expounders, certainly the most profound, was that which was systematized
by Saint Augustine from the writings of Paul. Augustine was the oracle
of the Latin Church until the Council of Trent, and nominally his
authority has never been repudiated by the Catholic Church. But he was
no more the father of the Catholic theology than he was of the
Protestant, as taught by John Calvin: these two great theologians were
in harmony in all essential doctrines as completely as were Augustine
and Anselm, or Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. The doctrines of theology,
as formulated by Augustine, were subjects of contemplation and study in
all the convents of the Middle Ages. In spite of the prevailing
ignorance, it was impossible that inquiring men, "secluded in gloomy
monasteries, should find food for their minds in the dreary and
monotonous duties to which monks were doomed,--a life devoted to
alternate manual labor and mechanical religious services." There would
be some of them who would speculate on the lofty subjects which were the
constant themes of their meditations. Bishops were absorbed in their
practical duties as executive rulers. Village priests were too ignorant
to do much beyond looking after the wants of hinds and peasants. The
only scholarly men were the monks. And although the number of these was
small, they have the honor of creating the first intellectual movement
since the fall of the Roman Empire. They alone combined leisure with
brain-work. These intellectual and inquiring monks, as far back as the
ninth century speculated on the great subjects of Christian faith with
singular boldness, considering the general ignorance which veiled
Europe in melancholy darkness. Some of them were logically led "to a
secret mutiny and insurrection" against the doctrines which were
universally received. This insurrection of human intelligence gave great
alarm to the orthodox leaders of the Church; and to suppress it the
Church raised up conservative dialecticians as acute and able as those
who strove for emancipation. At first they used the weapons of natural
reason, but afterwards employed the logic and method of Aristotle, as
translated into Latin from the Arabic, to assist them in their
intellectual combats. Gradually the movement centred in the scholastic
philosophy, as a bulwark to Catholic theology. But this was nearly a
hundred years after the time of Anselm, who himself was not enslaved by
the technicalities of a complicated system of dialectics.
Naturally the first subject which was suggested to the minds of
inquiring monks was the being and attributes of God. He was the
beginning and end of their meditations. It was to meditate upon God that
the Oriental recluse sought the deserts of Asia Minor and Egypt. Like
the Eastern monk of the fourth century, he sought to know the essence
and nature of the Deity he worshipped. There arose before his mind the
great doctrines of the trinity, the incarnation, and redemption. Closely
connected with these were predestination and grace, and then "fixed
fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute." On these mysteries he could
not help meditating; and with meditation came speculation on
unfathomable subjects pertaining to God and his relations with man, to
the nature of sin and its penalty, to the freedom of the will, and
eternal decrees.
The monk became first a theologian and then a philosopher, whether of
the school of Plato or of Aristotle he did not know. He began to
speculate on questions which had agitated the Grecian schools,--the
origin of evil and of matter; whether the world was created or
uncreated; whether there is a distinction between things visible and
invisible; whether we derive our knowledge from sensation or reflection;
whether the soul is necessarily immortal; how free-will is to be
reconciled with God's eternal decrees, or what the Greeks called Fate;
whether ideas are eternal, or are the creation of our own minds. These,
and other more subtile questions--like the nature of angels--began to
agitate the convent in the ninth century.
It was then that the monk Gottschalk revived the question of
predestination, which had slumbered since the time of Saint Augustine.
Although the Bishop of Hippo was the oracle of the Church, and no one
disputed his authority, it would seem that his characteristic
doctrine,--that of grace; the essential doctrine of Luther also,--was
never a favorite one with the great churchmen of the Middle Ages. They
did not dispute Saint Augustine, but they adhered to penances and
expiations, which entered so largely into the piety of the Middle Ages.
