Correspondance inédite, de Mabillon et de Montfaucon, avec L'Italie. Par M. VALERY. Paris: 1846. MIDDLETON and Gibbon rendered a real, however undesigned, a service to Christianity by attempting to prove that the rapid extension of the Primitive Church was merely the natural result of natural causes. For what better proof could be given of the divine origin of any religion than by showing that it had at once overspread the civilized world, by the expansive power of an inherent aptitude to the nature and to the wants of mankind? By entering on a still wider range of inquiry, those great but disingenuous writers might have added much to the evidence of the fact they alleged, although at a still greater prejudice to the conclusion at which they aimed. It is not predicted in the Old Testament that the progress of the Gospel should, to any great extent, be the result of any agency preternatural and opposed to ordinary experience; nor is any such fact alleged in any of the apostolical writings as having actually occurred. There is, indeed, no good reason to suppose that such miraculous though transient disturbances of the laws of the VOL XVI. NO. IV. 28 material or the moral world, would have long or powerfully controlled either the belief or the affections of mankind. The heavenly husbandman selected the kindliest soil and the most propitious season for sowing the grain of mustard seed; and so, as time rolled on, the adaptation of our faith to the character and the exigencies of our race was continually made manifest, though under new and ever varying forms. Thus the Church was at first Congregational, that by the agitation of the lowest strata of society the superincumbent mass of corruption, idolatry, and mental servitude might be broken up-then Synodal or Presbyterian, that the tendency of separate societies to heresy and schism might be counteracted-then Episcopal, that in ages of extreme difficulty and peril, the whole body might act in concert and with decisionthen Papal, that it might oppose a visible unity to the armies of the Crescent and the barbarians of the North-then Monastic, that learning, art, and piety might be preserved in impregnable retreats amidst the deluge of ignorance and of feudal oppression-then Scholastic, that the human mind might be educated for a return to a sounder knowledge, and to primitive doctrine-then Protestant, that the soul might be emancipated from error, superstition, and spiritual despotism-then partially Reformed, in the very bosom of the papacy, lest that emancipation should hurry the whole of Christendom into precipitate change and lawless anarchy-and then at length Philosophical, to prove that as there are no depths of sin or misery to which the healing of the Gospel cannot reach, so there are no heights of speculation to which the wisdom of the Gospel cannot ascend. Believing thus in the perpetuity as well as on the catholicity of the Church, and judging that she is still the same in spirit throughout all ages, although, in her external developments, flexible to the varying necessities of all, we have ventured on some former occasions, and are again about, to assert for "the pure and reformed branches" of it in England and in Scotland, an alliance with the heroes of the faith in remote times, and in less enlightened countries; esteeming that to be the best Protestantism, which, while it frankly condemns the errors of other Christian societies, yet claims fellowship with the piety, the wisdom, and the love, which, in the midst of those errors, have attested the divine original of them all. If, according to the advice which on some of those occasions we have presumed to offer to those who are studious of such subjects, there be among us any scholar meditating a Protestant history of the Monastic Orders, he will find materials for a curious chapter in this correspondence of the French Benedictines of the reign of Louis the XIV. In that fraternity light and darkness succeeded each other by a law the reverse of that which obtained in Europe at large. From the promulgation of their rule in the sixth century, their monasteries were comparatively illuminated amidst the general gloom of the dark ages. But when the sun arose on the outer world, its beams scarcely penetrated their cloisters; nor did they hail the returning dawn of literature and science until the day was glowing all around them in meridian splendor. Then, however, passing at one vault from the haze of twilight to the radiance of noon, they won the wreath of superior learning even in the times of Tillemont and Du Cange-though resigning the palm of genius to Bourdaloue, Bossuet, and Pascal. Thus the three great epochs of their annals are denoted by the growth, the obscuration and the revival of their intellectual eminence. M. Valery's volumes illustrate the third and last stage of this progress, which cannot, however, be understood without a rapid glance at each of the two preceding stages. "But why," it may be asked, " direct the eye at all to the mouldering records of monastic superstition, self-indulgence, and hypocrisy ?" Why indeed? From contemplating the mere debasement of any of the great families of man, no images can be gathered to delight the fancy, nor any examples to move or to invigorate the heart. And doubtless he who seeks for such knowledge, may find in the chronicles of the convent a fearful disclosure of the depths of sin and folly into which multitudes of our brethren have plunged, under the pretense of more than human sanctity. But the same legends will supply some better lessons, to him who reads books that he may learn to love, and to benefit his fellow men. They will teach him that, as in Judea, the