THE ninth century saw a great renaissance of learning and the arts both in eastern and western Europe, the latter usually known as the Carolingian renaissance. The two flowerings of letters and culture were, however, very different in character. In the Byzantine empire the revival occurred in an old, or at least, a mature civilization; where the inheritance of Latin learning had never been lost, where there had always been a large class of learned laymen; where the citizens of Constantinople and other great cities still lived their lives under Roman law and among Justinian’s buildings; where an educated class was no stranger to fine Latin poetry, the liberal arts and Greek philosophy. To such a people the ninth-century renaissance brought a change in the field of study: a turning back to Greek literature rather than Latin, but not a first introduction to fine literature and abstract thought as such. Moreover, to some small extent there was a meeting of two streams of culture, always a factor in the history of thought and the throwing up of a wave of new learning, architecture and art: the learning and the art of Baghdad met that of Constantinople. Whereas Greco-Roman mathematicians had used as an instrument only Euclidean geometry, an arithmetic that had to be demonstrated with an abacus, and an astronomy resting mainly on Ptolemy, Arabic scholars could use algebra as an instrument as well as geometry, Indian numerals for written calculation instead of the abacus, and a more developed astronomy. Byzantine scholars could advance their mathematical knowledge beyond the old quadrivium, if they had contact with Arabic thought, and a few had (see p. 209). At Constantinople much more attention was, in fact, given to the quadrivium than in the Latin west.
The Carolingian renaissance originated under different conditions, had a different character, and brought quite different results. It was more purely a renaissance: a re-birth of the old Greco-Roman learning: there was only a limited mingling of different streams of culture. It was again, in contrast to the revival at Constantinople, the appropriation by a much younger, more ‘barbarian’ people of an old learning, and an art more developed than their own. It was also a partial democratization, by means of monastic and episcopal schools, of the intellectual heritage that only a few giants, like Bede and Boniface and their immediate followers, had had before. This democratization did not mean that a class of learned laymen came into being, as in the Byzantine empire: but it meant a great extension of the clerical order, and its better education.
Moreover, in the days of oral teaching, the existence of a better educated clergy meant a less superstitious laity: the economic margin of life was still too small to permit of the extension of literacy generally to the laity, nor was this possible in fact for another thousand years; but in the peasant society of western Europe, it was something that the church, through her oral teaching, her yearly succession of fasts and festivals, her rogations, her blessings, her Christian sacraments, introduced men’s minds to thoughts of another order than those connected with the toil of work on the land. To teach illiterate Germanic or Celtic peasants the Christian faith, either by oral instruction or church paintings or the carved crosses, was to introduce them to a new philosophy of life and one lived and passed on now for some hundreds of years since Constantine by Greco-Roman scholars and administrators. Lay buildings of any splendour, or any material but wood, were few and far between in the Carolingian west: the houses of common men in the countryside, or even in the small towns, were mere lath and plaster shacks, thatched with straw and frequently destroyed by fire: but the village church, even when not of stone, would be larger than any villager’s house, and have a stone altar and some kind of altar vessels and books and candlesticks and harness (as the Anglo-Saxons said) for the priest, and a lamp to burn before the relics: all things precious and belonging to another world. The village priest might be by birth just a peasant, like the villager himself, but he should be able to read and write: literacy made him, in a sense, a citizen of the Greco-Roman world. Hence, the extension and better education of the clerical order, for which the Carolingian rulers pressed, meant the opening of a window even for the villagers on to a different world.
Again, the Carolingian renaissance contrasts with that in contemporary Byzantium in that it produced scholars with a young and almost naif admiration for Vergil and Ovid, and the cadences of Latin poetry, as against the new Byzantine rediscovery of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Compared to its volume, Carolingian poetry was not, in the main, great poetry: but all Carolingian scholars were poets of a sort. They wrote verses with their frequent and delightful letters; they wrote epitaphs in verse; they wrote verses in honour of newly-built churches or altars; they wrote honorific verses to rulers, and just occasionally, when they were moved by ‘the tears of things’, or some circumstance of their own life, the verse they wrote was poignant and unforgettable. Alcuin wrote of the cuckoo, Fredugis, his scholar, of the loneliness of Alcuin’s little cell at Tours without him, and Paulinus probably wrote the hymn used later for the foot-washing on Maundy Thursday: Ubi Caritas et amor, Deus ibi est:
congregavit nos in unum |
Christi amor, |
exultemus et in ipso |
iucundemur, |
timeamus et amemus |
deum vivum |
et ex corde diligamus |
nos sincero: |
ubi Caritas et amor, |
deus ibi est. |
The chant for the Mandatum was as beautiful as the words.
One striking feature in all this proliferation of Latin verse was the writers’ delight in the mere arrangement of words, in acrostics and anagrams and riddles, in the making of verses in which the initial letters of each line formed words, and sometimes where letters taken diagonally across the verse formed words also. In fact, the typical Carolingian scholar had a crossword-puzzle mind, and the Irish verses found in the manuscript from Reichenau seize upon this Carolingian appreciation of verbal dexterity. Translated from the Irish by Robin Flower, the well-known verses run
I and Pangur Bán my cat
’Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night
When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love.
