It happened with Bede as with some other Latin hymn-writers—there were several persons who had the same name as himself. Hilary and Fortunatus and Notker are not the only cases of confusion, for there were certainly three Bedes, and they were not long removed from each other in point of time. Beda Major—the elder or greater Bede—was a presbyter and monk of Lindisfarne, commemorated by his more celebrated namesake. Another was a holy man of the time of Charles the Great. But our own Beda or Bedan was a presbyter and monk of Jarrow, and is distinguished from the rest by the title of “Venerable,” which he shares with Peter the Venerable of Cluny.
There are few finer figures in early English history. Sprung from pagan and utterly illiterate ancestry, he has taken his place as an historian, a scholar, a natural philosopher, and a poet; and in every department of this varied knowledge he has shown his ability and industry. English literature recalls him; English history praises him; English scholarship has elaborately edited his writings, and English patriotism has affectionately honored his memory.
Cuthbert, his disciple, who wrote his life, begins his narration in the following words:
“The presbyter Beda, venerable and beloved of God, was born in the province of Northumbria, in the territory of the monasteries of the Apostles Peter and Paul, which is in Wearmouth and at Jarrow, in the year of our Lord’s incarnation the six hundred and seventy-seventh, which is the second year of the solitary life of St. Cuthbert.” It also was the ninth year after the reduction of Saxon England to the Roman obedience at the Synod of Whitby.
Bede himself relates that when he was seven years of age the care of his education was committed by his relatives to the AbbotBenedict and afterward to the Abbot Ceolfrid. He adds that from that date to the time at which he prepared the accompanying list of his works he had spent his days in the same place. His existence was passed in meditating upon the Holy Scriptures; and he “found it sweet,” in the midst of his observance of the conventual discipline and daily chanting in the church, “either to learn, or to teach, or to write.” The choice of this word “sweet” (dulce) is significant, for no man could more carefully have mingled the sweet with the useful. A gentle spirit breathes across his studious pages, as over the rough beards of the yellow grain a breeze moves and sways them, harsh though they are, in graceful waves. For he loved learning with a perfect avidity. His works reveal his desire to accumulate it—to teach it again in plain and simple fashions—and this benevolent desire redeems many a tedious discourse.
This life of his was devoid of personal incident. He includes nothing of his individual history in the little notices which he makes of contemporary events, and he is singularly silent even about the affairs of which we should think he would naturally speak. The light which we get upon his surroundings and circumstances we must, therefore, derive from other sources, but fortunately these are at hand. We know, for example, that Benedict Biscop, who founded those twin monasteries in which Bede dwelled all his life, was himself a remarkable person. He was of noble birth, and gave up place and ambition in the court of the king to proceed to Rome, there to be trained as a monk, and then to return and found Wearmouth in 674 and Jarrow in 682. To the second of these religious establishments, situated upon the Tyne, Bede was transferred under Ceolfrid, its first abbot, and there thenceforth he remained. We are even able to determine his usual food as a school-boy, for, says his latest biographer, Rev. G. F. Browne, “we have a colloquy in which a boy is made to describe his daily food in his monastery. He had worts (i.e., kitchen herbs), fish, cheese, butter, beans, and flesh meats. He drank ale when he could get it, and water when he could not; wine was too dear.” There is, indeed, in these Saxon monasteries the honest and hearty food which belonged to their age and people. Cedric the Saxon, in Sir Walter Scott’s novel ofIvanhoe, represents very fairly the popular feeling on the subject.Chaucer, too, can be quoted upon this same profusion and the generosity of the time. Of the Franklin he says:
“It snowed in his house of meat and drink.”
“It snowed in his house of meat and drink.”
With such a patron as Biscop the monasteries never lacked any good thing. He brought back from the Continent the best matters of the period—books, pictures, relics, skilled mechanics, makers of stained glass, and choir-masters. He saw before him a land in which the monk was to be the conservator and promoter of learning. And in carrying out this purpose he did more than plant a monastery, for he planted and reared a man. We have the word of that historian whose life and death so nearly approach those of his favorite author, when we declare that “prose took its first shape in the Latin history of Baeda.” For John Henry Greene closed his history of the English people much as Bede ended his own career, weary with his labor and yet completing what he had begun.
That which lies before us is what Greene finely styles “the quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge.” It was no hoarding, avaricious, trilobite life to be fossilized for future ages in the dead strata of ecclesiastical records. Instead, it concerned itself with all learning; and though it perished in the blackness of a general ignorance, it is a source of light and force to-day.
But let us return to Bede’s brief points of change. While he was still a boy, the monastery was desolated by one of the great plagues which followed the Synod of Whitby, and every monk who knew how to sing in the choir, except the Abbot and Bede, were among the victims. Unaided these two struggled with the double task of teaching the others to sing and keeping up the monastic services in the mean time. The antiphons they had to abandon, but they struggled through the Psalms, often weeping and sobbing as they sang. At nineteen—six years before the usual age—he became a deacon; at thirty he was a priest; at fifty-nine he died. He acquired his Greek through the agency of Archbishop Theodore, who had come from Paul’s city of Tarsus in Cilicia. There were many in England who actually spoke in that tongue, owing to his encouragement of it. And Bede was no mean nor small factor in its diffusion, for he taught at Jarrow a school of six hundred monks, besides an uncounted number ofstrangers who sought his instruction. The genealogy of school masters is truly suggestive. From Bede to Alcuin, from Alcuin to Rabanus Maurus, from Rabanus and his liberal methods on to the times of Abelard and the free inquiry; so the torch of learning passes down the generations. And when we remember Alcuin’s commendation of Bede and Rabanus Maurus’s instruction by Alcuin, we cannot doubt the close connection of these three earliest names. Abelard really revived the bolder and broader style which had been opposed at first in the Abbey of Fulda.
