In the second place, as regards morality in the individual, we see on

the one hand religion in its truly noble and attractive form in a few

isolated individuals alone. I refer to those solitary spirits who are

dead to the world and far removed therefrom, who find in their emotions

what satisfies them, and, living in a little circle, can limit themselves

to the sphere of religion. This is the case with women in the Middle

Ages, or with the monks or other solitaries who were able to preserve

themselves in a restricted and contracted state of fervour such as this,

in which the spiritual side makes itself infinitely felt, although it

lacks actuality. The one truth stood isolated and alone in man, the whole

actuality of mind was not yet penetrated by it. On the other hand it

is, however, essential that mind as will, impulse and passion, should

demand quite another position, another mode of venting and realizing

itself, than any such solitary and contracted sphere affords, that the

world should require a more extended sphere of existence, an actual

association of individuals, reason and thought coming together in

actual relations and actions. This circle in which mind is realized—the

human life—is, however, at first separated from the spiritual region of

truth. Subjective virtue partakes more of the character of suffering and

privation on its own account, morality is just this renunciation and

self-surrender, and virtue as regards others merely has the character

of benevolence, a fleeting, accidental character destitute of relation.

All that pertains to actuality is hence not perfected by the truth,

which remains a heavenly truth alone, a Beyond. Actuality, the earthly

element, is consequently God-forsaken and hence arbitrary; a few isolated

individuals are holy, and the others are not holy. In these others we

first see the holiness of a moment in the quarter of an hour of worship,

and then for weeks a life of rudest selfishness and violence and the most

ruthless passion. Individuals fall from one extreme into another, from

the extreme of rude excess, lawlessness, barbarism, and self-will, into

the renunciation of all things without exception, the conquest of all

desires.

The great army of the Crusaders gives us the best example of this. They

march forth on a holy errand, but on the way they give free vent to all

the passions, and in this the leaders show the example; the individuals

allow themselves to fall into violence and heinous sin. Their march

accomplished, though with an utter lack of judgment and forethought,

and with the loss of thousands on the way, Jerusalem is reached: it is

beautiful when Jerusalem comes in view to see them all doing penance in

contrition of heart, falling on their faces and reverently adoring. But

this is only a moment which follows upon months of frenzy, foolishness

and grossness, which everywhere displayed itself on their march. Animated

by the loftiest bravery, they go on to storm and conquer the sacred

citadel, and then they bathe themselves in blood, revel in endless

cruelties, and rage with a brutal ferocity. From this they again pass on

to contrition and penance; then they get up from their knees reconciled

and sanctified, and once more they give themselves up to all the

littleness of miserable passions, of selfishness and envy, of avarice and

cupidity: their energies are directed to the satisfaction of their lusts,

and they bring to nought the fair possession that their bravery had won.

This comes to pass because the principle is only present in them in its

implicitude as an abstract principle, and the actuality of man is not as

yet spiritually formed and fashioned. This is the manner in which the

opposition in actuality manifests itself.

In the third place, we reach the opposition existing in the content of

religion, in the religious consciousness; this has many forms, though

we have here only to call to mind those that are most inward. On the

one hand, we have the Idea of God—that He is known as the Trinity; on

the other, we have worship, _i.e._ the process of individuals making

themselves conformable to spirit, to God, and reaching the certainty of

entering the kingdom of God. A present and actual church is an actuality

of the kingdom of God upon earth, in such a way that this last is present

for every man—every individual lives and must live in the kingdom of

God. In this disposition we have the reconciliation of every individual;

thereby each becomes a citizen of this kingdom, and participates in the

enjoyment of this certainty. But this reconciliation is allied to the

fact that in Christ the unity of the divine and human nature is shown

forth, that is to say, the way in which the spirit of God must be present

in man. This Christ thus cannot be one who is past and gone, and the life

of reconciliation cannot be a mere recollection of that past. For as the

just behold Christ in heaven, so must Christ be an object on earth which

may likewise be beheld. In that case this process must be present—the

individual must be united to this to him objective form, and it becomes

identical with him; the history of Christ, that God reveals Himself as

man, sacrifices Himself, and through this sacrifice raises Himself to

the right hand of God, is in the individual always being accomplished

in the culminating point which is called the sacrifice of the mass. The

mediating element to which the individual relates himself in worship, is

ever present in the mass as the objective of which the individual must be

made to partake, as the Host and the act of partaking of the same. This

Host, on the one hand, as objective, is held to be divine, and, on the

other, it is in form an unspiritual and external thing. But that is the

lowest depth of externality reached in the Church; for in this perfect

externality it is before the thing that the knee must be bowed, and not

in as far as it is an object that may be partaken of. Luther changed

this way of regarding matters; in what is called the Supper, he has

retained the mystical fact that the subject receives the divine element

into himself; but he maintains that it is only divine in so far as it is

partaken of in this subjective spirituality of faith, and ceases to be

an external thing. But in the Church of the Middle Ages, in the Catholic

Church generally, the Host is honoured even as an external thing; thus

if a mouse eats of the Host, both it and its excrements are reverenced;

there the divine element has altogether the form of externality. This

is the central point of intense opposition which is on the one hand

dissolved, and on the other remains in perfect contradiction, so that the

Host, still held to be a merely external thing, must nevertheless be thus

high and absolute.

With this externality the other side is connected—the consciousness

of this relation—and here we then have the consciousness of what is

spiritual, of what is the truth, in the possession of a priesthood.

Thus as thing it is naturally also in the possession of another, from

whom, since it is something distinguished by itself, it has to receive

its distinction—or it must be consecrated—and this last is likewise an

external action only, performed by individuals. The power to give this

distinction to the thing is in the possession of the Church; from the

Church the laity receive it.

But besides all this, the relationship of the subject in himself, the

fact that he belongs to the Church and is a true member of the same,

must be considered. After the admission of individuals into the Church

their participation therein must likewise be brought about—that is,

their purification from sin. To this it is, however, essential, in the

first place, that it should be known what evil is, and secondly, that

the individual should desire the good and that pertaining to religion;

and thirdly, that sin should be committed from an innate and natural

sinfulness. Now since what is inward, or conscience, must be of a right

nature, the sins that are committed must be removed, and made as though

they had not happened; man must ever be purified, baptized anew, so to

speak, and received back again: the negation that shuts him out must

ever be removed. Against this sinfulness positive commands and laws are

now given, so that from the nature of spirit men cannot know what is

good and evil. Thus the divine law is an external, which must hence

be in someone’s possession; and priests are separated from others, so

that they are exclusively acquainted both with the particular details of

doctrine and the means of grace, _i.e._ the mode whereby the individual

is religious in his worship and comes to know that he participates in

the divine. In the same way that the administration of the means of

grace belongs as an outward possession to the Church in relation to

worship, so is the Church also in possession of a moral estimate for

judging of the actions of individuals; it is in the possession of the

conscience, as of knowledge as a whole, so that man’s inmost essence, his

accountability, passes into other hands and to another person, and the

subject is devoid of individuality even in his inmost self. The Church

also knows what the individual ought to do; his faults must be known,

and another, the Church, knows them; the sins must be taken away, and

this also is effected in an external way, through purchase, fasting and

stripes, through journeyings, pilgrimages, &c. Now this is a relation of

self-suppression, unspirituality and deadness both of knowledge and will,

in the highest things as well as in the most trivial actions.

These are the main facts as regards externality in religion itself, on

which all further determinations depend.

3. We have now obtained a better idea of the elements present in this

philosophy; but in barbaric nations Christianity could have this form

of externality alone, and this pertains to history. For the dulness

and frightful barbarism of such nations must be met by servitude, and

through this service must their education be accomplished. Man serves

under this yoke; this fearful discipline had to be gone through if the

Teutonic nations were to be raised into spiritual life. But this severe

and wearisome service has an end, an object; infinite spring and infinite

elasticity, the freedom of spirit, is the prize. The Indians are in equal

servitude, but they are irrevocably lost—identified and identical with

nature, yet in themselves opposed to nature. Knowledge is thus limited

to the Church, but in this very knowledge a positive authority is firmly

rooted, and it is a prominent feature of this philosophy, whose first

quality is consequently that of lack of freedom. Thought thus does not

appear as though it proceeded from itself and was grounded in itself, but

as being really independent of self and depending on a given content, the

doctrine of the Church—which, although speculative itself, also contains

the mode of the immediate existence of external objects.

In theological form it may be said that, in general, the Middle Ages

signify the dominion of the Son and not of Spirit; for this last is still

in the possession of the priesthood. The Son has differentiated Himself

from the Father, and is regarded as remaining in this differentiation,

so that the Father in Him is only implicit; but in the unity of both we

first reach Spirit, the Son as Love. If we remain a moment too long in

the difference without likewise asserting the identity, the Son is the

Other; and in this we find the Middle Ages defined and characterized. The

character of Philosophy in the Middle Ages is thus in the second place

an attempt to think, to conceive, to philosophize under the burden of

absolute hypotheses; for it is not the thinking Idea in its freedom, but

set forth in the form of an externality. We thus find here in Philosophy

the same character as is present in the general condition of things,

and for this reason I before called to mind the concrete character that

prevails; for on every period of time one special characteristic is

always imprinted. The philosophy of the Middle Ages thus contains the

Christian principle, which is the highest incentive to thought, because

the Ideas therein present are thoroughly speculative. Of this one side is

that the Idea is grasped by the heart, if we call the individual man the

heart. The identity of the immediate individuality with the Idea rests

in this, that the Son, the mediator, is known as _this_ man; this is the

identity of spirit with God for the heart as such. But the connection

itself, since it is likewise a connection with God in God, is hence

immediately mystical and speculative; thus here there is the call to

thought which was first of all responded to by the Fathers, and then by

the scholastics.

But since, in the third place, there exists the opposition between

the doctrine of the Church and the worldly man—who has indeed through

thought worked his way out of this same barbarism, but who in his

healthy human understanding has not yet penetrated to reason—the mode

in which Philosophy was treated at this time for the setting forth of

formal thought, has still no concrete content. We may appeal to the

human concrete mind; in it we have a living present as thinking and

feeling; a concrete content such as this has its root in the thought of

man, and constitutes the material for his independent consciousness.

