Ecclesia Militans: Where we got the Bible

Our Debt to the Monks

Thus far we have been speaking of the Bible as found written in the old manuscripts, mostly in the very early centuries of Christianity. Now the next question after settling how the Bible was made and collected and committed to writing, is, how was it preserved and multiplied and diffused throughout the centuries previous to the invention of printing? For you will bear in mind that we are as yet a long way off the day when the first printing press was invented or set up. Did the people at large know anything at all about the Sacred Scriptures before it was printed and put into their hands? Here we are suddenly plunged into the Middle Ages; what was the history of the Holy Book during that time which people in these countries generally call ‘Dark’? If you have patience with me for a little I shall prove to you that, just as the Catholic Church at the very beginning wrote and collected together the sacred books of the New Testament, so that by her monks and friars and clergy generally she preserved them from destruction during the Middle Ages and made the people familiar with them; and, in short, that it is to the Roman Church again under God that we owe the possession of the Bible in its integrity at the present day.

Now of course, this will sound strange and startling in the ears of those who have imbibed the common notions about the Middle Ages. As I said there was a traditional Protestant delusion about the Catholic Church and the Bible in general, so there is a traditional opinion which every good Protestant must adopt about those Ages of Faith, as we Catholics prefer to call them. The general idea is that they were centuries (from the eighth century to the end of the fourteenth) of profound ignorance, oppression, superstition and of universal misery – that the monks were debauched, greedy and lazy – that the people in consequence were illiterate and immoral, only half civilized, and always fighting – that the whole of Europe was sunk in barbarism and darkness, men’s intellects enslaved and their wills enervated, and all their natural energies paralyzed and benumbed by the blighting yoke of Rome – that (in the comprehensive language of the Church of England Homilies) ‘laity and clergy, learned and unlearned, all ages, sects and degrees of men, women and children, of whole Christendom, had been altogether drowned in damnable idolatry, and that by the space of 800 years and more’. That is fairly sweeping. How they can reconcile that alleged state of things with the unconditioned promises of Our Blessed Lord that ‘the gates of hell should never prevail against the Church’ and that He would ‘be with her always to the end of the world’, and that the ‘Holy Ghost would lead them into all the truth’ – is to me a mystery. But let that pass. We are asked then to believe that during the Middle Ages true Christianity was overlaid and buried beneath a mass of Popish fables and traditions, and that of course the Bible in consequence was unknown except to a very few; was neglected and ignored and kept out of sight, because it would have destroyed Popery if it had been known. Only when the light of the Reformation shone out did the Holy Book appear openly in the world, and become familiar to the faithful of Christ as that which was to ‘make them wise unto salvation’.

Now, I am not going to enter into a general defense of the condition of things in the Catholic world during these Ages of Faith, though, if time permitted, nothing would be more congenial to me. I would merely remark in passing, however, that perhaps men of the twenty-first or twenty-second century will take the very same view of this age of ours as some people do now of the Middle Ages, and will look back with horror upon it as a time when the world was desolated by famine, pestilence, and war – when nations of the earth amassed huge armies and built immense navies to slaughter each other and plunder each other’s territories – when the condition of the poor was harsher and crueller than ever before in the history of the world since Christ was born – when there were on the one side some hundreds or thousands of capitalists, with some millionaires amongst them; and on the other, many millions of the laboring classes in deepest want and misery; multitudes on the very verge of starvation wondering how they were to keep a roof over their heads or get a bit of food for themselves and for their children. People in ages to come will, mayhap, regard this century with its boasted progress and civilization, and this land with 350 years of Protestantism behind it as an age and a country where drunkenness and dishonesty and immorality and matrimonial unfaithfulness and extravagance and unbelief and youthful excesses and insubordination and barbarity of manners were so universally and so deeply rooted that the authorities of the kingdom were simply helpless to cope with them. I am one of those who hold that the ‘Dark Ages’ were ages full of light in comparison to these in which we are now living. The ages which built the gorgeous Cathedrals and Abbeys whose ruins still stand as silent but eloquent witnesses of their past glory and beauty, and still delight the eye and captivate the admiration of even the most unsympathetic beholder – those ages could not at least have been sunk in ignorance of architecture, or been insensible to the beautiful and the artistic, or been niggardly or ungenerous in their estimate of what was a worthy temple for the majesty of the God of heaven and earth and a dwelling-place fitting for the Lord of Hosts.

