This provision
was perhaps due to a clause in the bomilies of the contemporary Pope
Leo IV that “each priest should have a scholar clerk, who could read
the epistle or lesson and respond at mass, and with whom he could sing
psalms.
was perhaps due to a clause in the bomilies of the contemporary Pope
Leo IV that “each priest should have a scholar clerk, who could read
the epistle or lesson and respond at mass, and with whom he could sing
psalms.
Cambridge Medieval History - v5 - Contest of Empire and the Papacy
Pope Siricius wrote in 385 to
Bishop Himerius of Tarragona that “Whoever vows himself to the service
of the Church from his infancy (i. e. seven years old) ought to be baptized
. . . and joined to the ministry of the lectors. ”. Certain Statuta Antiqua!
mentioned these child lectors, who read in church, and laid down interesting
rules for the regulation of the bishop's familia of clerks, “widows," and
pilgrims. Pope Zosimus wrote (c. 418) to Esychius of these lectors: “If he
shall have given his name from infancy to ecclesiastical ministries, let him
remain until his twentieth year with continual observance among the
lectors. ” Leo I wrote to the African bishops about the choice of suitable
candidates for the priesthood: “The venerable sanctions of the holy
1 Used by Caesarius of Arles, see Hefele, 11, i, 104.
## p. 769 (#815) ############################################
Episcopal schools
769
fathers justly adjudged those to be suitable for sacred functions whose
whole life, from childhood to more advanced (provectior) age, has been
passed by means of the stipends of ecclesiastical discipline. ” A stipend,
an allowance sufficient to support life, could hardly have been made to
children otherwise than by maintenance in the bishop's familia: and this
is actually stated by the Council of Toledo in 531.
The first conciliar decree expressly dealing with familial schools
came from sixth century Gaul, where the rhetoric schools had just perished.
The Council of Vaison in 529 enacted that “all priests (presbyteri) who
are appointed to parochiae shall, according to the custom which we have
learned is wisely observed throughout all Italy, receive to live with
them, in their house where they themselves dwell, young lectors (as many
as have taken no wife); and, spiritually nourishing them like good fathers,
they shall strive to prepare psalms, to persist in readings of Scripture
(divinae lectiones), and in teaching the law of the Lord; so that they may
provide for themselves worthy successors, and receive from the Lord the
reward of eternal life. But when they shall come to full age, if any of
them through the frailty of the flesh wishes to marry, he shall not be denied
power to marry. ” The school of a “mater ecclesia” in a “rural diocese”
is clearly here indicated; no chaplain of a rural “oratorium” could have
nourished an indefinite number of young lectors. The cost of the main-
tenance and education of these ordinands is clearly the cause of the
frequent enactments that no bishop should ordain the scholar of another.
The Council of Toledo in 531 said expressly that it was unfair to the
bishop who had taken the child “from rustic and mean surroundings. ”
that he should later, "when imbued with such an education,” transfer
himself to another church. This council also echoed the decree of Vaison,
applying it to bishops' schools: “Of those whom the will of their parents
sets free from the years of their first infancy for the clerical office, we
decree that immediately they have received the tonsure they shall be
handed over to the ministry of the lectors; they ought to be taught in
1 This decree has sometimes been taken to refer to “parish schools” in the
modern sense, though this “parochia” actually corresponded far more to a modern
archdeaconry or rural deanery than to a modern parish: the bishop had usually no
more than two or three in his “rus” or “territorium. ” “Parochia,” till post-
Carolingian times, meant the sphere of a “mater ecclesia,” metropolitan, epis-
copal, or collegiate. There were besides priests and clerks serving chapels or oratories,
but these had no "parochia”; the Rule of Chrodegang of Metz, as revised by the
Council of Aix-la-Chapelle in 817, enacted that both the laity and priests who
served such oratories were to attend Sunday mass in the mater ecclesia. The spheres
of such rural, presbyteral-collegiate, churches as existed in Gaul between c. 450 and
c. 600 are referred to as “ dioceses,” and rarely, as at this council of Vaison, as
“ parochiae. ” While these rural dioceses, or rural parishes, were few, and served
by a comparatively large familia, councils provided that the presbyter in charge
should nourish lectors like a bishop; but when they became more numerous, smaller,
and poorer, the requirement was dropped as impossible: the maintenance of a single
clerk only was required from the ninth century.
49
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. XXII.
## p. 770 (#816) ############################################
770
The Dark Ages
the house of the church, in the bishop's presence, by his deputy. But,
when they shall have completed their eighteenth year, their wishes con-
cerning the taking of a wife ought to be scrutinised by the bishop in the
presence of clerks and laity. ” It was doubtless to this formal choice of
the young lectors trained in the familia of Augustine at Christ Church,
Canterbury, that Gregory the Great looked forward, when he advised
Augustine to live the apostolic (communal) life with his clergy, allowing
such lectors as wished at this stage to marry to do so, and to receive their
stipends (maintenance) outside the community, while attending its offices.
The training of the Canterbury (and Rochester) child lectors by “masters
and pedagogues” is independently attested. Gregory the Great himself
founded a “schola cantorum” at Rome of a similar nature: he built, that
is, two new houses for the school in the papal household which had
already existed. The functions of “lectors" and "cantors” run into one
another in medieval documents; the cantor or psalmista was not neces-
sarily episcopally “blessed,” the cantorate not being one of the seven
orders in the Western Church, although it was in the Eastern. In St
Ambrose's church at Milan (and in other instances), we find that it was
the lectors who did the singing (“Lectores ecclesiae pondus portantes,
docti cantu, lectioni. . . ").
In these episcopal schools the teaching depended on the learning of the
bishop, or after the seventh century his deputy, the magister scholarum,
scholasticus, or capischola. Latin and the computus were taught as
necessary for ecclesiastical equipment, but the seven liberal arts were not
usually so taught before the Carolingian renaissance. Paganism was still
too real a danger in Italy for ecclesiastics, even those who like Gregory
the Great had been taught in rhetoric schools themselves, to wish that
classical learning should be sought for its own sake by clerks; hence
Ireland, where Roman paganism had never been a danger, became for a
time the nursery of classical scholarship. The Irish schools, however, were
rather monastic than episcopal. The teaching of Hadrian and Theodore
at Canterbury included the liberal arts and the study of Roman Law;
but this far surpassed the teaching given in an average episcopal household
between 529 and 800. Grammar masters were hard to obtain, as is shewn
by the story told of Bishop Aitherius of Lisieux by Gregory of Tours.
Aitherius rescued from prison, he says, a clerk, from the city of Sens, of
extremely bad character. But the clerk “professed himself to be a doctor
of letters, and promised the priest that, if he would commend the children
to him, he would make them perfect in letters. ” Aitherius already had
a “praeceptor,” presumably for his household lectors, but he at once
“rejoiced, and collected the children of the city, and commended them to
him to teach. ” The clerk was presented with a vineyard by way of
salary, and invited to the homes of the boys he taught. He tried to
seduce one of the mothers, and complaints were made; but the bishop
could not believe evil of a man so learned, and dismissed them. The
## p. 771 (#817) ############################################
Early Frankish schools
771
wicked clerk then tried to induce the archdeacon to conspire to murder
the bishop, and, failing, crept after the bishop, who was walking in a
wood, with an axe. The bishop, however, turned and saw him; whereat he
explained that the archdeacon had hired him to murder his benefactor, but
that he had never intended to do the deed. The good bishop believed him,
wept, and made himn promise silence. Aitherius then returned to his house
for supper, and afterwards “he rested upon his couch, having around his
bed the many little beds of his clerks. ” The clerk approached in the
night and raised an alarm, saying that he had seen a woman coming
from the bishop; but the slander was apparent to all, for the bishop was
over seventy, and was sleeping surrounded by his clerks. Aitherius' eyes
were opened, and he got rid of him.
The lives of pre-Carolingian bishops and abbots refer frequently to
these household schools, and shew that pupils were also taken for training
by other priests; though in some cases the priest was probably, though it
is not directly stated, the scholasticus of a bishop. Thus St Lomer (ob. 590),
born of noble parents near Chartres, was confided by them to live with
a priest Chirmirus and be imbued with sacred letters. Chirmirus, who
was also the master of another Chartrain priest, Lancegesil, lived within
the city of Chartres, “Domino militans": a member, that is, of the
“clerical militia” or bishop's household, and probably his deputy in
training the young lectors. St Rigomer was thus “trained from infancy
by a certain religious priest"; many others, like Gregory of Tours, were
thus “nutriti" by some bishop. St Germain de Granval (ob. 667) was
delivered as an “infantulus” to Bishop Modoald of Tours; St Leger,
Bishop of Autun, was confided to the Bishop of Poitiers and was “strenue
enutritus. ” Acca was “nutritus atque eruditus” by Archbishop Bosa, the
predecessor of John of Beverley at York; Headda (ob. 790) left a bequest
to the cathedral of Worcester, “quia alumnus sum illius familiae, et iuxta
limites ecclesiae disciplinatus et nutritus fui. "
Even when, after the Frankish settlements in Gaul and during the
fighting of the early Merovingian kings, the practice of the communal
life of bishops with their households was relaxed, the familia still lived
normally near the cathedra, and in the society of the bishop. The Council
of Tours in 567 wrote: “Let the bishop have his wife as his sister, and
so let him govern all his house, both his ecclesiastical and his own house,
in holy conversation, that no suspicion. . . arise. And although by God's
help he shall live chastely by the testimony of his clerks, because they
dwell with him both in his cella and wherever he is, and thus the
priests and deacons, or at least the crowd of young clerks, keep him safe:
yet nevertheless, for zeal to God, let them be divided and sufficiently
distant from his mansio, that those who are being nourished in the hope
of being received into the clerical servitude be not polluted by the near
contagion of the women (famulae). ” When the reform of the Frankish
Church was in progress under the influence of Boniface, the chief instru-
CH. XXII.
4942
## p. 772 (#818) ############################################
772
Early monastic schools
ment of reform was the rule drawn up by Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz,
in 754, to ensure a return to communal life on the part of the bishop and
his familia. His own edition of the rule has no reference to the cathedral
school, though young clerks were no doubt in his day received for training.
Monastic schools before the Carolingian renaissance were internal
schools, and dealt almost solely with the training of oblate children, who
might be received from seven years old, or even younger, like the young
lectors in bishops' households. The children of princes and nobles
were received for training by abbots both Benedictine and Celtic, but
naturally not in large numbers; they would seem to have been received
rather as pages into the abbots' households than strictly into the monastic
school, though they were no doubt taught letters. In addition, where
missionary houses, Benedictine or Celtic, occupied the whole ground, two
other needs seem to have been met: that of teaching the outside peasantry
the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments by heart,
and that of training internally boys for the clerical militia. The latter
would only have been taught reading, writing, singing, and Latin. The
monastic schools were intended for monks, and the great monastic schools,
mainly post-Carolingian, were for adult monks; the practice of receiving
monks from other monasteries, sent to complete their studies, was common.
The greatest service to general education which the monks rendered was
that of supplying learned monks who, as bishops, were competent to teach
the young clerks of their household.