Formal thought directs its course by this; the wanderings of abstract

reflection have in such consciousness an aim, which sets a limit upon

them, and leads them back to a human concrete. But the reflections of the

scholastics on such a content depend unsupported on the determinations

of formal thought, on formal conclusions; and all the determinations

regarding natural relationships, laws of nature, &c., that may issue,

receive as yet no sustenance from experience; they are not yet

determined by the healthy human understanding. In this respect the

content likewise is unspiritual, and these unspiritual relationships are

inverted and carried into the spiritual in so far as advance is made to

determinateness of a higher kind. These three points constitute the main

characteristics of this philosophy.

More particularly we would shortly deal with the chief representatives

of this philosophy. Scholastic philosophy is considered to begin with

John Scotus Erigena who flourished about the year 860, and who must

not be confused with the Duns Scotus of a later date. We do not quite

know whether he belonged to Ireland or to Scotland, for Scotus points

to Scotland, and Erigena to Ireland. With him true philosophy first

begins, and his philosophy in the main coincides with the idealism of the

Neo-Platonists. Here and there stray works of Aristotle were likewise

known, even to John Scotus, but the knowledge of Greek was very limited

and rare. He shows some knowledge of the Greek and Hebrew tongues, and

even of Arabic as well; but we do not know how he attained to this. He

also translated from Greek to Latin writings of Dionysius the Areopagite,

a later Greek philosopher of the Alexandrian school, who more especially

followed Proclus: namely, _De cœlesti hierarchia_, and others which

Brucker calls (Hist. crit. phil. T. III. p. 521), _nugæ et deliria

Platonica_. Michael Balbus, Emperor of Constantinople, had in the year

824 made a present of these works to the Emperor Louis the Pious; Charles

the Bald caused them to be translated by Scotus, who long resided at his

court. In this way something of the Alexandrian philosophy became known

in the West. The Pope quarrelled with Charles, and complained to him of

the translator, against whom he made the reproach that “he should have

first sent the book to him in conformity with the general usage, and

asked his approval.” John Scotus afterwards lived in England as head of a

school at Oxford, which had been founded by King Alfred.[16]

Scotus was also the author of some original works, which are not without

depth and penetration, upon nature and its various orders (_De naturæ

divisione_), &c. Dr. Hjort, of Copenhagen, published an epitome of

the writings of Scotus Erigena, in 1823. Scotus Erigena sets to work

philosophically, expressing himself in the manner of the Neo-Platonists,

and not freely, and as from himself. Thus in the method of expression

adopted by Plato, and also by Aristotle, we are rejoiced to find a new

conception, and on bringing it to the test of philosophy, to find it

both correct and profound; but here everything is ready to hand, cut and

dry. Yet, with Scotus, theology is not yet built on exegesis, and on the

authority of the Church; the Church in many cases rejected his writings.

Thus Scotus is reproached by a Lyons church council in these words:

“There have come to us the writings of a boastful, chattering man, who

disputes about divine providence and predestination, in human fashion,

or, as he himself boasts, with philosophic arguments, and without

relying on the holy scriptures and bringing forward the authority of the

Fathers. And he dares to defend this on its own merit, and to establish

it on its own laws, without submitting himself to the holy scriptures

and the authority of the Fathers.”[17] Scotus Erigena hence even said:

“The true Philosophy is the true Religion, and the true Religion is the

true Philosophy.”[18] The separation came later on. Scotus then made a

beginning, but properly he does not belong to the scholastics.

B. GENERAL HISTORICAL POINTS OF VIEW.

All further scholastic philosophy attaches itself more to the doctrines

of the Christian Church; the ecclesiastical system which it thereby made

its necessary basis, became early established through church councils,

while the faith of the Evangelical Church already prevailed before

the time of these councils from which the Catholic Church derives its

support. The most important and most interesting thoughts which pertain

to the scholastics, are, on the one hand, the strife between nominalism

and realism; and, on the other, the proof of the existence of God—quite a

new manifestation.

1. THE BUILDING UP OF DOGMAS ON METAPHYSICAL GROUNDS.

The efforts of the scholastics were further directed, firstly, to the

building up of the dogmas of the Christian Church on metaphysical bases.

After this, the collected doctrines of the Church were systematically

treated. Then the scholastics had branches or modifications of these

dogmas, which were not determined by the doctrinal system. Those grounds

themselves, and then these further and special points of view, were

objects handed over for free discussion. Neo-Platonic philosophy was what

lay before the theologians first of all; the manner of this school is

recognized in the older and purer scholastics. Anselm and Abelard are the

more distinguished of those who follow later.

a. ANSELM.

Amongst those who wished to give additional proof of the doctrines of

the Church through thought, is Anselm, a man of great distinction and

high repute. He was born at Aosta, in Piedmont, about 1034; in 1060 he

became a monk at Bec, and in 1093 was raised to the rank of Archbishop

of Canterbury; in 1109 he died.[19] He sought to consider and prove

philosophically the doctrines of the Church, and it has even been said of

him that he laid the basis for scholastic philosophy.

He speaks as follows of the relation of faith to thought: “Our faith

must be defended by reason against the godless, and not against those

who glory in the name of Christian; for of these we may rightly demand

that they should hold firm to the obligations which they came under in

baptism. Those others must be shown through reason how irrationally

they strive against us. The Christian must go on through faith to

reason, and not come from reason to faith; but if he cannot attain to

comprehension, he must still less depart from faith. For if he is able to

press on to knowledge, he rejoices therein; when he is unable so to do,

he humbly adores.”[20] He makes a noteworthy remark, which contains his

whole philosophy, in his work _Cur Deus homo_ (I. 2), which is rich in

speculative thought: “It appears to me great negligence if we are firm

in the faith, and do not seek also to comprehend what we believe.” Now

this is declared to be arrogance; immediate knowledge, faith, is held to

be higher than knowledge. But Anselm and the scholastics maintained the

opposite view.

Anselm may be regarded from this point of view as quite specially the

founder of scholastic theology. For the thought of proving through

a simple chain of reasoning what was believed—that God exists—left

him no rest day and night, and tortured him for long. At first he

believed his desire to prove the divine truths through reason to be a

temptation of the devil, and he was in great anxiety and distress on

that account; finally, however, success came to him by the grace of God

in his _Proslogium_.[21] This is the so-called ontological proof of

the existence of God which he set forth, and which made him specially

famous. This proof was included among the various proofs up to the time

of Kant, and—by some who have not yet reached the Kantian standpoint—it

is so included even to the present day. It is different from what we

find and read of amongst the ancients. For it was said that God is

absolute thought as objective; for because things in the world are

contingent, they are not the truth in and for itself—but this is found

in the infinite. The scholastics also knew well from the Aristotelian

philosophy the metaphysical proposition that potentiality is nothing by

itself, but is clearly one with actuality. Later, on the other hand, the

opposition between thought itself and Being began to appear with Anselm.

It is noteworthy that only now for the first time through the Middle

Ages and in Christianity, the universal Notion and Being, as it is to

ordinary conception, became established in this pure abstraction as these

infinite extremes; and thus the highest law has come to consciousness.

But we reach our profoundest depths in bringing the highest opposition

into consciousness. Only no advance was made beyond the division as

such, although Anselm also tried to find the connection between the

sides. But while hitherto God appeared as the absolute existent, and the

universal was attributed to Him as predicate, an opposite order begins

with Anselm—Being becomes predicate, and the absolute Idea is first of

all established as the subject, but the subject of thought. Thus if

the existence of God is once abandoned as the first hypothesis, and

established as a result of thought, self-consciousness is on the way to

turn back within itself. Then we have the question coming in, Does God

exist? while on the other side the question of most importance was, What

is God?

The ontological proof, which is the first properly metaphysical proof

of the existence of God, consequently came to mean that God as the Idea

of existence which unites all reality in itself, also has the reality

of existence within Himself; this proof thus follows from the Notion of

God, that He is the universal essence of all essence. The drift of this

reasoning is, according to Anselm (Proslogium, c. 2), as follows: “It is

one thing to say that a thing is in the understanding, and quite another

to perceive that it exists. Even an ignorant person (_insipiens_) will

thus be quite convinced that in thought there is something beyond which

nothing greater can be thought; for when he hears this he understands

it, and everything that is understood is in the understanding. But that

beyond which nothing greater can be thought cannot certainly be in the

understanding alone. For if it is accepted as in thought alone, we may go

on farther to accept it as existent; that, however, is something greater”

than what is merely thought. “Thus were that beyond which nothing greater

can be thought merely in the understanding, that beyond which nothing

greater can be thought would be something beyond which something greater

can be thought. But that is truly impossible; there thus without doubt

exists both in the understanding and in reality something beyond which

nothing greater can be thought.” The highest conception cannot be in

the understanding alone; it is essential that it should exist. Thus it

is made clear that Being is in a superficial way subsumed under the

universal of reality, that to this extent Being does not enter into

opposition with the Notion. That is quite right; only the transition is

not demonstrated—that the subjective understanding abrogates itself.

This, however, is just the question which gives the whole interest to the

matter. When reality or completion is expressed in such a way that it is

not yet posited as existent, it is something thought, and rather opposed

to Being than that this is subsumed under it.

This mode of arguing held good until the time of Kant; and we see in it

the endeavour to apprehend the doctrine of the Church through reason.

This opposition between Being and thought is the starting point in

philosophy, the absolute that contains the two opposites within itself—a

conception, according to Spinoza, which involves its existence likewise.

Of Anselm it is however to be remarked that the formal logical mode of

the understanding, the process of scholastic reasoning is to be found

in him, the content indeed is right, but the form faulty. For in the

first place the expression “the thought of a Highest” is assumed as

the _prius_. Secondly, there are two sorts of objects of thought—one

that is and another that is not; the object that is only thought and

does not exist, is as imperfect as that which only is without being

thought. The third point is that what is highest must likewise exist.

