Chapter XXIV The Council of Trent
When the conclave of October 13, 1534, announced the election of Cardinal Alexander Farnese as successor to Clement VII., few men probably anticipated what would be the character of the new pontificate. The antecedents of Paul III. appeared to link him with what may be called the Conservative party of the day. He had been a pupil of Pomponius Lætus, had been raised to the purple by Alexander VI., had grown up in the luxurious atmosphere of Leo’s Court, and in his early youth, before he embraced the ecclesiastical state, had not escaped the worldly infection which clung to the literary circles among which he mixed. Men of letters indeed might naturally look for encouragement from the friend of Sadolet, the correspondent of Erasmus, and the elegant commentator on Cicero, but few expected to find in him the uncompromising champion of ecclesiastical reform. Yet such he soon proved himself. One fault alone was charged to his administration, the promotion of relatives whose subsequent misconduct brought scandal on the Church, and anguish to his own heart. But in other respects his favour was bestowed on precisely those who were best qualified to forward the interests of religion. He filled the sacred college with men worthy of the purple; Pole, Fisher, Caraffa, Contarini, Sadolet, Aleander, and Cortese, were all cardinals of his nomination. In his love of art and poetry he was hardly inferior to Leo X., but the thoughts that occupied his soul as Supreme Head of the Church had a higher and nobler aim than even the encouragement of letters. To restore peace between France and the Empire, to keep back the onward progress of the Turks, and to call a General Council for the purpose of healing the wounds of the Church, these were the objects he set before him as the work of his pontificate, and he never rested till he had accomplished them. Until Charles and Francis had laid down their arms, however, the Council so loudly demanded by men of all opinions was a simple impossibility, and ten weary years had to pass before these Christian princes could be brought to terms. If for a moment they suspended hostilities, it was only to renew them with greater animosity than before, and to give the French king an opportunity of covering himself with infamy by calling to his help the Turkish hordes, and inviting them to overrun Italy. Whilst Europe was involved in these broils, it was plain there could be no Council; but at least there could be the initiatives of reform, and in 1537 Paul III. proved his earnest desire to begin the work by naming a Commission of cardinals and other ecclesiastics, whom he charged with the delicate task of drawing up a statement of those abuses which, in their judgment, most loudly called for redress.
This Commission was composed of nine men, whose names were equally illustrious for integrity and learning. They were the cardinals Contarini, Caraffa, Sadolet, and Pole, together with five other prelates afterwards raised to the same dignity; namely, Fregoso, Archbishop of Salerno; Aleander, Archbishop of Brindisi; Ghiberti, Bishop of Verona; Gregory Cortese, Abbot of Lerins; and Father Thomas Badia, Master of the Sacred Palace.
Some of these have already been spoken of. Contarini and Aleander had distinguished themselves by their missions in Germany and their fruitless efforts to conciliate and win back the misguided Lutherans. Ghiberti had been associated with Pole in his legations, and was bound to him by close ties of friendship. He was regarded by St. Charles Borromeo as the ideal of a Christian bishop, and his portrait always hung in the saint’s chamber, to urge him, as he said, to imitate his pastoral career. He was also profoundly learned, and had set up a printing-press in his episcopal palace, whence issued forth magnificent editions of the Greek Fathers. Cortese, a Benedictine abbot, had revived the fame of the old monastery of Lerins, and restored regular observance in a great number of other houses of his order. Tiraboschi calls him one of the most elegant writers of his age, and says that his theological works are free from the least tincture of scholastic barbarism. Frederic Fregoso was a Hebrew scholar, and Aleander a learned Orientalist. Not one, in short, of all the nine could be taunted as a disciple of the retrograde school, and all had in one way or other taken part in the revival of polite letters.
Out of the twenty-seven heads to which they reduced their statement of existing abuses, one only concerns our present subject. The whole report was indeed of great importance, and furnished the basis on which were framed many of the decrees of discipline subsequently promulgated by the Fathers of Trent. But it is the sixteenth article alone which touches on the subject of university education, which we will here reproduce as containing both a brief summary and a sufficient justification of much that has been put forward in the foregoing pages. After noticing the reforms urgently called for in the collation to ecclesiastical benefices, the Congregation of prelates proceed as follows:—
“It is a great and pernicious abuse that in the public schools, especially of Italy, many philosophers teach impiety. Even in the churches most impious disputations are held, and if some are of a pious nature, yet in them sacred things are treated before the people in a most irreverent manner. We think, therefore, that it should be pointed out to the bishops, in those places where public schools exist, that they admonish those who deliver lectures not to teach impiety to the young, but to manifest to them the weakness of natural reason in questions appertaining to God, to the recent origin or eternity of the world, and the like, and that they rather lead them to piety. Also, that they permit not public disputations to be held on questions of this nature, nor even on theological subjects, which certainly in this way lose much in vulgar esteem; but let disputations be held in private on these matters, and let the public disputations be on other questions of physics. And the same thing ought to be enjoined on all other bishops, specially of great cities where disputations of this sort are wont to be held. And the same care should be employed about the printing of books, and all princes should be written to, warning them not to allow books of all sorts to be printed everywhere in their dominions. And the care of the matter should be committed to the ordinaries. And whereas it is now customary to read to boys in the schools the ‘Colloquies’ of Erasmus,356 in which there are many things which instil impiety into inexperienced minds, the reading of this book, and of others of a similar character, ought to be prohibited.”357
This certainly is a most remarkable document. It proceeded not from a body of “Scotists” and “barbarians,” but from elegant Humanists, all of them university scholars, whilst some, like Aleander, had themselves occupied Professors’ chairs. It will be observed that the evils which they point out in the existing system of education, and which they indicate as lying at the root of so many prevailing corruptions, are precisely those the growth of which we have been watching from the time when the universities replaced the episcopal and monastic schools. The whole weakness of the Professorial system is here laid bare; its incitements to vanity, its tendency to substitute novelties that tickle the ears of a mixed audience for the teaching of solid truth; the system which had Berengarius and Abelard for its fittest representatives; which had already produced a goodly crop of heretics and false teachers, and which, while it extinguished the old ecclesiastical seminaries, supplied in place of them, nothing better for the training of the Christian priesthood, than universities which, in Italy, at least, had grown to be little else than academies of heathen philosophy. Such a grave and deliberate declaration, and from such authority, requires no commentary; it was a candid avowal from the choicest intellects of Christendom, that three centuries before, a false step had been taken; and a plain and solemn warning that if the evil results of that step were now to be remedied, it could only be by returning to the ancient paths.
It was precisely at this time that St. Ignatius and his companions first appeared in Rome, and submitted to the Holy See the plan for the foundation of their society. The education of youth358 is set forth in the Formula of Approval granted by Paul III. in 1540 as the first duty embraced by the new Institute, and it is to be observed that the two patrons who most powerfully interested themselves in obtaining this approval were both of them members of the above-named commission, namely, Cardinal Gaspar Contarini, and the Dominican, Father Thomas Badia. Although the new religious were not at once able to begin the establishment of colleges, yet the plan of those afterwards founded was gradually ripening in the sagacious mind of St. Ignatius, who looked to these institutions as calculated to oppose the surest bulwarks against the progress of heresy. The first regular college of the Society was that established at Gandia in 1546, through the zeal of St. Francis Borgia, third General of the Society; and the regulations by which it was governed, and which were embodied in the constitutions, were extended to all the Jesuit colleges afterwards founded. The studies were to include theology, both positive and scholastic, as well as grammar, poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy. The course of philosophy was to last three years, that of theology four; and the Professors of Philosophy were enjoined to treat their subject in such a way as to dispose the mind for the study of theology, instead of setting up faith and reason in opposition to one another. The theology of St. Thomas, and the philosophy of Aristotle, were to be followed, except on those points where the teaching of the latter was opposed to the Catholic faith. Those points of metaphysics which involved questions depending for their demonstration on revealed truth, such as free-will, or the origin of evil, were not to be treated in the course of philosophy, but to be reserved for that of theology. No classical authors, whether Greek or Latin, wherein was to be found anything contrary to good morals, were to be read in the classes until first corrected, and the students were subjected to rules of discipline which aimed at forming in them habits of solid piety. It is clear that colleges thus constituted were exactly fitted to carry out those reforms which Pole and his colleagues had suggested as being so urgently called for, and that the system of education thus proposed effectually excluded the “impious philosophy” which had been nurtured in the academies of Italy.
Meanwhile the political horizon was gradually growing clearer, and on the 13th of December 1545, the first session of the long-expected Council was opened by the three legates nominated by the Pope. They were the Cardinals del Monte, Cervini, and Pole. The two first successively filled the chair of St. Peter after Paul III., under the titles of Julius III. and Marcellus II. Pole held his office only until the October of the following year, when the state of his health obliged him to retire from the legation. He nevertheless continued to be employed in affairs connected with the Council, and assisted in drawing up the Bull of Reform published by Julius III. in 1550. The exhortation addressed to the Fathers of the Council at the opening of the second session was composed by him, and the doctrinal decree on Justification, which defined the faith of the Church on the point most warmly controverted by the Lutherans, is believed to have been first sketched out by his pen,359 and was certainly submitted by his colleagues to his approval in its complete shape before publication, he being then detained by sickness at Padua. In 1554 the accession of Queen Mary recalled him to England, where, for the four remaining years of his life, he was engaged in reconstructing the shattered constitution of the English Church, and was, of course, unable to take any active part in the affairs of the Council. But some of his Synodal Acts anticipated in so remarkable a manner the Tridentine decrees of discipline that they have been even supposed to have furnished the model on which the decrees were drawn up. At any rate, they evince how thoroughly Pole was himself imbued with the views and principles which guided the Fathers of the Council, and bear too closely on our subject to be omitted here.
The first act of his primacy, after the formal reconciliation of the nation to the Holy See, was to summon a Provincial Synod, which met in Henry VII.’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey, and continued to sit from the November of 1554 to the same month in the ensuing year. After regulations passed for the remedy of sundry abuses, such as pluralities and non-residence, and others which aimed at providing for the instruction of the people, by means of preaching, we come to the important decrees on the subject of Church seminaries. A return was made to the ancient ecclesiastical system, and the cathedral schools were put on a footing which should enable them to train the future clergy of the diocese. Every cathedral was to maintain, in its own school, a certain number of boys, in proportion to its revenues. Those only were to be chosen in whom there seemed to be tokens of a vocation to the priesthood; they were to be received about the age of eleven or twelve, rather from the ranks of the poor than the rich, and were required before admission to know at least how to read and write. All were to wear the tonsure and the ecclesiastical habit, to live in common, and to assist daily at the public office in the cathedral. They were gradually to be admitted to Holy Orders, at proper intervals. The school was to be placed under the superintendence of the Dean and Chapter. Other students might be admitted, who were required to follow the rules of the seminary in all things. Moreover, all the schools and schoolmasters of the diocese were placed under the jurisdiction of the Ordinary, and the books used in these schools were first to be approved by him.360 The acts of this synod were sent to Rome, and formally approved by Pope Paul IV., and there is little doubt that they must have been in the hands of many of the prelates who assisted at the later sessions of the Council of Trent.
The next task which presented itself was the restoration of the universities, which, as we have seen, had sunk during the reign of Edward VI., into a state of utter decay. Here the Cardinal’s efforts were nobly seconded by Queen Mary, who re-endowed the Colleges with such portions of their revenues as had been seized by the Crown, and at her own charges commenced the rebuilding of the schools. To restore the ancient theological studies, and place the universities on their former footing, Nicholas Ormanetti, formerly Vicar-General to the good prelate Matthew Ghiberti, and now first Datary to the English Legation, was appointed visitor. The heretical professors were replaced with learned Catholics, both native and foreign, and among the latter number were the two Spanish Dominicans, Peter Soto and Bartholomew Carranza, both of whom had been present as theologians at some of the sittings of the Council of Trent. By their influence the scholastic theology was restored at Oxford—a circumstance which occasioned the charge of obscurantism to be very unsuitably brought against the Catholic professors, by those who had been engaged before them in crying down humane learning and burning Duke Humphrey’s library. Pole certainly was not one to neglect the cultivation of humane literature, but the restoration of the Divinity schools of Oxford was just then of more urgent necessity than anything else, and we could not have blamed the Catholic prelates if, in their solicitude on this point, they had even allowed the polite letters to remain for a time uncared for. They did, however, the very reverse of this, and put such renewed life into the English schools as inspired Sir Thomas Pope with courage to propose a new Oxford foundation, for the express purpose of promoting classical studies. The statutes of Trinity College, Oxford, were submitted to the approval of Pole, who pleaded strongly for more Greek. Sir Thomas Pope is represented by some to have resisted this, but his own letters explain the true state of the case. “I like the purpose well,” he says, “but I fear the times will not bear it now. I remember when I was a young scholar at Eton the Greek tongue was growing apace, but the study of it of late is much decayed.” That is to say, that the real “obscurantism” had been occasioned, not by the Spanish Dominicans, but by the Genevese Reformers, who left it to Pole and his colleagues to undo their mischievous work. In consequence of the Cardinal’s representations, a Greek lecturer was appointed at Trinity, and the buildings of old Durham College were given up to the new foundation, the present library being the very same originally built to receive the books deposited there by Richard of Bury.
The death of the queen in 1558, followed sixteen hours later by that of the Cardinal Primate, put an end to the work of restoration, and the curtain dropped heavily over the hopes of the English Catholics. And in what way, it may be asked, did the triumph of Protestantism affect the schools? “Duns, and his rabble of barbarous questionists” (to use the language of Ascham) were, of course, put to the rout; but what was substituted in their place during the golden reign of Queen Elizabeth? Five years after her accession, we learn from Wood, that there were only three divines in Oxford judged capable of preaching the university sermon. The established clergy were recruited from an illiterate class, who preached on Sundays, and worked at their trades on week days, some of them being hardly able to sign their names. Four years later, when Archbishop Parker founded three scholarships in Cambridge, for the best and ablest scholars to be elected from the chief schools of Kent and Norfolk, it was found prudent to require no higher attainments from the candidates than a knowledge of grammar, “and, if it may be, that they should be able to make a verse.” And three years later again, we find Horne, bishop of Winchester, requiring his minor canons every week to get by heart a chapter of St. Paul’s Epistles in Latin, which task they had to repeat aloud at the public episcopal visitation. The universities revived in some degree towards the close of Elizabeth’s reign, and yet more under the early Stuart princes, though it is remarkable how large a number of the best English scholars of this period, such as Campion and Crashaw, embraced the Catholic faith. But the free intercommunion with the mind of Europe, which had been the great intellectual advantage of these institutions in Catholic times, was now at an end. Whatever scholarship they fostered was henceforth stamped with a certain character of narrow nationality; their very Latinity became Anglicised in its pronunciation, and thus the Latin language ceased to be to English scholars what it was, and still is, to those of Catholic academies—a medium of intercourse between educated men. Among those Englishmen who have distinguished themselves in the ranks of science and literature since the Reformation, a very large proportion have not been university scholars, and our two philosophers of greatest note, Bacon and Locke, so far from acknowledging any obligations to their university training, avowedly despised, and set themselves to make others despise, the academic system of education.
It remains for us to speak of the decrees affecting the question of ecclesiastical education passed in the later sessions of the Council of Trent. The wars and political intrigues of that troublous time caused so many interruptions in the sittings of the Council that they were not finally closed until eighteen years from the date of their first opening.
