Augusta Theodosia Drane

THE DOMINICANS AND THE UNIVERSITIES.

A.D. 1215-1300.

In the very same year which witnessed the publication of the Paris Statutes by Robert de CourÇon, the city of Toulouse was being electrified by the lectures of a certain professor of theology named Alexander, who was held in great esteem throughout the south of France. One autumn day in the year 1215, having risen at a very early hour to pursue his studies, he fell asleep in his chair, and in his sleep he had a dream. He thought that seven stars appeared before him, small at first, but gradually increasing in size, and at last illuminating the whole world with their splendour. Starting from his slumber, he found that the hour had come for him to open his school, and hastening thither, seven men presented themselves to him as he entered, and informed him that they were about to preach in the country round about Toulouse, and desired, before doing so, to attend his lectures. They wore the usual dress of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, namely, a white serge tunic covered with a linen surplice, and over that a black mantle; and they were headed by one on whose brow the master seemed to recognise the starry splendour which he had seen in his late vision: they were Dominic Guzman, prior of Prouille and Canon of Osma, and his first six followers.

The Order of Preachers was at this time but just founded, but even before its holy patriarch had given it a rule, and obtained for it the Apostolic confirmation, he directed its first steps to the schools. The institute, of which he had conceived the plan, was expressly designed for the purpose of teaching and preaching, and hence the culture of sacred science formed, from the first moment of its existence, one of its primary and essential duties. Having, therefore, established his followers at Toulouse to pursue their studies under the direction of Alexander, St. Dominic hastened to Rome to lay his plans before Pope Innocent III., then presiding over the Fourth Lateran Council. The Fathers of that Council had already formally recognised the grand evils of the age, which cried for a remedy, to be the want of sound religious instruction among the people and of theological science among the clergy. And a decree had been passed directing the bishops in each diocese to choose persons capable of preaching and instructing the people who were to be employed in this office; and requiring that certain learned men should be appointed in all churches, whether cathedral or conventual, to assist the bishops in preaching the Word of God and administering the Sacraments. Thus the outline of a teaching and preaching order had been sketched by the Lateran Fathers even before its perfect design had been submitted to the Pope by its founder. No wonder, therefore, that it was readily approved; it appeared as though raised up by God to supply a want at the very moment when the existence of that want had been distinctly acknowledged. And as if to mark the fact that, from the first moment of its formal existence, the Order of Preachers was expressly intended to teach and cultivate sacred science, Honorius III., when confirming the rule in the year following, bestowed upon St. Dominic the office of Master of the Sacred Palace, which may be briefly defined as that of the Pope’s theologian. This office became hereditary in the Order, and distinguished the sons of St. Dominic as the chosen theologians of the Church.

To form a just idea of the solicitude of the holy founder, and of those who immediately succeeded him, in establishing a perfect system of studies, we must turn to the Constitutions of the Order. It was at the first general chapter held at Bologna in 1220, and presided over by the saint himself, that an ordinance was passed declaring that as the principal end of the Order is preaching, the brethren should concern themselves rather with books and studies than with the singing of Responsories and Antiphons, provided, however, that prayer be vigilantly attended to.[185] And elsewhere the pursuit of sacred learning is declared to be “most congruous to the design of the Order,” both because the Order professes the contemplative life, and the study of sacred things is necessary to this end, and because it is also designed for teaching others the Divine knowledge which its members have acquired by learning.[186] Schools were therefore to be opened in every convent, under a Master of Studies, which differed from the old monastic schools in being exclusively intended as theological seminaries, and not as academies of the arts. The study of arts was not indeed absolutely prohibited, but it was to be pursued under limitations, and too much time was not to be given to secular branches of learning.[187] It was, however, required that in all convents the brethren should study the languages of the neighbouring countries;[188] and early in the fourteenth century the study of the Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic tongues was likewise enjoined. Still later, in 1553, it was ordained that in all convents where there were younger brethren, there should be a lector appointed to teach them grammar and the arts, according to their capacity. But the studies chiefly contemplated by the rule were those of philosophy and theology. Three years were to be devoted to the study of philosophy, before the commencement of the theological course. The length of time devoted to theological studies may be gathered from the rule which enjoined that in each of the chief houses of studies there should be a Regent of Studies, a certain number of Bachelors and Lectors, and a Master of Studies; but no one could be appointed Regent till he had publicly taught theology for twelve years, and the Bachelor or Lector, ten years; and all these must have maintained at least five public disputations in the schools before the assembled doctors and scholars. Moreover, before any one could present himself for the examination required in order to become a Master of Studies, it was necessary to have completed the course of arts, and another four years’ course of theology.[189]

During the year of religious probation which preceded profession, the novices were exclusively to occupy themselves in acquiring a knowledge of their rule and the duties of their state, and were exercised in chanting the Divine Office and studying the Ceremonies of the Order. During this time they were not allowed to engage in any study except that of languages. After their profession their scholastic course began, during which time every facility was to be afforded them for pursuing their philosophical and theological course. They were to have suitable cells in which they might read, write, and even sit up at night with a light. There was to be some place in which the Master of Studies could assemble them to propose doubts and questions, in discussing which good order and courtesy were to be observed. Every student was to be provided with three books; a Bible, a copy of the Sentences, and a book of histories.[190] The studies began with a course of philosophy, then the Scriptures were explained, and no one could be sent to a Studium Generale, a house of general studies, until he had passed at least one year under a professor of the Sacred Scriptures. After this came the explanation of the Sentences, which formed the theological text-book, until the works of St. Thomas were substituted in their place. In the schools the Lector was forbidden to use any written manuscript; he might have the text of Aristotle and of the Sentences, but no gloss. The pupils might take written notes if they chose, and if they were able to do so, though, as they sat on bundles of straw, or at best on benches without desks, this was not always easy. Most were content to trust to their memory, and assist it afterwards by repetitions of the master’s lesson among themselves. Classes were held every day, and there were weekly and yearly examinations. At first there was but one Studium Generale, that, namely, of St. James’s Convent in Paris, but in 1248 four others were established at Cologne, Oxford, Montpelier, and Bologna, in all of which the students were able to take the same degrees as in Paris. The number of these houses was afterwards greatly multiplied, one being provided for each province. Certain scholars of remarkable capacity were selected by their superiors and sent to those houses. From the Studium Generale the students passed on to graduate at some university, unless, as was often the case, the house was itself aggregated to a university, as at Paris and Bologna. The order observed at Paris in advancing to the degree of Doctor, is given by Fleury in his “Fifth Discourse,” and was as follows. He who was named Bachelor by the General of the Order, or by the Chapter, began by explaining the Sentences in the school of some doctor, for the space of a year, at the end of which time the prior of the convent, with the other doctors then professing, presented him to the Chancellor of the Church of Paris, and affirmed on oath that they judged him worthy of obtaining a license to open a school of his own and teach as a doctor; after going through certain examinations, he taught the second year in his own school, and the third year was allowed to have a bachelor under him, whom at the end of that year he presented for his license. Thus, the doctor’s course lasted three years, and no one could be raised to the degree of Doctor of Divinity or Master of Sacred Theology, who had not thus publicly taught.[191] The teaching of the Friar Preachers, however, was not exclusively given in the pulpit or the professor’s chair. It was their aim to ingraft in men’s minds a knowledge and love of the truth, to protect them from heresy by informing them with the spirit of the Church, that spirit which finds expression, not in her creeds alone, but her Liturgy and sacred ceremonies. In our own day we have become accustomed to the idea that institutes founded for the purpose of teaching must necessarily lay aside something of the monastic character. The long offices, the solemn ceremonial, the austerities and ritual observances which take up so large a portion of cloistered life, are, it is thought, difficult, if not impossible, to associate with the active work of the Apostolate. But in the thirteenth century men were still deeply penetrated with the Liturgical spirit which animated the Church in earlier times; it was held that no words could be so fit to convey her teaching as her own, and not words alone but acts, the exact performance of her beautiful rites, made familiar to the eye and heart of the worshipper; her office, her music, the beauty of her sanctuary, and the silent eloquence of her sacred art. All these, therefore, were embraced by the Dominican rule and used as instruments of popular instruction, and it is probable that the Friars cherished those privileges which threw open their churches to the people, and encouraged them to assist at their public offices, almost equally with those that secured to them the free possession of the professor’s chair.

How thoroughly the newly-constituted order was fitted to supply the intellectual wants of the times is proved by the fact, that in the first period of its existence it was chiefly recruited from the ranks of university scholars and professors. Among the names that figure in its early annals those of the Blessed Reginald of Orleans, and St. Peter Martyr, Jordan of Saxony, and his friend Henry of Cologne, the Englishman, John of St. Giles, and the Parisian, Vincent of Beauvais, the three Bolognese doctors Roland, Conrad, and Moneta, Cardinal Hugh de St. Cher, and his disciple the Blessed Humbert, with the Spanish canonist St. Raymund Pennafort, were all taken from this class.