But what is highest, the standard to which all else must conform, must

be no mere hypothesis, as we find it represented in the conception of a

highest acme of perfection, as a content which is thought and likewise

_is_. This very content, the unity of Being and thought, is thus indeed

the true content; but because Anselm has it before him only in the form

of the understanding, the opposites are identical and conformable to

unity in a third determination only—the Highest—which, in as far as

it is regulative, is outside of them. In this it is involved that we

should first of all have subjective thought, and then distinguished from

that, Being. We allow that if we think a content (and it is apparently

indifferent whether this is God or any other), it may be the case that

this content does not exist. The assertion “Something that is thought

does not exist” is now subsumed under the above standard and is not

conformable to it. We grant that the truth is that which is not merely

thought but which likewise is. But of this opposition nothing here is

said. Undoubtedly God would be imperfect, if He were merely thought and

did not also have the determination of Being. But in relation to God

we must not take thought as merely subjective; thought here signifies

the absolute, pure thought, and thus we must ascribe to Him the quality

of Being. On the other hand if God were merely Being, if He were not

conscious of Himself as self-consciousness, He would not be Spirit, a

thought that thinks itself.

Kant, on the other hand, attacked and rejected Anselm’s proof—which

rejection the whole world afterwards followed up—on the ground of its

being an assumption that the unity of Being and thought is the highest

perfection. What Kant thus demonstrates in the present day—that Being

is different from thought and that Being is not by any means posited

with thought—was a criticism offered even in that time by a monk named

Gaunilo. He combated this proof of Anselm’s in a _Liber pro insipiente_

to which Anselm himself directed a reply in his _Liber apologeticus

adversus insipientem_.[22] Thus Kant says (Kritik der reinen Vernunft,

p. 464 of the sixth edition): If we think a hundred dollars, this

conception does not involve existence. That is certainly true: what is

only a conception does not exist, but it is likewise not a true content,

for what does not exist, is merely an untrue conception. Of such we do

not however here speak, but of pure thought; it is nothing new to say

they are different—Anselm knew this just as well as we do. God is the

infinite, just as body and soul, Being and thought are eternally united;

this is the speculative, true definition of God. To the proof which Kant

criticizes in a manner which it is the fashion to follow now-a-days,

there is thus lacking only the perception of the unity of thought and of

existence in the infinite; and this alone must form the commencement.

Other proofs such, for example, as the cosmological, which argues from

the contingency of the world to an absolute existence, have thereby

not reached the idea of absolute essence as spirit, and are without

consciousness of the fact that it is an object of thought. The old

physico-theological proof, which even Socrates possessed, from beauty,

order, organic ends, indeed implies an understanding, a richer thought

of absolute existence, and not alone an indeterminate Being, but in this

proof it likewise remains unknown that God is the Idea. And then what

sort of an understanding is God? A different and immediate one; then

this spirit is independent. Further, disorder likewise exists, and thus

there must be something else conceived of than this apparent order of

nature only. But from asking about the existence of God, from making his

objective mode a predicate and thus knowing that God is Idea, to pass to

making the absolute existence I = I, thinking self-consciousness, not as

predicate but in such a way that each thinking I is the moment of this

self-consciousness—is still a long stride. Here, where we see this form

first emerge, absolute existence is clearly to be taken as the Beyond of

finite consciousness; this is to itself the null and void, and it has

not yet grasped its sense of self. Its thoughts regarding things are

manifold, and the mere fact of being a thing is to it likewise just such

a predicate as the rest; but it is thereby not yet turned back within

itself, it knows of existence, but not of itself.

In this, says Tennemann (Vol. VIII. Sec. I. p. 121), “Anselm has laid

the first formal ground of scholastic theology;” but even before this

the same was present, only to a more limited extent, and merely for

individual dogmas—as is also the case with Anselm. His writings bear

witness of great penetration and mental ability; and he gave rise to

the philosophy of the scholastics, inasmuch as he united theology to

philosophy. The theology of the Middle Ages thus stands much higher than

that of modern times; never have Catholics been such barbarians as to

say that there should not be knowledge of the eternal truth, and that it

should not be philosophically comprehended. This is one point which has

to be specially noted in Anselm, the other is that he apprehended in its

unity that highest opposition between thought and Being spoken of above.

b. ABELARD.

With Anselm Peter Abelard is associated, both being mainly concerned

in the introduction of philosophy into theology. Abelard lived about

1100—from 1079 to 1142—and is famed for his learning, but still more

famed in the world of sentiment and passion for his love to Heloise and

his after fate.[23] After the days of Anselm he attained to great repute,

and he followed him in his treatment of the doctrines of the Church, more

especially seeking to give a philosophic proof of the Trinity. He taught

at Paris. Paris about this time was to the theologians what Bologna was

to the jurists, the central point of the sciences; it was at that time

the seat of philosophizing theology. Abelard often delivered his lectures

there before a thousand listeners. Theological science and philosophizing

regarding it, was in France (as was jurisprudence in Italy) a matter

of great importance, which, as most significant in the development of

France, has hitherto been too much neglected. The conception prevailed

that philosophy and religion were one and the same; which they absolutely

speaking are. But the distinction was soon reached, “that much may be

true in philosophy and false in theology:” this the Church denied.

Tennemann (Vol. VIII. Sec. II. pp. 460, 461) quotes as follows from a

rescript of the Bishop Stephen: “They say that this is true according to

philosophy, and not according to the Catholic faith, just as if there

were two contradictory truths, and as if in the doctrines of the accursed

heathen a truth contradictory to the truth of the holy scriptures could

be present.” While then undoubtedly, through the separation of the four

faculties in the University of Paris which came about in 1270, philosophy

became separated from theology, it was yet forbidden to it to subject

theological beliefs and dogmas to disputation.[24]

2. METHODICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE DOCTRINAL SYSTEM OF THE CHURCH.

We now go on to the more definite form which the scholastic theology

reached; for in a second development of scholastic philosophy the main

endeavour became to make the teaching of the Christian Church methodical,

while still keeping its connection with all previous metaphysical

arguments. These and their counter-arguments were placed side by side in

stating every dogma, so that theology became represented in a scientific

system, while before this the ecclesiastical teaching in the general

education of the clergy was limited to the propounding of successive

dogmas, and the writing down of passages from Augustine and other Fathers

bearing on each proposition.

a. PETER LOMBARD.

Peter of Novara in Lombardy was the first of those who brought this

to pass; he dates from the middle of the twelfth century, and was the

originator of this method. He died in the year 1164. Petrus Lombardus set

forth a whole system of scholastic theology which remained for several

centuries the basis of the doctrine of the Church. He composed to that

end his _Quatuor libros sententiarum_, and hence he likewise received

the name _Magister sententiarum_. For in those times every learned

schoolman had some predicate such as _Doctor acutus_, _invincibilis_,

_sententiosus_, _angelicus_, &c. Others also availed themselves of the

same title for their works; thus Robert Pulleyn wrote _Sententiarum

libros octo_.[25]

Lombard collected the principal points in church doctrines from councils

and Fathers, and then added subtle questions respecting particular items;

with these the schools occupied themselves, and they became a subject

of disputation. He himself, indeed, answered these questions, but he

caused counter-arguments to follow, and his answer often left the whole

matter problematical, so that the questions were not properly decided.

The arguments are thus enumerated on either side; even the Fathers

contradicted themselves, and numerous passages from them were quoted by

both the opposed sides in support of their respective views. In this way

_theses_ arose, then _quæstiones_, in reply to these _argumenta_, then

again _positiones_, and finally _dubia_; according as men chose to take

the words in this sense or that, and followed this or that authority. Yet

a certain degree of method began to enter in.

Speaking generally, this middle of the twelfth century forms the epoch

in which scholasticism became more universal as a learned theology.

The book of Lombard was all through the Middle Ages commentated by the

_doctores theologicæ dogmaticæ_, who were now held to be the recognized

guardians of ecclesiastical doctrine, while the clergy had charge of the

soul. Those doctors had great authority, they held synods, criticized and

condemned this or that doctrine and book as heretical, &c., in synods or

as the Sorbonne, a society of such doctors in the University of Paris.

They took the place of assemblages of the Church, and were something like

the Fathers in reference to the Christian doctrine. In particular they

rejected the writings of the mystics like Amalrich and his disciple David

of Dinant, who, resembling Proclus in their point of view, went back to

unity. Amalrich, who was attacked as a heretic in 1204, for instance

said, “God is all, God and the Creature are not different, in God all

things are, God is the one universal substance.” David asserted, “God

is the first matter and everything is one in matter, and God is just

this unity.” He divided everything into three classes, bodies, souls,

eternal immaterial substances or spirits. “The indivisible principle of

souls is the νοῦς, and that of spirits is God. These three principles

are identical and hence all things in essence are one.” His books were

burned.[26]

b. THOMAS AQUINAS.

The other individual who was equally famous with Peter Lombard, was

Thomas Aquinas, born in 1224 of the noble race Aquino, in his paternal

castle Roccasicca, in the province of Naples. He entered the Order

of Dominicans, and died in 1274 on a journey to a church council at

Lyons. He possessed a very extensive knowledge of theology, and also of

Aristotle; he was likewise called _Doctor angelicus_ and _communis_, a

second Augustine. Thomas Aquinas was a disciple of Albertus Magnus, he

wrote commentaries on Aristotle and on Petrus Lombardus; and he also

himself composed a _summa theologiæ_ (that is, a system) which with his

other writings obtained for him the greatest honour, and which became

one of the principal text-books in scholastic theology.[27] In this book

there are found, indeed, logical formalities—not, however, dialectical

subtleties, but fundamental metaphysical thoughts regarding the whole

range of theology and philosophy.

Thomas Aquinas likewise added questions, answers and doubts, and he gave

the point on which the solution depended. The main business of scholastic

theology consisted in working out the _summa_ of Thomas. The principal

point was to make theology philosophic and more widely systematic; Peter

Lombard and Thomas Aquinas are best known in respect of this endeavour,

and for long their works formed the basis of all further learned

elaborations of doctrine. With Thomas, Aristotelian forms constitute

the basis—that of substance (_forma substantialis_) is, for instance,

analogous to the entelechy (ἐνέργεια) of Aristotle. He said of the

doctrine of knowledge, that material things consist of form and matter;

the soul has the substantial form of the stone in itself.[28]

c. JOHN DUNS SCOTUS.

