The Catholic World, Vol. 16, October 1872-March 1873Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 16, October 1872-March 1873
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
was finished, calmly closed his book and died.”(53)
We have already named Fulda, the glorious monastic centre where the monk
Sturm established the Benedictine rule in 744, and where, before his
death, 400 monks sang daily the praises of God, and good scholars were
trained to intellectual warfare in the name of faith. In 802, “mindful of
its great origin, it was one of the first to enter heartily into the
revival of letters instituted by Charlemagne,” and sent the monks Hatto
and Rabanus to study under Alcuin. We find a most graphic description of
the daily routine of this great school in _Christian Schools and
Scholars_. It so well illustrates the common life of the middle ages that
we do not hesitate to give it at some length: “The German nobles gladly
entrusted their sons to Rabanus’ care, and he taught them with wonderful
gentleness and patience. At his lectures every one was trained to write
equally well in prose or verse on any subject placed before him, and was
afterwards taken through a course of rhetoric, logic, and natural
philosophy.... The school of Fulda had inherited the fullest share of the
Anglo‐Saxon spirit, and exhibited the same spectacle of intellectual
activity which we have already seen working in the foundations of S.
Benedict Biscop. Every variety of useful occupation was embraced by the
monks.... Within doors the visitor might have beheld a huge range of
workshops, in which cunning hands were kept constantly busy on every
description of useful and ornamental work in wood, stone, and metal....
Passing on to the interior of the building, the stranger would have been
introduced to the scriptorium, over the door of which was an inscription
warning the copyists to abstain from idle words, to be diligent in copying
good books, _and to take care not to alter the text by careless mistakes_.
Not far from the scriptorium was the interior school ... where our
visitor, were he from the more civilized South, might well have stood in
mute surprise in the midst of these fancied barbarians, whom he would have
found engaged in pursuits not unworthy of the schools of Rome. The monk
Probus is perhaps lecturing on Virgil or Cicero, and that with such hearty
enthusiasm that his brother‐professors accuse him in good‐natured jesting
of ranking them with the saints. Elsewhere disputations are being carried
on over the _Categories_ of Aristotle, and an attentive ear will discover
that the controversy which made such a noise in the twelfth century, and
divided the philosophers of Europe into the rival sects of Nominalists and
Realists, is perfectly well understood at Fulda, though it does not seem
to have disturbed the peace of the school. To your delight, if you be not
altogether wedded to the study of the dead languages, you may find some
engaged on the uncouth language of their fatherland, and, looking over
their shoulders, you may smile to see the barbarous words which they are
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