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                12 page printout, page 313 - 324
                           CHAPTER XX

                    The Church and the School

   The Moral Value of Education -- The Child Under Paganism --
     Education in the Roman Empire -- What the Church Did --
                   Learning in the Middle Ages

                  THE MORAL VALUE OF EDUCATION

     "YOU have one argument that seriously troubles me," said a
distinguished and earnest Christian to me some years ago; "the fact
that the world steadily improves while religion steadily decays."

     That fact must perplex every religious man or woman who looks
out upon the world without tinted glasses. I claim and I can
conclusively establish, that there was never before on this earth
as fine a generation as this unbelieving generation of ours; that
character is finest in the least religious countries, and
especially in the cities where the men and women who worship God
are in a minority; and that those generous impulses which make our
age, with all its defects, the happiest and most refined that ever
was, arise from humanitarian, not Christian, sentiment.

     Even writers who are not Christian have been puzzled by this
seeming paradox. Forty years ago a Positivist writer, Mr. J. Cotter
Morison, wrote a fine and learned work ("The Service of Man") in
which he hailed the coming of "the kingdom of man" which he saw
succeeding "the kingdom of God," but he thought that the world
would have to pay a price for the change. "Signs are not wanting,"
he said, "that the prevalent anarchy in thought is leading to
anarchy in morals."

     This sentence was much quoted by clerical writers, as a
Rationalist admission of our degeneracy, but it is just one of
those sentences which show the foolishness of making concessions to
the religious apologist. Not only does Cotter Morison fail to point
out these "signs," but the whole of the contents of his valuable
work support the opposite conclusion. The book is one long exposure
of the moral futility of Christianity. It examines "morality in the
ages of faith" (Chap. vii) very thoroughly and mercilessly, and to
speak of us as immoral in comparison with those ages is simply
amusing. Fifty pages after declaring that our skepticism is
engendering some "anarchy in morals" our moralist, when he comes to
face the facts, writes such sentences as these:

          The Ages of Faith were emphatically ages of crime, of
     gross and scandalous wickedness, of cruelty, and, in a word,
     of immorality. And it is noteworthy that, in proportion as we
     recede backward from the present age, and return into the Ages
     of Faith, we find that the faith rises steadily as we
     penetrate into the past, almost with the regularity which
     marks the rise of the physical temperature of the air as we
     descend into a deep mine; but a neglect and defiance of
     morality are found to ascend into a corresponding ratio. ...
     A progressive improvement has taken place in men's conduct,
     both public and private; but it has coincided, not with an
     increase, but with a decay, of faith. This, beyond any
     question, is the most moral age which the world has seen (p.
     53).

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     Every theorist about our degeneration thus breaks down when he
confronts the facts, and it is misleading to quote the mere
rhetoric of the Positivist writer without adding the exact
historical statements which follow. The same thing is found in
Lecky's books; and the clergy, of course, quote the sentiments and
ignore the facts.

     Here I would point out that, if this most delicate of critics
agrees with me that "this is the most moral age which the world has
seen," yet inconsistently talks of moral anarchy, which ought to
mean the collapse of a better order, it shows that there is a wide-
spread feeling that the decay of religion might be expected to
entail such anarchy.

     And an important part of the answer to this suspicion, or the
solution of this dilemma, is the moral influence of education. The
ages of faith were ages of gross ignorance: ours is the best
educated age upon which the sun has ever shone. The sanest thinker
that America has yet produced, Lester F. Ward, predicted long ago
that general education would raise the race to a higher moral
level, in every sound sense of the word "moral." Today no man can
question the truth of the principle he enunciated,

     This at once casts upon the Christian Church a peculiar
responsibility in regard to education. No one will question that
very ignorant men and women may have high character, and that very
cultured individuals may have a low standard of conduct. It has
been my good fortune to meet every variety of character, of every
color of skin, every degree of wealth or poverty, ignorance or
learning; and I know as well as any what fineness of disposition
and manliness of spirit may be found in a thousand-dollar cottage,
what mean and sordid ways may go with complete education, Yet the
general truth is inexorable. A nation that is grossly ignorant to
the extent of ninety percent of its people is generally a gross
nation. Reduce its illiteracy to ten percent, and its general
standard of conduct rises.

