Centres Of Thought In The Past. Second Article. The Universities.
The change from the monastic to the scholastic era was one of which we can hardly form an idea. As radical as that brought about in politics by the tempest of 1793, it was less sudden, and, though to the full as dangerous as the unhappy “Reformation,” it was fortunately shorn of its heretical perils by the vigorous and successful hand laid upon it by the church. Instead of producing an organized system of antagonism to revealed truth, which it seemed at one time on the very verge of doing, it became so thoroughly absorbed into the church's system that to many minds “scholasticism” is synonymous with “bigotry.” Yet how opposite was the reality to the idea which it conveys to the modern mind! The real temper of the church, the temper which will be hers eternally in heaven, is the temper of Mary; the contemplative, monastic ideal of perfect peace. In the XIIIth century (we say the XIIIth typically, for the change was gradually working some time before, and only grew to its maturity in that age), a giant intellectual convulsion took place, and the church was rudely wakened out of her placid ecstasy, to find herself assailed by brilliant and popular fallacies, urged by men of dazzling talent and fearless powers of questioning. It was as if some holy monk, who from childhood to ripe old age had spent his life on his knees before the silent tabernacle of a huge and perfect abbey-church, were suddenly to be startled into action by the rude attack of a sacrilegious band on the very altar at whose steps he had worshipped so long. See him spring to his feet, and with unexpected [pg 146] strength throw himself before the priceless treasure, quell by his eagle glance the bewildered assailers of his peace, and convert by his heaven-dictated eloquence those very men into saints, those enemies into friends, those proud opponents into fellow-watchers at the same hallowed shrine. So sprang the church to the defence of those doctrines which hitherto it had been mainly her duty to guard, and the struggle, distasteful as it must have been at first, nevertheless ended by producing a new harvest of saints, and increasing the human prestige as well as the spiritual armory of the church. The reader will no doubt be pleased to see what the writers already quoted have to say of this mighty intellectual revolution, and we gladly yield to them the field of description. “It will suffice to reconcile us to the temporary necessity of the change,” says the author of Christian Schools and Scholars, “that it was accepted by the church, and that she set her seal to the due and legitimate use of those studies which were to develop the human intellect to its full-grown strength. Nay, more, she absorbed into herself an intellectual movement which, had she opposed it, would have been directed against her authority, and so to a great extent she neutralized its powers of mischief. The scholastic philosophy which, without her direction, would have expanded into an infidel rationalism, was woven into her theology itself, and made to do duty in her defence, and that wondrous spectacle was exhibited, so common in the history of the church, when the dark and threatening thunder-cloud, which seemed about to send out its lightning-bolts, only distils in fertilizing rain.” Speaking of S. Dominic, Prior Vaughan, in his Life of S. Thomas of Aquin, says: “He felt that a single man was but a drop in the ocean in the midst of such a vast and organized corruption. Man may be met by man, but a system only can oppose a system. A religious institution, combining the poverty of the first disciples of Christ with eloquence and learning, would alone stand a chance of success in working a regeneration.” He tells us further on that Albertus Magnus, the master of S. Thomas, saw that “Aristotle must be christianized, and that faith itself must be thrown into the form of a vast scientific organism, through the application of christianized philosophy to the dogmata of revealed religion.” The state of men's minds is thus pithily described by the same author: “For, especially at this period, theory speedily resolved itself into practice; what to-day was a speculation of the schools, to-morrow became a fact; men lived quickly, thought quickly, and acted quickly in the days of William of Champeaux and Abelard.” Still, in summing up the character of those strange, contradictory times, so eminently “ages of faith” when contrasted with our day, yet ages of jarring contention when compared with the previous centuries, Prior Vaughan gives us the brighter side of the picture also: “Men were not startled in those days by the unusual deeds and privileges of chosen men. They took God's word for granted. They believed what they saw; they did not pry and test and examine their souls. They got nearer the truth than we do. Their minds were not corroded by false science.” And in a footnote he adds, speaking of the great difference between heresy in the middle ages and heresy now: “In this (the reverence for authority) is seated the great distinction between the darkness of those days and the darkness of the present. Then, men fell away in detail, they [pg 147] denied this or that truth, or fanatically set up as teachers of novel doctrines, or were cruel, or superstitious, or fond of dress, or of excitement, or self-display. But they held to the master-principle of order and of salvation, they did not reject the authority of the teaching church, or presume to call in question the directive power and controlling office of the sovereign pontiff.”
