CRISTO RAUL.ORG ' |
THE UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY |
FROM JUSTINIAN TO LUTHER. AD 518-1517CHAPTER XIII.SOME SCHOOLMEN
THE philosophic and theological systems of the Middle
Ages have received the name of Scholasticism from the cathedral and monastic
schools in which they originated. With the exception of John Scotus Erigena,
the first writers and teachers of the Carolingian age were of a practical turn
of mind. But in the eleventh century practical interests gave way to a pure
love of science, and scholars strove to give a perfectly logical form to the
doctrines of the Church. Soon after 1100 we already find a sharp distinction
between two different schools of thought, the Nominalists and the Realists,
though some germs of their different theories can be found in the ninth
century. The Nominalists maintained that 'general notions' or 'universals' are
mere abstractions of the understanding, to which we give names in order to
describe the qualities of particular things. The Realists held that these
'universals' have a substantial reality, they are objective ideal existences
before and apart from human thinking, and are more real than individual things.
The universals were believed to inhere in the individuals and to constitute
their 'form' or essence. Thus, according to the Realists, humanity is real;
according to the Nominalists men are real, each man is real, but humanity is
not real. The difference was one of serious importance, for Realism was linked
with a spiritual view of the universe, and Nominalism with an unspiritual view,
and might fairly be described as skeptical and rationalistic in tendency, if
not in intention.
Roscellinus (d.c. 1125) represented this rationalistic
school of thought and his tritheistic doctrine
concerning the Trinity was opposed by St. Anselm, whose guiding principle in
the philosophy of religion was 'Believe in order that you may understand'.
Condemned at Reims, Roscellinus was received at Rome
and then returned to teach in France. Nearly contemporary with him we find
several notable Schoolmen. Among the most important of them were John of
Salisbury and Peter Abelard, a pupil of Roscellinus.
John of Salisbury, an Englishman who became Bishop of
Chartres, may be called a forerunner of the Renaissance of the next century. He
is an Academician and reproduces the style and thought of Cicero. He is a
Christian humanist, believing that the love of God is the true philosophy. But
he hesitates to make affirmations where he sees no absolute certainty: he is
cautious and knows that we must often be content with probabilities.
The celebrated Abelard (1079-1142) was a thinker of a
different type. He was a born fighter. The basis of his doctrine was
Nominalist, and he had assimilated the Aristotelian theory of knowledge more
completely than any of his contemporaries. He compelled his Parisian teacher,
William of Champeaux, to change his views, and he then proceeded to attack
another distinguished teacher, Anselm of Laon. He left Laon for Paris, where
his lectures on theology and philosophy enjoyed an extraordinary vogue. At this
time he seduced and was secretly married to the beautiful and talented Heloise.
For his sake she unselfishly denied the marriage, while he was cruelly
mutilated in a way which disqualified him for ecclesiastical preferment. He
fled to the monastery of St. Denis, but had to leave it when he maliciously
announced the historical fact that St. Denis of Paris was not Dionysius the
Areopagite. He next lived for a short time at an oratory named the Paraclete,
leaving it to become abbot of a monastery in Brittany; he again lectured in
Paris, and was excommunicated by Pope Innocent II. He found a refuge with the
Abbot, Peter the Venerable, of Cluny, who not only effected a reconciliation of
Abelard with Bernard, but obtained permission from the Pope for him to pass his
last days in peace at Cluny. He died in 1142 near Chalon-sur-Saône whither he had gone in quest of health. His remains
