The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

In 822, when Egil died, by common consent Rabanus was invested with the dignity of abbot. For a time things went smoothly enough, and such scholars as Walafrid Strabo, Servatus Lupus, and Otfried of Weissenberg were the glory of the Fulda schools. But the pendulum swung too far in the rebound from Ratgar’s illiterate policy. The monks were kept at writing and teaching with too little discrimination as to their tastes and capacities. They began to grumble that the material interests of the monastery were neglected, and that Fulda might be growing rich in books and in bookworms, but was in danger of becoming poor in everything else. The disaffection found a support in Archbishop Otgar of Mainz, a busy political prelate, who seems to have become jealous of the prominence of Rabanus. As a supporter of Lothar and of the policy of imperial unity, he was in politics on the other side from Rabanus. Our abbot was a Nationalist and a Home Ruler. He wished to foster the cultivation of the German tongue and to maintain the distinctness of the German nation. He had stood by poor, weak Ludwig the Pious, whose sorrow it was to have succeeded to the work of Charles the Great. He addressed to him a letter of consolation in his troubles, and wrote a treatise: De Reverentia Filiorum erga Patres et Subditorum erga Reges, to recall his unfilial children to a sense of their duty. In Ludwig the German he recognized the most dutiful of the three. So when the Emperor Ludwig died in 840, he supported the younger Ludwig in the demand for virtual German independence against the high-handed imperialism of his elder brother Lothar. He thus shared in the triumph of the victory at Fontanetum, followed by the Compact of Verdun (843), which practically put an end to Karling imperialism, and secured the national independence of France and Germany. But in the mean time Otgar enabled the illiterate party at Fulda to drive Rabanus into exile, and when he came back he found the brethren had chosen another abbot, Hatto, in his stead. Waiving his own rights, and laying aside all grudges, he betook himself to his books in a priory or something of the sort on Mount St. Peter, not far off, and resumed the work of teaching. Here he is thought to have composed his great philosophical treatise on the All, which marks a distinct advance in the development of mediaeval metaphysics and logic. Indeed, there was but one thinker of the ninth century who surpassed him in penetration and learning—the wonderful Irish monk, John Scotus Erigena, who wrote Latin but thought in Greek and was filled with all the wisdom of the Hellenes, from Plato to Dionysius the Areopagite.

In 847 Archbishop Otgar died, and Ludwig the German elevated his friend Rabanus to the see of Mainz, the metropolitan see of Germany. Since Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon “Apostle of Germany,” who had succeeded to this dignity a century earlier, there had been no man of such eminence at the head of the German Church, nor have any of his successors surpassed him. His first care was the restoration of the discipline, which had decayed under the confusions of those dark days of civil war. A great synod met at Mainz in October, Rabanus having been consecrated in June. Besides the prelates, abbots and monks of all orders attended, and the canons adopted had reference to stricter life as the obligation of the clergy.

The year was not over before news of fresh trouble reached him. One of his own pupils at Fulda, the monk Gottschalk, a man of restless intellect, was reported as spreading an exaggerated version of Augustine’s doctrine of absolute predestination, and one which threatened to overturn the very idea of human responsibility. Gottschalk evidently was one of the people who love to walk on the fence rather than in the road—to carry every principle with ruthless logic to its remotest conclusion. The first news of his extravagances reached Rabanus in a letter from Italy setting forth the doctrines his former pupil was teaching. He at once responded in a letter (or rather a treatise) taking the same ground as the semi-Pelagians had done in the controversy with the school of Augustine, ground sanctioned by Gregory the Great, Beda, and Alcuin, although thought unsafe when first defended by Gennadius and John Cassian. Gottschalk seems to have accepted the reply as a sort of challenge. The next year, 848, he made his way to Mainz, and when Rabanus called together an assembly of churchmen and laymen—not a regular synod—he appeared before it with a confession of his faith in which he replied to the arguments of Rabanus. The assembly failed to convince him of his being in error, and at the king’s suggestion a pledge was exacted of him that he would never return to Germany. Hincmar of Rheims, the metropolitan of the Church of France, made sure of his keeping this pledge. As Gottschalk was handed over to him by King Ludwig, with a letter of explanation from Rabanus, he had him condemned by the Synod of Quiercy (853) to deposition from the priesthood, corporal chastisement until he should burn his confession with his own hands, and lifelong imprisonment. So ended, in 867, this Calvinist of the ninth century, without much credit to anybody who had a hand in his fate, but with least of discredit to Rabanus.

In 852, by order of King Ludwig, another synod convened at Mainz, to discuss, it is supposed, the doctrine of transubstantiation, which Paschasius Radbertus of Corbie had been setting forth in his treatise, De Corpore et Sanguine Christi. Our Rabanus resisted the new dogma, declaring that the participation of the Lord’s body and blood in the sacrament is “not carnal but spiritual.” Nor is this the only point of his agreement with Protestant teaching. Especially in his assertion that the Bible is a book for every Christian, and clear and intelligible as a rule of faith, he anticipates Luther.

In 850 a great famine desolated Germany, in whose course people were driven to the terrible deeds which sometimes characterize such times. Rabanus did his possible to relieve the terrible needs of his flock. Three hundred of these poor people were fed daily from his resources as archbishop, and his heart went out in pity to the multitudes he could not aid. Pitiful scenes he must have witnessed. One poor woman fell dead as she staggered to his threshold, with a babe at her breast. His charity was too late to save her, but her child was rescued.

He lived six years more, seeing his diocese recover from the desolation of that terrible winter, cherishing the literary and educational work of the monasteries on the lines laid down in his De Institutione Clericorum, keeping his clergy up to the ideal of the priestly life as defined in his De Disciplina Ecclesiastica, and civilizing the rude people of his great diocese. He died in 856, in his eightieth year, and was buried in St. Alban’s church in Mainz. In the era of the Reformation his bones were transferred to St. Maurice’s church in Halle. As Rome has not inscribed the opponent of transubstantiation in the list of her saints, they are allowed to rest together in peace, instead of being distributed through a long series of churches as relics.

He had composed for himself an epitaph, as was the fashion of those days, but it is pleasanter to read than some of those exaggeratedly humble and prosaic treatises concerning which we hardly know whether most to stand amazed at the badness of the Latin or the meanness of the piety. Rabanus avoids these objectionable features. His language is that of a poet and his sentiments those of a sincere Christian. Particularly there are two lines which are notable because they give us a glimpse of his personality:

“Promptus erat animus, sed tardans debile corpus;

Feci quod poteram, quodque Deus dederat.”

“Quick was my mind, but slow was my body through weakness;