that Alcuin despised secular literature and forbade his
scholars to cultivate it, appears to be an unfounded presumption : its sole positive basis lies in a "story told by a
biographer who was not even a contemporary and who
relates the affair simply in order to show the master’s
miraculous gift of clairvoyance. It was fitting enough
that Alcuin should have remonstrated with those who
studied their Virgil to the exclusion or neglect of the
Bible ; but the fact proves nothing as to his general regard
for letters, and the testimony of his writings and acts is
more eloquent than such private admonitions. Alcuin
and the Scots, we take it, laboured, with whatever transient
jealousies, in a common love of learning. The old
temper which regarded religion and letters as irreconcilable sqq.
opposites, was clean forgotten ; the spirit is caught up by
the rulers of the church themselves ; and soon a Roman
council held under the pope, Eugenius the Second, can
make a canon enjoining all diligence in the search for
teachers to be appointed in all places to meet the necessities of the age, masters and doctors to teach the study of
letters and liberal arts, and the holy doctrines which they
possess, since in them chiefly are the divine commands manifested and declared? [1]
That such an ordinance as this should have been required proves how much the learning of the new empire
- ↑ See the dissertation of Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, De Litterarum Stiidiis apud Italos primis medii Aevi Saeculis, 11, Berlin J845 quarto. The 34th canon of the Roman council, as re-enacted in an assembly presided over by Leo the Fourth in 853, is as fol- lows: De quibusdam locis ad nos refertur non magistros neque curam invenire pro studiis lit- terarum. Idcirco in universis episcopiis subiectisque populis, et aliis locis in quibus necessitas occurrerit, omnino cura et dili- gentia habeatur ut magistri et doctores constituantur, qui studia I litterarum liberaliumque artium ac sancta habentes dogmata, assiduedoceant; quia in his maxime divina manifestantur atque do- clarantur mandata : Mansi 14. 1008. For ac sancta habentes dogmata there is a variant habentium dogmata : but though the sancta seems required to justify the word dogmata, the genitive haben- tium is perhaps more suitable to the context than habentes. The authoritative admonition was ap- pealed to three centuries later by Abailard, as against the detractors of secular learning in his day : Theol. Christ, ii., Opp. 2. 442; ntrod. ad theol. ii., ib. p. 69; ed. V. Cousin, Paris 1859 quarto.