How the monk ever found time for his accomplishment of study and writing among his constant labors—his chanting and his teaching and his frequent preparation of homilies—it is indeed hard to discover. But he wore away the thin scabbard of the body by the keen edge of his sheathed and unsheathed mind, until he died before his days were truly done. How often must we lament the incredible monotony and weary routine of these noble lives! How much more, we say to ourselves, they could have achieved under better and freer conditions! But perhaps not. Perhaps this very constriction was a source of strength; and perhaps the severe stress which finally broke this noble student was, after all, the creator of his best powers and the director of his finest energy.
Did he ever visit Rome? Monks from the Anglo-Saxon monasteries went on pilgrimage back and forth, but if he went with them neither he nor they have mentioned it. Yet there is a letter of Pope Sergius to Ceolfrid which hints at such a journey, and might easily furnish a ground for the opinion. On the whole, we must consider Bede as an unflickering light, burning itself away at Jarrow, but illuminating all England with its rays. It is not because of deficiency in acquirement that we deny these traditions. He knew all that was then current. His writings are an encyclopaedia of universal learning. Honorius of Autun says of him,scripsit infinita—he wrote incalculably much. Lanfranc cites hisEcclesiastical History of the English Nation. Alcuin compares him to the Younger Pliny, and quotes him with great delight as “Magister Beda.”
The hymns ascribed to the Venerable Bede, on what appears to be good authority, are the following:
Also, but more doubtfully:
His Ascension hymn,
in its abbreviated form, spread beyond the bounds of English use, and found favor with the Churches of the Continent. It has simplicity and directness, if not much poetic force and is too prolix for Church use in its original form. Mrs. Charles’s version, “A hymn of glory let us sing,” is well known. Next to it stands his
known to English readers by the admirable version inHymns Ancient and Modern, which begins, “A hymn for martyrs sweetly sing.” A third notable hymn is that to the Cross:
in which he embodies the beautiful legend of St. Andrew’s death.
The notable thing about all Bede’s hymns is the influence which the old forms of Teutonic poetry—the alliterative staff-rhyme—have exerted on their construction. We can even trace an approximation to alliteration in his verses, while rhyme is rather an accident than an object. The verses of Beowulf and of Caedmon were in his mind when he wrote. That he could use the classic metres also, we see from his poem in hexameters on the life of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, the great Scoto-Irish saint, whose deeds still filled the North with their echoes.
None of the great Latin hymns is more regarded than theVeni, Creator Spiritus. TheDies Iraemay be grander; theVeni, Sancte Spiritusmay be sweeter; theAd perennis vitae fontemmay be lovelier; theStabat matermay be more pathetic, but, after all, theVeni, Creatorholds a place of equal honor in the estimation of the Church. The Church of England, while rejecting every other Latin hymn from her services, nevertheless retained this in the offices for the ordering of priests and consecration of bishops. This is only the carrying out, indeed, of the account given by the famous but unknown monk of Salzburg who rendered so many of the Latin hymns into the old High-German tongue. He says, “Whoever repeats this hymn by day or by night, him shall no enemy visible or invisible assail.” This has always been the repute of the hymn, and there is no doubt that this attended it on its journey down the ages in the worship of the Church.
Its authorship, however, has been less carefully preserved than its text, which is notably free from mutilation and obscurity. It is really singular to find a hymn which has been so universally employed, and which has escaped in such a marvellous manner from the profane meddling of prosaic or bigoted revisers. Its doxologic final stanza is one which is not often to be found elsewhere—as though the hymn had taken and maintained a place apart. If it were the product of the Ambrosian age this would not be likely to have occurred, for all those doxologies are formal and interchangeable to a marked degree. But this is the appropriate conclusion of a unique ascription of praise to the third person of the Trinity.
Its date is thus, to some extent, fixed for us. We cannot refer it to the days of Ambrose, and, since it is found in nearly all the twelfth to fourteenth-century breviaries, we are unable to attribute it to the period of the Renaissance. Its very verse would preventthis, if nothing else did. The wordspiritalisis a barbarism—an altogether post-classical expression. The true usage is that in which the genitive case is employed, thus “spiritual delight” would beanimi felicitas, notspiritalis(orspiritualis)felicitas.Perpetimis also a word which purists of the new classic revival would avoid if they could. So, too, there is a certain amount of stress to be put upon the scanning ofParaclitus—where theiis long, though Prudentius in the fifth century and Adam of St. Victor in the twelfth both make it short. It has therefore been said that the hymn was composed by a person who was skilled in the Greek language. This altogether depends on the question whether he pronounced the word by accent or by quantity. But still it is not to be denied that the prosody of the poet gives us reason to think that he did pronounce the word with the accent on the η. If this be so, it would follow that he was a man of rare and fine scholarship in comparison with the contemporaneous learning.