Now, let us at the outset anticipate one question our readers may very naturally ask themselves: Have we undertaken a sketch of the history of the church, or that of human thought and progress? The latter, undoubtedly. Then, how is it that “the church” runs through the whole, like the ground melody of the system? How is it that, even in the emancipating times on which we have now come, the doctors and masters of the schools are all monks and clerics, the theses chosen from Scripture texts, the disputes all turning on points of doctrine, and those, too, uncompromisingly of Catholic doctrine? We can only answer that such are the facts; secular learning hardly existed, and what there was of it was so tinged with religion that it was hardly distinguishable from that of theologians. Take Dante, for instance, an accomplished scholar, a patriot, a politician, and a keen philosopher. Who would not think him a priest and a theologian, from the way he has cast his grand and unrivalled poem? It is a summary of Catholic doctrine and tradition, a poetical version of S. Thomas' Summa, without some knowledge of which it is absolutely impossible to read the third part, the Paradiso, and understand it. We cannot help it if we seem to be sketching ecclesiastical, while we are engaged on intellectual, history. Never before the “Reformation” were they divorced, and no better proof than this could be adduced of the essentially teaching mission of the church.
The proximate cause of the greatness of the University of Paris may be traced through four or five generations of scholars up to our Saxon master Alcuin. His pupil Rabanus, the great Abbot of Fulda, formed Lupus of Ferrières in his own mould; he in turn instructed Henry of Auxerre, the scholasticus or master of the Auxerre school, where he found Remigius, destined to become the re-establisher of sacred studies at Rheims, the Canterbury of France. From Rheims this Remigius removed to Paris (in the Xth century), and from his time the schools of that city continued to increase in reputation and importance till they developed into the great university. He it was “who opened the first public school which we know with any certainty to have been established in Paris.”[81] The first rudiments of the laws governing the greatest corporate institution of scholastic times seem to have sprung from the very disorders occasioned by the immense numbers and pugnacious national characteristics of the rival students of all nations who flocked to Paris. In 1195, we find a certain John, Abbot of S. Alban's, associated with the body of elect masters,[82] and the year previous Pope Celestine III. ruled that the students should be subject to ecclesiastical tribunals only, and should be exempt from all civic interference in their affairs on the part of the town authorities.[83] In 1200, the university is acknowledged by Philip Augustus as a corporate body, governed by a head who shall not be responsible for his acts to any civil tribunal whatsoever. And now begins in good earnest a system the like of which was never seen, and for brilliancy as for license will never [pg 148] be surpassed. It is like plunging into the seething cauldron of a “witches' Sabbath” to read of the marvellous and feverish state of things in the Paris of the XIIIth century, and even of that of earlier days. For a vivid description of the turbulent city we can refer our readers to the recent work of the Benedictine, Prior Vaughan, and to the no less graphic pen of Victor Hugo in his Notre Dame de Paris. A grotesqueness wholly French pervades the latter work, but gives perhaps a truer picture of the reality than any less fastidious language could convey. In the Paris of old, as in our own day, things seem to have been inextricably mingled: the sage and the buffoon are elbowing each other in the streets; students who have come for fashion's sake flaunt their vulgar splendor and their disgusting shamelessness in vice in the face of the poor scholar who sits attentive and eager on the straw-covered floor of the lecture-room; midnight orgies that seldom end in less than murder take place within a few feet of the oases of monastic life, where the canonical hours are still faithfully repeated and the rule still silently kept up. Vanity and frivolity are there, and the arrogance of wealthy dunces. Witness the young man whose father sent him to Paris with an annual allowance of a hundred livres. “What does he do?” asks a chronicler of that time, Odofied. “Why, he has his books bound and ornamented with gold initials and strange monsters, and has a new pair of boots every Saturday.” This was at the time that pointed shoes were the “rage,” and the university even passed a decree against them as follies unbecoming a scholar.[84] “We read of starving, friendless lads with their unkempt heads and tattered suits, who walked the streets, hungering for bread and famishing for knowledge, and hankering after a sight of some of those famous doctors of whom they had heard so much when far away in the woods of Germany or the fields of France.”