A PIECE OF FURNITURE SERVING AS A SEAT AND A READING DESK
Restored by Viollet-Le-Duc from a thirteenth-century manuscript. At the left of the writing table is placed an inkstand; near the seat is a circular lectern which holds the chandelier and can be turned at the will of the reader.
At St. Aliquis, as in every convent, monks still are wont to argue among themselves, "How far is it safe to study pagan rather than Christian writers?" Undoubtedly Horace, Ovid, and Livy are a delight to any student who can read Latin. What wealth of new ideas! What marvelous vigor of language! What vistas of a strange, wonderful world are opened to the imagination! Unfortunately, however, all these authors died worshiping demons; their souls are in hell, or at least in limbo, its uppermost and least painful compartment. Did not Pope Gregory I write to a bishop who was fond of classical studies, "It behooves not that a mouth consecrated to the praise of God should open for those of Jupiter"? Did not Odilon, abbot of Cluny, renounce his beloved Virgil (the most favored of all heathen writers) after a warning dream, beholding therein a wondrous antique vase, which as he reached to grasp it, proved full of writhing serpents? Nevertheless, the pagan authors are so seductive that the monks persist in studying them, although always with a guilty feeling that "stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant."
In the monastery school advanced instruction is given to the younger monks, as well as to the very few laymen who have been through the primary instruction in the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics (the art of reasoning) all taught, of course, in Latin. Apt pupils are then encouraged to continue under one or two monks of superior learning in the quadrivium—astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music. Systematic instruction is hardly ever given in anything else, although odds and ends of certain other sciences can be absorbed around St. Aliquis.
Books of Learning
The fundamental textbooks are Donatus's grammar for instruction in Latin, and then for almost everything savoring of real learning, Latin translations of Master Aristotle. For a long time the monks have had to content themselves with the logical Works of the famous Grecian, explaining the processes of argumentation, but by 1200 they can enjoy the enormous advantage of using Latin versions of the Physics, the Metaphysics, and the Ethics—the great works of The Master of Those Who Know (to quote Dante, writing eighty years later). Some of these books have come directly from the Greek, but others have been distorted by passing through an Arabic version that in turn has been made over into Latin. There are also various Arabic commentaries of considerable value. Curious it doubtless is that Heaven, who has denied salvation alike to Greek and to Moslem, should suffer unbelievers to possess a worldly wisdom surpassing that of good Christians, but the Bible truly says, "The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light." On all secular matters, indeed, Aristotle is a final authority. "Thus says Aristotle" is the best way to silence every hostile argument. Only very rarely can a man hope by his own cogitations to overthrow the dicta of this wonderful sage of Athens.
A great deal of the monkish student's time is taken up with abstract problems of philology and logic. Nevertheless, the abbey contains many parchments widening to one's knowledge of the world. For example, you can read in Vincent de Beauvais's Mirror of Nature a minute account of the universe and all things within it. You can learn the astonishing fact that the world is a kind of globe suspended at the center of the cosmos. Many other wonderful things are described—as, for example, lead can be transmuted into gold, and all kinds of wonders which defy ordinary experience, but which are not to be doubted, since God can, of course, do anything. Or one can turn to Hugues de St. Victor's treatise On Beasts and Other Things and learn all about the habits of animals—concerning how stags can live nine hundred years and how the dove "with her right eye contemplates herself, and with her left eye God." There are books also on medicine, parts of which contain sober wisdom, worthy of attention by the murderous physicians, but elsewhere giving such directions as that since autumn is "the melancholy season," people should then eat more heartily than in summer and should refrain from love affairs.
As for the more abstract sciences, in music the monks know the four principal and the four secondary sounds—the do, re, mi, of the scales, the seven modulations and the five strings of the viol. In geometry they can, with the aid of a stick, "lying on the ground find the height of walls and towers." In arithmetic they can multiply and divide with great facility and keep accounts like a king's treasurer. In astronomy they understand the motion of the planets and their qualities—Saturn, which is "proud, wise, and ambitious," and Mars, "malevolent and bad, provoking strife and battles," and how the sun is hung in the midst of the planets, three above and three below, and much more similar wisdom; although one must proceed carefully in astronomy, for its connection with astrology is close, and from astrology to the black art is not a long journey.
Scientific Studies and Chronicle Writing