So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
The white Pangur and the Irish monk often caught their prey they were highly skilled hunters. But all this verbal dexterity, this delight in Latin verse, was not merely frivolous and useless: it accompanied ability to rewrite, digest and pass on the Latin classics. Realization of this is shown in those verses of Theodulf of Orleans which describe the liberal arts pictorially, as a tree ‘decorating’ the whole world: Grammar, a draped female figure, sits at the root of the tree, no art without her, and at her side Rhetoric and Dialectic; aloft in the boughs of the tree sits Measurement (Moderatio), embracing the art of numbers: she stands with both feet on a branch, holding in one hand number and the other volume, ‘whose mother is physics’. But Grammar sits at the root: the Carolingians were sure of that.
Apart from their delight in Latin verse, what did the Carolingians achieve in appreciation or extension of the Greco-Roman field of knowledge, the liberal arts? The study of these arts was assumed by all the Carolingian rulers to be the natural goal of education; western Europe, since the fall of the Roman empire, had had no contact with any learning more advanced than that then lost, her relations with Islam having been, in the main, hostile. It was natural that a desire for knowledge should take the form of an effort to repossess what had been lost and only partially recovered. It is true that these secular studies were now made professedly for the better understanding of the scriptures and the Christian faith and that some of the most voluminous Carolingian writings were in the sphere of theology; but, apart from theology and the old learning, ninth-century scholars explored few new fields. Many had a glossarial knowledge of Greek, and a few, notably John the Scot, Erigena, read Greek easily; a few studied medicine; there was some effort (less than might have been expected, with the great Frankish push to the east in progress) to use the German vernacular to teach the life of Christ; but the only study regularly promoted by imperial capitulary and the canons of councils was the study of the liberal arts and the ecclesiastical disciplines.
The great instruments for the promotion of such studies were the monastic and cathedral schools: the monastic schools above all. A bishop from Merovingian times had been bound to train boy clerks for the future clergy of his see, either himself, or through a scholasticus who was also his own secretary, and in Carolingian times the need remained. In 789 a capitulary of Charlemagne enjoined that there should be schools of young clerks (lectors) in every monastery and bishop’s house: ‘let them read psalms, notes, chants, the computus and grammar’. The computus meant more than just ‘reckoning’: Raban Maur’s treatise on the computus covered the whole field of the quadrivium except music, (see p. 521). For so general a command, the aim was high: and later imperial injunctions and the canons of councils show that it was not reached: the rural clergy in general never attained to this standard of education: but cathedral schools there were in the ninth century, from the famous schools of the canons of Tours, directed by Alcuin himself from 794 to 804, to those of small cathedrals ‘ruled’ by a single scholasticus. The council of Châlons, 813, again ordered that cathedral schools must be established, and the council of Aix-la-Chapelle, 817, in ordering that cathedral clergy should live communally (or ‘canonically’) required them to keep a school. The old rule of Chrodegang had ordered that the rulers of churches should appoint a canon to supervise and teach the children committed to the community, so that they might be duly promoted to the different grades of the clerical order: the regula Aquisgranensis of 817 enjoined that scholastici should strive after Latinity rather than rusticity: ‘in such lectures, the taking of written notes about the scriptures is sometimes more illuminating than mere reading, and the use of dictation should be learnt and the mind sharpened for study’. The council of Paris, 824, ordered each bishop to be more zealous for the education of the clerical militia, and to have schools for young clerks: but the financial difficulty of providing a good scholasticus, and maintaining the young clerks, still hindered the universal provision of good cathedral schools.
Monastic schools in the late eighth and ninth century produced riper scholars. They taught only the oblate children and young monks: only in a few cases, and in missionary lands, did the Benedictine monastery have a second and extern school to educate young secular clergy (as at Fulda). In the normal monastic schools there was not the difficulty of ‘providing a benefice’ for the scholasticus, for he would be a monk himself, spending his whole life in the community. Learning was also promoted by abbots, who sent their promising young monks to study at other abbeys under some famous scholasticus, which contributed to the wider influence of exceptional scholars, and also made the provision of a learned scholasticus easier for the smaller abbeys.
An endowment at least moderate and the maintenance of regular discipline were an indispensable background for monastic study, and the reform movement led by Benedict of Aniane helped to secure regularity and order. Benedict had been born near Dijon c. 751, and though trained for knighthood, he had thrown up his career in obedience to a monastic vocation. He looked back to the monks of Egypt, regarded the rule of St Benedict as professedly ‘only for beginners’ and the infirm, and ‘strove to ascend by the rules of Basil and Pachomius’. When he founded his own monastery at Aniane in Aquitaine, he turned, however, to the Benedictine rule, insisting only on its strict and primitive observance. Before his death in 821 he had, under the patronage of Louis the Pious, extended this observance to many older houses not hitherto professing the Benedictine rule, enjoined the capitulate monasticum for such observance on the abbots who assembled at the council of Aix in 817, and composed the Concordia Regularum and Codex Regularum for the further instruction of the Benedictine abbots and monks. Though Benedict had not set out to make the monks learned, the order and regularity he secured did, in fact, condition the success of the great monastic schools in the ninth century. The foundation of the abbey of Cluny in 911 was to perpetuate such conditions in the tenth.