The chief extension of the Order, especially among the students of Paris and Bologna, took place under the generalship of Blessed Jordan, who had a remarkable gift of drawing to himself the affection and confidence of the young. His influence was naturally enough most powerfully felt among his own countrymen. The convent of Cologne had already been founded by his old fellow-student and bosom friend Henry of Utrecht; and a namesake of his, Henry the German, who had begun life as a student, then assumed the cross, and finally taking the religious habit, became its first theological professor. And there in 1230 arrived the young Swabian, Albert of Lauingen, who had been drawn to the Order by B. Jordan, whilst pursuing his studies at Padua. Albert during his student-life had been remarkable for his love of the old classic literature and his enthusiastic admiration for Aristotle; and had already displayed a singular attraction to those physical sciences which he afterwards so profoundly studied. He had examined various natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, the mephitic vapours issuing from a long closed well, and some curious marks in a block of marble, which he explained in a manner which betrays an acquaintance with some of the chemical theories of modern geology.[192] After going through his theological course at Bologna, he was appointed to fill the vacant post of professor at Cologne, where he taught sacred and human science for some years, and lectured moreover at Hildesheim, Strasburg, Friburg, and Ratisbonn, in which last city an old hall is shown which still bears the title of “Albert’s School.” Converted into a chapel by one of his successors and ardent admirers, it may be supposed to exhibit the same form and arrangement as that which it bore five centuries ago. Round the walls are disposed ancient wooden seats, for the accommodation of the hearers, and fixed against the middle of the wall is an oak chair, or rather pulpit, covered with carvings of a later date, representing St. Vincent Ferrer delivering a lecture, and a novice in the attitude of attention. The chair is of double construction, containing two seats, in one of which sat the master, and in the other the bachelor, who explained under him the Book of the Sentences. All around are texts from the Holy Scriptures, fitly chosen to remind the student in what spirit he should apply himself to the pursuit of sacred letters. Ama scientiam Scripturarum, et vitia carnis non amabis. Qui addit scientiam addit et laborem. Bonitatem et disciplinam et scientiam doce me. Qui fecerit et docuerit, hic magnus vocabitur in regno cÆlorum. Videte ne quis vos decipiat per philosophiam, secundum elementa mundi, et non secundum Christum.

In such a hall as this we may picture to ourselves the Blessed Albert the Great lecturing at Cologne in 1245, where he first received among his pupils that illustrious disciple whose renown, if it eclipsed his own, at the same time constitutes his greatest glory. There are few readers who are not familiar with the student life of St. Thomas of Aquin, the silent habits which exposed him to the witticisms of his companions, who thought the young Sicilian a dull sort of importation, and nicknamed him “the dumb ox;” the obliging compassion which moved a fellow-student to offer him his assistance in explaining the lessons of the master, and the modesty and humility with which this greatest of Christian scholars veiled his mighty intellect, and with the instinct of the saints, rejoiced to be counted the least among his brethren. But the day came which was to make him known in his true character. His notes and replies to a difficult question proposed by Albert from the writings of St. Denys, fell into the hands of his master, who reading them with wonder and delight, commanded him on the following day to take part in the scholastic disputation. St. Thomas obeyed, and the audience knew not whether most to admire his eloquence or his erudition. At last Albert, unable to restrain his astonishment, broke out into the memorable words, “You call this the dumb ox, but I tell you his roaring will be heard throughout the whole world.” From that day St. Thomas became the object of his most solicitous care; he assigned him a cell adjoining his own, and when in the course of the same year he removed to Paris, to govern the school of St. James for three years, in order afterwards to graduate as doctor, he took his favourite scholar with him.

The position which the Friars at that time occupied in Paris requires a few words of explanation. In the year 1228, a tavern brawl, which terminated in a disgraceful riot, had brought on a collision between the civic and academic authorities; and the indiscriminating severity with which the excesses of the students had been punished, had determined all the masters to desert the city, and open their schools elsewhere. This quarrel, which threatened the entire break-up of the university, lasted three years, and was only finally adjusted by the interference of the Pope. During the absence of the masters, the archbishop and chancellor of Paris conferred one of the vacant chairs of theology on the Friars Preachers, and shortly afterwards erected a second chair in their favour, Roland of Cremona and John of St. Giles being named the two first university professors of the order.

When the masters returned to Paris they affected to regard this as an infringement of their rights, and a warm controversy arose, which lasted with ever-increasing violence for forty years, and was at its height when the two saints made their first appearance in the Parisian schools. It did not, however, prevent Albert from winning his doctor’s cap, together with the reputation of having illuminated every branch of science, and of knowing everything that was to be known.[193]

His doctor’s triennium had scarcely expired when he was recalled to Cologne to take the Regency of the Studium Generale, newly erected in that city; and St. Thomas accompanied him to teach, as licentiate or bachelor, in the school which proved the germ of a future university. This epoch of Albert’s life appears to have been that in which most of his philosophic writings were produced. They consist chiefly of his “Commentary on Aristotle,” in which, after collating the different translations of that author with extraordinary care, he aims at presenting the entire body of his philosophy in a popular as well as a Christian form; a commentary on the Book of the Sentences; other commentaries on the Gospels, and on the works of St. Denys, all of which are preserved; and a devout paraphrase of the Book of the Sentences cast into the form of prayers, which has been lost. His published works alone fill twenty one folio volumes, and it is said that a great number of other treatises exist in manuscript. Fleury, who is pleased to say that he knows nothing great about this writer except his volumes, takes in very bad part the labour he has expended on the study of natural science. The course of the stars; the structure of the universe; the nature of plants, animals, and minerals, appear to him unsuitable subjects for the investigation of a religious man; and he hints that the seculars who paid for the support of such students by their liberal alms expected them to spend their time on more profitable studies. The reader need not be reminded that Albert was not singular in directing his attention to these subjects, and that the scientific labours of our own Venerable Bede have ever been considered as among his best titles to admiration as a scholar. But more than this, it is surely a narrow and illiberal view to regard the cultivation of science as foreign to the purposes of religion. At the time of which we are now speaking, as in our own, physical science was unhappily too often made an instrument for doing good service to the cause of infidelity. It was chiefly, if not exclusively, in the hands of the Arabian philosophers, who had drawn great part of their errors from the physics of Aristotle. Schlegel, indeed, considers that the extraordinary popularity of Aristotle in the Middle Ages did not so much arise from the love of the mediÆval schoolmen for his rationalistic philosophy, as from the attraction they felt to some great and mysterious knowledge of nature. His works seemed to give promise of unlocking to them those vast intellectual treasures reserved for the scrutiny of our own age, but of the existence of which they possessed a kind of dim half-consciousness. Hence the teachers of the thirteenth century could hardly do more effective service to the cause of truth than by handling these subjects according to a Christian method, and proving that faith and science were in no sense opposed to one another. Hallam affects to grieve over the evil inflicted on Europe by the credit which Albert’s influence gave to the study of astrology, alchemy, and magic. The author of Cosmos, however, passes a very different verdict on the nature of his scientific writings, and one which our readers will be disposed to receive as more worthy of attention. “Albertus Magnus,” he says, “was equally active and influential in promoting the study of natural science, and of the Aristotelian philosophy.... His works contain some exceedingly acute remarks on the organic structure and physiology of plants. One of his works, bearing the title of Liber Cosmographicus de Natura Locorum, is a species of physical geography. I have found in it considerations on the dependence of temperature concurrently on latitude and elevation, and on the effect of different angles of incidence of the sun’s rays in heating the ground, which have excited my surprise.”[194] Jourdain, another modern critic, says, “Whether we consider him as a theologian or a philosopher, Albert was undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary men of his age; I might say, one of the most wonderful men of genius who has appeared in past times.”

It may be of interest to notice here a few of the scientific views of Albert, which show how much he owed to his own sagacious observation of natural phenomena, and how far he was in advance of his age. He decides that the Milky Way is nothing but a vast assemblage of stars, but supposes, naturally enough, that they occupy the orbit which receives the light of the sun. The figures visible on the moon’s disk are not, he says, as has hitherto been supposed, reflections of the seas and mountains of the earth, but configurations of her own surface. He notices, in order to correct it, the assertion of Aristotle that lunar rainbows appear only twice in fifty years; “I myself,” he says, “have observed two in a single year.” He has something to say on the refraction of the solar ray, notices certain crystals which have a power of refraction, and remarks that none of the ancients, and few moderns, were acquainted with the properties of mirrors. In his tenth book, wherein he catalogues and describes all the trees, plants, and herbs known in his time, he observes, “all that is here set down is the result of our own experience, or has been borrowed from authors, whom we know to have written what their personal experience has confirmed: for in these matters experience alone can give certainty.” (Experimentum solum certificat talibus.) Such an expression, which might have proceeded from the pen of Bacon, argues in itself a prodigious scientific progress, and shows that the mediÆval friar was on the track so successfully pursued by modern natural philosophy. He had fairly shaken off the shackles which had hitherto tied up discovery, and was the slave neither of Pliny nor of Aristotle.

