Many
suffered indignities, privations or death for questioning tradition or
for conducting scientific researches.
So while it is true that the monks rendered many services to the cause
of education, it is also true that their monastic theories tended to
narrow the scope of intellectual activity. "This," says Guizot, "is the
foundation of their instruction; all was turned into commentary of the
Scriptures, historical, philosophical, allegorical, moral commentary.
They desired only to form priests; all studies, whatsoever their nature,
were directed to this result." There was no disinterested love of
learning; no desire to become acquainted with God's world. In fact, the
old hostility to everything natural characterizes all monastic history.
Europe did not enter upon that broad and noble intellectual development
which is the glory of our era, until the right arm of monasticism was
struck down, the dread of heresy banished from the human mind, and
secular learning welcomed as a legitimate and elevated field for
mental activity.
Hamilton W. Mabie, in his delightful essay on "Some Old Scholars,"
describes this step from the gloom of the cloister to the light of God's
world: "Petrarch really escaped from a sepulcher when he stepped out of
the cloister of medievalism, with its crucifix, its pictures of
unhealthy saints, its cords of self-flagellation, and found the heavens
clear, beautiful, and well worth living under, and the world full of
good things which one might desire and yet not be given over to evil.
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