Each great Benedictine abbey became thus, in the ninth century, a focus of scholarship. Moving across the empire from east to west, Fulda, founded in Franconia by Boniface in 744, had the highest reputation: it was a channel through which the earlier, Northumbrian learning passed to the empire. Corvey in Saxony, daughter house of Corbie in Picardy, was a storehouse of Frankish learning set down, like Fulda, in a country recently pagan. On the shores of Lake Constance, the abbey of Saint-Gall retained, even in the ninth century, the Columbanian traditions of its founder, and Reichenau, at the other end of the lake, under the rule of Walafrid Strabo, was reputed a very learned abbey; it had been founded by an Irish missionary, St Pirnin, and Old Irish must once have been spoken there (see p. 503). The humanist scholar, Sedulius Scottus, founded his monastery at Lié ge in 848, and with his fellow Irishmen made it a famous school. Prüm, a few miles south-east of Liége, was a learned abbey, as was Wissembourg, farther south and near the Rhine. In Burgundy, the abbey of Lyons fostered scholars and controversialists: at the beginning of the ninth century it lay in the southern portion of the central Frankish kingdom, and the precariousness of its position was reflected in the bitterness of its academic disputes.
In the reign of Charles the Bald, the traditions of a learned palace entourage, a palace school, were transferred from Aix-la-Chapelle to Paris and the royal residences near the Seine among which the court moved. Similarly, the academic palm passed from the schools of Tours after Alcuin’s death to other schools; for a time to Ferrières under Servatus Lupus, and also to a ring of abbeys round Paris on the lower Seine: Jumièges, Saint-Wandrille and Saint-Riquier, where Angilbert, the Carolingian Homer, had died in 814. In Picardy, Saint-Vaast just outside Arras, Saint-Bertin (the nucleus of the town of Saint-Omer), and above all Corbie, were renowned for their learning. Wala and Adalard, Charlemagne’s sons, took refuge at Corbie in adversity, and there Paschasius Radbert taught, and the monk Ratramnus, who answered the attacks of Photius on the Latin church.
Some great cathedral schools shared the fame of the monasteries: Reims, Orleans and Metz were notable examples. Laon, later to be the school of the calculators and abacists, was now a hearth of Irish learning.
Among the abbeys founded by Columbanian scholars, Luxeuil and Bobbio continued to copy and study classical and patristic manuscripts: they were reinforced by a continuous flow of postulants from Ireland. The young Irish scholars appear to have struck the Franks and Italians as indefatigable travellers, enthusiastic for learning, but somewhat noisy and contentious. They became assiduous copyists at Bobbio, and their capacity for work outran the abbey’s supply of writing material. ‘This is the plain meaning’, writes Dr E. A. Lowe, ‘of the (abbey’s) imposing series of seventh-and eighth-century palimpsests.’ The number of these washed down and rewritten vellum manuscripts runs into dozens, even among those that still survive. The oldest of these extant palimpsests was made up of a discarded fifth- or sixth-century Gothic Bible. Bobbio had been built in the old country of the Ostrogoths, and it was, after all, natural that so much of the scanty literary remains of the Gothic tongue should have survived in the library at Bobbio. Apart from the very important copy of Wulfila’s gospels, the Codex Argenteus, which after its travels remains now at Uppsala, the remnants of Gothic manuscripts are nearly all buried in palimpsests, and, with the exception of a Milan palimpsest, ‘the burying was done by Bobbio monks’ (Lowe). They buried some Gothic gospels to rewrite them in Latin, and they equally buried certain classical Latin works which they held of no particular importance, to use the vellum for patristic works.
Charlemagne’s efforts for the maintenance of schools were clearly aimed less at the improvement of learning for its own sake than at the better education of the clerical order, which, incidentally, was now providing him with a civil service. That considerable success was obtained is witnessed by the proliferation of the clerical order itself, and the organization of the rural clergy in deaneries and archdeaconries in the Carolingian period; by efforts to extinguish pagan superstitions, and by the exercise of more effective scrutiny in the process of canonization.
That pagan practices still survived in the countryside is clear from imperial and conciliar legislation. Charlemagne had received from pope Hadrian on his visit to Rome in 774 the collection of canons known as the Dionysio-Hadriana, the canon law as it was observed at that time in the Roman church, and he sought to obtain its general observance among the Franks. Even in his first capitulary he had re-enacted an edict of Carloman, 742, against pagan practices.
We have decreed that each bishop, according to the canons, shall take heed in his parochia, the grafio who is the defensor ecclesiae helping him, that the people of God do no pagan rites, but cast away and scorn all the evil deeds of paganism, whether it be the profane offerings for the dead, or sortilege and divining, or phylacteries and auguries or incantations, or the sacrifice of victims, which fools perform near the churches with pagan ritual in the name of the holy martyrs and saints of God: which provoke the saints rather to wrath than to mercy.
