of profane or Christian orators were read and imitated. This study left its mark on mediaeval sermons and Vitae Sanctorum.
As for the third branch, Dialectic, Fulbert’s pupils studied the logical treatises in general use in the earlier Middle Ages: to wit, the Categories and the De interpretatione of Aristotle, and Porphyry’s Introduction, all in the Latin of Boëthius. For works which might be regarded as commentaries upon these, the school had at its disposal the Categories ascribed to Augustine and Apuleius’s De interpretatione, Cicero’s Topica, and Boëthius’s discussion of definition, division, and categorical and hypothetical syllogisms—the logical writings expounded by Gerbert at Rheims. The school had likewise Gerbert’s own Libellus de ratione uti and Boëthius’s De consolatione, that chief ethical compend for the early Middle Ages; also the writings of Eriugena, and Dionysius the Areopagite in Eriugena’s translation. Whether or not it possessed the current Latin version of Plato’s Timaeus, Fulbert and Berengar at all events refer to Plato in terms of eulogy.