Rabanus Maurus

Rabanus was born at Mainz about 780 and was given to the monastery of Fulda as a boy. Fulda had been founded by a disciple of Boniface, the English missionary who evangelized the Germans, and it was the intellectual center of the German church. Rabanus was sent from there to Tours to study under Alcuin, who thought so well of him that he gave him the additional name Maurus, after Benedict's favorite disciple.

He came back to Fulda, ran the school, was ordained priest in 814, and became abbot in 822. Under him Fulda became the great teaching monastery of Germany: he expanded the library, put his monks to copying, built and restored more than thirty churches, and turned out a generation of scholars, Walafrid Strabo, Otfrid of Weissenburg, Lupus of Ferrières, who staffed the intellectual life of the next fifty years. His contemporaries called him praeceptor Germaniae, the teacher of Germany.

He resigned the abbacy in 842, in the wake of the civil wars among Charlemagne's grandsons, and retired to a hermitage. In 847 he was made archbishop of Mainz, and he held that see until his death on 4 February 856.

One episode from those years is worth stating plainly. When famine struck in 850, Rabanus fed the poor from the church's stores, the record says more than three hundred people a day were fed at his own house.

He wrote across the whole range of learning. His De rerum naturis is a twenty-two-book encyclopedia, modelled on Isidore but reorganized so that every natural thing is also read for its spiritual meaning. He commented on most of the books of the Bible, wrote De institutione clericorum on the training of clergy, produced a treatise on grammar, and composed De laudibus sanctae crucis, a set of poems laid out on a grid so that shapes drawn across the letters spell out further verses. It is a strange and beautiful piece of book-making, and the illuminated copies are among the treasures of Carolingian art.

He was also on the wrong side of a hard argument, defending predestination in a form his opponent Gottschalk pushed further than the church would allow; Gottschalk was condemned, flogged, and imprisoned, and Rabanus had a hand in it.

The hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, is very widely attributed to him. It has been sung at ordinations, coronations, and the opening of councils ever since.

Sources: Rabanus Maurus, De rerum naturis, De institutione clericorum, and De laudibus sanctae crucis; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913); The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. III.