     Since this truth has been perceived, there is the usual
eagerness to claim that the Christian Church long ago knew and
acted upon it. Christianity gave the world schools, says H.G.
Wells. Christianity is "the best friend that learning ever had,"
Mr. William Jennings Bryan wrote in his last speech. From extreme
right to extreme left of the religious world the claim is made. And
just as I have shown the falseness of the Church's claim to have
emancipated woman and the slave, so I propose now to show that this
claim also is the precise reverse of the truth. The facts of
history prove that:

          (1) The pagan power to which Christianity succeeded in
     Europe had already given the world a fine general system of
     education.
          (2) Christianity contemplated the complete ruin of this
     school-system without a murmur, indeed applauded its
     disappearance, and made no effort to replace it.
          (3) So little was done in the way of education during the
     thousand years of absolute Christian domination that more than
     ninety percent of the people in every Christian nation were
     illiterate and densely ignorant.

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          (4) The modern school-systems which have opened the eyes
     of the masses and enabled them to rise are due entirely to
     secular sentiment, and their development was in most cases
     opposed and retarded by the Churches.

     I wish there were some recording angel who could lay at the
august feet of the Pope and his cardinals a veracious chronicle of
what women, workers, and children have suffered since the end of
the fourth century. We saw how woman fell with the fabric of Roman
law, and had to wait for modern skepticism to end her long
degradation. We saw how the workers passed from slavery to serfdom
and from serfdom to the degraded and degrading conditions in which
the nineteenth century found them.

     Who will tell what children have suffered since the golden
eagles of Rome were thrown into the dust for priests to trample
upon? "Children are the guests of humanity," said the Rationalist
Robert Owen, beautifully. But there was, you Protest, no need for
Robert Owen to discover that, for every Christian in the world had
the equally beautiful words of Christ ... Yes, I know. Yet,
somehow, what Robert Owen found, eighteen hundred years after
Christ had spoken, was that most of the children of the Christian
nation in which he lived suffered hell. There was a blanched look,
the pallor of the slave, on the face of the nation's childhood. At
the age of six or seven such of them as had survived the ghastly
perils and illnesses of the dreary, drainless home and the fetid
street were sent to work; and when twelve hours work a day, in a
suffocating atmosphere, were too much for their young frames, no
one then stayed the hand that laid a leather strap or an iron bar
upon their shoulders.

     That was the factory system, you protest. It was recent. Had
they, then, been in paradise before? From the fifth to the
nineteenth century half of them died before they knew the strong
joy of early manhood and womanhood. Four out of eight were laid in
"God's acre" -- the cynicism of it! -- before their hearts had
known more than the scanty and trivial pleasures of a child in the
world of serfdom.

     Did you ever see Maurice Maeterlinck's beautiful symbolic play
"The Blue Bird"? How one would love to think that his pretty land
of memory, where the dead children played in never-fading sunshine,
were a real heaven somewhere for those countless millions of
children who have been martyred during the last fifteen hundred
years. But there is no heaven. Their little bones are dust. Their
souls never grew to maturity.

     If by some miracle those children of the past could peep into
our world they would say that the paradise of children had come at
last. Our life is dreary enough for the children of the poor. But
there is a concern for the child, a care of the child, a protection
of the child from cruelty, a provision of entertainment, a crusade
against disease, a scattering of little pleasures, which were never
known in the world before. Surely a dreadful age, this godless age
of ours!




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     I said "never known in the world before," and it must follow
that paganism had not these things. We must admit it. This
generation of ours has advanced beyond any earlier generation,
especially in that most refined mark of unselfish character, the
service to children.

     In justice both to Christianity and to paganism we must
remember that it is science that has done most to brighten the life
of the child, and neither of them had science. We may justly ask
how it was that the world had to wait fifteen centuries for the
development of those germs of science which appeared in early
Greece, but that is another question. Our world is not merely
willing, but able, to do for the child what no previous
civilization could have done, even if it had dreamed of the ideal.
The wealth alone created by modern science is colossal. The United
States has a little more than the population which the Roman Empire
had in its best days: but it has hundreds of times the collective
wealth of the Roman Empire. Education, as we have it, was not
possible until our time.

