It is curious to observe the unavoidable influence of a crude Latin education upon the most strenuous of these reforming monks. In 994 Odilo became Abbot of Cluny. After a most notable and effective rule of more than half a century, he died just as the year 1049 began. The closing scenes are typically illustrative of the passing of an early mediaeval saint. The dying abbot preaches and comforts his monks, gives his blessing, adores the Cross, repels the devil:

The next day, “in the presence of all, the Creed is read for a shield of faith against the deceptions of malignant spirits and the attacks of evil thoughts; Augustine is brought in to expound, intently listened to, and discussed.”[374]

For Odilo, the Cross is a divine, not to say magic, safeguard. His prayer and imprecation have something of the nature of an uttered spell. No antique zephyrs seem to blow in this atmosphere of faith and fear, in which he passed his life, and performed his miracles before and after death. Nevertheless the antique might mould his phrases, and perhaps unconsciously affect his ethical conceptions. He wrote a Life of a former abbot of Cluny, ascribing to him the four cardinales disciplinas, in which he strove to perfect himself “in order that through prudentia he might assure the welfare of himself and those in his charge; that through temperantia (which by another name is called modestia), by a proper measure of a just discretion, he might modestly discharge the spiritual business entrusted to him; that through fortitudo he might resist and conquer the devil and his vices; and that through justitia, which permeates all virtues and seasons them, he might live soberly and piously and justly, fight the good fight and finish his course.”[375]

Thus the antique virtues shape Odilo’s thoughts, as seven hundred years before him the point of view and reasoning of Ambrose’s De officiis ministrorum were set by Cicero’s De officiis.[376] The same classically touched phrases, if not conceptions, pass on to Odilo’s pupil and biographer, the monk Jotsaldus, to whom we owe our description of Odilo’s last moments. He ascribes the four cardinal virtues to his hero, and then defines them from the antique standpoint, but with Christian turns of thought:

III

A friend of Odilo was Gerbert’s pupil Fulbert, Bishop of Chartres from 1006 to 1028. His name is joined forever with that chief cathedral school of early mediaeval France, which he so firmly and so broadly re-established as to earn a founder’s fame. It will be interesting to notice its range of studies. Chartres was an ancient home of letters. Caesar[378] speaks of the land of the Carnuti as the centre of Druidism in Gaul; and under the Empire, liberal studies quickly sprang up in the Gallo-Roman city. They did not quite cease even in Merovingian times, and revived with the Carolingian revival. Thenceforth they were pursued continuously at the convent school of St. Peter, if not at the school attached to the cathedral. For some years before he was made bishop, the grave and kindly Fulbert had been the head of this cathedral school, where he did not cease to teach until his death. As bishop, widely esteemed and influential, he rebuilt the cathedral, aided by the kings of France and Denmark, the dukes of Aquitaine and Normandy, the counts of Champagne and Blois. His vast crypt still endures, a shadowy goal for thousands of pilgrim knees, and an ample support for the great edifice above it. Admiring tradition has ascribed to him even this glory of a later time.

From near and far, pious students came to benefit by the instruction of the school, of which Fulbert was the head and inspiration. Close was their intercourse with their “Venerable Socrates” in the small school buildings near the cathedral. From the accounts, we can almost see him moving among them, stopping to correct one here, or looking over the shoulder of another engaged upon a geometric figure, and putting some new problem. Among the pupils there might be rivalry, quarrels, breaches of decorum; but there was the master, ever grave and steadfast, always ready to encourage with his sympathy, but prepared also to reprove, either silently by withdrawing his confidence, or in words, as when he forbade an instructor to joke when explaining Donatus: “spectaculum factus es omnibus; cave.”

Some of these scholars became men of sanctity and renown—Berengar of Tours gained an unhappy fame. A fellow-student wrote to him in later years addressing him as foster-brother:

The cathedral school included youths receiving their first lessons, as well as older scholars and instructors. They lived together under rules, and together celebrated the services of the cathedral, chanting the matins, the hours, and the mass. The Trivium and Quadrivium made the basis of their studies. Text-books and courses were already some centuries old.

