meaning‘hidden’in the text, separating‘fruit’from‘chaff’—the prototype of
what would be called a millennium and a half later, by professional readers
long secularized,‘explication de texte’.
It is well known that many European cities have histories of cultural and
civic development that begin either with a Roman garrison or a Benedictine
monastery. The Roman garrisons have all disappeared; most were gone by the
mid-fifth century. But the Benedictine monasteries are still there; even after
Viking marauders annihilated some of the monks, others would return to take
their place, briskly resuming their work of horticulture, medicine, translation,
and the building of libraries. This is because, in addition to poverty, chastity,
and obedience, the Benedictines took a vow to practisestabilitas, sticking
with it.^10 It is to their assiduous efforts at translation and paraphrase of the
Bible that numerous European languages owe theirfirst exhibition in written
form; subsequent to biblical paraphrase and specifically Christian poetry, a
literacy was created which allowed for the textual preservation of native poetry
and written chronicle.^11 Thefirst poetry preserved in writing in Anglo-Saxon
England is essentially biblical paraphrase or Targum; the cultural histories of
Whitby, Wearmouth, and Jarrow, as more particularly biographical vignettes
of Caedmon, Abbess Hilda, and King Alfred the Great, all make evident how
efforts at missionary translation in monastic centres led directly to the growth
of native as well as classical learning. Not only were the monasteries centres for
the study of Scripture and theological commentary, or for the growth of
experimental science and medicine, but because monastic libraries were the
repository of Greek and Latin texts—preserved (sometimes at the cost of lives)
from the ravages of war—they were durable centres for the continuation of
classical learning as well. If it were not so, then Alcuin in the ninth century
would hardly have needed to ask his version of Tertullian’s rhetorical question.
But here is the point too often missed: classical learning, indeed all types of
learning in the monasteries, was organized around astudiumwhose central
preoccupation was the Bible as a foundation foralllearning. It was the study of
the Bible far more than the study of Cicero and the classical authors generally
that spread Latin literacyandproduced also a textual tradition in several
European vernaculars. Moreover, we can say confidently that not only was
the Bible in such a fashion made foundational for general humane learning
in European culture; but that without it, much of Roman secular learning and
the ancient texts themselves would not have survived to be a part of our
culture at all.
(^10) David Knowles,Saints and Scholars: Twenty-Five Medieval Portraits(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1962), 6–8.
(^11) David Lyle Jeffrey,People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture(Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 97–138.
168 David Lyle Jeffrey