Again, the ages which covered the face of Europe with universities and schools of learning, which produced philosophers and theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, and Albertus Magnus and Scotus and Bacon, and which built up the scholastic system – a system which, for logical acuteness and metaphysical accuracy, for subtlety and unity and complete consistency, has never been equaled, and which still stands unshaken by all attacks and triumphing over all its rivals that ‘have their day and cease to be’ – that age, I say, could hardly have been intellectually dark or barren. Once more: an age which produced saints like Dominick and Francis and Bernard, and was fruitful in bringing forth Orders of men and women for assisting our poor humanity in every form and stage of its existence – teaching the ignorant, caring for the sick and the afflicted, and even redeeming captives from the yoke of slavery – the age, besides, which witnessed the Crusades, those magnificent outbursts of Christian chivalry and of loyalty to Jesus Christ Our Lord – when men, kings, and princes, and subjects, seizing the Crusader’s cross, went cheerfully to lay down their lives in myriads on the burning plains of Syria in their glorious attempts to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the hand of Turk and infidel – that age, I say, cannot have been altogether devoid of the love of Him who Himself gave His life for men, and whose feet had trod those sacred places in the days of His Flesh. People speak glibly nowadays of the ignorance of these far-back times; but it seems to me that no man who is really grounded in the truth of Christianity, who knows his Pater Noster, Ave, Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Seven Sacraments, and puts them into practice, can ever be said to be truly ignorant. He might not have been able to build a motor car or even to drive one – to turn out a steamship or a flying machine or speak the weird language of Esperanto. Neither could St. Peter or St. Joseph, for the matter of that. Nevertheless the practical teaching of the people of those ages received from priest and monk in church and school was, I submit, of far more real moral and intellectual value than the hash of scraps of hygiene and science, French and cookery, civics and art which is crammed into the unwilling brain of our twentieth century public school children. Generally speaking, the mediaevalists, so despised, had the knowledge of God and of the world to come; and that was really the best knowledge they could have. (See preface to Dr. Maintland’s Dark Ages.)

But I am afraid I have been guilty of a serious digression; what we must do now is confine ourselves to the single point as to how the Scriptures were preserved and multiplied and made known to the people in the Middle Ages. (I) I shall first prove that the Bible was multiplied and preserved by the monks and priests. All must now admit hat it was really in monasteries that multitudes of copies of the Holy Scriptures were made. Monasteries were centres of learning in those times even more than they are today, because education was not so widely spread. An indispensable part of the outfit of every monastery was a library. ‘A monastery without a library,’ writes a monk of the twelfth century to another monk, ‘is like a castle without an armory.’ And he goes on to declare that the great defense of the monastic armory should be the Bible. Sometimes the libraries were very large, and we read of Emperors and other great people borrowing from them. The monks were the most learned men of those days, and were by profession scholars, men who had renounced worldly pursuits and pleasures, an dedicated themselves to a retired life of prayer and study; and one of the principal parts of their scholastic activity was the copying and transcribing of the Sacred Scriptures. For this purpose there was a large room called the Scriptorium in which a dozen or more monks could be engaged at one time, but there were also many monks employed, each in his own cell, which contained all the necessary apparatus for literary work. These cells were so arranged around the central heating chamber that in winter their hands would not get benumbed with so much writing. Day by day, year after year, the monks would persevere in their holy labors, copying with loving care every letter of the sacred text from some old manuscript of the Bible, adorning and illuminating the pages of vellum with pictures and illustrations in purple and gold and silver coloring, and so producing real works of art that excite the envy and admiration of modern generations. Some Bishops and Abbots wrote out with their own hands the whole of both the Old and the New Testaments for the use of their churches and monasteries. Even nuns – and this point I would bring under special notice – nuns took their share in this pious and highly skilled labor. We read of one who copied with her own hands two whole Bibles, and besides made six copies of several large portions of the Gospels and Epistles. Every monastery and church possessed at least one, and some possessed many copies of the Bible and the Gospels. In those ages it was a common thing to copy out particular parts of the Bible (as well as the whole Bible); for example, the Gospels, or the Psalms, or Epistles, so that many who could not afford to purchase a complete Bible, were able to possess themselves of at least some part which was specially interesting or popular. This custom is truly Catholic, as it flourishes amongst us today. At the end of our prayer books, for instance, we have Gospels and Epistles for the Sundays, and various publishers, too, have issued the four Gospels separately, each by itself, and the practice seems to me to harmonize entirely with the very idea and structure of the Bible, which was originally composed of separate and independent portions, in use in different Churches throughout Christendom. And s owe find that the monks and clergy often confined their work to copying out certain special portions of Sacred Scripture, and naturally the Gospels were the favorite part.