In respect of the formal development of philosophic theology a third

individual is famous, namely, Duns Scotus, _Doctor subtilis_, a

Franciscan, who was born at Dunston in the county of Northumberland,

and who little by little obtained thirty thousand disciples. In the

year 1304 he came to Paris, and in 1308 to Cologne, as a doctor in the

university newly instituted there. He was received with great rejoicings,

but he died there of apoplexy soon after his arrival, and is said to

have been buried alive. He is supposed to have been only 34, according

to others 43, and according to others again 63 years old, for the year

of his birth is not known.[29] He wrote commentaries on the _Magister

sententiarum_, which procured for him the fame of a very keen thinker,

following the order of beginning with the proof of the necessity of a

supernatural revelation as against the mere light of reason.[30] On

account of his power of penetration he has been likewise called the _Deus

inter philosophos_. He was accorded the most excessive praise. It was

said of him: “He developed philosophy to such an extent that he himself

might have been its discoverer if it had not already been discovered; he

_knew_ the mysteries of the faith so well that he can scarcely be said to

have _believed_ them; he knew the secrets of providence as though he had

penetrated them, and the qualities of angels as though he were himself an

angel; he wrote so much in a few years that scarcely one man could read

it all, and hardly any were able to understand it.”[31]

According to all testimony it appears that Scotus helped the scholastic

method of disputation to reach its height, finding the material for

the same in arguments and counter-arguments arranged in syllogisms;

his manner was to add to each _sententia_ a long succession of

_distinctiones_, _quæstiones_, _problemata_, _solutiones_, _argumenta pro

et contra_. Because he also refuted his arguments in a similar series,

everything fell once more asunder; hence he was held to be the originator

of the quodlibetan method. The _Quodlibeta_ signified collections of

miscellaneous dissertations on individual objects in the every-day manner

of disputation, which speaks of everything, but without systematic order

and without any consistent whole being worked out and set forth; others,

on the other hand, wrote _summas_. The Latin of Scotus is exceedingly

barbarous, but well suited for exact philosophic expression; he invented

an endless number of new propositions, terms and syntheses.

3. ACQUAINTANCESHIP WITH ARISTOTELIAN WRITINGS.

We must further remark a third development, which proceeded from the

external historical circumstance that in the end of the twelfth and in

the thirteenth century the Western theologians became more generally

acquainted with the Aristotelian writings and their Greek and Arabian

commentators, in Latin translations from the Arabic. These now became

much used by them, and were made the subject of further commentaries

and discussions. The veneration, admiration and respect which Aristotle

received, now reached its height.

a. ALEXANDER OF HALES.

The familiar acquaintance with Aristotle and the Arabians became first

evident in Alexander of Hales (died 1245), the _Doctor irrefragabilis_.

The earlier stages by which this familiarity came about has been shown

above (p. 35). Hitherto the acquaintance with Aristotle was very slight,

and through many centuries it was limited, as we saw above (p. 37), more

especially to his Logic, which had survived from the earliest times and

was transmitted in the works of Boethius, Augustine and Cassiodorus. It

was only when we came to Scotus Erigena that we found (p. 59) a knowledge

of Greek, although it was quite unusual in his day. In Spain, under the

Arabians, the sciences flourished greatly. In particular the university

of Cordova in Andalusia was a centre-point of learning; many from the

lands of the West journeyed thither, just as even the Pope Sylvester

II., so well known in his earlier days as Gerbert, escaped as a monk to

Spain for the purpose of studying with the Arabs.[32] The sciences of

medicine and alchemy were diligently pursued. Christian doctors there

studied medicine under the Jewish-Arabian teachers. It was principally

the Aristotelian metaphysics and physics which were then known, and from

these abstracts (_summæ_) were constructed. The logic and metaphysics of

Aristotle were spun out with extreme fineness into endless distinctions,

and brought into genuine syllogistic forms of the understanding, which

constituted for the most part the principle for the treatment of the

subject dealt with. In this way dialectic subtlety was much increased,

while the properly speculative side in Aristotle remained for the spirit

of externality, and consequently also of irrationality, in the background.

The Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II. then sent for Aristotelian books

from Constantinople and had them translated into Latin. At first,

indeed, on the first appearance of the Aristotelian writings, the Church

made difficulties; the reading of his metaphysics and physics and the

abstracts prepared therefrom, as also the exposition of the same, was

forbidden by a church synod held at Paris 1209. Likewise in 1215 the

cardinal Robert Corceo came to Paris and there held a visitation of the

university, on which occasion he ordained that regular lectures on the

dialectical writings of Aristotle should be held while he forbade the

reading of and lecturing on the metaphysics and natural philosophy of

Aristotle, and the abstracts prepared from them; he also condemned the

doctrines of the heretics David of Dinant and Amalrich and likewise the

Spaniard Mauritius. Pope Gregory, in a bull issued to the University

of Paris in 1231, without mentioning metaphysics, forbade the books of

the Physics to be read until they had been examined and purified from

all suspicion of error. But later on, in 1366, it was on the other hand

ordained by two cardinals that no one could be made a _magister_ unless

he had studied the prescribed books of Aristotle—amongst which were

the Metaphysics and some of the Physics—and had proved himself capable

of explaining them.[33] It was only much later on, however, when Greek

literature in general had again become widely diffused, that men became

better acquainted with the Greek text of the Aristotelian writings.

b. ALBERTUS MAGNUS.

Amongst those who distinguished themselves through their commentaries

on Aristotle’s writings, we must specially mention Albertus Magnus, the

most celebrated German schoolman, of the noble race of Bollstadt. Magnus

either was his family name, or it was given him on account of his fame.

He was born in 1193 or 1205 at Lauingen on the Danube in Swabia, and

began by studying at Padua, where his study is still shown to travellers.

In the year 1221 he became a Dominican friar, and afterwards lived at

Cologne as Provincial of his Order in Germany: in 1280 he died. It is

said of him that in his youth he showed himself very dull and stupid,

until, according to a legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to him in company

with three other beautiful women, incited him to the study of Philosophy,

liberated him from his dulness of understanding, and promised him that

he should enlighten the Church, and, in spite of his science, should

still die in the faith. What happened was in accordance with this

prophecy, for five years before his death he forgot all his philosophy

as quickly as he learned it, and then actually died in the dulness and

orthodoxy of his earlier years. Hence there is current regarding him an

old saying: “Albert changed quickly from an ass into a philosopher, and

from a philosopher into an ass.” His learning was generally understood

to consist largely of magic. For although natural objects have nothing

to do with scholasticism proper, which was really perfectly blind to

nature, he occupied himself much therewith; and amongst other devices

he manufactured a talking machine which alarmed his pupil Thomas of

Aquino, who even aimed a blow at it, thinking he saw therein a work of

the devil. Likewise the fact that he received and entertained William

of Holland[34] in the middle of winter in a garden full of blossom, is

counted as magic.[35] While as for us—we find the winter-garden in Faust

quite natural.

Albert wrote a great deal, and twenty-one folios remain to us of his

writings. He wrote on Dionysius the Areopagite, commentated the _Magister

sententiarum_, was specially conversant with the Arabians and the

Rabbis, as he was also well acquainted with the works of Aristotle,

although he himself understood neither Greek nor Arabic. He likewise

wrote on the Physics of Aristotle. There is found in him a remarkable

instance of deficient knowledge of the history of Philosophy. He derived

the name Epicurean (Opera, T.V. pp. 530, 531) from the fact that they

idled away their time [auf der faulen Haut lagen] (ἐπὶ _cutem_) or else

from _cura_ because they concerned themselves with many useless things

(_supercurantes_). He represents the Stoics as being something like our

choir-boys; he says that they were people who made songs (_facientes

cantilenas_), and roamed about in porticoes. For, as he here remarks

in a very learned way, the first philosophers clothed their philosophy

in verses, and then sang them in halls and porches, and hence they

are called standers in the porch (_Stoici_). Gassendi relates (_Vita

Epicuri_, I. c. 11, p. 51) that Albertus Magnus mentioned as the first

Epicureans, Hesiodus, Athalius or Achalius (of whom we know nothing),

Cæcina, or, as others call him, Tetinnus, a friend of Cicero, and

Isaacus, the Jewish philosopher. How that is arrived at we do not know

at all. Of the Stoics Albertus, on the contrary, mentions Speusippus,

Plato, Socrates and Pythagoras. These anecdotes give us a picture of the

condition of culture in these times.

4. OPPOSITION BETWEEN REALISM AND NOMINALISM.

In the fourth place we must mention an important matter, to which

much attention was devoted in the Middle Ages, namely that particular

philosophic question which formed the subject of controversy between the

Realists and the Nominalists, and the discussion of which was continued

through very nearly the whole of the Scholastic period. Speaking

generally, this controversy is concerned with the metaphysical opposition

between the universal and the individual; it occupies the attention of

Scholastic philosophy for several centuries, and reflects great credit

upon it. A distinction is drawn between the earlier and later Nominalists

and Realists, but otherwise their history is very obscure; and we know

more of the theological aspect of the subject than of this.

a. ROSCELINUS.

The beginning of the controversy dates back to the eleventh century,

Roscelinus being the earliest Nominalist. The famous Abelard, although

he professes to be an opponent of Roscelinus, is himself nothing more or

less than a Nominalist. Roscelinus wrote also against the doctrine of the

Trinity, and was pronounced guilty of heresy in 1092 at an ecclesiastical

council which met at Soissons. His influence was, however, but small.[36]

The matter in question is the universal as such (_universale_), or the

genus, the essence of things, what in Plato was called the Idea—for

instance, Being, humanity, the animal. The followers of Plato asserted

that these universals exist; their existence was individualized, and

thus ‘tableness’ was said to be also a real existence (_supra_, Vol. II.

p. 29). We make representations of a thing to ourselves, and say “it is

blue;” this is a universal. The question now is whether such universals

are something real in and for themselves, apart from the thinking

subject, and independent of the individual existing thing, so that they

exist in the individual things independently of the individuality of

the thing and of each other; or whether the universal is only nominal,

only in the subjective representation, a thing of thought. Those who

maintained that the universals had a real existence apart from the

thinking subject and distinct from the individual thing, and that the

Idea alone constitutes the essence of things, were termed Realists—a

use of the term in quite an opposite sense to that which passes current

now. I mean that this expression has for us the signification that

things as they are in their immediacy have an actual existence; and

to this idealism is opposed, that being a name which was given later

to the philosophy which ascribes reality to ideas alone, and asserts

that things as they appear in their individuality have no truth. The

realism of the Scholastics in the same way maintained that the Universal

has an independent, absolute existence, for Ideas are not liable to

destruction, like natural things, therefore they are immutable and the

only true existence. In opposition to this, the others, the Nominalists

or Formalists, asserted that if generals or universals are formed,

these are only names, matters of form, representations which we make to

ourselves, a subjective generalization, a product of the thinking mind;

the individual alone is the real.

