Monastic school

“ Effectively to set out the work of the monastic orders for education, it is advisable to consider separately: (I.) schools in connection with monasteries, (II.) almonry schools, (III.) the education of girls, (IV.) the education of the novices, (V.) the monks and university education, (VI.) education and the mendicant orders.
I. Schools in connection with Monasteries.
As a general principle, it may be assumed that a school existed in connection with every large monastery. ”

“ It would seem that the scriptorium was not unlike a modern school-room in some respects. In silence the younger members of the monastic community and other students sat there writing out and multiplying books, sometimes from dictation, sometimes by copying. An invigilator sat there also to preserve silence and to act as task master. On the margins of the MSS. we sometimes find short fragmentary notes devoid of literary value, but of deep human interest as showing that unregenerate human nature had its opportunities even in a monastic scriptorium as much as in a modern school-room. ”

“ Eventually the pagan schools were suppressed by the edict of Justinian in 529 A. D., and the Christian education was left alone in the field. It then found an additional Reversion to otherworldliness. means of expression in the ‘monastic’ schools, in which there was naturally a tendency to revert to an ascetic or ‘otherworldly’ ideal, and to leave intellectual attainments largely out of consideration. But these monastic institutions are to be grouped with mediævalism and belong more distinctly to the next chapter. ”

“ To the half-century which preceded the Conquest of England we can trace the beginnings of twenty important monasteries and six nunneries, not counting priories and smaller foundations, a movement165 for which contemporaries could find no parallel short of the palmy days of monasticism in Roman Egypt. In course of time the monastic ideal reacted upon the secular clergy, and the monastic schools raised the level of learning throughout the duchy, until provincial councils succeeded in establishing the celibacy of the priesthood and the stricter discipline of Rome. ”

“ So the monks found it necessary to cultivate the ornamental as well as the useful arts of life. They delved and sowed and reaped; but they also built their churches, and decorated their altars, and wrote their books, and sang in choir, and computed their festivals, and healed the sick. There must be amongst them physicians, astronomers, geometers, and musicians, as well as moralists, preachers, scribes, and illuminators. Every branch of human knowledge was useful, if not necessary, for a great monastery, and they all came to be cultivated in the great monastic schools. ”

“ Lay students were received in these exterior schools, and that far more extensively than is commonly supposed, most popular writers having represented the monastic schools as exclusively intended for those in training for the religious life, thus confusing together the interior and exterior schools. ”

“ These privileges suggest that monastic students were the dominant class in the early days of the University. They were, however, naturally distrusted by other students, for admittedly they owed allegiance to outside bodies, and no man can serve two masters. By the end of the thirteenth century the monastic movement had spent its force, and thenceforth the religious students took a constantly decreasing share in university activities ”

“ As the organization of the Irish monastic schools was so intimately connected with the Irish monastic system it is impossible to form a clear idea of the character, aims, curriculum, or the scope of scholarship of these schools without some reference to Irish monasticism and its relation to other types of monasticism.
Monasticism in general is a system of living that owes its origin to those tendencies of human nature which are summed up in the words mysticism and asceticism. Mysticism may be defined as the efforts to give effect to the craving for union with the Deity even in this life ”

“ The Benedictine monasteries soon possessed not only libraries but ateliers, where architecture, painting, mosaic, sculpture, metal-chasing, calligraphy, ivory carving, gem-setting, book-binding, and all the branches of ornamentation were studied and practised with equal care and success, without interfering in the least with the exact and austere discipline of the foundation. The teaching of these various arts formed an essential part of monastic education. “The greatest and most saintly abbeys were precisely those most renowned for their zeal in the culture of Art. ”

“ The spirit of monasticism is the same to-day as in the days of Augustine—the growing need of the Church that the few should sacrifice themselves for the many, and, by their self-effacement, further the spiritual and material work of Christ on earth. Undoubtedly the civilisation of England from the earliest times is largely due to monastic influence. The monks promoted the love of architecture and art in every form ”

“ To live in the service of God, in the religious denunciation of the world, and in the abnegation of the joys of life—that is the universal reply. In the early Church this position was very strongly emphasised and led, in consequence, to the rise of monasticism. Hence it may be said that the monastic ideals simply expressed the highest ideals of the Church, and the history of monasticism becomes a vital part of the history of the mediæval Church. ”

“ A famous letter of his to the abbats of monasteries {167} throughout the Empire, written in 787, is a salient example of the close connection between learning and monasticism in his day. He urged that "letters" should be studied, students selected and taught, that all the clergy should teach children freely, and that every monastery and cathedral church should have a theological school. "Although right doing is better than right speaking," he wrote, "yet must the knowledge of what is right go before the doing of it." ”

“ What a contemplation for the mind, and what endless food for thought, is the reverberation of God upon the human wall!
CHAPTER II—THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT
From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monasticism is condemned. Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are clogs in its circulation, cumbrous establishments, centres of idleness where centres of labor should exist. Monastic communities are to the great social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is to the human body. ”

“ Subsequent regulations issued by superiors had aimed at the better enforcement of this rule (R. 44) , that the monks might lead devout lives and know the Bible and the sacred writings of the Church. Imposed at first as a matter of education and discipline for the monks, this rule ultimately led to the establishment of schools and the development of a system of monastic instruction. As youths were received at an early age [6] into the monasteries to prepare for a monastic life, it was necessary that they be taught to read if they were later to use the sacred books. ”