[85] Many had to share their miserable garments with their companions, and take it by turns to wear their one tunic so as to make a decent appearance in the lecture-hall, while the rest stayed at home. Others spent all they had on parchment, and were in need of oil for their lamps to study at nights. Long before the collegiate system became general, the lay-students were huddled together in unhealthy tenements, over the shops of the burghers, with whom they had many an affray on the score of extortion and injustice. While the rich students employed their many servants and the tradesmen they patronized as instruments in their shameful intrigues, the poor scholars struggled on, some selling books at ruinously low prices, others absolutely begging their food in the streets or at the doors of the rich shopkeepers, while others again, more miserable because less determined, took refuge in the taverns, and drank away the little remains of vitality left in them, or as often were despatched in the unseemly brawls which tavern-life was sure to foster. Then, as the brighter side of the picture, there were the monasteries, especially that of the Dominicans of S. James, where eager scholars studied in peace and order; the cloisters of Notre Dame, where venerable orthodoxy was long entrenched; the Sorbonne, destined to be for ages the most celebrated school of theology in Europe, and to hold its own long after the mediæval university had decayed. Disputed cases were sent to the Sorbonne for decision, popes took the advice of its doctors on important ecclesiastical matters, and its [pg 149] students possessed even greater personal immunities than their fellows of other colleges. Then, if we are to take the personal representatives of this wonderful university into account, what a forest of illustrious names starts up before our bewildered vision! In the XIth century, quite at the latter end, we are introduced to the gifted Abelard, who during the first half of the XIIth century gathered together all the stormy elements of the age, and centred upon himself the attention of the intellectual world. “He appears to have possessed,” says Prior Vaughan, “the special gift of rendering articulate the cravings of the age in which he lived.... One day he took into his hands Ezechiel the Prophet, and boasted that next morning he would deliver a lecture on the Prophecy. With bitter irony some of his companions implored him to take a little longer time to prepare; he replied with disdain, ‘My road is not the road of custom, but the road of genius.’ He was true to his word, and mockery was speedily turned to amazement when his companions, overcome with his eloquence, followed him verse after verse as he unfolded the hidden sense of the obscurest of prophecies, with a facility of diction and clearness of exposition and a readiness of resource which subdued the mind and captivated the imagination.” Success was his idol, pride his natural temper. He thought no question above his understanding, no truth beyond his apprehension; he threw down the glove in the face of a system more for the sake of routing its exponent than of impugning its truth, and when all eyes were upon him, and the populace of Paris rushed madly out on its door-steps and house-tops to cheer him as he passed, his end was won and his dearest wish fulfilled. One by one all his opponents were silenced; from school to school he rose, till at last the chair of Notre Dame was his; his name eclipsed that of all the masters of Paris, and drove from men's minds even the fame of the doctors of the church.... And then what was the climax? It is told in three words—Héloïse, Soissons, and Sens. True, there was a long interval between the two misfortunes represented by the first two names, and that galling one which at last proved his salvation at Sens, and during the interval his fame revived, and again at Paris, though at S. Geneviève and no longer at Notre Dame, his prestige broke down all prejudice and his victorious career began afresh. Then see the last drama of his stormy, eventful life. He meets S. Bernard at Sens before a court of bishops, monks, and princes, his own disciples crowding triumphantly around him, a huge concourse of people heaving before him, he “the spokesman of thousands, from whose midst he would, as it were, advance and proclaim the creed of human reason.”[86] Opposed to him stands one whose cheeks are furrowed with tears, and who has made no preparation to meet the irrefragable dialectician, the prince of debate, but who, “though in appearance but an emaciated mystic from the solitude of his cell, would represent as many thousands more who saw beyond the range of human vision, and judged the highest natural gifts of God from the elevation of a life of faith.”[87] History gives us the thrilling denouement in startlingly simple form. When summoned to defend, deny, or explain the heretical propositions drawn from his brilliant works, Abelard turns in sudden contempt from the august assembly, and answers thus: “I appeal to the Sovereign Pontiff.” But all felt that this was defeat, the blow had been struck, the heresy was dead. And the heretic? Let many who have [pg 150] tried to-day to walk in the dizzy path his footsteps have marked out, strive rather to imitate the end of his life; let them follow him to the solitary Benedictine Abbey where his gentle friend Peter the Venerable led him like a little child, and where his earnest, passionate nature, that could do nothing by halves, soon transformed him into a saint. And let the world which knows him chiefly through his sin and early shame fix its eyes upon him as one who, having abdicated honors greater than those of the greatest throne, having sorrowed with more than David's sorrow, and taught with more than Solomon's wisdom, at last found peace and justification in a narrow cell and in his daily avocations of instructing a small and obscure community on “divine humility and the nothingness of human things.”