The Medieval Mind. Henry Osborn Taylor
add, it was no far cry to the monastery (Marmoutier) of Anselm’s sharp critic Gaunilo. These places lay within the confines of central and northern France, the home of the most originative mediaeval development. For this region, the renewed studies of the Carolingian period were the proper antecedents of the efforts of the eleventh century. The topics of study still remained substantially the same; yet the later time represents a further stage in the appropriation of the antique and patristic material, and its productions show the genius of the authors more clearly than Carolingian writings, which were taken piecemeal from patristic sources or made of borrowed antique phrase.
The difference is seen in the personality and writings of Gerbert of Aurillac,[355] the man who with such intellectual catholicity opens the story of this period. One will be struck with the apparently arid crudity of his intellectual processes. Crude they were, and of necessity; arid they were not, being an unavoidable stage in the progress of mediaeval thinking. Yet it is a touch of fate’s irony that such an interesting personality should have been afflicted with them. For Gerbert was the redeeming intellect of the last part of the tenth century. The cravings of his mind compassed the intellectual predilections of his contemporaries in their entirety. Secular and by no means priestly they appear in him; and it is clear that religious motives did not dominate this extraordinary individual who was reared among monks, became Abbot of Bobbio, Archbishop of Rheims, Archbishop of Ravenna, and pope at last.
He appears to have been born shortly before the year 950. From the ignorance in which we are left as to his parents and the exact place of his birth in Aquitaine, it may be inferred that his origin was humble. While still a boy he was received into the Benedictine monastery of St. Geraldus at Aurillac in Auvergne. There he studied grammar (in the extended mediaeval sense), under a monk named Raymund, and grew to love the classics. A loyal affectionateness was a life-long trait of Gerbert, and more than one letter in after life bears witness to the love which he never ceased to feel for the monks of Aurillac among whom his youthful years were passed, and especially for this brother Raymund from whom he received his first instruction.
Raymund afterwards became abbot of the convent. But it was his predecessor, Gerald, who had received the boy Gerbert, and was still to do something of moment in directing his career. A certain duke of the Spanish March came on a pilgrimage to Aurillac; and Gerald besought him to take Gerbert back with him to Spain for such further instruction as the convent did not afford. The duke departed, taking Gerbert, and placed him under the tuition of the Bishop of Vich, a town near Barcelona. Here he studied mathematics. The tradition that he travelled through Spain and learned from the Arabs lacks probability. But in the course of time the duke and bishop set forth to pray for sundry material objects at the fountainhead of Catholicism, and took their protégé with them to Rome.
In Rome, Gerbert’s destiny advanced apace. His patrons, doubtless proud of their young scholar, introduced him to the Pope, John XIII., who also was impressed by Gerbert’s personality and learning. John told his own protector, the great Otto, and informed him of Gerbert’s ability to teach mathematics; and the two kept Gerbert in Rome, when the Spanish duke and bishop returned to their country. Gerbert began to teach, and either at this time or later had among his pupils the young Augustus, Otto II. But he was more anxious to study logic than to teach mathematics, even under imperial favour. He persuaded the old emperor to let him go to Rheims with a certain archdeacon from that place, who was skilled in the science which he lacked. The emperor dismissed him, with a liberal hand. In his new home Gerbert rapidly mastered logic, and impressed all with his genius. He won the love of the archbishop, Adalberon, who shortly set the now triply accomplished scholar at the head of the episcopal school. Gerbert’s education was complete, in letters, in mathematics including music, and in logic. Thenceforth for ten years (972–982), the happiest of his life, he studied and also taught the whole range of academic knowledge.
Fortune, not altogether kind, bestowed on Gerbert the favour of three emperors. The graciousness of the first Otto had enabled him to proceed to Rheims. The second Otto listened to his teaching, admired the teacher, and early in the year 983 made him Abbot and Count of Bobbio. Long afterwards the third Otto made him Archbishop of Ravenna, and then pope.