were carried off in secrecy to the Paraclete, where Heloise was laid to rest in
1164. Their bones still lie united in the cemetery of Père-la-Chaise.
Abelard's influence, both during his life and in later
days, has been the result rather of his force of character than of any
originality of ideas. The notion that he was an apostle of free thought who
deliberately intended to wreck the principle of authority must be seriously
questioned. It cannot be denied that in opposing the tritheism of Roscellinus he taught a Sabellian doctrine of the Trinity,
and his doctrine of the Atonement fails to do justice to the propitiatory
character of Christ's death. But he wished to understand in order that he might
believe. And his famous Sic et Non, in which he put together the conflicting
opinions of the Fathers, was written to promote the solution of religious
problems, and not the dissolution of faith. He says, “I do not want to be a
philosopher by contradicting St. Paul, nor to be an Aristotle so as to separate
from Christ”. The extent of his learning was not vast, but what he studied he
studied deeply; his mind was penetrating and his dialectic was formidable.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) was Abelard's most
persistent antagonist. He was genuinely disturbed by the effects of Abelard's
teaching. The discussions which had begun in the schools were now taken up in
the universities, where famous teachers were able to gather together large and
enthusiastic bands of followers. And his letters are full of lament over the
loss of faith arising from attempts to apply the canons of our limited reason
to truths which in a great measure belong to a sphere beyond our grasp.
Abelard, he maintains, is suspicious of God's word, and his disciples debate in
the streets about the Virgin birth of Christ and the Sacrament of the altar.
The arguments on such questions were not very different then from what they are
now; and the uniformity of nature was invoked with equal assurance by the
skeptics, though impressed upon the student's imagination with less wealth of
detail than in modern times.
Bernard was a man of fervent faith and the most
eminent mystical writer of this period. He inaugurated a spiritual movement
which can be traced through the Middle Ages to the Reformation and beyond it.
Without excluding philosophy from religion, he expresses his own conviction
when he says, “My philosophy is to know Jesus and Jesus crucified”. The way to
truth is Christ, and the principal thing in the teaching of Christ is humility.
It is the virtue by which a man knows what he is himself and feels compassion
for his neighbor, and so rises through sorrow for his sins to the contemplation
of God. The Bible was his favorite reading, and his theology was a theology of
the heart.
Hugo of St. Victor (d. 141) and his pupil Richard of
St. Victor (d. 1173) tried from the side of mysticism to bridge the gulf
between those who subordinated faith to reason and those who believed that
faith is the surest path to truth. The former writer was very highly esteemed
as a ripe scholar and deep thinker, and is placed by Dante among the great
teachers of the Church. Side by side with a mystical reaction from the
philosophy and somewhat perverted logic of the time, we find the production of
learned summaries of the content of the Christian faith. Such books were
written by Hugo of St. Victor himself, Robert Pullen of Oxford, who was admired
by Bernard, and Peter Lombard, whose work remained for centuries a popular
text-book of the schools and won for its author the title of Magister Sententiarum. But the speculative impulse was nearly
exhausted by the middle of the twelfth century, and the mystics were devoting
themselves to preaching and edification. A momentous change was at hand. After
an interval of about half a century there came a new development of
Scholasticism. It was the result of a knowledge of the complete works of
Aristotle, transmitted by the Muslims and the Jews of Spain.
Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), an English archdeacon
who studied and lectured in Paris and entered the order of St. Francis, was the
first Schoolman who knew all the Aristotelian writings and applied the forms of
Peripatetic philosophy to the elaboration of the doctrinal system of the
Church. His ponderous Summa Theologiae, which Roger
Bacon declared to be equal in weight to one horse, was recommended highly by
Pope Alexander IV and a Roman Conclave, and it caused the Franciscans to give
him the name of Doctor Irrefragabilis. It is not a
book of great intrinsic value, but it is of real historical importance as
marking a new stage in human knowledge. And Alexander of Hales had the honor of
teaching St. Bonaventura, whom he described as 'an Israelite indeed, in whom
Adam appears not to have sinned'.