[88] Among the other great names that stand out in the tumult of Paris as stars of learning and holiness are William of Champeaux, Abelard's chief adversary, and the founder of that saintly school of S. Victor which gathered in one the spirit of the old cloisters with that of the new scholastic teachers, and led the way through its famous doctor-saints, Hugh and Richard, to the final welding together of the new form of theology, the incomparable Summa of S. Thomas. Then, too, we have the preacher Fulk of Neuilly, who became a scholar at a ripe age, and soon surpassed the young students whose aim was display rather than knowledge—the man who preached the fifth crusade at the tournament of Count Thibault de Champagne,[89] and was followed by such crowds that, to rid himself of them and their inconvenient homage (shown by cutting pieces out of his habit), he called out, “My habit is not blessed, but I will bless the cloak of yonder man, and you can take what you please.”[90] John of St. Quentin, also, a famous doctor, who, preaching on holy poverty and the vanity of all learning, all riches, and all honors, suddenly stops, descends the pulpit-stairs, kneels at the feet of the astonished prior of the Dominicans, and will not rise before the latter has thrown around him his own black cloak and enrolled him in the army of that holy poverty he had just praised with so much zeal. Then Albert the Great, whose followers were so numerous that he had to leave the schools and speak in the open air, so that the square where he delivered his lectures was called Place du maître Albert, which name later on became corrupted into the form it still bears, Place Maubert. Albert brings before us the school of Cologne, inferior of course to the mighty university, but yet a centre, at least for Germany. There S. Thomas of Aquin first studied, and now and then astonished his undiscerning companions by the “bellowings of the great dumb Sicilian ox,” until he was finally sent to Paris, the scene of his matchless and altogether spiritual triumph. In him, the heir of the old Benedictine school of quies, sanctity worked that marvellous union of the old spirit and the new which ended by harmonizing the truths of the church with the clamoring aspirations of a new and venturesome age. But, inseparably connected though he be with the crisis of the XIIIth century, when passion was at its hottest, and the intoxication of world-wide success made Paris reel like a drunken man, we feel nothing but peace in the life of the Angel of the Schools, the greatest scholar of the European university. A divine calm seems to curtain off [pg 151] his soul from the contentions in which his mind and body are engaged; his lessons seem rather to be given from a holy of holies than from a professor's chair, and, while we see in him the greatest thinker of the age, we feel that above all he was its greatest saint. One might say of him, with all due reverence, that he was the only man of that turbulent and questioning day who had looked upon the face of God and lived. Beside him was his gentle friend, Bonaventure, of whom, though a professor also, we hear but little intellectually, but whom the highest authority on earth has sealed as a doctor of the church, a burning seraph of love.
And here we must leave that greatest of centres, Paris, whose prosperity at that time seemed so unalterable, and take a glance, necessarily a cursory one, at the other continental universities. Bologna undoubtedly claims the first place. It was called the “Mater Studiorum” of Italy, and vied more successfully with Paris than any other of the universities. The great Countess Mathilda of Tuscany, the liberal patroness of learning and protectress of the Holy See, was connected with its foundation, and by the end of the XIth century it was celebrated as the first law school in Europe.[91] This characteristic it always retained, while in the XIIth century canon law began to be equally studied there. Connected with Bologna was the publication of the Decretals of Gratian, a summary of the decrees of the popes, of a hundred and fifty councils, of selections from various royal codes, and of extracts from the fathers and other ecclesiastical writers.[92] The few errors in this gigantic work have often served as a peg whereon to hang many calumnies against the church; but the whole scope of the undertaking, so bold in its conception, so lucid in its exposition—has it ever been sufficiently examined outside the church? And will the world be astonished to know who was its compiler and who spent twenty-five years of his hidden life upon it? A simple Benedictine monk of Chiusi, of whom nothing is known but his immortal work.
M. de Maistre has cleverly said, “Grattez le Russe et vous trouverez le Tartare,” and we might adapt the pithy saying thus: Raise but the thinnest crust of what we call civilization, and you will find beneath the solid structure, the immovable foundation of monasticism.