Another criticism is purely theological and aids in fixing the date by the history of doctrine itself. At the Council of ToledoA.D.589, the wordfilioquewas added to the Creed to indicate the faith of the Church in the procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son. This hymn preserves this point of the orthodox belief with such care that there can be no doubt of its being subsequent in time to the date of that council.
In coming more particularly to the various authors who have been credited with its composition, it may be well to attend to each claim as it is put forward in some sort of chronologic order.
George Fabricius of Chemnitz (1564) was ready enough to ascribe it to Ambrose himself. The only ground for this conjecture is the structure of the verse. And this is no more a proof of authorship than that a hymn written in what we call “long metre” must be, because of that fact alone, the production of Isaac Watts. On the other hand, it is plain that the theological allusion and the doxology, when taken together, remove the hymn far enough away from the days of the great Bishop of Milan.
In later times of more critical scholarship the learned and accurate Professor Hermann Adalbert Daniel has devoted much study to the hymn, and has reached the conclusion that it belongs to that king whom the Germans are never tired of praising—Charles the Great (Karl der Grosse), by the French called Charlemagne.Led by his illustrious opinion the compilers and translators have, without another question, set it down for Charles’s work. So it has gone; the minor German collators, like Königsfeld and others, following peacefully in the rear of an original investigator. This was not true, however, of men who hunted for proof on their own account, as, for instance, Mone and Wackernagel. But it is distinctly true of the English scholars, among whom Archbishop Trench appears to carry the most prevalent influence. They usually assent without a murmur to this conjecture of Daniel indorsing Thomasius, who was, so far as can be discovered, the parent of the opinion. The only real exception is the Scotch hymnologist, Dr. H. M. MacGill, who doubts, but conforms to the opinion which is in vogue.
The grounds of this general confidence in Charles’s authorship it may be proper to mention here in brief. We know it is said that he was a patron of learning, a friend of scholars, and a devout believer in the orthodox theology. In the year 809 he took an active part in a synod at Aquisgranum which affirmed the doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son. There is, furthermore, a statement, quoted by Cardinal Thomasius from theActa Sanctorum, which goes in the direction of a positive assertion. In the life of the Blessed Notker it is said that this hymn was composed by Carolus Magnus.
Now it has never been established that Charles was even a ready writer of prose, to say nothing of verse. Berington, following Einhard, Charles’s secretary, says in hisHistory of the Literature of the Middle Ages(1814), that Charles was not a literary man. “He seems never to have acquired the easy practice of writing,” is his strong language (p. 102). The hymn, on the contrary, bears the evident marks of accustomed skill and practice in the art of verse as well as the accuracy of a mind trained in theologic discriminations. Moreover, if Maitland (he of the Dark Ages) is to be credited, then this life of the Blessed Notker, by Ekkehard Junior, is full of errors, of ignorance, and wilful design. It naturally celebrates whatever is likely to add to the credit of St. Gall. Hence we need not be astonished when it tells us that Notker composed the sequence,Spiritus Sancti adsit nobis gratia, and sent it to Charles the Great, receiving in return his composition theVeni, Creator Spiritus. Nor should we be surprised when this turns out(as it is now conceded to be) a mere legend without any historic basis. When Thomasius follows this story, and Daniel follows Thomasius, and Trench follows Daniel, and the compilers follow Trench, it really appears that but little independent judgment has been exercised on the subject.
Notker died in 912, and as Charles the Great was dead in 814, the absurd anachronism of the Ekkehard legend is clear to a glance. It should perhaps be added that Trench, although allowing Charles as author, believes the hymn to be possibly of earlier date.
Mone takes a new departure when he gives up the common opinion and announces that the hymn ought to be assigned to Gregory the Great (540-606). In his first volume he taxes Daniel with having been altogether too prompt to agree to the cardinal’s dictum. He finds no reason to give the hymn to Charles, but he regards the classical style of its composition to be very fitting to the culture and well-known powers of Gregory. He rejects the doxologySit laus, etc., and considers, very justly, that the stanzaPer te sciamus, etc., is the true conclusion of the hymn.
Wackernagel agrees with Mone. He thinks that the only way in which Charles could have secured the authorship would have been by getting the composition effected by the intervention of Alcuin. He therefore believes that Gregory was the poet of theVeni, Creator, and so publishes it in his exhaustive work upon the German church hymns. Professor March, always careful and scholarly in his assignments, adopts this opinion also.
Against the Gregorian authorship, supported as it is by such eminent and independent scholars, one must be slow to contend. But in fact there is no great similarity between the hymn before us and those of Gregory. The great Pope is not a great poet. He has not written one hymn which has really endured. TheAudi benigne Conditoris quoted freely, and theRex Christe, factor omniumreceived Luther’s highest approbation. But these and other hymns from his pen are imitations of Ambrose—almost slavish imitations. The lofty and grand largeness of theVeni, Creatoris wanting to them all. The argument, good as it may seem, is only negative. The inference is that the hymn was written by him—nothing more. On the same grounds we might as well go back to old George Fabricius and give it into the hands of Ambroseas he did. The truth is that Gregory’s writings do not contain it, and why they should not, if he were its actual author, it is hard for any one to understand.
