Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/89

Rh since in the north, at least, they formed the only class that received any sort of mental culture. But it is one of the contrasts between the northern and southern civilisations that while in the former what schools there were, existed solely for the clergy and did not travel beyond their meagre professional requirements, in Italy the degradation of the church and papacy (the more felt because near at hand) produced so general a contempt for their ordinances and prescriptions that educated men turned away from theology to the more tangible interest of classical learning.

The candidates for ecclesiastical orders here mixed with the sons of nobles at schools which were established and conducted, more often than otherwise, by lay philosophers, for the exclusive purpose of teaching grammar, and which to the stricter churchman appeared directly pagan in their bias. One of these teachers, Anselm of Bisate, complains that he was shunned as a demoniac, almost as a heretic; and Anselm, the Peripatetic as he styles himself, is a good, if late, specimen of his class. He was a highly connected Milanese clergyman, a travelled man too, who had visited Mentz and Bamberg. The Rhetorimachia, which he wrote between the years 1049 and 1056, and dedicated to the emperor Henry the Third, is a masterpiece of laborious futility. How little the pedant's vein was in keeping with catholic notions may be learned from a vision which he relates that he once saw. The saints and the muses, he tells us, struggled for possession of him, and he was in the greatest perplexity to which side he should ally himself, for so noble, so sweet, were both companies that I could not choose either of them; so that, were it possible, I had rather both than either.

Under such training as Anselm's, the future clergy of Italy gave themselves up to their humanistic studies with an enthusiasm which the theology of the day was impotent to excite in them. There are even a few symptoms of a declared hostility to Christianity. One Vilgard of Ravenna is said to have reverenced Virgil, Horace, and