“ Forgetting the inevitable cost of human freedom, and lightly passing over the iniquities of the monastic system, they fondly dwell upon the departed glory of the ancient abbeys. They recall with sadness the days when the monks chanted their songs of praise in the chapels, or reverently bent over their books of parchment, bound in purple and gold, not that they might "winnow the treasures of knowledge, but that they might elicit love, compunction and devotion." ”

“ Further, as we have seen that study was specially enjoined upon monks by S. Benedict, it is precisely in the direction of study that we might expect to find features common to the two sets of communities. And, in fact, an examination of the statutes affecting the library in the codes imposed upon some of the earlier colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, leads us irresistibly to the conclusion that they were derived from monastic Customs, using the word in its technical sense, and monastic practice. The resemblances are too striking to be accidental. ”

“ The secular clergy fall into one or other of two classes. In the one class, we place those who worked in the various parishes of which they were placed in charge; in the other class, were certain bodies of clergy who were organised into communities, termed colleges, and who served a church in common.
About the beginning of the twelfth century, there was in this country a general movement towards monasticism. Some of the existing secular cathedrals and collegiate churches were made monastic, and, in addition, there was a great increase in the number of monasteries. ”

“ It is inconceivable how any author who has read the most meagre abridgments of European history can be found to advance the monstrous assertion that monasticism flourished after the death of Charlemagne in proportion as ignorance increased. The tenth century, this very century of lead and iron ignorance, witnessed the all but total extinction of the monastic institute in France; and in Germany, where it survived and flourished, schools and letters continued to flourish likewise. ”

“ CHURCH OF S. M. NOVELLA, FLORENCE representation of the various classes of books. Generally speaking, the monastic collection comprised proportionately more theology and less canon and civil law than the academic library. In the subjects of the trivium and the quadrivium, and in philosophy, a college was more strongly equipped than a monastery; on the other hand, a monastery frequently had a larger proportion of classical literature, and always more “light” or romance literature. ”

“ They gave us cathedrals, that we might know how glorious was the God they taught; they gave us Roman, Greek, and Hebrew lore, that we might see how liberal was the Master they served. The laws under which all European nations and their offshoots now live were framed on the model of the Canons of the Church, themselves based on the Tables of the Mosaic law; and the sciences, the literature, and the arts, of which we in our pygmy self-glorification are so proud, have been painfully transmitted to us by the patient labor of monastic scholars. ”

“ Only those who see in it a cosmic study, a life work, a divine inspiration to better thinking, better feeling, and better living, with the spiritual attainment of enlightenment as the end, and with the daily life of the true Mason as the means, have gained even the slightest insight into the true mysteries of the ancient rites.
The age of the Masonic school is not to be calculated by hundreds or even thousands of years, for it never had any origin in the worlds of form. ”

“ The Benedictine Statutes of 1334 emphasised the importance of study, and in order that monks might subsequently be fitted to proceed to the universities, it was decreed and ordained that “in all monastic cathedral churches, priories or other conventual and solemn places of sufficient means belonging to such order or vows, there shall henceforth be kept a master to teach the monks such elementary sciences, viz. grammar, logic and philosophy.” ”

“ In every field of thought and activity monasticism wrought good and evil. Education, industry, government and religion have been both furthered and hindered by the monks. What Francis Parkman said of the Roman Catholic Church is true of the monastic institution: "Clearly she is of earth, not of heaven; and her transcendently dramatic life is a type of the good and ill, the baseness and nobleness, the foulness and purity, the love and hate, the pride, passion, truth, falsehood, fierceness, and [pg 387] tenderness, that battle in the restless heart of man." ”

“ The fundamental idea of the old monasticism was retirement from human society in the belief that the world was bad and could not be bettered, and [120] that men could lead holier lives and better please God by forsaking secular employments and family relations, and devoting all their attention to purifying their characters. The first monastic order in Europe were the Benedictines, organized in the seventh century, whose rule and organization were the pattern for those that followed. ”

“ Here a very active common life was maintained. We have seen how it was a centre of opposition to the iconoclastic movement. It was the home of a succession of writers of devout hymns of the Greek Church. It was also the place where the reproduction of literature in the form of beautifully written manuscripts was carried on with the greatest assiduity guided by the best taste, so that this monastery may be regarded as taking the place of a modern university press and school of technology in one of the finest and most characteristic arts of the Middle Ages. ”

“ The church, to an architectural student, is interesting and important. A man needs a good eye and a good education to feel and thoroughly appreciate the grand symphonies which this wonderful architectural music of the Middle Ages has so long been silently playing. San Miniato belongs to the close of the Romanesque or Latin period. The early Christian school had expired in the midst of the general convulsions of the ninth and tenth centuries,—in the struggles of an effete and expiring antiquity with the brutal, blundering, but vigorous infancy of mediæval Europe. ”

“ In the early golden age of monasticism only men and women with a vocation, that is to say a real genius for monastic life, entered convents. Moreover, when there they worked very hard with hand and brain, as well as with soul, and so they got variety of occupation, which is as good as a holiday. The basis of wise St Benedict's Rule was a nicely adjusted combination of variety with regularity; for he knew human nature. Thus monks and nuns did not find the services monotonous, and indeed regarded them as by far the best part of the day. ”