But we are not at the end of the inquiry yet. We positively know certain facts. These are: That the earliest mention of the hymn is in theDelatio S. Marculfi,A.D.898; that it is found in the breviaries of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries; that its author was a skilled theologian and probably a master of the Greek language; that he was a poet in the true sense and therefore quite certain to have written other hymns and poems; that it was so soon and so generally adopted as to prevent any corruption of its text; that all these ascriptions of it to this or that person are nothing but tradition; and, finally, that the hymn has such spiritual worth and power as to mark it for the production of a devout as well as scholarly mind. All these requirements are met in Rabanus Maurus, Bishop of Mainz, pupil of Alcuin, and laureate after Alcuin and Theodulphus.
There was a certain Christopher Brower, a Jesuit and a profoundly learned scholar, who was born in 1559 at Arnhem in Gelderland. In the year 1580 he went to Cologne in pursuit of his studies. Then he studied philosophy at Trier, and eventually became rector of the college at Fulda. Here he wrote four books upon antiquarian topics. His diligent, exhaustive style can be judged by the fact that he spent thirty years upon a history of Trier. HisAntiquitateswere printed in 1612, but in 1603 he had edited the writings of Fortunatus, and this book was reissued in 1617, the year of his death, by Joannes Volmar at Cologne. This edition has an appendix of 150 pp. 4to., in which is contained the entire series of hymns and other poetical compositions which were due to the aforesaid Bishop of Mainz, Rabanus Maurus. It was edited from a very oldMS.of undoubted veracity, and it contains theVeni, Creatorin the precise text which we now employ. It is to be noticed that it does not recognize the doxologySit laus, etc., and this Mone assures us was composed at a later period by Hincmar of Rheims, and is, as we have said, unique. But it accents Paraclitus upon the secondaand not upon thei.
The stanzaDa gaudiorum, etc., was rejected some time ago by the best scholars. It is from a hymn of later date. And we therefore find the version which appears in Brewer’s editions of thepoems of Rabanus Maurus to be consonant with the most intelligent criticism of the text of theVeni, Creator.
The hymn itself we can assign with very considerable certainty to the author in whose pages it again is apparent, and we may believe in the accuracy and scholarly acuteness of the Jesuit antiquarian.
It will not be amiss if we set our reasons in order, for a long-established delusion is as hard to overthrow sometimes as the stubbornest fact. They are such as the following:
1. The hymn is found in the writings of Rabanus Maurus, in a codex which Brower calls “very ancient and well approved.”
2. It is the precise paraphrase of the learned bishop’s chapter on the Holy Spirit. Thus he begins the chapter with an assertion of the procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son. He then calls this Spiritdonum Dei, and several times repeats the phrase. He argues that the Spirit is coequal and coeternal God. He then discusses the termParaclete, and proceeds to speak of theseptiformisnature of His power. Next follows a most significant and unusual expression—namely, that the Holy Spirit isdigitus Dei—the finger of God. And the consecution and coincidence of thought is still further increased by an allusion to the grace which bestowed the gift of tongues. He then speaks of the Spirit as fire—which accords with the wordaccende—and then he explains the simile of water, which corresponds with the wordinfundeand with the previous phrasefons vivus. He also quotes from the Gospel of John to show that this “living water” means no more nor less than the Holy Spirit. These coincidences are doubly remarkable, for they not only exhibit the same ideas—some of which, by the way, are quite uncommon—but they also set them forth in the precise order in which the good bishop employs them in his hymn. It is as if, being aroused and animated by his great and noble theme, he had turned to verse as an appropriate medium of lofty praise and had sung from his heart this immortal hymn.
3. To these reasons we may add a third—that the internal structure of the hymn shows its author to have been a person of theological soundness, spiritual insight, scriptural knowledge, genuine scholarship, and a natural poetical capacity. These facts againagree with what we know to have been the talents and learning of Rabanus Maurus.
4. If Gregory had written this hymn it would have appeared at an earlier date and would have been undoubtedly attributed to its illustrious author; whereas it is not in his carefully compiled writings nor is it accredited to him by Thomasius or any hymnologist before the time of Mone and Wackernagel.
5. Charles the Great had not the learning, and both he and his grandson, Charles “the Bald,” are named on the strength of a long-exploded and always anachronistic tradition.
6. Ambrose is out of the question by the theological limitation of the stanzaPer te sciamus, etc.
7. Finally, we have the right to believe that a man whose other hymns have been so extensively, though anonymously, introduced into the worship of the Church, was entirely competent to frame this present hymn.
This last point is worthy of more than this terse remark. Rabanus composed the hymns,Adest dies sanctus Dei,Festum nunc celebre,Fit porta Christi pervia,Tibi Christe splendor Patris,Christe Redemptor omnium, andJesu Salvator saeculi, all of which display great powers of sacred poetry and two of which are beyond any possible doubt his authentic productions. Of the twenty-nine hymns found in Brewer’s codex there are two which have been credited to Ambrose beside theVeni, Creator, and there are seven which are classed by Daniel and Fabricius as belonging between the tenth and fourteenth centuries and to unknown authorship. The codex adds to our previous list eight entirely new poems, and two others which raise a question on which we may pause for a moment before conceding the current opinion.
The first of these hymns is theAltus prosator, of which the codex gives us a much fuller and longer version. It is called ordinarily the “Hymn of St. Columba,” and was reprinted by Dr. Todd from theLiber Hymnorumof old Irish hymns in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. Our present line of inquiry would lead us to assign it to Rabanus, and thus do away with the mere conjecture which makes Columba its author.