He treats as fabulous the commonly-received idea, in which Bede had acquiesced, that the region of the earth south of the equator was uninhabitable, and considers that, from the equator to the south pole, the earth was not only habitable, but, in all probability, actually inhabited, except directly at the poles, where he imagines the cold to be excessive. If there are any animals there, he says, they must have very thick skins to defend them from the rigour of the climate, and are probably of a white colour. The intensity of cold is, however, tempered by the action of the sea. He describes the antipodes and the countries they comprise, and divides the climate of the earth into seven zones. He smiles with a scholar’s freedom at the simplicity of those who suppose that persons living at the opposite region of the earth must fall off—an opinion which can only arise out of the grossest ignorance, “for, when we speak of the lower hemisphere this must be understood merely as relatively to ourselves.” It is as a geographer that Albert’s superiority to the writers of his own time chiefly appears. Bearing in mind the astonishing ignorance which then prevailed on this subject, it is truly admirable to find him correctly tracing the chief mountain chains of Europe, with the rivers which take their source in each, remarking on portions of coast which have in later times been submerged by the ocean, and islands which have been raised, by volcanic action, above the level of the sea, noticing the modification of climate caused by mountains, seas, and forests; and the divisions of the human race, whose differences he ascribes to the effect of the countries they inhabit. In speaking of the British Isles, he alludes to the commonly-received idea that another distant island, called Tile or Thule, existed far in the Western Ocean, uninhabitable by reason of its frightful climate, but which, he says, has perhaps not yet been visited by man. He was acquainted with the sleep of plants, with the periodical opening and closing of blossoms, with the diminution of sap during evaporation from the cuticle of the leaves, and with the influence of the distribution of the bundles of vessels on the folial indentations.[195] His minute observations on the forms and variety of plants intimate an exquisite sense of floral beauty. He distinguishes the star from the bell flower, tells us that a red rose will turn white when submitted to the vapour of sulphur, and makes some very sagacious observations on the subject of germination. The extraordinary erudition and originality of this treatise has drawn from M. Meyer the following comment:—“No botanist who lived before Albert can be compared to him, unless it be Theophrastus, with whom he was not acquainted; and after him none has painted nature in such living colours, or studied it so profoundly, until the time of Conrad, Gesner, and Cesalpini. All honour, then, to the man who made such astonishing progress in the science of nature as to find no one, I will not say to surpass, but even to equal him for the space of three centuries.”

In the Treatise on Animals which Jourdain particularly praises, nineteen books are a paraphrase of Michael Scott’s translation of Aristotle, but the remaining seven books are Albert’s own, and form, says Jourdain a precious link between ancient and modern science. It was not extraordinary that one who had so deeply studied nature, and had mastered so many of her secrets, should by his wondering contemporaries have been judged to have owed his marvellous knowledge to a supernatural source, or that his mechanical contrivances,[196] his knowledge of the power of mirrors, and his production of a winter garden, or hothouse, where, on the feast of the Epiphany 1249, he exhibited to William of Holland, king of the Romans, plants and fruit-trees in full blossom, should have subjected him in the mind of the vulgar to the suspicion of sorcery. But it is certainly surprising that such charges should be reproduced by modern critics, who, it might have been thought, would have condemned the very belief in witchcraft as a mediÆval superstition. The more so as Albert devotes no inconsiderable portion of his pages to the exposure and refutation of those forbidden arts, which he will not allow to be reckoned among the sciences, such as geomancy, chiromancy, and a formidable list of other branches of magic.

During the time that Albert was engaged in these labours, his daily life was one which might rather have seemed that of a contemplative than of a student of physical science. “I have seen, and know of a truth,” says his disciple Thomas of CantimprÉ, “that the venerable Albert, whilst for many years he daily lectured on theology, yet watched day and night in prayer, daily recited the entire Psalter, and at the conclusion of every lesson and disputation gave himself up to Divine contemplation.” His skill as a master drew an incredible number of students to Cologne, whom he not only inspired with his own love of science, but directed in the spiritual life. Among these were the blessed Ambrose of Siena, and Ulrich of Engelbrecht, who afterwards became provincial of Germany, and made use of the mechanical and scientific lore he had acquired from his master in the construction of the great organ in Strasburg cathedral.

But the fame of all the other pupils of Albert pales like his own before that of St. Thomas of Aquin, who claims our notice in these pages less in his character of saint and theologian than in that of Regent of schools. From the period of his promotion to the doctorate to the day of his death, he was incessantly engaged in the work of teaching, as a very brief outline of his life will show. After lecturing for four years in Cologne, he was recalled to Paris in order to take his degrees, and though under the accustomed age, for he was then but twenty-five, no opposition was offered on the part of the university to his being received as Bachelor, and lecturing as such in the public schools. But at the end of the year, when he should, by right, have proceeded to the degree of Doctor, the quarrel which had already broken out between the Seculars and Regulars was fanned into a flame by the calumnies of William de St. Amour, and the secular Regents persisted in refusing to admit the friars to any of the theological chairs. The dispute being at last referred to Rome, St. Thomas was summoned thither, and by his eloquent defence procured the condemnation of St. Amour’s book on “The Perils of the Latter Times,” in which the religious orders were attacked in scandalous terms. Not only were the deputies of the university obliged to subscribe this condemnation, but also to promise on oath, in presence of the cardinals, to receive members of the two mendicant orders to their academic degrees, and especially St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas, who had hitherto been unable to obtain their Doctor’s caps. The publication of the Pope’s bull, and the authority of St. Louis, finally brought this vexatious dispute to a close, but the university authorities, though forced to yield, contrived to give expression to their ill-will by an act which provided that the Dominicans should always hold the last place, not only after the secular regents, but after those of every other religious body.[197]

On the 23rd of October, 1257, the two saints were received to their Doctor’s degree. St. Thomas, who had no small difficulty in overcoming the scruples of his humility, and who only yielded at last to the orders of his superiors, chose for the text of his “Act of Theology,” not as it would appear without a divine inspiration, the words of the Psalmist, “Thou waterest the hills from Thy upper rooms; the earth shall be filled with the fruit of Thy works;”[198] words which he interpreted to refer to Jesus Christ, who, as the Head of men and angels, waters the heavenly mountains with the torrent of His graces, and fills the Church with the fruit of His works, in the Sacraments which convey to us the merits of His Passion. But as PÈre Croiset observes, the event gave to this text the character of a prophecy regarding his own future career.

Having taken his Doctor’s degree, he now, according to custom, taught in his own school, having under him a bachelor, who appears to have been either Annibal Annibali, his particular friend, and afterwards cardinal, or Peter Tarantasio, afterwards Pope Innocent V. Many of his theological works were composed during the time he was teaching at Paris, and among the rest his “Summa against the Gentiles,” written at the particular request of St. Raymond Pennafort. Father Nicholas Marsillac, one of his disciples, who gave evidence at the process of his canonisation, speaking of his extreme love of poverty, declared that when he was composing this work, he was often in want of paper to write it on. Nor were his charity and humility less remarkable than his spirit of detachment. In the arena of disputation, where the desire to be right, and the shame of appearing wrong, are apt enough to elicit warm feelings and sharp words, those who watched him the most closely never saw his tranquillity for one moment disturbed;[199] master of himself and of his passions, he possessed his soul in meekness and patience.

On the death of Alexander IV., in 1261, his successor, Urban IV., summoned St. Thomas to Rome, where he continued to discharge the same functions as at Paris, and composed a great number of his theological treatises. It was also during this period of his life that he visited England, being present as Definitor to the General Chapter, held at the Blackfriars in London, in the year 1263. Immediately on his return he was called to Orvieto, and charged by Urban to draw up an office for the newly-appointed Feast of Corpus Christi. “What chiefly strikes us in this office,” says Dom GuÉranger,[200] “is the grand scholastic form which it presents. Each of the Responsories at Matins is composed of two sentences, one drawn from the Old, and the other from the New Testament, which are thus made to render their united testimony to the great mystery which is the object of the Feast. This idea, which has in it something truly great, was unknown to St. Gregory and the other authors of the ancient liturgy. But St. Thomas possessed the genius not only of a theologian, but of a poet. In his prose Lauda Sion, as the same writer observes, he has found means to unite scholastic precision to poetry, and even to rhyme. For,” he adds, “every sentiment of order necessarily resolves itself into harmony, and hence, St. Thomas, the most perfect scholastic of the thirteenth century, is on that very account its most sublime poet.” About the same time he appears to have composed his Treatise on the “Unity of the Intellect,” against the errors of Averrhoes; at least it is known to have been written during the pontificate of Urban IV., who died in 1264.

Clement IV., who succeeded him, showed himself no less sensible of the merits of the great doctor than his predecessor had been. He wished to have raised him to the archbishopric of Naples, and even published a Bull conferring that dignity on him, but the prayer of the saint induced him to suppress it, being unwilling, by persisting in his design, to afflict one so dear to him. St. Thomas was therefore left in peace, and he used his liberty to commence his great work, “The Summa of Theology,” of which John XXII. is reported to have said, that if the author had worked no other miracle, he might be deemed to have worked as many as there were articles in the book. Tolomeo of Lucca says, that it was begun in the year 1265, and that the saint devoted to it the remaining nine years of his life, during which time, however, he never ceased to preach and teach publicly both at Rome, Bologna, and Naples. At Bologna, in particular, his lectures caused a sort of revival of learning in that city, and drew thither a great number of foreigners. He remained there for three years, at the end of which time he was called to Paris to attend the General Chapter of his order, and, according to Echard, was again raised to the professor’s chair in that university, which he filled for two years. On his return to Bologna, in 1271, the publication of the second part of his “Summa” produced such an excitement that all the universities of Europe disputed which should gain possession of him. Naples won the preference, and thither the saint repaired, passing on his way through Rome, where he began the third part of his “Summa” and lectured in public according to his custom. A contemporary writer, quoted by the Bollandists, affirms that being engaged in explaining the mystery of the Holy Trinity, the waxlight, which he held in his fingers, burnt down and scorched them without his being conscious of the pain, so entirely was he absorbed in the greatness of his subject.

