The living force in the spiritual life of the Roman empire was, after
all, not philosophy, but religion, and specifically Christianity. With
the extension of Christianity to the Gentile world it at length became
necessary for it to orientate itself towards what was best in Greek
culture. There is a Stoic element in the ethic of the Pauline epistles,
but the theological affinity that the Johannine gospel, with its
background of philosophic ideas, exhibits to Platonic and Neoplatonist
teaching caused the effort at absorption to be directed rather in that
direction. Neoplatonism had accepted the Aristotelian logic with its
sharper definition than anything handed down from Plato, and, except the
logic of the Sceptics, there was no longer any rival discipline of the
like prestige. The logic of the Stoics had been discredited by the
sceptical onset, but in any case there was no organon of a fitness even
comparable to Aristotle's for the task of drawing out the implications
of dogmatic premises. Aristotelian logic secured the imprimatur of the
revived Platonism, and it was primarily because of this that it passed
into the service of Christian theology. The contact of the Church with
Platonism was on the mystical side. Orthodoxy needed to counter
heretical logic not with mysticism, itself the fruitful mother of
heresies, but with argument. Aristotelianism approved itself as the
controversial instrument, and in due course held the field alone. The
upshot is what is called Scholasticism. Scholasticism is the
Aristotelianism of medieval orthodoxy as taught in the "schools" or
universities of Western Europe. It takes form as a body of doctrine
drawing its premises from authority, sometimes in secular matters from
that of Aristotle, but normally from that of the documents and
traditions of systematic theology, while its method it draws from
Aristotle, as known in the Latin versions,[94] mainly by Boethius, of
some few treatises of the _Organon_ together with the _Isagoge_ of
Porphyry. It dominates the centres of intellectual life in the West
because, despite its claim to finality in its principles or premises,
and to universality for its method, it represents the only culture of a
philosophic kind available to the adolescent peoples of the Western
nations just becoming conscious of their ignorance. Christianity was the
one organizing principle that pulsed with spiritual life. The vocation
of the student could find fulfilment only in the religious orders.
Scholasticism embodied what the Christian community had saved from the
wreckage of Greek dialectic. Yet with all its effective manipulation of
the formal technique of its translated and mutilated Aristotle,
Scholasticism would have gone under long before it did through the
weakness intrinsic to its divorce of the form and the matter of
knowledge, but for two reasons. The first is the filtering through of
some science and some new Aristotelian learning from the Arabs. The
second is the spread of Greek scholarship and Greek manuscripts
westward, which was consequent on the Latin occupation of Constantinople
in 1204. It was respited by the opportunity which was afforded it of
fresh draughts from the Aristotle of a less partial and purer tradition,
and we have, accordingly, a golden age of revived Scholasticism
beginning in the 13th century, admitting now within itself more
differences than before. It is to the schoolmen of the two centuries
preceding the Turkish capture of Constantinople that the controversial
refinements usually associated with the name of Scholasticism are
attributable. The _Analytics_ of Aristotle now entered quite definitely
into the logical thought of Scholasticism and we have the contrast of a
_logica vetus_ and _logica nova_. That other matters, the _parva
logicalia_ and Mnemonics adapted from Psellus and possibly of Stoic
origin, entered too did not outweigh this advantage. Confrontation with
the historical Aristotle may have brought but little comfort to the
orthodox system, but it was a stimulus to dialectical activity within
the schools. It provoked the distinction of what was true _secundum
fidem_ and what was true _secundum rationem_ among even sincere
champions of orthodoxy, and their opponents accepted with a smile so
admirable a mask for that thinking for themselves to which the revival
of hope of progress had spurred them. The pioneers of the Renaissance
owe something of their strength to their training in the developments
which the system that they overthrew underwent during this period. The
respite, however, was short. The flight of Byzantine scholarship
westward in the 15th century revealed, and finally, that the philosophic
content of the Scholastic teaching was as alien from Aristotle as from
the spirit of the contemporary revolt of science, with its cry for a new
medicine, a new nautical astronomy and the like. The doom of the
Scholastic Aristotle was nevertheless not the rehabilitation of the
Greek Aristotle. Between him and the tide of feeling at the Renaissance
lay the whole achievement of Arab science. That impatience of authority
to which we owe the Renaissance, the Reformation and the birth of
Nationalism, is not stilled by the downfall of Aristotle as the _nomen
appellativum_ of the schools. The appeal is to experience, somewhat
vaguely defined, as against all authority, to the book of nature and no
other. At last the world undertakes to enlarge the circle of its ideas.