The second hymn is that usually credited to Elpis, the wife of Boethius. But the designation of this hymn is as fanciful as the other. Brower in his loyalty to the Church will not impugn theauthorship which is commonly received, but he is constrained to admit that a stanza is appended which the popular version entirely omits. It seems far more reasonable to think that Rabanus composed the whole hymn than that he only added a few verses at the end. What Rabanus Maurus really did was to construct anhymnodiawhich had an appropriate sacred song for every season. He was a poet and he lauded the verses of Hilary and of Ambrose. Had he intended to make selections he would not have omitted them. But he has certainly put his own compositions into this list. Therefore it follows that he may well have included more than was at first supposed. And when it is plain—for the index of hymns makes it plain—that not one single hymn of the twenty-nine is the undoubted and absolute property of any other poet, we are safe in assuming that they all are what the codex declares them to be—the actual productions of the Bishop Rabanus.
The hymnFit porta Christi perviaoccurs in the midst of the AmbrosianA solis ortus cardine, et usque, and was there inserted by the Benedictines of St. Maur. Daniel says it is an entire hymn as it stands. And so say we who find it standing alone in the codex of Brower.
At once, then, Rabanus Maurus ascends from comparative obscurity to a front rank among hymn-writers. And we are ready for all the light upon his personal history which we can obtain.
Veni, Creator Spiritus,Mentes tuorum visita,Imple superna gratiaQuae tu creasti pectora.
Veni, Creator Spiritus,
Mentes tuorum visita,
Imple superna gratia
Quae tu creasti pectora.
Qui Paraclitus diceris,Donum Dei altissimi,Fons vivus, ignis, charitas,Et spiritalis unctio.
Qui Paraclitus diceris,
Donum Dei altissimi,
Fons vivus, ignis, charitas,
Et spiritalis unctio.
Tu septiformis munere,Dextrae Dei tu digitus,Tu rite promissum Patris,Sermone ditans guttura.
Tu septiformis munere,
Dextrae Dei tu digitus,
Tu rite promissum Patris,
Sermone ditans guttura.
Accende lumen sensibus,Infunde amorem cordibus,Infirma nostri corporis,Virtute firmans perpetim.
Accende lumen sensibus,
Infunde amorem cordibus,
Infirma nostri corporis,
Virtute firmans perpetim.
Hostem repellas longius,Pacemque dones protinus,Ductore sic te praevioVitemus omne noxium.
Hostem repellas longius,
Pacemque dones protinus,
Ductore sic te praevio
Vitemus omne noxium.
Per te sciamus da PatremNoscamus atque Filium,Te utriusque Spiritum,Credamus omni tempore.
Per te sciamus da Patrem
Noscamus atque Filium,
Te utriusque Spiritum,
Credamus omni tempore.
O Holy Ghost, Creator, come!Thy people’s minds pervade;And fill with thy supernal graceThe souls which thou hast made.
O Holy Ghost, Creator, come!
Thy people’s minds pervade;
And fill with thy supernal grace
The souls which thou hast made.
Thou who art called the Paraclete,The gift of God most high;Thou living fount, and fire, and love,Our spirit’s pure ally;
Thou who art called the Paraclete,
The gift of God most high;
Thou living fount, and fire, and love,
Our spirit’s pure ally;
Thou sevenfold Giver of all good;Finger of God’s right hand;Thou promise of the Father, richIn words for every land;
Thou sevenfold Giver of all good;
Finger of God’s right hand;
Thou promise of the Father, rich
In words for every land;
Kindle our senses to a flame,And fill our hearts with love,And through our bodies’ weakness, stillPour valor from above!
Kindle our senses to a flame,
And fill our hearts with love,
And through our bodies’ weakness, still
Pour valor from above!
Drive farther off our enemy,And straightway give us peace;That, with thyself as such a guide,We may from evil cease.
Drive farther off our enemy,
And straightway give us peace;
That, with thyself as such a guide,
We may from evil cease.
Through thee may we the Father know,And thus confess the Son;For thee (from both the Holy Ghost),We praise while time shall run.
Through thee may we the Father know,
And thus confess the Son;
For thee (from both the Holy Ghost),
We praise while time shall run.
Rabanus Maurus, teacher and Abbot of Fulda and Archbishop of Mayence (Mainz), was commonly called the “foremost German of his time.” Though the centuries have somewhat obscured the lustre of his renown, they have not deprived him of his place in history, nor have they dissociated his name from that of his instructor, prototype, and model, the great pedagogue Alcuin.
Of the birthplace of Rabanus we have no certain knowledge. Some have said that he was Scotch or English, others that he was French; but the more reliable authorities are convinced that he was a German, born either at Fulda or Mainz. The epitaph written by himself affords probably the solution of the question. It was composed at Mainz while its author was archbishop, and contains these words:
“Urbe quidem hac genitus sum, ac sacro fonte renatus,In Fulda post haec dogma sacrum didici.”
“Urbe quidem hac genitus sum, ac sacro fonte renatus,
In Fulda post haec dogma sacrum didici.”
That is, he was born at the place where he was writing these verses—most likely Mainz—and there he was baptized. Afterward he was educated in Fulda. An additional reason for this belief is that his father was of a family known in the records of Mainz.