At Naples he found a very different state of things from that which had prevailed there when he had studied as a youth in the Ghibbeline university of Frederic II. The rule and the race of that emperor had passed away like a dream, and the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was now held by Charles of Anjou, the brother of St. Louis, and the faithful supporter of the rights of the Holy See. He reckoned it among the glories of his reign to have drawn to his capital the greatest doctor of the Church; and an inscription engraved on marble was long to be seen at the entrance of the school of the Dominican Convent at Naples, bidding the visitor, before entering, do reverence to the chair whence St. Thomas had taught an infinite number of disciples, King Charles I. having procured this happiness for his kingdom and assigned an ounce of gold per month for the support of the said doctor. During the year and a half that he resided at Naples, St. Thomas continued his accustomed labours; only during the three last months of his life did he lay aside his pen, and cease to write or dictate.

It appeared as though he were conscious of his approaching end, for which God was preparing him by astonishing revelations. Often he was rapt in ecstasies at the altar, concerning which, when questioned, he could only answer, “So great are the things that have been revealed to me, that all I have hitherto taught and written seems to me as nothing.” Yet he was able, before his death, to complete the third part of the Summa, which he left in the state in which we still possess it, and besides this to compose several other lesser treatises. On his deathbed, as is well known, his humility yielded to the entreaties of the religious who surrounded him, and he consented to explain to them the Canticle of canticles. His dying words, as they are reported by the Bollandists, are precious as the last instruction of the greatest of Christian scholars. When he beheld the Sacred Host in the hands of the priest who was about to administer to him the last sacraments, he made his profession of faith according to the accustomed form. Then he added, “I have written much, and have often disputed on the mysteries of Thy law, O my God! Thou knowest I have desired to teach nothing save what I have learnt from Thee. If what I have written be true, accept it as a homage to Thine Infinite Majesty; if it be false, pardon my ignorance. I consecrate all I have ever done to Thee, and submit all to the infallible judgment of Thy Holy Roman Church, in whose obedience I am about to depart this life.”

It will be seen that the career of St. Thomas was exclusively that of a scholastic professor, and the anecdotes left us by his biographers prove with what a hearty and genuine earnestness he devoted himself to the cause of sacred learning. His prodigious powers of mind were accompanied with a childlike simplicity of character, which has been recognised by every writer of his life, and which, no less than the purity of his doctrine, won him the title of the Angelic Doctor. In the schools he was known as the sweetest and most charitable, as well as the most learned, of masters; no harsh word was ever heard to pass his lips, and the youngest of his scholars could reckon on commanding his whole attention. He had no thoughts apart from his religions duties and his books; and the splendours of the courts of France and Naples, in both of which he was received with such distinguished honour, had no power to dazzle him. Seated at the table of St. Louis, he was absorbed in a convincing argument against the Manicheans, and became wholly forgetful of the royal presence; and at Naples his student-like absence of mind was not less conspicuous. When the cardinal legate and the Archbishop of Capua came to visit him, he descended into the cloister to receive them; but on the way, revolving in his mind the solution of a theological difficulty, became so absorbed in his subject that by the time he reached the cloister he had forgotten all about the business and the visitors that had called him thither, and stood like one in a dream. The archbishop, who had formerly been his pupil, persuaded the cardinal to leave him alone till he should have recovered himself, and assured him that these reveries were perfectly well understood by those familiar with his habits.

F. Daniel d’Agusta once pressed him to say what he considered the greatest grace he had ever received from God, sanctifying grace, of course, excepted. He replied, after a few moments’ reflection, “I think, that of having understood whatever I have read.” St. Antoninus says, in his life, that no doubt was ever proposed to him that he did not solve, and that he remembered everything he had once heard, so that his mind was like a huge library. He often wrote, dictating at the same time on other subjects to three or four secretaries. Erveo Britto, one of these secretaries, declared that on one occasion the saint becoming weary, closed his eyes and appeared to have fallen asleep, but that in this state he nevertheless continued to dictate as before.

There are few saints, in fact, of whose daily life and habits we know more than St. Thomas. He is familiar to us as one of ourselves. We seem to see him enjoying his ordinary recreation of walking up and down the cloister of his convent, occasionally dragged off by his brethren to take a breath of fresh air in the garden, but sure in such cases to be found before long in some remote corner, absorbed in cogitation. Or we behold him contentedly following a lay brother through the markets of Bologna, who, ignorant of the rank of the new guest in the convent, had summoned him to be his companion on the quest, and charged him with the bag, which he carried all day on his shoulder, with undisturbed good-humour. His clothes were always the poorest in the whole convent, and his love of poverty was so great, that we are told that he wrote his “Summa against the Gentiles” on old letters and other scraps of paper. He ate but once in the day, and his total indifference to comfort or convenience, seemed to indicate that he had been heard, in what is said to have been his daily prayer for detachment: Da mihi, Domine, cor nobile, quod nulla deorsum trahat terrena affectio. And with these homely anecdotes are mingled others which exhibit him to us in ecstasy before his crucifix, preparing himself for his daily celebration of Mass by penance, confession, and meditation, and making his thanksgiving by humbly serving another, feeding his devotion by acts of charity, and binding himself by a law never to admit into his soul a single thought that should not be directed to God.[201]

In the last chapter we have seen something of the ravages caused by that pagan philosophy which had gradually established itself in the schools, and without some knowledge of which it is impossible to appreciate the work accomplished by St. Thomas. The university professors of the thirteenth century regarded Aristotle much as the masters of Carthage had done, of whom St. Augustine says that they spoke of the Categories of that philosopher with their cheek bursting with pride, as of something altogether divine. To displace a system which had obtained so firm a hold of the European mind, would probably have been a hopeless enterprise, and St. Thomas therefore achieved his triumph in another way. He humbled the proud Agar, Reason, under the hand of her mistress, Faith, and presented the truths of Revelation in the language of philosophy. In the five volumes which he devoted to his Commentaries on Aristotle he purged the text of the pagan philosopher from everything opposed to the truths of Christianity, and in his Summa of Theology he used the Aristotelian system of reasoning to combine those truths in one vast and harmonious whole.[202] Far from depreciating the office of the understanding, he vindicated its rights, by proving how close an alliance existed between Faith and Reason, and drove from the field the pantheistic dreams of Averrhoes by defining the nature and powers of the individual intellect.

The Arabian philosopher had attempted to explain the existence of universal ideas as found alike in all minds, by the hypothesis that mankind had but one common intellect, and that their ideas were therefore the creation not of many intellects, but of one. His view was embraced by many of the schoolmen, and carried to its extremest consequences, so that it was not uncommon to hear it asserted that after death all souls were merged in one, and thus that all distinction of rewards and punishments would be impossible.

“St. Thomas fought the new sceptical school with their own weapons; with the Conceptualists he admitted the axiom that the mind is the creator of its own objects:[203] by its own powers it forms its ideas of external things; yet its ideas are no false representations of the external world, for the matter of these ideas has been furnished from without by the senses.[204] There was, therefore, no necessity for imagining such a oneness of intellect as Averrhoes held, in order to give objective certainty to human knowledge. The intellect of each man has its own powers, and is the image of the Everlasting Wisdom; and its ideas are shadows of the archetypal ideas of the Divine mind, according to which the world was created. Limited as are its powers, by looking on itself it can form a notion of God, which, though feeble and inadequate, is capable of being developed by the Church on earth, and more perfectly still in heaven. The Pantheism of Averrhoes was nothing but the perversion of a great truth. There is, indeed, one Light ‘which lighteneth every man who cometh into the world,’ but the intellect of each man is a substantive thing with its own powers and operations. Moreover, Averrhoes had removed the intellect utterly out of the control of the conscience; according to him and his disciples the doctrines of faith and the conclusions of reason were the direct contradictory to each other; nevertheless, both might exist together in the mind without the necessity of coming to any conclusion. In other words, they believed in nothing whatever; and truth was a mere matter of words. St. Thomas, therefore, set himself to place faith and reason in right relations to each other. The intellect, he said, was a sacred gift of God, and could never be really contrary to the truth.[205] In its own sphere it was perfect, but the field of faith was a vast system lying beyond the sphere of the intellect. It was out of the jurisdiction of the reason which could pronounce nothing on the matter. Yet though powerless as an organ for the discovery of the faith, it may serve as an expression of the doctrines of revelation. Faith no more excludes reason than grace excludes nature,[206] and Divine truths when received into the human mind, must take the shape of human ideas and human words. Therefore it was that St. Thomas conceived it possible that the great truths of revelation might be expressed in terms of reason, and that the faith might be systematised and presented as one vast whole. And to effect this he chose the terms of Aristotle’s philosophy, as the most scientific classification of the ideas of the human mind.”[207]

