Again, the only trouble is stylelessness. In fine, an absence of quality characterizes Carolingian prose, of which a last example may be taken from the Spaniard Theodulphus, Bishop of Orleans, “an accomplished Latin poet,” and an educator yielding in importance to Alcuin alone. The sentence is from an official admonition to the clergy, warning them to attach more value to salvation than to lucre:
“Admonendi sunt qui negotiis ac mercationibus rerum invigilant, ut non plus terrenam quam viam cupiant sempiternam. Nam qui plus de rebus terrenis quam de animae suae salute cogitat, valde a via veritatis aberrat.”[238]
Evidently there was a good knowledge of Latin among these Carolingians, who laboured for the revival of education and the preservation of the Classics. The nadir of classical learning falls in the succeeding period of break-up, confusion, and dawning re-adjustment. In the century or two following the year 850, the writers were too unskilled in Latin and often too cumbered by it, to manifest in their writings that unhampered and distinctive reflex of a personality which we term style. A rare exception would appear in such a potent scholar as Gerbert, who mastered whatever he learned, and made it part of his own faculties and temperament. His letters, consequently, have an individual style, however good or bad we may be disposed to deem it.[239]
Accordingly, until after the millennial year Latin prose shows little beyond a clumsy heaviness resulting from the writer’s insufficient mastery of his medium; and there are many instances of barbarism and corruption of the tongue without any compensating positive qualities. A dreadful example is afforded by the Chronicon of Benedictus, a monk of St. Andrews in Monte Soracte, who lived in the latter part of the tenth century. He relates, as history, the fable of Charlemagne’s journey to the Holy Land; and his own eyes may have witnessed the atrocious times of John XII., of whom he speaks as follows:
“Inter haec non multum tempus Agapitus papa decessit (an. 956). Octabianus in sede sanctissima susceptus est, et vocatus est Johannes duodecimi pape. Factus est tam lubricus sui corporis, et tam audaces, quantum nunc in gentilis populo solebat fieri. Habebat consuetudinem sepius venandi non quasi apostolicus sed quasi homo ferus. Erat enim cogitio ejus vanum; diligebat collectio feminarum, odibiles aecclesiarum, amabilis juvenis ferocitantes. Tanta denique libidine sui corporis exarsit, quanta nunc (non?) possumus enarrare.”[240]
No need to draw further from this writing, which is characterized throughout by crass ignorance of grammar and all else pertaining to Latin. It has no individual qualities; it has no style. Leaving this example of illiteracy, let us turn to a man of more knowledge, Odo, one of the greatest of the abbots of Cluny, who died in the year 943. He left lengthy writings, one of them a bulky epitome of the famous Moralia of Gregory the Great.[241] More original were his three dull books of Collationes, or moral comments upon the Scriptures. They open with a heavy note which their author might have drawn from the dark temperament of that great pope whom he so deeply admired; but the language has a leaden quality which is not Gregory’s, but Odo’s.
“Auctor igitur et judex hominum Deus, licet ab illa felicitate paradisi genus nostrum juste repulerit, suae tamen bonitatis memor, ne totus reus homo quod meretur incurrat, hujus peregrinationis molestias multis beneficiis demulcet.”
And, again, a little further on:
“Omnis vero ejusdem Scripturae intentio est, ut nos ab hujus vitae pravitatibus compescat. Nam idcirco terribilibus suis sententiis cor nostrum, quasi quibusdam stimulis pungit, ut homo terrore pulsatus expavescat, et divina judicia quae aut voluptate carnis aut terrena sollicitudine discissus oblivisci facile solet, ad memoriam reducat.”[242]
One feels the dull heaviness of this. Odo, like many of his contemporaries, knew enough of Latin grammar, and had read some of the Classics. But he had not mastered what he knew, and his knowledge was not converted into power. The tenth century was still painfully learning the lessons of its Christian and classical heritage. A similar lack of personal facility may be observed in Ruotger’s biography of Bruno, the worthy brother of the great emperor Otto I., and Archbishop of Cologne. Bruno died in 965, and Ruotger, who had been his companion, wrote his Life without delay. It has not the didactic ponderousness of Odo’s writing, but its language is clumsy. The following passage is of interest as showing Bruno’s education and the kind of learned man it made him.