Educational activities which had been partial and sporadic before
Charlemagne became normal or compulsory through the renaissance he
inspired. The personal curiosity for learning, which made him attract
learned clerks to his court, had immediate effects on the palace school, and
on episcopal and monastic schools. He collected from Italy, at one time
and another, Peter of Pisa, Paul the Deacon, Leidrad, probably Theodulf
the Visigoth, and cantors from the Roman school, to teach the cathedral
schools of Metz and Soissons; from England and Ireland he obtained
Alcuin, the pupil of Aethelbert and the school of York, and some of his
English students, and later Clement the Scot. The court became an
“academia,” where Charles himself learned classics from Peter of Pisa and
the liberal arts from Alcuin—by way of question and answer. In this
scholarly circle, Frankish names were too dull; Charles became “king
David," Alcuin “Flaccus” (Horace), Theodulf “Pindar,” Angilbert
“ Homer," Arno of Salzburg“ Aquila,” Eppin the cup-bearer“Nehemiah,"
and Charles' daughters “Lucia” and “Columba. ”
The palace school, to be distinguished from this “academia” of cour-
tiers, had dated back to the days of St Leger (ob. 678), but not as a school
where the liberal arts were taught. It had consisted of the young clerks
under the archchaplain, and the sons of the nobility in training as pages
and squires; young children do not seem to have been received, for the
school was, like the court, ambulatory, and there are references to several
## p. 773 (#819) ############################################
Charlemagne's palace school
773
“adolescentuli” who attended it after receiving training elsewhere. It is
significant that Pepin the Short, by whom so many of the Carolingian
reforms were begun, was educated, not in the palace school, but in the
monastery of St Denis. In Charles' own time, when Peter of Pisa and
Alcuin taught the school, the majority of boys and youths who attended
it would seem to have been clerks, the future bishops and abbots of the
kingdom, and to these the old classical education of the liberal arts was
again afforded; but the point of great interest about the school is that
some young lay nobles, like Einhard the historian, also received similar
instruction, and this was a new departure. Bishop Wilfrid of York
had received young nobles to train either as clerks or squires, according
to their own wish when they were old enough to decide; but it was the
greatness and magnificence of his household, his “innumerus sodalium
exercitus," which procured his banishment. His successor, John of Beverley,
also had young laymen in his train when travelling, and apparently living
with him “in clero"; but if the tonsure was not yet given separately from
a minor order in England, they may have been probationers for such
orders. Certainly, the Carolingian palace school was the first to give
classical (as distinct from religious) teaching to lay boys in any number,
a feature in which it was copied by Alfred's palace school later. The
account of Charlemagne's visit to his scholars, after they had been left
behind for a time in Gaul under Clement the Scot, during one of his
campaigns, would seem to shew that even his scholars were mainly clerks;
for he rebuked the idle, and promised to the industrious “bishoprics and
abbeys"—not lay offices. The sort of instruction conferred on the lay
boys may have been of the nature of the “propositio” found in a manu-
script contemporary with Alcuin and headed "Ad acuendos iuvenes. ” A
certain man had a herd of 100 pigs, it begins; he wished to have them
slaughtered in equal numbers on three days; how many should he have
slaughtered each day? When time has been given for meditation, the
“magister" should say, “quasi increpando iuvenes,” “Now this is a fable
and it can be solved by nobody. "
From the accession of Charlemagne till c. 1170 episcopal schools were
the most important organ of education, and were frequent subjects of
legislation; after c. 1170 the universities, which grew out of them, replaced
them as centres of the teaching of the liberal arts; though they, with the
grammar schools of the diocese, continued to teach grammar and rhetoric
to schoolboys, and theology to the greater part of the diocesan clergy.
Monastic schools from about 800 to 1000 probably produced greater
scholars, but these were monks who gave their whole lives to scholarship.
From c. 1000 to c. 1170 the cathedral schools-Tours, Orleans, Utrecht,
Liège, Rheims, Chartres, Paris—eclipsed the monastic schools even in
the production of scholars ; during this period they were the international
centres of adult scholarship, as well as training-schools for the diocesan
clergy.
CH. XXII.
## p. 774 (#820) ############################################
774
Alcuin
Charlemagne's capitulary of 787, addressed to the Abbot of Fulda,
ordered that in all the monasteries and bishops' houses under his rule
there should be study, “ litterarum meditationes,” and “those who can
shall teach,” for grammar and rhetoric were indispensable for under-
standing the figures of scripture. In 789 he issued another more precise :
“Let the ministers of God's altar. . . collect and associate with themselves
(i. e. maintain in their houses) children, not only of servile condition but
also free-born (ingenui). ” Some bishops are known to have redeemed
slaves for this purpose. “ And that there may be schools of reading-boys
(i. e. lectors), let them learn psalms, notes, chants, the computus, and
grammar in each monastery and bishop's house. ” In these internal
schools bishops were to train young clerks, and abbots were to train
monks. The capitulary of 805 referred to such schools and ordered that
all should learn truly about the computus, that children should be sent
to learn the art of medicine (presumably, boarded in some school in
South Italy), and that the Roman chant, as used at Metz, should be
followed. Alcuin, exhausted with the perambulations of the court, retired
in 796 to teach the liberal arts to the canons of the cathedral monastery
of St Martin of Tours, and to such scholars as resorted to him?
He wrote in that year to Eanbald of York about the conduct of his
familia, advising that his clerks should be separated according to their
occupation, reading, the chant, or writing, and that a master should be
provided for each“ order. ” Possibly the scholastic classes coincided with
the reception of some minor order, as a comparison with the clerks of
Milanº suggests; or perhaps the use of the word is merely accidental.
Alcuin wrote to Arno, later Archbishop of Salzburg, in 799, advising
that he and his suffragans should have scholars, and make them diligently
learn psalms and church melodies, that the daily course of the praises of
God might be performed in each (mother) church ; and to another bishop
in Germany, advising him to hasten home and set in order the boys'
lessons: who should learn grammar, who read epistles and small books,
and who Holy Scripture.
Bishop Theodulf of Orleans carried the provision for education within
his diocese a stage further. “If any priest wishes to send his nephew or
his relation to school in the cathedral) church of Ste Croix, or in the
monastery of St Aignan, or St Benoît, or St Liphard, or in other of the
monastic comm, unities which it is granted us to govern: we give him
leave to do this. " The concession is here financial : the cathedral school
shall receive their relations for nothing (and board them, probably); and
the bishop will see that abbots also receive, board, and teach them for
1 Cf. for an apparent reference to the reception and boarding of such scholars
“quantum possibilitas sinit” in the monastery of Murbach, Pez, B. , Thesaurus
anecdotorum novissimus, Augsburg, 1721, tom. II, pt. iii, col. 378.
2 For an account of the Milanese episcopal household and schools, see Landulf
Junior, Historia Mediolanensis, in MGH, Script. vii, p. 40; pp. 70–71.
## p. 775 (#821) ############################################
Theodulf of Orleans
775
nothing, as oblates, or possibly as candidates for the secular clergy also.
The next canon probably refers to the teaching of day scholars : “ Let
priests in towns and villages have schools, and if any of the faithful
wishes to commend his little ones to them to learn letters, they ought to
receive them . . . and teach them with the greatest affection. . . . They shall
demand nothing in this matter by way of price, nor shall they receive
anything from them, except what the parents. . . shall bestow upon them
voluntarily. ". This canon shews the high-water mark of Carolingian
advance, and shews the ideal of one of the greatest scholars of Charles?
court--of one also acquainted with conditions in Italy, where grammar
masters were fairly plentiful. The whole set of canons are rather counsels
of perfection than ecclesiastical laws; the laity were equally canonically
bound to say their prayers at least twice a day, and priests to confess
their sins with groans and tears, reciting the fifty-first psalm, once or
twice a day, or as much oftener as possible. Theodulf was at one time
Abbot of St Benoît (Fleury), and energetic in the reform movement
connected with St Benedict of Aniane, and hence his capitulary was read
and copied by monastic reformers. Dunstan and the English reformers
were closely in touch with Fleury, and this probably explains the presence
of different parts of the capitulary in two English manuscripts, both in
Latin with English translations. The part of the capitulary dealing with
schools occurs in a manuscript following some “statuta” collected by
Abbot Aelfric of Eynsham; but there is no evidence that it was ever
“lecta et publicata” in any English synod, or even that the translator
was Aelfric. Another copy in a monastery at Ghent attributed it
explicitly, but certainly wrongly, to the Council of Constantinople, 680,
causing confusion to later writers. The canon about schools is not drawn
from any Eastern council, but was Theodulf's own work.
Charlemagne’s capitularies were not universally obeyed. In 813 the
Council of Chalon reiterated that schools must be set up; and in 817
the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle dealt with both monastic and cathedral
schools. In monasteries there were to be schools only of oblates; a few,
like Fulda and St Gall, continued for a time to have "scholae exteriores
seu canonicae” for training secular clerks. Chrodegang's rule, revised
and enlarged by some chapters, was to be observed, as the “regula
Aquisgranensis,” by all the cathedrals of the Empire. A chapter of the
rule regulated the provisions for the cathedral school. As earlier, it was
to be an internal school, in which the young clerks were maintained by
the chapter; the boys slept and worked together, in charge of an aged
and discreet canon, though they might have a younger one to teach them.
The rule was influential in reforms carried out by Dunstan in England,
1 The teaching may have been intended to include Latin: it was certainly
different from the learning by heart of the Creed and Lord's Prayer, in Latin or
German, by the newly-converted Saxons, as ordered by the Council of Mayence.
(Mansi, xiv, col. 74, cap. xlv. )
CH. XXII.
## p. 776 (#822) ############################################
776
Post-Carolingian episcopal schools
and was forinally adopted by Leofric of Exeter c. 1050. The chapter
describing the school must be taken as descriptive of the normal cathedral
school in the Carolingian Empire from this time forward, apart from
evidence to the contrary in particular cases, and till the communal life
of chapters lapsed. Alcuin's teaching at Tours made the school so famous
that conditions were perhaps abnormal there in his day. External scholars,
boarding in the town, may have been taught by him ; certainly in 843
Amalric, canon and scholasticus, left a bequest to the future preceptors
in the school, to prevent the abominable custom, which had sprung up
in his predecessors' day, of taking a price for instruction, “as from any
other worldly business. ” Whether the endowment was to recompense
the preceptors for renouncing the fees of external scholars, or to enable
them to board these scholars gratis in their house, is not clear. There
was certainly an internal and an external school at Rheims later; and,
from about 900 onwards, the general practice of the cathedrals seems to
have been for the chapter to maintain a number of “clericuli," while
others were taken into the school as a private bargain with their relatives,
and yet others were boarded by individual canons, who made a special
bargain with relatives for “introducing them into the clerical order. ”
Generally speaking, and theoretically, no fees, or very small fees, were
charged for teaching only in the cathedral grammar or theology school,
the masters being maintained by the chapter; but unless they had a
prebend the maintenance was sometimes insufficient, and practice varied.