The mind of Europe, which had been fast lapsing into infidelity, found itself at last in possession of a system of Christian philosophy wherein the Aristotelian dialectics were employed to defend the Catholic dogmas. “In the Summa of Theology was presented,” says Ozanam, “a vast synthesis of the moral sciences, in which was unfolded all that could be known of God, of man, and of their mutual relations,—a truly Catholic philosophy.” The value of such a gift, at such a time, was at once apprehended, and so instantaneously was the doctrine of St. Thomas accepted in the schools of his own order, that only four years after his death we find a decree of the general chapter of Milan directing that certain English friars should be severely punished for having departed from his teaching, and having had the temerity to call in question some of his propositions. Before the end of the century decrees were passed[208] expressly requiring all the brethren to adhere to the doctrine which he taught, without allowing the least departure from it, and this even before his canonisation. But it was not his own order alone which thus adopted his teaching, and bore witness to his position as a Doctor of the Church. That very university of Paris, which in 1255 had refused him his Doctor’s cap in 1259, agreed to refer to his sole decision a theological question of deep interest, regarding the Sacramental species which then agitated the schools; and in 1274 addressed a letter to the Chapter-General of the Order, in which it speaks of the consternation into which the schools of the metropolis have been cast by the news of his death. They know not where to find expressions honourable enough by which to designate him; he is the morning star, the luminous sun, the light of the whole Church. They remind the Fathers how vehemently they had desired to have him restored to them, and beg that they may now at least be permitted to have his ashes. Two years after his canonisation, certain students in arts having revived some of the philosophical errors refuted by St. Thomas, Stephen, Bishop of Paris, immediately issued a letter, condemning every article which seemed to affect “the doctrine of that most excellent Doctor, the Blessed Thomas,” whom he calls “the great luminary of the Catholic Church, the precious stone of the priesthood, the flower of Doctors, and the bright mirror of the university of Paris.” The universities of Bologna, Padua, Naples, Toulouse, Salamanca, Alcala, and Louvain, at various times and in various ways formally declared their adhesion to his doctrine, as did also a great number of the religious orders, enumerated by Touron in his life of the saint.[209] And even during the lifetime of the saint, as Echard remarks,[210] the numerous disciples whom he had trained in his school, carried his teaching into the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, Rome, and Cologne, for so great was the authority which his name enjoyed, that they seldom made use of any other commentaries than those of their master.

The character of St. Thomas is commonly regarded as presenting us with the perfect model of a Christian doctor. The ideal of such a character has been sketched by his own pen in that commentary on St. Matthew’s Gospel, wherein he reminds the reader that it is not enough for the scholar to study the truths of religion, if he does not draw near to God in his life. For God is the source of light, whom if we approach by faith and charity we shall be truly illuminated, and it is by a holy life rather than by subtlety of reasoning that we must seek for a knowledge of the truth. There is a light which men may gain by study, but it suffices not to fill the soul; and there is a light which God pours out on those who sanctify study with prayer, and this is the true wisdom; according to the words of the Wise Man—“I called upon God, and the spirit of wisdom came upon me.” The perfect Doctor, therefore, he continues, is he whose life, as well as whose doctrine, is light. Three things are necessary to him: stability, that he may never deviate from the truth; clearness, that he may teach without obscurity; and purity of intention, that he may seek God’s glory, and not his own.[211] The life and the writings of St Thomas verified his own words. “The most learned of the saints,” said Cardinal Bessarion, “he was also the holiest among the learned.” He has himself expressed the guiding principle of his scholastic career in a passage which we may be permitted to quote here for the edification of all scholars. It occurs in his Summa against the Gentiles, wherein he attempts to define the office of the true philosopher, and shows that, even according to Aristotle, the only real philosophy is the science of truth. But, if truth is to be held, error must be refuted; hence, the office of the wise man is twofold—to meditate on the divine truths, and to combat all errors opposed to them. “Encouraged, therefore, by the divine goodness to undertake this office, albeit the enterprise is far beyond my powers, my intention is, according to my scanty measure, to manifest the truth professed by the Catholic faith, and to eliminate the contrary errors; for to use the words of St. Hilary, I feel and am persuaded that the chief duty of my life which I owe to God is, in all my words, as in all my thoughts, to speak His praise.”[212]

What an earnest loyalty to God breathes forth in these words! What a deep conviction of the oneness of philosophy with divine dogma! What a majesty of resolve in his determination to make the manifestation of Catholic truth the “duty of his life,” and how rare a picture of lifelong purpose nobly achieved when we compare these expressions with his dying words!—“Sumo Te pretium redemptionis animÆ meÆ, sumo Te viaticum peregrinationis animÆ meÆ; pro cujus amore studui, vigilavi et laboravi, prÆdicavi et docui; nihil unquam contra Te dixi; sed si quid dixi ignorans, non sum pertinax in sensu meo. Totum relinquÔ correctioni SanctÆ RomanÆ EcclesiÆ, in cujus obedientia nunc transeo ex hac vita.”[213]

The reconciliation of revealed truth and philosophy to which St. Thomas devoted his life must doubtless be regarded as the great intellectual triumph of the thirteenth century; and when we contemplate the group of illustrious men who took part in that work, it is impossible not to render homage to the good providence of God, who, in the hour of need, supplies His Church with fit instruments with which to effect His own purposes. The Friar Minors shared with the Friar Preachers the toils and glory of this great enterprise. Their order had not, indeed, been founded with the same express view of cultivating sacred science; but they were required to labour for the salvation of souls, and as souls could only be saved at this crisis by the vigorous defence of Catholic dogma, the humble sons of St. Francis scrupled not to enter the university schools, and soon gave to the Church a long line of doctors. The seraphic St. Bonaventure was bound to St. Thomas in the ties of friendship, and intimately associated with him in his work; and his teaching regarding the office of the human intellect, and the source of its illumination, is homogeneous with his. “All illumination descends to man,” he says, “from God, the Fontal Light: all human science emanates, as from its source, from the Divine light.” This light, he goes on to say, is fourfold—there is the inferior, the exterior, the interior, and the superior light. The first gives us the knowledge of those things manifested by the senses. The second illuminates us in respect of artificial forms, and includes a knowledge of the useful and ornamental arts, even those of the loom and the needle.[214] The third is the light of philosophical knowledge, and its object is intelligible truth; and this is threefold, for there are three kinds of verities—truth of language, truth of things, and truth of morals. Lastly, superior truth is that of grace and holy Scripture, and illuminates us in respect of saving truth. “Thus, the fourfold light descending from above has yet six differences, which set forth so many degrees of human science. There is the light of sensitive knowledge, the light of the mechanical arts, the light of rational philosophy, of natural philosophy, and of moral philosophy, and lastly, the light of grace and holy Scripture. And so there are six illuminations in this life of ours, and they have a setting, because all this knowledge shall be destroyed. And therefore there succeedeth to them the seventh day of rest, which hath no setting, and that is the illumination of glory.”[215]

It is obviously beyond our present purpose to attempt anything like an account of the Dominican theologians who succeeded St. Thomas, and were formed in his school; and I shall content myself, therefore, with noticing a few of those friars of the thirteenth century, whose influence may be said to have told on education rather than on theology. And the first who claims our attention as having distinguished himself in this line, is, naturally, the librarian of the good king St. Louis, and the tutor of his children, Vincent of Beauvais. He devoted a great part of his life to a gigantic undertaking, the very conception of which attests the colossal scale on which men of those days thought and laboured for futurity. He desired to facilitate the pursuit of learning by collecting into one work everything useful to be known. The plan was not a new one; many such EncyclopÆdias had already been produced, as that of St. Isidore, and their value was great in an age when the scarcity of books rendered it next to impossible for any ordinary student to procure all the authors he would require to consult, if he desired to perfect himself in various sciences. But it is also possible that a more profound motive than that of mere convenience induced so many of the Christian writers to spend their labours on these encyclopÆdiac collections. They desired to present to the student the idea of knowledge as a whole, the parts of which were intimately connected, and could not be dissevered from one another without mutual injury. By philosophy, they understood a knowledge of truth in all its parts; and hence the student, according to the old established system, was steadily led through his trivium and quadrivium, those seven liberal arts selected as representing the chief divisions of philosophy, properly so called. The scholastics of Abelard’s stamp had revolutionised this system, and, as we have seen, had all but banished the arts from the school, and made philosophy to consist in little more than the science of reasoning. And this was one point on which Hugo of St. Victor attacked them. Bred up in the old school of monastic students, he contended that their philosophy was no philosophy at all, and that the seven liberal arts cohered one with another, so that, if one were wanting, philosophy, which consisted in a comprehensive knowledge of all science,—rational, physical, and moral,—must necessarily be imperfect.[216] The same teaching is implied in the passage from St. Bonaventure, quoted above; and it seems probable that this sound view of the intimate connection of all parts of human knowledge flowing, as separate streams, from One Fontal source, prompted Vincent of Beauvais to undertake his gigantic work, that so the great edifice of science should be once more presented with all its halls and porticoes forming one harmonious whole, domed over, if we may so express ourselves, with Theology, and surmounted by the Cross.