temple, so, in Christendom, the monastery, was the ark, freighted during the deluge, with the destinies of the Church and of the worldthat there our own spiritual and intellectual ancestry found shelter amidst the tempestthat there were matured those powers of mind which gradually infused harmony and order into the warring elements of the European commonwealth and that there many of the noblest ornaments of our common Christianity were trained, to instruct, to govern and to bless the nations of the West. Guided by the maxim "that whatever any one saint records of any other saint must be true," we glide easily over the enchanted land along which Domnus Johannes Mabillon conducts the readers of the earlier parts of his wondrous compilations: receiving submissively the assurance that St. Benedict sang eucharistic hymns in his mother's womb -raised a dead child to life-caused his pupil Maurus to tread the water dry-shod-untied by a word the notted cords with which an Arian Goth (Zalla by name) had bound an honest rustic-cast out of one monk a demon who had assumed the disguise of a farrierrendered visible to another a concealed dragon who was secretly tempting him to desertionand by laying a consecrated wafer on the bosom of a third, enabled him to repose in a grave which till then had continually cast him out; for all these facts the great annalist relates of his patriarch St. Benedict, on the authority of the pontiff (first of that name) St. Gregory. If, however, the record had contained no better things than these, the memorial of Benedict would have long since perished with him. His authentic biography is comprised in a very few words. He was born towards the end of the fifth century, at Nursia, in the duchy of Spoleto. His mother died in giving him birth. He was sent to Rome for his education by his father, a member of the Anician family, which Claudian has celebrated; but was driven from the city by the invasions of Odoacer and Theodoric to the Mons Subiacus, where, while yet a beardless youth, he took up his abode as a hermit. Like Jerome, he was haunted in his solitude by the too vivid remembrance of a Roman lady; and subdued his voluptuous imagination by rolling his naked body among the thorns. The fame of such premature sanctity recommended him to the monks of the neighboring monastery as their abbot; but scarcely had he assumed the office when, disgusted by the rigors of his discipline, the electors attempted to get rid of him by poison. Returning to his hermitage, he soon found himself in the centre of several rude huts, erected in his vicinity by other fugitives from the world, who acknowledged him as the superior of this monastic village. But their misconduct compelled him to seek a new retirement, which he found at Monte Casino, on the frontiers of the Abbruzzi. There, attended by some of his pupils and former associates, he passed the remainder of his life-composing his rule, and establishing the order which, at the distance of thirteen centuries, still retains his name and acknowledges his authority. He died in the year 543, in the sixty-fourth year of his age. the deep insight into the human heart by which he rendered myriads of men and women, during, more than thirty successive generations, the spontaneous instruments of his purposes-these all unite to prove that profound genius, extensive knowledge, and earnest meditation, had raised him to the very first rank of uninspired legislators. His disciples, indeed, find in his legislative wisdom a conclusive proof that he wrote and acted under a divine impulse. Even to those who reject this solution, it is still a phenomenon affording ample exercise for a liberal curiosity. That the Benedictine statutes remain to this day a living code, written in the hearts of multitudes in every province of the Christian world, is chiefly perhaps to be ascribed to the inflexible rigor with which they annihilated the cares and responsibilities of freedom. To the baser sort, no yoke is so galling as that of self-control; no deliverance so welcome as that of being handsomely rid of free agency. With such men mental slavery readily becomes a habit, a fashion, and a pride. To the abject many, the abdication of self-government is a willing sacrifice. is reserved for the nobler few to rise to the arduous virtues of using wisely the gifts which God bestows, and walking courageously, though responsibly, in the light which God vouchsafes. It And by the abject many, though often under the guidance of the nobler few, were peopled the cells of Monte Casino and her affiliated convents. Their gates were thrown open to men of every rank, in whom the abbot or prior of the house could discover the marks of a genuine vocation. To exclude any such candidate, though a pauper or a slave, would have been condemned by Benedict, in the words and spirit of Augustine, as grave delictum. In those sacred enclosures, therefore, many poor and illiterate brethren found a refuge. But they were distinguished from the rest as conversi—that is, as persons destined neither for the priesthood nor the tonsure, but bound to labor for the society as husbandmen, shepherds, artiBut sans, or domestic servants. To the intercourse of Benedict with the refractory monks of Subiaco, may perhaps be traced the basis of his system. It probably revealed to him the fact that Indolence, Self-will, and Selfishness are the three archdemons of the cloister; and suggested the inference that Industry, Obedience, and Community of goods are the antagonist powers which ought to govern there. the comprehensiveness of thought with In the whirl and uproar of the handicrafts which he so exhausted the science of monastic of our own day, it is difficult