The ninth century brought difficulties to the schools. Louis the
Pious, in 822, desired that schools should be amended : the parents or
lords of scholars (no longer, significantly, the bishop) must help to provide
for them ; if the diocese (parochia) were very large, two or three places of
study must be founded. The Council of Paris, in 824, ordered each bishop
to shew more zeal to have a school to educate the militia of Christ; to
encourage this, let each bishop bring his scholasticus to the provincial
council. In 824 Lothar, as co-regent with his father, ordered that, since
instruction was lacking in Italy, schools of “ doctrina” should be main-
tained in certain towns, which he specified. In 826 Pope Eugenius II
enacted that, since in some places there were neither masters nor care for
the study of letters, each bishopric, and other places where there was
need, should have masters and doctors to teach letters and the “dogmas
of the liberal arts. " The Council of Paris, in 829, repeated the provisions
of 822, and the bishops petitioned the Emperor Louis that, lest his
father's work should be lost, three “public schools” should be set up in
his Empire; which three schools of Charlemagne they referred to is not
clear, though a subsequent canon shews that they were including Italy
in the Empire. The Council of Meaux, in 845, declared all the capitularies
of Charles and Louis the Pious to be still in force, and ordered all bishops
to build a cloister near their church for the regular training of their
clerks (as Eugenius II had also ordered in 826). In 852 Archbishop
## p. 777 (#823) ############################################
Their difficulties
777
Hincmar of Rheims enjoined in a synod that answers should be made to
certain questions, to be propounded by the magister and the dean “in
each mother-church, and in each chapel of our parochia (archbishopric)" ;
among others: “Had the priest a clerk who could keep school, or read
the epistle and sing, according as was necessary”—the one, probably, in
a mother-church (ecclesia), the other in a chapel (capella).
This provision
was perhaps due to a clause in the bomilies of the contemporary Pope
Leo IV that “each priest should have a scholar clerk, who could read
the epistle or lesson and respond at mass, and with whom he could sing
psalms. ” The same Pope, in 853, practically repealed Eugenius' canon
about the schools of liberal arts, by acknowledging that grammar masters
were scarce, and ordering that, in lack of them, masters of divine scriptures
and teachers of the office should be provided.
The ravages of the Northmen and internecine wars had half consumed
learning by the mid-century, and the Council of Valence, summoned in
855 for the provinces of Lyons, Vienne, and Arles, could only order that
“ something should be discussed, and if possible decreed and ordained,
about schools both of divine and secular literature and church chant,
since, from the long intermission of this study, ignorance of the faith
and of all knowledge has overtaken many bishoprics. ” Archbishop Herard
of Tours, in 858, ordered that “priests should have schools as much as
they can, and corrected books”; and Bishop Walter of Orleans in the
same year interpreted this by enacting that “every priest must have
a clerk, whom he must have religiously educated ; and, if it is possible
for him, he must have a school in his church, and wisely take heed that
those whom he receives to teach he may chastely and sincerely nourish. "
This seems an interesting attempt to extend the system of training
lectors from episcopal and collegiate churches to those of single priests;
each priest must train or have trained (procuret educare) one clerk (the
ancestor, of course, of the later parish clerk), and, if it be possible, let
him nourish more. In 859 the Council of Savonnières urged that “scholae
publicae” (apparently implying, at the date, royally-endowed schools)
should be set up, so that fruit both of divine and human learning might
accrue to the Church.
After these enactments, however, the schools gradually recovered and
became flourishing; the records of individual cathedrals indicate greater
prosperity and scholarship. Bishop Ratherius of Verona in 966 decreed
that he would in future promote no ordinands who had not lived in his
own city, or in some monastery, or “ apud quemlibet sapientem," and to
some extent learned letters. The clause about private teaching is char-
acteristic of Italian conditions ; north of the Alps ordinands would have
attached themselves to some cathedral school (unless ordained without
preparation in deference to the wish of some layman). Gregory VII in
1078 ordered that “all bishops were to have the arts of letters taught
1 The Old Testament passage sometimes read in place of the Epistle.
CH. XXII.
## p. 778 (#824) ############################################
778
Chartres
in their churches," i. e. not merely “divine learning” but secular. The
growth of the schools is marked by increase of masters. Fulbert (ob. 1028),
the scholar-Bishop of Chartres, who raised the schools to the pitch of
fame, gave Hildegaire both the birch of the grammaticus and the tablets
of the chancellor as symbols of authority ; in addition, Hildegaire held
the position of sub-dean. Fluctuations still occurred at Chartres between
the work and functions of the chancellor, vice-chancellor, and gram-
maticus ; but by c. 1150 the chancellor as such had a prebend, taught
only theology, and had under him a scholasticus now usually termed the
“magister scholarum. ” The latter had no prebend as such, but was some-
times a canon ; in any case, he received the usual distributions of food
and
money for attendance at offices. Development at other cathedrals
was roughly parallel, the magister scholarum of the earlier centuries
becoming the chancellor in the twelfth century, and teaching only
theology, with a grammar master under him. In all dioceses other
granımar schools were now fairly frequent, the right of teaching, however,
remaining a strict monopoly, guarded by the chancellor of the diocese.
After the rise of the universities (c. 1170), the best scholars were drawn
away from the cathedral schools as such, and the teaching of the liberal
arts in these dwindled to the teaching of grammar and rhetoric.
The decline of diocesan teaching roused the anxiety of the Church.
In the lesser cathedrals there was difficulty even in obtaining a grammar
master, since no benefice was provided for him, and there was more
lucrative employment elsewhere. The Third Lateran Council, in 1179,
ordered that a competent benefice should be given in every cathedral to
a master, who should teach the clerks of the church and
poor
scholars
for nothing ; nor was the ecclesiastical authority to charge for the license
to teach, nor deny it to any suitable candidate. The Fourth Lateran
Council, in 1215, asserted that this provision had remained widely unful-
filled; it ordered each cathedral church, and other (collegiate) churches
which had the means, to provide a prebend for a grammar master, and
each metropolitan church one for a theology master. The provisions still
remained largely unfulfilled, the difficulty being to get the chapter to
give up a prebend for the purpose, especially as so many prebends were
anticipated by papal provision. The friars, however, set up in this
century their own hierarchy of schools, in some of which the presence of
seculars was allowed. St Thomas Aquinas wrote in 1257 that the decree
for the provision of a theology master in each metropolitan church had
not been observed “through lack of letters," but now it had been more
than fulfilled by the religious.
The monastic schools saw their two most flourishing centuries after
the Carolingian renaissance. The external schools about which most is
known were those of Fulda, St Gall, and Bec. Raban Maur of Fulda
was sent by his abbot to study under Alcuin at Tours, and was afterwards
given the direction of the monks' school at Fulda, with orders to preserve
## p. 779 (#825) ############################################
External monastic schools
779
Alcuin's method of teaching. He then ruled both schools (for oblates
and clerks) “with piety and doctrine,” and appointed two masters to
teach under him. The schools of St Gall were famous in the ninth
century, when Notker the Stammerer and other scholars were trained
there. « The cloister school with blessed Notker and other children of
the monastic habit was handed over to Marcellus, and the external school,
that is the canonical school, to Iso. " In 937 one of the scholars of this
school started a serious fire in the monastery, to save himself a beating.
The external school started at Bec by Lanfranc was somewhat of a new
departure; it was not maintained to fill the place of a non-existent
canonical, or cathedral, school, but to aid the poverty of the newly-
founded house with fees; it was, in fact, a continuation of Lanfranc's
work as a private rhetoric teacher in Italy. On the other hand, when
St William of Dijon (ob. 1031) was called by Duke Richard to Normandy
to introduce the Cluniac reforms, he substituted monks for clerks in the
abbey of Fécamps, and started an external school there of the old,
canonical type. “For when he saw that knowledge of singing and reading
among the rural clerks was. . . almost perished, not only in that place but
throughout the whole province,. . . he founded a school of the sacred
ministry where the brothers skilled in this office taught freely, for the
love of God. ”
The teaching of laymen in this period has been passed over, for there
were no schools for laymen as such, even the little A. B. C. schools being
mainly intended to teach “song” to little clerks. The sons of the nobility
were more frequently taught reading, writing, and such Latin as they
were considered to need, by their father's chaplain, or the chaplain of
the lay noble, bishop, or abbot to whom they were sent for “nurture. "
Learned laywomen were similarly taught, though the nunneries, being
poorer than the men's houses, more often received little “prebendinants”
(boarders), boys as well as girls, for education. But as a rule the teaching
of laymen and laywomen before 1300 was individual 1.
1 No description of grammar schools, other than those attached to cathedral or
collegiate churches, has been here attempted, for reasons of space. Between the
rise of the universities, c. 1170, when grammar masters became more plentiful, and
the end of the thirteenth century, such schools existed, and even in some numbers;
but they were the same in character and method as they were in the next two
centuries, when they became still more numerous. A full description of such
grammar schools will be given in Vol. viii.
OH. XXII.
## p. 780 (#826) ############################################
780
CHAPTER XXIII.
PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
Not even the briefest sketch of medieval philosophy can dispense with
a preface. Superfluous as it may seem to enquire what is meant by the
“Middle Ages,” and again by “philosophy,” neglect of these elementary
questions has often led to misunderstanding of those still shadowy centuries
which lie between antiquity and ourselves. Precisely when and why the
Middle Ages were first so designated it might be hard to decide. The
presumption of some affinity between the ancient and modern world is
tolerably clear, but when this vague resemblance is tried by a variety of
tests, the grounds for affirming it become more and more obscure. And
since our business here is only with philosophy, it may be well to assert
at once that the ancient status of philosophy has never been reproduced.
To the Greeks, from the days of the half-legendary Pythagoras, philosophy
meant the adoption of a considered way of life which was not the common
way of the world, and did not coincide with observance of the law. On
the one side were the authority of custom and the religion of the State;
on the other curiosity and criticism, the impulse to search for the hidden
meaning of things and to establish a link between knowledge and life.
The original freedom of Greek philosophy must indeed be largely attri-
buted to the inseparable alliance between the Pagan State and the Pagan
religion. For the official religion of the Greeks (as of the Romans) was
founded on no articulate theology and embodied in no visible Church.
The only theologians of early days were the poets. They at least gave
an account of the gods, in the form of scandalous stories; and with them,
therefore, rather than with popular piety, the philosophers were moved to
quarrel when they too began to examine the cosmos and to meditate upon
the agency of the gods. Then it was that “theology," in the predestined
sense of that ominous word, cast its first deep shadow across the life of
man. In answer to poetic travesties of the divine nature, Plato lightly
sketches his "outlines of theology," with their innocent appearance and
their promise of unending dispute. Aristotle in his turn, for all his
reticence on the subject of the gods, gives “theology” as an alternative
name for the “first philosophy,” which posterity was to know as “meta-
physics. ” Whatever name be preferred, the momentous fact is that
monotheism, as an intellectual and moral doctrine, arose in philosophical
circles beyond the range of civic religion, and without reference to the
authority of the State.
## p. 781 (#827) ############################################
Character of Ancient Philosophy
781
The original stamp of philosophy was preserved with some difficulty
in the respectable circumstances of the Academy and the Lyceum. The
danger now was that a brotherhood of seekers after truth would degenerate
into a school of dialecticians. Philosophy languishes sadly as the trade
of professors and the sport of impertinent boys. From this fate it was
partly delivered in Greece by the march of political events. When the
career of Alexander put an end to the reality of the city-state, without
providing a substitute, less attraction was found henceforward in the
political life and more, therefore, in the theoretic. At the same time,
philosophy began to be Hellenistic rather than Hellenic. Zeno of Citium
was a portent of many things, and the tenets of Stoicism, though they
rang a little hollow at times, sounded further abroad than the voice of
the town-crier in Aristotle's diminutive metropolis. Philosophy grew
daily more like a religion, a refuge for the disconsolate and a guide for
the perplexed. Now when there is one religion derived from a philoso-
phical valuation of life, and another bound up with the State but unsup-
ported by theology, we have before us all the elements of a revolution
which sooner or later will overturn the world. What delayed the catas-
trophe in the ancient world was the scorn of philosophers for the vulgar
and the indifference of the State to theological speculation. It remains
to consider briefly the causes which brought this mutual disregard to an
end.