The first branch of the Trivium was Grammar, which included literature by way of illustration; and he who held the chair had the title of grammaticus. For the beginners, Donatus was the text-book, and Priscianus for the more advanced.[380] Nor was Martianus Capella neglected. The student annotated these works with citations from the Etymologies of Isidore. Divers mnemotechnic processes assisted him to commit the contents to memory. The grammatical course included the writing of compositions in prose and verse, according to rule, and the reading of classic authors. For their school verses in metre the pupils used Bede’s De arte metrica, an encyclopaedia of metrical forms. They also wrote accentual and rhymed Latin verse. Of profane authors the Library appears to have contained Livy, Valerius Maximus, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Statius, Servius the commentator on Virgil; and of writers who were Christian Classics in the Middle Ages, Orosius, Gregory of Tours, Fortunatus, Sedulius, Arator, Prudentius, and Boëthius, the last named being the most important single source of early mediaeval education. Rhetoric, the second branch of the Trivium, bore that vague relationship to grammar which it bears in modern parlance. The rules of the rhetoricians were learned; the works of profane or Christian orators were read and imitated. This study left its mark on mediaeval sermons and Vitae Sanctorum.

As for the third branch, Dialectic, Fulbert’s pupils studied the logical treatises in general use in the earlier Middle Ages: to wit, the Categories and the De interpretatione of Aristotle, and Porphyry’s Introduction, all in the Latin of Boëthius. For works which might be regarded as commentaries upon these, the school had at its disposal the Categories ascribed to Augustine and Apuleius’s De interpretatione, Cicero’s Topica, and Boëthius’s discussion of definition, division, and categorical and hypothetical syllogisms—the logical writings expounded by Gerbert at Rheims. The school had likewise Gerbert’s own Libellus de ratione uti and Boëthius’s De consolatione, that chief ethical compend for the early Middle Ages; also the writings of Eriugena, and Dionysius the Areopagite in Eriugena’s translation. Whether or not it possessed the current Latin version of Plato’s Timaeus, Fulbert and Berengar at all events refer to Plato in terms of eulogy.

Passing to the Quadrivium, we find that Fulbert had studied its four branches under Gerbert. In Arithmetic the students used the treatise of Boëthius, and also the Abacus, a table of vertical columns, with Roman numerals at the top to indicate the order of units, tens, and hundreds according to the decimal system. In Geometry the students likewise fell back upon Boëthius. Astronomy, the third branch of the Quadrivium, had for its practical object the computation of the Church’s calendar. The pupils learned the signs of the Zodiac and were instructed in the method of finding the stars by the Astrolabius, a sphere (such as Gerbert had constructed) representing the constellations, and turning upon a tube as an axis, which served to fix the polar star. Music, the fourth branch of the Quadrivium, was zealously cultivated. For its theory, the treatise of Boëthius was studied; and Fulbert and his scholars did much to advance the music of the liturgy, composing texts and airs for organ chanting.

In addition to the Quadrivium, medicine was taught. The students learned receipts and processes handed down by tradition and commonly ascribed to Hippocrates. For more convenient memorizing, Fulbert cast them into verse. Such “medicine” was not founded on observation; and a mediaeval scholar-copyist would as naturally transcribe a medical receipt-book as any other work coming within the range of his stylus. One may remember that in the early Middle Ages the relic was the common means of cure.