He had some special facilities for carrying out his design which were not at the command of ordinary students. He was able to make free use of that noble library collected by St. Louis, and attached by him to the Sainte Chapelle. It was thence that he drew the materials of his work, and nature had endowed him with exactly the kind of genius which his task demanded. Antoine Poissevin says of him that he was a man who was never tired of reading, writing, teaching, and learning; the most gigantic labours did not alarm him; neither work, watching, nor fasting was ever known to cause him fatigue; and after devoting one-half of his life to reading the royal library, and every other collection of books that came within his reach, he did not shrink from employing the other in producing a compendium of all he had read. He limited himself to no one subject, or section of subjects; but resolved to embrace all arts and all sciences, whatever he found that was beautiful and true in the physical or in the moral world; whatever could make known the wonders of nature, or the yet greater wonders of grace; all that poets, philosophers, historians, or divines had said that was worth remembering—all this he determined to set before his reader in orderly arrangement; and undismayed at the magnitude of his enterprise, he laboured at it day and night till it was accomplished. “The Great Mirror,” as he calls his work, is divided into three parts, in which are treated separately, Nature, Doctrine, and History. All his scientific and philosophic views are not, of course, original, for he proposed rather to give to the world the cream of other men’s thoughts than of his own. But for this very reason the statements contained in his book are of greater value, as they show the shallowness of those charges so continually brought against the science of the Middle Ages, by writers who have probably concerned themselves very little to ascertain in what that science consisted. Vincent did not write to support new theories or explain away vulgar errors; he aimed only at presenting, in a compendious form, the commonly-received views of his own time, and of times anterior to his own, occasionally illustrating his subject with a sagacious remark, derived from reflection or personal observation. And what a host of misconceptions and traditional calumnies fall to pieces, as we glance through such an analysis of his pages as is given by Rohrbacher![217] How then, we exclaim, did not the mediÆval savants oscillate between the opinion that the earth was a flat plane, and that other equally luminous view, that it was a cube? Is it possible that they knew anything of the principle of the attraction of gravitation, and stranger still, that they explained the spherical form of the earth by reasoning drawn from that very principle? Are we to believe our eyes when we read that Vincent of Beauvais illustrates this part of his subject by reminding us of the globular form of the rain drops, which he says, in language which reads like an anticipation of the verses of Montgomery, are so formed by the very same law as that which regulates the shape of the earth?

And who would expect to find the librarian of St. Louis putting forth the argument which still does good service in our popular class-books, wherein the spherical form of the earth is demonstrated by the gradual disappearance below the horizon of the hull and sails of a receding ship, and their as gradual reappearance in a contrary order, on its approach towards us? Yet there it is, together with yet more learned things; such as the method for measuring an arc of the meridian as a means of obtaining the circumference of the earth, quoted from the writings of Gerbert. His treatment of the metaphysical questions which occupied so much attention at the time at which he wrote, is no less remarkable than his natural philosophy, and Rohrbacher, comparing his explanation of universal ideas with that of Bossuet, gives the preference in point of profundity to the mediÆval friar. “Thus, then,” he continues, “by the middle of the thirteenth century, the religious of St. Dominic and St. Francis had resumed all Christian doctrine, the teaching of the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the Councils into a sum of theology; St. Thomas had examined in detail the pagan philosophy, had corrected it, and reconciled it with Christian truth. Roger Bacon, the Franciscan, not content with the ancient sciences catalogued by Aristotle, had begun to penetrate deeper into the secrets of nature, and the Dominican, Vincent of Beauvais, presented in his ‘Mirror’ an epitome of all that man, up to that time, knew in nature, science, art, philosophy, and history.”[218]

Even had the benefits conferred by the friars on the world of letters stopped here, they would have done very much to counteract that narrowing tendency which has been noticed in the last chapter and to restore the broader and truer theory of education which in the twelfth century had been gradually pushed out of place. But to complete our idea of the work achieved by the Dominicans, we must add that they largely encouraged the cultivation of Biblical studies, and of the Greek and Oriental tongues. The Cardinal Hugh de St. Cher claims the gratitude of students as the author of the first Biblical Concordance, a work which he commenced in the year 1236. The Chapter-General of the Order, which was that year held in Paris, entered with large liberality into so useful a design, and appointed a great number of the brethren to labour at it under his direction. Martene, in his Thesaurus Anecdotorum, gives an ordinance of the Chapter of Paris, directing that all copies of the Sacred Scriptures used in the Order should be revised, corrected, and punctuated according to the correction of the body of religious thus employed. This great work was begun under the generalship, and with the hearty concurrence, of Blessed Jordan of Saxony; his successor St. Raymund Pennafort, whose election had been mainly brought about through the exertions of Hugh de St. Cher, made yet more important provision for the encouragement of the Scriptural sciences. With a view of promoting the critical study of the Scriptures, and arming his brethren with weapons of controversy against the Jews and Mahometans, whose influence in this century was far more powerfully felt among Christians than it now is, he established Arabic and Hebrew studies in all the convents of Spain. Not content with this, he founded two colleges more expressly intended for the same purpose, attached to convents of the Order, one at Murcia, and the other at Tunis, filling them with religious whom he selected as best qualified to devote themselves to these pursuits. One of these was his celebrated namesake, Raymund Martin, the author of the Pugio Fidei, whom a learned French academician, M. Houtteville, has, by a singular blunder, numbered among the literary stars of the sixteenth century, unable, as it would seem, to credit the fact that so erudite a scholar could have flourished before the age of Francis the First. He was, however, a contemporary of St. Raymund, and is declared to have been as familiar with the Arabic, Hebrew, and Chaldaic tongues, as he was with Latin. The two last parts of his book are written in Hebrew, and he employed his last years in teaching the same language to a number of disciples, as well secular as religious.[219] The value of St Raymund’s labours in founding these schools, which won him the title of the Restorer of Oriental Studies, was publicly acknowledged in a Bull of Clement VIII., who declares that the revival of the Eastern languages in the Dominican schools has contributed to the glory both of Spain and of the entire Church, and has been the proximate cause of a vast number of conversions.[220] Ten thousand Saracens had already been won to the faith before the year 1236.

Nevertheless, no charge is more commonly brought against the scholars of the Middle Ages, than that of neglecting the study of the Greek and Oriental languages. Hallam, in his “Literary History,” with a great show of candour and painstaking research, notices certain examples of authors belonging to the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, who, he says, appear to have known a few words of Greek. Greek books, he admits, were to be found in the libraries of the eleventh century, and Greek lexicons were compiled by Benedictine abbots, which seems an odd waste of labour if no one ever dreamed of using them. In the “Philobiblon” of Richard of Bury, written in the fourteenth century, he gravely informs us that he has counted five words of Greek. As to the statement made in the same book to the effect that the learned author had caused Greek and Hebrew grammars to be drawn up for the use of students, he dismisses the passage with the comment that no other record of such grammars is to be found. Nor does the decree of the Council of Vienne, passed in 1311, ordering the establishment of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldaic professorships in the universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca, strike him as offering any evidence that these languages were really cultivated. The decree, he says (though he brings no authority in support of his words), “remained a dead letter.” He accounts for the occasional phenomenon which is to be met with, of a scholar acquainted with five words of Greek, by attributing it to the assistance of Greek priests who found their way into Europe; and observes, that after all, supposing anybody did really know the language, he only used it to read “some petty treatise of the Fathers, or apocryphal legend.” One is tempted to criticise the accuracy of a writer who begins by denying that any mediÆval scholars in the West were acquainted with Greek, and then goes on to tell us what they did, and what they did not, read in that language. But there is a more serious fault in these statements than their bad logic. Having made an assertion of this nature on a subject which is certainly of no mean importance in the history of literature, he was bound to take some pains in investigating it. And it is difficult to understand how he can really have examined the literary history of the thirteenth century, without coming across some incidental proof of the ardour with which the Greek and Oriental languages were being at that time pursued in the Dominican schools. It was a fact of such world-wide notoriety that the motive which induced the university of Oxford to assign the Jews’ quarter of the town to the Friars Preachers, was their known familiarity with the learned tongues, by means of which it was hoped they might become efficient instruments for the conversion of their Jewish neighbours. General after General added to the ordinances made by his predecessors for keeping up these studies. Humbert de Romanis, the fifth General of the Order, to whom St. Raymund had communicated the success of his own efforts in Spain, at once determined to extend the ordinance, which had hitherto been partial in its operation, to all the convents of the order; and in 1256 he addressed a circular letter to the brethren, in which he invites all who feel themselves inspired by the grace of God to devote themselves to the study of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, to communicate with him, because the knowledge of these languages is most necessary in order to extend the light of the Gospel among the Greek schismatics and Moorish infidels.[221] F. Penna, auditor of the Rota to Clement VIII., assures us that it was the success of the colleges established by the Friars Preachers, and specially in Spain, that moved the Council of Vienne to issue the decree already quoted, and the same is repeated by other writers. The acts of that council are, however, by others attributed to the influence of the celebrated Franciscan Raymund Lully, the Illuminated Doctor, as he was called, who devoted many years and much labour to the endeavour to obtain the foundation of colleges for the study of these languages, in order to provide missionaries qualified to labour among the infidels. He himself was a profound Orientalist, and the legendary tales which multiplied in connection with his extraordinary life, represent the tree under which he constructed his mountain hut, as bearing on its very leaves the Greek, Arabic, and Chaldaic characters. At last he persuaded King James of Arragon to found a college in the island of Miraman for thirteen Franciscans who were to be given up to the study of the learned tongues. Pope Honorius IV. entered warmly into his views, but died before he was able to forward them; Philip le Bel acceded so far as to endow a college at Paris, and the Council of Vienne passed its decree confirming the erection of that college, and directing that similar establishments should be formed in the other chief European universities. Hallam, as we have seen, boldly asserts that the decree remained “a dead letter.” How generally it was carried out, or how long its provisions remained in force, may not be easy to determine; but there are precise documents to prove that it was at least put in force at Paris and Oxford. A letter is preserved, written in 1325, by Pope John XXII., to his legate in Paris, recommending him to watch the holders of the new professorships very closely, lest, under colour of the study of the Oriental tongues, they introduce any of the pernicious philosophical doctrines already condemned, and gathered out of the Gentile books.[222] The historic evidence of the bon fide existence of the professorships at Oxford is yet more circumstantial, and is thus referred to by Ayliffe in his history of that university. “I pass on,” he says, “to speak of the lectures founded by Pope Clement V. for the teaching of the Hebrew, Chaldaic, Arabic, and Greek languages, among which lectures John de Bristol, a converted Jew, read the Hebrew for many years at Oxford with great applause; and this year (1318), received a stipend settled on him by Walter Reynolds, Archbishop of Canterbury, and a tax of an halfpenny per mark from every ecclesiastical benefice throughout his province. This money was collected at the beginning of every Lent, and was lodged with the prior of the Holy Trinity.”[223] He goes on to notice some frauds committed in the collection of this tax in 1327, which, he says, is the last notice he finds concerning it. It is very probable that the professorships afterwards fell into abeyance, but the assertion that they were never founded is manifestly one of those made by a writer who draws his bow at a venture, and never cares to inquire into the fact.