Trithemius says that Rabanus was born in 788quarto nonas Februarii, the second of February. Mabillon adds, “I do not know whence he got the day; the year is probably pretty close.” But the year itself, on the strength of internal evidence found in the man’s writings and in the monastic rules regarding the holding of office before the attainment of a fixed age, Mabillon places at 776. This extension of twelve years is a very important affair since it makes Rabanus a monk of thirty-three at the date of the Council of Aquisgranum (Aix-la-Chapelle or Aachen), called by Charlemagne to reannunciate the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit.
The name of Rabanus’s father was Ruthard and his mother waschristened Aldegunde. “She was a woman of the most honest conversation,” as Trithemius declares, the fit helpmeet of a man “rich and powerful, who for a long time served in the wars under the Frank princes.” There was a brother, doubtless an elder brother, called Tutin, a person “noble among the first,” and perhaps the father of a nephew, Gundram, whom Rabanus mentions as the royal chaplain of Lewis of Germany.
The lad Raban—“the raven”—took on his dark garments at nine years of age and went to be a little shaveling monk at Fulda. There he continued, patiently toiling on at his studies according to the methods of a benighted time, and it is plain that he progressed so well as to get the favor of his abbot, Ratgar. Since Ratgar took office in 801 or 802, and Alcuin died in May, 804, it must have been at or about the twenty-fifth year of his age that Rabanus was directed to put himself under the care of Alcuin. A record which has been preserved shows that in 801 our poet had been made a deacon at Fulda, and it is natural for us to look upon this journey to the monastic school of St. Martin at Tours as an honor given to one who had already earned some distinction in scholarship.
Be this as it may it is certain that nearly the latest work of Alcuin’s life was the preparation of the successor to his own ideas who should hold high the torch of knowledge to his land and generation. To him—though the old eyes at Tours should not see it—was to succeed Walafrid Strabo, and to Walafrid Strabo were to be added the scholars of St. Gall, and notably the marvellous cripple Herman of Reichenau. Ratgar now was busy building a great church, and architectural notions befogged his brain. But he had built better than he was aware when he sent off Rabanus and Hatto to sit at the feet of the man who had brought the system of Bede the Venerable into Gaul, and who was to commit his own enthusiasm for learning to a greater scholar than Paul Winfrid, the Deacon.
This Hatto was not the infamous bishop of the Rat Tower whom Southey has immortalized in blood-curdling verses. That notorious prelate was indeed Abbot of Fulda and Bishop of Mainz, but he died in 969 or 970, and the swarming rats which devoured him for his avarice in keeping the corn from the poor owe their original celebrity to those curious volumes, theCenturies of Magdeburg.So far as we can discover, the Hatto who accompanied Rabanus became neither famous nor infamous, unless it be something to have obtained the abbacy of Fulda when his friend laid it down.
In 804 Rabanus returned to Fulda. He had profited by the instruction he had received, and was now the fittest person to be put at the head of the school in the cloisters. To his original name the old teacher had affixed the honorable title Maurus, and to this again Rabanus himself added the descriptive adjective Magnentius. So that Rabanus Maurus Magnentius is the full appellation of the man henceforth to be styled with the largest truth,Primus Germaniae preceptor. This giving of names was one of the features of those times. Alcuin was called Albinus Flaccus, Paul Winfrid was known as Bonifacius, and Ratbert, the advocate of transubstantiation, became Paschasius. Besides this, the spelling of proper names was very much at sea. Thus, to the R of Rabanus there was prefixed or suffixed a Greek “rough breathing,” making it HRabanus or Rhabanus, precisely as we some times find HLudovicus or HLotharius.
It is at this time that the true skill and ability of Rabanus appear before us. He was the first person to establish a school in Germany which had in it the promise of modern education. He allowed pupils to attend and be trained in the cloisters who had no vocation for a monastic life. In point of fact he was the real founder of the school system of Germany, and his fellow-countrymen have not been slow to accredit him with the achievement. His life and accomplishments have employed the pens of Buddeus, Schwarz, Dahl, Bach, Kunstmann, Spengler, Köhler, Richter, and other writers on the history ofpaedagogik.[7]It is beyond debate that the school at Fulda was a most remarkable place.
Rabanus was not the only teacher in the school. He was assisted by his faithful friend Samuel of Worms, a fellow pupil under Alcuin. Together these men developed and enlarged the minds of many of the future nobles of Germany, and laid in Bible study and in the advanced opinions which they announced, thefoundations for a nation the most scholarly of any on the earth. In these classes were to be seen such disciples of the new learning as Walafrid Strabo, Servatus Lupus, Einhard (who subsequently sent thither his son Wussin), and Rudolf who wrote the life of his preceptor.
Leaving the manner of that ancient school life for the present, we are struck with astonishment at the broad and liberal tone of the instruction. Rabanus followed Bede in providing an encyclopaedia of human knowledge for his pupils. He entitled itDe Universisand based it on the previous work of Isidore of Seville. Additionally he abridged the grammar of Priscian, a treatise which furnished, even as late as the days of Richard Braythwaite and hisDrunken Barnabee, the suggestive line,
“Fregi frontem Prisciani.”
“Fregi frontem Prisciani.”
“I’ve broke Priscian’s forehead mainly.”
“I’ve broke Priscian’s forehead mainly.”