The seven Artes of the Trivium and Quadrivium were the handmaids of Theology; and Fulbert gave elaborate instruction in this Christian queen of the sciences, expounding the Scriptures, explaining the Liturgy, and taking up the controversies of the time. As a part of this sacred science, the students apparently were taught something of Canon and Roman law and of Charlemagne’s Capitularies.[381]

IV

The Chartres Quadrivium represents the extreme compass of mathematical and physical studies in France in the eleventh century, when slight interest was taken in physical science—a phrase far too grand to designate the crass traditional views of nature which prevailed. Indifference to natural knowledge was the most palpable intellectual defect of Ambrose and Augustine, and the most portentous. The coming centuries, which were to look upon their writings as universal guides to living and knowing, found therein no incentive to observe or study the natural world. Of course the Carolingian period evolved out of itself no such desire; nor did the eleventh century. At the best, the general understanding of physical fact remained that which had been handed down. It was gleaned from the books commonly read, the Physiologus or the edifying stories of miracles in the myriad Vitae Sanctorum, quite as much as from the scant information given in Isidore’s Origines, Bede’s Liber de temporibus, or the De universo of Rabanus Maurus.

So much for natural science. In historical writing the quality of composition rarely rose above that of the tenth century.[382] No sign of critical acumen had appeared, and the writers of the period show but a narrow local interest. There was no France, but everywhere a parcelling of the land into small sections of misrule, between which travel was difficult and dangerous. The chroniclers confine their attention, as doubtless their knowledge also was confined, to the region where they lived. To lift history over these narrow barriers, there was needed the renewal of the royal power, which came with the century’s close, and the stimulus to curiosity springing from the Crusades.[383]

In fine, the eleventh century was crude and inchoate, preparatory to the intellectual activity and the unleashed energies of life which mark the opening of the twelfth. Yet the mediaeval mind was assimilating and appropriating dynamically its lessons from the Fathers, as well as those portions of the antique heritage of thought which, so far, it had felt a need of. Difficult problems were stated, but in ways presenting, as it were, the apices of alternatives too narrow to hold truth, which lies less frequently in warring opposites than in an inclusive and discriminating conciliation. This century, especially when we fix our attention upon France, appears as the threshold of mediaeval thinking, the immediate antecedent to mediaeval formulations of philosophic and theological conviction. The controversies and the different mental tendencies which thereafter were to move through such large and often diverging courses, drew their origin from still prior times. With the coming of the eleventh century they had been sturdily cradled, and seemed safe from the danger of dying in infancy. Thence on through the twelfth century, through the thirteenth, the climacteric of mediaeval thought, opinions and convictions are set in multitudes of propositions, relating to many provinces of human meditation.

These masses of propositions, convictions, opinions, philosophic and religious, constitute the religious philosophy of the Middle Ages—scholasticism as it commonly is called. Hereafter[384] it will be necessary to consider that large matter in its continuity of development, with its roots or antecedents stretching back through the eleventh century to the Carolingian period, and beyond. Mediaeval thinkers will then be seen to fall into two classes, very roughly speaking, the one tending to set authority above reason, and the other tending to set reason above authority. Both classes appear in the ninth century, represented respectively by Rabanus Maurus and Eriugena. In the eleventh they are also evident. St. Anselm, who came from Italy, is the most admirable representative of the first class, being in heart and mind a theologian whose philosophy revolved entire around his faith. Of him we have spoken; and here may mention in contrast with him two Frenchmen, Berengar of Tours and Roscellinus. In place and time they come within the scope of the present chapter; nor were their mental processes such as to attach them to a later period. By temperament, and in somewhat confused expression, they set reason above authority, save that of Scripture as they understood it.

Berengar was born, apparently at Tours, and of wealthy parents, just as the tenth century closed. After studying under his uncle, the Treasurer of St. Martin, he came to Chartres, where Fulbert was bishop. Judging from a general consensus of expression from men who became his opponents, but had been his fellow-pupils, he quickly aroused attention by his talents, and anxiety or enmity by his pride and the self-confident assertion of his opinions. He would neither accept with good grace the admonitions of those about him, nor follow the authority of the Fathers. He was said to have despised even the great grammarians and logicians, Priscian, Donatus, and Boëthius. Why err with everybody if everybody errs, he asked. He appears as a vain man eager for admiration. The report comes down that he imitated Fulbert’s manner in lecturing, first covering his visage with a hood so as to seem in deep meditation, and then speaking in a gentle, plaintive voice. From Chartres he passed to Angers, where he filled the office of archdeacon, and thence he returned to Tours, was placed over the Church schools of St. Martin’s, and in the course of time began to lecture on the Eucharist. This was between the years 1030 and 1040.

