Читать книгу Christian Schools and Scholars - Augusta Theodosia Drane - Страница 6

Even the triumphs of the barbarians did not in all cases result in the immediate extinction of letters. In Italy a second Augustan age bid fair at one time to arise under the rule of Theodoric, the Ostrogoth. His court was adorned by the genius of two great men—Boethius, the Christian philosopher, and the last of the classic writers; and Cassiodorus, in whom closed the long line of Roman consuls. Both of them exerted a powerful influence over the studies of succeeding generations. The original Latin works of Boethius supplied the schools with a series of Christian classics which were naturally held in extraordinary esteem by teachers who, as time went on, felt with increasing force the difficulty of training Christian youth exclusively out of pagan class-books. And it was chiefly by his translations from the Greek that the mediæval scholars acquired their knowledge of the Greek philosophy, at a time when the study of that tongue had ceased to be generally pursued. A yet further addition to scholastic literature was contributed by Cassiodorus. He was not indeed the only statesman who had distinguished himself in this line. Towards the close of the fifth century Marcian Capella, an African pro-consul, had produced his celebrated work on the Espousals of Mercury and Philology, which he chooses to personify as a goddess; the seven liberal sciences, into which all known learning had been classified since the days of Philo, being represented as the handmaidens presented by the bridegroom to the bride. His Satiricon, written in nine books, continued to be one of the most popular text-books in use during the middle ages, and was at an early period translated into the vernacular.

But Cassiodorus was not merely a writer of schoolbooks; he was the founder of a monastic school, which, for the variety of sciences which it cultivated, has not unfrequently been given the title of a university. And indeed it was not undeserving of the name. Its noble founder, when still in the service of Theodoric, had attempted, in conjunction with Pope St. Agapetus, to found a catechetical school at Rome, on the model of those which formerly flourished at Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Nisibis, in which he proposed to maintain a staff of professors at his own expense. This magnificent design having failed, in consequence of the troubles of the time, Cassiodorus retired from a world in which he had nobly toiled for seventy years, and devoted his old age to the creation of a seminary of Christian learning on his own estate of Vivaria, at the very extremity of the Calabrian peninsula. He collected a rich library, which he increased by the labours of his monks, on whom he enjoined the transcription of books as their principal manual labour. It was to ensure their accuracy in this employment that, at the age of eighty-three, he undertook the composition of his treatise De Orthographia. He drew up a plan of studies for his scholars, and wrote for their use two treatises, one “On the Teaching of Sacred Letters,” and the other “On the Seven Liberal Arts.” This latter was a kind of encyclopædia, including separate treatises on each subject, which formed some of the favourite elementary class-books in use during the middle ages. Hallam remarks of this encyclopædia and of others undertaken on a similar plan, that they themselves furnish significant indications of a decadence of letters. Such collections must necessarily include only the most meagre sketches of the sciences of which they profess to treat, and their multiplication at this period indicates that men were beginning to be content with a very superficial description of knowledge. So also the numerous translations from the Greek undertaken by Boethius and Cassiodorus are sufficient evidence that the knowledge of that language was becoming rare. Nor will the praises bestowed by Cassiodorus on his friend’s versions, which he declares superior to the originals, probably raise his character as a critic in the judgment of scholars. But the fact that his labours were undertaken at a period of literary decay, when the inconceivable disorders of the time seemed to present an insuperable obstacle to the pursuit of learning, increases our admiration of the energy and zeal displayed by the old Roman, which enabled him in spite of every discouragement to create a school of sacred and profane learning, where strangers were encouraged to seek that hospitality the exercise of which was regarded as one of the most sacred duties of the brethren. There, under porticoes and gardens adorned with every beauty that could charm the eye or soothe the heart, pilgrims, weary with those scenes of violence and devastation that were turning many a fair district of Gaul and Italy into a howling wilderness, found all that remained of Roman learning and civilisation linked with the higher attractions of Christian devotion; and were able, amid the monastic shades of Vivaria, to enjoy at one and the same time the calm of retirement and the solace of prayer.

The foundation of Cassiodorus took place in the year 540. Eighteen years previously—in 522—the two Roman senators, Equitius and Tertullus, had taken their sons Maurus and Placidus to the grotto of Subiaco, and committed them to the care of a solitary named Benedict. Maurus was twelve years old and Placidus seven, and they were soon joined by other children of the same age. They were humble beginnings indeed of a mighty edifice, the first fruits of the Benedictine schools.[35] In 543 St. Maurus carried the rule of St. Benedict into Gaul, where monasteries soon multiplied, in which were cultivated letters both sacred and profane.[36] But they were not the earliest monastic schools which had sprung up on the Gallican soil. I need not here remind the reader of that famous abbey of Marmoutier, erected by St. Martin of Tours in the fourth century, and formed on the model of those episcopal monasteries founded by St. Eusebius of Vercelli and St. Ambrose of Milan. Yet more celebrated, and more closely associated with the history of letters in our own country, was the school of Lerins, a rocky isle off the coast of Gaul, where, about the year 400, St. Honoratus fixed his abode, peopling it with a race of monks who united the labours of the scholar to the penitential practices of the recluse. Its rule, though strictly monastic, aimed at making its disciples apostolic men, “thoroughly furnished to all good works.” Hence the brethren were not required to renounce the pursuit of letters. St. Honoratus himself did not disdain the flowers of eloquence, and the sweetness of his style drew from St. Eucher the graceful remark, that “he restored the honey to the wax.”[37] St. Hilary of Arles, another of the Lerins scholars, is represented by his biographer sitting among his clergy with a table before him, whereon lay his book and the materials of his manual work, and while his fingers were busy making nets, dictating to a cleric, who took down his notes in shorthand. It would take us too long to enumerate the distinguished prelates who were sent forth from the school of Lerins during the sixth century. The names of St. Cesarius of Arles and St. Vincent of Lerins; of Salvian, the master of bishops as he was called; of St. Eucher, the purity of whose Latin eloquence even Erasmus has praised; and of St. Lupus of Troyes, whom Sidonius Apollinaris hesitated not to call the first bishop in the Christian world—may suffice to show what sort of scholars were produced by this holy congregation.

Such then was the state of letters at the opening of the sixth century, an epoch when Europe was covered with the shattered remains of an expiring civilisation, and when whatever literary activity lingered about the old academies of Italy and Gaul must be regarded as the parting rays of a light, fast sinking below the horizon. Yet, as it sank, another luminary was sending forth its rising beams, and the essentially Christian institution of the monastic schools was acquiring shape and solidity. Such an epoch stood in need of a master to harmonise its disordered elements, and such a master it found in St. Gregory. But before speaking of him and of his Anglo-Saxon converts we must glance at the state of letters among that earlier Celtic population which sent students from Britain to the schools of Rome in the days of St. Jerome and St. Damasus. Nor whilst doing so, can we forget that sister-isle which never felt the tread of the Roman legions, and which, sharing with Britain the glorious title of the “Isle of Saints,” merited by its extraordinary devotion to learning to be designated also the “Isle of Scholars.”