The idea of penances and expiations, pushed to their utmost logical
sequence, was salvation by works and not by faith. Grace, as understood
by the Fathers, was closely allied to predestination; it disdained the
elaborate and cumbrous machinery of ecclesiastical discipline, on which
the power of the clergy was based. Grace was opposed to penance, while
penance was the form which religion took; and as predestination was a
theological sequence of grace, it was distasteful to the Mediaeval
Church. Both grace and predestination tended to undermine the system of
penance then universally accepted. The great churchmen of the Middle
Ages were plainly at war with their great oracle in this matter, without
being fully aware of their real antagonism. So they made an onslaught on
Gottschalk, as opposed to those ideas on which sacerdotal power
rested,--especially did Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, the greatest
prelate of that age. Persecuted, Gottschalk appealed to reason rather
than authority, thus anticipating Luther by five hundred years,--an
immense heresy in the Middle Ages. Hincmar, not being able to grapple
with the monk in argument, summoned to his aid the brightest intellect
of that century,--the first man who really gave an impulse to
philosophical inquiries in the Middle Ages, the true founder of
scholasticism.
This man was John Scotus Erigena,--or John the Erin-born,--who was also
a monk, and whose early days had been spent in some secluded monastery
in Ireland, or the Scottish islands. Somehow he attracted the attention
of Charles the Bald, A.D. 843, and became his guest and chosen
companion. And yet, while he lived in the court, he spent the most of
his time in intellectual seclusion. As a guest of the king he may have
become acquainted with Hincmar, or his acquaintance with Hincmar may
have led to his friendship with Charles. He was witty, bright, and
learned, like Abélard, a favorite with the great. In his treatise on
Predestination, in which he combated the views of Gotschalk, he probably
went further than Hincmar desired or expected: he boldly asserted the
supremacy of reason, and threw off the shackles of authority. He
combated Saint Augustine as well as Gottschalk. He even aspired to
reconcile free-will with the divine sovereignty,--the great mistake of
theologians in every age, the most hopeless and the most ambitious
effort of human genius,--a problem which cannot be solved. He went even
further than this: he attempted to harmonize philosophy with religion,
as Abélard did afterwards. He brought all theological questions to the
test of dialectical reasoning. Thus the ninth century saw a rationalist
and a pantheist at the court of a Christian king. Like Democritus, he
maintained the eternity of matter. Like a Buddhist, he believed that God
is all things and all things are God. Such doctrines were not to be
tolerated, even in an age when theological speculations did not usually
provoke persecution. Religious persecution for opinions was the fruit of
subsequent inquiries, and did not reach its height until the Dominicans
arose in the thirteenth century. But Erigena was generally denounced; he
fell under the censure of the Pope, and was obliged to fly, taking
refuge about the year 882 in England,--it is said at Oxford, where there
was probably a cathedral school, but not as yet a university, with its
professors' chairs and scholastic honors. Others suppose that he died in
Paris, 891.
A spirit of inquiry having been thus awakened among a few intellectual
monks, they began to speculate about those questions which had agitated
the Grecian schools: whether _genera_ and _species_--called
"universals," or ideas--have a substantial and independent existence, or
whether they are the creation of our own minds; whether, if they have a
real existence, they are material or immaterial essences; whether they
exist apart from objects perceptible by the senses. It is singular that
such questions should have been discussed in the ninth century, since
neither Plato nor Aristotle were studied. That age was totally ignorant
of Greek. It may be doubted whether there was a Greek scholar in Western
Europe,--or even in Rome.
No very remarkable man arose with a rationalizing spirit, after Erigena,
until Berengar of Tours in the eleventh century, who maintained that in
the Sacrament the presence of the body of Christ involves no change in
the nature and essence of the bread and wine. He was opposed by
Lanfranc. But the doctrine of transubstantiation was too deeply grounded
in the faith of Christendom to be easily shaken. Controversies seemed to
centre around the doctrine of the real existence of ideas,--what are
called "universals,"--which doctrine was generally accepted. The monks,
in this matter, followed Saint Augustine, who was a realist, as were
also the orthodox leaders of the Church generally from his time to that
of Saint Bernard. It was a sequence of the belief in the doctrine of
the Trinity.