It was, however, the Dominican order, and not the
Franciscan, which succeeded in effecting the great revolution of which
Alexander of Hales was the forerunner. The men who did this work were Albertus
Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas. They presented to the world a synthesis which
combined all that revelation called men to believe and all that the reason
allowed them to comprehend. Before this synthesis was made, the philosophers
were dialecticians who had derived from Aristotle instruments for argument, but
had little matter concerning which to argue. The theologians employed the same
methods of discussion, although their theology remained in its essence the
Christian Platonism of St. Augustine. But when the Physics, Metaphysics, and
Ethics of Aristotle were assimilated, there came a change. A clearer
distinction became drawn between philosophy and theology, between what can be
demonstrated and what cannot, and a new importance became attached to the
experience of the senses. It became necessary to observe nature as it is.
It is in this realm of nature that Albertus Magnus (d.
128o) recognized the authority of Aristotle, and in his appeal to Aristotle and
the Greeks he liberated human reason by simultaneously restricting and
enlarging its domain. It was his deliberate purpose 'to make intelligible to
the Latins' the treasures of knowledge accumulated by the Greeks and by their
Arab and Jewish disciples. It has been well said that in his works they can be
discovered like unpolished precious stones, stones which were to gain from the
Latin genius of St. Thomas a brilliance and a setting which were not given to
them by the German intellect of Albertus. His knowledge of physical science is
considerable. And in spite of inconsistencies, his immense industry and his
protracted study of Aristotle gave him a real power in digesting and expounding
the philosophy of the great master and remodeling it for Christian use. He
studied at Padua and Bologna, and lectured with great success at Cologne,
Strasbourg, and Paris. In 1254 he became Provincial of the Dominicans and in
126o the Pope made him Bishop of Regensburg. He was an efficient provincial and
an active preacher. Among his voluminous writings is a commentary on St. John
and a criticism of the Muslim Averroes. His principal theological works are a
commentary on the Book of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and his own Summa Theologiae, which shows the influence of both Peter Lombard
and Alexander of Hales.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274) entered into the labors
of his teacher Albertus, and may be regarded as the incarnation of medieval
Christian philosophy. Born of a noble family at Rocca Secca, he was taught as a
child in the monastery of Monte Cassino, and as a lad at the university of
Naples. There, against the wishes of his family, he assumed the habit of St.
Dominic in his seventeenth year. He then studied under Albertus at Cologne and
at Paris, and became under Albertus second lecturer at Cologne. He then
returned to Paris in 1252 to win his doctor's degree, and lived in intimate
friendship with St. Bonaventura. He threw himself into the controversy raging
between the Dominicans and the University of Paris with regard to the liberty
of teaching; and it was not until 1257, when the opposition of the university
to the mendicant orders had been overcome, that the two friends obtained the
degree of doctor. Urban IV recalled him to Italy in 1261, and he taught
successively in Rome, Bologna, Pisa, and Naples. He died on March the 7th,
1274, on his way to the second general Council of Lyons.
His works cover an enormous ground and illustrate the
gradual travail of his mind. The Commentary on the Sentences manifests his
thought in process of formation, influenced by Augustinian views which he
afterwards abandoned. The Commentaries on Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius show
two great sources on which he drew for his philosophy and his theology. The
Summa Theologiae shows us his own philosophy in a
form adapted to beginners. And the Summa contra Gentiles contains the same
doctrine, but with an exhaustive discussion of the problems briefly solved in
the Summa Theologiae.