In the Admonitio Generalis of March 789, which was in fact a short digest of the Dionysio-Hadriana with the addition of a few African canons, the prohibition of pagan rites was repeated: ‘there must be no more enchanters nor weavers of spells nor weather magicians: and where there are trees or rocks or springs where fools are wont to carry lights and other rites, such evil customs must be altogether removed and destroyed wherever found’. The capitularies for Saxony, newly converted, naturally prohibited heathen rites in several passages: canonical authority must be obtained for the cutting down of (sacred) trees and groves. But that pagan practices lingered on in the whole Carolingian empire is attested by the repetition of prohibitions in the later capitularies. A ninth-century Vatican manuscript gives a full list of pagan practices, auguries and rites, including celebrations for Woden and Thor. The canons of church councils forbade the giving of Christian serf-girls to pagans, pagan witchcraft, auguries, phylacteries, etc., the making of pagan vows, pagan dancing and leaping and singing by women on Christian festivals, etc.
The efforts in the Carolingian period to procure a more effective supervision of the process of canonization may be also accounted a sign of the better education of the clergy. Canonization had hitherto been popular and little supervised. From the earliest days of the church special reverence had been shown for the bodies of the martyrs and their natalicia, or anniversaries, had been celebrated: this was a matter for the local church. In Africa, however, after the Donatist schism, doubts arose about the veneration paid to local martyria, little altars in the fields or at the roadside, believed to have been erected over the relics of Catholic martyrs: a council of Carthage, 401, ordered that no memorials of doubtful martyrdoms should be made ‘except where there is a body or relics, or the origin of any such habitation or site of martyrdom is most faithfully known: for completely untrustworthy altars are widely set up attested only by vain dreams accounted as revelations’. The local bishop was charged with ascertaining the authenticity or otherwise of these altars. This African canon of 401 was embodied in both the collections of Dionysius Exiguus and the Hispana (see p. 537): but Merovingian canonists in the centuries before Charlemagne were less concerned with the subject of canonization than ecclesiastical penance, and practice in the veneration of the relics of the saints changed.
The great factor in this change was the barbarian invasion of western Europe: it became necessary in very many cases to transport the relics of saints to a place of safety, and the honour paid to martyrs, and now also to men of known holy life, confessors, became dissociated from the place of burial: very many early ‘translations’ were made under fear of desecration. But such removal of relics led to confusion and doubts about authenticity: in the days of Gregory of Tours, for instance, and later, ‘when the history of the saint was unknown, or the cult of some early martyr was revived, there was always a great danger of inadequate investigation and of uncritical reliance upon visions’ (E. Kemp). Local devotion seems to have led to the translation and veneration of new saints, usually without sanction from any high ecclesiastical authority, and certainly without any recognition that episcopal permission must be obtained before such translation and veneration. While the Merovingian church was expanding into the countryside, the finding that a martyr’s bones were buried in an adjacent cemetery, even if his identity were only attested in a dream, made possible their translation to the altar of the new church and an increase of offerings.
In the reign of Charlemagne, however, the bishops were no longer willing to allow this practice, and their reforming efforts were expressed in the royal capitularies. The Admonitio Generalis of 789 forbade new saints to be venerated or invoked, or have memorials to them erected by the wayside: except those known by the authority of their passions (attested accounts of their martyrdoms) or the merit of their life. In 802 a capitulary ordered that the spurious names of martyrs be not venerated; in 813 the council of Mainz forbade that the bodies of saints should be translated from place to place, and, further, that any man should presume to translate the bodies of saints from place to place without the council of the prince or the leave of the holy synod of bishops. A yet more explicit ruling of 811 had reprobated the practice by which the relics of saints were translated where new basilicas were being built, and ‘men were urgently invited to endow the new church with their property, in so far as they were able. Those who made such a translation seemed to themselves to perform a meritorious action, deserving well of God: but let them persuade the bishops of this and let all things be done openly.’
In short, a new stage was reached in the process of canonization in the ninth century: episcopal and even metropolitan inquiry came to precede translation and the raising to the altar of the saint’s body or relics. Iso, scholasticus of Saint-Gall (see p. 541), gives an account of the canonization of St Othmar, who died in 759. The monks, revering his memory and led by certain signs, compiled a book containing accounts of his holiness by the saint’s contemporaries: they submitted the book to Salomon, bishop of Constance, and though he was much edified, he in turn laid the matter before the diocesan synod. The synod assembled, heard the life of St Othmar described by the bishop, fasted for three days, and authorized the translation (864). Translation was, by this date, the act of canonization. The care for verification shown in this new process of episcopal or synodal inquiry compares with the care taken by scholars like Servatus Lupus in the collation of texts, and attests a general improvement in clerical education.