That a man’s fortunes and fame are linked to a certain doctrine or controversy may be an accident of environment. Berengar chose to adduce and partly follow the teachings of Eriugena, whose fame was great, but whose orthodoxy was tainted. The nature of the Eucharist leant itself to dispute, and from the time of Ratramnus, Radbertus, and Eriugena, it was common for theologians to try their hand on it, if only in order to demonstrate their adherence to the extreme doctrines accepted by the Church. These were not the doctrines of Eriugena, nor were they held by Berengar, who would not bring himself to admit an absolute substantial change in the bread and wine. Possibly his convictions were less irrational than the dominant doctrine. Yet he appears to have asserted them, not because he had a clearer mind than others, but by reason of his more self-assertive and combative temperament. He was not an original thinker, but a controversial and turgid reasoner, who naturally enough was forced into all kinds of tergiversation in order to escape condemnation as a heretic. His self-assertiveness settled on the most obvious theological dispute of the time, and his self-esteem maintained the superiority of his own reason over the authorities adduced by his adversaries. Of course he never impugned the authority of Scripture, but relied on it to substantiate his views, merely asserting that a reasonable interpretation was better than a foolish one. Throughout the controversy, one may observe that Berengar’s understanding of fact kept somewhat closer than that of his opponents’ to the tangible realities of sense. But a difference of intellectual temperament lay at the bottom of his dissent; and had not the Eucharist presented itself as the readiest topic of dispute, he would doubtless have fallen upon some other question. As it was, his arguments gained adherents, the dominant view being repellent to independent minds. Still, it won the day, and Berengar was condemned by more than one council, and forced into all manner of equivocal retractions, by which at least he saved his life, and died in extreme old age.

It may be that a larger relative import attributed by Berengar and also Roscellin to the tangibilities of sense-perception, led the latter at the close of the century to put forth views on the nature of universals which have given him a shadowy repute as the father of nominalism. The Eucharistic controversy pertained primarily to Christian dogmatics. That regarding universals, or general ideas, pertains to philosophy, and, from the standpoint of formal logic, lies at the foundations of consistent thinking. So closely does it make part of the development of scholasticism, that its discussion had best be postponed; merely assuming for the present that Roscellin’s thinking upon the topic to which his name is attached was not superior in method and analysis to Berengar’s upon the Eucharist.

One cannot escape the conclusion that intellectually the eleventh century in France was crude. The mediaeval intellect was still but imperfectly developed; its manifestations had not reached the zenith of their energy. Yet doubtless the mental development of mankind proceeds at a more uniform rate than would appear from the brilliant phenomena which crowd the eras of apparent culmination, in contrast with the previous dulness. The profounder constancy of growth may be discerned by scrutinizing those dumb courses of gestation, from which spring the marvels of the great epoch. The opening of the twelfth century was to inaugurate a brilliant intellectual era in France. The efficient preparation stretched back into the latter half of the eleventh, whose Catholic progress heralded a period of awakening. The Church already was striving to accomplish its own reordering and regeneration, free itself from things that drag and hinder, from lay investiture and simony, abominations through which feudal depotentiating principles had intruded into the ecclesiastic body; free itself likewise from clerical marriage and concubinage, which kept the clergy from being altogether clergy, and weighted the Church with the claims of half-spurious priests’ offspring. In France the reform of the monks comes first, impelled by Cluny; and when Cluny herself becomes less zealous, because too great and rich, the spirit of soldiery against sin reincarnates itself in the Grand-Chartreuse, in Citeaux and Clairvaux. The reform of the secular clergy follows, with Hildebrand the veritable master; for the Church was passing from prelacy to papacy, and the Pope was becoming a true monarch, instead of nominal head of an episcopal aristocracy.

