LEARNING AND MONASTICISM
Something has been said in earlier chapters of the relation of several
great Churchmen towards education, towards the ancient classics, and
towards the studies of their own times. Something has been said, too,
in the last chapter, of Greek monastic life. The period which begins
with the eighth century deserves a longer mention, inadequate though it
be; for there was over a great part of Europe in the days of Charles
the Great a veritable literary renaissance which broke upon the long
period which men have called the dark ages with a ray of light.
[Sidenote: Learning at the court of Charles the Great.]
Charles the Great had all the interests of a scholar. He knew Latin
well and Greek passably. He delighted to listen to the deeds of the
past, or to theological treatises, when he dined, after the fashion of
monks. His interest in learning centred in his interest in the
teaching and services of the Church. Most reverently, we are told by
his biographer, and with the utmost piety did he cultivate the
Christian religion with which he had been imbued from his infancy. He
was a constant church-goer, a regular worshipper at the mass. Near to
his religious interest was his interest in education. A famous letter
of his to the abbats of monasteries {167} throughout the Empire,
written in 787, is a salient example of the close connection between
learning and monasticism in his day. He urged that "letters" should be
studied, students selected and taught, that all the clergy should teach
children freely, and that every monastery and cathedral church should
have a theological school. "Although right doing is better than right
speaking," he wrote, "yet must the knowledge of what is right go before
the doing of it."
What he tried to do throughout his empire was a reflection of what he
did in his own court. He delighted to surround himself at Aachen with
learned men. Most notable among them were Paul the Deacon, the
historian of the Lombards, and Alcuin the Northumbrian whom he had met
in Italy and whom he made prominent among his counsellors.
Charles, says Einhard, spent much time and labour in learning from
Alcuin, and that not only in religion, but "in rhetoric and dialectic
and especially astronomy"; and he "carefully reformed the manner of
reading and singing; for he was thoroughly instructed in both, though
he never read publicly himself, nor sang except in a low voice, and
with the rest of the congregation."
[Sidenote: Alcuin of Northumbria.]
Alcuin connects the learning of England with the revival on the
Continent. He had been trained in the school at York by Archbishop
Egbert, who was himself a pupil of Bede. He had studied the ancient
classics in Greek as well as Latin and knew at least a little of
Hebrew. The library at York is known to have contained books in all
those languages, and Aristotle was among them. Vergil, he said, when
he was a boy he cared more for [Transcriber's note: a line appears to
be missing here] than the vigils of the Church and the chanting of the
{168} psalms. About 782 he took charge of the schools which Charles
had founded at his court, and he became a very close friend and trusted
adviser of the emperor himself. With him (but for a short return to
England) he lived till in 796 he had leave to retire to Tours, where he
was abbat of the great monastery of S. Martin, and where he died in
804. He was a great teacher; a writer of books of education and books
of Church practice, of lives of the saints, of hymns, epigrams,
prayers, controversial tracts; a compiler of summaries of patristic
teaching; a leader in the reform of monastic houses. Among the many
notable points in his career, as illustrating the life of learned
churchmen of his age, are two especially to be observed. The first is
his "humanism." He was a scholar of an ancient type; and the society
in which he lived delighted to believe itself classical as well as
Christian. In a contemporary description of the life at Charles's
court Alcuin is called "Flaccus" and is described as "the glory of our
bards, mighty to shout forth his songs, keeping time with his lyric
foot, moreover a powerful sophist, able to prove pious doctrines out of
Holy Scripture, and in genial jest to propose or solve puzzles of
arithmetic." As a theologian he was most famous for his books against
Felix of Urgel and Elipandus of Toledo, on the subject of the
Adoptianist heresy (see above, ch. vi), and there is no doubt that his
was an important influence in the Council of Frankfort which condemned
them. The second is his attitude towards the monastic life. He
admired the monastic life, but he had not been trained as a strict
Benedictine, indeed he was probably no more than a secular in deacon's
orders. He held abbeys as their superior, just as many {169} laymen
did; but he never seems to have been inclined to take upon him any
strict rule. His example shows how natural was the next step in
monastic history which is associated with the abbey of Cluny.
[Sidenote: The schools of Europe.]