To the contemporaries of St. Thomas the influx of new
knowledge seemed to certify the truth of doctrines incompatible with the faith
of the Church, and it was therefore necessary to distinguish reason and faith
more carefully and to render to each its real due. St. Thomas knew what a proof
is when it is solely rational, and, because he knew, he denied the possibility
of demonstrating the doctrine of the Trinity or the creation of the world in
time as opposed to its creation in eternity. The universe is distinct from God
and has a perfect and intelligent cause, but reason does not, like revelation,
tell us that it had a beginning in time. The demonstration of the existence of
God is necessary and possible; and in the things of sense, that is, things
whose nature is proportionate to our own, we can find a point from which our
minds can rise upward to God. He is the summit of a series of causes of which
the base is the reality of things perceived by the senses. The forms of things
created, the ideas of things, exist in the thought of God, they are the
knowledge which He has of a possible participation in His perfection on the
part of things created. Our knowledge is not capable of reaching directly to
the supreme good; but by a constant effort of the intellect and by choosing the
things that are in necessary connection with that good, we can reach a real
beatitude here, and divine that which we may reach hereafter. Now, this
reduction of our knowledge of God to a knowledge which begins with the senses
appeared to be directly opposed to the mystical belief that man can have direct
evidence and clear intuitions of God's existence and God's presence. It might
seem a dry theory to men who were conscious of an abiding “unction from the
Holy One”. But it was the teaching of a man who was not only a great thinker
but also a fervent saint and poet. If St. Thomas had not that passion for
conformity with the Crucified that we find in St. Francis, he devoted his life
to the contemplation of God, and his Eucharistic hymns are among the most
precious jewels of medieval devotion.
It is to be regretted that he was ignorant of Greek,
and he defended the authority of the Pope against the Greeks by quotations from
the usual forgeries then current in Western Christendom.
Roger Bacon (1214-1294) was not only one of the most
distinguished members of the Franciscan order, but also a great man in an age
of great men. Popular English tradition came to regard him as a combination of
the magician and the mechanician. And it is true that, like a child of his age,
he believed in astrology and the philosopher's stone: and it is also true that
he describes the method of constructing a telescope. But he was first of all a
wise and learned man who perceived the folly of deserting the Scriptures for
the works of Peter Lombard and of cultivating physical science by arguments
which ignored research. His Oxford teachers gave him a bent in the direction of
positive science and the knowledge of languages; he took the degree of Doctor
of Theology at Paris, and returned to England about 125o. He then spent most of
his time in Oxford, but his lectures roused the suspicion of his Franciscan
superiors, and about 1257 he was sent back to Paris, where he was kept under
strict supervision and endured great hardships. Help came to him from an
unexpected quarter. In 1265 Guy de Foulques, who had
acted as papal legate in England, became Pope with the name of Clement IV. He
wrote to Bacon ordering him, notwithstanding any injunctions of his superiors,
to send him a treatise on the sciences concerning which he had inquired when
legate.
In spite of the want of money and other materials,
Bacon in two years' time sent to the Pope two works, the Opus Majus and the
Opus Minus, and began an Opus Tertium. These large works were regarded by him
as introductions leading to a greater work embracing the principles of all the
sciences. But these with his other writings reveal to us a keen thinker
exposing the sources of error, outlining the relation between philosophy and
theology, insisting on the necessity of acquiring foreign languages, and the importance
of mathematics and of experimental knowledge. For a time Bacon enjoyed a
breathing space in Oxford, but in 1278 his books were condemned by Jerome of
Ascoli, the general of the Franciscan order, and he was again imprisoned. He
was free once more in 1292 and probably died in Oxford in 1294.
Duns Scotus, probably a native of Scotland, became a
member of the Franciscan order about 129o, studied in Oxford and Paris, and
died in Cologne in 1308. He was one of the most original thinkers that Oxford
has produced. An Aristotelian who had learned much from St. Thomas, he was also
deeply influenced by the Augustinianism of the Franciscans and the scientific
methods which had been taught by Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. With him
philosophy and theology have fewer points of contact than with St. Thomas, and
he makes a sharper distinction between reason and revelation. He lays the
utmost stress upon the primacy of the will in both God and man, though he
regards Infinity as the most essential attribute of God. To him the fact that
will controls the acts of the intelligence, and is the first cause of the act,
is proof of the supremacy of the will. Even when the choice of an act seems to
be the irresistible result of the knowledge that we have of an object, the will
is wholly responsible for the choice that is made. He repeatedly criticizes St.
