One feels the dull heaviness of this. Odo, like many of his contemporaries, knew enough of Latin grammar, and had read some of the Classics. But he had not mastered what he knew, and his knowledge was not converted into power. The tenth century was still painfully learning the lessons of its Christian and classical heritage. A similar lack of personal facility may be observed in Ruotger's biography of Bruno, the worthy brother of the great emperor Otto I., and Archbishop of Cologne. Bruno died in 965, and Ruotger, who had been his companion, wrote his Life without delay. It has not the didactic ponderousness of Odo's writing, but its language is clumsy. The following passage is of interest as showing Bruno's education and the kind of learned man it made him.
"Deinde ubi prima grammaticae artis rudimenta percepit, sicut ab ipso in Dei omnipotentis gloriam hoc saepius ruminante didicimus, Prudentium poetam tradente magistro legere coepit. Qui sicut est et fide intentioneque catholicus, et eloquentia veritateque praecipuus, et metrorum librorumque varietate elegantissimus, tanta mox dulcedine palato cordis ejus complacuit, ut jam non tantum exteriorum verborum scientiam, verum intimi medullam sensus, et nectar ut ita dicam liquidissimum, majori quam dici possit aviditate hauriret. Postea nullum penitus erat studiorum liberalium genus in omni Graeca vel Latina eloquentia, quod ingenii sui vivacitatem aufugeret. Nee vero, ut solet, aut divitiarum affluentia, aut turbarum circumstrepentium assiduitas, aut ullum aliunde subrepens fastidium ab hoc nobili otio animum ejus unquam avertit.… Saepe inter Graecorum et Latinorum doctissimos de philosophiae sublimitate aut de cujuslibet in ilia florentis disciplinae subtilitate disputantes doctus interpres medius ipse consedit, et disputantibus ad plausum omnium, quo nihil minus amaverat, satisfecit."[1]
The gradual improvement in the writing of Latin in the
- ↑ Ruotgerus, Vita Brunonis, cap. 4 and 6; Pertz, Mon. Germ. Script. iv. p. 254, and Migne 134, col. 944 and 946. A translation of this passage is given ante, Vol. I., p. 310. See ibid., p. 314, for the scholarship and writings of Hermannus Contractus, an eleventh-century German. Ruotger's clumsy Latin is outdone by the linguistic involutions of the Life of Wenceslaus, the martyr duke of Bohemia, written toward the close of the tenth century by Gumpoldus, Bishop of Mantua, who seems to have cultivated classical rhetoric most disastrously (Pertz, Mon. Germ. Script. iv. p. 211, and in Migne 135, col. 923 sqq.).
depravities of this life. For to that end with its dreadful utterances, as with so many goads, it pricks our heart, that man struck by fear may shudder, and may recall to memory the divine judgments which he is wont so easily to forget, cut off by lust of the flesh and the solicitudes of earth."