The harvest of Charlemagne’s efforts to foster monastic and episcopal schools can be seen best in the work of particular ninth-century scholars. Raban Maur, one of the greatest of them, was intellectually the child of Alcuin, who had died at Tours in 804. Raban was born at Mainz in 784, made an oblate monk at Fulda, and sent by his abbot to complete his studies at Tours under Alcuin, who called him Maurus after the favourite pupil of St Benedict. He returned to Fulda and at no long interval was made the monastic scholasticus: under his care, the schools at Fulda in the days of Louis the Pious came to eclipse even those of Tours. Raban was made abbot of Fulda in 822, adhered to the emperor Lothar I in the troubles between him and his brothers, and in 842 after Lothar’s defeat, was dispossessed of his abbey and retired to that of Petersburg. Louis the German, esteeming his character and learning, made him archbishop of Mainz in 847, and he died in that position in 856. Apart from many scriptural commentaries and a great encyclopedia of Christian knowledge about the universe that betrays no recent contacts with Byzantine science or theology (see p. 421), Raban’s most interesting work was his De institutione clericorum, written while he was still responsible at Fulda for the schools not only of oblate monks but of secular clerks. For the young clerks he desired instruction in both the ecclesiastical disciplines and the old Greco-Roman learning: the trivium and quadrivium. He himself produced no work of striking originality: but men called him the praeceptor Germaniae primus and he did as much as any man to form the climate of opinion of the early middle ages.
What Raban Maur had been to Alcuin, Walafrid Strabo was to Raban Maur. He was twenty years younger, received his monastic training at Reichenau, with its Irish traditions, and was then sent to Fulda to study under Raban Maur. While still under twenty he wrote the tract foreshadowing Dante’s Inferno, the Visio Wettini. In 829 he went from Fulda to Aix-la-Chapelle, to instruct the young Charles (the Bald), and when this task was completed, he was made abbot of Reichenau, though not yet thirty. He lost his abbey in the troubled year, 840, but recovered it in 842; he died in 849 at the court of Charles the Bald.
It was held till recently that he actually compiled the Glosa Ordinaria, a great catena of marginal and interlinear glosses on every verse of the Old and New Testaments: a work which digested the comments and exegesis of patristic and early students of the biblical text. Dr Beryl Smalley has shown, however, that Raban Maur was concerned only in the early stage of the gradual accretion of these glosses; Bede had supplied commentaries which presented the barbarians with patristic teaching on the scriptures simply but faithfully; Alcuin had supervised the revision of the text of the Bible and presented it to Charlemagne as a present for his coronation; Raban Maur had made further commentaries on certain biblical books. Walafrid Strabo commented on the Psalms and Canonical Epistles: and later scholars continued the work. The Glosa Ordinaria was not completed till the twelfth century, not, in fact, till, by a parallel development, the sciences of civil and canon law had also produced for themselves a Glosa Ordinaria. The brief, terse gloss, marginal or interlinear, was in fact a legal rather than a theological technique: the Glosa Ordinaria on the scriptures could scarcely have been completed in that form before the twelfth century legal commentators at Bologna had done their work. For the rest, Walafrid Strabo’s reputation rested on some saints’ lives, some Latin verses in the humanist Carolingian tradition (addressed, for instance, to the emperor or describing the equestrian statue of Theoderic at Aix), on a mainly liturgical tract entitled De ecclesiasticarum rerum exordiis et elementis, and on an interesting verse tract about his garden (Hortulus). In this, passing among his flowers and herbs, he lingered lovingly over the description of rue, with its sharp, blue-green leaves: his rounded pumpkins, dyed yellow by the summer sun: horehound, which smells sweet but does not taste sweet: fennel and gladiolus, lily and poppy, betony and agrimony and the rose: ‘and may the eternal God grant us green-springing virtue and the palm of life unwithering’
Just before Walafrid Strabo’s death an Irishman, Sedulius Scottus, came to Liége with some companions (848), and made of it a famous school. He wrote graceful Latin verses to the great, commentaries on the epistles of St Paul and a political treatise entitled Liber de Rectoribus Christianis, in which he showed acquaintance with the political theorists of antiquity. He knew some Greek, like most Irish scholars. Just south of Liége, the poet Wandalbert used a variety of Latin metres with great skill and pleasant effect in his Martyrologe.
Meanwhile another scholar, Servatus Lupus (805–862), abbot of Fernères, was illustrating the Carolingian thirst for learning less by his treatises than by the assiduity with which he collected and collated manuscripts for the abbey library, particularly the works of classical writers. He entered at Ferrières under an abbot third in succession and tradition to Sigulf, a pupil of Alcuin, but the house was poor and there was little teaching of the liberal arts. When Lupus was twenty-five, he was sent to Fulda to study under Raban Maur, and became one of the circle of scholars who corresponded with him and each other. He himself wrote to Einhard, and began that series of letters by which he is chiefly known, containing so many requests for the loan or gifts of books. Lupus was a sedulous copyist of classical manuscripts, and frequently importuned his friends for the loan of a second copy so that he might correct the lacunae in his first; he had his own system in copying a manuscript of leaving a gap for a word where he suspected his text to be corrupt. He borrowed Cicero from Einhard, and several patristic manuscripts from Alcuin at Tours; he wrote to the archbishop of York for books, to pope Benedict III, and many others. The sending of books from monastery to monastery was, he knew, dangerous unless the book was small enough to conceal in the messenger’s clothes or satchel, and he would not send any larger book from his own library. He collected most of Cicero’s works, which were less generally accessible than those of Vergil, which he also possessed: some Livy, Caesar, Sallust, Suetonius, the Latin Josephus, and Boethius’ De Arithmetica. He was a great teacher and a very great librarian. The greatest of his pupils, Heiric of Auxerre, who studied not only at Fernères but with the Irishmen of Laon and at Soissons, has left a collection of long passages from classical writers taken down from Lupus’ dictation: and also a long poem on the life of Germanus of Auxerre.
