RISE OF THE MONASTERIES.
Alchemy the parent of Chemistry.
Learning in Europe was greatly advanced by the foundation of the famous
monastery of Monte Cassino, by ST. BENEDICT, near Naples, in the year
529. The religious houses of this order, of which Monte Cassino was the
parent, were the means of sheltering in those troublous times the men
who devoted themselves to literature and secular learning, as well as
to the severities of the religious life. In these peaceful abodes men
learned how to make the desert blossom as the rose, agriculture and
other civilizing occupations were studied and successfully practised,
and from the sixth century to the ninth such medical knowledge as
existed in Europe chiefly emanated from these abodes of piety,
industry, and temperance. Missionaries issued from them to convert and
civilize the nations; and wherever the monks went, they acted as the
healers of the sick, as well as the spiritual advisers of the sinner.
Everywhere they cultivated medicinal plants, whose properties they
learned to understand; by interchange of thought and comparison of
opinions every monastery, with its constant going and coming of the
brethren, became an exchange of knowledge: the science of Spain was
carried to Italy, that of Italy to France and England, which in their
turn contributed to the general stock of information such items of
knowledge as they possessed. “If science,” says Schlegel,[721] “was
then of a very limited range, it was still quite proportioned to the
exigencies and intellectual cultivation of the age; for mankind cannot
transcend all the degrees of civilization by a single bound, but must
mount slowly and in succession its various grades.”
ALCUIN (735-804), the great reviver of learning in the eighth century,
was an ecclesiastic who instructed Charlemagne and his family in
rhetoric, logic, mathematics, and divinity. “France,” says a great
writer, “is indebted to Alcuin for all the polite learning it boasted
in that and the following ages. The universities of Paris, Tours,
Fulden, Soissons, and many others, owe to him their origin and
increase.” By the benefits he obtained from Charlemagne for the
Christian schools which he founded, education began to revive in
Europe, and by the Emperor’s command schools were established in every
convent and cathedral throughout his vast empire, wherein not clerics
alone, but the sons of the nobility who were destined for a secular
life, could receive the highest education at that time attainable. “The
monasteries became a kind of fortress in which civilization sheltered
itself under the banner of some saint; the culture of high intelligence
was preserved there, and philosophic truth was reborn there of
religious truth. Political truth, or liberty, found an exponent and a
defender in the monk, who searched into everything, said everything,
and feared nothing. Without the inviolability and the leisure of the
cloister, the books and the languages of the ancient world would never
have been transmitted to us, and the chain which connects the past with
the present would have been snapped. Astronomy, arithmetic, geometry,
civil law, physic and medicine, the profane authors, grammar, and
the _belles lettres_, all the arts, had a succession of professors
uninterrupted from the first days of Clovis down to the age when
the universities, themselves religious foundations, brought science
forth from the monasteries. To establish this fact it is enough to
name Alcuin, Anghilbert, Eginhard, Treghan, Loup de Terrières, Eric
d’Auxerre, Hincmar, Odo of Clugny, Cherbert, Abbon, Fulbert.”[722]
THE ORIGIN OF CHEMISTRY.
The great importance of the science of chemistry in its connection with
that of medicine, compels some allusion to its origin. Without question
alchemy was the forerunner of chemistry. Beginning in the search for
the means of transmuting base metals into gold, it ultimately endowed
us with a far more precious knowledge—the art of preparing many of our
most valuable medicines.
The first authentic account of alchemy is an edict of Diocletian about
A.D. 300, in which a diligent search is ordered to be made in Egypt
for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and
silver, that they might be destroyed. This shows that the pursuit
must have been of great antiquity. Fable credits Solomon, Pythagoras,
and Hermes amongst its adepts. We find nothing more about it till its
revival by the Arabians some five or six hundred years later.[723]
The word _Alchemy_ is mentioned for the first time by the Byzantines.
The art of transmuting metals under the name of _Chemia_, is first
spoken of by Suidas, who wrote in the tenth century. The Byzantines
began to make chemical experiments about the seventh century; all
the books they quote were attributed to Hermes. What is known as the
Hermetic philosophy was synonymous with alchemy, but the books were
really the work of the monks of the period.[724]
The earliest works on alchemy which we possess are those of Geber of
Seville, who lived probably about the eighth or ninth century. His
works were entitled _Of the Search of Perfection_, _Of the Sum of
Perfection_, _Of the Invention of Verity_. He divided metals into the
more or less perfect, gold the most perfect, silver the next, etc. His
aim was to convert inferior metals into gold; that which should turn
base metals into gold would be also a universal medicine, would cure or
prevent diseases, prolong life, and make the body beautiful and strong.
The philosopher’s stone would embrace in itself all perfections.
Alchemy led to chemistry; it is even declared by some to have been the
mother of chemistry. Some have thought that without the hope of making
gold and other precious things, men would never have been inspired
to investigate the secrets of nature and sustained in the arduous
and often dangerous work of the chemist. But this is to take far too
low a view of the scientific mind in all ages. The search for truth,
the passion for investigating and interrogating nature has happily
never wholly depended upon mercenary motives, and men have devoted
their lives as ardently to scientific researches, by which they could
never have hoped to gain a single penny, as did those alchemists of
old, who bent over their crucibles in the vain search for the perfect
magistery.[725]
Gibbon says,[726] “The science of chemistry owes its origin and
improvement to the industry of the Saracens. They first invented and
named the alembic for the purposes of distillation, analysed the
substances of the three kingdoms of nature, tried the distinction and
affinities of alkalis and acids, and converted the poisonous minerals
into soft and salutary medicines.” Gibbon somewhat exaggerates.
Analysis and affinity were discovered at a much later period. It was
Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who advanced
chemical science towards its present high position.
NONNUS (10th century) wrote “a compendium of the whole art of
medicine,” in 290 chapters. It is a mere compilation, and the author
is only worthy of remembrance in medical history as the earliest Greek
medical writer who mentions distilled rose-water, an article originally
derived from the Arabians.