To rest where shadows of thy Son's cross fall.
Centres Of Thought In The Past. First Article. The Monasteries.
It seems very ambitious to try and present to the reader a sketch of anything so vast as the field of research pointed out by the above title, and, indeed, far from aiming at this, we will set forth by saying, once for all, that our attempts will be nothing more than passing views, isolated specimens of that immense whole which, under the names of education, progress, development, scholasticism, and renaissance, forms the intellectual “stock in trade” of every modern system of knowledge.
The “past” is divided into two distinct eras—the monastic and the scholastic. In the earlier era, the centres of thought were the Benedictine and the Columbanian monasteries; in the second era, intellectual life gathered its strength in the universities, under the guidance of the church, typified by the Mendicant Orders. The first era may be said to have lasted from the fifth century to the eleventh, and to have reached its apogee in the seventh and eighth. The second reached from the eleventh century to the sixteenth, and attained its highest glory in the prolific and gifted thirteenth century. Each had its representative centre par excellence, its representative men, philosophy, and religious development. Prior Vaughan, in his recent masterpiece, the Life of S. Thomas of Aquin, expresses this idea in many ways. “From the sixth to the thirteenth century,” he says, “the education of Europe was Benedictine. Monks in their cells ... were planting the mustard-seed of future European intellectual growth.” Further on he says: “Plato represents rest; Aristotle, inquisitiveness. The former is synthetical; the latter, analytical. Quies is monastic, inquisitiveness is dialectical.” Thus, Plato is the representative master of the earlier era; S. Benedict and his incomparable rule, its representative religious outgrowth; the study of the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the liberal arts, its representative system of education. We do not hear of many “commentaries” in those days, nor of curious schedules of questions, such as, “Did the little hands of the Boy Jesus create the stars?”[26] On the other hand, elegant Latinity was taught, and the Scriptures were multiplied by thousands of costly and laborious transcriptions. The first era was eminently conservative. Its very schools were physically representative; “the solitary abbey, hidden away amongst the hills, with its psalmody, and manual work, and unexciting study.”[27] In the scholastic era, things were reversed. “Latinity grew barbarous, and many far graver disorders arose out of the daring and undue exercise of reason. Yet intellectual progress was being made in spite of the decay of letters.... In the extraordinary intellectual revolution which marked the [pg 080] opening of the thirteenth century, the study of thoughts was substituted for the study of words.”[28] Here the representative exponent was Aristotle; the religious developments, the Crusades and the Mendicant Orders; and the personal outgrowth of the clashes of the two systems—that of the old immovable dogmatic church, and that of irreverence and rationalism—S. Bernard, S. Dominic, S. Thomas of Aquin, on the one hand, and Peter Abelard and William de Saint Amour, on the other. Here, again, we find the locale analogous to the spirit of the age. Cities were now the centres of knowledge; noisy streets, with ominous names, such as the “Rue Coupegueule,”[29] in Paris, so named from the frequent murders committed there during university brawls, take the place of the silent cloister and long stone corridors of the abbey; physical disorder typifies the moral confusion of the day; and Paris the chaotic stands in the room of Monte Casino, S. Gall, or English Jarrow. Then followed the “Renaissance,” that “revival of practical paganism.”[30] “The saints and fathers of the church gradually disappeared from the schools, and society, instead of being permeated, as in former times, with an atmosphere of faith, was now redolent of heathenism.”[31] Petrarch and Boccaccio were the representatives of this refined (if we must use the word in its ordinary sensual meaning) infidelity; Plato was the god of the new Olympus, but unrecognizable from the Plato embodied in the Fathers and Benedictine littérateurs, for, practically speaking, polite life had now become Epicurean; while as for the religious development of the times, since it could no longer be representative, it became apostolic. Savonarola and S. Francis Xavier are names that stand out in the moral darkness of that era, and the latter suggests the only new creation in the church from that day to our own. Christian education had been Benedictine, then Dominican; it now became Jesuit. The world knew its old enemy in the new dress, and ever since has warred against it with diabolical foresight and unwearied venom. Of this last phase of the past, which is so like the present that we have classed it apart, we do not purpose to speak, but will confine ourselves to those older and grander, though hardly less troublous times known as the middle ages.