In Alcuin England was linked to the wider world of Christendom. This
has been summarily expressed by a great English historian thus: "The
schools of Northumbria had gathered in the harvest of Irish learning,
of the Franco-Gallican schools still subsisting and preserving a
remnant of classical character in the sixth century, and of Rome,
itself now barbarised. Bede had received instruction from the
disciples of Chad and Cuthbert in the Irish studies of the Scriptures,
from Wilfrid and Acca in the French and Roman learning, and from
Benedict Biscop and Albinus in the combined and organised discipline of
Theodore. By his influence with Egbert, the school of York was
founded, and in it was centred nearly all the wisdom of the West, and
its great pupil was Alcuin. Whilst learning had been growing in
Northumbria, it had been declining on the Continent; in the latter days
of Alcuin, the decline of English learning began in consequence of the
internal dissensions of the kings, and the early ravages of the
Northmen. Just at the same time the Continent was gaining peace and
organisation under Charles. Alcuin carried the learning which would
have perished in England into France and Germany, where it was
maintained whilst England relapsed into the state of ignorance from
which it was delivered by Alfred. Alcuin was rather a man of learning
and action than of genius and contemplation like Bede, but his power of
organisation and of teaching was great, and his services {170} to
religion and literature in Europe, based indeed on the foundation of
Bede, were more widely extended and in themselves inestimable." [1]
[Sidenote: John Scotus.]
Side by side with the career of Alcuin, of which much is known, may be
placed that of another scholar who was at least equally influential,
but of whose life little is known. John the Scot, whose thought
exercised a profound influence on the ages after his death, was one of
the Irish scholars whom the famous schools of that island produced as
late as the ninth century. He became attached to the court of Charles
the Bald, as Alcuin had been to that of Charles the Great. He became
like Alcuin a prominent defender of the faith, being invited by
Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, to answer the monk Gottschalk's
exaggerated doctrine of predestination, which went much farther than S.
Augustine, and might be described as Calvinist before Calvin; but his
arguments were also considered unsound, and his opinions were condemned
in later synods. The argument that, evil being the negation of good,
God could not know it, for with Him to know is to cause, was certainly
weak if not formally heretical, and his subtleties seemed to the
theologians of his time to be merely ineptitudes. He was also, it is
at least probable, engaged in the controversy on the doctrine of the
Holy Eucharist which began about this time, originating in the treatise
of Paschasius Radbertus, _de Sacramento Corporis et Sanguinis Christi_.
In 1050 a treatise bearing John the Scot's name was condemned; but it
seems that this was really written by Ratramnus of Corbie. The view of
Radbert was that which was {171} afterwards formalised into
Transubstantiation. The view attributed to John was a clear denial of
any materialising doctrine of the Sacrament. Later writers say that
John returned to England, taught in the abbey school at Malmesbury, the
famous school originated by Irish monks and illustrated by the fame of
S. Aldhelm, and there died. His chief work was the _de Divisione
Naturae_, in which he seems to anticipate much later philosophic
argument (notably that of S. Anselm and Descartes as to the existence
of God) and to have been the precursor if not the founder of Nominalism.
With John the Scot it is clear that both the old literature and
philosophy survived and were fruitful and that new interests, which
would carry theology into further developments, were arising. A
revival of learning was naturally the growth of the monastic system;
but that system was itself far from secure at the time of which we
speak.
[Sidenote: The Benedictine rule.]
The Benedictine rule did not win its way over Europe without some
checks; nor was it always able to retain its hold in an age of general
disorder. Much depended upon the abbat in each particular house. In
Gaul, the rule of S. Columban had made him absolute. But such a
submission was never accepted in central and southern Gaul. From the
end of the sixth century it is clear that monasticism was beginning to
slacken its devotion. The history of the monastery of S. Radegund as
given by Gregory of Tours shows this; so does the letter of Gregory the
Great to Brunichild. Nor did the milder rule of S. Benedict long
remain unaltered in practice.
A new revival is connected with the names of Odo and Cluny.
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[Sidenote: The decay of monasticism in the ninth century.]
Saint Odo emerges from an age in which the most striking feature was
the reassertion of the imperial power and the imperial idea. The ninth
century, as it began, witnessed a remarkable revival, the revival of a
decayed and dormant institution--the Roman Empire--in whose ashes there
had yet survived the fire which had inspired the rulers of the world in
the past. The great idea of imperialism was reborn in the person of a
man of extraordinary physical and mental power, a sovereign who, while
he had not a little of the weaknesses of his age, had also in a
remarkable degree centred in himself its highest philosophic
aspirations. The early ninth century is dominated by the figure of
Charles the Great. The result was inevitable. Lay power, lay
over-lordship or supremacy, extends everywhere, intrudes into the
recesses of monastic life, and dictates even in things purely
spiritual. And as the new tide of barbarian invasion, Saracen or
Norman, sweeps on in Spain or Gaul, the Church, for very physical
needs, seeks refuge under the protection of lay barons, princes, and
kings. Feudalism is rising. The monastic houses fall often under the
arrogant rule of lay abbats. And the popes, not rarely a prey
themselves to the vices of the age, sink into impotence and become
enmeshed in worldly, often shameful, intrigue and disorder. The canons
of Church councils show that it was below as it was above. Secularity
was general, vice was far from rare.
