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the work of a disciple or of some writer who had received his education at Fulda.

His sympathies as a politician. During the unhappy struggle which preceded the dissolution of the empire, Rabanus espoused the cause of the emperor against the sons. In this policy he was opposed to Otgar, the archbishop, a zealous and ambitious partisan, with aims very different from those of the peace-loving abbat, intent solely on the interests of religion and the His loyalty to Lewis the Pious and Lothair. Church. While Otgar urged on the war, Rabanus quoted examples from Scripture calculated to recall the unfilial princes and disloyal nobility to their duty and allegiance; and while the former, under the guise of zeal for the Church's laws, took an active part in the cruel deposition of Lewis at Soissons, the other openly maintained the invalidity of the proceedings. After the emperor's death, Rabanus attached himself to the party of Lothair, and his loyalty to that monarch remained unshaken. The results that followed upon the battle of Fontenay were, however, felt by him as a He retires to Petersberg. severe blow; and, having resigned his abbatship, he retired, as Baugulfus had done before him, into religious seclusion.^[1] He chose for his retreat the cell at Petersberg, and there, to quote the expression of Rudolfus, devoted himself to the His writings while in retirement. study of 'heavenly philosophy,'^[2] — that is, in more prosaic Ianguage, there compiled his De Universo (a feeble though laborious reproduction, with some additions, of the Encyclopaedia of Isidorus); wrote also, at the request of the emperor Lothair, his commentary on Ezekiel;^[3] and further, at the request of Lewis the German, an exposition of the 'allegorical' sense of the hymns used in the services of the Church. The relations which he appears to have maintained,

1. See Dümmler, pp. 171, 301.
2. Rudolfus, De Reliquiis, p. 249: '... ibi manens ac deo serviens caelesti philosophiae vacabat' (quoted by Dümmler, p. 302).
3. Opera, iv 196. It is to be noted that Rabanus pays a high tribute to the 'aviditus multa sciendi et copiose investigandi' exhibited by Lothair.