Few, comparatively, of those who had taken part in the first sessions, assisted at the three last held in the year 1563, under the presidency of five cardinal legates.361 Of the three who had presided at the opening of the Council, two had been successively raised to the Chair of St. Peter, and all had passed to a better life. Not one survived of those nine Cardinals who had sat in Paul III.’s Congregation of Reform. But the new generation which had arisen in their place were animated with the same spirit, or, if there were any difference to be noticed, it lay, perhaps, in the fact, that the deliberations of those eighteen years had supplied them with fuller light, and deepened their desire for the restoration of ecclesiastical discipline. The very troubles of the times had co-operated in the development of a strong Christian reaction against the Paganism of the last half century; and many prelates had not waited for the close of the Council before instituting a vigorous reform of abuses in their own dioceses. Thus the church of Verona under Matthew Ghiberti had become a model of discipline, and in Portugal the celebrated Bartholomew of the Martyrs, Archbishop of Braga, had set the example of exact observance of the canons, in the government of his large diocese. Among the other means he had adopted for the reform of his clergy, was the establishment of a sort of seminary in his own palace, which he endowed out of his episcopal revenues, appointing as scholasticus a religious of his order. The archbishop sat in the later sessions of the Council, and took a very prominent part in its deliberations. Again, the establishment of the Jesuit colleges, specially the German college in Rome, and the extraordinary success which had attended the labours of the Blessed Peter Canisius, in restoring Catholicism in Germany, had poured a flood of light on the whole subject of educational reform. Canisius assisted at the sittings of the Council in 1547 and again in 1562, and even when absent his opinion was continually consulted by Cardinal Hosius and the other legates. Reform was now not a theory, but a fact. In Aichstadt, the old diocese of St. Wilibald, where heresy and irreligion, had, as it seemed, firmly established themselves, the university was purged of the evil leaven, and the faith had revived in all its fervour. In Vienna, in spite of the protection of the Government, religion had so rapidly declined under the infection of the Lutheran doctrines, that for twenty years not a single candidate for holy orders had presented himself. Parishes were left without pastors, the sacraments were neglected, and through timidity and human respect the Catholic clergy opposed but a faint resistance to the encroachments of the heretics. But under the direction of Canisius the university was restored, a college was founded for the education of youth, and public catechisms were instituted, which effected a change little short of miraculous, and the same scenes were to be witnessed in the other cities of Germany.
The Fathers, therefore, who assembled at the twenty-seventh session of the Council of Trent had facts as well as principles before them, indicating a sound system of ecclesiastical education as the measure best calculated to remedy the evils which afflicted the Church. In earlier sessions the old canons had been confirmed requiring cathedrals to maintain a theologian and grammar-master for the instruction of the younger clergy, but this law fell very far short of what was needed, and its frequent renewal by former Councils does not appear to have been attended with much result. What the Church had possessed in former ages, and what she now desired to restore, were not mere theological classes, but rather nurseries, in which her clergy could be trained in ecclesiastical discipline as well as supplied with the learning proper to their state. Such seminaries had existed before the rise of the universities; they were now to reappear, and it was with unanimous consent, accompanied with an emotion of grateful joy not easy to express, that the Fathers passed that decree which has been called the practical résumé of the whole Council. It forms the eighteenth chapter of the twenty-seventh session, and its provisions are briefly as follows:—
Every cathedral or metropolitan church is bound, according to its means, to maintain a certain number of youths belonging to the city or diocese in some suitable college, who shall then be trained for the ecclesiastical state. They are to be at least twelve years old, and chosen from those who give hopes of their being eventually fit for the priesthood. The Holy Council desires that a “preference be given to the children of poor parents,” though the rich are not to be excluded. The college, which is to be “a perpetual seminary for the service of God,” is entirely under the direction of the bishop, who is to be assisted by two canons chosen by himself. The students, on their entrance, are to wear the tonsure and ecclesiastical habit; to learn grammar, church music, the ecclesiastical computation, and the other liberal arts; but they are specially to apply themselves to the study of the Scriptures, and all that appertains to the right administration of the Sacraments. The bishop, or the visitors whom he appoints, are to watch over the maintenance of good discipline among them, and to take all proper means for the encouragement of piety and virtue. The seminary is to be maintained by a tax on all the benefices in the diocese. If in any province the dioceses are too poor each to maintain its own seminary, the Provincial synod may establish one attached to the metropolitan church for the general use of all churches of the diocese; or, again, if a diocese be very large and populous, the bishop may, if necessary, establish in it more than one seminary. It belongs to the bishop to appoint or remove the scholasticus, and no person is to be appointed who is not a doctor or licentiate in theology or canon law. The bishop also has the right of prescribing what studies are to be pursued by the seminarists, according as he may think proper.362
So universal was the satisfaction caused by this decree, that many prelates hesitated not to declare, that if no other good were to result from the labours of the Council, this alone would compensate to them for all their fatigues and sacrifices. They regarded such a reform as was here provided, as the only efficacious means of restoring ecclesiastical discipline, well knowing that in every state and government, as are the heads, so are the members, and that the character of a people depends on that of their teachers.363
It will be observed that in this famous decree there is no allusion to the universities as in any way regarded as nurseries of the clergy. Canons for their reform were passed in the twenty-fifth session,364 but not a word was said connecting them in any way with the proposed seminaries. It is not even recommended that seminaries should be established in the vicinity of universities where these already existed, though at that time universities were far more numerous than now, every province almost possessing one in its territory; but it is distinctly laid down, that they are to form a part of the cathedral establishment, and, where it can conveniently be done, that they be erected in the cathedral city of the diocese. The radical idea of the seminary is that of its being the bishop’s school,365 formed under his eye, and subject to his control—an idea which is manifestly totally inconsistent with the plan of a university. So strictly is this the case, that where colleges have since been founded (as at Rome) for ecclesiastical students of different nations, which of course could not be placed under the jurisdiction of their own bishops, these colleges are rarely given the name of seminaries, the nature of such institutions, properly so-called, requiring them to be subject to the canonical authority of their own Ordinary. Universities were not abolished or condemned, or even discountenanced, by the Fathers of Trent: they were reformed, indeed, and laws were passed requiring all masters and doctors to engage by oath, at the beginning of each year, to explain the Catholic faith according to the canons of the Council, and obliging visitors to institute the necessary corrections of discipline. But universities, when doing their own proper work, continued to receive the same encouragement as before; and even in our own time, we have witnessed new ones established, at the express recommendation of the Sovereign Pontiff, to the end that the Catholic youth of Belgium and Ireland might enjoy the same advantages for following a course of liberal studies as were at the command of the uncatholic world around them.366 But other schools than those of the world were to be provided for those who were to minister divine things, that they might be “wholly in them, and that their profiting might be manifest to all.”367 Them the world was not to touch; the smell of the fire was not to pass on them; from childhood they were to be taken out of it, and fashioned after another model, signed and set apart as “holy to the Lord.” Their consecration was not to be the change of a moment, but the formation of a life; and for ever they were to be preserved from what even the heathen poet bewailed as “the intolerable calamity of yielding to what is base,” and to enjoy that which he declares should be the object of all men’s prayers,—to dwell in those sacred temples where “nature and the law of the place should both conspire to present us in innocence to the Deity.”368
Besides the important decrees already referred to, the reform of education was encouraged by other provisions of the Council of Trent, in which we recognise the same solicitude for restoring the Christian spirit, and abolishing the corrupt Paganism which had crept into its place. The Tridentine Fathers had something to say on the matter of art. The object of pictures and images, is, they remind us, to instruct the people, and recall to them the mysteries of the Faith; therefore everything profane and indecorous is to be avoided in the House of God, and the beauty that is represented must be that alone which savours of holiness. Nor was it to be supposed that they could be silent on the subject of that ecclesiastical chant, which from the very infancy of the Christian schools had taken its place by the side of grammar. The Gregorian chant had by this time all but disappeared in the greater number of churches, and had been replaced by orchestral music of the most profane and unsuitable description. Against this abuse, which had been growing for upwards of two centuries, Popes and Councils had uniformly protested, but with little fruit. The Fathers of Trent seriously contemplated prohibiting the use of instrumental music altogether, but at the earnest representations of the Emperor Ferdinand, they contented themselves with prescribing the abuses introduced by the musical professors,369 and making the study of the plain-song of the Church one of the indispensable studies of the new seminaries. They number among the duties of those promoted to cathedral canonries that they should “reverently, distinctly, and devoutly praise the name of God in hymns and canticles in the choir appointed for psalmody;” and require the Provincial synods to regulate the proper way of singing and chanting the divine office. And the various Provincial councils and synods held to promulgate the Tridentine decrees, failed not to enforce the same salutary provisions, as that of Toledo, in 1566, which forbade those noisy exhibitions wherein the sense of the words is buried under the confusion of voices.370
The projected reforms had been very warmly urged on the Fathers by St. Charles Borromeo in his letters from Rome. The friend of Pole and of St Ignatius, he had watched with lively interest the success of the German college, and in his twenty-third year had already put his hand to the work of educational reform, by giving up the Borromeo palace at Pavia, for the purpose of a college which he founded out of his own revenues. When in the July of 1563, therefore, letters from Trent arrived in Rome notifying to the Holy Father the decree which had been passed, and soliciting his confirmation of the same, St. Charles earnestly supported the petition of the Legates, and had the happiness of conveying to them the warm approval of his Holiness, and his promise that the confirmation should be published with the least possible delay, and that he himself would be the first to carry it into execution. Accordingly, on the 18th of August following he convoked the Cardinals to deliberate with them on the subject. The foundation of seminaries in all the dioceses of the Roman State was at once determined on; 6000 scudi were assigned for the purpose by the Pope, and a Commission of Cardinals, of whom St. Charles was one, was appointed to carry the resolution into effect.
Thanks to the exertions of St. Charles, the solemn confirmation of the Canons of Trent was not long delayed. In a consistory held on the 30th of December, Pius IV, addressed a moving discourse to the assembled Cardinals, including several who had recently returned from the Council, in which, while declaring his firm resolve to enforce every one of the reforms which had been therein recommended, he took special notice of the decree on seminaries, which he praised as having been suggested by the “special inspiration of God,”371 declaring again that he desired to be the first who should put his hand to so blessed a work. The confirmation of the Tridentine Canons followed on the 26th of January 1564, and on the 15th of April the same year, in a consistory which met in the Hall of Constantine, plans were proposed for the foundation of the Roman Seminary, the care of which was committed to the Fathers of the Society of Jesus.
Nor was it at Rome alone that the decree of the Council was thus eagerly and promptly carried out. The first act of Bartholomew of the Martyrs, on returning to his diocese, was to institute measures for the establishment of a seminary, in precise conformity to the prescribed canons. He accordingly summoned his chapter and laid before them the urgency of the business; giving them a noble example by his own munificent contribution to the necessary expenses. As it was an undertaking involving a question of finances, there were not wanting those who murmured at the idea of a compulsory taxation, but the prudence and moderation of the archbishop prevailed over every difficulty, and at the end of six months he had the satisfaction of seeing accommodation provided for sixty students, and of opening the first seminary founded in Portugal. This appears to have been in the year 1565. In the same year Daniel, the worthy successor of St. Boniface in the See of Mentz, commenced the foundation of the first episcopal seminary of Germany, which he appropriately dedicated to our great English apostle, and placed under the direction of the Jesuits. The Provincial Councils, held at Salzburg and Toledo in 1569, decreed the establishment of provincial seminaries, and, not to multiply examples, we have but to turn to the correspondence of St. Pius V. to see how rapidly this great work was taken up throughout every part of Christendom, and how energetically it was encouraged by the Sovereign Pontiff himself.
One Saint, however, and one diocese, stands out pre-eminent in the history of Church seminaries. St. Charles Borromeo had protected the design in its infancy, and he lived to give the Church a perfect model of its practical realisation. Appointed to the archbishopric of Milan when only in his twenty-second year, St. Charles found it impossible for several years to obtain leave from Pope Pius IV. to withdraw from Rome and devote himself to his pastoral cares. Nevertheless, he never ceased to occupy himself with plans for its benefit, and sought the counsel of every one whom he deemed best able to instruct him in the duties of government. One of the friends whose advice he most highly esteemed was Bartholomew of the Martyrs; another was one whose name, if less famous than that of the great Archbishop of Braga, has a peculiar interest to the English reader—it was the good priest, Nicholas Ormanetti. This saintly ecclesiastic had acted as Vicar-General to Matthew Ghiberti, and assisted in the reforms which that zealous prelate had instituted in his diocese. He had afterwards been appointed first Datary under Cardinal Pole to the English Legation, and as we have seen, had been named by him visitor of the English universities. He continued to act as confidential adviser to our last Archbishop of Canterbury up to the time of his death, when he left England and attended several sessions of the Council of Trent.372 After this he retired to a humble country parish in the diocese of Verona, where he busied himself with his parochial duties as quietly and happily as if he had never exercised a more weighty charge. From this obscurity he was drawn by St. Charles, who conjured Navagerio, now Bishop of Verona, to send Ormanetti to him at Rome, that he might enjoy the benefit of his counsels. He received the humble Curé with extraordinary respect, and for weeks, to the amazement of the Roman courtiers, he was closeted day after day with a man whom nobody knew, and nobody thought worth knowing, and whose exterior was altogether poor and unpretending. In these long conferences every point of pastoral discipline was gravely and deliberately discussed, and the whole plan of the future government of Milan moulded, as it were, into shape. St. Charles listened eagerly to the account which Ormanetti gave of the views and methods of government which had been adopted by the two men whose example and maxims he most venerated, Ghiberti and Reginald Pole. They consulted together on the fittest method of executing the Tridentine decrees, and specially on the formation of seminaries, and the holding of diocesan synods. And these measures being thus concerted, Ormanetti was despatched to Milan to discharge the office of Vicar-General until St. Charles should himself be able to assume the government of his diocese. Poor Ormanetti, however, found his new dignity beset with thorns, and the contradictions he had to endure from the clergy who would not endure the name of reform, moved St. Charles to make such renewed entreaties that he might repair himself to his diocese, that he at last obtained from the Pope the desired permission, and set out for Milan in 1565, where he almost immediately held his first Provincial Synod. He commenced the visitation of his diocese in the following year, and in spite of the overwhelming labour which was thus imposed on him, found time to begin a series of educational establishments such as never before, we may confidently affirm, owed their existence to any single founder. “Reform education,” said the sagacious Leibnitz, “and you will have reformed the world.” And it was on this principle that St. Charles applied himself to the task of reforming, not the world indeed, but a vast province, in which doctrine and discipline had alike fallen into decay. To begin with his foundations for seculars, which were very numerous, the Borromeo College, dedicated to St. Justina, of which mention has been already made, had been planned by him while a student at Pavia, where his own observation of the disorders prevalent there moved him to make larger provision for the protection of his fellow-students. In 1572 he founded at Milan the College of St. Fidelis, in which Humane Literature and all the higher branches of study were taught, and which was more particularly intended for the benefit of poor scholars. A second college was in the following year attached to the church of St. John the Evangelist, for the education of noble youths. It was under the care of the Oblates of St. Ambrose, and was commonly known as the College of Nobles. St. Charles himself drew up the rules both for the masters and scholars. He marked the time to be assigned to prayer, reading, and study, and established such a discipline as was calculated to form a character of solid piety in the most influential classes of the laity. Next to virtue and learning he desired to see his noble scholars trained in habits of Christian courtesy, and was accustomed to insist much on the importance of good manners. He often visited the school in person, examined the boys at their tasks, and addressed them some brief religious instructions. Every year, at the close of the studies, he attended their public literary exercises, and distributed prizes with his own hand; and so solicitous was he to perfect this establishment, that he engaged Cardinal Sylvius Antonianus, his former secretary and a man of rare learning, to write a work on the education of the higher classes, for the guidance of those who taught in his College of Nobles. Besides these colleges, he founded others at Arona, Lucerne, and Fribourg, as well as the admirable Swiss college established at Milan, for the education of young Swiss ecclesiastics, which became afterwards the great means of upholding religion in the Catholic cantons.