The single object of this hasty glance at the ancient world being to
secure the right line of approach to the medieval period, the story of
philosophy at Rome must be passed over, until the age when the old Latin
elements of culture are well nigh lost in a medley of Greek and Oriental
ideas. Never, perhaps, would the fortunes of philosophy have been united
with those of the imperial city but for the advent of Plotinus in the third
century and the eventual adoption of Neo-Platonism as the forlorn hope
of pagan civilisation against the onset of the Christian Church. The
story of the Church in its early generations has been related many times
and with many objects. Seldom has it been presented in one of its most
genuine aspects, as a struggle with rival philosophies at a time when the
call to a spiritual life was audible to all serious men. When the Christian
society escaped from the circle of Judaism and began to grasp the full
nature of its mission, there existed only two forces sufficiently universal
to compete with it for mastery of the world, Greek philosophy and Roman
Law. The Pagan cults cannot rank as a third and equal competitor.
Neither singly nor collectively did they embody an idea capable of welding
mankind into social coherence. The imperium, on the other hand, the
whole majestic apparatus of law and sovereignty, was a visible bond of
union, and behind it lay, to all appearance, irresistible force. Yet in the
end it was to prove easier for a Christian to mount the throne of the
Caesars than for the new doctrine of the Logos to prevail against its
philosophical rivals. The last and greatest victory of the Church was over
CH. XXIII.
## p. 782 (#828) ############################################
782
Philosophy and Theology
Neo-Platonism, when the spoils of the vanquished passed to the camp of
the victor, to be handed down as part of the armour of faith.
To set Christianity among the philosophies is not fanciful, so long as
we bear in mind that philosophy meant to the Greeks a way of life be-
longing to a particular society. When we read in the Acts of the Apostles
how Paul had once persecuted “this way,” or how the convert was taken
to be further instructed in “the way,” we hear a language long familiar
to Hellenes and easily intelligible to educated Romans. Where the Chris-
tian way differed patently from the others was in making its first appeal
to the simple and in its frank abhorrence of popular religion. For these
reasons it figures in Roman authors as a kind of odium humani generis
long before it was counted worthy of intellectual opposition. But by the
age of Plotinus and Porphyry that phase was concluded. Christianity
had now taken its place as one of the proffered ways of salvation, just as
Gnosticism of a kind was a second, and Neo-Platonism a third. In the school
of Plotinus we see the climax of the tendency to theologise philosophy,
and thus to fashion an exalted religion far removed from the superstitions
of the vulgar. To this conclusion ancient philosophy had grown steadily
nearer, and this was its final legacy to the Church. No greater fiction,
then, can well be alleged as history than the assertion that the Middle
Ages corrupted the nature of philosophy by confusing it with theological
doctrine. On the contrary, the attempted distinction between theology
and philosophy was a characteristic medieval invention. For not until
the last days of Paganism did the occasion for such discrimination
arise.
For philosophy, as for political history, the arresting figure of Julian
is full of significance. Sagacious enough to learn from the Church the
secret of victory, he sought to create a bond between the religion of the
many and the lofty speculations of the few. He failed because Neo-
Platonism, however refined as theology, possessed no means of trans-
lating itself into a rule for the humble. Its solitary implement, already
dull and rusty, was the allegorising of fable and myth. But the multitude,
as Plato had foreseen, could not be saved by hidden meanings. When we
read the last book of the last Ennead, we understand how the new faith
may have failed to touch Plotinus; but when we set the unvarnished
story of the Gospel side by side with any Pagan allegory, the contrast is
almost painfully absurd. Nevertheless, we may learn from the story of
Julian that, as Pagan philosophy had grown ever more theological, so the
Pagan State, under a Neo-Platonist Emperor, might almost have assumed
the character of an authoritative Church. To look at the same facts from
the Christian point of view, we see how the Church, by her double victory
over the imperium of Rome and the philosophy of Greece, committed
herself to the two great enterprises of the Middle Ages, the search for a
distinction between philosophy and theology, and the search for a way of
reconciling the temporal with the spiritual power. As soon as those two
## p. 783 (#829) ############################################
The medieval problems. The Latin world
783
problems are in being, we may know, in fact, that the Middle Ages have
begun. To the Middle Ages, also, it fell to discover, through much toil
and tribulation, that fundamentally the two problems are one.
For the student of philosophy the result of the successive blows which
shattered the Roman Empire is almost wholly comprised in the division
of civilisation into eastern and western halves. A prophet in the age of
Marcus Aurelius, or even of Trajan, might well have foretold a time when
Hellenism would have completely submerged the Latin elements of culture
carried westward by victorious generals as far as the British Isles. Whether
such a prophecy would ever have been fulfilled it is idle to speculate. The
fact remains that it was not. For the various reasons narrated by historians
there came the great reaction, when the tide of Hellenism rolled back
eastwards, bearing with it the treasures of culture as well as the imperial
throne. Even the greatest of Roman products, jurisprudence, appeared
to forsake its proper home; and while the great codification was being
accomplished at Byzantium, Roman Law in the West was becoming an
adjunct of persons rather than the voice of an independent and sovereign
society. In this cleavage of East and West there was nevertheless, a kind
of historical justice. For between the Greek and the Latin there was, and
is, a deep and abiding antagonism. The enthusiasm of Roman authors
for Hellenic models disguised that truth for antiquity, as the ambiguity
of the term “classical” has often obscured it for ourselves. Yet the fact
persisted, and one clear function of the Middle Ages was to make a new
revelation of latinitas, barely possible until the superior light of Hellas
was at least partially eclipsed. The contrast, perpetually recurring in
medieval authors, between Graeci and Latini does not rest upon differences
of nationality or race. The true line of demarcation was always the
grammatical or literary language. The Latini were simply the miscel-
laneous assemblage of peoples who used Latin as their vehicle of literary
expression; a similar interpretation must be given to Graeci; and for the
same reason, when we arrive in due course at the philosophers of Islām,
the single and sufficient excuse for calling them “Arabs” will be that their
works were composed in the Arabic tongue. These divisions must not,
however, be interpreted too narrowly. They stood less for the interruption
of colloquial intercourse than for wide intellectual schisms and radical
diversities of mind. Nothing proves this better than a scrutiny of the
several occasions, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, when some
Greek author was newly translated into Latin. We then learn that the
famous Graccia capta ferum. . . , however true in antiquity, became conspicu-
ously false in the medieval centuries. The truth was rather that each
translated Greek became in his turn the captive of latinitas. He entered
a world where the very terminology was steeped in Latin associations, and
where there flourished a spirit of auctoritas as alien from the traditions
of Hellas as the Summa of Aquinas from the dialogues of Plato. To mark
the stages in medieval philosophy as a series of Greek invasions is not
CH. XXIII.
## p. 784 (#830) ############################################
784
The Carolingian Renaissance. John the Scot
unscientific; but we have always to add that the result was rather to
enlarge a Latin structure than to remodel it on pure Hellenic lines.
After two or three of the darkest centuries in European history the
Carolingian renaissance offers a glimmer of daylight. With Charles the
Great we see Europe awaking to the consciousness of ignorance and to
the need of regaining touch with the past. When Alcuin (ob. 804) was
summoned from England to reform the methods of school instruction,
he revived the old curriculum of the seven liberal arts, the famous Trivium
and Quadrivium, and thus incidentally renewed the study of dialectic, the
most durable element in European education. By his own writings, and
still more by his pupils, his educational influence was spread widely abroad.
An attempt has been made to claim more for him. He has been hailed
as the father of Scholasticism (most ambiguous of titles), or at least as
the progenitor of philosophy in France. It is more than doubtful, how-
ever, if the claim can be upheld. The circle of Charles the Great caught
eagerly at the threads of tradition and found novelty enough in ideas far
from original. Philosophia itself was a name that stood for the general
culture of the liberal arts, or sometimes for dialectic in particular, rather than
for the apprehension of grave intellectual problems. In spite, therefore,
of the noble work of Alcuin, and in spite of the encyclopedic learning of
his pupil Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mayence, and, as he has well
been styled, primus praeceptor Germaniae, it is not unfair to judge that
no figure of high import for philosophy emerges before the astonishing
Johannes Scottus Eriugena, court-philosopher and even, if tales be true,
court-jester to Charles the Bald.
The entrance and exit of this mysterious Irishman are swift and his-
trionic. Appearing suddenly from one wing, he remains on the stage of
France just long enough to derange the plot and bewilder the actors,
before he vanishes on the other side and is lost in “confused noise without. "
Long afterwards we learn from William of Malmesbury that the noise
was caused by his English scholars, who were busy murdering their master
with the points of their pens. Doubtless they took the hint from
John's own observation: stilus ferreus alia parte qua scribamus, alia qua
deleamus a fabro factus est? . Uncertainty about his origin and end is,
however, of small consequence. His works are with us, and the occasion
of his first and last appearance in the ecclesiastical drama is notorious.
Gottschalk, a man of noble birth and a reluctant follower of St Benedict,
had extracted from the study of St Augustine a doctrine of “double pre-
destination,” which ensured the damnation of the wicked no less firmly
than the salvation of the good. Whatever the logical difficulty of evading
that conclusion, the moral danger of fatalism was so plainly threatened
by it that Hincmar, the powerful and restless Archbishop of Rheims
(ob. 882), was roused to vigorous action. The unhappy monk was indicted,
condemned, imprisoned, and finally harried into his grave. But Gottschalk
1 MPL, CxxII, 422.
## p. 785 (#831) ############################################
John the Scot and Greek Philosophy
785
or his opinions, did not lack supporters. Assailed from many sides by
weighty rebukes, Hincmar judged it expedient to add reason to force, and
in a rash moment entrusted to John the Scot the task of demolishing
Gottschalk's position. The result was (in the year 851) the treatise on
Predestination, which defeated not only Gottschalk but Hincmar and all
parties concerned.
The knowledge of Greek, now a rare accomplishment, which John
brought with him from Ireland, stood for more than linguistic proficiency.
His philosophy is a genuine derivation from Greek sources, Pagan and
Christian, and must be interpreted rather by the ideas of the fifth century
than by later developments of medieval thought. In the De Praedestina
tione, it is true, he affects to rely solely on Latin authors; whence it has
been doubtfully inferred that he had not yet acknowledged the sway of
the Pseudo-Dionysius. A more likely explanation is found in the contro-
versial character of the work. John's business was to turn against Gott-
schalk the authorities, especially Augustine, to whom he had appealed.
With an ingenuity almost too subtle he carries out this programme, yet
only on the surface. The force and substance of his argument belong to
Neo-Platonism. Either, therefore, he was already familiar with the
Areopagite, or he must in some other way have mastered a body of
doctrine akin to the philosophy of Proclus. In any case, the refutation
of Gottschalk depends entirely on an account of the Divine Nature
developed by Plotinus and his school out of elements originally supplied
by Plato. The essence of God, His will, and His intellect, are one pure
and indivisible substance identical with goodness. From his eternal per-
fection no effects but what are good can proceed. If the will of the
Creator is the necessity of the creature, yet that will is the pure expression
of liberty, and man's necessity is but the appetite for goodness, in which
human liberty essentially consists. How, then, shall we distinguish the
good from the bad? And how leave room for the freedom of decision
upon which moral responsibility depends? John firmly maintains the
reality of liberum arbitrium, and denies that God compels any man to be
either good or bad; but the critical question evidently is whether the
existence of evil in any real sense can be allowed. Boldly and variously
as John wrestles with his problem, he never wavers in his belief that evil
is pure negation.