Thomas. And though his work is less magnificently harmonious than that of the
great Dominican, he surpasses him in force and originality. The manner in which
he balances together the doctrine of God's transcendence and the doctrine of
His creative will, and his elucidation of certain aspects of Christ's Person,
helped to safeguard some essentially Christian ideas against a mischievous
logic. He was fitly named Doctor Subtilis.
Henceforth the Dominicans and the Franciscans were
opposed as respectively the followers of Thomas and the followers of Scotus.
The Franciscans tended to be critical and progressive, whereas the Dominicans,
after the revolution effected by Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas, became
conservative and the friends of tradition.
The differences between the Thomists and the Scotists extended to almost every branch of theology and
intimately touched the questions of grace and sin, predestination and free
will. St. Thomas, in dealing with these great questions, remained in line with
the teaching of St. Augustine. The Scotists were
nearer to Pelagianism. St. Thomas, like St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and many
others, held that although the Blessed Virgin committed no sin, she was not
conceived immaculate. Duns Scotus held that she was even in her conception free
from the taint of original sin, and this theory became a darling doctrine of
the Franciscans. It was erected into a dogma in 1854 by Pope Pius IX after
considerable discussion and a good many misgivings. In the sixteenth century
the Council of Trent strove to keep the balance between Thomists and Scotists, but inclined on the whole towards the former. The
influence of the two schools can be clearly traced in the intellectual
movements of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and the late medieval
revival of Nominalism left its mark on Socinianism, the left wing of the
theological revolt against Rome.
In spite of the differences by which they were
divided, the Thomists and the Scotists were alike
Realists, and for a time checked the advance of Nominalism. But the last stage
of medieval philosophy was marked by a revival of Nominalism in a militant
form. This revival was mainly the work of the English Franciscan William of
Occam (d. c. 1349). It became widely influential, and the last of the medieval
Schoolmen, Gabriel Biel (d. 1495), a professor of Tubingen, was a Nominalist.
The Realists of this later period called themselves Antiqui,
while the Nominalists, who prided themselves on being Moderni,
showed remarkable points of contact with some modern modes of religious
thought.
Occam's method proceeded on the supposition that logic
deals not with things nor with thoughts, but with terms arbitrarily imposed by
ourselves. Words are signs of thoughts which are signs of something else, but
the relations between words and thoughts, thoughts and things, are all
imperfect; and when we use certain terms we neither assert nor prove anything
as to the relations aforesaid. Occam believed the Realists to be quite wrong in
thinking that there is a real universal or common element in all the individuals
of one class, for the individual thing is the only reality, whether it be in
the outward world or in the world of mind. He distrusted abstractions and laid
stress upon the objects of immediate perception. Further, Occam made a complete
severance between philosophy and theology. He denied that any doctrines are
rationally demonstrable. Reason can only bring forward probabilities in their
favor. Thus the unity and the infinity of God are more probable than a
plurality of gods, but they cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless he accepted
theological truths because they are revealed: they are certain from the point
of view of faith, and reason does not contradict them. Like Scotus, he held
that morality is founded on the arbitrary will of God.
In all this theory of a twofold truth we can see a
reaction against the great work of Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas, which was
the reconciliation of reason and faith as 'two bells of one accord'. Occam, and
others like him, were believers. But their belief was built upon the very
skepticism from which it was intended to be a refuge. The result was that this
theory of a twofold truth was accepted by philosophers who had no love for any
religion, and on the other hand by mystics who cared little for any systematic
theology. We must now consider the splendid effort to reconstruct the relation
between faith and reason that was made by a great ecclesiastic, Nicholas of
Cusa.
One of the most attractive and interesting figures of
the fifteenth century is Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). He was a man
endowed with rare sagacity and a passionate love of truth. He detected as
frauds the Donation of Constantine and the forged Decretals, and he anticipated
Copernicus by maintaining the theory of the rotation of the earth. He was
conspicuous at the Council of Basel, where he proposed a scheme for concord
based on a recognition of the rights of both Pope and Council. He afterwards joined
the papal party; but his honesty is beyond question, and as papal legate he
carried out numerous reforms in Germany. He was a many-sided philosopher, and
his writings prove him to be one of the finest representatives of later
medieval thought. The word Unity may be called the motto of his aspirations. He
was deeply dissatisfied with the scholastic Nominalism which separated faith
and knowledge, for he believed that faith must be sustained by knowledge both
new and old. And he desired to heal the divisions of Christendom by a
reconciliation between the Greek and the Latin Church, hoping that Western
thought might be renovated by contact with Greek culture.