For the clergy of his own province he founded no fewer than six seminaries—three in his cathedral city, and three in other parts of the diocese. It must be remembered that the giant evil with which St. Charles had to struggle was a slothful and corrupt clergy: the salt had lost its savour, and had to be salted anew. The whole face of the diocese had to be changed; and such a change demanded a body of skilful workmen. To create these was his first care, and with the sagacity of a mind illuminated with something higher than mere human prudence, he perceived at once that an undertaking so vast as the creation of a new body of clergy, and the reform of the old one, could only be grasped by division. He had to classify his work in order to master it, and in this lay the secret of his success.
His first and principal seminary was attached to his cathedral church, and was intended to receive 150 of the most promising candidates for the ecclesiastical state. In this greater seminary dedicated to St. John the Baptist, the students went through a regular course of philosophy, theology, and canon law.373 But the second seminary, called the Canonica, which was intended for youths of less ability, who from their good dispositions, nevertheless promised to make useful parish priests, nothing more was required than a course of instruction on moral theology, Scripture, the Catechism of the Council of Trent, and the rubrics and ceremonies of the Church. A third seminary in the city was set apart to receive such priests as, either from ignorance or negligence, were found unfit to discharge their sacred duties, and were placed here for a time to renew their ecclesiastical spirit, and acquire the learning necessary for their state. These city seminaries received altogether about 300 students—a number quite inadequate to supply the wants of the diocese. Three others were, therefore, added in the different deaneries, and these were intended as nurseries to those at Milan. In them were received youths of all ages and ranks of society, principally those of the poorer classes, who, when properly prepared, were passed on into the higher schools, all being dependent on the great seminary of St. John the Baptist as their head.
At first the archbishop supported these establishments at his private charge, but he was at length obliged to have recourse to the plan of taxation laid down by the Council of Trent, though this was only continued until a permanent endowment had been secured. The rules for their government he drew up himself, placing the care of their temporal affairs in the hands of four of his clergy, chosen by himself.
Every student on entering was required to make a spiritual retreat under the director of the seminary, and a general retreat was made yearly by all before the opening of the classes. The great object aimed at in every regulation was to train the subjects in the spiritual life, and to supply them with both the learning and the habits proper to their state. The care and personal supervision which the archbishop bestowed on his seminarists, whom he used to call “the restorers of his diocese,” were rather such as might have been expected from a father than a superior, and one whose time was never at his own command. There were few days that he did not visit the seminary, which occupied one side of his cathedral quadrangle; it was his wish to receive all new-comers in person, that he might examine their vocation himself; and when once he had seen and conversed with them, each one had a peculiar place in his memory, and became a separate object of his paternal care. Twice a year he made a visitation of his seminaries, and held an examination of all the classes. On such occasions he determined those who were to be promoted to higher classes, and when the course of study was finished, assigned them offices and benefices, according to the ability of each. These visitations lasted a fortnight, besides other shorter ones which he made in the course of the year. One result of the extreme solicitude he bestowed on the spiritual training of his disciples was not altogether such as he had anticipated: so many of his priests evinced an inclination to embrace the religious life, that he had to solicit from Pope Clement XIII. that some means might be adopted for keeping them for the service of the diocese;374 for every religious order and every bishop were eager to obtain subjects who had been educated in a seminary of St. Charles. On the other hand, detractors were not wanting who busied themselves in representing these colleges as prisons, in which the unhappy students were worn to death by prayers, watchings, and austerities, by which means they succeeded in frightening away some who were about to enter. But the seminarists had but to show themselves in the streets of Milan to dispel these malicious rumours; their countenances and their whole deportment being marked with a certain character of peace and joy, that was recognised as the effect of that holy discipline under which the whole interior and exterior man was being formed anew.
St. Charles had now provided for the education of his clergy and seculars of the upper ranks, but he did not stop there; he had thought also for the children of the poor; and his plans on this point were formed when he was still at the Court of Rome, presiding over the brilliant academy of learned men which he had formed in the palace of the Pope, and taking part in the erudite conference of the Noctes Vaticanæ. Among the instructions which he gave to his Vicar-General, Ormanetti, the establishment of poor schools for teaching the Christian doctrine held a prominent place, and in his first Provincial Synod he made a special decree obliging his curates to assemble the children of each parish for catechism on Sundays and other festivals. By his exhortations he moved a greater number of pious persons, of both sexes, to interest themselves in the good work, so that at the appointed hour the churches of Milan were crowded with catechists and their classes, and it was the good archbishop’s recreation, to go from one church to another, encouraging teachers and learners with his presence and his gracious words. Before he died there was not a parish in his diocese, however remote, which had not its school; and whereas before his time it was common enough to meet with persons of advanced age who scarcely knew the Our Father and the Hail Mary correctly, it was now as common to find children of ten or twelve perfectly instructed in their religion. The schools of the diocese were at last entirely placed under the care of the Oblates of St. Ambrose, that congregation which had been created by St. Charles, and which he employed as a kind of spiritual militia for carrying out all his charitable designs. The discipline established in the poor schools of Milan by their means was the admiration of every stranger, and the extent of their labours may be estimated from the fact, that at the death of the archbishop there existed in his diocese seven hundred and forty poor schools, two hundred and seventy-three superintending officers, and seventeen hundred and twenty-six others acting under their orders, having under their care no fewer than 40,098 scholars.
Here, then, we may fitly close our studies of the Christian schools. We have watched them in their infancy springing up under the shadow of the cloister, and having traced them through their varied fortunes of good and ill, we leave them at the moment when the episcopacy was recovering its ancient jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical seminaries, and when a vast majority of the secular schools of Catholic Christendom were passing into the hands of a great religious order, raised up, as it would seem, with the special design of consolidating anew a system of Christian education. Did we need a token that the reforms of the sixteenth century were truly the work of God, we should find it in that deadly hostility which the enemies of religion, and the rulers of the world, have never ceased to exhibit against the seminaries of the Church and the colleges of her religious orders. And this, not in Protestant countries alone, but under nominally Catholic Governments, where heretical impieties have been excluded, only, as it would seem, that there might be set up the odious idol of the State.
For two centuries at least, education has been the battle-ground of the Church, and the battle is not yet fought out and finished. In France, in Belgium, in Germany, and in Switzerland, infidelity has triumphed exactly in proportion as it has succeeded in substituting an Anti-Christian State system of education for the system of the Church, and has never done its work more surely than when its agents have been philosophic universities, and ministers of public instruction.
For us in England, who, by a strange anomaly enjoy a freedom denied to many a Catholic land, and who are called on in one way or other to take part in the reconstruction of so many of our shattered institutions, the educational annals of the past have imperative claims on our attention. It is not for a writer to point the moral of his own tale; we can but hope, therefore, that our story, however rambling and diffuse, may yet have been told with sufficient clearness for our readers to draw that moral for themselves, and to resolve that, in so far as they may be called on to lend their aid in the great work of education, they will take no lower models for their guidance than those that have been bequeathed them by the saints.
And what a calendar is that which belongs to the Christian schools! The profession of the teacher, which in our day falls, by choice or duty, on so vast a number, is irradiated by the light which streams from ten thousand saintly aureoles. If the work be often wearisome and seem to promise little hope; if the spirit flag, and, ignorant of those sweet secrets by which the saints kept fresh their springs of devotion in a thirsty soil, the teacher too often finds his heart grow dry with incessant labour of the head; if pressed on by a busy age, be he ever tempted to shorten prayer that he may double toil, forgetful of the example of those who with one hand only did the work, while with the other they held the sword;375 if, in short, the spirit of the world steal in upon him and assault him with its manifold vexations, what can he do better than turn to those who have gone before him, and learn from their examples, and invoke their aid?
And what can we do better than commend these pages to the saints, under whose patronage they were first undertaken; but chiefly and above all to those,—too seldom venerated by us, too little loved,—the saints and martyrs of England? To St. Bede and St. Aldhelm, therefore, to St. Boniface, and St. Dunstan and St. Ethelwold; to St. Edmund and St. Richard, and all who with them have sanctified our cloisters with their prayers and studies,—for were not the studies of the saints themselves a prayer?—to them in whose ears the names of our own homes were once sweet household words, and who, as they listen to the eternal chimes, do not, as we fondly trust, forget those scenes where, in the days of their sojourning, they learnt at the springs of heavenly wisdom “the true knowledge of the things that are;” whose memory has been to us, wandering in the wilderness, “as the flower of roses in the days of spring, and as the lilies that grow upon the brink of the waters,”376—to our glorious English Saints we offer these pages as an act of homage due to them on a thousand grounds, and which, if unworthy of their greatness, may by its own littleness the better move them to shelter it with their aid, and may at least bear witness to the grateful love of the least and humblest of their clients!
Footnotes
1 Fuit autem forma Beatissimi Marci hujusmodi: longo naso, subducto supercilio, pulcher oculis, recalvaster, prolixa barba, velox, habitudinis optimæ, canis aspersus, affectione continens, gratia Dei plenus.—Metaphrastes, Vita S. Marci, ap. Surium.
2 Nahum iii. 8.
3 Vita S. Marci.
4 A faded copy of St. Mark’s Gospel, preserved in St. Mark’s Treasury at Venice, claims to have been written by his own hand. Montfauçon, who has described it in his Iter Italicum, considers that this claim cannot be supported, though he attests the great antiquity of the manuscript.
5 The ecclesiastical chant took its first great development at Alexandria, and appears to have been brought thither from Rome by St. Mark. Philo the Jew, a native of Alexandria, who lived in the time of the Evangelist, describes the Christians passing their days in psalmody and prayer, and singing in alternate choirs (Euseb. lib. ii. c. 17). On the martyrdom of the Evangelist we read how certain just men buried him “singing prayers and psalms.” (Vita S. Marci, Sim. Met.) The nature of the chant established at Alexandria in the time of St. Athanasius, is very precisely indicated by St. Augustine, in that passage of his Confessions (lib. x. c. 33) where, speaking of the voluptates aurium, he says that he sometimes desires even to banish from his ears the sweet tones to which the Psalms of David were generally sung in church; “and then that method seems to me more safe which I remember often to have heard of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who caused the lector to intone the Psalms with so slight an inflection of the voice, that it was more like reading than singing.” Hippolytus, in his Book on Antichrist, declares that one effect of His coming at the end of the world will be the abolition of the Psalmody of the Church.
6 Cassian, Inst. ii. c. 5; Coll. 18. 6.
7 Euseb. Hist. l. v. c. 20.
8 Durandus, Rational. lib. viii. c. 1. It is also frequently used to signify an elementary knowledge of arithmetic.
9 In spite of the labours of recent critics, the history of St. Hyppolitus still remains obscure. It appears uncertain whether there were one or many saints of the name; whether the Hyppolitus celebrated by Prudentius was ever really Bishop of Porto, and lastly, whether he was, or was not, the author of the Philosophumena. The former opinion is maintained by Bunsen, Döllinger, and the majority of German and English critics; the latter is generally supported by the Catholic writers of France.
10 Acta S. Feliciani, ed. Boll.
11 Fleury, l. xviii. 35.
12 Breviary Lessons: Feb. 13, proper for Rome. Vignoli, Liber Pontificalis, tom. ii. c. 89.
13 Cœpit vivere secundum regulam sub sanctis apostolis constitutam. (Office of St. Augustine.)
14 Fleury, l. xx. 32.
15 Fleury, l. xxxii. 22.
16 Ruinart, Atti Sinceri, vol. ii. 367-381. Ed. Rom. 1777.
17 S. Greg. Vita S. Benedicti.
18 S. Aug. Conf. l. viii. c. 5.
19 S. Basil. De Legendis Gentilium Libris, tom. ii. p. 245. Ed. Gaume.
20 S. Joan. Chrys. tom. i. pp. 115-122. Ed. Gaume.
21 The words of the Christian orator are almost identical with those of Quinctilian on the same subject. “Si studiis quidem scholas prodesse, moribus autem nocere constaret, potior mihi ratio vivendi honeste, quam vel optime dicendi videretur.”—Lib. i. c. 3.
22 Regula S. Pachomii, cap. i. cxl.
23 Boll., Vit. S. Pach. c. 3, 4.
24 Mabillon, Acta SS. Ord. Ben. Præf. in sec. iii.
25 Reg. S. Basil. fus. tract. 15. Tom. 2, p. 498. Ed. Gaume.
26 Omnes literas discant: omni tempore duabus horis, hoc est, a mane usque ad horam secundam, lectioni vacent.—S. Cæsarii Reg. ad Virg. cap. xvii.
27 S. Leand. De Instit. Virg. cap. vi. et vii.
28 There are, however, indications that at Alexandria at least young children took part in some of the exercises of the catechetical school. St. Clement’s hymn to the Saviour appears to have been written for his younger disciples. “O Shepherd of the lambs!” he says, “assemble Thine innocent children, and let their stainless lips sing hymns to Christ, the guide of youth.” And again: “Fed by the Divine milk of wisdom, that mother of grace has taught our infant lips, and made them taste the dew of the Spirit. Let us then sing to Christ our King.... Let us celebrate the praises of the Almighty Child.”
29 2 Tim. i. 5.
30 Vit. S. Mac., cap. 2.
31 Vita S. Fulgen., cap. i. ap. Surium.
32 St. Hier., Ep. 96 (aliter 127, ed. Migne), ad Principiam.
33 Gladstone, Studies on Homer.
34 The works of Virgil the grammarian have been edited by Cardinal Mai (Auctores classici, tom. v.), who considers that the Toulouse Academy cannot be assigned a later date than the end of the sixth century.
35 Mabillon, Acta SS. Ben. Præf. Secul. iii. 39.
36 These are the words of Trithemius, who says that from the very beginning of the order the sons of nobles were educated in the Benedictine monasteries, “non solum in Scripturis Divinis, sed etiam in secularibus litteris.”
37 In allusion to the waxen tablets then used for writing.
38 S. Ælred, Vit. S. Nin.
39 A solis ortus cardine and Hostis Herodes, the latter of which stands in the Roman Breviary under a somewhat altered form. This Sedulius is to be distinguished from Sedulius the younger, who was also of Irish extraction, and was Bishop of Oreta in Spain, in the eighth century.