Bishop Himerius of Tarragona that “Whoever vows himself to the service
of the Church from his infancy (i. e. seven years old) ought to be baptized
. . . and joined to the ministry of the lectors. ”. Certain Statuta Antiqua!
mentioned these child lectors, who read in church, and laid down interesting
rules for the regulation of the bishop's familia of clerks, “widows," and
pilgrims. Pope Zosimus wrote (c. 418) to Esychius of these lectors: “If he
shall have given his name from infancy to ecclesiastical ministries, let him
remain until his twentieth year with continual observance among the
lectors. ” Leo I wrote to the African bishops about the choice of suitable
candidates for the priesthood: “The venerable sanctions of the holy
1 Used by Caesarius of Arles, see Hefele, 11, i, 104.
## p. 769 (#815) ############################################
Episcopal schools
769
fathers justly adjudged those to be suitable for sacred functions whose
whole life, from childhood to more advanced (provectior) age, has been
passed by means of the stipends of ecclesiastical discipline. ” A stipend,
an allowance sufficient to support life, could hardly have been made to
children otherwise than by maintenance in the bishop's familia: and this
is actually stated by the Council of Toledo in 531.
The first conciliar decree expressly dealing with familial schools
came from sixth century Gaul, where the rhetoric schools had just perished.
The Council of Vaison in 529 enacted that “all priests (presbyteri) who
are appointed to parochiae shall, according to the custom which we have
learned is wisely observed throughout all Italy, receive to live with
them, in their house where they themselves dwell, young lectors (as many
as have taken no wife); and, spiritually nourishing them like good fathers,
they shall strive to prepare psalms, to persist in readings of Scripture
(divinae lectiones), and in teaching the law of the Lord; so that they may
provide for themselves worthy successors, and receive from the Lord the
reward of eternal life. But when they shall come to full age, if any of
them through the frailty of the flesh wishes to marry, he shall not be denied
power to marry. ” The school of a “mater ecclesia” in a “rural diocese”
is clearly here indicated; no chaplain of a rural “oratorium” could have
nourished an indefinite number of young lectors. The cost of the main-
tenance and education of these ordinands is clearly the cause of the
frequent enactments that no bishop should ordain the scholar of another.
The Council of Toledo in 531 said expressly that it was unfair to the
bishop who had taken the child “from rustic and mean surroundings. ”
that he should later, "when imbued with such an education,” transfer
himself to another church. This council also echoed the decree of Vaison,
applying it to bishops' schools: “Of those whom the will of their parents
sets free from the years of their first infancy for the clerical office, we
decree that immediately they have received the tonsure they shall be
handed over to the ministry of the lectors; they ought to be taught in
1 This decree has sometimes been taken to refer to “parish schools” in the
modern sense, though this “parochia” actually corresponded far more to a modern
archdeaconry or rural deanery than to a modern parish: the bishop had usually no
more than two or three in his “rus” or “territorium. ” “Parochia,” till post-
Carolingian times, meant the sphere of a “mater ecclesia,” metropolitan, epis-
copal, or collegiate. There were besides priests and clerks serving chapels or oratories,
but these had no "parochia”; the Rule of Chrodegang of Metz, as revised by the
Council of Aix-la-Chapelle in 817, enacted that both the laity and priests who
served such oratories were to attend Sunday mass in the mater ecclesia. The spheres
of such rural, presbyteral-collegiate, churches as existed in Gaul between c. 450 and
c. 600 are referred to as “ dioceses,” and rarely, as at this council of Vaison, as
“ parochiae. ” While these rural dioceses, or rural parishes, were few, and served
by a comparatively large familia, councils provided that the presbyter in charge
should nourish lectors like a bishop; but when they became more numerous, smaller,
and poorer, the requirement was dropped as impossible: the maintenance of a single
clerk only was required from the ninth century.
49
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. XXII.
## p. 770 (#816) ############################################
770
The Dark Ages
the house of the church, in the bishop's presence, by his deputy. But,
when they shall have completed their eighteenth year, their wishes con-
cerning the taking of a wife ought to be scrutinised by the bishop in the
presence of clerks and laity. ” It was doubtless to this formal choice of
the young lectors trained in the familia of Augustine at Christ Church,
Canterbury, that Gregory the Great looked forward, when he advised
Augustine to live the apostolic (communal) life with his clergy, allowing
such lectors as wished at this stage to marry to do so, and to receive their
stipends (maintenance) outside the community, while attending its offices.
The training of the Canterbury (and Rochester) child lectors by “masters
and pedagogues” is independently attested. Gregory the Great himself
founded a “schola cantorum” at Rome of a similar nature: he built, that
is, two new houses for the school in the papal household which had
already existed. The functions of “lectors" and "cantors” run into one
another in medieval documents; the cantor or psalmista was not neces-
sarily episcopally “blessed,” the cantorate not being one of the seven
orders in the Western Church, although it was in the Eastern. In St
Ambrose's church at Milan (and in other instances), we find that it was
the lectors who did the singing (“Lectores ecclesiae pondus portantes,
docti cantu, lectioni. . . ").
In these episcopal schools the teaching depended on the learning of the
bishop, or after the seventh century his deputy, the magister scholarum,
scholasticus, or capischola. Latin and the computus were taught as
necessary for ecclesiastical equipment, but the seven liberal arts were not
usually so taught before the Carolingian renaissance. Paganism was still
too real a danger in Italy for ecclesiastics, even those who like Gregory
the Great had been taught in rhetoric schools themselves, to wish that
classical learning should be sought for its own sake by clerks; hence
Ireland, where Roman paganism had never been a danger, became for a
time the nursery of classical scholarship. The Irish schools, however, were
rather monastic than episcopal. The teaching of Hadrian and Theodore
at Canterbury included the liberal arts and the study of Roman Law;
but this far surpassed the teaching given in an average episcopal household
between 529 and 800. Grammar masters were hard to obtain, as is shewn
by the story told of Bishop Aitherius of Lisieux by Gregory of Tours.
Aitherius rescued from prison, he says, a clerk, from the city of Sens, of
extremely bad character. But the clerk “professed himself to be a doctor
of letters, and promised the priest that, if he would commend the children
to him, he would make them perfect in letters. ” Aitherius already had
a “praeceptor,” presumably for his household lectors, but he at once
“rejoiced, and collected the children of the city, and commended them to
him to teach. ” The clerk was presented with a vineyard by way of
salary, and invited to the homes of the boys he taught. He tried to
seduce one of the mothers, and complaints were made; but the bishop
could not believe evil of a man so learned, and dismissed them. The
## p. 771 (#817) ############################################
Early Frankish schools
771
wicked clerk then tried to induce the archdeacon to conspire to murder
the bishop, and, failing, crept after the bishop, who was walking in a
wood, with an axe. The bishop, however, turned and saw him; whereat he
explained that the archdeacon had hired him to murder his benefactor, but
that he had never intended to do the deed. The good bishop believed him,
wept, and made himn promise silence. Aitherius then returned to his house
for supper, and afterwards “he rested upon his couch, having around his
bed the many little beds of his clerks. ” The clerk approached in the
night and raised an alarm, saying that he had seen a woman coming
from the bishop; but the slander was apparent to all, for the bishop was
over seventy, and was sleeping surrounded by his clerks. Aitherius' eyes
were opened, and he got rid of him.
The lives of pre-Carolingian bishops and abbots refer frequently to
these household schools, and shew that pupils were also taken for training
by other priests; though in some cases the priest was probably, though it
is not directly stated, the scholasticus of a bishop. Thus St Lomer (ob. 590),
born of noble parents near Chartres, was confided by them to live with
a priest Chirmirus and be imbued with sacred letters. Chirmirus, who
was also the master of another Chartrain priest, Lancegesil, lived within
the city of Chartres, “Domino militans": a member, that is, of the
“clerical militia” or bishop's household, and probably his deputy in
training the young lectors. St Rigomer was thus “trained from infancy
by a certain religious priest"; many others, like Gregory of Tours, were
thus “nutriti" by some bishop. St Germain de Granval (ob. 667) was
delivered as an “infantulus” to Bishop Modoald of Tours; St Leger,
Bishop of Autun, was confided to the Bishop of Poitiers and was “strenue
enutritus. ” Acca was “nutritus atque eruditus” by Archbishop Bosa, the
predecessor of John of Beverley at York; Headda (ob. 790) left a bequest
to the cathedral of Worcester, “quia alumnus sum illius familiae, et iuxta
limites ecclesiae disciplinatus et nutritus fui. "
Even when, after the Frankish settlements in Gaul and during the
fighting of the early Merovingian kings, the practice of the communal
life of bishops with their households was relaxed, the familia still lived
normally near the cathedra, and in the society of the bishop. The Council
of Tours in 567 wrote: “Let the bishop have his wife as his sister, and
so let him govern all his house, both his ecclesiastical and his own house,
in holy conversation, that no suspicion. . . arise. And although by God's
help he shall live chastely by the testimony of his clerks, because they
dwell with him both in his cella and wherever he is, and thus the
priests and deacons, or at least the crowd of young clerks, keep him safe:
yet nevertheless, for zeal to God, let them be divided and sufficiently
distant from his mansio, that those who are being nourished in the hope
of being received into the clerical servitude be not polluted by the near
contagion of the women (famulae). ” When the reform of the Frankish
Church was in progress under the influence of Boniface, the chief instru-
CH. XXII.
4942
## p. 772 (#818) ############################################
772
Early monastic schools
ment of reform was the rule drawn up by Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz,
in 754, to ensure a return to communal life on the part of the bishop and
his familia. His own edition of the rule has no reference to the cathedral
school, though young clerks were no doubt in his day received for training.
Monastic schools before the Carolingian renaissance were internal
schools, and dealt almost solely with the training of oblate children, who
might be received from seven years old, or even younger, like the young
lectors in bishops' households. The children of princes and nobles
were received for training by abbots both Benedictine and Celtic, but
naturally not in large numbers; they would seem to have been received
rather as pages into the abbots' households than strictly into the monastic
school, though they were no doubt taught letters. In addition, where
missionary houses, Benedictine or Celtic, occupied the whole ground, two
other needs seem to have been met: that of teaching the outside peasantry
the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments by heart,
and that of training internally boys for the clerical militia. The latter
would only have been taught reading, writing, singing, and Latin. The
monastic schools were intended for monks, and the great monastic schools,
mainly post-Carolingian, were for adult monks; the practice of receiving
monks from other monasteries, sent to complete their studies, was common.
The greatest service to general education which the monks rendered was
that of supplying learned monks who, as bishops, were competent to teach
the young clerks of their household.
