It was difficult for many to contribute their share in all this expense, in addition to the cost of living in a large city; but in the hope of acquiring the knowledge, the poorer subjected themselves to the most painful sacrifices. The romance of Gil Blas depicts the young men of the University of Salamanca as valets and students. What existed in Spain in the eighteenth century was the condition of many students of the middle ages. Yes, they reduced themselves to servitude to obtain degrees, and made themselves valets to gain their daily bread—a noble servitude for which they did not blush, which put the body in subjection, and left the mind free, showing the superiority of mind over matter; it was a voluntary humiliation, which, for a time, put the indigent scholar beneath the rich, but aided him to attain in the world the place due to intelligence and knowledge, to rise to the level of the most powerful, and often to the most eminent dignities of the church and state—to the councils of kings and the purple of cardinals.
And what ardent scholars! It was the age of the schoolmen. Scholastic learning, afterward so disdained by forgetfulness or ignorance, was the animated, living, and natural form which gave expression to the passionate love of those young men for study. Those descendants of the Franks rushed forward with the same eagerness as to battle to share in the close reasoning, the logic that contended so fiercely, that made every effort and climbed tooth and nail to obtain a position strongly contested. What valiant armies! what soldiers in "these tournaments that are like combats!" [Footnote 265] But what captains also! what leaders! what masters! St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus—at once theologians, philosophers, moralists, politicians, writers on political economy, and savants! What a trio in one century and at the same period!
[Footnote 265: Bonald.]
But do you know what took place in the thirteenth century at the course of Albertus Magnus? Not hundreds but thousands of pupils hastened to his lessons. [Footnote 266]
[Footnote 266: It was the same throughout the middle ages. At Bologna there were, in the thirteenth century, ten thousand pupils at the law school; in the eleventh century, they came from every land to attend the instructions of Abelard; he counted several thousand auditors, and among them twenty cardinals and fifty bishops. We could multiply these examples indefinitely.]
It was not ardor that animated them, but enthusiasm; an apartment was not required to contain them, but a square! No enclosure would have sufficed for such a multitude. A great commotion forced the master to leave his chair—a commotion such as is rarely seen in our days, in which the crowd cried to their teacher, "Away from here!" "Exi! Foras!"—a respectful uprising in which the master is proud to obey; he descends from his chair into the midst of the crowd, which is roaring like the sea, and is borne away by a thousand arms to a large square, where, on an elevation of stone, he can overlook the countless human heads which extend back to the houses and fill up the openings of the streets, but which are now motionless, attentive, and mute before the sound of a single voice that enchains them. O barbarous generation! O age of darkness in which a master required the open air of heaven and the paved square for a classroom! Compare the literary dilettantism of a few hundred young men enclosed within the walls of an amphitheatre of a hundred feet, with the ardent thirst of this crowd, which required not a jar, but a whole river, to satisfy its thirst for knowledge, and which has left a proof of its eager desire in the capital and in the language, the name of the square into which so many students crowded to hear their master—the Place Maubert, Magni Alberti—the Square of the great Albert!
We see how erroneous is the opinion that attributes to the epoch between the middle of the fifteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries the revival of letters and the arts. Letters were not revived; they still existed and enlightened the world. "The great agitation of the Reformation is often represented as having contributed to literary and scientific development," says M. A. Maury, a writer not suspected of partiality to the middle ages. "This is not absolutely true. The contests to which it gave rise retarded for a time the diffusion of knowledge; many monasteries, libraries, and schools were suppressed, which had been, up to that time, the great sources of light." Christian historians were the first to become suspicious of error and to point it out. Hurter, the great German historian, says: "Only superficial minds that disdain the study of documents and are blinded by the pretended superiority of our epoch, or by systematic hatred, dare accuse the church of having favored ignorance." [Footnote 267] All truly learned men soon became of the same mind. One of them, who has made the middle ages his study for twenty years, cannot restrain his indignation: "Our historians, even those who are considered the best, dwelling on the grossest conjectures and influenced by obsolete prejudices, without thinking of verifying, still less of rectifying, old assertions, have summed up the whole history of the first part of the middle ages in these two words, ignorance and superstition; but it is to themselves," he adds severely, "and not to the ages they have misunderstood and calumniated, that these two words should be applied." [Footnote 268] "The idea of progress is not a pagan idea," says Ozanam. [Footnote 269]
[Footnote 267: History of Innocent III., book xxi.]
[Footnote 268: Daremberg, Cours of 1867; and to the support of his opinions he brings Guizot, Dom Pitra, Ozanam, Heeren, etc.]