     Thus even what is called the materialistic triumph of our age
has a most important relation to our general standard of character.
It has enabled us to create an educational system which will, when
its errors are eliminated, when it becomes entirely practical and
is freed from pedantry and academic nonsense, lift the race to a
still higher level. It has made possible philanthropic schemes
which dwarf all the "charity" of previous ages. Yet when one has
made every allowance for our greater resources it remains true that
we have, since we began to discard Christianity, a finer and more
generous feeling as well as a surplus of wealth. Christianity
wrought woman actual evil; it did nothing for the mass of the
workers; and what it pretends to have done for the child we find to
have been as illusory as all its other social claims.

                    THE CHILD UNDER PAGANISM

     Any properly informed apologist will at this point take down
his copy of Lecky's "History of European Morals," and he would like
to make me blush by confronting me with the admissions of that
learned Rationalist historian. George Eliot once maliciously said
that Lecky's fundamental principle was: "Two and two certainly make
four, but it does not do to press these things too far." Many
people follow that amiable maxim, but the witticism is not quite
just to Lecky. Nearer the truth is the remark which an American
consul once made to me: that Lecky tried so hard to stand up
straight that he occasionally fell backward. His compliments to the
Christian Church are almost always undone by the facts he gives.

     Lecky dwells on the three services of the new religion to the
child which the more cultivated apologist would claim. In point of
fact, I am not sure that there is any apologist sufficiently
informed to abandon the common claim that Christianity gave the
world education; although -- I ask the reader who has access to a
decent library to verify this, as it must seem impossible there is
not one authoritative manual of the history of education (Kapps,
Denk, Paroz, Letourneau, Compayri, Seeley, Boyd, etc.) which does
not make that claim ridiculous. However, apart from education, the


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apologist will warmly plead that Christianity rendered to the child
three mighty services by abolishing the practices of abortion, the
exposure of children, and infanticide.

     I shall not linger long over abortion. It is generally to be
deprecated on the ground of health and risk. It may in a nation
with a shrinking population (which no nation now has) have a social
aspect. But it is not (except legally) a crime or a vice. The
Fathers of the Church put it on a level with murder because they
thought that the foetus had an immortal soul. We don't. In our age
it ought not to be practiced to any great extent because science
has provided contraceptives. In the ancient world it was
inevitable; and even in our world I should call any theologian who
forbade an unfortunate unmarried girl to resort to it a moral
pervert.

     But I dismiss the point briefly because there is not the least
positive evidence that the Church even reduced the practice. The
Fathers condemned it, certainly. There was not much in connection
with sex that they did not condemn. The Stoics also condemned it.
Lecky himself -- though he unfortunately leaves all his Stoic
quotations in Latin, so that the clergy cannot read them -- shows
that Seneca, Juvenal and others condemned it. He quotes Favorinus
saying that abortion deserves "public detestation and the hatred of
all men." One association of doctors in Rome compelled its members
to swear that they would never give drugs for abortion. But neither
Christian nor pagan ever succeeded in putting a stop to it. All
through the ages it has continued, Even now, when preventives are
known to everybody ... I will give only one fact. In a very large
American city, where a third of the population are Catholics
(forbidden to use preventives), a man of exceptional information in
such matters told me that two hundred physicians of the city
practiced abortion and were sufficiently organized to disarm the
curiosity of the police.

     The exposure of children and infanticide were real evils of
the pagan world. The old Roman law did not reach across the
threshold of a man's house. The father had power of life and death
over his wife, his children, and his slaves. The new-born child was
brought to him, and be decided whether he would "receive it into
the family." If he refused to take the baby-girl in his arms, she
was taken out of the house and hid in a public place, where slave-
dealers or baby-farmers found and reared it. Legally the father
could have her stifled.

     This was barbaric: a relic of the barbaric days of the Romans,
which were not far away. But the preacher who imagines Roman
fathers callously killing their baby-girls, or flinging them out
into the street, until the Christian Church became powerful enough
to intervene, simply does not know what he is talking about. Even
scholars who ought to know better grossly exaggerate the situation.
Dr. Fairbairn, for instance, shudderingly says of the pagan
children: "The very sense of their rights was not yet born: the
feeling of obligation toward them waited on the footsteps of
Christ." He impresses his religious readers by giving, a reference
to Mommsen, the greatest authority on the Roman Republic. If they
troubled to look up Mommsen ("Roman History," i, 74), which they


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never do, they would find this: "The moral obligations of parents
toward their children were fully and deeply felt by the Roman
nation." Any authority will tell you that. Dr. Emil Reich, the
Protestant writer on Rome, says ("History of Civilization," p. 371
"It would be the easiest thing in the world to accumulate examples
of the most tender charity practiced by these immoral Romans."
Strange if they slew their baby-girls and then showed a most tender
charity to other people's children.