He also furnished a text-book in arithmetic, drawn mostly from Boethius, and an etymology in which he depends to some extent on Isidore. He utilized Bede for chronology, and Gregory for ecclesiastical forms, and Augustine for doctrine, and Cassiodorus for commentary and exegesis.
Moreover, he was free from much of the superstition of his age. He objected to giving the liver of a mad dog to one who had been bitten by it—that being then held a perfect cure. His letters show an independent and almost an audacious mind. In all religious discussion his motto was, “When the cause is Christ’s, the opposition of the bad counts for naught.” In statecraft—for ecclesiastics were chief movers in these affairs—he held with Ludwig the Pious. He wrote a great deal in the way of Scripture commentary, and his intellect was of a mystical order. He delighted in allegories, in enshrining the bones of saints and confessors, and in making the most marvellous and intricate anagrams and arrangements of verses and letters upon the subject of the Holy Cross, whose praise he has elaborately set forth. Wimpfeling may well style this production a “wonderful and highly elaborate work.” It dates from the year 815, and no modern reader can view it without dismay at its enormous expenditure of labor.
A man like this in the teacher’s seat of Fulda would not be longin obscuring by his manifest talents the feebler light of his abbot. So Ratgar found, and devoted himself and his monks with mistimed zeal to the erection of a great addition to the cloister church. He grudged the time given to the studies of the school. He would much prefer to have had the full control of all that was passing in the cloisters, but this was plainly impossible. So he devised a very satisfactory way of interrupting the success of Rabanus. He took the books from the scholars and he even forbade them to the teacher. This was the cause of some pathetic verses in which Rabanus sets forth his petition for their return. “Let thy clemency,” he exclaims, “concede me books, for the poverty of knowledge suffocates me.” One grates his teeth in reading farther on the words, “Whether you do this or not, yet let the divine power of the Omnipotent always afford you all good things and complete a good fight with an honest course, that you may ever be with Christ in the height of heaven.”
Ratgar was a tyrant; there was no doubt of that. The only question was how long this tyranny would survive the loss of students and the defection of the monks, who had already begun to complain and resist. There was not any hope, however, that this line of conduct would be materially altered, and here again we have verses of Rabanus, lamenting in moving terms the loss of scholars and the demoralization of the school. It is not at all unlikely that the praises of the Holy Cross were the solace of the poor pedagogue who had lost his favorite volumes. He could scarcely otherwise have found the leisure for this elegant trifling.
The poem just mentioned is imperfect. It breaks off abruptly and the conclusion is missing. What it may have had to do with the outcome of Ratgar’s tyranny we therefore cannot say, but the times upon which the monastery had fallen were very grievous; and in 807 there was a pestilence which depleted the list of monks from four hundred down to one hundred and fifty, and these must, of course, have been more pressed by the manual labor than ever. They toiled as did Israel in bondage, and yet the end had not come. It was a period of the worst sort of misrule, paralleled later at Cluny and not unknown in other conventual establishments. In 814 Rabanus was ordained priest on December 23d, and, as is supposed, after his withdrawal for a time from the monastery to the refuge offered by a friend’s house. From a passagein one of his commentaries it has been inferred that he used this suspense of his labors to make a journey to Palestine.
In 811 there was, says Dahl, a great confusion (Verwirrung) in the cloister. A libel was sent to Charles the Great criticising the conduct of Ratgar—“libel” being used in its old sense of “little treatise.” Nothing, as it would seem, was done about this, although the ordination of Rabanus may have been a link in the chain.
But when Ludwig the Pious (Ludwig der Fromme) came to the kingdom Ratgar was summarily deposed, and Egil, a kindly, book-loving man, created abbot in his stead. This occurred in 817, three years after Ludwig began to reign. All difficulties were now over. The school was reopened with greater prosperity than before. The library was increased. The secular scholars were taught outside the walls, for the number of students surpassed the accommodation. And, in a word, Ratgar had merely held back a constantly augmenting torrent which now poured itself in in an intrepid tide. When Martin Luther, centuries later, cries out for intelligent instruction and for the extension of the school system of Germany, he is but repeating the cry which swelled in the ears of Ratgar and drove him before it with execration from his abbacy.
In 822, when Egil died, by common consent Rabanus was invested with the dignity of abbot. For a time things went smoothly enough, and such scholars as Walafrid Strabo, Servatus Lupus, and Otfried of Weissenberg were the glory of the Fulda schools. But the pendulum swung too far in the rebound from Ratgar’s illiterate policy. The monks were kept at writing and teaching with too little discrimination as to their tastes and capacities. They began to grumble that the material interests of the monastery were neglected, and that Fulda might be growing rich in books and in bookworms, but was in danger of becoming poor in everything else. The disaffection found a support in Archbishop Otgar of Mainz, a busy political prelate, who seems to have become jealous of the prominence of Rabanus. As a supporter of Lothar and of the policy of imperial unity, he was in politics on the other side from Rabanus. Our abbot was a Nationalist and a Home Ruler. He wished to foster the cultivation of the German tongue and to maintain the distinctness of the German nation. He had stood by poor, weak Ludwig the Pious, whose sorrow it was to have succeeded to the work of Charles the Great. He addressed to him aletter of consolation in his troubles, and wrote a treatise:De Reverentia Filiorum erga Patres et Subditorum erga Reges, to recall his unfilial children to a sense of their duty. In Ludwig the German he recognized the most dutiful of the three. So when the Emperor Ludwig died in 840, he supported the younger Ludwig in the demand for virtual German independence against the high-handed imperialism of his elder brother Lothar. He thus shared in the triumph of the victory at Fontanetum, followed by the Compact of Verdun (843), which practically put an end to Karling imperialism, and secured the national independence of France and Germany. But in the mean time Otgar enabled the illiterate party at Fulda to drive Rabanus into exile, and when he came back he found the brethren had chosen another abbot, Hatto, in his stead. Waiving his own rights, and laying aside all grudges, he betook himself to his books in a priory or something of the sort on Mount St. Peter, not far off, and resumed the work of teaching. Here he is thought to have composed his great philosophical treatise on the All, which marks a distinct advance in the development of mediaeval metaphysics and logic. Indeed, there was but one thinker of the ninth century who surpassed him in penetration and learning—the wonderful Irish monk, John Scotus Erigena, who wrote Latin but thought in Greek and was filled with all the wisdom of the Hellenes, from Plato to Dionysius the Areopagite.