Meanwhile, two efforts were made to supply a life of Christ in the vernacular for the instruction and use of priests out in the countryside, or possibly for presentation to some great lay noble: the peasants themselves, of course, could neither read nor afford the great cost of books. The Heliand (Saviour) was written in Old Saxon, in the alliterative metre used by Caedmon in England long before; the author is unknown, but a Latin preface states that the work was commissioned by Louis the Pious, and the poem appears to date from the second quarter of the ninth century. The preface quotes Bede’s story of Caedmon’s inspired poems: it would seem that Anglo-Saxon tradition occasioned the work. Whether the actual writer was a missionary, familiar with Old Saxon, or an old Saxon skóp, or an old Saxon monk who well remembered the songs heard in his youth, is not clear. Somewhere behind the poem was a man of learning, for the material of the poem was the old gospel harmony (Diatessaron) of Tatian; the commentaries of Bede, Alcuin and Raban Maur were also familiar to the poet, or supplied to him by the said man of learning. Rather later, c. 865, Otfrid, monk of Wissembourg in Alemania, made a prose digest of the gospels in ‘the tongue of the Franks’, i.e. German. He was a native of the country, but trained at Fulda under Raban Maur, and in his German Liber Evangeliorum he loaded his digest of the life and teaching of Christ so heavily with comment that all freshness and directness was lost: it does not appear that the work was widely known.
Lyons in Burgundy had been a great pre-Carolingian school and scriptorium, with natural contacts with the Byzantine Mediterranean, as is shown by some surviving leaves of Greco-Latin grammars and glossaries on papyrus, a few papyrus leaves of the breviary of Alaric, and a fine sixth-century vellum copy of the Theodosian Code, probably written there, as well as other indications. In the early ninth century it was still an intellectual centre: the Visigothic archbishop, Agobard of Lyons, in spite of the struggles of 833 in which he was involved, wrote a treatise De modo regiminis ecclesiastic engaged in the controversy with the Spanish Adoptianists, and with archbishop Amalaric who had replaced him during the period (835–838) when he had been dispossessed of his see. Amalaric, a liturgist with a considerable reputation, had in 820 presented Louis the Pious with his treatise, De ecclesiasticis officiis; a considerable struggle against Amalaric’s interpretation of the ceremonies of the mass had been maintained in Agobard’s absence by the learned archdeacon, Florus.
In western France, in the reign of Charles the Bald, the most renowned of all the Irishmen, John the Scot, outshone not only the other Carolingian scholars, but those of some centuries to come. He was, in fact, in touch with Byzantine learning. That such contact was not impossible is shown by the fragmentary Greco-Latin vocabularies and grammars of the pre-Carolingian period that have survived, as by, for instance, a Greco-Latin psalter beautifully written in uncials (see p. 527), certainly produced in some important Frankish centre where the Greek caligraphy was still practised, and before the eighth century. There must have been many more such vellum manuscripts in the ninth century than now survive, for the Carolingian scribes were prone to wash down such little-used manuscripts for palimpsests. The list of Carolingian scholars who knew some Greek from glossaries is long, particularly in the case of the Irishmen: but apart from Erigena there were few interested in Greek literature. The works of the Greek fathers, the lives of the desert fathers, the canons of Greek councils, were all accessible in Latin versions: it was easier to use them in a language with which all were familiar. It took a fine and far-ranging mind like John the Scot’s to read the Greek theological literature as yet untranslated: to read, that is, the theology long studied and accepted at Byzantium, but as yet unknown in the west. That he in no way dispensed himself from the normal field of Greco-Roman study is shown by his commentary on Martianus Capella’s treatise on the arts (see p. 86).
The place of John’s early studies in Ireland is unknown; he is first found attached to the palace school of Charles the Bald, which he directed. At the request of Hincmar of Reims, then engaged in his controversy on predestination with Gottschalk, he wrote his De Predestinatione in 850–1; and till 860 he seems to have contented himself with the study of Latin philosophy and theology; in that year, however, he began his series of translations from Greek theologians. His knowledge of Greek had gone far beyond the meaning of names and terms, such as his contemporaries gleaned from the glossaries and Isidore. His most important work was to popularize the Neoplatonist but orthodox teaching of Dionysius ‘the Areopagite’ long esteemed in Byzantine thought. The nom-de-plume of Dionysius the Areopagite had been adopted c. 500 by a Christian disciple of the Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus; this disciple was ascetic, orthodox, and possibly a bishop in Syria. In the struggle over the Christological decisions of Chalcedon then agitating the east, he appears to have been a moderate Chalcedonian, not actively hostile to the Monophysites; he wrote treatises On the divine names, Mystical theology, The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and certain epistles to the disciples of the apostles. These works taught the approach of the Christian soul to God by ascesis and the via negativa: they were of massive importance in the development of Byzantine theology, and they were never, from the time of John the Scot’s translation of them, completely unknown in the west. Such works as Meister Eckhart’s sermons, and the English Cloud of Unknowing show their influence, as do other western tracts.