Educational activities which had been partial and sporadic before
Charlemagne became normal or compulsory through the renaissance he
inspired. The personal curiosity for learning, which made him attract
learned clerks to his court, had immediate effects on the palace school, and
on episcopal and monastic schools. He collected from Italy, at one time
and another, Peter of Pisa, Paul the Deacon, Leidrad, probably Theodulf
the Visigoth, and cantors from the Roman school, to teach the cathedral
schools of Metz and Soissons; from England and Ireland he obtained
Alcuin, the pupil of Aethelbert and the school of York, and some of his
English students, and later Clement the Scot. The court became an
“academia,” where Charles himself learned classics from Peter of Pisa and
the liberal arts from Alcuin—by way of question and answer. In this
scholarly circle, Frankish names were too dull; Charles became “king
David," Alcuin “Flaccus” (Horace), Theodulf “Pindar,” Angilbert
“ Homer," Arno of Salzburg“ Aquila,” Eppin the cup-bearer“Nehemiah,"
and Charles' daughters “Lucia” and “Columba. ”
The palace school, to be distinguished from this “academia” of cour-
tiers, had dated back to the days of St Leger (ob. 678), but not as a school
where the liberal arts were taught. It had consisted of the young clerks
under the archchaplain, and the sons of the nobility in training as pages
and squires; young children do not seem to have been received, for the
school was, like the court, ambulatory, and there are references to several
## p. 773 (#819) ############################################
Charlemagne's palace school
773
“adolescentuli” who attended it after receiving training elsewhere. It is
significant that Pepin the Short, by whom so many of the Carolingian
reforms were begun, was educated, not in the palace school, but in the
monastery of St Denis. In Charles' own time, when Peter of Pisa and
Alcuin taught the school, the majority of boys and youths who attended
it would seem to have been clerks, the future bishops and abbots of the
kingdom, and to these the old classical education of the liberal arts was
again afforded; but the point of great interest about the school is that
some young lay nobles, like Einhard the historian, also received similar
instruction, and this was a new departure. Bishop Wilfrid of York
had received young nobles to train either as clerks or squires, according
to their own wish when they were old enough to decide; but it was the
greatness and magnificence of his household, his “innumerus sodalium
exercitus," which procured his banishment. His successor, John of Beverley,
also had young laymen in his train when travelling, and apparently living
with him “in clero"; but if the tonsure was not yet given separately from
a minor order in England, they may have been probationers for such
orders. Certainly, the Carolingian palace school was the first to give
classical (as distinct from religious) teaching to lay boys in any number,
a feature in which it was copied by Alfred's palace school later. The
account of Charlemagne's visit to his scholars, after they had been left
behind for a time in Gaul under Clement the Scot, during one of his
campaigns, would seem to shew that even his scholars were mainly clerks;
for he rebuked the idle, and promised to the industrious “bishoprics and
abbeys"—not lay offices. The sort of instruction conferred on the lay
boys may have been of the nature of the “propositio” found in a manu-
script contemporary with Alcuin and headed "Ad acuendos iuvenes. ” A
certain man had a herd of 100 pigs, it begins; he wished to have them
slaughtered in equal numbers on three days; how many should he have
slaughtered each day? When time has been given for meditation, the
“magister" should say, “quasi increpando iuvenes,” “Now this is a fable
and it can be solved by nobody. "
From the accession of Charlemagne till c. 1170 episcopal schools were
the most important organ of education, and were frequent subjects of
legislation; after c. 1170 the universities, which grew out of them, replaced
them as centres of the teaching of the liberal arts; though they, with the
grammar schools of the diocese, continued to teach grammar and rhetoric
to schoolboys, and theology to the greater part of the diocesan clergy.
Monastic schools from about 800 to 1000 probably produced greater
scholars, but these were monks who gave their whole lives to scholarship.
From c. 1000 to c. 1170 the cathedral schools-Tours, Orleans, Utrecht,
Liège, Rheims, Chartres, Paris—eclipsed the monastic schools even in
the production of scholars ; during this period they were the international
centres of adult scholarship, as well as training-schools for the diocesan
clergy.
CH. XXII.
## p. 774 (#820) ############################################
774
Alcuin
Charlemagne's capitulary of 787, addressed to the Abbot of Fulda,
ordered that in all the monasteries and bishops' houses under his rule
there should be study, “ litterarum meditationes,” and “those who can
shall teach,” for grammar and rhetoric were indispensable for under-
standing the figures of scripture. In 789 he issued another more precise :
“Let the ministers of God's altar. . . collect and associate with themselves
(i. e. maintain in their houses) children, not only of servile condition but
also free-born (ingenui). ” Some bishops are known to have redeemed
slaves for this purpose. “ And that there may be schools of reading-boys
(i. e. lectors), let them learn psalms, notes, chants, the computus, and
grammar in each monastery and bishop's house. ” In these internal
schools bishops were to train young clerks, and abbots were to train
monks. The capitulary of 805 referred to such schools and ordered that
all should learn truly about the computus, that children should be sent
to learn the art of medicine (presumably, boarded in some school in
South Italy), and that the Roman chant, as used at Metz, should be
followed. Alcuin, exhausted with the perambulations of the court, retired
in 796 to teach the liberal arts to the canons of the cathedral monastery
of St Martin of Tours, and to such scholars as resorted to him?
He wrote in that year to Eanbald of York about the conduct of his
familia, advising that his clerks should be separated according to their
occupation, reading, the chant, or writing, and that a master should be
provided for each“ order. ” Possibly the scholastic classes coincided with
the reception of some minor order, as a comparison with the clerks of
Milanº suggests; or perhaps the use of the word is merely accidental.
Alcuin wrote to Arno, later Archbishop of Salzburg, in 799, advising
that he and his suffragans should have scholars, and make them diligently
learn psalms and church melodies, that the daily course of the praises of
God might be performed in each (mother) church ; and to another bishop
in Germany, advising him to hasten home and set in order the boys'
lessons: who should learn grammar, who read epistles and small books,
and who Holy Scripture.
Bishop Theodulf of Orleans carried the provision for education within
his diocese a stage further. “If any priest wishes to send his nephew or
his relation to school in the cathedral) church of Ste Croix, or in the
monastery of St Aignan, or St Benoît, or St Liphard, or in other of the
monastic comm, unities which it is granted us to govern: we give him
leave to do this. " The concession is here financial : the cathedral school
shall receive their relations for nothing (and board them, probably); and
the bishop will see that abbots also receive, board, and teach them for
1 Cf. for an apparent reference to the reception and boarding of such scholars
“quantum possibilitas sinit” in the monastery of Murbach, Pez, B. , Thesaurus
anecdotorum novissimus, Augsburg, 1721, tom. II, pt. iii, col. 378.
2 For an account of the Milanese episcopal household and schools, see Landulf
Junior, Historia Mediolanensis, in MGH, Script. vii, p. 40; pp. 70–71.
## p. 775 (#821) ############################################
Theodulf of Orleans
775
nothing, as oblates, or possibly as candidates for the secular clergy also.
The next canon probably refers to the teaching of day scholars : “ Let
priests in towns and villages have schools, and if any of the faithful
wishes to commend his little ones to them to learn letters, they ought to
receive them . . . and teach them with the greatest affection. . . . They shall
demand nothing in this matter by way of price, nor shall they receive
anything from them, except what the parents. . . shall bestow upon them
voluntarily. ". This canon shews the high-water mark of Carolingian
advance, and shews the ideal of one of the greatest scholars of Charles?
court--of one also acquainted with conditions in Italy, where grammar
masters were fairly plentiful. The whole set of canons are rather counsels
of perfection than ecclesiastical laws; the laity were equally canonically
bound to say their prayers at least twice a day, and priests to confess
their sins with groans and tears, reciting the fifty-first psalm, once or
twice a day, or as much oftener as possible. Theodulf was at one time
Abbot of St Benoît (Fleury), and energetic in the reform movement
connected with St Benedict of Aniane, and hence his capitulary was read
and copied by monastic reformers. Dunstan and the English reformers
were closely in touch with Fleury, and this probably explains the presence
of different parts of the capitulary in two English manuscripts, both in
Latin with English translations. The part of the capitulary dealing with
schools occurs in a manuscript following some “statuta” collected by
Abbot Aelfric of Eynsham; but there is no evidence that it was ever
“lecta et publicata” in any English synod, or even that the translator
was Aelfric. Another copy in a monastery at Ghent attributed it
explicitly, but certainly wrongly, to the Council of Constantinople, 680,
causing confusion to later writers. The canon about schools is not drawn
from any Eastern council, but was Theodulf's own work.
Charlemagne’s capitularies were not universally obeyed. In 813 the
Council of Chalon reiterated that schools must be set up; and in 817
the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle dealt with both monastic and cathedral
schools. In monasteries there were to be schools only of oblates; a few,
like Fulda and St Gall, continued for a time to have "scholae exteriores
seu canonicae” for training secular clerks. Chrodegang's rule, revised
and enlarged by some chapters, was to be observed, as the “regula
Aquisgranensis,” by all the cathedrals of the Empire. A chapter of the
rule regulated the provisions for the cathedral school. As earlier, it was
to be an internal school, in which the young clerks were maintained by
the chapter; the boys slept and worked together, in charge of an aged
and discreet canon, though they might have a younger one to teach them.
The rule was influential in reforms carried out by Dunstan in England,
1 The teaching may have been intended to include Latin: it was certainly
different from the learning by heart of the Creed and Lord's Prayer, in Latin or
German, by the newly-converted Saxons, as ordered by the Council of Mayence.
(Mansi, xiv, col. 74, cap. xlv. )
CH. XXII.
## p. 776 (#822) ############################################
776
Post-Carolingian episcopal schools
and was forinally adopted by Leofric of Exeter c. 1050. The chapter
describing the school must be taken as descriptive of the normal cathedral
school in the Carolingian Empire from this time forward, apart from
evidence to the contrary in particular cases, and till the communal life
of chapters lapsed. Alcuin's teaching at Tours made the school so famous
that conditions were perhaps abnormal there in his day. External scholars,
boarding in the town, may have been taught by him ; certainly in 843
Amalric, canon and scholasticus, left a bequest to the future preceptors
in the school, to prevent the abominable custom, which had sprung up
in his predecessors' day, of taking a price for instruction, “as from any
other worldly business. ” Whether the endowment was to recompense
the preceptors for renouncing the fees of external scholars, or to enable
them to board these scholars gratis in their house, is not clear. There
was certainly an internal and an external school at Rheims later; and,
from about 900 onwards, the general practice of the cathedrals seems to
have been for the chapter to maintain a number of “clericuli," while
others were taken into the school as a private bargain with their relatives,
and yet others were boarded by individual canons, who made a special
bargain with relatives for “introducing them into the clerical order. ”
Generally speaking, and theoretically, no fees, or very small fees, were
charged for teaching only in the cathedral grammar or theology school,
the masters being maintained by the chapter; but unless they had a
prebend the maintenance was sometimes insufficient, and practice varied.
The ninth century brought difficulties to the schools. Louis the
Pious, in 822, desired that schools should be amended : the parents or
lords of scholars (no longer, significantly, the bishop) must help to provide
for them ; if the diocese (parochia) were very large, two or three places of
study must be founded. The Council of Paris, in 824, ordered each bishop
to shew more zeal to have a school to educate the militia of Christ; to
encourage this, let each bishop bring his scholasticus to the provincial
council. In 824 Lothar, as co-regent with his father, ordered that, since
instruction was lacking in Italy, schools of “ doctrina” should be main-
tained in certain towns, which he specified. In 826 Pope Eugenius II
enacted that, since in some places there were neither masters nor care for
the study of letters, each bishopric, and other places where there was
need, should have masters and doctors to teach letters and the “dogmas
of the liberal arts. " The Council of Paris, in 829, repeated the provisions
of 822, and the bishops petitioned the Emperor Louis that, lest his
father's work should be lost, three “public schools” should be set up in
his Empire; which three schools of Charlemagne they referred to is not
clear, though a subsequent canon shews that they were including Italy
in the Empire. The Council of Meaux, in 845, declared all the capitularies
of Charles and Louis the Pious to be still in force, and ordered all bishops
to build a cloister near their church for the regular training of their
clerks (as Eugenius II had also ordered in 826). In 852 Archbishop
## p. 777 (#823) ############################################
Their difficulties
777
Hincmar of Rheims enjoined in a synod that answers should be made to
certain questions, to be propounded by the magister and the dean “in
each mother-church, and in each chapel of our parochia (archbishopric)" ;
among others: “Had the priest a clerk who could keep school, or read
the epistle and sing, according as was necessary”—the one, probably, in
a mother-church (ecclesia), the other in a chapel (capella).