In 847 Archbishop Otgar died, and Ludwig the German elevated his friend Rabanus to the see of Mainz, the metropolitan see of Germany. Since Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon “Apostle of Germany,” who had succeeded to this dignity a century earlier, there had been no man of such eminence at the head of the German Church, nor have any of his successors surpassed him. His first care was the restoration of the discipline, which had decayed under the confusions of those dark days of civil war. A great synod met at Mainz in October, Rabanus having been consecrated in June. Besides the prelates, abbots and monks of all orders attended, and the canons adopted had reference to stricter life as the obligation of the clergy.
The year was not over before news of fresh trouble reached him. One of his own pupils at Fulda, the monk Gottschalk, a man of restless intellect, was reported as spreading an exaggerated version of Augustine’s doctrine of absolute predestination, and one whichthreatened to overturn the very idea of human responsibility. Gottschalk evidently was one of the people who love to walk on the fence rather than in the road—to carry every principle with ruthless logic to its remotest conclusion. The first news of his extravagances reached Rabanus in a letter from Italy setting forth the doctrines his former pupil was teaching. He at once responded in a letter (or rather a treatise) taking the same ground as the semi-Pelagians had done in the controversy with the school of Augustine, ground sanctioned by Gregory the Great, Beda, and Alcuin, although thought unsafe when first defended by Gennadius and John Cassian. Gottschalk seems to have accepted the reply as a sort of challenge. The next year, 848, he made his way to Mainz, and when Rabanus called together an assembly of churchmen and laymen—not a regular synod—he appeared before it with a confession of his faith in which he replied to the arguments of Rabanus. The assembly failed to convince him of his being in error, and at the king’s suggestion a pledge was exacted of him that he would never return to Germany. Hincmar of Rheims, the metropolitan of the Church of France, made sure of his keeping this pledge. As Gottschalk was handed over to him by King Ludwig, with a letter of explanation from Rabanus, he had him condemned by the Synod of Quiercy (853) to deposition from the priesthood, corporal chastisement until he should burn his confession with his own hands, and lifelong imprisonment. So ended, in 867, this Calvinist of the ninth century, without much credit to anybody who had a hand in his fate, but with least of discredit to Rabanus.
In 852, by order of King Ludwig, another synod convened at Mainz, to discuss, it is supposed, the doctrine of transubstantiation, which Paschasius Radbertus of Corbie had been setting forth in his treatise,De Corpore et Sanguine Christi. Our Rabanus resisted the new dogma, declaring that the participation of the Lord’s body and blood in the sacrament is “not carnal but spiritual.” Nor is this the only point of his agreement with Protestant teaching. Especially in his assertion that the Bible is a book for every Christian, and clear and intelligible as a rule of faith, he anticipates Luther.
In 850 a great famine desolated Germany, in whose course people were driven to the terrible deeds which sometimes characterizesuch times. Rabanus did his possible to relieve the terrible needs of his flock. Three hundred of these poor people were fed daily from his resources as archbishop, and his heart went out in pity to the multitudes he could not aid. Pitiful scenes he must have witnessed. One poor woman fell dead as she staggered to his threshold, with a babe at her breast. His charity was too late to save her, but her child was rescued.
He lived six years more, seeing his diocese recover from the desolation of that terrible winter, cherishing the literary and educational work of the monasteries on the lines laid down in hisDe Institutione Clericorum, keeping his clergy up to the ideal of the priestly life as defined in hisDe Disciplina Ecclesiastica, and civilizing the rude people of his great diocese. He died in 856, in his eightieth year, and was buried in St. Alban’s church in Mainz. In the era of the Reformation his bones were transferred to St. Maurice’s church in Halle. As Rome has not inscribed the opponent of transubstantiation in the list of her saints, they are allowed to rest together in peace, instead of being distributed through a long series of churches as relics.
He had composed for himself an epitaph, as was the fashion of those days, but it is pleasanter to read than some of those exaggeratedly humble and prosaic treatises concerning which we hardly know whether most to stand amazed at the badness of the Latin or the meanness of the piety. Rabanus avoids these objectionable features. His language is that of a poet and his sentiments those of a sincere Christian. Particularly there are two lines which are notable because they give us a glimpse of his personality: