It is surprising that the literary men of the medieval period should have written so little of interest to the modern mind, or that helps us to an understanding of the momentous events amid which they lived.  Unfortunately the monkish mind was concentrated upon a theology, the premises of which have been largely set aside by modern science.  Their writings are so permeated by grotesque superstitions that they are practically worthless to-day.  Their hostility to secular affairs blinded them to the tremendous significance of the mighty political and social movements of the age.

It is undeniable that the monks never encouraged a love of secular learning.  They did not try to impart a love of the classics which they preserved.  The spirit of monasticism was ever at war with true intellectual progress.  The monks imprisoned Roger Bacon fourteen years, and tried to blast his fair name by calling him a magician, merely because he stepped beyond the narrow limits of monkish inquiry.  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.  He ventured to look at life for himself and found it full of wonderful dignity and power.  He opened his Virgil, brushed aside the cobwebs which monkish brains had spun over the beautiful lines, and met the old poet as one man meets another; and lo! there arose before him a new, untrodden and wholly human world, free from priestcraft and pedantry, near to nature and unspeakably alluring and satisfying.”