This provision
was perhaps due to a clause in the bomilies of the contemporary Pope
Leo IV that “each priest should have a scholar clerk, who could read
the epistle or lesson and respond at mass, and with whom he could sing
psalms. ” The same Pope, in 853, practically repealed Eugenius' canon
about the schools of liberal arts, by acknowledging that grammar masters
were scarce, and ordering that, in lack of them, masters of divine scriptures
and teachers of the office should be provided.
The ravages of the Northmen and internecine wars had half consumed
learning by the mid-century, and the Council of Valence, summoned in
855 for the provinces of Lyons, Vienne, and Arles, could only order that
“ something should be discussed, and if possible decreed and ordained,
about schools both of divine and secular literature and church chant,
since, from the long intermission of this study, ignorance of the faith
and of all knowledge has overtaken many bishoprics. ” Archbishop Herard
of Tours, in 858, ordered that “priests should have schools as much as
they can, and corrected books”; and Bishop Walter of Orleans in the
same year interpreted this by enacting that “every priest must have
a clerk, whom he must have religiously educated ; and, if it is possible
for him, he must have a school in his church, and wisely take heed that
those whom he receives to teach he may chastely and sincerely nourish. "
This seems an interesting attempt to extend the system of training
lectors from episcopal and collegiate churches to those of single priests;
each priest must train or have trained (procuret educare) one clerk (the
ancestor, of course, of the later parish clerk), and, if it be possible, let
him nourish more. In 859 the Council of Savonnières urged that “scholae
publicae” (apparently implying, at the date, royally-endowed schools)
should be set up, so that fruit both of divine and human learning might
accrue to the Church.
After these enactments, however, the schools gradually recovered and
became flourishing; the records of individual cathedrals indicate greater
prosperity and scholarship. Bishop Ratherius of Verona in 966 decreed
that he would in future promote no ordinands who had not lived in his
own city, or in some monastery, or “ apud quemlibet sapientem," and to
some extent learned letters. The clause about private teaching is char-
acteristic of Italian conditions ; north of the Alps ordinands would have
attached themselves to some cathedral school (unless ordained without
preparation in deference to the wish of some layman). Gregory VII in
1078 ordered that “all bishops were to have the arts of letters taught
1 The Old Testament passage sometimes read in place of the Epistle.
CH. XXII.
## p. 778 (#824) ############################################
778
Chartres
in their churches," i. e. not merely “divine learning” but secular. The
growth of the schools is marked by increase of masters. Fulbert (ob. 1028),
the scholar-Bishop of Chartres, who raised the schools to the pitch of
fame, gave Hildegaire both the birch of the grammaticus and the tablets
of the chancellor as symbols of authority ; in addition, Hildegaire held
the position of sub-dean. Fluctuations still occurred at Chartres between
the work and functions of the chancellor, vice-chancellor, and gram-
maticus ; but by c. 1150 the chancellor as such had a prebend, taught
only theology, and had under him a scholasticus now usually termed the
“magister scholarum. ” The latter had no prebend as such, but was some-
times a canon ; in any case, he received the usual distributions of food
and
money for attendance at offices. Development at other cathedrals
was roughly parallel, the magister scholarum of the earlier centuries
becoming the chancellor in the twelfth century, and teaching only
theology, with a grammar master under him. In all dioceses other
granımar schools were now fairly frequent, the right of teaching, however,
remaining a strict monopoly, guarded by the chancellor of the diocese.
After the rise of the universities (c. 1170), the best scholars were drawn
away from the cathedral schools as such, and the teaching of the liberal
arts in these dwindled to the teaching of grammar and rhetoric.
The decline of diocesan teaching roused the anxiety of the Church.
In the lesser cathedrals there was difficulty even in obtaining a grammar
master, since no benefice was provided for him, and there was more
lucrative employment elsewhere. The Third Lateran Council, in 1179,
ordered that a competent benefice should be given in every cathedral to
a master, who should teach the clerks of the church and
poor
scholars
for nothing ; nor was the ecclesiastical authority to charge for the license
to teach, nor deny it to any suitable candidate. The Fourth Lateran
Council, in 1215, asserted that this provision had remained widely unful-
filled; it ordered each cathedral church, and other (collegiate) churches
which had the means, to provide a prebend for a grammar master, and
each metropolitan church one for a theology master. The provisions still
remained largely unfulfilled, the difficulty being to get the chapter to
give up a prebend for the purpose, especially as so many prebends were
anticipated by papal provision. The friars, however, set up in this
century their own hierarchy of schools, in some of which the presence of
seculars was allowed. St Thomas Aquinas wrote in 1257 that the decree
for the provision of a theology master in each metropolitan church had
not been observed “through lack of letters," but now it had been more
than fulfilled by the religious.
The monastic schools saw their two most flourishing centuries after
the Carolingian renaissance. The external schools about which most is
known were those of Fulda, St Gall, and Bec. Raban Maur of Fulda
was sent by his abbot to study under Alcuin at Tours, and was afterwards
given the direction of the monks' school at Fulda, with orders to preserve
## p. 779 (#825) ############################################
External monastic schools
779
Alcuin's method of teaching. He then ruled both schools (for oblates
and clerks) “with piety and doctrine,” and appointed two masters to
teach under him. The schools of St Gall were famous in the ninth
century, when Notker the Stammerer and other scholars were trained
there. « The cloister school with blessed Notker and other children of
the monastic habit was handed over to Marcellus, and the external school,
that is the canonical school, to Iso. " In 937 one of the scholars of this
school started a serious fire in the monastery, to save himself a beating.
The external school started at Bec by Lanfranc was somewhat of a new
departure; it was not maintained to fill the place of a non-existent
canonical, or cathedral, school, but to aid the poverty of the newly-
founded house with fees; it was, in fact, a continuation of Lanfranc's
work as a private rhetoric teacher in Italy. On the other hand, when
St William of Dijon (ob. 1031) was called by Duke Richard to Normandy
to introduce the Cluniac reforms, he substituted monks for clerks in the
abbey of Fécamps, and started an external school there of the old,
canonical type. “For when he saw that knowledge of singing and reading
among the rural clerks was. . . almost perished, not only in that place but
throughout the whole province,. . . he founded a school of the sacred
ministry where the brothers skilled in this office taught freely, for the
love of God. ”
The teaching of laymen in this period has been passed over, for there
were no schools for laymen as such, even the little A. B. C. schools being
mainly intended to teach “song” to little clerks. The sons of the nobility
were more frequently taught reading, writing, and such Latin as they
were considered to need, by their father's chaplain, or the chaplain of
the lay noble, bishop, or abbot to whom they were sent for “nurture. "
Learned laywomen were similarly taught, though the nunneries, being
poorer than the men's houses, more often received little “prebendinants”
(boarders), boys as well as girls, for education. But as a rule the teaching
of laymen and laywomen before 1300 was individual 1.
1 No description of grammar schools, other than those attached to cathedral or
collegiate churches, has been here attempted, for reasons of space. Between the
rise of the universities, c. 1170, when grammar masters became more plentiful, and
the end of the thirteenth century, such schools existed, and even in some numbers;
but they were the same in character and method as they were in the next two
centuries, when they became still more numerous. A full description of such
grammar schools will be given in Vol. viii.
OH. XXII.
## p. 780 (#826) ############################################
780
CHAPTER XXIII.
PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
Not even the briefest sketch of medieval philosophy can dispense with
a preface. Superfluous as it may seem to enquire what is meant by the
“Middle Ages,” and again by “philosophy,” neglect of these elementary
questions has often led to misunderstanding of those still shadowy centuries
which lie between antiquity and ourselves. Precisely when and why the
Middle Ages were first so designated it might be hard to decide. The
presumption of some affinity between the ancient and modern world is
tolerably clear, but when this vague resemblance is tried by a variety of
tests, the grounds for affirming it become more and more obscure. And
since our business here is only with philosophy, it may be well to assert
at once that the ancient status of philosophy has never been reproduced.
To the Greeks, from the days of the half-legendary Pythagoras, philosophy
meant the adoption of a considered way of life which was not the common
way of the world, and did not coincide with observance of the law. On
the one side were the authority of custom and the religion of the State;
on the other curiosity and criticism, the impulse to search for the hidden
meaning of things and to establish a link between knowledge and life.
The original freedom of Greek philosophy must indeed be largely attri-
buted to the inseparable alliance between the Pagan State and the Pagan
religion. For the official religion of the Greeks (as of the Romans) was
founded on no articulate theology and embodied in no visible Church.
The only theologians of early days were the poets. They at least gave
an account of the gods, in the form of scandalous stories; and with them,
therefore, rather than with popular piety, the philosophers were moved to
quarrel when they too began to examine the cosmos and to meditate upon
the agency of the gods. Then it was that “theology," in the predestined
sense of that ominous word, cast its first deep shadow across the life of
man. In answer to poetic travesties of the divine nature, Plato lightly
sketches his "outlines of theology," with their innocent appearance and
their promise of unending dispute. Aristotle in his turn, for all his
reticence on the subject of the gods, gives “theology” as an alternative
name for the “first philosophy,” which posterity was to know as “meta-
physics. ” Whatever name be preferred, the momentous fact is that
monotheism, as an intellectual and moral doctrine, arose in philosophical
circles beyond the range of civic religion, and without reference to the
authority of the State.
## p. 781 (#827) ############################################
Character of Ancient Philosophy
781
The original stamp of philosophy was preserved with some difficulty
in the respectable circumstances of the Academy and the Lyceum. The
danger now was that a brotherhood of seekers after truth would degenerate
into a school of dialecticians. Philosophy languishes sadly as the trade
of professors and the sport of impertinent boys. From this fate it was
partly delivered in Greece by the march of political events. When the
career of Alexander put an end to the reality of the city-state, without
providing a substitute, less attraction was found henceforward in the
political life and more, therefore, in the theoretic. At the same time,
philosophy began to be Hellenistic rather than Hellenic. Zeno of Citium
was a portent of many things, and the tenets of Stoicism, though they
rang a little hollow at times, sounded further abroad than the voice of
the town-crier in Aristotle's diminutive metropolis. Philosophy grew
daily more like a religion, a refuge for the disconsolate and a guide for
the perplexed. Now when there is one religion derived from a philoso-
phical valuation of life, and another bound up with the State but unsup-
ported by theology, we have before us all the elements of a revolution
which sooner or later will overturn the world. What delayed the catas-
trophe in the ancient world was the scorn of philosophers for the vulgar
and the indifference of the State to theological speculation. It remains
to consider briefly the causes which brought this mutual disregard to an
end.