The works of the Pseudo-Dionysius were not completely unknown in the west before John the Scot: pope Gregory the Great knew them, and pope Martin I knew Maximus the Confessor, their great exponent and commentator: he was present at the Lateran council of 649. The works of Dionysius were known at Saint-Denis in 827, and translated into Latin. John the Scot retranslated them all before 862, and in the years following he translated also the Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa’s De Imagine and Epiphanius’ Ancoratus: he commented on the Celestial Hierarchy. All this mystical theology, carefully aligned with orthodox teaching, was commonly accepted in the Byzantine church, and the work of John the Scot made a notable contribution towards keeping western theology in line with that of the east.
After thus steeping himself in the Dionysiac literature, John produced between 862 and 866 his chief philosophical-theological treatise, the Peri Physeon or De Divisione Naturae, an exposition of the ‘how’ as well as ‘why’ of the universe after which Raban Maur had been merely groping. He attempted a synthesis of the Latin and Greek sources of knowledge available to him, and even, though his Latin theological vocabulary was insufficient to the task, he produced a reasoned synthesis. From God, uncreated and the creator, come the (platonic) Ideas, created and yet creative, eternal like the creator, ‘for so, coming from God, they are eternal and created, for they are eternal in the Word of God’. From them all creation comes into being, and, coming from God, shall return to him again. Quoting Maximusè De Ambiguis, he wrote: ‘All that is moved according to its nature is moved by the cause of all things: and the end to which each moves is that cause by which it is moved and to which it is drawn back again’ The Dionysiac teaching had been received with surprise in the east when it first appeared, but after examination its orthodoxy had been approved. Erigena’s version, with its less subtle Latin vocabulary, gave rise to some suspicion of pantheism: but Erigena was, in fact, no monist, and a papal condemnation of his teaching as pantheist was given only after some centuries, an intervention in a controversy then current. He died about 875, the year Charles the Bald was crowned at Rome and came back to preside over his bishops in Byzantine ceremonial robes: Charles was no defender of the Frankish monasteries from the northmen, but his court was not uninterested in Byzantine learning.
Some of the finest Carolingian verse came from a near contemporary of John the Scot, the unhappy Gottschalk, who died in his silent prison, desiring the last sacrament and unreconciled, in 870. He was the son of a Saxon knight, offered as an oblate at Fulda, and at sixteen passionately anxious for release. A council of bishops granted it him: but such dispensation was novel, for the vows taken by the parents who offered their son were then held as binding as those taken by a novice himself. Gottschalk’s abbot, Raban Maur, appealed against the conciliar decision, and Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, submitted the case for the emperor’s decision: Gottschalk’s plea for release was disallowed, but he was not sent back to Fulda. Corbie and abbot Ratramnus first received him, and then Orbais, where he long studied the doctrine of Augustine about man and sin and the prevenient grace of God (see p. 90). The doctrine of predestination became henceforth the sheet anchor and absorbing interest of his life, but while all his prose works on his subject have perished or been destroyed, the Latin verse that he wrote so effortlessly has survived. He tells us in one place that he spent only a year on the study of rhetoric, perhaps with Ratramnus to whom he wrote a poem: but he spent years wandering in Italy, land of grammarians, and came to write the old, familiar language in the new metres. The use of rhyme in Christian Latin verse is said to have sprung from the example of rhetorical rhymed prose, but Irish influence probably gave it a further impetus.1 Gottschalk’s use of rhyme, as in those flute-like sounds of his lines to a friend who had asked him, an exile, for a song, is remarkable:
Ut quid tubes, pusiole,
quare mandas, filiole,
carmen duke me cantare
cum sim longe exul valde
intra mare?
O cur tubes canere?
If the Carolingian period was notable in the history of Latin poetry for the change from measured verse to verse with the stress accent, it was notable also for its use of rhyme and for the introduction of the sequence into the liturgy. The ninth century saw increased use of the Roman chant among the Franks, but even more significant were the developments which were to come from the sequence itself; this liturgical sequence was to be a factor of the greatest importance in the history of western Latin poetry, vernacular poetry and the first dawn of medieval drama. The history of the sequence belongs both to those of western Latin poetry and of music, as one of the liberal arts: it is connected also with those of the monastic schools and of a scholar long considered its originator, Notker Balbulus, scholasticus of Saint-Gall. While the general subject of Frankish plain chant is briefly treated in the next chapter (see p. 541), that of the liturgical sequence may be mentioned here, for its use marked a beginning. The Easter sequence
Victimae paschali laudes
immolent Christiani
with the ceremonial actions that accompanied it, have been considered the germ of medieval drama.