This is then the matter in question; it is of great interest, and is

founded upon a much higher opposition than any the ancients knew of.

Roscelinus made universal conceptions arise only from the necessities

of language. He maintained that ideas or universals, like Being, life,

reason, are in themselves nothing but mere abstract notions or generic

names, which, as such, have in and for themselves no universal reality

of their own: that which has Being and life is found in the individual

alone. Against these assertions arguments are brought forward by which

one can see that the manner in which the Christian world was taken as

basis, often became in the highest degree ridiculous. For instance,

Abelard reproaches Roscelinus for having asserted that no thing has

parts, that only the words which denote the things are divisible.

Abelard proved that according to Roscelinus, Christ did not eat a real

part of the broiled fish, but only a part—I do not know which—of the

word “broiled fish,” since according to him there were no parts—which

interpretation would be preposterous and highly blasphemous.[37] Our way

of reasoning from “healthy human understanding,” is not much better.

b. WALTER OF MORTAGNE.

Walter of Mortagne (d. 1174) aimed at the union of the particular and the

universal, saying that the universal must be individual, that universals

must be united with individuals in accordance with their essence.[38]

In later times the two rival factions were known to fame as Thomists,

from the Dominican Thomas Aquinas, and Scotists, from the Franciscan

Johannes Duns Scotus. Nevertheless, the original question as to whether

universal notions have reality, and, if so, to what extent they have

it, underwent a great variety of modifications and gradations, just as

the opposing parties received very various names. Nominalism, in its

crude form, declared universal notions to be mere names, which have

reality only in speech, and it ascribed reality to individuals alone;

Realism followed the exactly opposite course of attributing reality only

to universals, while it considered that what distinguished individual

things was an accident only or a pure difference. Neither of these two

theories was correct in the manner of passing from the universal to the

particular. There were some, however, among the Schoolmen who grasped

the true conception that individuation, the limitation of the universal,

and indeed of what is most universal, Being and entity, is a negation.

Others said that the limit is itself something positive, but that it is

not one with the universal by union with it, for it rather stands in a

metaphysical connection with it, that is, in a connection such as that

which binds thought with thought. This implies that the individual is

only a clearer expression of what is already contained in the general

conception; so that these conceptions, in spite of their being divided

into parts and differentiated, still remain simple; Being or entity,

moreover, really is a Notion.[39]

Thomas, who was a Realist, declared the universal Idea to be

indeterminate, and placed individuation in determinate matter (_materia

signata_), _i.e._ matter in its dimensions or determinations. According

to him, the original principle is the universal Idea; the form, as _actus

purus_, may, as with Aristotle, exist on its own account; the identity of

matter and form, the forms of matter, as such, are further removed from

the original principle,—while thinking substances are mere forms.[40] But

for Scotus the universal is rather the individual One, the one he thinks

may appear also in the other; he maintained therefore the principle of

individuation, and the formal character of the universal. In his view

indeterminate matter becomes individual through an inward positive

addition; the substantial forms of things are their real essence. Occam

thus represents the views of Scotus: “In the thing that exists outside of

the soul the same Nature exists _realiter_ with the difference limiting

(_contrahente_) it to a determinate individual, being only formally

distinguished, and in itself neither universal nor individual, but

incompletely universal in the thing, and completely universal in the

understanding.”[41] Scotus racked his brains much over this subject. To

universals the Formalists allowed only an ideal reality in the divine and

human intellect beholding them.[42] We thus see how closely connected

with this is the thought which we first meet with in the Scholastics,

namely the seeking and giving of so-called proofs of God’s existence

(_supra_, pp. 62-67).

c. WILLIAM OCCAM.

The opposition between Idealists and Realists appeared at an early stage,

it is true, but it was not until later, after the time of Abelard, that

it became the order of the day, and was invested with general interest.

This was brought about chiefly by the Franciscan William Occam, of the

village of Occam in the county of Surrey in England, who was surnamed

_Doctor invincibilis_, and flourished in the beginning of the fourteenth

century: the year of his birth is unknown. He is greatly celebrated for

his skill in handling the weapons of logic; he is keen in discrimination

and fertile in devising arguments and counter-arguments. Occam was a

leading champion of Nominalism, which up to this time had found only

here and there a defender, like Roscelinus and Abelard; his numerous

followers received the name of Occamists and were Franciscans, while

the Dominicans retained the name of Thomists. The conflict between

Nominalists and Realists raged with a burning vehemence, and was carried

to the greatest extremes; a pulpit is still shown which was separated by

a wooden partition from the platform of the opponent, in order that the

disputants might not come to blows. Henceforth theology was taught under

two forms (_theologia scholastica secundum utramque partem_). Owing to

the civil wars in France, politics also began gradually to affect the

relationship between the orders, and this lent increased importance to

the conflict into which jealousy had plunged the rival factions. In 1322,

at a convention of his order, and also on other occasions, Occam and his

order defended to the utmost of their power the claims of the different

princes, such as the King of France and the Emperor of Germany, Louis

of Bavaria, against the pretensions of the Pope. Among the words of

William to the Emperor were these, “Do thou defend me with the sword,

and I will defend thee with the pen.” Interdicts of the Paris University

and Papal bulls were issued against Occam. The Paris University forbade

his doctrines to be taught or his works quoted. A special prohibition

was issued in 1340: “No teacher shall venture to assert plainly, or in

so many words, that some familiar maxim of the author on whom he is

lecturing is false, but shall either assent to it, or distinguish the

true and the false significance; otherwise the dangerous result is to

be apprehended that the truths of the Bible might be in like manner

rejected. No teacher shall assert that a maxim cannot be thus explained

or further defined.” Occam was excommunicated in 1328, and died at Munich

in 1343.[43]

Occam asks in one of his writings (_in libr. I. Sentent. Dist. II.

Quæst. 4_), “Whether what is immediately and proximately denoted by the

universal and by the generic name is a real thing outside of the soul,

something intrinsic and essential in the things to which it is common

and which are called by its name, and yet in reality distinguished from

them.” This definition of the Realists is given more in detail by Occam

as follows: “As to this question, one opinion is that each generic

designation or universal is a thing really existing outside of the soul

in each and every individual, and that the Being (_essentia_) of each

individual is really distinguished from each individual” (_i.e._ from

its individuality), “and from each universal. Thus man, the universal,

is a true thing outside of the soul, which exists in reality in each

human being, but is distinguished from each human being, from Universal

living nature, and from the universal substance, and in this way from

all species and genera, those that are subordinate as well as those that

are not subordinate.” The universal, the common designation of all the

individuals, is therefore, according to this, not identical with the

Self, the ultimate point of subjectivity. “As many universal predicables

as there are of any individual thing”—_e.g._ humanity, reason, Being,

life, quality, &c.—“so many really different things there are in nature,

each of which is really distinct from the other and from that individual,

and all these things are in no wise multiplied in themselves, however

much the separate predicables are multiplied, which are in every

individual of the same kind.” That is the most uncompromising way of

stating the independence and isolation of every universal quality in a

thing. Occam refutes this, saying: “Nothing which is one in number can,

without being changed or multiplied, be present in several subjects

or individuals. Science invariably restricts itself to propositions

regarding the known; it is, therefore, a matter of no moment whether the

terms of the propositions are known things outside of the soul, or only

in the soul; and therefore it is not necessary for the sake of science to

assume universal things, really distinct from individual things.”

Occam proceeds to state other opinions opposed to that first given; he

does not exactly give his own decision, yet in this same passage (Quæst.

8) he, in the main, argues in favour of the opinion “that the universal

is not something real that has explicit subjectivity (_esse subjectivum_)

neither in the soul nor in the thing. It is something conceived, which,

however, has objective reality (_esse objectivum_) in the soul, while

the external thing has this objective reality as an explicitly existent

subject (_in esse subjectivo_). This comes to pass in the following

manner. The understanding, which perceives a thing outside the soul,

forms the mental image of a similar thing, so that, if it had productive

power, it would, like an artist, exhibit it in an absolutely existing

subject, as numerically an individual distinct from any preceding. Should

anyone be displeased by this manner of speaking of the mental image as

being _formed_, it may be said that the mental image and every universal

conception is a quality existing subjectively in the mind, which by its

nature is the sign of a thing outside of the soul, just as the spoken

word is a sign of the thing, arbitrarily instituted for marking out that

thing.” Tennemann says (Vol. VIII. Section II. p. 864): “One result of

this theory was that the principle of individuation, which had occupied

to such an extent the attention of the Scholastics, was cast aside

as utterly unnecessary.” Thus the main question with the Scholastics

concerns the definition of the universal, and this was in itself highly

important and significant for the culture of more modern times. The

universal is the One, but not abstract; it is conceived or thought of as

comprehending all things in itself. With Aristotle the universal was, in

a judgment, the predicate of the subject in question; in a syllogism it

was the _terminus major_. With Plotinus, and especially with Proclus, the

One is still incommunicable, and is known only by its subordinate forms.