Among those who took part in the deliberations of the Council of Vienne was Aymeric of Placentia, twelfth General of the Order of Preachers, who in the previous year had established a house of studies in every Province for the Greek and Oriental languages, requiring the Provincials to provide very learned teachers of the same, and if none such were to be found among the brethren, they were to engage the services of secular professors, to be paid out of the revenues of the Province,[224] a provision which certainly seems to imply that such professors were there to be found. This Aymeric, whom the chronicle of the Masters-General call “a learned man, and a great lover of letters,” did much also to promote the study of the Scriptures at other chapters of his Order. Echard tells us of the magnificent present bestowed by him on the convent of Bologna, in the shape of a Hebrew Pentateuch, which Bernard of MontfauÇon describes as having himself seen. It contained an inscription, declaring the book to be the identical copy written by Esdras the scribe after the return from Babylon, and which he read in the ears of the people. After being preserved in various Jewish synagogues with the utmost veneration, Aymeric had obtained possession of it, and its authenticity was attested by several learned Jews. Though Echard hesitates to yield full credit to the tradition, he admits that the antiquity of the copy was not to be doubted.

The culture of Greek in the Order is no less distinctly proved than that of the Oriental tongues. William de Moerbeka made a number of translations from Plato, Galen, and Proclus of Tyre; and his translation of Aristotle was made directly from the original, at the request of St. Thomas, who himself understood the language well enough to criticise his friend’s version. Moerbeka was appointed Archbishop of Corinth in 1277, after being several times despatched as apostolic missionary to the East. Another fellow-student and intimate friend of St. Thomas, the cardinal Annibal Annibaldi,[225] is declared to have been learned both in Greek and Arabic philosophy. These examples of the linguistic erudition of the friars are but few out of many that might be given, and it is clear that their Greek reading was not limited to Apocryphal legends and petty treatises of the Fathers. It certainly included the Greek philosophy, both Plato and Aristotle having found translators among the Friars Preachers of the thirteenth century. But it is more than probable that the poets and historians of Greece were little known or cultivated, for the object of these studies was less literary than practical. The Friars had to contend with a false philosophy, drawn out of the books of the Gentiles, and to maintain controversies with Greek schismatics and Jewish and Moorish unbelievers; and they studied to arm themselves for the work in which they were engaged. Practical views predominated very generally in that wonderful thirteenth century, which we are so disposed to contemplate through a poetic medium; and so we may safely admit the likelihood that the Greek poetry was not much studied before the period of classic renaissance.

The influence of the Dominicans meanwhile extended to other universities besides those of Paris, Cologne, and Bologna, to which they were first affiliated. At Toulouse, the nursery of their Order, they naturally held a forward position, and led the struggle against the Albigensian errors, for the suppression of which the university had been mainly founded. At Orleans their convent was used as the place of assembly for the doctors, and the establishment of the university being for some reason regarded with disfavour by the citizens, they directed their spleen against the friars, regarding them as the main prop of the unpopular institution, and did their best to level the convent with the ground. But they always held their ground at Orleans, and their larger theories on the subject of education may have had something to do with the character which distinguished that university, for Orleans opposed itself to the rage for logic, and always upheld the study of the arts.

One other foundation must be named, which, though it in no way shares the brilliant historic fame of so many sister academies, is too illustrative of the position held by the Dominicans in the mediÆval schools to be passed over in this place.

The ancient university of Dublin was founded in 1320 by Archbishop Bicknor, in virtue of a Bull from Pope Clement V., confirmed by Pope John XXII.; one of its first masters and doctors being an Irish Dominican, William De Hardite.[226] This university was established in connection with St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but from the troubles of the times and the want of funds, it very soon declined, and in the following century became all but extinct. To supply the means of academic education to the youth of Ireland, therefore, the Dominicans of Dublin made a noble effort. In 1428 they opened a gymnasium, or high school, on Usher’s Island, dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas, in which all branches of knowledge were taught, from grammar to theology, and to which all classes of students, whether ecclesiastical or secular, were admitted. Hither a great number of young men flocked to pursue their course of philosophy and theology. As the convent was on one side of the river, and the house of studies on the other, the friars, with that munificence which characterised the ancient regular orders, erected a stone bridge of four arches at their own expense, long known as the “Old Bridge,” which was not destroyed till 1802, and which for two centuries was the only bridge of the kind in Dublin. With the consent of the common council, a Dominican lay brother received the tolls paid by carriage passengers over the bridge, and sprinkled the passers-by from a font for holy water, which was erected there. “It is an interesting fact in the history of education in Ireland,” says Mr. Wyse,[227] “that the only stone bridge in the capital of the kingdom was built by one of the monastic orders as a communication between a convent and its college, a thoroughfare thrown across a dangerous river for teachers and scholars to frequent halls of learning, where the whole range of the sciences of the day was taught gratuitously.” But even this noble foundation did not satisfy the Irish Dominicans. In 1475, the four mendicant Orders, headed by the Friars Preachers, presented a memorial to Pope Sixtus IV., praying for canonical authority to erect their schools in Dublin into a university for the liberal arts and theology, which petition was granted, and a Brief[228] was issued the same year to that effect, granting the new academy the same rights and privileges that were enjoyed by the members of the university of Oxford. It appears certain that the proposed scheme was really carried into effect, for Campion, in his History of Ireland, written in 1570, before his conversion to the Catholic faith, declares that before the subversion of the monasteries, “divines were cherished” in them, “and open exercise maintained.” But whatever were the success or the failure of the scheme, it is equally worthy of our admiration that four mendicant Orders should thus unite, under the leadership of the children of St. Dominic, to supply an academic education to the youth of their country solely out of their own resources. They asked neither for royal charters nor state endowments, but, content with the authority of the Papal Brief, they offered to their countrymen, with more than princely munificence, a gratuitous university education.

The result of the Christian philosophy established in the schools by the labours of St. Thomas, and propagated by the brethren of his Order, spread far beyond the academic circles. That philosophy appeared in an age which was full of the force and passion of youth, and ready to find utterance in the language of the heart and the imagination. It spoke, not in the Summa alone, but in the poetry of Dante, in the paintings of Cimabue and Giotto, and in the minsters of Salisbury or Cologne. For in each and all of these we see in various ways the reflection of Christian dogma. If we may credit the voice of tradition, it was to the geometrical science, united to the profound Christian mysticism of Albert the Great, that the German architects were indebted for many of the secrets of their art. He is known to have consecrated, and is believed to have designed, more than one of those superb cathedrals which date their existence from the same century which witnessed the rise of the universities; and the choir of the Dominican convent at Cologne, which Rodolph tells us was rebuilt by the great master “according to the rules of geometry, and as a most skilful architect,” is said to have served as the model on which the cathedral itself was designed. Almost at the same time the two Dominican artists, Fra Sisto, and Fra Ristoro, were initiating an architectural reform in Italy, and it was the Greek paintings that decorated their beautiful church of Sta. Maria Novella, at Florence, that gave the first impulse to the genius of Cimabue. That great man, the father of Italian art, was a pupil of the Florentine Dominicans. The friars, “in order to carry out that portion of their rule which commands them to be useful,” says Marchese, “had opened a grammar school for the instruction of the Florentine youth, as well as for their own novices. The grammar master was sometimes one of the friars, and sometimes a secular; and in the latter case he received a fixed salary of a florin a month, with board and lodging.” At this time the office happened to be filled by an uncle of Cimabue, who numbered his own nephew among his scholars. The boy often escaped from his books in order to watch the painters at work in the church; and in school, instead of attending to his lessons, would sometimes employ himself in making rude pen-and-ink sketches. His masters discerned his rare gifts, and instead of punishing him for preferring his pencil to his grammar, they wisely determined to encourage his genius, and placed him under the tuition of the Greek artists, whom he soon surpassed, as he was himself surpassed by his own pupil Giotto. The latter also was largely indebted to the Dominican Order, for his first patron was Pope Benedict XI., a Friar Preacher, and a disciple of St. Thomas, who was gifted with that love of art which has ever been hereditary in the order. Giotto was the friend of Dante, and, like him, steeped in the essentially Christian ideas of the age. The hero of his pencil was St. Francis, and he has left his poems in honour of that hero painted on the walls of the church of Assisi.

