These are examples, which might be multiplied indefinitely, of the pious
mediaeval view that the _artes_, with a very little reading of the
_auctores_, were proper for the educated Christian, whose need was to
understand Scripture. Sometimes, stung, at least rhetorically, by fear of
the lust and idolatry of the antique, mediaeval souls cry out against its
lures, even as Jerome’s Christianly protesting nature dreamed that famous
dream of exclusion from heaven as a “Ciceronian.” Alcuin, who led the
educational movement under Charlemagne, gently chides one whose fondness
for Virgil made him forget his friend--“would that the Gospels rather than
the _Aeneid_ filled thy breast.”[160] Three hundred years later, St. Peter
Damiani, himself a virtuoso in letters and a sometime teacher of rhetoric,
arraigns the monks for teaching grammar rather than things spiritual.[161]
Damiani speaks with the harshness of one who fears what he loves. In
France, about the same time, our worthy sermon-writer, Honorius of Autun,
liked the profanities well enough, and drew from them apt moral tales,
which preachers might introduce to rouse drowsy congregations. Yet he
directs his pulpit-thunder at the _cives Babyloniae_, the _superbi_, who
after their several tastes finger profane literature to their peril:
“Those delighting in quibbling learn Aristotle: the lovers of war have
Maro, and the lustful idlers their Naso. Lucan and Statius incite
discords, while Horace and Terence equip the pert and wanton
(_petulantes_)--but since the names of these are blotted from the book of
life, I shall not commemorate them with my lips.”[162]
This with the excellent Honorius was pious rhetoric. Yet the love and fear
of antique letters caused anxiety in many a mediaeval soul, deflected by
them from its narrow path to the heavenly Jerusalem. Indeed the love of
letters and of knowledge was to play its part, and might take one side or
the other, according to the motive of their pursuit, in the great
mediaeval _psychomachia_ between the cravings of mortal life and the
militant insistencies of the soul’s salvation. This conflict, not confined
to mediaeval monks, has its universal aspects. It echoes in the sigh of
Michelangelo over the
“affectuosa fantasia,
Che l’ arte si fece idolo e monarca,”
--which had so long drawn his heart from Eternity.[163]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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