But because the Christian religion is a revelation, God is no longer

therein the unapproachable, incommunicable, a hidden mystery: for the

various stages of the progression from Him are verily His manifestation,

and the Trinity is thus the revealed. In this way the triads and the

One are not distinguished, but these three Persons in the Godhead are

themselves God and One, _i.e._ One as it is for another, as in itself

relative. The Father, the God of Israel, is this One; the moment of the

Son and of the Spirit is the Most High in spiritual and bodily presence,

the former in the Church, the latter in Nature. With the Neo-Platonists

the universal is, on the contrary, only the first condition of things

which then merely opens out and develops; with Plato and Aristotle it is

rather the Whole, the All, the All in One.

d. BURIDAN.

Buridan, a Nominalist, inclines to the view of the Determinists that the

will is determined by circumstances. Against him is cited the case of

the ass which, being placed between two equal bundles of hay, perforce

perished from hunger.

Louis XI., in 1473, confiscated the books of the Nominalists and

interdicted the teaching of their doctrines, but in the year 1481 this

interdict was removed. In the theological and philosophical faculty

Aristotle is said to have been interpreted and studied, as were also his

commentators, Averroës, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas.[44]

5. FORMAL DIALECTIC.

The study of dialectics was carried to a very great height, but it

was quite formal in character; this constitutes the fifth point for

consideration. With this is closely connected the interminable finding

out of _termini technici_. This formal dialectic was very ingenious in

devising objects, problems and questions, destitute of all religious and

philosophic interest, on which to practise its method of procedure. The

last remark that we have, however, in this connection to make regarding

the Scholastics is this, that it was not only into the ecclesiastical

system that they introduced all possible formal relations of the

understanding, but that also objects intelligible in themselves—the

intellectual conceptions and religious ideas—they represented as

immediately and sensuously real, as brought down into the externality

of altogether sensuous relations, and in these relations subjected

to systematic investigation. Originally, it is true, the basis was

spiritual, but the externality in which it was at once comprehended,

made of the spiritual something perfectly unspiritual. It may therefore

be said that, on the one hand, the Scholastics showed great profundity

in their treatment of Church dogma; and, on the other hand, that they

secularized it by placing it in quite inappropriate external relations;

thus here we have the worst kind of secularity. For the dogma of the

Church explicitly contains, in the historical form of the Christian

religion, a number of ordinary conceptions determined in an external

way, which are connected with the spiritual, it is true, but trench

upon sensuous relationships. If a network of such relationships is then

contrived, there arises a host of oppositions, contrasts, contradictions,

which have not the very slightest interest for us. It is this aspect of

the matter that the Scholastics have taken up and handled with finite

dialectic; and it is on this account that the Scholastics in later times

were so much ridiculed. Of this I have some examples to give.

a. JULIAN, ARCHBISHOP OF TOLEDO.

Julian, Archbishop of Toledo, sought, with as great earnestness as if

the salvation of the human race depended on it, to answer questions

which contain an absurd assumption. In doing so he no less gives himself

up to petty triflings than do the philologists when they institute

investigations regarding Greek accents, metres, and verse-divisions.

For instance, there arises a question of this kind as to the dead. It

is a dogma of the Church, that man will rise again; now if to this it

be added that he will be clothed with the body, we thereby enter the

sensuous sphere. The following were inquiries which arose in connection

with this question: “What will be the age of the dead when they rise?

Will they rise as children, youths, grown men, or aged? In what form

will they rise? What will be the constitution of their bodies? Will the

fat be again fat, and the lean again lean? Will the distinction of sex

continue in that future life? Will those who rise again recover all

that they lost here in the way of nails and hair?”[45] Thus a special

distinction was drawn between the actual dogma, which was indisputable,

and the various aspects of the supersensuous world which are connected

with that dogma. These were regarded, though often only for the time

being, as detached from the doctrinal system of the Church. For the

system was not so definitely formulated but that anything in it might

have to be proved from the Fathers, until a council or a special synod

decided the point. Disputes were also possible regarding the proofs which

were given of the content of this system; and besides there was quite a

large amount of matter which was open to discussion, and respecting which

the Scholastics—with the exception, of course, of the noble men, renowned

as _Doctores_ and writers,—expressed themselves in finite syllogisms

and forms, which degenerated into an utterly empty and formal craze for

disputation. The Scholastic Philosophy is thus the direct opposite of the

empirical science of the understanding, with which curiosity is largely

mingled, and which, careless of the Notion, follows after facts alone.

b. PASCHASIUS RADBERTUS.

About 840 another subject of discussion was raised, namely, the birth of

Christ, whether it was natural or supernatural. This led to a protracted

controversy. Paschasius Radbertus wrote two volumes, _De partu beatæ

virginis_; and many others wrote and argued on the same topic.[46] They

went so far as even to speak of an accoucheur, and to discuss this

subject; and many questions were raised, to which our sense of what is

fitting forbids us even to turn our thoughts.

God’s wisdom, omnipotence, foresight, and predetermination led in the

same way to a host of contradictions in abstract, meaningless, local

and trivial particulars, which concern not God. In the works of Petrus

Lombardus, where the Trinity, the Creation, and the Fall are dealt with,

as also angels and their orders and ranks, questions are found such as

whether God’s providence and predetermination would have been possible,

had nothing been created; and where God was before the Creation. Thomas

of Strasburg answered: _Tunc ubi nunc, in se, quoniam sibi sufficit

ipse_.[47]

Lombardus goes on to ask “If God can know more than He knows?” as if

potentiality and actuality still remained distinguished; “If God retains

at all times all power that He has once possessed? Where the angels were

after their creation? If the angels have always existed?” A multitude

of other questions of this kind are raised regarding the angels. Then

he asks: “At what age was Adam created? Why was Eve made from the rib,

and not from some other part of the man? Why during sleep, and not when

the man was awake? Why did the first human pair not have intercourse in

Paradise? How the human race would have been propagated, if man had not

sinned? If in Paradise children would have been born with limbs fully

grown, and the complete use of their senses? Why it was the Son, and not

the Father or the Holy Ghost, who became man?” To do this rests in the

very Notion of the Son. “If God could not have also become incarnate in

female form?”[48]

Additional examples of _quæstiones_ of this kind are given by those

who ridiculed such dialectic, for instance by Erasmus in his _Encomium

moriæ_: “Could there be several sonships (_filiationes_) in Christ? Is

the proposition possible that God the Father hates the Son? Might God

not have also taken the form of a woman, or have passed into the devil?

Might He not also have appeared in the form of an ass or of a pumpkin? In

what manner would the pumpkin have preached and wrought miracles, and how

would it have been crucified?”[49] Thus were intellectual determinations

combined and distinguished in a manner altogether without sense or

thought. The main point is that the Scholastics were like barbarians

in their way of handling divine things and bringing them into sensuous

determinations and relations. They thus introduced a completely sensuous

rigidity and these altogether external and senseless forms into the

purely spiritual, thus bringing it to a lower and unspiritual level;

Hans Sachs similarly made a Nürnberg version of sacred history [die

göttliche Geschichte vernürnbergert]. In such representations as are

given in the Bible of the wrath of God, or of the history of God’s work

of creation, it is said that God did this or that, naming some human and

homely action. God is certainly not to be looked on as something alien

and unapproachable; on the contrary, we are to come to Him with courage

and with all our heart. But to bring Him into the province of thought,

and strive in earnest after a knowledge of Him, is a very different

matter. The reverse of this is to bring forward arguments _pro_ and

_contra_, for they decide nothing, and are of no use; they are no more

than the assumptions which are only sensuous and finite determinations,

and therefore infinite differences and distinctions. This barbarous use

of the understanding is utterly irrational; it is like putting a golden

necklace on a sow. The One is the Idea of the Christian religion, and it

is also the philosophy of the great and noble Aristotle; neither of the

two could have been more bedraggled and besmirched, to so low a pass had

the Christians brought their spiritual Idea.

6. MYSTICS.

In the above sketch we have mentioned the principal heads which come

under our consideration in studying Scholastic philosophy. With regard

to this intrusion of distinctions of the understanding and sensuous

relations into that which in and for itself and by virtue of its very

nature is spiritual, absolute and infinite, it is to be remarked that

to this craze for reducing everything to the finite, some noble spirits

here and there opposed themselves. As such we must here, in the sixth

place, make honourable mention of the many great Scholastics who have

been named Mystics, for although they are to be distinguished from the

real ecclesiastical Scholastics, they followed upon identical lines, and

are closely connected with them. They took but little interest in these

discussions and arguments, and maintained their purity in regard to

Church doctrines and philosophic speculation. Some of them were pious and

spiritual men, who carried on their philosophic studies upon the lines of

the Neo-Platonic philosophy, as Scotus Erigena had done in earlier times.

Among them genuine philosophy is to be found—termed also Mysticism; it

tends to inwardness and bears a great resemblance to Spinozism. They also

derived morality and the religious sentiment from actual feelings, and

the meditations and maxims we have from them embody these views.

a. JOHN CHARLIER.

John Charlier, more generally known as Von Jerson or Gerson, was born in

1363; he wrote a _theologia mystica_.[50]

b. RAYMUNDUS OF SABUNDE.

Very similar were the views expressed by Raymundus of Sabunde or Sabeyde,

a Spaniard of the fifteenth century, and professor at Toulouse about

the year 1437. In his _theologia naturalis_, which he handled in a

speculative spirit, he dealt with the Nature of things, and with the

revelation of God in Nature and in the history of the God-man. He sought

to prove to unbelievers the Being, the trinity, the incarnation, the

life, and the revelation of God in Nature, and in the history of the

God-man, basing his arguments on Reason. From the contemplation of Nature

he rises to God; and in the same way he reaches morality from observation

of man’s inner nature.[51] This purer and simpler style must be set off

against the other, if we are to do justice to the Scholastic theologians

in their turn.

c. ROGER BACON.

Roger Bacon treated more especially of physics, but remained without

influence. He invented gunpowder, mirrors, telescopes, and died in

1294.[52]

d. RAYMUNDUS LULLUS.

