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PERTH, WEDNESDAY, JULY 28, 1943.
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SEVENTIETH YEAR.
(CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK) LIBRARY LECTURE V
Charlemagne Revives the Roman Empire With the Faith as the Bond of Union The Church's Role in the Subsequent Disintegration . . .
Importance of Knightly Chivalry and Guilds effected; I myself with pointing to the matter which few heads under be grouped. The Tenth.Century Monastic Schools. from the teaching of the Faith, the monastic curriculum was very largely inspired by the Compendium of Cassiodorus. This work, which had survived from its composition as a monastic text book in the sixth century, comprised: grammar based on Donatus, rhetoric from Cicero, and dialectics from Boethius. These subjects were known as the "Arts," and the modern university which confers degrees in arts still bears witness to its descent from the monastic schools. From the Arts-later known as the "Trivium," the Compendium led the student on to the four disciplines, which in turn were to be known as the "Quadrivium"-arithmetic, geomThe etry, astronomy, and music. twelfth century saw a great increase in the attendance at the monastic and episcopal schools, and that same century-largely as a result of the Crusades-found the minds of Christian men being disturbed by a profounder the discipline-the philosophy of ancient Greeks, reintroduced from Arab sources, where it had undergone some changes for the worse. In order to meet the menace to the Faith, the ecclesiastical schools, now, at the end of the twelfth century, taking on the proportions of universities, bad to turn to the study of philosophy. But I am going beyond my period: by the time the schools took to philosophy, the civilising of the West was no longer a process of tilling the virgin soil, but of reaping a rich harvest. To say so little of the Church's work for the schools and for learning is to leave a noble story untold, but I must say a word of the Church's work for the warriors of Europe.
of civilising Europe was
How the Holy Roman Empire amightcontent Survived Until Our Own Time Apart shall
tern of royal overseers who were
Mohammedanism.
In 622 a half -crazed Arab scampered
across the desert from Mecca to Medina. There was nothing to suggest that any importance should ever be attached to this journey; but the man was Mohammed, and his journey was the "Flight of Prophet," and from it the Mohammedans still date their era. Mohammed returned to his native city at the head of an armed band of his followers, and they conquered. Many centuries were to pass before his followers would be halted in their whirlwind career of conquest. By 711 they had conquered the whole northern coast of Africa and invaded Spain, where the Christian Goths fled to the mountains. On and over the Pyrenees swarmed the hosts of Islam, and they seemed to be about to overrun the Christian West, when they were confronted with the Franks, mustered under Charles Martel, the Mayor of the palace and all -but king of the Franks. This man hurled them back over the Pyrenees, and his grandson, Charlemagne gave to the West a new inspiration; for with the sanction of the Pope, Martel's son assumed the Frankish crown, and in turn, at the bidding of the Pope, Martel's grandson added to the Frankish crown, the imperial crown of a new Roman Empire of the West. Charlemagne. Europe has known many war lords, of them have been agents of most and destruction; but Charlemagne, who spent most of his life in the saddle at the head of armed men, realised that true might does not lie in the sword alone. Far from being guilty of wanton aggression, he strove in his various campaigns to establish order in the place of barbarian confusion; his aim was not only to subdue his enemies but to control the illiterate princelings that governed his dominions as his subordinates. To this end, he set up a sys-
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act as judges and administrators in each district under his authority. Charlemagne's empire was not destined to survive him for many years, and it would have had but little influence on history, had he not formed a close Called alliance with the Holy See. in to defend the Pope against the Lombards, Charlemagne received the imperial crown from the Pope on Christmas Day in the year 800. The memory of the great past was still strong, and the revival at the hands of the Pope of the Roman Empire gave to
the Christian world a new ideal-that of an empire in which the Christian faith was to be the bond of union. Under the direction of his English Benedictine friend, Alcuin, Charlemagne struggled to provide his illiterate empire with monastic schools. These centres of learning were to suffer in the collapse of the Carolingian empire, but still it was through them that Charlemagne's influence for good And the idea of the proved lasting. Christian empire was to survive him. However, the empire did disintegrate, and the confusion and turmoil of the ninth century can best be summed up by the statement that civilian life ceased to exist. On the one hand, there were the fighting men who divided their time between hunting, war, and harassing peasants; on the other was the Church. Towns in so far as they existed were ecclesiastical settlements
--groups of artisans settled
round the monastery or episcopal see which they served. But each see and each monastery had its school. And so we come to the tenth century, and if we omit Italy, where some remnants of the ancient civil life remained, we see the Church beginning her work of planting civilisation in a soil that had fallen back into its virgin state. It would take me too long to give any adequate account of how the task
due to the warrior's eagerness to win the favour of the fair sex, and not a little of its etiquette was borrowed, through Spain, from the Moslem courts. What the Church did was to baptise the warrior's heart. Fight he must, then let him vow never to draw his sword except in the cause of justice and often in defence of the weak. Again, let his regard for woman be governed by the Christian concept of womanhood, exalted in the person of Mary, to the dignity of God's immaculate Mother. So the conferring of knighthood became a religious ceremony preceded by Confession and a vigil in the church, and the new knight sanctified his vows with the reception of Holy Communion. It was inevitable that the fighting should go on; the cattle of Europe were all descended from herds stolen and stolen back at the point of the sword, nor could any tribunal decide the ownership of land; so the Church tried to limit feudal warThe fare to so many hours a week. "Truce of God" was established to sanctify Sunday and the week -end. Sometimes the ban on warfare covered the penitential seasons, too. Finally, the call to the Crusades gave the warriors of Europe a cause for which they could fight without qualm of conscience, and incidentally they brought Europe into contact with the splendour For two and culture of the East. whole centuries the knights of the West streamed across Europe in an effort to have Christendom from the advance of Islam, and if the Crusaders had
but intermittent success in attaining their immediate object of winning back the Holy Places from the Infidel, it must be remembered that they did succeed in holding back the advance of the Saracen. They saved the West. I have spoken of the Church's work for the scholar and the knight. Now, a word about the merchant and the craftsman. Chivalry. The Towns. To speak of the knightly code as It would be an exaggeration to say though it were something wholly de- that the medieval towns were the creavised by ecclesiastical reformers would tion of the Church; indeed we have be to commit a gross blunder. Much many instances of towns struggling of it was due to the warrior's proud re- to win their independence of monastic fusal to take advantage of the weak- control; but the fact remains that ness of his opponent; still more was (Continued on Back Cover.)
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