In 1138, Frederic Barbarossa consulted the Bolognese doctors as to the framing of a code of laws for his Germano-Italian Empire, and in return for their help gave them the Habita, or series of protective ordinances which raised the Italian university almost to the level of that of Paris. Alexander III., formerly a theologian in its schools, also favored Bologna, and a tide of scholars from all parts of Europe began to flow towards the Apennines. Among these we find S. Thomas of Canterbury, who, as we know, made such brave use of the legal science he acquired there. Bologna was the second centre of the Dominican Order, the teaching order of the church—the instrument raised up in the warm-hearted but intemperate middle ages to guide aright those lava-streams of misdirected enthusiasm which at one time threatened to rationalize or fanaticize the intellectual world. It is at Bologna that we read of the miracles of the gentle and bright S. Dominic, and of the angels that constantly followed him to do the bidding of him who through opposition and misunderstanding was always doing God's bidding. Here, too, S. Thomas of Aquin came once, and, [pg 152] being unknown to the procurator of the convent, was required to carry the basket while his companion collected the friars' daily pittance through the streets. A true monk, he gladly obeyed, and was pained and confused when some of the passers-by told the procurator of the mistake he had made.
Italy was fruitful in universities, for, to mention only prominent names, there were Padua, Pavia, Salerno, and Naples, besides Rome, where the tradition of learning, especially sacred learning, was never quite broken. Padua was an offshoot from Bologna, and became famous in the XIIIth century for its devotion to classic literature and the liberal arts. At the time of the “Renaissance” it had become, however, a notorious focus of atheism.[93] Salerno was a school of medicine, and Pavia a brilliant and wicked resort of every intellectual aberration. We remember reading an excellent description of its vices, its dangers, and its attractions, in the life of a Venetian, a poet and child of genius, the friend and librettist of Mozart, whose name we cannot, however, recall. Even in those days of moral decadence the picture seemed appalling, and at Pavia as at Paris, as at Oxford in old times and our own day, there appears to have been no lack of brainless young profligates whose college career was a disgrace to their early education, and must have been a remorse prepared for their more sober conscience in later life.
The University of Naples, as we learn from Prior Vaughan, was the creation of Frederick II., the Sybarite emperor whose splendid barbaric physique knew how to make all Eastern luxury of body and Greek luxury of mind minister to his sovereign pleasure. The description of his harem, his kiosks, his palaces, his gardens at Naples, reads like a page from the Arabian Nights, and rival the impossible tales that are told of Bagdad's lavish magnificence under the caliphs. Utterly pagan the university seems to have avowedly been. It had no being of its own, but was a royal appurtenance, as the other institutions of Frederick II. Learning was a luxury, and it behooved the emperor to have all luxuries at his feet. Students from all parts of his kingdom of Naples were compelled by arbitrary enactments to study nowhere else but in the exotic university; the professors were all paid from the public treasury, and among them, with characteristic pride and contemptuous eclecticism, the imperial patron had canonists, theologians, and monks. Astrology and the wildest theories were broached, Michael Scott, the pretended seer and alchemist, was conspicuous for his brilliant talents and pagan tendencies, the existence of the soul was freely questioned, materialism openly professed, and many literati ostentatiously paraded their preference of the philosophy of Epicurus or Pythagoras over the religion of Jesus Christ. A secret society is also alluded to in a popular poem of the day, its express purpose being the expunging of Christianity and the introducing of the exploded obscenities of paganism in its place.[94] This reminds us of Disraeli's Lothair, in which such prominence is given to a secret society called Madre Natura, framed for the identical purpose we have just mentioned. It is said to have existed ever since the time of Julian the Apostate, and always with the same intent. The materialistic theories of the artist Phœbus concerning the absolute necessity of “beauty worship” and the [pg 153] superiority of the Aryan over the Semitic races (or principles) are only modern echoes of this pestilential teaching of the deification of materialism. Whether Disraeli, descended from that high race whose history and laws are a standing protest, and have been for ages a bulwark, against the “concupiscence of the flesh,” believes in these theories, is more than we can tell; he has at any rate clothed them with suspiciously gratuitous beauty in his recent work, and has, moreover, tried to fix upon the Anglo-Saxon race the stigma of practically adopting them as her own. The monastic history of the countrymen of Bede and Wilfrid tells a very different tale, and nevertheless does not omit to mention the love of sport and athletic exercises peculiar to Englishmen. How far, however, is the character of the young race-riders[95] and fox-hunters[96] of monastic England from that of the voluptuous Oriental and sensuous Greek!