Raymundus Lullus, the _Doctor illuminatus_, made himself famous chiefly

by the art of thinking which he invented, which was called the _ars

magna_. He was born at Majorca in 1234, and was one of those eccentric,

unsettled natures whose activity finds vent in all directions. He had a

strong inclination towards alchemy and great enthusiasm for the sciences

in general, as well as a fiery, restless power of imagination. In his

youth he led a reckless life, throwing himself headlong into a round of

pleasures; then he retreated to a desert, and had there many visions

of Jesus. At this time the impulse shaped itself in his ardent nature

to dedicate his life to spreading the blessings of Christianity among

the Mohammedans in Asia and Africa. In order to carry on this work of

conversion he learned Arabic, travelled through Europe and Asia, sought

for assistance from the Pope and all the crowned heads of Europe,

without giving up, for all that, his interest in his ‘Art.’ He suffered

persecution and passed through many hardships and strange adventures,

perils of death, imprisonments, cruelties. He lived long in Paris at the

beginning of the fourteenth century, and was the author of well-nigh

four hundred works. After a life of the utmost restlessness, he died in

1315, revered as a saint and martyr, his death being the result of cruel

treatment which he had suffered in Africa.[53]

The chief object aimed at in this man’s ‘Art’ was an enumeration and

arrangement of the various concepts under which all objects fall, or

of the pure categories according to which they can be determined, so

that it may be possible in regard to every object to indicate with

ease the conceptions applicable to it. Lullus is so systematic that he

becomes at times mechanical. He constructed a diagram in circles, on

which were marked triangles through which the circles pass. In these

circles he arranged the various concepts, and strove to give a complete

catalogue of them. Some of the circles were fixed, others movable, and

they were six in number, two of them indicating the subjects, three the

predicates, while the outermost circle represented possible questions.

For each class he had nine qualities, to indicate which he chose nine

letters, B C D E F G H I K. Thus in the first place he wrote round the

diagram nine absolute predicates, goodness, greatness, duration, power,

wisdom, volition, virtue, truth, splendour; then he wrote nine relative

predicates, diversity, unanimity, opposition, beginning, middle, end,

the qualities of being greater, equal, or less; in the third place

he set down the questions Whether? What? Whence? Why? How great?

Of what nature? When? Where? How and wherewith? the ninth of which

contains two determinations; in the fourth place he put nine substances

(_esse_), viz. God (_divinum_), angel (_angelicum_), heaven (_cæleste_),

man (_humanum_), _imaginativum_, _sensitivum_, _vegetativum_,

_elementativum_, _instrumentativum_; in the fifth place were nine

accidents, _i.e._ natural relations, viz. quantity, quality, relation,

activity, passivity, possession, position, time, place; and sixthly

nine moral relations, the virtues, viz. justice, prudence, courage,

temperance, faith, hope, love, patience, piety; and the vices, viz. envy,

wrath, inconstancy, covetousness, falsehood, gluttony, riotousness,

pride, sluggishness (_acedia_). These circles had to be placed in a

certain way, in order to give proper combinations. By turning them round

according to certain rules, by which all substances received the absolute

and relative predicates which fitted them, it was supposed that there

would be obtained in every possible combination universal science, truth,

and the knowledge of concrete objects in general.[54]

C. GENERAL STANDPOINT OF THE SCHOLASTICS.

After thus dealing with the subject in detail, we must pronounce judgment

on the Scholastics, and give an estimate of them. Though the subjects

which they investigated were lofty, and though there were noble, earnest

and learned individuals in their ranks, yet this Scholasticism on the

whole is a barbarous philosophy of the finite understanding, without

real content, which awakens no true interest in us, and to which we

cannot return. For although religion is its subject matter, thought

here reached such an excessive point of subtlety that, as a form of

the mere empty understanding, it does nothing but wander amongst

baseless combinations of categories. Scholastic philosophy is this utter

confusion of the barren understanding in the rugged North German nature.

We see here two different worlds, a kingdom of life and a kingdom of

death. The intellectual kingdom, which is outside and above, while in

the popular conception, is thereby brought within the sphere of the

mere understanding and the senses, even though by nature it is purely

peculative; and this does not take place as in art, but, on the contrary,

after the fashion of ordinary reality. As the relationship of Father

and Son, to begin with, appealed to the senses, so the divine world was

furnished for the imaginative faculty and for purposes of devotion (in a

way unknown to the disciples of Plato) with angels, saints and martyrs,

instead of with thoughts;—or the thoughts are nothing but a rubbishy

metaphysic of the understanding. In the supersensuous world there was no

reality of the thinking, universal, rational self-consciousness to be met

with: in the immediate world of sensuous nature, on the other hand, there

was no divinity, because nature was but the grave of God, in the same

way that God was outside of nature. The existence of the Church, as the

government of Christ upon earth, is higher, it is true, than the external

existence which stands in contrast to it; for religion must rule our

temporal affairs, and through the subjection of worldly power the Church

became a theocracy. But the divine kingdom, the dwelling-place of the

dead, was to be reached only through the gate of death; yet the natural

world was dead to an equal degree—all that lived in it was the vision

of that other world, and hope—it had no present. It was of no avail to

introduce mediators as a connecting link, the Virgin Mary, or the dead

in a world beyond. The reconciliation was formal, not absolute; for it

was nothing but the longing of man for a satisfaction to be found only

in another world. What purpose does all this serve? It lies behind us as

a thing of the past, and must continue useless to us on its own merits.

There is no good, however, in calling the Middle Ages a barbarous period.

It is a singular kind of barbarism, and is not simple and rude; for the

absolute Idea and the highest culture have sunk into barbarism, and that

through the agency of thought. Thus we have here, on the one hand, the

most hideous form of barbarism and perversion, but, on the other hand,

the never-failing source of a higher reconciliation.

If we seek an immediate contrast to scholastic philosophy and

theology and their methods, we may say that it is to be found in the

“healthy human understanding,” in outward and inward experience, in

the contemplation of nature, and in humanity. The character of Greek

humanity, for instance, was that everything concrete, everything that

possessed interest for mind, had its place in the human breast, and its

root in the feelings and thoughts of man. Intelligent consciousness,

cultured science, has in such content its real material—that in which it

is and remains at home with itself; knowledge busies itself on all sides

with that which concerns it, and remains true to itself, while both on

its serious and its playful side it finds in this material, in Nature and

its uniform laws, a standard and a guide by which to direct its course

aright. Even should we go astray on ground like this, our errors keep in

view the fixed centre-point of the self-consciousness of the human mind,

and as errors even they have a root therein, which as such forms the

justification for them. It is only a one-sided withdrawal from the unity

of this root with the altogether concrete ground-work and original, that

is really faulty. What we see here, in contrast with the above, is the

infinite truth, expressed as spirit, committed to a nation of barbarians

who have not the self-consciousness of their spiritual humanity—they

have a human breast, it is true, but not yet a human spirit. The absolute

truth does not yet make itself real and present in actual consciousness,

but men are torn out of themselves. They still find this content of

spirit within themselves, introduced as into a strange vessel full of the

most intense impulses and desires of physical and intellectual life, but

it is like a ponderous stone, whose enormous pressure they only feel,

but which they neither digest nor assimilate with their own impulses or

desires. Thus they can only find rest and reconciliation when they come

absolutely out of themselves, and they have become fierce and savage in

the very circumstances and by the very means which ought to have rendered

their spirit peaceable and mild.

Just as truth was not yet the foundation of reality, so science was

likewise destitute of firm basis. The understanding, when it comes to

think, applies itself, it is true, in the first place to the mysteries

of religion, which, as an altogether speculative content, exist for the

rational Notion only. But as Spirit, the rational element in question,

has not yet taken its place in thought, thought is still God-forsaken, it

is still only abstract, finite understanding, a manner of thinking which

is in itself quite formal and devoid of content, which is a stranger

to subjects of such profundity as this, even when it is ostensibly

occupying itself with the same. This understanding therefore draws its

content entirely from things to which it remains altogether alien,

and which remain altogether alien to it; yet it is not thereby at all

circumscribed, for it observes no bounds in its determinations and

distinctions. It is just as if one were to arbitrarily form and connect

propositions, words and tones—without making the presupposition that they

should by themselves express a concrete sense—which need be only capable

of being uttered, without having any restriction except possibility, that

is, that they must not contradict each other.

In the second place, in so far as the understanding keeps to the given

religious content, it can prove this content; one can demonstrate that

it must be so, just as if it were a geometrical proposition. But there

still remains something to be desired, in order that the satisfaction may

be complete; the content is proved, but I nevertheless do not understand

it. Thus Anselm’s excellent proposition (_supra_, pp. 63, 64) in which

we may perceive the general character of the scholastic understanding,

is a proof, it may be admitted, of the existence of God, but it shows no

comprehension of it. Though I see the truth of the proposition, I have

not attained to the final point, the object of my desire; for there is

lacking the I, the inner bond, as inwardness of thought. This lies only

in the Notion, in the unity of the particular and the universal, of Being

and thought. For the comprehension of this unity, without which there

could be no true proof, it was implied that further progress should not

take place after the manner of the understanding. It was necessary that

from the nature of thought itself it should become evident how, taken on

its own account, it negates itself, and how the determination of Being

itself rests therein, or that the manner in which thought determines

itself into Being should be shown forth. On the other hand it must in

like manner be demonstrated in the case of Being that it is its peculiar

dialectic to abrogate itself, and from itself to make itself a universal

Notion. The determination of itself into Being is certainly an object of

thought, whose content is thought itself. This is inwardness, not a mere

conclusion drawn from presuppositions. Here in scholastic philosophy,

however, the object is not the nature of thought and Being, for what they

are is a mere matter of assumption.