His theology is influenced by Pythagorean and Platonic
metaphysics. From these metaphysics he borrowed formulas to express his
speculations on Christian doctrine. He gave to his principal treatise the title
of Docta Ignorantia,
holding that, like Socrates, we must start from the knowledge that we know
nothing. The man who begins with this knowledge may find in the truths which
his intellect first regards as contradictory a path towards the highest and
most perfect unity. The One for which he seeks must be that in which all things
find their meeting point, accident and substance, body and spirit, movement and
repose. It must include the greatest and the least, the highest and the lowest.
It harmonizes all. Yet are we right when we say It? Should we not rather speak
of Him? Nicholas of Cusa seeks a positive constructive theology in which God
will appear as uniting in himself that which is scattered in all creatures, and
he seeks a negative transcendent theology which distinguishes God from His
creatures. He has been accused of Pantheism, but it is very doubtful whether
this charge can be substantiated, in spite of phrases that suggest it. A
mystical element appears in his doctrine that among those who profess religion
the highest class find their delight not in sensuous things like the lowest
class, nor in the understanding like the intermediate class, but in a manner
which transcends everything that sense and understanding can grasp.
The highest stage can be reached by the true believer
in Christ. In his third book Nicholas shows how the absolute Being of God is
presented to man in the Person of our Lord. In Him God and the world find their
reciprocal mediation. In the universe, which is a limited image of God, there
are not infinitely many degrees of concrete being; and the universe therefore
does not exhaust the absolutely greatest power of God. If we were to think of
the greatest as existing concretely in a determinate species, it would in
reality be all that lies within the whole possibility of that species: it would
be its highest possible perfection. It would be both creature and God, the
perfection of a determinate species and the absolute maximum. Now Man has the
most relationship with the totality of being, and therefore is the best fitted
of all things for union with God. For this union it was necessary that the
likeness in God, that is the Son, should unite with Man. Through this Son, and
for Him, all things exist, and nothing can attain to higher perfection without
this union of the human and the divine. It has appeared in the Person of
Christ. In His Person and in His death He has made up and completed what is
defective in all men. His perfect humanity remained throughout hypostatically
united with His Deity. He rose again with a glorified immortal body that human
nature might also rise to eternal life, and the mortal body become spiritual
and indestructible. So He is both the centre and the
completion of all creation.
A deep and devout religion is allied with these more
metaphysical doctrines. The activity of faith consists in the inward union of
the believer with Christ. The possibility of this union lies in the fact that
in Christ is the most perfect humanity, and all men are in Him. Faith, which is
developed by knowledge, is vitalized by love. As everything that lives loves
life and every thinker loves thought, so we cannot have faith in Jesus as
immortal life and perfect truth without loving Him. The Church is the mystical
body of Christ, and through the Word and the sacraments is the medium of union
with Him; and as diverse finite things, notwithstanding their plurality, are
comprehended in the concrete unity of the universe, so Christians have their
concrete unity in the Church.
Nicholas believed that man had been created for unity
and redeemed for unity. He held that the eternal Word had taught all nations to
feel after Him and one nation to be His special messenger, that his own
inquiries and the inquiries of the philosophers were directed towards the same
goal, and that one Book gives to all the assurance that those who seek will
find.
With Nicholas of Cusa the age of medieval
scholasticism and of medieval reform ends, and ends with dignity.
CHAPTER XIV.BONIFACE VIII AND THE BABYLONISH CAPTIVITY
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