A. W. W.

“ The foundation of the earliest Brotherhood of the Common Life can hardly be dated before the last quarter of the fourteenth century; but, like all institutions which have satisfied a real need in the life of their age, this was not a sudden growth, still less the invention of a single mind. The Netherlands, which at this time had not yet reached the full height of their prosperity, were more and more shaking off the predominance of their nobility; while at no stage of their history has the part played by the clergy in the life of the people been more insignificant. ”

“ The brethren of Deventer and their foundations took no part, so far as I know, in any endeavor to heal the breach which the Reformation had effected. But Catholics and Protestants alike may acknowledge the efforts of men who helped to teach the modern world to love books without ceasing to love what is better than books, and who (though educational reformers in their generation) did not lose sight of the maxim of one of their number that “there is a great difference between the wisdom of an enlightened and devout man, and the knowledge of a well-read and studious clerk.” ”

“ But the chief and favorite pursuits, of course, continued to be those of education and literature; for it was not forgotten that the origin of the brotherhoods had been an endeavor to furnish young scholars with the means for carrying on their studies, by encouraging and promoting on their part the transcription of books.
As was natural enough among simple men at a time when book-learning partook not a little of the nature of a luxury, there was among the brethren considerable searching of heart as to the righteousness of the spread of books in general. ”

“ There are more ways than one, as a mystic visionary of the twelfth century tells us, leading heavenward; but both the hyacinthine path of contemplation and the green path of active life were trodden by the men to whom Deventer and the foundations branching out from it were at once places of retreat and scenes of active labor. To the influence which the movement begun in these regions exercised upon the course of the Renascence in the fifteenth century Germanic Europe owed something besides traditions of self-denying beneficence and examples of unworldly piety. ”

“ On the one hand, it is certain that the Deventer Brotherhood, or one or more of the institutions of which it was the parent, gave their moral and intellectual nurture to men who may without any misuse of a most misused term be reckoned among the precursors of the Lutheran Reformation. And on the other, it was here that were also educated some of the most illustrious representatives of that great, and in its failure most pathetic, movement of the Renascence age, the endeavor to reform the Church from within. ”

“ When they were old enough to be sent to those schools “which are now called universities,” the guardians fearing the secular influence of such a place upon their wards, determined to place them in an establishment of those Fratres Gollationarii “who nowadays are to be found any and everywhere, and who gain their living by teaching boys.” The principal purpose of these brethren, continues Erasmus, is to break the spirit of their best pupils, and to mould them into fit subjects for a monastic life. ”

“ In the lives of institutions, as in those of individual men and women, it is the period of aspiration which has the greatest charm; but how difficult, at times how impossible, it is for the observer to catch and reproduce this bloom of youth! ”

“ Not less fortunately he had been indifferent (except in the case of Bibles and service-books) to the mere exterior of the copies which he so assiduously collected, thus giving the tone, so to speak, to the literary efforts of the brethren, whose object was rather to transcribe large numbers of books, and distribute them freely (often even gratuitously) , than to shine as artistic copyists in the eyes of bibliophiles such as the spectacled collector of “unprofitable books” in the “Ship of Fools.” ”

“ Its most characteristic product is after all to be sought in the life and labors of the master-scholar of the Germanic Renascence. Zealots, who hold that a law is binding upon honest men in all quarrels, whether political or ecclesiastical, to choose one of two sides, will doubtless continue to impugn the consistency and single-mindedness of Erasmus; but those who believe him to have been distinguished by these qualities, will also incline to think that he was animated and steadied for the efforts of his maturity by the training of his youth. ”

“ Not all the brotherhoods had as a matter of course schools of their own — even at Deventer such was not the case at first; but even where the existing school had not been set up by the brethren, they boarded and lodged its pupils, or paid the fees of the poorer among them (the distinction between poor and rich scholars runs through the whole educational life of the Middle Ages) , or supplied the school with books, or even with teachers. ”

“ As a rule, however, every brethren’s house provided, at least for its own inmates, instruction in reading, writing, singing, and the Latin tongue, together with that all-pervading influence of a common life in which wise judges have at all times recognized an invaluable moral and disciplinary aid to education. ”