40 Scripsit Abegetoria, ccclxv. Nenn. Camb. MS. c. 57.
41 Acta SS. Boll. Mart.
42 Columba had previously studied in the school of St. Finian of Maghbile and received deacon’s orders, so that he could not have been a mere boy when he came to Clonard. But Adamnan tells us that he was still a youth, adhuc juvenis.
43 Now Clonmacnois in King’s County.
44 I should not have thought it necessary to remind the reader that St. Columba, the founder of Iona in 563, is to be distinguished from St. Columbanus the founder of Luxeuil in 585, had not so considerable a writer as Thierry, in his history of the Norman Conquest, spoken of them as the same persons.
45 Act. SS. Boll.
46 Ara Multiscilus, Schedæ de Islandia, cap. 2, quoted by Haverty, who sums up the number of Irish saints known to have settled in different parts of Europe as follows: 150 in Germany, of whom 36 were martyrs; 45 in Gaul, 6 martyrs; 30 in Belgium; 44 in England; 13 in Italy; and 8 martyrs in Norway and Iceland. They founded 13 monasteries in Scotland, 12 in England, 40 in Gaul, 9 in Belgium, 16 in Bavaria, 15 in Switzerland, 6 in Italy, and others in different parts of Germany.
47 It is first spoken of by John of Salisbury, a writer of the twelfth century, who quotes no authority for the statement. With regard to the reproof administered to Bishop Didier, it is not denied, for the passage is extant in one of St. Gregory’s letters. But the real and authentic justification is given in the Gloss on the Canon Law, which explains that Didier’s fault did not lie in his studying humane literature, but in his giving public lectures in his church on the profane poets, and substituting the same in the place of the Gospel lesson. “Recitabat in ecclesia fabulas Jovis, et eas moraliter exponebat in prædicatione sua.” (Decret. pars i. dis. 86.) And again, “Beatus Gregorius quemdam episcopum non reprehendit quia litteras seculares didicerat; sed quia, contra episcopale officium, pro lectione Evangelica, grammaticam populo exponebat.” (Decret. pars i. dis. 37, c. 8. ed. Antwerp., 1573, quoted by Landriot, Recherches Historiques, p. 212.)
48 St. Ignatius is generally spoken of as a disciple of the Apostle St. John. But many writers call him a disciple of St. Peter also, and some even represent that Apostle as placing him in the see of Antioch (S. Chrys. Hom. in S. Ignat. t. ii. p. 712). Tillemont (t. ii. p. 87, ed. 1732) quotes St. Athanasius, Origen and Theodoret, to the same effect. The historian Socrates speaks of St. Ignatius as introducing into the ancient Church of Antioch the alternate chant of two choirs (Socrates, lib. vi. c. 8.). Theodoret says that it was used there, in the time of the Arians, as a powerful instrument to oppose their blasphemous heresies.
49 Bede, lib. i. ch. 27.
50 This expression requires some explanation, being an apparent contradiction of what has been said before as to the Roman origin of the Irish schools. It must be borne in mind that the error in the Irish manner of observing Easter was not that of the Eastern Quarto Decimans, as they are called, who kept it on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month Nisan, on whatever day of the week that might fall. This error was corrected at the Council of Nice, when it was commanded that the feast should always be celebrated on the Sunday after the fourteenth day of the moon; and the decree of the council was obeyed in Britain and Ireland as in Rome. But difficulties afterwards arose in the method of calculating Easter; the Cycles, or periods of years used for that purpose, were after a time found to be incorrect, and the philosophers of Alexandria were applied to, to calculate the day and notify it each year to the Pope, who should publish it to the rest of the Church. Even this plan failed to secure uniformity, and in the fifth century Rome and Alexandria were to be found computing the time of Easter after different cycles, Rome using one of eighty-four years, and Alexandria one of nineteen, which caused the feast to be celebrated on different days. The old Roman cycle was that which had been introduced into Ireland, and the Irish clergy continued to use it after it had been reformed in the time of Pope Hilarion, by whose command the Alexandrian cycle was established as more correct, and the calendar was corrected by Victorinus of Aquitaine. Such was the disturbed date of the world at this time, however, that the British and Irish churches heard nothing of this change, and stuck to their old Roman cycle even after the arrival of St. Gregory’s missionaries. The notion of the Irish having adopted the Eastern computation of the Quarto Decimans is very clearly disproved by reference to Bede, lib. iii. ch. 4. They at last adopted the Roman calendar at the Synod of Lene, held in 630, wherein it was agreed that “they should receive what was brought to them from the fountain of their baptism and of their wisdom, even the successors of the Apostles of Christ.”
51 By astrology and the calculation of horoscopes must not be here understood the practice of judicial astrology, which was regarded by all the Anglo-Saxon prelates as a forbidden art; but, as Lingard supposes, studies connected with the Zodiac, and the art of dialling, here called horoscopii computatio; an art much in vogue among early scholars, and which formed one of the scientific recreations of Boethius.
52 Surtees, History of Durham.
53 Bede, lib. iv. c, 18.
54 Alc. Opera i. p. 282.
55 Nec linguam Hebraicam ignoravit. (Breviary Lessons.)
56 Among the authors quoted by Bede are Virgil, Horace, Terence, Ovid, Lucan, Lucretius, Prudentius, Juvencus, Macer, Varro, Cornelius, Severus, Fortunatus, Sedulius, and Pacuvius, besides the Latin Fathers. He also makes frequent references to Homer, which was not at that time translated into Latin, and which he can, therefore, only have known in its original Greek.
57 See De Nat. Rerum, Op. tom. ii. p. 37.
58 Iren. de Hær. l. iii. 4.
59 Three, however, were preserved which expressed sounds not conveyed by the Roman alphabet, corresponding to w, th, and dh.
60 The instruction of the people was not, however, to be limited to a knowledge of these prayers. “Let them be taught,” he says, “by what works they may please God, and from what things they must abstain; with what sincerity they must believe in Him, and with what devotion they must pray; how diligently and frequently they must fortify themselves with the holy sign of the Cross; and how salutary for every class of Christian is the daily reception of the Lord’s Body and Blood, which is, you know, the constant practice of the Church of Christ throughout Italy, Gaul, Africa, Greece, and the whole of the East.” This is a most important testimony as to the existing practice of the Church in the eighth century, and Bede goes on to say that to his knowledge there are innumerable young persons, of both sexes, who might, beyond all question, be suffered to communicate, at least, on all Sundays and festivals.
61 “Caras super omnia gazas.” (De Pont. Ebor. Eccl.)
62 Jamdiu optata adest dies. (Vita S. Bon. Acta SS. Ben.)
63 “O felix collegium beatissimi Bonifacii!” exclaims the biographer of S. Sola.
64 Dr. Campbell in his “Strictures on the Ecclesiastical History of Ireland,” observes that “this great man was degraded by Pope Zachary on conviction of being a mathematician.” But perhaps the most remarkable reproduction of this oft-told tale occurs in Dr. Enfield’s translation of Brucker’s “History of Philosophy,” which I give verbatim, as only to be paralleled in the “Art of Pluck.” “Boniface,” he says, “the patron of ignorance and barbarism, summoned Polydore Virgil, bishop of Salisbury, to the Court of Inquisition for maintaining the existence of the antipodes.” (Vol. i, p. 363.) Would it be believed that a writer who is engaged in bewailing the ignorance of monkish philosophers should commit himself to a statement which confuses St. Feargil, or Virgil, bishop of Saltzburg, in the eighth century, with Polydore Vergil, archdeacon of Bath (for he was never bishop of Salisbury at all), in the fifteenth? And then the Inquisition! To make it complete he should have identified Virgil with the Latin poet, and convicted him of the Albigensian heresy. Yet these are the writers who find no terms contemptuous enough in which to speak of mediæval ignorance. “Among the scholastics,” writes Dr. Enfield, in the very next sentence, “we find surprising proofs of weakness and ignorance.” The scholastics, could they speak, might find something to retort on their accusers.
65 The doctrines attributed to Virgil, and their condemnation by Pope Zachary, have been examined by Decker, a professor of Louvain, who shows very clearly that the error lay, not in their maintaining the existence of the antipodes, but in the notion of a race distinct from that of Adam. Feller, in the account he gives of the matter in his Historical Dictionary, refers to the teaching of Bede, who, he declares, denied the spherical figure of the earth. But the work from which he quotes is not to be found among the writings of our English saint, whose real opinion on the subject may be seen from the following explicit passage: “We call the earth a globe, not that it is absolutely the perfect form of a globe, by reason of the unevenness of hills and plains, but because its whole compass, if comprehended within the circumference of lines, would make the figure of a globe.”—De Nat. Rer. c. xlvi. 118.
66 This question was resolved by Pope Zachary in favour of the validity of the baptism so administered.
67 Vita S. Liob. ap. Surium.
68 Tradition says that they stopped at Antwerp some days, and a grotto is still shown in the ancient church dedicated to St. Walburga, where she is said to have prayed.
69 For the ingenious arguments by which certain writers have endeavoured to show that the Council of Cloveshoe rejected the authority of the Roman Pontiff (by whose command it was summoned), and for their able refutation, the reader is referred to “Lingard’s Anglo-Saxon Antiquities,” vol. i. Appendix, note G.
70 Thorpe II. 414.
71 Sid. Apol. Ep. iv. 3.
72 Hist. Litt. t. iii. p. 22.
73 Guizot, Hist. de Civil. vol. ii. lect. 22.
74 Guizot, Hist. de Civil. vol. ii. lect. 22.
75 According to Durandus, the circumstances under which Paul the Deacon wrote this hymn were as follows. Having to sing the blessing of the Paschal candle on Holy Saturday, he unfortunately lost his voice from hoarseness, and to recover it, invoked the aid of St. John Baptist, in whose honour he composed this hymn, in which he solicits him to restore him the use of his voice, and reminds him how at his nativity he had procured a like grace for his father Zachary. This anecdote explains the allusion in the opening lines. To avoid the tiresome confusion arising from the similarity of names, I will remind the reader that there were two persons designated as Paul the Deacon; one the contemporary of St. Gregory, and the other his historian; and moreover that he had another historian in the person of John the Deacon, who lived in the ninth century.
76 The identical copy is still preserved in the Library of Sta. Maria in Vallicella at Rome, and bears on its fly-leaf the following inscription, which many suppose to be the autograph of Alcuin:—
Pro me quisque legas versus, orare memento.
Alcuine dicor; tu, sine fine, vale.
A folio Bible now in the British Museum, and formerly the property of M. de Speyer Passavant, has also its claims to be considered the original copy of Alcuin, though commonly held to have been written in the reign of Charles the Bald.
77 Crevier, Hist. de L’Univ. de Paris, vol. i.
78 Vita Caroli Mon. Engol. an. 787.
79 Vita S. Greg. Joan. Diac. lib. ii. 7.
80 Quatuor Evangelia Christi in ultimo ante obitus sui diem, cum Græcis et Syris optime correxerat. (Thegani, Vita Ludovici Pii, printed in Pertz, Mon. Germ. t ii.)
81 Vita Karoli, Eginhard, cap. 22.
82 See Patrologie Latine, vols. xcvii. and xcviii.
83 The interior schools were known as claustral, and the exterior for secular students as canonical. Ekhehard, in his life of B. Notker, is the first who accurately distinguishes the two sorts of schools. “Traduntur post breve tempus Marcello scholæ claustri cum beato Notkero Balbulo et cæteris monachici habitus pueris: exteriores vero, id est canonicæ, Isoni cum Salomone et ejus comparibus.” It is probable however that the law directing a total separation of the scholars under different masters, could not in all cases be carried out as rigidly as at the great abbey of St. Gall’s, where the studium was, in Notker’s time, the first in Europe; and in many monasteries both schools continued to be directed by the same scholasticus.
84 Præfatio in IV. Sæculum, 184. Trithemius gives the names of sixteen monasteries containing these major schools; Mabillon adds eleven more, and the list might undoubtedly be yet further enlarged.
85 He probably rested his statement on the petition presented by the Council of Paris in 829 to Louis le Débonnaire, in which they requested him, by his royal authority, to establish public schools in three chief cities of his empire, to the end that the troubles of the times might not quite destroy the good work set on foot by his father. But this was a suggestion and nothing more; the three cities were never named, and are merely spoken of as in tribus congruentissimis imperii vestri locis; and the deposition of Louis, and the civil wars that raged between his sons, effectually prevented the suggestion from being carried out. The academy founded by Charlemagne at Pavia, which was directed by the Irish Dungal, was itself attached to a monastery. This is possibly the school alluded to by Bulæus, but there is certainly nothing in its history which claims for it the least pre-eminence over the monastic schools of France and Germany. The university historians have, in general, greatly misrepresented or misunderstood the character of the monastic schools. Du Boulay talks of the public schools of Charlemagne as if they were Etons or Harrows, and in one place likens them to universities. But, in fact, the term public school meant simply that they were not confined to the use of the monks of that monastery, but were open to all comers. We find in them rather the germ of the collegiate system, which was in some sense the counterpoise of the university idea. But Bulæus and Du Boulay always write with Paris University in their mind as the normal principle of education. They seem unable to conceive of any institution for teaching which was not either its copy or its anticipation.
86 Mab. Vet. Analecta, i. 357.
87 See his verses on the destruction of Lindisfarne (Acta SS. Ben.)
88 At Aix-la-Chapelle his bones have been quite recently discovered and identified.—See Die Eröffnung des Karlsschreines, being No. 61 of the Aachener Zeitung, March 2, 1861.
89 See Ampère, Hist. Lit. avant le xii. Siècle, t. ii.
90 Matthew of Westminster represents him as taking refuge in England, where, according to the same authority, he was warmly received by King Alfred, and becoming scholasticus at Malmsbury abbey, was there stabbed to death by his scholars. This story was received as authentic, until Mabillon showed it to have been an incorrect version of the history of John of Saxony, who, when abbot of Ethelingay, was killed in a commotion with some of his monks. In spite of the pains taken by this writer to clear up the mistake, the narrative still finds its place in most works which treat of our old English schools, and will probably be as hard to dislodge as other traditions of the same genus. It appears certain, however, that Scotus Erigena returned to France and died there in peace, some time after the death of Charles the Bald.
91 Many of these towns derive their names from the monks under whom the cells dependent on the abbey were first founded; thus we have Abrazell, Aichezell, Kerzell, and Edelcell, from Abraham, Haicho, Kero, and Edeling, all monks of Fulda.
92 Nepotem meum et cum eo duo alios nobiles puerulos, quando, si Deus vult, nostro monasterio profuturos, propter Germanicæ linguæ nanciscendam scientiam, Vestræ Sanctitati mittere cupio. (Ep. xci.)
93 He appears to have had some knowledge of Hebrew, and introduces a quotation from the Hebrew Scriptures in his Treatise De Partu Virginis.
94 Rabanus, De Instit. Clericorum, lib. iii. c. 24.
95 Tract. de Corpore Christi, printed in Martène, Vet. Script. t. 9.
96 Scandens et descendens inter montium confinia
Silvarum scrutando loca, valliumque concava.
(Hymn for the Procession of Relics. ap. Leibnitz.)