Bobbio, the chief foundation of Columbanus, situated not far from Genoa, was powerful and rich; but its vast possessions, scattered throughout Italy, had been squandered by worthless abbots or seized by lawless nobles. The new count-abbot, eager to fulfil the ecclesiastical and feudal functions of his position, strove to reclaim the monastery’s property and bring back its monks to decency and learning. In vain. Now, as more than once in Gerbert’s later life, brute circumstances proved too strong. Otto died. Gerbert was unsupported. He struggled and wrote many letters which serve to set forth the situation for us, though they did not win the battle for their writer:
“According to the largeness of my mind, my lord (Otto II.) has enriched me with most ample honours. For what part of Italy does not hold the possessions of the blessed Columbanus? So should this be, from the generosity and benevolence of our Caesar. Fortune, indeed, ordains it otherwise. Forsooth according to the largeness of my mind she has loaded me with most ample stores of enemies. For what part of Italy has not my enemies? My strength is unequal to the strength of Italy! There is peace on this condition: if I, despoiled, submit, they cease to strike; intractable in my vested rights, they attack with the sword. When they do not strike with the sword, they thrust with javelins of words.”[356]
Within a year Gerbert gave up the struggle at Bobbio, and returned to Rheims to resume his duties as head of the school, and secretary and intimate adviser of Adalberon. Politically the time was one of uncertainty and turmoil. The Carolingian house was crumbling, and the house of Capet was scheming and struggling on to a royalty scarcely more considerable. In Germany intrigue and revolt threatened the rights of the child Otto III. Archbishop Adalberon, guided by Gerbert, was a powerful factor in the dynastic change in France; and the two were zealous for Otto. Throughout these troubles Gerbert constantly appears, directing projected measures and divining courses of events, yet somehow, in spite of his unmatched intelligence, failing to control them.
Time passed, and Adalberon died at the beginning of the year 989. His successor, Arnulf, a scion of the falling Carolingian house, was subsequently unseated for treason to the new-sprung house of Capet. In 991 Gerbert himself was made archbishop. But although seeming to reach his longed-for goal, troubles redoubled on his head. There was rage at the choice of one so lowly born for the princely dignity. The storm gathered around the new archbishop, and the See of Rome was moved to interfere, which it did gladly, since at Rome Gerbert was hated for the reproaches cast upon its ignorance and corruption by bishops at the council which elected him and deposed his predecessor. In that deposition and election Rome had not acquiesced; and we read the words of the papal legate:
“The acts of your synod against Arnulf, or rather against the Roman Church, astound me with their insults and blasphemies. Truly is the word of the Gospel fulfilled in you, ‘There shall be many anti-Christs.’ … Your anti-Christs say that Rome is as a temple of idols, an image of stone. Because the vicars of Peter and their disciples will not have as master Plato, Virgil, Terence or the rest of the herd of Philosophers, ye say they are not worthy to be door-keepers—because they have no part in such song.”[357]
The battle went against Gerbert. Interdicted from his archiepiscopal functions, he left France for the Court of Otto III., where his intellect at once dominated the aspirations of the young monarch. Otto and Gerbert went together to Italy, and the emperor made his friend Archbishop of Ravenna. The next year, 999, Gregory V. died, and the archbishop became Pope Sylvester II. For three short years the glorious young imperial dreamer and his peerless counsellor planned and wrought for a great united Empire and Papacy on earth. Then death took first the emperor and soon afterwards the pope-philosopher.
Gerbert was the first mind of his time, its greatest teacher, its most eager learner, and most universal scholar. His pregnant letters reflect a finished man who has mastered his acquired knowledge and transformed it into power. They also evince the authorship of one who had uniquely profited from the power and spirit of the great minds of the pagan past, had imbibed their sense of form and pertinency, and with them had become self-contained and self-controlled, master of himself and of all that had entered in and made him what he was. Notice how the personality of the writer, with his capacities, tastes,