The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

Nor was this all. He became an excellent historian, a distinguished musician, and a renowned philosopher and theologian. In mathematics he was equally skilled and ingenious. He is considered by some to have invented the astrolabe, the first instrument by which the height and distances of stars were calculated. Assuredly he wrote an exhaustive treatise upon its use, whether he originated it or not; and it is said that he added to his scientific studies the making of clocks and watches. He has left us essays upon the monochord, on the squaring of the circle, on computation and physiognomy and metrical rules and astronomy. These are marked by the inferior attainments of the age, as we might expect, but they display an amount of original research for which we are unprepared.

He was also an excellent scribe, and the library of St. Gall still contains a copy of a work ascribed to Anselm of Canterbury written by him in the fulfilment of a vow. He resembled the Venerable Bede in the universality of his knowledge, and, like Alcuin and Rabanus Maurus, he is one of the great teachers of his time. Always, during these darkening years, there appears to have been some ministering priest in the temple of education—some self-devoted, God-fearing man, who patiently kept the altar-fire burning, and spent his life, to the utmost verge, in climbing those altar-steps with fresh fuel for the flame.

We do not know how much of this work was begun or completed during his life at St. Gall. We are able to say that he translated Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric from the Arabic language, and this of itself should award to him the very highest renown. It is impossible in a single sentence to do justice to this achievement and we must take it more at large.

The dictator Sylla brought the works of the great Greek philosopher, together with his library, to Rome, in the year B.C. 147. This was on the capture of Athens, and these writings were still comparatively unknown in Greece. The philosophy of the Peripatetic school was, of course, familiar to their countrymen; but it was by and through the Latin race and not the Greek, that the “Master of Syllogisms” was to become most potent. Aristotle’s was the controlling system of the Middle Ages. His rules of logic were imperative. They governed theology, and indeed every other form of metaphysics. They restrained with an iron grip the expanding ideas of men. It was against Aristotle, in the person of William of Champeaux, future Bishop of Chalons and founder of the school of St. Victor, that Peter Abelard laid his lance in rest. Even to the days of Dean Swift these ideas bore sway, and when that brilliant man sought his degree from Trinity College, Dublin, he was met by the question whether he reasoned according to Aristotle. And his reply, that he did well enough in his own fashion, was held to be little less than atheism. Nor is this the only comparison which might be aptly instituted between Swift and Abelard.

So Aristotle had his authority and held his sceptre down almost to our own time. But at the commencement his writings were either used in the Greek language or in the Arabic. In the twelfth century the schools of the Moors in Spain were the true centre of philosophy. They first applied his teachings to theology, and to these schools resorted many scholars from other parts of the continent. But such translations as these travelling students brought home were probably of a sort to make intricacy and subtlety more intricate and subtle. A fog had gathered over Europe, and the Dark Ages are indeed no myth. There were few points of light anywhere, and among these few were the bright spots called St. Gall and Reichenau.

Charles Jourdain asserts that only a part of Aristotle was known before 1200 A.D., and that this was through the translation of Boethius. (See Ueberweg: Hist. Philos., I., 367.) So that if Hermannus Contractus translated Aristotle at so early a date, it shows that his rendering was in advance of most, if not of nearly all those which were used in the Western schools. He had a brother, or uncle, Manegold, who died in Palestine. He had another brother Werner, who afterward became a legate to Gregory VII. (Hildebrand) in the fierce struggle between Pope and Emperor in 1077. And he was further well placed both by his family connections and his situation at a centre of learning, to secure the best manuscripts and the best Arabic instruction. (See an elaborate dissertation in Wegelin: Thes. Rerum Suevicarum, II., p. 120.) It evinces decided wisdom and toil on his part to have undertaken and completed this translation; and there is no doubt that the humble paralytic from his bed of suffering influenced materially the scholastic movements of the coming centuries. Could he have seen the swarming thousands who built the abbey of the Paraclete; could he have witnessed in vision the uprising of such schools as St. Victor in France and Oxford in England; could he have heard Roger Bacon confess his indebtedness to those pages; could he have foreseen the infinite consequences both to the preservation and the hindrance of human thought, with what strange zeal he would have traced each painful line!

But he could not know it. He had removed at thirty years of age to his perpetual celibacy at Reichenau—Augia the Rich, as it is called in the Latin tongue. It is built on an island in the western arm of the Lake of Constance. And there, with great mountains to gaze upon and fair waters to catch for him the rosy light of evening; with the brethren of the convent laboring cheerfully in their fields or toiling in their cells, Hermann of Vöhringen, Hermann of Reichenau, Hermannus Contractus, Hermann der Gebrechliche, Hermann the Cripple, spent his uneventful life.

Here he wrote the legends of some of the saints, and here he prepared his valuable compendium of universal history. He calls it a Chronicon, and condensed into its records the story of the world from A.D. 1 to the year 1054, the date of his own death. It is very brief through the first portion of its account of “the Six Ages.” Then its statements are fuller. When it reaches contemporaneous events it becomes exceedingly important to the historical student, for it is in the nature of a chronicle. Here also the man’s own personality occasionally appears. He speaks of Reichenau as Augia nostra and mentions the basilica which Henry III. (“the Black”) has erected to “our patron, St. Mark the Evangelist.” This establishes the fact that Reichenau was his true residence, and gives us the standpoint of the little isle in Lake from which to look out across the dark-green and sometimes stormy waters upon the confusions of the time. These were the days when the Truce of God (1041 A.D.) was necessary in order to prevent the bloody feuds of the barons during Advent, Lent, and from Wednesday evening of each week until the following Monday morning. Yet amid all these conflicts Hermann the Paralytic remained secure, guarded by religion and surrounded by the peaceful lake. And like that lake the Rhine stream of secular affairs flowed always through his life clear and undisturbed.

It is during these closing scenes that a touching entry is made in the pages of the Chronicon. Under the year 1052 the crippled hand slowly traces these words: “At the same time, on January 9th, my mother Hiltrude, the wife of the Count Wolfrad, a pious, meek, generous, and religious woman, and one who was as devoted to and happy in her husband and her seven surviving children as any person could be, closed the last day of her life in about the sixty-first year of her age and the forty-fourth of her marriage, and was buried at the Villa of Altshausen, in a sepulchre under the chapel of St. Udalric which she had herself constructed.” And then follows a brief poem in which the merits and the love of this dear mother are affectionately told.

Hermann, on the best of testimony, was a person of just this amiable and beautiful spirit. He is called hilarissimus, as if to show his great cheerfulness. He was always a strict vegetarian in his diet. He hated injustice; scorned every sort of vice—and Heaven alone knows how much there then was of nameless wickedness!—and finally, he was thoroughly free from all envy and malice. It is a curious testimony to his breadth of mind that one of his biographers says of him (quoting the old adage), that he regarded nothing human as alien to his search.