One of the marks of the end of classical antiquity, and of the passage to the Middle Ages, was the almost complete reduction of the sphere of literacy to the domain of the Church. This happened by default, rather than by design. The barbarian invasions and the institutional collapse of the Roman Empire entailed the disappearance of Roman schools and of the literate general public that they had formed. But the Church, committed to Holy Scripture and to a liturgy that was read out loud, could not abandon the written word. Priests and monks had to continue reading and writing, copying and preserving books, no matter how little need the world around them had for texts.
The Church fathers were unwittingly setting the stage for a world where only works in the new Christian genres would be written.
Once writing was the nigh-exclusive business of clerics, there was an inevitable change in what was being written. The patterns of clerical writing had been set by the Church fathers of the late centuries of Roman antiquity: Scriptural commentary, sermons, theological polemic, pastoral exhortation, religious poetry. The fathers invented and developed these genres in a world where many other sorts of text were still being written outside the Church. But they were unwittingly setting the stage for a world where only works in these new Christian genres would be written.
This is not quite what happened. Medieval churchmen and women gradually became aware that they were the sole custodians of the written word, and that this required that they stretch themselves somewhat beyond the fathers’ example, even if that example always remained paramount. Typical here is the literary career of the Venerable Bede (c. 672-735), the first great medieval author of the West. Bede was also the first historian of the English people, but his history was explicitly ecclesiastical: its core subject was the rise of the Anglo-Saxon church. In addition to the History, Bede wrote copious Scriptural commentaries, but also a number of less directly religious works, covering grammar, natural history and astronomy. However, Bede, following suggestions from the fathers themselves, perceived such works as ancillary. Latin grammar needed to be learnt to make sense of Scripture and the fathers, and to write further Christian texts. Natural history served to grasp the order of God’s Creation and also to further understand the Bible, which has its share of plants, animals, minerals and celestial phenomena. Astronomy served similar purposes, and above all was a guide to the vexed question of determining the dating of Easter.
The Bible and the fathers were of little use for studying grammar, natural history or astronomy. For matters of this sort, Christians had to resort to the remnants of pagan antiquity. There thus emerged a concept of secular literature, formed both of pagan texts, and of new texts written using pagan models, rather than the fathers (there were also hybrids). Medieval clerics often praise learned contemporaries by calling them erudite in both divine and secular letters.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the ordinary explanation of secular learning’s purpose remained that adopted by Bede: that it was ancillary to sacred learning. It was hence most copiously present at the early stages of education. The medieval syllabus, inherited from late antiquity, was, at least ideally, that of the “seven liberal arts” (students are, to this day, made Bachelors or Masters “of Arts” because of this tradition). Those arts were grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. For each art, there were reference texts from antiquity or late antiquity, and the first three (known as the “trivium”) were comprehensive enough to potentially incorporate the reading of all surviving classical texts in prose and verse, while dialectic eventually evolved into the medieval universities’ enormously elaborate study of Latin translations of Aristotle and of the Arabic and Jewish philosophers.
The Middle Ages’ ancillary model for secular learning cannot be taken at face value.
As that evolution indicates, the ancillary model for secular learning cannot be taken at face value at all times and places in the Middle Ages. For Bede, it was entirely genuine. But one could not, for instance, ever seriously argue that the reading of Ovid’s erotic poetry was a necessary preparation for the study of Scripture. Yet that poetry became enormously popular among twelfth century clerics, surely for much the same reasons that it was enjoyed in Ovid’s own time or is enjoyed today.
Still, clerics could never justify making the study or writing of secular texts their primary avocation. This would require the emergence of a literary world beyond the confines of the Church. Hence the Renaissance humanists’ obsessive and unabashed concentration on the remnants of pagan antiquity. It can seem puzzling to us that a movement of cultural renewal was so focussed on the most distant past of which remains were preserved. But to make those ancient texts and monuments the primary focus of study and imitation was the most obvious way to affirm the possibility of a secular domain of arts and letters that could exist on equal footing with the Church’s.
Even before the humanists, there was Dante, the first great author of the West for a millennium not to have been in holy orders. Dante was of course profoundly Christian, perhaps the most Christian of all poets. Yet no churchman could have imagined to choose Virgil, the paragon of pagan poets, as a guide through Hell and Purgatory, just as no churchman could have contemplated writing a poem to rival Virgil’s in Latin’s bastardized Tuscan descendant. Dante reminds us that the return of secular letters to the West did not, of necessity, mean a turning away from God or the Church. Its essential promise was something else: a great widening of the scope of what could be said and seen, in this world, and beyond it.