The first two centres of Christianity and patristic learning outside Rome were Alexandria and Constantinople. The latter soon fell away into schism, and thence into that barbarism which the vigorous Western races were at that very same time casting off through the influence of the church that Byzantium had rejected. From Alexandria we may date the beginnings of our own systems of learning. The end of the second century already found the Christian schools of that city famous, and the converted Stoic Pantænus spoken of as one of “transcendent powers.” Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Hippolytus, Bishop of Porto, were teachers in those schools, and the Acts of the Martyrs tell us that Catharine, the learned virgin-martyr, was an Alexandrian. Hippolytus was a famous astronomer and arithmetician. Clement used poetry, philosophy, science, eloquence, and even satire, in the interests of religion. Origen became the master of S. Gregory Thaumaturgus and his brother [pg 081] Athenodorus. “It was now recognized that Christians were men who could think and reason with other men, ... and of whom a university city need not be ashamed. Christians were expected to teach and study the liberal arts, profane literature, philosophy, and the Biblical languages, ... and all the time the business of the school went on, persecution raged with small intermission.”[32] Prior Vaughan says that “Faith took her seat with her Greek profile and simple majesty in Alexandria, and withstood, as one gifted with a divine power, two subtle and dangerous enemies—heathen philosophy and heretical theology—and, by means of Clement and of Origen, proved to passion and misbelief that a new and strange intellectual influence had been brought into the world.”[33] Antioch and Constantinople claimed the world's attention later on, and the Thebaid teemed with equal treasures of learning and of holiness. S. John Chrysostom exhorts Christian parents, in 376, “to entrust the education of their sons to the solitaries, to those men of the mountain whose lessons he himself had received.”[34]
When the glories of the patristic age were waning, and the East seemed to fail the church, through whose influence alone she had become famous, there arose in the West, among the half-barbarous races of Goths, Franks, Celts, and Teutons, other champions of monasticism and pioneers of learning. The raw material of Christian Europe was being moulded into the heroic form it bore during mediæval times by poet, philosopher, and legislator-monks.
Of these monastic centres, Lerins is perhaps the oldest. Founded in 410, on an island of the Mediterranean near the coast of France, it became “another Thebaid, a celebrated school of theology and Christian philosophy, a citadel inaccessible to the works of barbarism, and an asylum for literature and science which had fled from Italy on the invasion of the Goths.”[35] All France sought its bishops from this holy and learned isle. Among its great scholars was Vincent of Lerins, the first controversialist of his time, and the originator of the celebrated formula: Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est. We may be pardoned for extending our notice of him, since the words he uses on the progress of the church are so singularly appropriate to our own times and problems. Having established the unchangeableness of Catholic doctrine, he goes on to say: “Shall there, then, be no progress in the church of Christ? There shall be progress, and even great progress, ... but it will be progress and not change. With the growth of ages there must necessarily be a growth of intelligence, of wisdom, and of knowledge, for each man as for all the church. But the religion of souls must imitate the progress of the human form, which, in developing and growing in years, never ceases to be the same in the maturity of age as in the flower of youth.”[36] Had the monk of Lerins foreknown the aberrations of the doctor of Munich, he could not have better refuted the latest heresy of our own day. S. Lupus of Troyes, who arrested Attila at the gates of his episcopal city, and successfully combated the Pelagian heresy in England; S. Cesarius of Arles, who was successively persecuted and finally reinstated by two barbarian kings, and who gave his sister Cesaria a rule for her nuns which was [pg 082] adopted by Queen Radegundes for her immense monastery of Poictiers; Salvian, whose eloquence was likened to that of S. Augustine, were all monks of Lerins. S. Cesarius has well epitomized the training of this great and holy school when he says: “It is she who nourishes those illustrious monks who are sent into all provinces of Gaul as bishops. When they arrive, they are children; when they go out, they are fathers. She receives them as recruits, she sends them forth kings.”[37] As late as 1537, we find on the list of the commission appointed by Pope Paul III. to draw up the preliminaries of the Council of Trent, and especially to point out and correct the abuses of secular training and paganized art, the name of Gregory Cortese, Abbot of Lerins.[38] But we must hasten on to other foundations of a reputation and influence as world-wide as that of the Mediterranean Abbey.
In 580, there was a famous school at Seville, where all the arts and sciences were taught by learned masters, presided over by S. Leander, the bishop of the diocese. Then S. Ildefonso, of Toledo, a scholar of Seville, founded a great school at Toledo itself (where the famous councils took place later on), which, together with Seville, made “Spain the intellectual light of the Christian world in the seventh century.”[39]
From the South let us turn to the fruitful land where monks supplied the place of martyrs, and where the faith, planted by Patrick, grew so marvellously into absolute power within the short space of a century. Armagh, Bangor, Clonard, are names that at once recall the palmy days of sacred learning. “Within a century after the death of S. Patrick,” says Bishop Nicholson, “the Irish seminaries had so increased that most parts of Europe sent their children to be educated there, and drew thence their bishops and teachers.”[40] “By the ninth century, Armagh could boast of 7,000 students.”[41] “Clonard,” says Usher, “issued forth a stream of saints and doctors like the Greek warriors from the wooden horse.”[42] The Irish communities, Montalembert tells us in his brilliant language, “entered into rivalry with the great monastic schools of Gaul. They explained Ovid there; they copied Virgil; they devoted themselves especially to Greek literature; they drew back from no inquiry, from no discussion; they gloried in placing boldness on a level with faith.” The young Luan answered the Abbot of Bangor, who warned him against the dangers of too engrossing a study of the liberal arts: “If I have the knowledge of God, I shall never offend God, for they who disobey him are they who know him not.”