The Divine spirit and the past history of Christianity made it certain
that a revival of life must come. The dry bones would feel the breath
and would live {173} again. [Sidenote: S. Odo.] On the borders of the
lands of Maine and Anjou was born in 879, of a line of feudal barons,
Odo, the regenerator of monasticism, the ultimate reviver of the
papacy, the spiritual progenitor of Hildebrand himself. Promised to
God at his birth, he was long held back by his father for knighthood
and the life of a warrior such as he himself had led; a grievous
sickness gave him, on his recovery, to the monastic life. The disciple
alike of S. Martin and S. Benedict, he took inspiration from them to
revive the strict monastic rule. From a canon he became a monk, after
a noviciate at Baume, the foundation of Columban in the wild and
beautiful valley between the Seille and the Dard, in the diocese of
Besançon. For a time he tasted the life of the anchorite and the
coenobite. Then he passed to the abbey of Cluny, founded in 910 by
William of Aquitaine in the mountains above the valley of the Grosne,
and ruled till 927 by Berno, who came himself from Baume. On his death
Odo became abbat; and to him the great development of the revival of
strict monasticism is due.
[Sidenote: Cluny.]
Cluny became the type of the exempted abbeys, and the highest
representative of the monastic privileges. It embodied in itself the
best expression of the resistance to feudalism; it became the most
powerful support of the papacy and of the much-needed movement for the
reform of the Church. The first necessity of the new monasticism was
an absolute independence of the lay power. Thus the founder attached
it from the first to the Roman Church, and gave up all his own rights
of property. Its situation, in the heart of Burgundy, {174} removed it
from the power of the king. Charles the Simple permitted its
foundation, Louis d'Outremer confirmed its privileges. When Urban II.,
a militant Cluniac, became pope the interests of Cluny and Rome were
more than ever identified. The monks elected their abbat without
exterior interference. To prevent this becoming an abuse, the first
abbats always proposed their coadjutors as their successors. Thus it
was with Berno(910-27), Odo (927-48), Maieul (948-94), Odilo
(990-1049). After that there arose the custom of appointing the grand
prior as successor--as in the case of S. Hugh (1049-1109). From the
confirmation of its foundation in 931 by John XI. Cluny received the
greatest favours at the hands of the papacy, its abbats being created
archabbots with episcopal insignia; and it was made entirely
independent of the bishops.
[Sidenote: The rule of Cluny.]
Cluny soon attracted attention, wealth, and followers. Corrupt old
communities or new foundations sought the guidance or protection of its
abbats. When each monastery was independent and isolated it was
impossible to reform a lax community, or for it to defend itself from
feudal violence and the hostility of the secular clergy. Odo, the
saint who saw these evils, therefore started what soon became the
Congregation of Cluny. The daughter-houses were regarded not as
independent, but as parts of Cluny. There was only one abbat, the
arch-abbat of Cluny, who was the head of all. Necessary local control
was exercised by the prior, responsible to and nominated by the abbat.
Some houses resisted annexation to Cluny, such as S. Martial at
Limoges, which kept up the contest from 1063 to 1240. Contact {175}
between the abbey and its dependencies was preserved by visitation of
the abbat; and the dependent houses sent representatives to periodical
chapters, which met at Cluny under the abbat. In the eleventh century
these were merely consultative, but in the thirteenth they had become
political, administrative, and judicial, even subjecting the abbat to
their control. The rule of S. Benedict was followed in the abbey and
its dependencies. The monks did some manual labour, but devoted
themselves chiefly to religious exercises, to teaching the young, to
hospitality and almsgiving.
But the Cluniacs, protected by the papacy, and enriched by the
offerings of the faithful all over Europe, taught an extreme doctrine
as to the power of the Holy See. Their ideal was the absolute
separation of Church from State, the reorganisation of the Church under
a general discipline such as could be exercised only by the pope. He,
in their ideal, was to stand towards the whole world as the Cluniac
abbat stood towards each Cluniac priory, the one ultimate source of
jurisdiction, the Universal Bishop, appointing and degrading the
diocesan bishops as the abbat made and unmade the priors.
How much of all this did the great Odo plan? Not very much. But it
was his work to revive the discipline, the holiness, the
self-sacrifice, which, through the reformed monasteries, should touch
the whole Church.
And thus monasticism at the beginning of the eleventh century was a
wholly new force in the life of Christendom. It was destined to reform
the papacy itself.
[1] Bp. Stubbs in _Dict. of Christian Biography_, vol. i. p. 74.
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