     Let us take infanticide, which is far more serious than
abortion. Most critics of pagan Rome would refer us to Lecky's
"History," where it is described as "one of the deepest stains of
the ancient civilization" and "a crying vice of the empire" (ii,
12). The apologist stops there. It is enough for pulpit purposes.
But it is constructive lying to quote these phrases alone.

     What Lecky says is that "pagan and Christian writers united in
speaking of infanticide as a crying vice of the empire." We pass
the Christian writers. They called abortion infanticide. But who
are the pagan authorities, and are they merely speaking
rhetorically? Knowing how Lecky, who is always sound in his facts,
has a weakness for saying things which religious readers like, we
are not very much surprised to find that he does not give a single
pagan authority for his strong statement; and it is his custom to
give his authorities most liberally in footnotes.

     He quotes two writers of fiction (the comedian Terence and the
story-writer Apuleius) each of whom makes one of his characters
direct his wife to kill a new-born baby girl; and in each occasion,
even in fiction, the wife is too humane to do it! Then he quotes
Seneca and certain Greek writers saying, with approval, that
"portentous" or "weak and monstrous" new-born babes-monstrosities,
in short, or defective babies -- are and ought to be destroyed.
There are plenty of very humane men and doctors who say the same
today.

     Lecky does not give any evidence that the theoretical right of
the Roman father to kill was ever exercised to any extent. He says
that "infanticide never appears to have been common in Rome till
the corrupt and sensual days of the Empire." He gives no evidence
that it was common in those days, and he adds: "The legislators
then absolutely condemned it." In fact, on the very same page he
writes this passage, which ought to be studied by every apologist:

          The power of life and death, which in Rome was originally
     conceded to the father over his children, would appear to
     involve an unlimited permission of infanticide; but a very old
     law, popularly ascribed to Romulus, in this respect restricted
     the parental rights, enjoining the father to bring up all his
     male children, and at least his eldest female child,
     forbidding him to destroy any well-formed child till it had
     completed its third year, when the affection of the parent
     might be supposed to be developed, but permitting the
     exposition of deformed or maimed children with the consent of
     their five nearest relations.




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     Not so barbaric, after all! In fact, Lecky himself gives a
case under Augustus -- that is to say, "in the corrupt and sensual
days of the empire" -- of a father using his legal right to execute
a delinquent son, and he says that the act provoked the indignation
of Rome. The Emperor Hadrian banished a man who had killed his son
for adultery with his step-mother; and the Stoic lawyer Marcianus
praised the emperor, saying that "the power of a father should be
displayed in affection, not atrocity." In fine, we have this
singular situation which Lecky notices without a smile, that one of
the commonest ways of provoking a pagan mob against the Christians
was to accuse them of infanticide! Strange, if infanticide was one
of the "crying evils" of the pagans themselves, that the mere rumor
of it infuriated them.

     Apart, therefore, from maimed, deformed, or very feeble
children, whom the Romans had no science to cure, we have no
evidence of this alleged prevalence of infanticide. With the
exposure of the new-born female babe it was different. But even
here it is quite false to say that the pagan moralists did not
condemn the practice, or that the Church caused it to be abandoned,
or even materially reduced it.

     The Stoic lawyers of the first and second centuries tried to
prevent exposure by making it equivalent to infanticide. It was no
Christian, but the great pagan lawyer Paulus, three centuries
before the Church had any influence, who said ("Digest," bk. xxv,
title iii, line 4): "Death is inflicted not only by the man who
smothers the new-born child, but by him also who casts it away, who
denies it food, who exposes it in public places to receive a mercy
which he himself does not possess." It was the pagan Emperor Trajan
who decreed that an exposed child could not be made a slave; and it
was the Christian Emperor Constantine who reversed this law. It was
the pagan Emperors Caracalla and Diocletian who attempted to check
the traffic in children,

                  EDUCATION IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

     By the second half of the fourth century, the period when
Christianity took over the rule of the world, there was in the
Roman Empire a general system of elementary schools for the
children of the workers. The children of the wealthy were, of
course, educated at home. generally by freedmen, but all the
evidence goes to show that the children of the workers quite
generally were, at the expense of the municipality, taught to read
and write and cipher.