We may judge how very powerfully the Christian philosophy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries told on the restoration of art by a glance at such documents as the statutes drawn up for the corporation of Siennese painters, in 1335. “We are called by the grace of God,” they say, “to manifest to rude and ignorant men who cannot read the miraculous things operated by the power of the holy faith. Now our faith chiefly consists in believing and adoring one eternal God—a God of infinite power, immense wisdom, and boundless love and goodness; and we are persuaded that nothing, however small it may be, can be begun or finished without three things—namely, power, wisdom, and will, with love.”[229] Who drew up these statutes, and whence were such ideas of art derived? We know not; yet the theological cast of the phraseology leads us to infer that their author must have been perfectly familiar with the writings of St. Thomas.[230]

To speak broadly, then, we may say that the victory achieved in the thirteenth century, through the labours of the scholastic theologians, was that which established the supremacy of dogma in the schools, and which made its power indirectly felt in every province of thought, art, and literature. The immediate result may be stated in the words wherein Rohrbacher sums up the ecclesiastical history of this period. “During the whole of this time,” he says, “in spite of the prodigious activity which we have seen taking possession of men’s minds in the West, moving them to embrace and examine every question of theology, philosophy, and other sciences, as well in general as in detail, not a single new heresy arose.”[231] Order had been introduced into the wild chaos of opinion, and the Christian schoolmen assumed the position as masters of thought, which had hitherto been held by pagans.

Before closing this chapter, we will anticipate an objection which has probably suggested itself to some who have accompanied us through the foregoing studies. Whilst freely acknowledging the services rendered to the faith by the scholastic theologians, they may be disposed to fear lest something of the elder tone of spirituality was lost when the lecture halls of university professors were substituted for the claustral schools of the Benedictines. There was doubtless more accurate science; but was there the old contemplative wisdom that fed itself in silent communing on God? Had the heart kept pace with the intellect, or had not the schools become more rich in dogma, and less full of love? And this kind of doubt as to the possibility of uniting things apparently so little in harmony as philosophic acuteness and unction of heart, is the more natural and excusable as we find that it actually prevailed to a very considerable extent among the religious students of the period, and gave rise to not a few disputes. Hence, in the early days of the order of Preachers, conscientious scruples were entertained by some among the friars themselves as to the lawfulness of cultivating philosophy and the liberal arts; and we find a decree passed, in consequence, at one of the first Chapters-General, declaring the use and necessity of such studies. So powerful, however, was the impulse felt in the order towards the contemplative life during the first century of its existence, that some still felt uneasiness lest the too great application to scholastic science should leave the heart dry and barren. But Humbert de Romanis severely condemned such scruples, comparing those who entertained them to the Philistines, who deprived the children of Israel of all smiths’ tools;[232] and declared the study of philosophy to be necessary on the part of Christian scholars, inasmuch as it was now employed by unbelievers as a weapon with which to attack the dogmas of the Church.

Dryness and spiritual barrenness, in fact, were the last faults which could be charged against the dogmatic theologians of the thirteenth century. It is remarkable that the Dominican convent most noted as a house of studies north of the Alps, and which was the nursery of all the greatest doctors of the order, was precisely that in which the brethren most eagerly devoted themselves to the contemplative life. All the first friars of Cologne, including Brother Henry, the first prior, distinguished themselves as contemplative writers.[233] Albert the Great—the greatest star of the Cologne school—displayed in his later writings the germs of that tender mysticism which afterwards appeared in the writings of Tauler and Suso. In the distinction he draws between Christian and pagan philosophy, he clearly shows that the studies then pursued in the order, whilst they illuminated the intellect, were far from drying up the heart. “The contemplation of the Catholic Christian is one thing,” he said, “and that of a pagan philosopher is another. The philosopher meditates for his own utility alone—his end is merely to learn and to know. But the Christian contemplates out of love for Him whom he contemplates—that is, God. Hence, not only has he a more perfect knowledge for his end, but he passes from knowledge into love.” And the very last of his works, written in his old age, and, as his biographer says, with the view of refreshing his mind when weary with the fatigues of teaching, bears the title De AdhÆrendo Deo, and opens with these touching words:—“Having desired to write something, in order, as far as possible, to end well our labours in this region of exile, we have proposed to ourselves to inquire how a man may best detach himself from all below, in order to attach himself solely, freely, and purely, to our Lord God. For the end of Christian perfection is love, and it is by love that we adhere to God.”[234]

To the same effect are the words of St. Thomas: “In the perfect contemplative life, divine truth is not merely seen, but loved.”[235] The soul, plunging itself in the contemplation of the Divine greatness, acquires a knowledge of God, not so much by means of light and cognition, as by an experimental union with Him; so that, through the affections thence derived, it knows and it contemplates. “Hence it comes to pass,” he continues, “that He is loved more than He is known, because He can be perfectly loved, even although He be not perfectly known.”[236]

His life corresponded to his teaching. Though not exhibiting to the ordinary observer that miraculous and extraordinary character which attaches to many of the saints, all his biographers agree in asserting that his union with God became at last wholly uninterrupted. “So entirely was his mind intent upon God,” says Flaminius, “that nothing was able to separate him from this contemplation.” “I have learnt more by prayer than by study,” were his own words to his familiar companion, Brother Reginald, and he often repeated the warning that, Wisdom being the gift of God, a man ought not to endeavour or hope to acquire it by dint of study, without humbly asking for it in prayer. From none of the writings of the saints could there be collected maxims of more tender piety than from St. Thomas; it was he who said that the measure of our love of God was to love Him without measure,[237] who called the Holy Scriptures the Heart of Christ,[238] and who confessed to one of his friends that there were two things he did not understand: how a religious could ever think or speak of anything, but God, and how a man who had committed mortal sin could ever smile. Divine science took in him its most attractive form, and, to use his own words in describing the truly wise man, it lifted him into a world beyond the moon where he enjoyed a perpetual serenity.[239] The violence and injustice to which he was exposed in the long and vexatious controversy with the Parisian doctors never had power to disturb him; and this sweet serenity of heart was so apparent on his countenance that he is said to have had a peculiar power of imparting the gift of spiritual joy to all who conversed with him.

When he preached the Lent to the people of Naples, he appeared in the pulpit like one rapt in ecstacy, with his eyes closed and his face turned towards heaven, as though he were contemplating another world. Even at table he was always ruminating divine things, and St. Antoninus tells us that, when he was asleep, he was often heard to pray aloud. It is clear that he fully recognised the possibility of a life of study drying up the fountains of devotion, for he gave as his reason for daily reading the Collations of Cassian, after the example of his holy patriarch St. Dominic, that he might draw thence devotion, and that by means of devotion his understanding might be raised to sublimer things.[240] And it was the same principle which made him, like Bede, inflexible with himself in never absenting himself from assisting in choir, both by day and night, frequently telling his religious that a student must by all means keep open the wells of devotion, so that the work of the head may never cause the heart to grow dry and tepid.

Some particular instances are recorded of his special love for the Divine Office, and the singular relish he took in the Sacred Psalmody. Flaminius speaks of the frequent raptures and devout tears which certain portions of it elicited from him, such as the versicle “Ne projicias me in tempore senectutis,” which recurs so frequently in the time of Lent. It may also be observed that all his biographers notice the unction which attached to his preaching, for he possessed an extraordinary power of moving the hearts of his hearers, and exciting compunction and amendment of life. He was frequently called upon to preach the Lent both at Rome and Naples, and on one of these occasions, when preaching in St. Peter’s to an immense audience on Good Friday, all the people who heard him were moved to tears, and ceased not to weep until Easter day, when his Paschal sermon filled them with holy jubilation.

MassouliÉ, one of the greatest commentators on St. Thomas, has remarked the erroneous impression entertained by many who believe that great doctor to have been “so completely occupied with the speculations of the intellect as not to have applied himself equally to excite the emotions of the heart.... It is, however, certain,” he continues, “that, if we attentively read his works, we shall find his love to have been equal to his knowledge, for they contain all the secrets of the mystical life, and the sublimest and most divine operations of grace in the hearts of those consecrated to God. In fact, there is nothing really important in all the states to which a soul can be raised in the spiritual life, and in all God’s secret communications with holy souls, which he has not explained in the second part of his Summa; whilst in his smaller works he has given his heart full liberty to expand itself.... Hence,” he adds, “we must not suppose that St. Thomas received the name of the Angelic Doctor only on account of his profound arguments and vast knowledge of the truths of faith; but still more justly on account of those ecstacies which made him enter into the society of the blessed Spirits.”[241] So far, indeed, was the Angel of the Schools from being all intellect and no heart, that even the more human side of his character exhibits him to us as peculiarly accessible to the tenderness of Christian friendship. He described it with his pen, he felt it in his heart, and he failed not to excite corresponding sentiments in others. The tie which existed between him and St. Bonaventure is well known, nor was that which bound him to Blessed Albert less close and enduring. After the death of St. Thomas, Albert was never able to speak of his great pupil without shedding tears, a circumstance which is even alluded to in the process of canonisation. His brethren wondered at it, and feared lest this excessive weeping should arise from some weakness of the head. But his tears flowed only out of the abundance of his love. The very name of his beloved disciple sufficed to draw from him these tokens of affection, and he never wearied in repeating to those around him that they had lost “the flower and ornament of the world.”

The stem that produced that flower did not lose its fertility when its fairest blossom was transplanted to Paradise. The “Order of Truth,” as it was called, continued to bud forth a long succession of philosophers and theologians, the bare enumeration of whose names would fill a volume, for according to a moderate computation they number about 5000. When St. Dominic and his six disciples first entered the school of Alexander of Toulouse, who could have anticipated the mighty stream that was to flow from that seemingly humble source? Yet now “the brook had become a river,” and the river had swelled into a sea, and the doctrine of his sons “shone forth as the morning light,” and was poured out to “all those who sought the Truth.”[242]