97 Vita B. Notkeri. ch. ix. Acta SS. Ben.
98 Archives of the Chapter of Rouen, ann. 1449.
99 Spicilegium, t. ii. 311.
100 Consuet. Clun. Spicileg. t. i. 687.
101 Vita Ratgari. Acta S.S. Boll. t. i.
102 D’Achery Spicileg. t. ii. p. 139.
103 Hallam’s Middle Ages, vol. iii. p. 330, and note.
104 Guibert de Nogent refers to his school studies of Ovid and Virgil’s Eclogues; and Peter de Blois names Suetonius and Q. Curtius, “besides the other books which are commonly used in schools.” For a full and careful enumeration of the class-books used in the monastic schools, see Bahr: Geschichte der Römischen Literatur; and also Prof. Pauly’s Real Encyclopädie der Classischen Alterthumswissenschaft.
105 Acta SS. Ben. Præf. in Secul. iii.
106 It is reprinted by Mai, Scrip. Vet. t. iii. p. 251.
107 Hilduin, abbot of St. Denis in 814, was the chief supporter of this opinion. The letter addressed to him by the Emperor Louis, and his reply, are prefixed to the Areopagitica in Surius. t. v.
108 Deut. vi. 7.
109 In the preface to the metrical version of the Bible, executed by command of Louis le Debonnaire, we find the following passage: “Præcepit namque uni de gente Saxonum qui apud suos non ignobilis vates habebatur ut Vetus ac Novum Testamentum in Germanicam Linguam poetice transferre studeret, quatenus non solum litteratis verum etiam illiteratis sacra divinorum præceptorum lectio panderetur.”
110 Martene: Thesaurus Anec. i. 489.
111 Vos lumina; vos mea vita... vos novella plantatio. (Vita Sanctæ Cæsariæ.)
112 Si qua enim soror, reliquis in templo cantantibus, sonoræ vocis modulatione non congrueret, a pia illa matre objurgata, vel etiam in facie manibus cæsa, toto reliquæ vitæ spatio clara fuit et delectabili voce. (Vita S. Adehildæ: ap. Surium.)
113 The whole document is to be found in D’Achery’s “Spicilegium,” vol. ii.
114 Hallam, Middle Ages, iii. p. 332.
115 This Saxon school became, afterwards, a great object of interest to Alfred; and Asser tells us, that at his request Pope Martin II. freed it from all taxes and tribute.
116 Wise’s Edition, Oxon. 1722.
117 Asser (Wise’s Ed.), p. 67.
118 Among these homilies is that for the festival of Easter, commonly quoted in support of the audacious theory that the Anglo-Saxon divines knew nothing of the doctrine of Transubstantiation. The whole question is satisfactorily examined by Dr. Lingard, in his “History of the Anglo-Saxon Church,” to which the reader is referred. But it may be observed, that whatever obscurity is to be found in Ælfric’s language, that of other writers of his nation is singularly emphatic. The very term, Transubstantiation, is all but anticipated by Alcuin, who, in a letter to Paulinus, bids him remember his friend “at that time when thou shalt consecrate the bread and wine into the substance of the body and blood of Christ.” And of two saints contemporary with Ælfric, viz. St. Odo and St. Oswald, their biographers record the fact, that while celebrating mass, the appearance of a bleeding Host in their hands removed the doubts of certain beholders. Yet, what doubts had to be removed if the doctrine were not then held?
119 Hist. of Ramsey, ch. lxvii.
120 In the first edition of this book allusion was made to the studies pursued in this century at Croyland abbey. But the chronicle of Ingulphus from which the narrative was quoted, is now generally admitted to be spurious, and the passage has therefore been omitted.
121 Berington, Lit. Hist. book iii. 154.
122 Hallam, Middle Ages, chap. ix. part 1. passim.
123 Florus, Carmina Varia, Vet. Anal. 413.
124 The battle of Fontenay was gained by Charles the Bald and Louis the German over their elder brother Lothaire. The latter was totally defeated, and the old Frankish or Teutonic nobility who supported him were all but entirely destroyed. From this time the Gallo-Roman element began to prevail in France over the German, and the treaty shortly afterwards renewed between Charles and Louis at Strasburg, is the first instance on record of the vernacular dialects being employed on any solemn occasion. Louis as king of the Germans, swore to the treaty in the Romance language, now formally recognised as the language of France while the French king took his oath in Tudesque, or German. On that day, France and Germany may be said to have first assumed their distinct nationalities. The Romance or Rustic Latin became the language of France, though this afterwards separated into two branches, that spoken in the northern provinces, which was more largely mingled with Germanic idioms, and which was known as the Langue d’oyl, or d’oui and the softer dialect of the south, which was called the Langue d’oc. Later on, the Italian Romance became distinct from either of these, and is sometimes spoken of as the Langue de si.
125 Footnote: Hallam, Middle Ages, chap. i. part 1.
126 Acta SS. Ben. Vita S. Anscharii.
127 Odericus Vitalis, B. vi. ch. 10.
128 Analect. tom. i. 426.
129 Gesta Epis. Leod. cap. 25.
130 Fleury observes that by the “Dialectics of St. Augustine” is supposed to be meant the treatise of the ten categories, attributed to St. Augustine from the time of Alcuin.
131 D’Achery, Spic. t. i. 372.
132 Esuries Te, Christe Deus, sitis atque videndi
Jam modo carnales me vetat esse dapes.
Da mihi Te vesci, Te potum haurire salutis,
Unicus ignotæ Tu cibus esto viæ;
Et quem longa fames errantem ambedit in orbe
Hunc satia vultu, Patris Imago, Tuo.
133 St. Maieul of Cluny always “refreshed his mind with reading” as he rode, and one day both horse and man fell into a quagmire. And Thierry, abbot of St. Hubert’s, lost his way, and very nearly his life also, owing to his being so intent on the recitation of the Psalms that he did not see where his horse was going. Many examples of a similar nature are to be met with.
134 Quando illi prandentes in angulis scholæ, dulcia obsonia magistro furantur.—Vita S. Adalberti, Acta SS. Ben.
135 The following is his version of the “Our Father”:—
Fater unser du in himele bist. Din na’ mo vuerde geheiligot. Din riche chome. Din wille geskehe in erdo also in himele. Unser ta’ golicha brot kib uns hinto-unde. Unsere sculde belak uns, also ouch wir bela’ zend unsern sculdigen. Und in chorunga nit leitest du unsich. Nu belose unsich some ubele.
136 I wish to be a Greek, lady, who am scarcely yet a Latin.
137 I am altogether unable to compose worthy verses, for I am so confused by the caresses of the duchess.
138 Oderic. Vit. B. vi. c. iv.
139 Wis. vii. 17. 22-23.
140 Richer’s history is printed at length in Pertz’s Monumenta Germaniæ Historica, Tom. iii.
141 Gerbert taught his disciples the use of the monochord; a single string, which being struck at different intervals, gave out the different sounds of the gamut. These intervals were marked on the chord, and the words to be sung had written over them a cipher, showing to what interval on the monochord it corresponded. A person therefore could always set himself right by sounding the note he wanted, as we should use a pitch-key. A description of this instrument is given by the monk Odoramn, whose works have been discovered and published by Cardinal Mai, and whose musical treatises are said to be based on the scientific principles of Boëthius and Euclid.
142 The Arabs received the knowledge of the Indian numerals in the ninth century. “But the profound and important historical investigations to which a distinguished mathematician, M. Chasles, was led by his correct interpretation of the so-called Pythagorean table in the geometry of Boëthius,” says M. Humboldt, “render it more than probable that the Christians in the West were acquainted even earlier than the Arabians with the Indian system of numeration; the use of the nine figures, having their value determined by position, being known by them under the name of the System of the Abacus.” (Cosmos, vol. ii. p. 226, also note 358. See also M. Chasles, Aperçu historique des méthodes en géométrie, 464-472, and his papers in the Comptes-rendus de l’Acad. des Sciences.)
143 The story has of course been taken up by the usual chorus of modern writers, but its fallacy is well exposed by Gretser, who shows that the tenth century knew nothing of the rumour, which entirely originated in the fertile brain of Benno.
144 Meibomius, Scrip. Rerum German. t. i. 706.
145 In the year 1867 a controversy arose in Germany concerning the authenticity of the works attributed to Hroswitha. Professor Aschbach, of the Imperial Academy of Vienna, in a paper printed that year in the Acts of the Academy, endeavoured to prove them audacious forgeries; and supposed the author of the fraud to have been one Conrad Celtes, a Humanist of the fifteenth century. The question was taken up on both sides. Several distinguished writers and their arguments and investigations appear to have successfully vindicated the genuine character of the works, and to have established Hroswitha’s claim to be considered their real authoress. See B. Tenk, Neber Roswitha Carmen de Gestis Oddonis, Leipzig, 1876. R. Kœpke, Ottonische Studien zur deutschen geschichte im 10ten jahrhundert, II. Hroswith von Gandersheim (xv. s. 314.) Die Aelteste deutsche Dichterin (III. 127. S), Berlin, 1869. Hroswitha, die helltönende Stimme von Gandersheim. In Westermann’s Illustr. Monatsheften, 1871, &c.
146 Rohrbacher, Hist. de l’Eglise, vol. xiii. 540.
147 Adelmann Rythmi Alphabetici. Vet. Anal. iv. 382.
148 Analecta, t. iv. 385-387.
149 Rémusat, St. Anselme de Cantorbéry, liv. ii. chap. iv. The various opinions in favour of and against this argument are given in chap. v.
150 Fleury, lib. lxii. 1.
151 O’er wayward childhood wouldst thou hold firm rule,
And sun thee in the light of happy faces?
Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces,
And in thine own heart let them first keep school.
For, as old Atlas on his broad neck places
Heaven’s starry globe, and there sustains it;—so
Do these upbear the little world below
Of education,—Patience, Love, and Hope.
—Coleridge.
152 So at least we conjecture from certain stage directions in the dramas of Hroswitha, which seem to infer a good deal of skill on the part of the stage manager.
153 M. Delisle, in his Notice on the Life and Writings of Odericus, explains this expression to mean the Latin alphabet; Carmenta Nicostrata, the mother of the Arcadian Evander, being held by some to have first invented letters. He could not, however, have been five years learning his alphabet, so we may probably understand him to mean the ordinary elementary instruction in Latin.
154 Now known as the Priorata, or Priory of St. John of Jerusalem.
155 Rohrbacher, Hist. Ecc. tom. xiv. 48-60.
156 Essa è la luce eterna di Sigieri,
Che, leggendo nel Vico degli Strami,
Sillogizzo invidiosi veri.—Parad. x. 136.
157 Pertz, Monumenta Germanica, tom. iv. 39.
158 Chron. Clun. ap. Bib. Clun. 1645.
159 It may be taken as tolerably well proved, however, that he was really an Irishman, and he is supposed to have been a monk of Clonard. Contemporary with him was another famous Irish historian, Tigernach, abbot of Clonmacnoise, who wrote his chronicle partly in Irish and partly in Latin, and is held to have been well acquainted with Greek. The Irish scholars highly distinguished themselves in this century. There was an Irish monastery at Erford, and another at Cologne, into which Helias, a monk of Monaghan, on returning from a visit to Rome, introduced the Roman chant (Lanigan, Ecc. Hist. c. xxiv.)
160 Histoire Lit. tom. vii. 58, and tom. ix. 149. The same authority makes mention of other translations in French of the Four Gospels, the Epistles of St. Paul, the Psalms, and some books of the Old Testament, all made in the diocese of Metz in the twelfth century.
161 Sicut rectus ordo exigit ut profunda Christianæ fidei credamus, priusquam ea præsumamus ratione discutere; ita negligentia mihi videtur si postquam confirmati sumus in fide, non studemus quod credimus intelligere. Opp. S. Anselm, de Fide Trinitatis et de Incarn. Prœf. et Cur Deus homo? c. i. et 2.
162 Abelard is classed by John of Salisbury as belonging to the sect of the Nominalists. (De Nugis Curialium, 7, 12. Metalog. 2, 17.) His followers, however, disliked the name, and he is more commonly described as a Conceptualist.
163 Jo. Saris. Ep. xxiv.
164 A certain enemy of the poets in the days of Virgil.
165 Except indeed we reckon St. Anselm as the first of the schoolmen. But though this would be, strictly speaking, correct, the formation of Scholastic Theology as a distinct science is not generally spoken of before the time of Peter Lombard.
166 In his work entitled De Nugis Curialium, he is said to have quoted upwards of one hundred and twenty writers of antiquity.
167 Metalogicon, lib. vii. c. 13.
168 Jos. xv. 15.
169 Jacob de Vitrag. Hist. Occ. c. 7. Fleury, Hist. Eccles. liv. 66. lix.
170 Archi-Trenius, or the Chief Lamenter,—a name taken from the Greek title of the Book of Lamentations.
171 Du Boulai. Hist. de l’Univ. t. iii. p. 31.
172 Terra mota est, etenim cœli distillaverunt... pluviam voluntariam segregabis Deus, hæreditati tuæ. Ps. lxvii. 10, 11.
“La main de Dieu, lorsqu’elle nous châtie, est comme celle du chirurgien qui ne blesse que pour guérir, et à la fin les foudres se convertissent en pluies que Dieu réserve pour l’heritage de ses élus.” (Esprit de S. François de Sales.)
173 Grandes Chroniques de France, ann. 1196.
174 Lebœuf, Hist. du diocèse de Paris, i. 6.
175 The collection of the Roman Imperial statutes, known as the Justinian Code, was published by order of Justinian in 529. Three years later appeared fifty books, containing the decisions of famous jurists, and this digest received the name of the Pandects. An introduction, to facilitate the study of the Pandects, with four additional books, make up the Institutes; and, lastly, certain new statutes added at the revision of the code made in 534, formed the Novellæ; the whole collection making up the body of the Roman or civil law.
176 Cosmos (Sabine’s Translation), vol. ii. note 331.
177 His story is introduced by Dante into the Inferno, cant. xiii.
178 The university of Toulouse was established in virtue of certain articles introduced into the treaty of peace between Count Raymund of Toulouse and St. Louis of France. The count agreed to pay 4000 marks for the maintenance of certain masters for ten years; namely, two doctors of theology, two canonists, six masters of liberal arts, and two of grammar. This foundation was made for the express purpose of combating the Albigensian heresy in its headquarters.
179 The feudal lords in the eleventh century frequently claimed and exercised the right of appointing the scholasticus to certain churches where benefices were attached to the office. (See Martene, Ampl. Coll. t. ii. 974-979.) But even then the approval of the bishop or his chancellor was required, and he could claim the right of veto, when objections to the candidate existed on the score of faith or morals.
180 Crevier, Hist. de l’Univ. vol. i. p. 256. The custom was made law by a decree of the Third Council of Lateran in 1179. But forty years earlier we find the Council of Westminster prohibiting cathedral scholastics from accepting payment for the licenses granted by them to schoolmasters in towns and villages.
181 Thus we read that W. de Champeaux held the office of archdeacon of Paris, and governed the cathedral schools. “It had been the rule,” says Crevier, “that all who wished to open a school should obtain a license from the scholasticus, that is, the chancellor, of the church in whose territory they wished to establish themselves.” See also the statutes of Lichfield Cathedral. (Monas. Anglic. t. 3. p. 34.) “Officium Cancellarii est, sive residens sive non extiterit, lectiones legendas in ecclesia per se, vel per suum vicarium, auscultare, male legentes emendare, scholas conferre, &c.” (Quoted by Du Cange.) The chancellor of St. Paul’s, London, had jurisdiction over all the schools of the city. He was called the Magister Scholarum, and the master of the cathedral grammar school acted as his vice-chancellor. (Lib. Stat. Eccl. S. Pauli.) In the reign of Stephen we find an ordinance from the legate, Henry de Blois, to the effect that all schoolmasters teaching schools in London, without license from the cathedral scholasticus, should be excommunicated.