     We have no statistics. How many schools there were even in
Rome, how far there were schools in rural districts, what
proportion of the population could read and write, are questions
that we cannot answer. But we have ample evidence that a network of
primary schools spread over the empire. St. Augustine, for
instance, was born in 354 A.D. in the very small Roman town of
Thogaste, in what is now Algeria. He, as a matter of course, found
and attended a free elementary school in his native town, to learn
reading, writing, and arithmetic. When he had mastered these
elementary accomplishments, he passed to the "grammar" (or high)
school in the same small Africo-Roman town. His parents intended


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him for the bar, and he was, at the age of sixteen, sent to a still
higher school, the school of rhetoric. Even for this he did not
need to go to Carthage. After a few further years he was sent to
the great school at Carthage, which might be likened to the modern
university.

     It is quite clear from Augustine's own words that for this
education as such nothing was paid; and we have the decrees of the
emperors fixing the salaries which the municipality had to pay
teachers. From this one experience, therefore, we may realize the
general condition of the civilized parts of the Roman Empire. Small
towns like Thogaste had a free grammar school as well as free
elementary schools. Literacy must have been the general condition;
and, in fact, ancient Pompeii, with its names cut in marble slabs
at every street corner, shows that the people were generally
literate.

     The elementary school was so poor that we have no difficulty
in believing that there was one wherever there were a few score
children to each. Quite commonly it was held in the porch of a
house, with sheets of canvas at each end, and the teacher received
a miserable payment. He usually had some other means of livelihood
in addition, yet he was proverbially a poor man. "Cabbage cooked a
second time kills wretched schoolmasters," says a famous line of
Horace. Such schools could be multiplied all over the empire, and
the imperial decrees give us an assurance that they were.

     We may, therefore, assume that the great majority of the free
citizens of the empire could read and write. In those paperless
days writing would not be a matter of much consequence, but it was
taught in the elementary school. Tablets coated with wax were used,
and one wrote with a stylus, pointed at one end for writing, and
broad and flat at the other end for erasing. Simple arithmetic also
was taught, and literary men of the time have left us their
grumbles at the noise made by the children as they sang their
"twice two is four." The Church, in short, came to power in a world
where the middle class were gentlemen and the great mass of the
workers had at least learned to read and write. In the year 400,
when the triumph of Christianity was complete, the leaders of the
Church found a complete government system of schools radiating from
Rome over the entire empire. Paganism had created those schools.
What was the attitude of the Church toward them?

                       WHAT THE CHURCH DID

     In the course of the fifth century this Roman system of
schools was entirely destroyed. By the year 400, as I said,
Christianity had become, by imperial decree, the sole religion of
the empire, which means of the entire civilized world apart from
India and China. By the year 500, there was not a single trace left
of the pagan structure of schools. No writer on education can prove
the existence of a single school in Europe at that date. To say,
therefore, that Christianity gave the world schools, when its
triumph was followed by the annihilation of the finest system of
education the world ever had until the second half of the
nineteenth century, is a constructive untruth of a monumental
character; for there is not the least controversy anywhere about


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these two facts -- that the pagan Romans of the fourth century had
a fine system of general and higher education, and that the whole
of it perished in the fifth century.

     Although I was for several years a professor, and ultimately
head of a college, in the Church of Rome, I then knew nothing
whatever about these facts. We merely copied from earlier
apologists, and repeated the traditional claim that "Christianity
gave the world education." These traditional claims we never
dreamed of checking by modern authorities. The preacher who repeats
them today is usually honest. They are given to him as part of his
clerical education. They occur still, as brazenly as ever, in his
apologetic literature. There is not one preacher in a thousand who
goes further and inquires if the facts, as given in modern history,
support the claims he makes.