The perfected organization and unceasing purification of the Church made one part of the general progress of the period. Another consisted in the disengaging of the greater powers from out the indiscriminate anarchy of feudalism, and the advance of the French monarchy, under Louis the Sixth,[385] toward effective sovereignty, all making for a surer law and order throughout France. Then through the eleventh and twelfth centuries came the struggle of the people, out of serfdom into some control over their own persons and fortunes. The serfs were affranchised and became peasants; the huddled dwellers in the squalid towns tended to become burghers with actual strength and chartered power to protect themselves against signorial tyranny. Their rights limited and fixed the exactions of their lords. Everywhere the population increased; old cities grew apace, and a multitude of new ones came into existence. Economic evolution progressed, advancing with the affranchisement of industry, the organization of guilds, the growth of trade, the opening of new markets, fairs, and freer avenues of commerce: thus more wealth was diffused among the many. Architecture with new civic resources was pushing on through Romanesque toward Gothic, while the affiliated arts of sculpture and painting were becoming more expressive. Then the Crusades began, and did their work of spreading knowledge through the Occident, carrying foreign ideas and institutions across provincial barriers. The Crusades could not have taken place had it not been for the freeing of social forces during the half century preceding their inception in the year 1099. They were led up to and made possible by the advance of the papacy to domination, by the growth of chivalry, and the habit of making far pilgrimages to holy places, and by the wealth coming with more active trade and industry.

Thus humanity was universally bestirring itself throughout the land we know as France. Such a bestirring could not fail to crown itself with a mightier winging of the spirit through the higher provinces of thought. This was to show itself among saints and doctors of the Church in their philosophies and theologies of the mind and heart; with like power it was to show itself among those hardier rationalists who with difficulty and misgivings, or under hard compulsion, still kept themselves within the Church’s pale. It showed itself too with heretics who let themselves be burned rather than surrender their outlawed convictions. It was also to show itself through things beautiful, in the strivings of art toward the perfect symbolical presentation of what the soul cherished or abhorred; and show itself too in the literature of the common tongues as well as the literature of the time-honoured Latin. In fine, it was to show itself, through every heightened faculty and appetition of the universally striving and desirous soul of man, in a larger, bolder understanding and appreciation of life.

CHAPTER XIII

Consequently the appropriation of the Latin culture in Germany is a labour of translation: first a palpable labour of translation from the Latin language into the German tongue, and secondly, and for always, a more subtle kind of translation of the antique influence into a German understanding of the same, and gradually into informing principles made use of by a strong and advancing racial genius. The German genius will be enlarged and developed through these foreign elements, but it will never cease to use the Latin culture as a means of informing and developing itself.

No need to say that these strong statements apply to the Germans in their home north of the Alps and east of the Rhine; not to those who left the Fatherland, and in the course of generations became Italians, for example. Moreover, general phrases must always be taken subject to qualification and rounding of the corners. No people can absorb a foreign influence without in some degree being made over into the likeness of what they are receiving, and to that extent ceasing to be their unmitigated selves. In general, however, while Latin Christianity and the antique culture both were brought to Germany from abroad, the Germans were converted or transformed only by the former, and merely took and used the latter—a true statement this, so far as one may separate these two great mingled factors of mediaeval progress.

Evidently those Germans of the opening mediaeval centuries who did most to advance the civilization of their people were essentially introducers of foreign culture. This was manifestly true of the missionaries (chief among whom was the Anglo-Saxon Boniface) who brought Christianity to Germany. It was true both as to the Christian and the secular learning of Rabanus Maurus, who was born at Mainz, a very German.[386] With all his Latin learning he kept his interest in his mother tongue, and always realized that his people spoke German and not Latin. He encouraged preaching in German; and with the aid of his favourite pupil, Walafrid, he prepared German glosses and Latin-German glossaries for Scripture.