182 Quoted in Catholic University Gazette, Oct. 26, 1854.
183 Crevier, Hist. de l’Univ. vol. ii.
184 For a summary of the errors condemned, see Martene, Thesaur. Anecdot. t. iv. col. 163, 164.
185 Jasinski, Sum. Ordin. Cap. Gen. p. 403.
186 Const. FF. Præd. dis. n. note a.
187 Const. FF. Præd. dis. ii. note b.
188 Ibid. Paris, 1236. De Studiis linguarum. S. (Const. Fontana, 1862.)
189 Const. Dis. ii. De Student. iv. note g.
190 Const. F. F. Præd. De Studentibus. This provision of the ancient Constitutions is commented on by the statutes of more modern addition, wherein we see the immense importance attached by the Order to the study of Church history. After speaking of the study of the Scriptures, it is said: “Another fount of theological science is ecclesiastical history, which is, as it were, the complement, and ever-living interpreter of Holy Scripture; so that these two are the duo luminaria magna, illuminating all the faithful in Christ, and manifesting without a cloud of error, all those truths revealed by God; for the history of the Church, rightly speaking, is nothing else than Christian doctrine in act, nor is there any better or more easy way of knowing the Catholic dogma; for it is nothing else than a series of battles and triumphs of our faith against the insurgent heresies, which the Church, by her doctors, martyrs, and decrees of Popes and Councils has successively pierced through and overcome; whence the certain interpretation of Scripture and the clear explanation of tradition and the authoritative definition of dogma, are all to be found in the History of the Church.” Const. F. F. Præd. (Fontana, 1862.) De Studio, p. 458.
191 Fleury, Histoire Eccl. Discours 5me.
The order of graduation, as it exists at present, is as follows: Eight years of study are required before any one can be admitted to the degree of Lector, and to obtain this a student must undergo an examination in Philosophy, Modern Controversy, Scripture, and the Summa of St. Thomas. The active or teaching course, required for the higher degrees of Bachelor and Doctor, remains nearly the same as in former days. Various modifications have from time to time been introduced into the legislation of the Order on this point, but the principle has always been retained of making a long course of teaching and repeated examinations the test of qualification. Secular students in a Dominican College, however, may be admitted to the degree of Doctor after only a three years’ course of Theology, provided they stand an examination in the Summa; and by the Bull of Pope Clement XII., all such secular graduates of the Dominican schools hold the same position in every respect as though they had been promoted to the Doctorship in the Roman College of the Sapienza. (Fontana, p. 206.)
192 His words are as follows: “When I was at Venice, being still a youth, they were sawing some stones for the repair of one of the churches, and it chanced that in one of these blocks there appeared the figure of a head; as of a king, crowned with a long beard. The countenance had no other defect, save that the forehead was too high ascending towards the top of the head. All of us who examined it were satisfied that it was the work of nature. And I being questioned as to the cause of the disproportioned forehead, replied that this stone had been coagulated by the work of vapour, and that by means of a more powerful heat the vapour had arisen without order or measure.” (Op. tom. 2 De Mineralibus. lib. 2, tract. 3, c. i.) The expressions here used are somewhat obscure, but they seem to imply that Albert knew something of those phenomena which geologists explain as the result of volcanic heat and the action of vapour. “Transformed, or metamorphic rocks,” says Humboldt, “are those in which the texture and mode of stratification have been altered either by the contact or proximity of an irrupted volcanic rock, or, as is more frequently the case, by the action of vapours and sublimations which accompany the issue of certain masses in a state of igneous liquefaction.” (Cosmos. vol. i. p. 236.)
193 “Quia totum scibile scisti.”—Jammy, Vita B. Alberti.
194 The very remarkable passage here referred to by Humboldt is to be found in the Treatise, “De Cælo et Mundo.”
195 Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. ii. p. 247.
196 Among these, besides the celebrated speaking head, the account of which is too legendary to be depended on, we must reckon the mode of rendering sensible the phenomena of an earthquake, which he describes in his book on meteors, and which finds a place in most modern works on popular science; his automata made to move by means of mercury according to the method of Chinese toys; and the so-called magic cup, which is still preserved in the Museum of Cologne.
197 Rutebœuf, the celebrated crusading minstrel of the thirteenth century, whose reckless sarcasm spared no one, not even St. Louis himself, endeavoured to console the defeated seculars by directing his most cutting satire against their opponents, in a piece entitled “La descorde de l’université et des Jacobins.” The poem contains many curious illustrations of the manners and studies of the Paris students, and it need hardly be said that the Jacobins fare but badly. When first the friars came into the world, he says, they took lodgings with humility, but now they are masters of Paris and Rome,
Et par leur grant chape roonde
Ont versé l’université.
198 Ps. ciii. 13.
199 Boll. Vita S. Thom. p. 712, n. 77.
200 Institutions Liturgiques, tom. 1, 348.
201 Frigerio, Vita di S. Tomaso, lib. ii. c. x.
202 Sixtus of Sienna and Trithemius both declare that St. Thomas explained all the works of Aristotle, and that he was the first Latin Doctor who did so, but the Commentaries that are preserved treat only of fifty two books. This purgation of the pagan philosophy is alluded to in the Matins hymn for his office, as forming one of his chief glories:
Plusquam doctores cæteri
Purgans dogma Gentilium.
203 Qu. 85, Act. 2, Ad. 3
204 Qu. 84, 7.
205 Contra Gen. 1, 7.
206 Qu. i. Act. 8.
207 Dalgairns, Introduction to the Life of St. Richard, pp. 36, 37.
208 At Paris 1286, Bourdeaux 1287, and Lucca 1288.
209 Vie de S. Thomas, livre v. ch. xi.
210 Echard, de Script. Ord. t. i. 435.
211 In c. 5. Matth. quoted by Touron, liv. 4, ch. 3.
212 Lib. 1, contra Gentil. c. 2, quoted by Touron.
213 Boll. p. 715, n. 80.
214 This idea is doubtless little in accordance with our ordinary way of regarding the mechanical arts, but the reader will remember the words of Scripture, which tells us how the Lord called Beseleel the son of Uri, and filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom and understanding and all learning to work in gold and silver and carpenter’s work; and how He put wisdom into the heart of every skilful man to know how to work artificially, and to the women that they might spin fine linen. (Exod. xxxi. 3; xxxv. 25, 35; xxxvi. 1.) How sublime is this view, which displays to us every part of human knowledge, the humblest as well as the most profound, as, alike, but sparks from the One Fontal Light,—the Illuminating Spirit of God!
215 S. Bonaventure (quoted in the Dublin Review, Dec. 1851), from his small work called “The Reduction of the Arts to Theology.”
216 De Studio legendi, iii. 3-6, quoted in the Appendix to Newman’s University Lectures.
217 Eccl. Hist. vol. 18, p. 434-444.
218 Ibid. vol. 18, p. 444.
219 See Touron, Vies des Hommes Illustres, tom. i. 489-504; where are also to be found notices of F. Paul Christiani, and other Hebrew scholars of the order.
220 These foundations are thought worthy of being named among his greatest works in the Breviary lessons for the Octave day of his feast: “Hebraicæ et Arabicæ linguæ publicas scholas in Ordine Prædicatorum impensis instituit.”
221 The letter is printed at length in Martene’s Collection, Tom. iv. col. 1527.
222 Crevier, Hist. de l’Univ. de Paris. Vol. ii. p. 227. There is incidental evidence that the Greek and Oriental tongues were occasionally studied even by members of the secular colleges of Paris, during this and the following century. Stephen Pasquier speaks of a certain youth of twenty, who in the year 1445 spoke very subtle Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldaic, and Arabic, besides many other tongues; and winds up his account by saying that if an ordinary man had lived a hundred years without eating and sleeping he could not have learnt as much as this young prodigy. His learning, however, was evidently something rather uncommon, for, says the historian, it put all his fellow-students in fear lest he knew more than human nature ought to know, and might possibly be “a young Antichrist.”
223 Ayliffe; State of the University of Oxford, vol. i. p. 106.
224 Fontana, Const. De studio Linguarum. g. p. 467; also Jasinsky, Studium Linguarum. lit. B.
225 Annibaldi was a pupil of Albert the Great, and took his Doctor’s degree in Paris, where he enjoyed a very brilliant reputation. Innocent IV. created him Master of the Sacred Palace. But being promoted to the purple in 1263 be solicited Urban IV. to name as his successor in that office a certain learned English Friar, F. William Bonderinensis, as he is called in the Catalogue of the Masters, who belonged to the Convent of London, and was the only one of our countrymen who ever filled that important post.
226 Hibernia Dominicana, p. 191.
227 Speech on the Extension of Academic Education in Ireland, delivered at Cork, Nov. 13, 1844; quoted in an article on the Ancient Dominican Irish Schools; Dublin Review, Sept. 1845.
228 Hib. Dominicana, p. 193.
229 Cantu, Histoire Universelle, vol. xi, p. 593.
230 M. Cartier, in his introduction to the Life of Fra Angelico, has adduced many passages from St. Thomas, not only elucidating the philosophy of Christian art, but showing that he had a natural taste for such pursuits, and drew from them more than one graceful illustration. Thus he lays down the three conditions of beauty to consist in entireness, proportion, and clearness of colour. He also enunciates that broad principle which justifies us in requiring that one who aims at representing spiritual subjects should himself be holy in life, when he declares that “all inferior forms flow from the forms which are in the intellect.” For how then, we may argue, can a spiritual form flow from a debased intellect? And among the maxims and sayings preserved by his biographers there occur more than one, the imagery of which seems to show even a practical acquaintance with the art of painting.
231 Histoire Eccl., vol. xviii. p. 686.
232 The image is taken from St. Gregory, who compares secular letters to the smiths’ tools which were to be found in the hands, not of the Israelites, but of the Philistines. Nevertheless, he says, as the Israelites went down to the Philistines and borrowed their tools to sharpen their own instruments, so Christians may and ought to use the liberal arts in order to explain and defend the truths of religion. And those who seek to prohibit the faithful from the study of the liberal sciences are like the Philistines who did not suffer the children of Israel to have smiths among them, “lest they should make them swords or spears.” (S. Greg. in 1 Reg. lib. v. c. iii. No. 30.)
233 Greith; Die Deutsche Mystik im Prediger-Orden, pp 38, 39.
234 Quoted by Sighart (French Trans.), p. 378.
235 Summa, 2, 2, qu. 180, 1, ad 1 et 2.
236 Ibid. 1. 2, qu. 27, a. 2, and 2.
237 S. Thom. 2, 2, q. 27, a. 6.
238 Sup. Psal. xxi.
239 Sermon for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost.
240 S. Antoninus, Vita, § 6.
241 Preface to his Meditations from St. Thomas.
242 Eccles. xxiv. 43, 44, 47 (Lessons for the Common of Doctors).
243 Leland.
244 Nevertheless, oddly enough, the susceptibility to natural beauty and the power of describing it with the pen is often claimed as one of the good things restored to us by the Renaissance. The author of Cosmos, in that beautiful Introduction to his work in which he traces the history of the love of nature, observes that, “when the sudden intercourse with Greece caused a general revival of classical literature, we find as the first example among prose writers a charming description of nature from the pen of Cardinal Bembo.” Had the writer opened any of the monastic Chronicles in which his own country is so rich, he would have found that the monks, whom Bembo would have regarded as barbarians, had been before him as landscape painters in words, by at least six centuries.
245 Fescennia, a town of Etruria, was noted in the days of Horace for the rude extempore verses, full of coarse raillery, composed by its inhabitants, and commonly known as Fescennina carmina (Hor. Ep. ii. 1. 145). The Theonine tooth is likewise an expression derived from Horace (Ep. i. 18. 82); and seems to have been a proverbial expression derived from Theon, the name of a certain Roman freedman, well known for his malignant wit. (See Notes on Horace by Rev. A. J. Maclean.)
246 If the suggestion to restore the teaching of the Latin prayers and the plain song of the Church in our parochial schools be deemed preposterous on the ground of its difficulty, we would simply beg objectors to try the experiment before passing judgment. A very short experience will prove that with ordinary perseverance nothing is easier than to make a class of boys recite fluently and chant correctly from note the Psalms of Vespers or Compline, or the Credo, Gloria, and other portions of the Mass; and we may add, that nothing seems more acceptable to the scholars themselves. What was possible in an age when the whole instruction must have been given orally, cannot have any insuperable difficulties about it in days when every child may be provided with a printed book. Possibly in a congregation thus trained there might be fewer complaints than there now are on the score of children behaving badly in church: for when children understand and take part in what is going on around them, they do not behave amiss. More valid objections can be conceived as arising from the difficulty of sparing the time when so many other subjects have to be taught. But what is more essential to teach Catholics than their Catholic prayers? and what branch of secular learning will prove a substitute for sound, genuine, and intelligent Catholic Faith?
247 Many different versions exist of this hymn, which may be thus rendered into modern English: “Saint Mary, pure Virgin Mother of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, take, shield, help mine Godric, take, bring him safe with thee into the kingdom of God., Saint Mary, bower of Christ, purity of virgins, flower of mothers, take away my sins, reign in my mind, and bring me to dwell with the only God.”
248 The custom was very general in poor parishes. Thus Reginald of Durham tells us of a certain scholar, Haldene by name, who was wont to attend the school which, “according to the known and accustomed usage,” was held in the Church of St. Cuthbert, at Northam. One day Haldene, who did not know his lessons and was afraid of the rod, conceived the bright idea of getting hold of the key and throwing it into the Tweed, so that when the hour of Vespers came no key was to be found. The example, in far later times, of “Wonderful Walker,” keeping school in his village church, was therefore but a surviving relic of the primitive manners.
249 Antiquities of the Monastical Church of Durham, pp. 54, 77.
250 Wood. Antiq. of Oxford, lib. i. p. 135.
251 Ralph Bocking was a Dominican Friar and a native of Chichester, and wrote the life of the Saint (whose confessor he was) with great feeling and devotion.
252 He adds that this decking of the well was prohibited by the Parliament, as a popish abomination, after which “the water shranke up.” On this the rustics set the Parliament at defiance and revived the ancient custom, whereupon, to their inexpressible consolation the water recommenced flowing.
253 For a statement of the arguments by which this opinion is supported, see Rohrbacher, Histoire Eccl. t. xviii. pp. 478-482.
254 Fleury, who in his fifth Discourse has spoken with equal contempt of the theological and literary merits of the scholastics, winds up by reminding the reader that they wrote at a time when everything exhibited the same bad taste as was displayed in Gothic architecture, that absurd assemblage of petty ornaments “which no architect would ever dream of imitating.” Nothing endurable in point of style or art was, according to him, to be seen in Europe from the fall of the Roman empire until the fifteenth century, that is, during the whole essentially Christian period. With what amazement would he have beheld the Christian Renaissance of our own days, and the reflux of taste into mediæval channels!