                   LEARNING IN THE MIDDLE AGES

     How profound was the night that now enveloped Europe, and how
fully the Church was responsible for it, may be gathered from a
letter written by Pope Gregory "the Great" to a French bishop.
Gregory ruled the Church from 590 to 604 A.D. The triumph of
Christianity was now complete. Paganism was very dead; and
civilization had almost expired with it. Rome had not been
destroyed by the Goths, but it was suffered, decade by decade, to
fall into ruin by the forty thousand miserable and grossly ignorant
Christians who now moved, like lizards, amongst the moldering
buildings that had once housed a million happy, open-eyed folk.
Europe at large was correspondingly desolate.

     Gregory, who ascended the chair of Peter in 590, was a monk.
Ah, the Catholic will say, one of that glorious army of industrious
scholars who preserved for all time the treasures of classic
literature ... We shall see. I would rather point out that Gregory,
before be became a monk, had been a Roman patrician, a rich man of
the standards of the time, even Prefect of Rome. He was by no means
a peasant or an emancipated serf. But what a fall from the
patricians of pagan days: refined and cultivated men who would
spend hours polishing a short letter to a friend or preparing a
public oration.

     Gregory expected the end of the world. I tell elsewhere how he
laid the foundation of the temporal power and wealth of the Papacy
through this fortunate belief of his that the end of the world was
really approaching at last. A man with possessions, the Bible said,
had as much hope of getting through the eye of a needle as of
getting through the narrow gate of heaven. So the men who had large
estates in Italy passed them over to the Papacy and looked for the
heavens to open. The Pope became a prince; and a few more
forgeries, a century later, would make him a king. However, Gregory
did believe that the last trumpet would soon sound in the ears of
the mortals, and so nothing but virtue mattered. He heard that
Bishop Desiderius, of Vienne in Gaul, was conducting a small
school, and he wrote him a letter (Migne edition, bk. XI, ep. liv)
of which I may translate a passage:




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          After that we heard a thing that cannot be repeated
     without a feeling of shame -- namely, that you are teaching
     grammar to some. This troubled us so greatly, and filled us
     with so deep a disdain, that we fell from our former praise of
     you to mourning and sorrow, because the praise of Jove must
     never be heard from the mouth that praises Christ. Think how
     grave and horrible it is for a bishop to repeat what even a
     religious layman should not. And, though our beloved son the
     presbyter Candidus denied the affair, at our pressing inquiry,
     and tried to excuse you, ye have not lost the suspicion,
     because it is so execrable for this to be said of a priest
     that it must be strictly investigated.

Desiderius is, in fine, to give up "studying trifles and secular
letters" if he is to return to the Pope's favor.

     The latest Catholic apologist for the atrocities of his
Church, Dr. H.A. Mann, contends in his "Lives of Popes" -- a
marvelous piece of whitewashing -- that Bishop Desiderius had been
teaching the classics in church. I have translated the relevant
passage of the letter in full so that the reader may see for
himself that this is a quite unscrupulous defense. The bishop's
fault was, pure and simple, that he was teaching "profane letters."
This was "execrable," "horrible," etc. The age of education was
over. Father Mann tries to support his theory by quoting some
praise of secular learning from what he calls Gregory's "Commentary
on the First Book of Kings." Even the Benedictine monks who edit
Gregory's works admit that this work is spurious. It was written by
an admirer who in the main reproduces Gregory's sermons, but -- the
art of shorthand had been lost, of course -- mixes his own ideas
with those of the Pope.

     After Gregory's death there was a tradition in the Church,
reproduced in the "Polycraticus" (ii, 26) of John Salisbury, that
the Pope had burned the old Roman libraries which still remained on
the Capitoline and the Palatine Hills. I have little doubt that the
tradition is correct. Civilization was to be killed, Somehow it
meant love, joy, and beauty: things which any saint loathed. In any
case, Gregory, the greatest Pope in many centuries, thundered out
the orders of the Papacy: no schools. A very tame sort of "profane"
culture had been provided by the grammarian Donatus, the teacher of
St. Jerome, and it is probably this that the French bishop gave in
his schools. In his most famous work, the "Magna Moralia," the
largest volume of sheer nonsense ever put together, Gregory pours
scorn even on these innocent "rules of Donatus."