The work, we must remember, was very slow, and expensive as well. Dr. Maitland reckons that it would require ten months for a scribe of those days to copy out a Bible; and that Ł60 or Ł70 would have been required if he had been paid at the rate that law-stationers pay their writers. Of course, with the monks it was a labor of love, and not for money; but this calculation of Dr. Maitland only refers to the work of copying; it leaves out of account the materials that had to be sued, pen and ink and parchment. Another authority (Buckingham) has made a more detailed calculation, and assuming that 427 skins of parchment would have been needed for the 35,000 verses, running into 127,000 folios, he reckons that a complete copy of Old and New Testaments could not have been purchased for less than Ł218. Yet Protestants stare in astonishment when you tell them that not everybody could sit by his fireside in those days with a Bible on his knees! Some princes (among them, I think, Charlemagne) gave the monks permission to hunt for deer in the Royal forest, so as to get skins to make into parchment for copying work. I have no space to give elaborate proof of my assertion that, as a matter of course, all monasteries and churches possessed copies of the Scriptures in the Middle Ages. It stands to reason that those who made the copies would keep at least one for their own use in the monastery, and another for the public services in the Church. We read of one convent in Italy which had not money enough for the bare necessaries of life, yet managed to scrape up Ł50 to purchase a Bible. Dr. Maitland, in his most valuable book The Dark Ages – he was a Protestant, librarian to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a great student, and a most impartial scholar – gives page after page of instances, that came under his own notice in his researches, of religious houses that had Bibles and Testaments in their possession. Of course these are but casual specimens; the thing was so common that there was no need to chronicle the fact any more than you would chronicle the fact that A or B had a clock in his parlor in the nineteenth century. Kings and Princes and Popes often presented beautiful copies of the Bible to Abbots and Priors for use in their monastery, sometimes gloriously embellished within with painting and illuminations, written in letters of gold and silver, and bound in gold casing set with gems. We frequently read of such gifts. And not only the Bible, but other books used in the service of the Church, such as copies of the Missal or Psalter or Gospels, all containing great portions of Holy Scripture, were often presented as gifts by great personages in Church or State, bound in gold or ivory or silver of the utmost purity, and marvelously adored and studded with pearls and precious stones. Nothing was considered too costly or too magnificent to lavish on the sacred volume. But I suppose that when we find Popes like Leo III, and Leo IV, and Emperors like Henry II, and Lewis the Debonnaire, and Bishops like Hincmar of Rheims, and Dukes like Hugh of Burgundy, and Bishops like Ralph of Rochester and numberless Abbots and Priors in the eighth and ninth centuries causing copies of the Sacred Scriptures to be made and gifted to monasteries and churches throughout Europe, this must be taken as evidence of Rome’s hatred of the Word of God, and her fear of its becoming known or read or studied! Yet that this was the common custom for hundreds of years is a fact of history that is quite beyond the region of doubt. Moreover, the Sacred Scriptures were a favorite subject of study among the clergy; and a popular occupation was the writing of commentaries upon them, as all priests at least are aware, from having to recite portions of them every day, ranging from the age of St. Leo the Great and St. Gregory, down to St. Bernard and St. Anselm.

(2) Now one could go on at any length accumulating evidence as to the fact of monks and priests reproducing and transmitting copies of the Bible from century to century, before the days of Wycliff and Luther; but there is no need, because I am not writing a treatise on the subject, but merely adducing a few proofs of my assertions, and trying to show how utterly absurd is the contention that Rome hates the Bible, and did her best to keep it a locked and sealed book and even to destroy it throughout the Middle Ages. Surely nothing but the crassest ignorance or the blindest prejudice could support a theory so flatly contradicted by the simplest facts of history. The real truth of the matter is that it is the Middle Ages which have been a closed and sealed book to Protestants, and that only now, owing to the honest and patient researches of impartial scholars amongst them, are the treasures of those grand centuries being unlocked and brought to their view. It is this ignorance or prejudice which explains to me a feature that would be otherwise unaccountable in the histories of the Bible written by non-Catholics. I have consulted many of them, and they all, with hardly an exception, either skip over this period of the Bible’s existence altogether or dismiss it with a few off-hand references. They jump right over from the inspired writers themselves, or perhaps from the fourth century, when the Canon was fixed, to John Wycliff, ‘The Morning Star of the Reformation’, leaving blank the intermediate centuries, plunged, as they imagine, in worse than Egyptian darkness. But I ask – Is this fair or honest? Is it consistent with a love of truth thus to suppress the fact, which is now happily beginning to dawn on the more enlightened minds, that it was the monks and clergy of the Catholic Church who, during all those ages, preserved, multiplied, and perpetuated the Sacred Scriptures? The Bible on its human side is a perishable article. Inspired by God though it be, it was yet, by the Providence of God, written on perishable parchment with pen and ink; liable to be lost or destroyed by fire, by natural decay and corruption, or by the enemies, whether civilized or pagan, that wasted and ravaged Christendom by the sword, and gave its churches and monasteries and libraries to the flames. Who, I ask, but the men and women, consecrated to God by their vows and devoted to a life of prayer and study in monasteries and convents, remote from worldly strife and ambition – who but they saved the written Word of God from total extinction, and with loving and reverent care reproduced its sacred pages, to be known and read of all, and to be handed down to our generation, which grudges to acknowledge the debt it owes to their pious and unremitting labors?

Chapter Eight