255 Godwin, and some other writers, claim Kilwarby as a Franciscan. But the evidence in favour of his being a Dominican is irresistible. He was present at the general chapter of the Order of Preachers held at Barcelona in 1261; he attended the Provincial chapter of Montpelier in 1271, and is named in the acts of that council among other distinguished men of the Order then present. He was discharged from his office of Provincial in the General Chapter held at Florence, 1272, but was re-elected by the Provincial Chapter of England the same year. He is described as a Friar Preacher in the Patent Rolls of Edward I., when the temporalities of Canterbury were restored; and Nicholas Trivet, the historian of the Order, who lived only fifty years after the archbishop, distinctly names him as a Dominican. Finally, his name does not occur in the Catalogue of English Franciscan Provincials.
256 Collier, Eccl. History; vol. i. Book 5, p. 484.
257 Nich. Trivet. Annales regum Angliæ.
258 For the beautiful narrative of this event see the Life of St. Edmund, by the Abbé Massé.
259 His name appears in the MS. Catalogue of Fellows of Merton under Edward II., preserved in the College Library.
260 In his inedited commentary on the Divina Commedia, written whilst attending the Council of Constance, he says, “Anagogice dilexit theologiam sacrum in qua diu studuit tam in Oxoniis in regno Angliæ, quam Parisiis.” And again: “Dante se in juventute dedit omnibus artibus liberalibus, studens eas Paduæ, Bononiæ, demum Oxoniis et Parisiis, ubi fecit multos actus mirabiles, intantum quod ab aliquibus dicebatur magnus philosophus, ab aliquibus magnus theologus, ab aliquibus magnus poëta.” It is possible that his authority for this statement was drawn from English sources; for his own Latin translation of the poem was undertaken at the request of two English bishops present at the Council, Bubwith of Bath and Halam of Salisbury.
261 Il maestro vostro ben vi scrive.—Par. canto viii.
262 Par. xxiv. 130.
263 It must not be supposed, from the mention of burning, that Dante was the object of religious persecution. A reference to the annals of Florence, Siena, or any of the other Italian republics, will show that this punishment was very commonly decreed by the dominant party against their political opponents. Thus Silvestro de’ Medici, on gaining the upper hand in Florence, burnt several citizens of note, with their palaces. And these atrocious cruelties were perpetrated for no imaginable crime, but simply to get rid of hated rivals. In the Revolution of 1369 we read that Bruno da Renaldini had his head cut off, senza cagione niuna.
264 Par. vi. 106.
265 Purg. xx. 85.
266 The celebrated Dominican, Durandus, Bishop of Mende, wrote his Rationale Divinorum Officiorum about the year 1290. He may be considered almost the last of the great liturgical writers of the Church, the catalogue of whom includes the names of St. Isidore of Seville, Alcuin, Amalarius of Metz, Walafrid Strabo, Rabanus Maurus, Bruno of Asti, the Abbot Rupert, Honorius of Autun, and Pope Innocent III.
267 Purgatorio, xxii. 101 (Carey’s translation).
268 Purg. x. 128.
269 Rafel maì amech zàbi almi,
Comincio a gridar la fiera bocca
Cui non si convenien più dolci salmi.—Inferno, xxxi. 70.
270 Purg. i. 23.
271 Par. i. 37; Purg. xxx. 89.
272 Inferno, xxxiv. 110.
273 See particularly the description of the falcon (Purg. xix. 63), the lark (Par. xx. 73), the rooks (Par. xxi. 34), the pigeon (Purg. ii. 118), the cranes (Purg. xxiv. 63), and of other birds (Par. xviii. 68, xxiii. 1).
274 Purg. xxviii. 18, i. 113, and xxvii. 76; Par. xxxiii. 77.
275 Purg. x. 37; Par. xx. 73, and xxxi. 40.
276 Par. xv. 124 (Carey’s translation).
277 Tiraboschi, Istoria della Lit. Ital. v. 43.
278 Soc. Hist. Eccl., l. 3, c. 16.
279 “Pendant deux siècles, ni parmi les évêques, ni parmi les prêtres, ni parmi les moines français, on ne rencontre pas un seul personnage d’une vertu, d’une saintété, d’une doctrine entièrement approuvées par l’Église. Cette expérience de deux siècles accuse dans le clergé français une diminution de l’esprit de Dieu.”—Rohrbacher, xxii. 462.
280 St. Palaye, Mémoires sur l’Ancienne Chevalerie, part i. 7.
281 Chaucer, Romaunt of the Rose. Eustache Deschamps is equally emphatic on this point:—
Vous qui voulez l’ordre de chevalier
Il vous convient mener nouvelle vie,
Devotement en oraison veillier,
Péché fuir, orgueil et villenie.
282 Ordre de Chevalerie, fol. 10, 11.
283 Godwin, Life of Chaucer.
284 How significant are the words famulus and famula, by which the household servants are designated in the unclassical Latin of the Middle Ages! The servus of the Romans was, we know, nothing more than a slave; but the famulus, whether bond or free, was a member of the family, and a servant only in that sense in which his master owned himself the servant of Christ—famulus Christi.
285 Innumerable decrees of provincial councils are to be found directed against these wandering clerks. And Edward II. issued a proclamation setting forth, “that whereas many idle and evil men, under colour of minstrelsy, get received into the houses of the rich to meat and drink, henceforth no great lord shall receive more than three or four minstrels of honour; and that none shall thrust themselves in unless they be sent for.”
286 Dibdin in his Typographical Antiquities (p. 142) examines the question whether Trevisa did or did not translate the Bible into English. To settle the question whether such a book was preserved at Berkeley Castle (where Trevisa was chaplain in 1387) Dibdin wrote to the Rev. J. Hughes, who filled the same office in 1807, and received the following reply:—
“I have the strongest reason for supposing that such a translation was made in the English language, and that it existed in the family so late as the time of James I. The book translated by Trevisa was given as a very precious gift by the Lord Berkeley of that time to the Prince of Wales, and I have read his letter thanking Lord Berkeley for the same. He does not positively say that the book was the Bible, but he says he hopes to make good use of so valuable a gift. This letter is still extant among the archives of the castle. Lord Berkeley has informed me that the book so given by his ancestor is at present in the Vatican Library. When he was at Rome several persons mentioned to him having seen there such a book, written by Trevisa; but as he had no opportunity of examining it, he cannot ascertain if it were the Bible.”
287 Lamberde’s Perambulations in Kent, 1570.
288 S. Anselmi Elucidarii, lib. ii. cap. 18.
289 Chaucer’s expansion of some of the Latin of Boëthius, in his English version of the “Consolation of Philosophie,” has led some people to suppose that the poet translated from a French rendering of Boëthius, and not direct from the Latin. If he did so, the version he would have used was doubtless that of one of his known favourite authors, Jean de Méung, the continuator of Guillaume de Lorris’s “Romance of the Rose.” A magnificent copy of Jean de Méung’s Boëthius, printed in 1494, is in the British Museum. It is illuminated with miniatures, bound in velvet, and was presented to Henry VII. A chapter of this has lately been compared with Chaucer’s translation and the original Boëthius, by Mr. Edward Bell, for the Early English Text Society; and the result is, that Chaucer’s version was certainly not made from the French of Jean de Méung, but direct from Boëthius; though some phrases of the Latin are paraphrased rather than translated, in order to bring out their meaning more fully.
290 Wilk. Con. iii, 242. Quoted by Lingard, v. ch. i.
291 It appears that so far from being a friend to the classics, Wickliffe felt almost a superstitious intolerance for anything that savoured of ancient Rome. In one of his Prologues he condemns the ecclesiastics for their study of a pagan jurisprudence, meaning thereby the Roman law.
292 See Lingard, iv. ch. 3, where he gives several examples of Wickliffe’s system of non-natural interpretation of his own words.
293 William Lyndwood, LL.D., was Bishop of St. David’s, and a learned canonist. He was the author of a collection of constitutions of the English Primates, entitled, Provinciale, seu Constitutiones Angliæ, which were printed by Caxton.
294 Strype’s Cranmer, app. 242. We may compare this admission of the Protestant archbishop with the statute of his royal master (33 Henry VIII. c. 12), whereby it was enacted that “no women not of gentle birth, nor journeymen, artificers’ apprentices, should read the Bible in English, either to themselves or others;” whilst another Act of the same monarch forbade the public reading of the Scriptures.
295 A field of battle is perhaps the last place where one would expect to find a Bible; yet in the British Museum is still preserved the copy of the Scriptures found in the tent of King John of France after the battle of Poictiers. It may be remarked, that versions of the Scriptures seem to have appeared in all languages as soon as the vernacular idiom of any country assumed a literary form. Thus we see Queen Anne had her Bohemian Catholic translation; and in 1399 the Polish translation was made by command of the learned queen St. Hedwiges.
296 The Lollard heresy had been imported from the University of Oxford into that of Prague by some Bohemian gentlemen, who had come over to England in the suite of Queen Anne during the height of the controversy. Prague University at that time numbered as many as 60,000 scholars, and was divided into several nations, and presided over by sixty deans. Only twelve of the deans were Bohemians, and the rest Germans. John Huss, the rector of the university, who eagerly embraced the new opinions, endeavoured to destroy the German influence; and putting himself at the head of a national party obtained that in future the Bohemians should have two votes in all questions affecting the university and all the other nations united but one. In consequence of this change, which took place in 1409, the German students forsook the university, which from that time fell into decay. This national spirit, which was so largely mixed up with the origin and progress of the Hussite heresy, must be taken into account when studying the history of those social revolutions which followed in the track of the new Apostles.
297 For an account of these foundations see The Three Chancellors. (Burns, 1860.)
298 The present revenues amount to something like £4000 a year, and still afford relief to about 140 poor persons. But the beautiful collegiate church, the carved and gilded roof of which is still visible, is now converted to domestic purposes. The choir is occupied by the women’s wards, and the nave by those of the men. This, however, is better than the fate which has awaited St. Paul’s Hospital in the same city, which has been transformed into a Bridewell. Few English cities can have been richer in these charitable houses than Norwich, which contained, besides its great College, seventeen hospitals for the poor and the sick, by means of which it is probable that very sufficient relief was given to all in distress. For, in most cases, while only a limited number were received into the house, outdoor relief was very extensively granted, and at St. Giles’ Hospital it was customary on the Feast of the Annunciation to distribute alms to 130 necessitous persons.
299 i.e. bread and milk.
300 Fadeth.
301 Pierced.
302 Warton says 600, but this possibly included the Angervyle Library, which was united to Gloucester’s in 1480. The 129 volumes named above were valued at £1000. Possibly his collection included not a few of the 853 volumes sent over from Paris by his brother the Duke of Bedford.
303 Carpenter’s Life has been written by Brewer, and a statue to his memory, on the pedestal of which are engraved all his munificent deeds, has been erected by the Corporation of London. A catalogue of his books is given in the Appendix to his Life.
304 Stowe.
305 The Saints Lives printed by Caxton are The Lyf of St. Katherin of Senis, Bradshaw’s Lyf of St. Wenefryde, and The Golden Legende, of which last he printed three editions.
306 These he never lived to publish, but the autograph MS. of his translation from the French is preserved at Cambridge.
307 Martene has published in his Collectanea an interesting letter addressed to Cecilia by Gregorio Corraro, an old schoolfellow of hers at the Joyous House, who then filled the office of Apostolic Notary, in which he affectionately encourages her in her vocation. Of her mother, Paula Gonzaga, we read that “she was a woman of singular virtue, the mirror of excellence to all Italy. She had a good knowledge of letters, always dressed with great modesty, and daily recited the Divine Office. It was enough to see her,” adds her biographer, Vespasiano Bisticci, “to understand what she was.”
308 According to Echard, the dangerous tendency of his idolatry of Plato was pointed out to Ficinus by St. Antoninus, who engaged him to suspend his studies of the heathen philosopher till he had read the Summa against the Gentiles, of St. Thomas. And he was wont afterwards to acknowledge that if he had been saved from actual heresy, he owed it solely to the care of this good pastor.
309 Some curious facts in connection with the proceedings of Pomponius and his associates have recently come to light. Among other discoveries made by the Cavaliere de Rossi in the Roman Catacombs, are certain inscriptions left there by the Academicians, who appear to have made use of these sacred excavations, which were at that time quite neglected by the literary world, as convenient places in which to hold their secret assemblies. One of the accusations brought against them by Paul II. was that they sought to make one of their own members Pontifex Maximus. In the Catacombs appear several inscriptions conferring this title on Pomponius: Regnante Pom. Pont. Max., Pomponius Pont. Max., &c.; and others, from which we gather that the unanimes antiquitatis amatores, as they called themselves, were lovers not merely of ancient names but of ancient manners; and that they saw no disgrace in thus perpetuating the dissolute habits of their members. It is remarkable that in none of their writings have any of the Academicians said one word about the Catacombs; for though they boasted of being the lovers of antiquity, it was only Pagan antiquity which they regarded worthy of their study: and the Catacombs were simply chosen by them for their convenient privacy. (See De Rossi, Roma Sutterranea, tom. i.)
310 In his second journey into Greece, Lascaris brought back 200 manuscripts, of which eighty were, he informs us, of authors at that time unknown in Europe. The Medicean Library, however, was not destined long to survive its noble collector. On the death of Lorenzo, his son Pietro having become odious to the Florentines in consequence of his intrigues with Charles VIII. of France, was compelled to fly, the Medici Palace was sacked, and the great library fell a little later into the hands of the French soldiery and the Florentine mob, by whom its vast treasures were soon dispersed. Such portions as could be recovered, however, were afterwards deposited in St. Mark’s library.
311 Bacon, Essay on Gardens.
312 Wisd. vii. 13.
313St. Bernard, Serm. xxxvi. in Cantica Canticorum.
314 Budæus did not escape the suspicion of heretical tendencies, but the charge appears to have been chiefly grounded on certain directions contained in his will for the performance of his funeral obsequies, which his biographers assure us arose from no indifference to religious ceremonial, but from a characteristic modesty and dislike of ostentation.
315 Perhaps I am wrong in calling Erasmus an apostate canon, for though he quitted his monastery, he at times resumed his habit, whenever he found it convenient. He generally wore it in England, for old-fashioned ideas still held their ground at Oxford; and always appeared with it in Rome, until having been once mobbed by some ragamuffin boys, he applied to the Pope for a formal permission to lay it aside for ever.
316 This was a hit at the monkish Latin, in which poetria sometimes does duty for poeta, and, as Erasmus seems to intimate, for the ars poetica itself.
317 Menzel, t. 8, p. 455: t. 6, p. 6-10.
318 Ibid. t. 6, p. 10-13.
319 To do Francis I. justice, it must be admitted that he had in his concordat with Leo X. repealed the Pragmatic Sanction; but the same concordat abolished the right of election to benefices, on the plea that such a right was too often abused, and gave the Crown the nomination to all bishoprics, abbeys, and conventual priories within his dominions, with a few privileged exceptions.—See Gaillard, Hist. de Francois I. t. 6, p. 37.
320 Not Peter Martyr Vermigli, the celebrated heretic who afterwards figured as Professor at Oxford, but Peter of Anghieria, a relation of the Borromeo family, who had come into Spain at the invitation of the Spanish Ambassador at Rome, and at the solicitation of Isabella, chose it for his adopted country.