Before Rabanus’s death popular translations of the Gospels had appeared, imbued with the Germanic spirit. The Heliand and Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch are the best known of these.[387] Then, extending through the last part of the tenth and the first part of the eleventh century we note the labours of that most diligent of translators, Notker the German, a monk of St. Gall, and member of the Ekkehart family, which gave so many excellent abbots to that cloister. He died in 1022. Like Bede, Rabanus, and many other Teutonic scholars, he was an encyclopaedia of the knowledge afforded by his time. He was the head of a school of German translators. His own translations covered part of Boëthius’s De consolatione, Virgil’s Bucolics, Terence’s Andria, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis, Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione, an arithmetic, a rhetoric, Job, and the Psalms. He was a teacher all his life, and a German always, loving his mother tongue, and occupying himself with its grammar and word forms. His method of translation was to give the Latin sentence, with a close German rendering, accompanied by an occasional explanation of the matter, also in German.[388] All the while, this foreign learning was being mastered gallantly in the leading cloisters, Fulda, St. Gall, Reichenau, Hersfeld, and others. Within their walls this Latin culture was studied and mastered, as one with resolve and perseverance masters that to which he is not born.

Besides those who laboured as translators, other earnest fosterers of learning in Germany appear as introducers of the same. Bruno, youngest brother of Otto I., is distinguished in this rôle. He promoted letters in his archiepiscopal diocese of Cologne. From many lands learned men came to him, Liutprand and Ratherius among others. Otto himself loved learning, and drew foreign scholars to his Court, one of whom was that conceited Gunzo, already spoken of.[389] Schools moved with the emperor (scholae translatitiae) also with Bruno, who though archbishop, duke, and burdened with affairs, took the time to teach. A passage in his Life by Ruotger shows the education and accomplishments of this most worthy prince of the Church and land:

One may read between these awkward lines that all this learning was something to which Bruno had been introduced at school. Another short passage shows how new and strange this Latin culture seemed, and how he approached it with a timorous seriousness natural to one who did not well understand what it all meant:

Such an attitude would have been impossible for an Italian cradled amid Latin or quasi-Latin speech and reminiscence.

The most curious if not original literary phenomenon of the time of Bruno and his great brother was the nun Hrotsvitha, of Gandersheim, a Saxon cloister supported by the royal Saxon house. A niece of Otto’s was the Abbess, and she it was who introduced Hrotsvitha to the Latin Classics, after the completion of her elementary studies under another magistra, likewise an inmate of the convent. The account bears witness to the taste for Latin reading among this group of noble Saxon dames. Hrotsvitha soon surpassed the rest, at least in productivity, and became a prolific authoress. She composed a number of sacred legendae, in leonine or rhymed hexameters.[392] One of them gave the legend of the Virgin, as drawn from the Apocryphal Gospel of Matthew. She also wrote several Passiones or accounts of the martyrdoms of saints, and the story of the Fall and Repentance of Theophilus, the oldest poetic version of a compact with the devil. Quite different in topic was the Deeds of Otto I. (De gestis Oddonis I. imperatoris) written between 962 and 967, likewise in leonine hexameters. It told the fortunes of the Saxon house as well as the career of its greatest member.

Possibly more interesting were six moral dramas written in formal imitation of the Comedies of Terence. As an antidote to the poison of the latter, they were to celebrate the virtue of holy virgins in this same kind of composition which had flaunted the adulteries of lascivious women—so the preface explains. Again, Hrotsvitha’s sources were legenda, in which Christian chastity, martyred though it be, triumphs with no uncertain note of victory.[393] These pious imitations of the impious Terence do not appear to have been imitated by other mediaeval writers: they exerted no influence upon the later development of the Mystery Play. They remain as evidence of the writer’s courage, and of the studies of certain denizens of the cloister at Gandersheim.