     Let the reader understand clearly what is meant. I am not
speaking of the mass of the people. They remained universally in
the densest ignorance. Of schools for them there was no question.
A bishop of Laon (in France) of the eleventh century says: "There
is more than one bishop who cannot name the letters of the alphabet
on his fingers." Ordinary priests had not the slightest
understanding of the Latin they mumbled. Even the secretaries of
the Papacy at Rome sent out their documents in the most atrocious
Latin, full of common grammatical errors. Kings and nobles could
not sign their names. Their signatures had to be cut for them in
wood and stamped on documents. The illiteracy of Europe had
increased to more than ninety-nine percent.

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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     That there were schools for teaching clerics how to read the
Bible and the Breviary may be taken for granted, but they were so
obscure and paltry that pedagogists can hardly find the names of
any of them. As to the monks -- I imagine my Catholic reader
waiting on tiptoe for me to come to these famous monks of the
Middle Ages -- their supposed literary activity is as priceless a
legend as that of the early martyrs.

     The French writer Montalembert is responsible for the myth.
His discovery that "every monastery was a school" is still quoted
everywhere, though every serious historian of education will tell
you that not one monastery in one hundred educated even its own
monks. He tells about the fervor for copying manuscripts, the great
libraries, of the monks. Why, he says, we know that in one
monastery (at Novaless) there were six thousand seven hundred hand-
written books! Yes: and at the same time the Moors in Spain had
seventy public libraries besides private collections, one of which
contained six hundred thousand books. And in pagan days the library
of Alexandria had contained seven hundred thousand books. The
Julian library at Rome (which, with others, the Pope is said to
have burned) contained one hundred and twenty thousand books.

     The overwhelming majority of the monasteries of the Middle
Ages were colonies of fat and gross sensualists, mainly
hypocritical peasants, who could not write their own names.
Impossible? In his "History of Pedagogy" Compayre shows that at the
close of the thirteenth century, which is supposed to be the most
intellectual and scholarly period of the Middle Ages, not one
single monk in the largest and greatest monastery of France, St.
Gall, could read or write! From the days of St. Augustine, who
found himself compelled to write a book against monks ("Contra
Monachos") within a century of their appearance in Europe, until
the Reformation serious Christian literature is full of stern
indictments of the piggish idleness and the hypocrisy of the monks.

     "Without these [monastic] copyists," says the wonderful
Montalembert, "we should possess nothing -- absolutely nothing --
of classic antiquity." Catholic writers repeat this, and Catholics
all over the world have a gloriously vague idea that we owe our
Plato and Aristotle and all the Greek works we so justly treasure
to the monks of the early Middle Ages. Whereas any expert on the
subject will tell you that we owe not one single genuine piece of
Greek literature to the monks, unless it be Aristotle's
"Dialectics," which is disputed. Professor Heeren, who has made
special research into this question ("Geschichte des Studiums der
Klassischen Literatur") says that until the time of Charlemagne
(who made the monks work) there was not a monastery in Europe that
"rendered any service whatever in connection with classical
literature" (p.101).

     Let the Catholic use his own common sense in the matter. Does
he really imagine his pious monks spending the hours between their
prayers in copying what he calls the obscenities of Apuleius, the
amorous verse of Horace, the adventures of the gods and goddesses
in Ovid? A moment's reflection will tell him what really happened.
Greek literature was preserved in the Greek Empire, and was
conveyed to Europe by the Jews and Moors. As to Latin literature,


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

genuinely religious monasteries regarded it, like Tertullian, as
"inspired by the devil," and would not look at it; and the great
bulk of the monasteries were too gross and ignorant to do any
copying. (Fortunately, in every age there was an abbot or a bishop
here and there who loved a cup of wine and a maid as well as Horace
did, and they preserved the treasure for us.) Copies even of the
Latin classics were exceedingly rare in the Middle Ages, Heeren
shows, although a parchment-book lasted practically forever.

     Where the monks did spend any part of their time in "the
writing room," they were, naturally, copying the Fathers of the
Church and later Christian literature. In a corner of the great
British National Library at London there is a full collection (the
Migne collection) of the works of the Fathers, Latin and Greek:
five or six hundred large quarto volumes of closely printed ...
what shall I call it? No one seems to approach this gallery of
literary fossils except myself. It is all waste paper from the
modern point of view. And that is almost all we owe to the famous
monks. Heeren insists that they destroyed more classical works than
the barbarians did.





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