321 Prescott, Hist. of Ferd. and Isabella.
322 See Newman’s Lectures; “Athens, the fit site for a university.”
323 It was the scene of the martyrdom of the two scholars, Justus and Pastor. See Prudentius, Hymn 4.
324 By the middle of the seventeenth century the ten colleges of the founder had increased to the number of thirty-five.
325 This is generally spoken of as the first Italian comedy. The first dramatic composition of the Italian muse, however, was the Orpheus of Politian. Previous to this time the only scenic representations known in Italy were sacred mysteries drawn from Scripture. The questionable glory of introducing profane performances is due to Pomponius Lætus, who, along with his other revivals of ancient Roman manners, caused the comedies of Terence and Plautus to be acted in Rome, in which enterprise, says Maffei, he was greatly seconded by Cardinal Riario, who opened a theatre in his own private house. Jovius tells us that Cardinal Bibiena organised a staff of skilful players, and encouraged the youths of Rome to take part in his theatricals.
326 Jovius, the first historian of his time, was accustomed frankly to avow that “he had two pens, one of gold and the other of iron, to write of princes according to the favours or slights which they bestowed.” The Medicean princes were fortunate enough to secure the services of the golden pen, and Clement VII. rewarded his services with the bishopric of Nocera.
327 Vivere qui sancte vultis, discedite Roma:
Omnia hic esse licet, non licet esse probum.
328 Pietro Pomponatus is by some writers erroneously confounded with Pomponius Lætus, the founder of the Roman academy, of whom mention has been made in a foregoing chapter. They resembled one another as in their philosophic errors, so also in their sincere conversion before their death. Pomponius died in 1495; Pomponatus, thirty years later.
329 The following are the words of Pope Leo X. in the Bull, Apostolici regiminis:—“As truth cannot contradict truth, we declare every assertion contrary to the truth of Divine faith to be absolutely false, and strictly forbid any one to teach differently; we command that those who adhere to such assertions shall be avoided and punished, as men who seek to disseminate damnable heresies.” Moreover, he rigorously prescribes to all and each of those who give public lessons of philosophy in the universities and elsewhere, that when they read or explain to their pupils the principles and conclusions of those philosophers who notoriously wander from the orthodox faith... “they employ every effort to set before their eyes the truth of the Christian religion, and persuade them to it with all their power, and use every care to refute and expose philosophic arguments of this kind, since there are none such which cannot be refuted.”
330 His critics, however, accuse him of often enough falling into the like absurdities. In his version of the New Testament he was accused of continually using pagan expressions, and even of adopting the word fable when speaking of the plan of Redemption, using it in the sense in which it is employed by the ancient dramatists to express the action which they portray.
331 Also known as Philip of Having, or Philip de Bonne Espérance, from the name of the abbey which he governed in the twelfth century. He was the author of many learned works, and the good studies he established in his abbey continued to flourish down to the eighteenth century.
332 A word first created by the Humanists, who made the name of Duns Scotus to stand for an ignoramus.
333 Ps. lxx. 15.
334 For the decrees of the Council on these heads, see Rohrbacher, vol. xxii. ch. v.
335 Audin. Hist. de Luth., ch. viii.
336 Zach. viii. 3.
337 Knight, in his life of Colet, remarks that “the History and Antiquities of Oxford sufficiently confess that nothing was known there but Latin, and that in the most depraved style of the schoolmen.” Yet two pages back he has quoted from Wood an account of Colet’s university studies, which show that this statement, like many of a similar import, is grossly exaggerated. Colet, he says, was educated in grammaticals in London, and then, after spending seven years at Oxford in logicals and philosophicals, was licensed to proceed to arts, “in which he became so exquisitely learned that all Tully’s works were as familiar to him as his Epistles.” He also read, conferred, and paralleled Plato and Plotinus (in Latin translations), and attained great eminence in mathematics. Erasmus, on occasion of his first visit to Oxford, writes thus to his friend Pisco:—“You ask, does our beloved England please me? Nothing ever pleased me so much. I have found here classic erudition, and that not trite and shallow, but profound and accurate, both Latin and Greek, so that I no longer sigh for Italy.” In fact, his own Greek learning was chiefly acquired at Oxford, for previous to his coming thither, his knowledge of that language was very superficial. Elsewhere, he says, “I think, from my very soul, there is no country where abound so many men skilled in every kind of learning as there are here.”
338 “Right studious she was in books,” says Bishop Fisher in his funeral sermon on this princess, “of which she had great number both in English, Latin, and French, and did translate divers matters of devotion out of French into English.”
339 Mr. Seebohm’s interesting work on the “Oxford Reformers of 1498” has appeared since the publication of our first edition. His view of Colet’s character is naturally a more favourable one than that here given; but in representing him as a sort of Broad Churchman of the sixteenth century, he sufficiently justifies our strictures on Colet as a Catholic divine.
340 Knight, quoting from Antiq. Britan., speaks of his preaching a second sermon after his interview with Henry VIII., wherein, at the king’s request, he spoke in favour of the French war. Of this Erasmus says nothing.
341 To these free views, most Protestant writers, following the authority of Fox and Knight, have added that Colet was opposed to the practice of Auricular Confession. This charge is, however, distinctly disproved in his life. Not only did he bear witness to the comfort and help he himself found in the practice, but in his “Institution of a Christian Man,” written for the use of his school, he expressly enjoins the frequent use of confession. ‘Use oft tymes confessyon,’ is one of his “Precepts of Lyvynge,” besides other directions for the reception of the Sacraments of Penance and Houslynge, in sickness, and the hour of death. Colet’s strictures, however free, were in fact never directed against the doctrines of the Church, but only against popular practices of devotion. The idea of his having set himself against the use of one of the sacraments, so very welcome to those who would fain claim him as a precursor of the Reformation, has arisen from a gross misconstruction put upon a passage in one of the Epistles of Erasmus. That writer, speaking of his deceased friend, says, among other things, “Ut confessionem secretam vehementer probabat, negans se ulla ex re capere tantundem consolationis ac boni spiritus; ita anxiam ac subinde repetitam vehementer damnabat” (Eras. Jod. Jon. Ep. 577). Knight, in his Life of Colet (p. 68), paraphrases this sentence in the following extraordinary manner: “Though he approved of private confession, receiving himself a great deal of comfort and inward satisfaction from the use of it, yet he could not but condemn the popular custom of the frequent repetitions of what they called auricular confession.” The uninitiated Protestant reader is here given to understand that private confession was something quite distinct from what they called auricular confession, and that whilst Colet approved of the one, he vehemently condemned the other. The plain fact, of course, being that he approved, practised, and enjoined the right and proper use of the Sacrament of Penance, but condemned the indiscreet use which may be made of it by scrupulous and weak-headed penitents. And it is probable that most directors would be of the same opinion.
342 Fox tells us that Colet sat with some others as judge on certain Lollards, who were burnt for heresy.
343 In connection with the name of Ammonius, I cannot help noticing the ridiculous use which has been made of one of his familiar letters to Erasmus. A native of Lucca, he suffered much from the inclement English climate, and grumbles about it sadly, saying, moreover, that the burning of heretics has raised the price of wood. Erasmus replies in the same vein: “I am angry with the heretics for making wood so dear for us in this cold season.” The jest was rather a heartless one, yet it was but a jest; twenty-three heretics had been induced to recant, but no more than two had suffered in England up to this date of Henry’s reign: nevertheless, Knight, and some other writers, have made out from this passage the grave historic fact that such numbers were put to death at this time that all the wood in London was spent in burning them! The fact is, that Ammonius and Erasmus ceaselessly exercised their wits upon each other, and all their letters are couched in the same style of banter. Thus Erasmus professing to instruct his friend how to get on in England, says in the same merry strain: “First of all, my dear Ammonius, be impudent, thrust yourself into everybody’s business, elbow every one who stands in your way, give nothing to anybody without a prospect of getting something better, and always consult your own advantage.”
344 This mystic number bore reference to the miraculous draught of fishes mentioned in St. John’s Gospel: ch. xxi. 11.
345 Holte was usher at Magdalen school, and published his grammar in 1497, under the patronage of Cardinal Morton. Among the grammars enumerated by Erasmus, was one entitled “Mammotrectus” (or “a boy taught by his grandmother”), a name which, as we shall see, was sadly out of place in the academies of the sixteenth century. Before Lily’s time, says Wood, there were as many grammars as masters, and the rules of one were contradicted in another.
346 From Paul’s I went, to Eton sent,
To learn straightway the Latin phrase,
Where fifty-three stripes given to me
At once I had;
For fault but small, or none at all,
It came to pass thus beat I was,
See, Udall, see, the mercy of thee
To me, poor lad.
The result of the Eton system was, that many boys ran away from the school to escape a beating, a circumstance which led Ascham to compose his “Schoolmaster,” wherein, like Sir J. Elyot, he pleads for a more humane treatment of young scholars.
347 Erasmus, de Pueris instituendis. Mr. Seebohm questions the fact of Colet being the “theologian” here referred to.
348 Exercita Spiritualia. Regulæ ad sentiendum vere cum Ecclesia.
349 Hall.
350 Ep. 871.
351 Wilkins, Con. iii. 736. Collier, ii. 52, 53.
352 Pole had explained the motives of his conduct in a letter addressed to the king, of which Cranmer writes: “It is written with such eloquence, that if it were set forth and known to the common people, I suppose it were not possible to persuade them to the contrary.”
353 Pollina, lib. i. ch. xxix.
354 As Flaminius is frequently made much of by Protestant writers as an adherent to their opinions, it may be as well to add that the passage touching his conversion by Pole, which appears in the original Italian life of Beccadelli, is omitted in Dudizio’s Latin translation. Beccadelli was the personal friend both of Pole and Flaminius, and his testimony is above suspicion.
355 This is admitted by Ascham, who after boasting in one letter that Homer, Thucydides, and Xenophon are now critically studied at Oxford, is to be found very soon afterwards complaining that these authors are being neglected for others of an inferior calibre. It was no better at Cambridge, where, after the departure of Sir John Cheke, the classical revival died a natural death, the study of divinity having expired long before. “It would pity a man’s heart,” says Latimer, “to hear what I hear of the state of Cambridge. There be few that study divinity, save those who must of necessity furnish the colleges.”
356 Erasmus died two years before the publication of this report. His “Colloquies” were intended as an educational work, and were written originally for the use of the son of his printer, Froben, their elegant Latinity having found them a ready admittance into the schools. He died in the Protestant city of Basle, unfortified by the sacraments of the Church. His friends erected a monument to his memory, which they surmounted with a bust of the God Terminus, and his fellow-citizens of Rotterdam raised his statue in their great square, the bronze of which was obtained by melting down a large crucifix which had formerly stood there. The condemnation of his “Colloquies” by the congregation of cardinals, was confirmed by the judgment of the Council of Trent, which caused several of his works to be placed on the index.
357 Concilium delectorum cardinalium et aliorum Prælatorum de emendanda Ecclesia, S. D. N. D. Paulo III. ipso jubente conscriptum, et exhibitum, anno MDXXXVIII.
358 It is perhaps only fair to notice the earlier efforts made by St. Jerome Æmilian to establish religious colleges and seminaries for the clergy. He appears to have been greatly assisted by the advice of St. Cajetan, and as he died in 1537, must be reckoned as one of the first who organised any scheme for the reform of education. The regular clerks of Somascha continue to this day to carry on the work of their holy founder.
359 It is stated by Phillips in his Life of Pole, that the rough draft of the decree was after his death found among his papers. Pallavicini tells us that during his absence at Padua, all important questions were communicated to him by his colleagues, especially the decree on Justification.
360 Wilkins, Concilia, t. iv. p. 135.
361 They were the Cardinals Moroni, Hosius, Gonzaga, D’Altemps, and Navagerio. Cardinals Simonetta and Seripando had also been joined in the Legation, but both died in the early part of 1563, and Cardinal Navagerio was appointed in room of Seripando.
362 Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, Sess. xxiii. ch. xviii. Pallavicini, lib. xxi. ch. xii. n. 8. The prelate who most warmly supported the decree was Balduino Balduini, bishop of Aversa. See Martene, Coll. Vet. Scrip. tom. viii.
363 Pallavicini, lib. xxi. ch. viii. n. 3.
364 Pall., lib. xxiv. c. 7. n. 2.
365 The words of M. Olier on this subject are worthy of quotation: “The true and only superior of the seminary is the bishop, who, containing in himself the plenitude of that grace and spirit which is to be shed over the diocese, can alone impart to it its spirit and its life. What the head is to the natural body, the bishop must be in the mystical body of his clergy, and we should labour in vain did we try any other means of sanctifying the ecclesiastical colleges. However excellent may be the sanctity possessed by those eminent and virtuous personages who are to be found scattered through the dioceses, not having that peculiar and essential grace, that spirit of headship (cet esprit de chef), which is attached to the sacred character of the episcopate, they cannot attain the fulness of spirit and of life which is capable of filling and vivifying the whole body of the clergy: for, according to St. Paul, this must flow from the head to the members by means of those joints, veins, and nerves intended for the distribution and communication of life. And these channels communicating with the Fountain Head are nothing else than the priests united to their bishop, according to the primitive ordinance of Jesus Christ.”—Vie de M. Olier, t. 2. p. 354.
366 The Catholic university of Thonon was founded exactly with a similar purpose by Clement VIII., at the request of St. Francis of Sales, and the German bishops are said at one time to have contemplated the foundation of a university for the benefit of the Catholic youth of Germany.
367 1 Tim. iv. 15.
368 Up to the present time, as we are informed by Dr. Döllinger, in his inaugural discourse to the University of Munich, the Italian clergy, the most numerous of Europe, make no use of the universities, but are content with the 217 Episcopal seminaries which they possess in their various dioceses.
369 Ab Ecclesiis vero, musicas eas ubi, sive organo sive cantu, lascivum aut impurum aliquid miscetur, arceant Episcopi. Sess. xx. ch. ix.
370 Caveant Episcopi ne strepitu incondito sensus sepeliatur.
371 Pall., lib. xxiv. ch. ix. n. 6.
372 Parvum gregem bonus Pastor, sancte quieteque pascebat. (Carol. Basc. in Vita S. Caroli. l. i. c. 6, p. 9.) It would seem as if this remarkable man were destined to take part in every good work set on foot during his lifetime, for in 1574 we find him in Spain, where as Apostolic Nuncio, he supported St. Theresa in her reforms. His love of strict discipline earned for him from the wits the nickname of “The World’s Reformer.”
373 In the Acts of the Church of Milan (part 5, p. 948) are given the rules for study, drawn by St. Charles for the use of his seminarists. There was to be a grammar class, divided into two sections, which were to be exercised in the grammar of Emanuel Alvarez, the Jesuit, the Epistles of Cicero, and some of the works of Ovid and Virgil. The second class was to be that of the Humanities, also subdivided into two sections, in both of which the students were to practise an elegant Latin style, and to study Cicero De Officiis, his epistles to Atticus, and corrected editions of Virgil and Horace. The Greek grammar of Clenard, a celebrated professor of Louvain, was likewise to be explained three times in the week. In the Jesuit schools of Milan the Hebrew language was likewise taught.
374 They did, in fact, after this take an engagement to serve the diocese for at least three years.
375 2 Esdras, iv. 17.
376 Eccles. l. 8.