Besides this convent for high-born women, and such monasteries as Fulda and St. Gall, an interesting centre of introduced learning was Hildesheim, fortunate in its bishops, who made it an oasis of culture in the north. Otwin, bishop in 954, supplied its school with books from Italy. Some years after him came that great hearty man, Bernward, of princely birth, who began his clerical career at an early age, and was made bishop in 992. For thirty years he ruled his see with admirable piety, energy, and judgment; qualities which he likewise showed in affairs of State. He was a diligent student of Latin letters, one “who conned not only the books in the monastery, but others in divers places, from which he formed a goodly library of codices of the divines and also the philosophers.”[394] His was a master’s faculty and a master-hand, itself skilfully fashioning; for not only did he build the beautiful cloister church of St. Michael at Hildesheim, and cause it to be sumptuously adorned, but he himself carved and painted, and set gems. Some of the excellent works of his hand remain to-day. His biographer tells of that munificence and untiring zeal which rendered Hildesheim beautiful, as one still may see. Yet, throughout, Bernward appears as consciously studying and gathering and bringing to his beloved church an art from afar and a learning which was not of his own people. The bronze work on the Bernward column in Hildesheim is thought to suggest an influence of Trajan’s column, while the doors of Bernward’s church unquestionably follow those of St. Sabina on the Aventine. This shows how Bernward noticed and learned and copied during his stay at Rome in the year 1001, when Otto III. was imperator and Gerbert was pope.

Bernward’s successor, Godehard, continued the good work. One of his letters closes with a quick appeal for books: “Mittite nobis librum Horatii et epistolas Tullii.”[395] Belonging to the same generation was Froumundus (fl. cir. 1040), a monk of Tegernsee, where Godehard had been abbot before becoming bishop of Hildesheim. He was a sturdy German lover of the classics—very German. At one time he writes for a copy of Horace, apparently to complete his own, and at another for a copy of Statius; other letters refer to Juvenal and Persius.[396] His ardour for study is as apparent as the fact that he is learning a literature to which he was not born. His turgid hexameters sweat with effort to master the foreign language and metre. People would have made a priest of him; not he:

and a good grin seems to escape him:

The spirit is grand, the literary result awful. With diligence, the studious élite of Germany applied themselves to Latin letters. And in the course of time tremendous scholars were to rise among them. But the Latin culture remained a thing of study; its foreign tongue was never as their own; and in the eleventh century, at least, they used it with a painful effort that is apparent in their writings and the Germanisms abounding in them. There may come one like Lambert of Hersfeld, the famous annalist of the Hildebrandine epoch, who with exceptional gifts gains a good mastery of Latin, and writes with a conscious approach to quasi-classical correctness. The place of his birth and the sources of his education are unknown. He was thirty years old, and doubtless had obtained his excellent training in Latin, when he took the cowl in the cloister of Hersfeld in 1058. But the next year he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and afterwards other journeys. He wrote his Annals[398] in his later years, laying down his pen in 1077, when he had brought the Emperor to Canossa. His was a practised hand, and his style the evident result of much study of the classics. His work remains the best piece of Latin from an eleventh-century German.

Among German scholars of the period, one can find no more charming creature than Hermann Contractus, the lame or paralytic. His father, a Suabian count, brought the little cripple to the convent of Reichenau. It was in the year 1020. Hermann was seven years old. There he studied and taught, and loved his fellows, till his death thirty-four years later. His mind was as strong as his body was weak. He could not rise from the movable seat on which his attendant placed him, and could scarcely sit up. He enunciated with difficulty; his words were scarcely intelligible. But his learning was encyclopaedic, his sympathies were broad: “Homo revera sine querela nihil humani a se alienum putavit,” says a loving pupil who sketched his life. Evil was foreign to his nature. Affectionate, cheerful, happy, his sweet and engaging personality drew all men’s love, while his learning attracted pupils from afar.