The single object of this hasty glance at the ancient world being to
secure the right line of approach to the medieval period, the story of
philosophy at Rome must be passed over, until the age when the old Latin
elements of culture are well nigh lost in a medley of Greek and Oriental
ideas. Never, perhaps, would the fortunes of philosophy have been united
with those of the imperial city but for the advent of Plotinus in the third
century and the eventual adoption of Neo-Platonism as the forlorn hope
of pagan civilisation against the onset of the Christian Church. The
story of the Church in its early generations has been related many times
and with many objects. Seldom has it been presented in one of its most
genuine aspects, as a struggle with rival philosophies at a time when the
call to a spiritual life was audible to all serious men. When the Christian
society escaped from the circle of Judaism and began to grasp the full
nature of its mission, there existed only two forces sufficiently universal
to compete with it for mastery of the world, Greek philosophy and Roman
Law. The Pagan cults cannot rank as a third and equal competitor.
Neither singly nor collectively did they embody an idea capable of welding
mankind into social coherence. The imperium, on the other hand, the
whole majestic apparatus of law and sovereignty, was a visible bond of
union, and behind it lay, to all appearance, irresistible force. Yet in the
end it was to prove easier for a Christian to mount the throne of the
Caesars than for the new doctrine of the Logos to prevail against its
philosophical rivals. The last and greatest victory of the Church was over
CH. XXIII.
## p. 782 (#828) ############################################
782
Philosophy and Theology
Neo-Platonism, when the spoils of the vanquished passed to the camp of
the victor, to be handed down as part of the armour of faith.
To set Christianity among the philosophies is not fanciful, so long as
we bear in mind that philosophy meant to the Greeks a way of life be-
longing to a particular society. When we read in the Acts of the Apostles
how Paul had once persecuted “this way,” or how the convert was taken
to be further instructed in “the way,” we hear a language long familiar
to Hellenes and easily intelligible to educated Romans. Where the Chris-
tian way differed patently from the others was in making its first appeal
to the simple and in its frank abhorrence of popular religion. For these
reasons it figures in Roman authors as a kind of odium humani generis
long before it was counted worthy of intellectual opposition. But by the
age of Plotinus and Porphyry that phase was concluded. Christianity
had now taken its place as one of the proffered ways of salvation, just as
Gnosticism of a kind was a second, and Neo-Platonism a third. In the school
of Plotinus we see the climax of the tendency to theologise philosophy,
and thus to fashion an exalted religion far removed from the superstitions
of the vulgar. To this conclusion ancient philosophy had grown steadily
nearer, and this was its final legacy to the Church. No greater fiction,
then, can well be alleged as history than the assertion that the Middle
Ages corrupted the nature of philosophy by confusing it with theological
doctrine. On the contrary, the attempted distinction between theology
and philosophy was a characteristic medieval invention. For not until
the last days of Paganism did the occasion for such discrimination
arise.
For philosophy, as for political history, the arresting figure of Julian
is full of significance. Sagacious enough to learn from the Church the
secret of victory, he sought to create a bond between the religion of the
many and the lofty speculations of the few. He failed because Neo-
Platonism, however refined as theology, possessed no means of trans-
lating itself into a rule for the humble. Its solitary implement, already
dull and rusty, was the allegorising of fable and myth. But the multitude,
as Plato had foreseen, could not be saved by hidden meanings. When we
read the last book of the last Ennead, we understand how the new faith
may have failed to touch Plotinus; but when we set the unvarnished
story of the Gospel side by side with any Pagan allegory, the contrast is
almost painfully absurd. Nevertheless, we may learn from the story of
Julian that, as Pagan philosophy had grown ever more theological, so the
Pagan State, under a Neo-Platonist Emperor, might almost have assumed
the character of an authoritative Church. To look at the same facts from
the Christian point of view, we see how the Church, by her double victory
over the imperium of Rome and the philosophy of Greece, committed
herself to the two great enterprises of the Middle Ages, the search for a
distinction between philosophy and theology, and the search for a way of
reconciling the temporal with the spiritual power. As soon as those two
## p. 783 (#829) ############################################
The medieval problems. The Latin world
783
problems are in being, we may know, in fact, that the Middle Ages have
begun. To the Middle Ages, also, it fell to discover, through much toil
and tribulation, that fundamentally the two problems are one.
For the student of philosophy the result of the successive blows which
shattered the Roman Empire is almost wholly comprised in the division
of civilisation into eastern and western halves. A prophet in the age of
Marcus Aurelius, or even of Trajan, might well have foretold a time when
Hellenism would have completely submerged the Latin elements of culture
carried westward by victorious generals as far as the British Isles. Whether
such a prophecy would ever have been fulfilled it is idle to speculate. The
fact remains that it was not. For the various reasons narrated by historians
there came the great reaction, when the tide of Hellenism rolled back
eastwards, bearing with it the treasures of culture as well as the imperial
throne. Even the greatest of Roman products, jurisprudence, appeared
to forsake its proper home; and while the great codification was being
accomplished at Byzantium, Roman Law in the West was becoming an
adjunct of persons rather than the voice of an independent and sovereign
society. In this cleavage of East and West there was nevertheless, a kind
of historical justice. For between the Greek and the Latin there was, and
is, a deep and abiding antagonism. The enthusiasm of Roman authors
for Hellenic models disguised that truth for antiquity, as the ambiguity
of the term “classical” has often obscured it for ourselves. Yet the fact
persisted, and one clear function of the Middle Ages was to make a new
revelation of latinitas, barely possible until the superior light of Hellas
was at least partially eclipsed. The contrast, perpetually recurring in
medieval authors, between Graeci and Latini does not rest upon differences
of nationality or race. The true line of demarcation was always the
grammatical or literary language. The Latini were simply the miscel-
laneous assemblage of peoples who used Latin as their vehicle of literary
expression; a similar interpretation must be given to Graeci; and for the
same reason, when we arrive in due course at the philosophers of Islām,
the single and sufficient excuse for calling them “Arabs” will be that their
works were composed in the Arabic tongue. These divisions must not,
however, be interpreted too narrowly. They stood less for the interruption
of colloquial intercourse than for wide intellectual schisms and radical
diversities of mind. Nothing proves this better than a scrutiny of the
several occasions, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, when some
Greek author was newly translated into Latin. We then learn that the
famous Graccia capta ferum. . . , however true in antiquity, became conspicu-
ously false in the medieval centuries. The truth was rather that each
translated Greek became in his turn the captive of latinitas. He entered
a world where the very terminology was steeped in Latin associations, and
where there flourished a spirit of auctoritas as alien from the traditions
of Hellas as the Summa of Aquinas from the dialogues of Plato. To mark
the stages in medieval philosophy as a series of Greek invasions is not
CH. XXIII.
## p. 784 (#830) ############################################
784
The Carolingian Renaissance. John the Scot
unscientific; but we have always to add that the result was rather to
enlarge a Latin structure than to remodel it on pure Hellenic lines.
After two or three of the darkest centuries in European history the
Carolingian renaissance offers a glimmer of daylight. With Charles the
Great we see Europe awaking to the consciousness of ignorance and to
the need of regaining touch with the past. When Alcuin (ob. 804) was
summoned from England to reform the methods of school instruction,
he revived the old curriculum of the seven liberal arts, the famous Trivium
and Quadrivium, and thus incidentally renewed the study of dialectic, the
most durable element in European education. By his own writings, and
still more by his pupils, his educational influence was spread widely abroad.
An attempt has been made to claim more for him. He has been hailed
as the father of Scholasticism (most ambiguous of titles), or at least as
the progenitor of philosophy in France. It is more than doubtful, how-
ever, if the claim can be upheld. The circle of Charles the Great caught
eagerly at the threads of tradition and found novelty enough in ideas far
from original. Philosophia itself was a name that stood for the general
culture of the liberal arts, or sometimes for dialectic in particular, rather than
for the apprehension of grave intellectual problems. In spite, therefore,
of the noble work of Alcuin, and in spite of the encyclopedic learning of
his pupil Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mayence, and, as he has well
been styled, primus praeceptor Germaniae, it is not unfair to judge that
no figure of high import for philosophy emerges before the astonishing
Johannes Scottus Eriugena, court-philosopher and even, if tales be true,
court-jester to Charles the Bald.
The entrance and exit of this mysterious Irishman are swift and his-
trionic. Appearing suddenly from one wing, he remains on the stage of
France just long enough to derange the plot and bewilder the actors,
before he vanishes on the other side and is lost in “confused noise without. "
Long afterwards we learn from William of Malmesbury that the noise
was caused by his English scholars, who were busy murdering their master
with the points of their pens. Doubtless they took the hint from
John's own observation: stilus ferreus alia parte qua scribamus, alia qua
deleamus a fabro factus est? . Uncertainty about his origin and end is,
however, of small consequence. His works are with us, and the occasion
of his first and last appearance in the ecclesiastical drama is notorious.
Gottschalk, a man of noble birth and a reluctant follower of St Benedict,
had extracted from the study of St Augustine a doctrine of “double pre-
destination,” which ensured the damnation of the wicked no less firmly
than the salvation of the good. Whatever the logical difficulty of evading
that conclusion, the moral danger of fatalism was so plainly threatened
by it that Hincmar, the powerful and restless Archbishop of Rheims
(ob. 882), was roused to vigorous action. The unhappy monk was indicted,
condemned, imprisoned, and finally harried into his grave. But Gottschalk
1 MPL, CxxII, 422.
## p. 785 (#831) ############################################
John the Scot and Greek Philosophy
785
or his opinions, did not lack supporters. Assailed from many sides by
weighty rebukes, Hincmar judged it expedient to add reason to force, and
in a rash moment entrusted to John the Scot the task of demolishing
Gottschalk's position. The result was (in the year 851) the treatise on
Predestination, which defeated not only Gottschalk but Hincmar and all
parties concerned.
The knowledge of Greek, now a rare accomplishment, which John
brought with him from Ireland, stood for more than linguistic proficiency.
His philosophy is a genuine derivation from Greek sources, Pagan and
Christian, and must be interpreted rather by the ideas of the fifth century
than by later developments of medieval thought. In the De Praedestina
tione, it is true, he affects to rely solely on Latin authors; whence it has
been doubtfully inferred that he had not yet acknowledged the sway of
the Pseudo-Dionysius. A more likely explanation is found in the contro-
versial character of the work. John's business was to turn against Gott-
schalk the authorities, especially Augustine, to whom he had appealed.
With an ingenuity almost too subtle he carries out this programme, yet
only on the surface. The force and substance of his argument belong to
Neo-Platonism. Either, therefore, he was already familiar with the
Areopagite, or he must in some other way have mastered a body of
doctrine akin to the philosophy of Proclus. In any case, the refutation
of Gottschalk depends entirely on an account of the Divine Nature
developed by Plotinus and his school out of elements originally supplied
by Plato. The essence of God, His will, and His intellect, are one pure
and indivisible substance identical with goodness. From his eternal per-
fection no effects but what are good can proceed. If the will of the
Creator is the necessity of the creature, yet that will is the pure expression
of liberty, and man's necessity is but the appetite for goodness, in which
human liberty essentially consists. How, then, shall we distinguish the
good from the bad? And how leave room for the freedom of decision
upon which moral responsibility depends? John firmly maintains the
reality of liberum arbitrium, and denies that God compels any man to be
either good or bad; but the critical question evidently is whether the
existence of evil in any real sense can be allowed. Boldly and variously
as John wrestles with his problem, he never wavers in his belief that evil
is pure negation.
