Flowers from Mediæval History

by Minnie D. Kellogg

It is Said There is No Better Test of a Bible Student Than to
Ask Him to Read the Stories which Ghiberti Tells so
Distinctly on the Baptistry Doors.

But from the vantage-ground of the Old Book of Kells it is as pretty to look backward as to look forward, so sweetly does it recall a certain monastery on the Island of Iona which casts its ray in history like a good deed in a naughty world. This old book speaks eloquently of the lonely Irish cloisters where, in perhaps the darkest hour of written history, the seeds of occidental civilization were laid away until a more favorable season dawned in which to sow them broadcast.

About a hundred years after the blessed Saint Patrick converted Ireland, in which time many had fallen from grace, Saint Columba appeared on the scene, made a second conversion of that region and founded the old Scotch Kirk (very indirectly). When Saint Columba appealed to the canny Scots and the thrifty northern Irishmen for a situation for his monastery, they hospitably turned over to his use the rocky Island of Iona. Though agriculturally it was not much, through long ages it had borne the fruits of the spirit until even its stones did duty as amulets. In its bosom slept the Scottish kings, King Macbeth being the last of the royal line to lie there. Iona was hallowed ground to the Druid, and is, to this day, a haven of superstition. There Saint Columba, the scribe, located his lonely monastery wherein books were made, wondrous in their day and generation, and there or at some Columbian monastery in the neighborhood, perhaps at Kells, the Book of Kells was executed.

One of its big pages, which is covered by a great cross wherein eight circles are incorporated in a network of infinitely involved interlacements, especially illustrates one phase of early art—its reverent patience. Study that cross as you may you will find no false line, no irregular interlacement, for all this was done in the olden time when the ways of holy men were made so clear unto them. That none might disturb the holy calm of the silent scribes as they multiplied the precious “Word” Saint Jerome had taken down from the direct dictation of the angels, a code of signs was in use in the scriptoriums of the monasteries. The sign of the cross indicated a missal, the sign of the crown, King David’s psalms, while a contemptuous scratching of the ear, in the manner of a dog, was an order for a mere pagan volume; for then “the world was very wicked,” as the good monks droned; or at least very rude, cruel, lazy and barbarous, as history affirms, and gentle spirits were only too prone to recoil from it.

The early Christians in general were filled with contempt for this life and proud certainty of reward in the next: those whose practice was no higher than their theory withdrew from the world to secure to themselves particularly high seats in heaven. The composite story of their lives emphasizes the barrenness of the scoffer, the futility of the contemptuous. But the story of the scribe, though he may have seen through the glass just as darkly as the anchorite did, is the living story of Christian brotherhood.

One of the first of these scribes, old Cassiodorus of Ravenna, writes: “All who sing form but a single voice, and we may mingle our notes with those of the angels, though we may not hear them.” I am sure that was the sentiment which finally turned this old statesman from the world, even though he did not retire till after the death of Theodoric, his patron. Perhaps the career of a statesman prepared him to be a statesman of the world of letters; at any rate, when he repaired to the cloister he gathered together, according to his lights, the best books of his world, and especially enjoined upon the monks the noble duty of multiplying them.

All this was some hundred years before Saint Columba’s time, but angel voices carry, and I do believe in their highest moments the ignorant, undeveloped scribes of the old Irish monasteries vaguely echoed ideals like those of Cassiodorus.

These scribes came to feel a certain ownership in the great Bibles on which they worked. At the end of each section of the old Book of Durrow its scribe smuggled in his petition that all who take the book in hand might pray for him. I have known a merry old scribe to insert a jingle in very bad Latin at the end of a chapter, indicating that after so much good work he should be rewarded with a drink. The jolly old monk has always appealed to me most unreasonably.

Within the century of the making of the old Book of Kells in Ireland, stirring old Charlemagne brought a semblance of order to the land of the Gaul and the Frank and, “that requests should not be made to God in bad language,” he regulated copists and reproductions by law; he ordered holy books elaborately adorned, and collected, to the best of his ability, artists for that purpose, thereby leaving his mark on the books of his time and of some generations following, which are technically known as Carlovingians. Indeed, as a bibliophile Charlemagne shows the most charming side of his character. In his enthusiasm he went to work and learned to read, but he never could succeed in learning to write.

As might be expected, Carlovingians are mechanically decorated. They show Byzantine importation rather than the loving development of an early and original art. We still have a couple of pages of the Amiens copy of a work written by the Abbot of Fulda during Charlemagne’s reign. One page is covered by a lone figure, without ground or background, of Louis the Pious with text printed all over it. (Not that in the Dark Ages anybody read between the lines; that they failed to do so was their greatest difficulty.) Then other Carlovingians are examples of the dyers’ art, being written in gold on purple vellum, like the “Golden Gospels” which one thousand one hundred years later proved such an excellent speculation on Wall street. But that is unquestionably “another story.”