What then was the sequence? It sprang from the wordless prolongation of the last syllable of the Alleluia sung before the gospel at mass, already very old. Gregory I had stated that in the time of pope Damasus (d. 384) the Alleluia had been prolonged by the singing of a iubilus or iubilatio, a melody without words (melisma). A direction in the Roman Ordo ran: Sequitur iubilatio quam sequentiam vocant. When words were added to the iubilus, the sung passage was called a versus, or, among the Franks, a prosa (prosa ad sequentiam). The term sequentia, in Byzantine music akolouthia, soon came to be used, however, of the words and music together: the singing of such sequences in the Carolingian empire was certainly in imitation of Byzantine practice, and illustrates the relation of western music to eastern music at the time. The singing of the long iubilus after the Alleluia was eastern and had appeared in the Ambrosian Alleluia before the days of Gregory I: it was sung twice, with a verse of scripture set to a melody in between.
The Ambrosian rite had only a small number of these Alleluia melodies, sung at the different feasts, but they were long. Dr E. Wellesz has shown that in Gregory I’s day the singing of the Alleluia with verse was introduced at Rome into all the masses of the ecclesiastical year, save those of the penitential seasons: but at the same time the first singing of the iubilus was shortened and, in the verse, the melody was brought into closer relation to the words. Gregory said of the singing of the Alleluia at Rome: ‘We have cut short this custom, which in this matter had been handed down from the Greeks.’ Dr Wellesz believes that the Gallican Alleluia up till the eighth century had had the same structure as the Ambrosian, the Mozarabic and other pre-Gregorian types, and that the older, longer, pre-Gregorian form was still used by the Franks till the sequence poems, such as those composed by Notker Balbulus, began to be widely used among them.
It was once believed, on the strength of the incipit of the Liber Hymnorum, that Notker was himself the originator of the sequence, at least among the Franks: this is now discredited. Notker was the younger scholasticus in charge of the oblates’ school at Saint-Gall, and worked under his master Iso (d. 871) towards the end of the ninth century. Saint-Gall had certainly a rich treasury of chants, transmitted in its tropers (troparia) or hymn-books. Notker himself tells us in the Prooemium to his Liber Hymnorum that a priest of Jumièges, fleeing to Saint-Gall after his abbey had been sacked by the Nortmanni, had come, bringing with him his antiphoner, in which were certain verses sung at the sequences, ‘but already corrupted’. Delighted at these verses, but disapproving of certain features of them, Notker himself wrote two new verse sequences. Since Saint-Gall was not the monastery where the writing of sequences originated: claims have been put forward for other monasteries, on the Continent or in England, but no certain conclusions have been reached. What is certain, from Notker’s own words in the Prooemium, is that Iso, Notker’s master, knew of such music in the older, Ambrosian manner, with the words of the sequences sung to melodic phrases more or less elaborate, and knew also of the more succinct, Roman chant applied to the verses of the Alleluia: he approved Notker’s first two sequences, but recommended him to write his hymns with one note to each syllable (in the Roman manner), and Notker complied. Though Notker was not the originator of the sequence, he is the first western cantor whose name is connected with it: and he and the choir of Saint-Gall, using Byzantine prototypes, did for Frankish music what the scribes of the schola Palatina did for the illumination of western manuscripts.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For Carolingian abbeys, see under ‘La Renaissance carolingienne’, E. Amann, L’époque Carolingienne, pp. 93–106, and references, and J. M. Clark, The Abbey of St. Gall. For a list and résumé of Carolingian writings on the liberal arts as well as ‘science’ in its modern sense, see G. Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, vol. i, 1950. For Carolingian thought, see the earlier portions of J. de Ghellinck, Literature latine au moyen âge, 1939, and E. Gilson, La philosophie au moyen âge, 1944. See supra, bibliog. note to chapter xvii, on Alcuin: and W. S. Howell, ‘The Rhetoric of Alcuin and Charlemagne’, 1941, Princeton Studies in English, vol. 23. See also M. Cappuyns, ‘Jean Scot Erigène’, 1933, Louvain dissert, in fac. theol., Ser. 2, torn. 26, and C. E. Lutz, Iohannis Scotti Annotationes in Marcianum, Med. Acad, of America, 1939: for the pseudo-Dionysian writings, used by John the Scot, see E. Amann, L’époque carolingienne, p. 313 and refs. For Carolingian verse, see E. Duemmler’s Poetae Latini aevi Carolini, torn, i, 1881: C. U. J. Chevalier’s Repertorium hymnologicum, 6 tomes, 1892–1920: F. J. E. Raby, A History of Secular Latin Poetry, 2 vols., 1934, and H. Waddell, The Wandering Scholars, 1927. For the Irish influence on rhyme, see P. Grosjean, S.J., ‘Confusa Caligo’, in Celtica, vol. iii (1955): an article on the Hisperica Famina.