138. Prevailing Ignorance in the Western Church. (Chapter 13. The State of Learning.) (History of the Christian Church) (Schaff, Philip)

The ancient Roman civilization began to decline soon after the reign of the Antonines, and was overthrown at last by the Northern barbarians. The treasures of literature and art were buried, and a dark night settled over Europe. The few scholars felt isolated and sad. Gregory, of Tours (540-594) complains, in the Preface to his Church History of the Franks, that the study of letters had nearly perished from Gaul, and that no man could be found who was able to commit to writing the events of the times.

Middle Ages and Dark Ages have become synonymous terms. The tenth century is emphatically called the iron age, or the saeculum obscurum. The seventh and eighth were no better. Corruption of morals went hand in hand with ignorance. It is re-ported that when the papacy had sunk to the lowest depth of degradation, there was scarcely a person in Rome who knew the first elements of letters. We hear complaints of priests who did not know even the Lord's Prayer and the Creed. If we judge by the number of works, the seventh, eighth and tenth centuries were the least productive; the ninth was the most productive; there was a slight increase of productiveness in the eleventh over the tenth, a much greater one in the twelfth, but again a decline in the thirteenth century.

But we must not be misled by isolated facts into sweeping generalities. For England and Germany the tenth century was in advance of the ninth. In France the eighth and ninth centuries produced the seeds of a new culture which were indeed covered by winter frosts, but not destroyed, and which bore abundant fruit in the eleventh and twelfth.

Secular and sacred learning was confined to the clergy and the monks. The great mass of the laity, including the nobility, could neither read nor write, and most contracts were signed with the mark of the cross. Even the Emperor Charlemagne wrote only with difficulty. The people depended for their limited knowledge on the teaching of a poorly educated priesthood. But several emperors and kings, especially Charlemagne and Alfred, were liberal patrons of learning and even contributors to literature.

Scarcity of Libraries.

One of the chief causes of the prevailing ignorance was the scarcity of books. The old libraries were destroyed by ruthless barbarians and the ravages of war. After the conquest of Alexandria by the Saracens, the cultivation and exportation of Egyptian papyrus ceased, and parchment or vellum, which took its place, was so expensive that complete copies of the Bible cost as much as a palace or a farm. King Alfred paid eight acres of land for one volume of a cosmography. Hence the custom of chaining valuable books, which continued even to the sixteenth century. Hence also the custom of erasing the original text of manuscripts of classical works, to give place to worthless monkish legends and ascetic homilies. Even the Bible was sometimes submitted to this process, and thus the word of God was made void by the traditions of men.

The libraries of conventual and cathedral schools were often limited to half a dozen or a dozen volumes, such as a Latin Bible or portions of it, the liturgical books, some works of St. Augustine and St. Gregory, Cassiodorus and BoEthius, the grammars of Donatus and Priscianus, the poems of Virgil and Horace. Most of the books had to be imported from Italy, especially from Rome.

The introduction of cotton paper in the tenth or eleventh century, and of linen paper in the twelfth, facilitated the multiplication of books.