II
The decades on either side of the year 1000 were cramped and dull. In Burgundy, to be sure, the energies of Cluny,[1] under its great abbots, were rousing the monastic world to a sense of religious and disciplinary decency. This reform, however, took little interest in culture. The monks of Cluny were commonly instructed in the rudiments of the Seven Arts. They had a little mathematics; bits of crude physical knowledge had unavoidably come to them; and just as unavoidably had they made use of extracts from the pagan poets in studying Latinity.[2] But they did not follow letters for their own sake, nor knowledge because they loved it and felt that love a holy one. Monastic principles hardly justified such a love, and Cluny's abbots had enough to do in bringing the monastic world to decency, without dallying with inapplicable knowledge or the charms of pagan poetry.
Religious reforms in the ninth century had helped letters in the cathedral and monastic schools of Gaul. The latter soon fell back to ignorance; but among the cathedral schools, Chartres and Rheims continued to flourish. A moral ordering of life increases thoughtfulness and may stimulate study. Hence, in the latter part of the tenth century, the Cluniac reforms, like the earlier reforming movements, affected letters favourably in the monasteries.
- ↑ Post, Chapter XV.
- ↑ Cf. Sackür, Die Cluniacenser, ii. 330 sqq.; Pfister, Études sur le règne de Robert le Pieux, p. 2 sqq. (the latter takes an extreme view).
paragraph recalls to the emperor the disputation which we have been following. The Libellus is naturally more coherent than the disputation, in which Otric's questions seem intended rather to trip his adversary than to lead a topic on to its proper end. It is devoted, however, to a problem exactly analogous to the point taken by Otric, that the term rational was not as broad as the term mortal. For the Libellus discusses whether the use of reason (ratione uti) can be predicated of the rational being (rationale). The concept of the predicate should be the broader one, but here it might seem less broad, since all reasonable beings do not exercise reason. The discussion closely resembles the dispute in the character of the intellectual interests disclosed, and its arguments are not more original than those employed against Otric. Disputation and Libellus alike represent necessary endeavours of the mind, which has reached a certain stage of tuition and development, to adjust itself with problems of logical order and method.
