IV.7.5
CULTIVATION OF LINGUISTIC
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
Yet all of this fades into insignificance if viewed against
the contributions which the monastery made to Western
life in the fields of learning and in the arts. Early monastic
asceticism generated disgust rather than sympathy for
classical learning. But the teaching and dissemination of
the Faith depended on the availability of a substantial body
of sacred texts, which necessitated the establishment of libraries
and of schools of writing both in the secular and the
monastic churches. It was inevitable that the linguistic and
intellectual skills required for the copying and writing of
these books would engender an interest in the study of the
great secular legacy of classical writing as a preparatory education
for religious teaching.
[219]
The great protagonists of
this school of thinking were such giants of Early Christian
learning as St. Augustine (354-430) and Cassiodorus (c.
490-585). From them a direct line leads to Alcuin (735-804)
who formulated, under Charlemagne, the educational policy
that made the establishment of schools of learning a primary
monastic obligation, and who was himself the founder of
some of the greatest monastic schools of writing, including
the school that flourished at the Palace itself.
To define what went on in these scriptoria would mean
to write half of the intellectual history of the Middle Ages
and half of the history of its visual arts. Apart from the important
task of providing the books that were indispensable
for the conduct of the religious services, there was a demand
for a great variety of original compositions, the writing of
the lives of the saints, the writing of the monastery's own
history, often reaching out to include a rich account of
events that took place in the secular world, the creation of
new hymns, and lectionaries, new antiphons, and numerous
other liturgical innovations. The ever increasing preoccupation
with these concerns—as students of medieval intellectual
history have pointed out—"made men into historians,
prose writers, poets and composers."[220]