“ Rusbroek cannot in any sense be called a reformer, and the question as to the measure of originality traceable in his religious conceptions must be passed over here. But the significance of his personality and teachings for that chapter of religious history with which we are more particularly concerned, is that they pointed the way which was actually taken by the man who made mysticism a practical and popular influence, and who thus became the author of a movement destined to make itself felt throughout his native land, and far beyond its boundaries. ”

“ It was standard authorities of this description which the more intelligent and simple teaching encouraged by the brethren overthrew, or at least subjected to a long-needed revision. The most famous of the teachers at Deventer was no doubt Alexander Hegius (of Heck, in Westphalia) , who died near the close of the fifteenth century, as rector of the Latin school of the town, leaving nothing behind him but his clothes and his books, and among whose pupils a greater number of eminent men chose to reckon themselves than had actually sat on the benches under him. ”

“ An even more widely remembered son of Deventer is that truly venerable figure among the Roman pontiffs, whose name has received no less lustre from his failure than the names of many of his predecessors have from their success. It is true that, as a teacher and a man of learning, Pope Adrian VI. is to be reckoned among the adherents of scholasticism rather than among the humanists ”

“ The efforts of the brethren called into life throughout the Netherlands an active educational spirit which has never since deserted the country. Statistics are generally suspicious; and we may decline to be overcome by the statement that Cele’s school at Zwolle, early in the fifteenth century, sometimes numbered nearly one thousand, and the school at Herzogenbusch even twelve hundred pupils. ”

“ I believe that these institutions may contain some honest men; but as they all suffer from lack of the best authors, and in their obscurity follow their own usages and rules of life, without comparing themselves with any one but themselves, I do not see how they can be liberal educators of youth ”

“ Frequently the brethren practised handicrafts; and indeed, as was perhaps inevitable, in some fraternities the industrial spirit gained the mastery to such an extent as to convert them into something not very unlike co-operative societies. ”

“ The country was, as is well known, during the whole of the Middle Ages, a favorite home of those tendencies of religious thought and feeling which are commonly classed together under the rather vague name of mysticism ”

“ It was he who daringly, and yet successfully, revised the famous “Doctrinale Puerorum” of Alexander de Villa Dei, and thereby rendered a signal service to education in the Netherlands and in Germany. (In educational, as in other reforms, it is usually the first step which costs the most trouble; nor was it so very long before one of the Obscure Ones was to be found lamenting the good old times of the universities, when the “Partes Alexandri” and the “Dicta Ioannis Sinthenii” together were indispensable in a grammatical student’s literary luggage.) ”

“ Already, however, in this second period the institution of the brotherhoods was — in accordance with an almost inevitable law — tending to merge itself in the general monastic system of the Church of Rome. It has been noticed how, so soon as two years after the death of Groot, a monastery of Regular Canons in connection with the Brotherhood of the Common Life, and following the rule of St. Augustine, had been established at Windesem, near Zwolle, and how not long afterwards a second convent of the very simplest kind had been opened on Mount St. ”

“ The brotherhoods may thus be said to have assumed the attitude of reformers in the matter of classical studies, and to have helped to cut the ground from under the old scholastic training, which had treated the Latin tongue merely as an instrument for its own purposes, a “sermo” (to quote the Prologus to the Leipzig “Manuale Scholarium”) “in guem omnes doctrinæ sunt translatæ.” ”

“ At another, he can thus directly point the way to his ideal: “This is the reason why there are found so few contemplative men, because there are few who know how to separate themselves wholly from perishable and created things. ”

“ Carrying out in these different directions the purpose of their establishment, the brotherhoods by their example, and occasionally even by their direct influence, contributed largely to the reformation of the existing religious orders, of whom, notwithstanding their own modest protests, they were in truth the natural competitors. ”

“ After this fashion he from the very first connected the pursuit of learning with religious thoughts and ways. Very soon an ardent disciple of Groot, afterwards his successor in the direction of the brotherhoods, Florentius, the son of Radevyn (Floris Radevynzoon) , suggested that he and the copyists should club their weekly earnings into a common fund, and from its proceeds lead a common life. ”