The understanding may take its start from experience, a given concrete

content, a determinate contemplation of nature, the human heart, right,

duty, which are just exactly what inwardness means. It may find its

determinations, so to speak, on behalf of this content, and starting

from this point it may come to abstractions, such as matter and force

in physics. In this case, although a general form such as this does not

satisfy the content, it has at any rate therein a fixed point, by which

it can regulate itself, and a boundary line for speculation, which would

otherwise have no limit set to its roaming. Or when we have the concrete

perception of state and family, reasoning has in this content a fixed

point which gives it guidance—a conception, which is the main thing; the

deficiency in its form becomes concealed and forgotten, and emphasis is

not laid on it. But in scholastic philosophy, in the third place, a basis

was not sought in such objects as direct the course of reflection; with

this understanding of the Scholastics it was rather the case that they

received in the categories the external culture of the understanding as

tradition, and enlarged upon it. Because there was no standard set up

for this scholastic understanding, either by concrete intuition or by

the pure Notion, it remained unregulated in its externality. In later

times this spirit-forsaken understanding came across the philosophy

of Aristotle, in an external way; but that philosophy is a two-edged

sword, a highly determinate, clear understanding, which is at the same

time speculative Notion; in it the abstract determinations of the

understanding, taken by themselves, and powerless thus to stand, pass

away by means of dialectic, and have truth only when taken in their

connexion. The speculation that we find in Aristotle has this condition,

that such thought never abandons itself to free reflection, but keeps

ever before it the concrete nature of the object; this nature is the

Notion of the thing, and this speculative essence of the thing is the

ruling spirit, which does not leave the determinations of reflection

free on their own account. But the Scholastics laid down hard and fast

the abstract determinations of the understanding, which are always

inadequate to their absolute subject, and in like manner they took

every example from life as subject, and since the concrete contradicts

them, they could hold fast by these determinations of the understanding

only by defining and limiting. In so doing, however, they involved

themselves in an endless web of distinctions, which could themselves

be held in the concrete, and maintained thereby alone. There is thus

no “healthy human understanding” in such procedure of the Scholastics;

the former cannot oppose itself to speculation, but it can very well

take up a position hostile to ungrounded reflection, seeing that it

contains a basis and a rule of guidance for abstract determinations of

the understanding. The Aristotelian philosophy is quite opposed to this

Scholastic procedure, but it became therein alienated from itself. The

fixed conception of the supersensuous world with its angels and so on

was a subject which the Scholastics elaborated without any regulating

standard, in barbaric fashion, and they enriched and embellished it with

the finite understanding and with the finite relationships of the same.

There is present no immanent principle in the thinking itself, but the

understanding of the Scholastics got into its possession a ready-made

metaphysic, without the need of making it relate to the concrete; this

metaphysic was killed, and its parts in their lifelessness were separated

and parcelled out. It might be said of the Scholastics that they

philosophized without conception, that is, without a concrete; for _esse

reale, esse formale, esse objectivum, quidditas_ (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) they

made their subjects of discussion.

This crude understanding, in the fourth place, made everything equal,

reduced it all to the same level, and that in virtue of its abstract

universality, which was held to be valid. In politics also the

understanding aims at making all alike equal. This crude understanding

did not make away with itself and its finitude, but in its dealings

with them simply reduced to finite relations Heaven, the Idea, the

intellectual, mystic, speculative world; for it makes no difference (and

can make none) whether its finite determinations are valid here or not.

Hence arose these senseless questions, and the endeavours to decide them;

for it is senseless, I may even say it is distasteful and revolting,

although it may be logically correct, to carry over determinations into

a field where they are utterly out of place, as soon as it comes to be

a matter of comprehending a concrete content in its universality. This

understanding in its operations furnishes no bridge from the universal

to the particular, and the conclusions which it draws it leaves up in

the clouds as conceptions of its fancy. If, for instance, law is divided

into canonical law, criminal law, and so on, the ground of division is

not taken from the universal itself; and it is thus left vague which

particular determination is in accordance with the universal object. If

this object is God,—for instance, such a determination as that He became

man—the relation between God and man is not derived from their nature.

Because God only manifests Himself, He can do so in any way whatever;

then, because nothing is impossible with God, the pumpkin idea is easily

introduced (p. 90), since it is a matter of indifference in which

determination the Universal is supposed to be. Regarding the apple in

Paradise the understanding asks to what species of apple it belonged.

We must go on to indicate the principles which have been adopted and

stand opposed to one other, and the development of the same, in order to

comprehend the transition into modern history and the present standpoint

of philosophy. For this reason we must speak of the further progress of

universal spirit. For thought was distorted by reason of its being bound

to an externality, and spirit was in it no longer acting for spirit.

Because then in this and similar ways the Idea of spirit had, as it

were, its heart pierced through, the parts remained without spirit and

life, and were worked upon by the understanding. Amongst the learned

ignorance of the rational was displayed, a complete and unnatural lack of

spirituality; and in the same way there was the most utter and terrible

ignorance amongst the others, the monks. This destruction of knowledge

brought about the transition to a different state of affairs; while

heaven and the divine were thus degraded, the lofty aspirations and high

spiritual claims of the clerical element rose above the secular. For we

saw that the supersensuous world of truth, as the world of religious

conceptions, was ruined by the understanding making all things equal. We

saw, on the one hand, a handling of dogma in philosophic fashion, but

we saw also a development of formal logical thought, the secularization

of the absolutely existent content. In the same way the existing

Church, this presence of heaven upon earth, brought itself down to the

level of the secular, by entering upon the possession of riches and

lands. In this way the distinction between the world and the Church is

blotted out, not in a rational manner as regards the Church, but in a

way that is altogether revolting, and which amounts to destruction: it

is a reality, I grant, but one most terrible and barbarous. For state,

government, right, property, civil order, all these enter into religion

as rational differences, that is, laws on their own account fixed. The

acknowledgment of ranks, classes, divisions, their different occupations,

the stages and degrees of evil, as well as of good, are an entering into

the form of finitude, actuality, existence of the subjective will, while

what is religious has only the form of infinity. But the Church in its

outward existence is inviolable, it can throw over all the laws of the

good; every offence against it is a violation of sanctity. Evil and its

penalties are made eternal, divergences of opinion are punished even with

death: so are heresy and also heterodoxy in respect of the most abstract

and empty determinations of an endless system of dogmas. Abominable

practices and evil passions, utter wantonness, voluptuousness, bribery,

dissoluteness, avarice, crimes of all kinds found their way into

the Church, because it was unrestrained by laws; and it founded and

maintained the system of government. The secular ought to be only

secular; but this whole secular government of the Church claims at the

same time the dignity and authority of the divine. This mingling of the

sacred, divine, inviolable, with temporal interests, begets, on the one

hand, fanaticism, as among the Turks, and on the other hand, the humility

and _obedientia passiva_ of the laity against this dread power. It was

this ruin of the supersensuous world, as represented in knowledge and as

the actual Church, that inevitably forced man out of a temple such as

this, the Holy of Holies degraded into finitude.

Against this disunion, on the other hand, the secular element has

spiritualized itself in itself; or it has established itself firmly in

itself, and that in a manner which the Spirit justifies. To religion was

lacking the presence of its culminating point, the present reality of

its head; to the present secularity there is lacking the presence in it

of thought, reason, spirit. In the tenth century there was manifested

in Christendom a general impulse to build churches, although it was not

possible to regard God Himself as present therein. It was thus that

Christianity rose up, in her longing to take to herself the principle

of reality as absolutely her own. But neither these buildings, nor

external wealth, nor the power and dominion of the Church, nor monks,

nor clergy, nor Pope, are the principle of real actual presence in

her; they were insufficient for the spiritual. The Pope or the Emperor

is not Dalai-lama, the Pope is only the Vicar of Christ; Christ, as

a past existence, is in memory and hope alone. Impatient at the lack

of reality and at the want of holiness, Christendom goes to seek this

true Head; and this is the ruling motive of the Crusades. Christendom

sought Christ’s outward presence in the land of Canaan, the traces of

Him, the mount where He suffered, His grave; they took possession of

the Holy Sepulchre. What they represent to themselves as real they also

take possession of in fact as real; but a grave is a grave—all that they

find is a grave, and even that is torn from them. “Because Thou wilt not

leave my soul in hell, neither wilt Thou suffer Thine Holy One to see

corruption.” Christians made the mistake of thinking that they would find

satisfaction in this; this was the true object of their search; but they

did not understand themselves. These holy spots, the Mount of Olives,

the Jordan, Nazareth, as external sensuous presence of place without

presence of time, are things of the past, a mere memory, no perception

of the immediate present; the Christians found only their loss, their

grave, in this present. Barbarians all the time, they did not seek the

universal, the world-controlling position of Syria and Egypt, this

central point of the earth, the free connection of commerce; Bonaparte

did this when mankind became rational. The Crusaders were by the

Saracens and by their own violence and repulsiveness, as also by their

own misery (p. 53), brought to confess that they had in this deceived

themselves. This experience taught them that they must hold to the actual

reality which they despised, and seek in this the realization of their

intelligible world. What they sought for they were to find in themselves,

in the present of the understanding; thought, personal knowledge and

will constitute this present. Because their acts, their aims and their

interests are upright, and thus are constituted the Universal, the

present is rational. What pertains to the world has thus become fixed in

itself, that is, it has received into itself thought, justice, reason.

With reference to the general aspect of the period, from an historical

point of view, it may be remarked that as on the one side we see the

selflessness of spirit, the fact that spirit is not at home with itself,

the torn and rent condition of man, on the other side we see the

political condition becoming more consolidated, in the establishment

of an independence which is no longer merely selfish. In the first

independence there is contained the moment of barbarism, which has need

of fear in order to be held within bounds. Now, however, we see justice

and order enter in; it is true that the ruling order is the feudal

system with its servitude, but everything therein has certainly a firm

basis in justice. Justice, however, has its root in freedom, and thus

the individual therein brings himself into existence, and is recognized;

nevertheless relationships which properly belong to the state are here

still made the concern of private individuals. Feudal monarchy, which now

emerges in opposition to the self-abnegation of the Church, determines

essential rights, it is true, according to birth; ranks are not, however,

like the system of caste among the Indians, for in the ecclesiastical

hierarchy, for instance, anyone might from the lowest class rise to the

very highest position. Even under the feudal system, moreover, justice,

civil order, legal freedom gradually emerged. In Italy and Germany

cities obtained their rights as citizen republics, and caused these to

be recognized by the temporal and ecclesiastical power; wealth displayed

itself in the Netherlands, Florence and the free cities on the Rhine. In

this way men gradually began to emerge from the feudal system; an example

of this is seen in the case of the Capitani. The fact that the _lingua

volgare_ became the language used may also be looked on as a springing up

of self-abnegation of spirit: as in Dante’s _Divina Commedia_.