to imagine the polity, that all subsequent rules have been noiseless spectacle which in those ages so nothing more than modifications of his own- often caught the eye, as it gazed on the sethe prescience with which he reconciled con- cluded abbey and the adjacent grange. In ventual franchises with abbatial dominion-black tunics, the mementoes of death, and in the skill with which he at once concentrated and diffused power among the different members of his order, according as the objects in view were general or local-and leathern girdles, the emblems of chastity, might then be seen carters silently yoking their bullocks to the team, and driving them in silence to the field-or shepherds inter changing some inevitable whispers while they watched their flocks--or vine-dressers pruning the fruit of which they might neither taste nor speak-or wheelwrights, carpenters, and masons plying their trades like the inmates of some deaf and dumb asylumand all pausing from their labors as the convent bell, sounding the hours of primes, or nones, or vespers, summoned them to join in spirit, even when they could not repair in person, to those sacred offices. Around the monastic workshop might be observed the belt of cultivated land continually encroaching on the adjacent forest; and the passerby might trace to the toils of these mute workmen the opening of roads, the draining of marshes, the herds grazing, and the harvests waving in security, under the shelter of ecclesiastical privileges which even the Vandal and the Ostrogoth regarded with respect. Our own annual agricultural meetings, with their implements and their prizes, their short horns and their long speeches, must carry back their economic genealogy to those husbandmen who, with dismal aspect, brawny arms, and compressed lips, first taught the conquerors of Rome the science in which Columella and Virgil had instructed the ancient Romans. A similar pedigree must be assigned to our academies of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. The fine arts are merely imitative in their infancy; though, as they become mature, they also become symbolical. And this maturity is first attained by the architect, because he ministers to a want more urgent than the rest-because, in the order of time, the edifice must precede the works designed for its embellishment-and because, finding in nature no models, except for the details of his performance, he must, from the first, be inventive in the composition of it. Thus the children of Benedict, when contemplating their lofty avenues sacred to meditation, and the mellowed lights streaming through the foliage, and the flowers clustering in the conventual garden, and the pendulous stalactites of the neighboring grottoes, conceived of a Christian temple in which objects resembling these, though hewn out of imperishable stone, and carved into enduring forms, might be combined and grouped together into one glorious whole. With a ritual addressed to the eye rather than to the ear-a sacred pantomime, of which the sacrifice of the mass was the action, the priests the actors, and the high altar the stage-nothing more was requisite to the solemn exhibition but the cathedral as its appropriate theatre. It arose, therefore, not the servile representation of any one natural object, but the majestic combination of the forms of many; and full of mystic significance, in the cruciform plan, the lofty arch, the oriel windows, the lateral chapels, and the central elevation. Not a groining, a mullion, or a tracery was there, in which the initiated eye did not read some masonic enigma, some ghostly counsel, or some inarticulate summons to confession, to penitence, or to prayer. Every niche without, and every shrine within these sanctuaries, was adorned with images of their tutelary saints; and especially of Her who is supreme among the demigods of this celestial hierarchy. But, instead of rising to the impersonation of holiness, beauty, or power in these human forms, the monkish sculptors were content to copy the indifferent models of humanity within their reach; and the statues, busts, and reliefs which, in subsequent times, fell beneath the blows of Protestant Iconoclasts, had little if any value but that which belonged to their peculiar locality and their accidental associations. In painting, also, whether encaustic, in fresco, or on wood, the performances of the early Benedictine artists were equally humble. In order to give out their visible poetry, the chisel and the pencil must be guided by minds conversant with the cares and the enjoyments of life; for it is by such minds only that the living soul which animates mute nature can ever be perceived, or can be expressed in the delineation of realities, whether animated or inanimate. In ecclesiastical and conventual architecture, and in that art alone, the monks exhausted their creative imagination; covering Europe with monuments of their science in statics and dynamics, and with monuments of that plastie genius which, from an infinity of elaborate, incongruous, and often worthless details, knew how to evoke one sublime and harmonious whole. In those august shrines, if any where on earth, the spirit of criticism is silenced by the belief that the adorations of men are mingling in blessed accord with the hallelujahs of heaven. To animate that belief, the Benedictine musicians produced those chants which, when long afterwards combined by Palestrina into the Mass of Pope Marcellus, were hailed with rapture by the Roman Conclave and the Fathers of Trent, as the golden links which bind together in an indissoluble union the supplications of the Militant Church and the thanksgivings of the Church Triumphant. |