Was not this a scholar’s vision? The German dwarf reads and cares for the Hortensius even as Augustine, from whose Confessions doubtless came the recommendation of this classic. The barbarous Latin of the Vita is so uncouth and unformed as to convey no certain grammatical meaning. One can only sense it. The biographer cannot write Latin correctly, nor write it glibly and ungrammatically, like a man born to a Latinesque speech. Hermann’s own Latin is but little better. It approaches neither fluency nor style. But the scholar ardour was his, and his works remain—a long chronicle, a treatise on the Astrolabe, and one on Music; also, perhaps, a poem in leonine elegiacs, “The Dispute of the Sheep and the Flax,” which goes on for several hundred lines till one comes to a welcome caetera desunt.[400]

Thus, with a heavy-footed Teutonic diligence, the Germans studied the Trivium and Quadrivium. They sweated at Latin grammar, reading also the literature or the stock passages. Their ignorance of natural science was no denser than that of peoples west of the Rhine or south of the Alps. Many of them went to learn at Chartres or Paris. Within the mapped-out scheme of knowledge, there was too much for them to master to admit of their devising new provinces of study. They could not but continue for many decades translators of the foreign matter into their German tongue or German selves. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they will be translators of the French and Provençal literatures.

Even before the eleventh century Germans were at work at Logic—one recalls Gerbert’s opponent Otric;[401] and some of them were engaged with dialectic and philosophy. William, Abbot of Hirschau, crudely anticipated Anselm in attempting a syllogistic proof of God’s existence.[402] He died in 1091, and once had been a monk in the convent of St. Emmeram at Ratisbon in Bavaria, where he may have known a certain monk named Othloh, who has left a unique disclosure of himself. One is sufficiently informed as to what the Germans and other people studied in the eleventh century; but this man has revealed the spiritual conflict out of which he hardly brought his soul’s peace.

II

Nothing is so fascinating in the life of a holy man as the struggle and crisis through which his convictions are established and his peace attained. How diverse has been this strife—with Buddha, with Augustine, with Luther, or Ignatius Loyola. Its heroes fall into two companies: in one of them the man attains through his own thought and resolution; in the other he casts himself on God, and it may be that devils and angels carry on the fight, of which his soul is the battle-ground and prize. Nevertheless, the man himself holds the scales of victory; the choice is his, and it is he who at last goes over to the devil or accepts the grace of God. This conflict, in which God is felt to aid, is still for men; only its forms and setting change. Therefore the struggle and the tears, through which souls have won their wisdom and their peace, never cease to move us. Othloh, like many another mediaeval scholar, was disturbed over the sinful pleasure derived from Tully and Virgil, Maro and Lucan. But his soul’s chief turmoil came from the doubts that sprang from his human sympathies and from moral grounds—can the Bible be true and God omnipotent when sin and misery abound? The struggle through which he became assured was the supreme experience of his life: it fixed his thoughts; his writings were its fruit; they reflect the struggle and the struggler, and present a psychological tableau of a mediaeval German soul.

He was born in the bishopric of Freising in Bavaria not long after the year 1000, and spent his youth in the monastic schools of Tegernsee and Hersfeld. His scholarship was made evident to men about him through his skill in copying texts in a beautiful script, ornamented with illuminations. In the year 1032 he took the monk’s vows in the monastery of St. Emmeram at Ratisbon, which had been founded long before in honour of this sainted Frankish missionary bishop, who had met a martyr’s death in Bavaria in the late Merovingian period. The annals of the monastery are extant. When the Ottos were emperors, grammatical and theological studies flourished there, especially under a certain capable Wolfgang, who died as Bishop of Ratisbon in 994, and whose life Othloh wrote. The latter, on becoming a monk, received charge of the monastery school, which he continued to direct for thirty years.[403] Then he left, because some of the young monks had turned the Abbot against him; but after some years spent mainly at the monastery of Fulda, he returned to St Emmeram’s in 1063, where he died an old man ten or fifteen years later. From his youth he had been subject to illness, even to fits of swooning, and, writing in the evening of his days, he speaks of his many bodily infirmities.

As Othloh looked back over his life, his soul’s crisis seemed to have been reached soon after he was made a monk. The wisdom brought through it came as the answer to those questionings which made up the diabolic side of that great experience. Othloh describes it in his Book concerning the Temptations of a certain Monk.