No one of mark opposed the Realism which had now become one of the
accepted philosophical opinions of the age, until Roscelin, in the
latter part of the eleventh century, denied that universals have a real
existence. It was Plato's doctrine that universals have an independent
existence apart from individual objects, and that they exist before the
latter (_universalia_ ANTE _rem_,--the thought _before_ the thing);
while Aristotle maintained that universals, though possessing a real
existence, exist only in individual objects (_universalia_ IN _re_,
--the thought _in_ the thing). Nominalism is the doctrine that
individuals only have real existence (_universalia_ POST _rem_,--the
thought _after_ the thing).
It is not probable that this profound question about universals would
have excited much interest among the intellectual monks of the eleventh
century, had it not been applied to theological subjects, in which
chiefly they were absorbed. Now Roscelin advanced the doctrine, that, if
the three persons in the Trinity were one thing, it would follow that
the Father and the Holy Ghost must have entered into the flesh together
with the Son; and as he believed that only individuals exist in reality,
it would follow that the three persons of the Godhead are three
substances, in fact three Gods. Thus Nominalism logically led to an
assault on the received doctrine of the Trinity--the central point in
the theology of the Church. This was heresy. The foundations of
Christian belief were attacked, and no one in that age was strong enough
to come to the rescue but Anselm, then Abbot of Bec.
His great service to the cause of Christian theology, and therefore to
the Church universal, was his exposition of the logical results of the
Nominalism of Roscelin,--to whom universals, or ideas, were merely
creations of the mind, or conventional phrases, having no real
existence. Hence such things as love, friendship, beauty, justice, were
only conceptions. Plato and Augustine maintained that they are eternal
verities, not to be explained by definitions, appealing to
consciousness, in the firm belief in which the soul sustains itself;
that there can be no certain knowledge without a recognition of these;
that from these only sound deductions of moral truth can be drawn; that
without a firm belief in these eternal certitudes there can be no repose
and no lofty faith. These ideas are independent of us. They do not vary
with our changing sensations; they have nothing to do with sensation.
They are not creations of the brain; they inherently exist, from all
eternity. The substance of these ideas is God; without these we could
not conceive of God. Augustine especially, in the true spirit of
Platonism, abhorred doctrines which made the existence of God depend
upon our own abstractions. To him there was a reality in love, in
friendship, in justice, in beauty; and he repelled scepticism as to
their eternal existence, as life repels death.
Roscelin took away the platform from whose lofty heights Socrates and
Plato would survey the universe. He attacked the citadel in which
Augustine intrenched himself amid the desolations of a dissolving world;
he laid the axe at the root of the tree which sheltered all those who
would fly from uncertainty and despair.
But if these ideas were not true, what was true; on what were the hopes
of the world to be based; where was consolation for the miseries of life
to be found? "There are many goods," says Anselm, "which we
desire,--some for utility, and others for beauty; but all these goods
are relative,--more or less good,--and imply something absolutely good.
This absolute good--the _summum bonum_--is God. In like manner all that
is great and high are only relatively great and high; and hence there
must be something absolutely great and high, and this is God. There must
exist at least one being than which no other is higher; hence there must
be but one such being,--and this is God."
It was thus that Anselm brought philosophy to the support of theology.
He would combat the philosophical reasonings of Roscelin with still
keener dialectics. He would conquer him on his own ground and with his
own weapons.
Let it not be supposed that this controversy about universals was a mere
dialectical tournament, with no grand results. It goes down to the root
of almost every great subject in philosophy and religion. The denial of
universal ideas is rationalism and materialism in philosophy, as it is
Pelagianism and Arminianism in theology. The Nominalism of Roscelin
reappeared in the Rationalism of Abélard; and, carried out to its
severe logical sequences, is the refusal to accept any doctrine which
cannot be proved by reason. Hence nothing is to be accepted which is
beyond the province of reason to explain; and hence nothing is to be
received by faith alone. Christianity, in the hands of fearless and
logical nominalists, would melt away,--that is, what is peculiar in its
mysterious dogmas. Its mysterious dogmas were the anchors of belief in
ages of faith. It was these which animated the existence of such men as
Augustine, Bernard, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas. Hence their terrible
antagonism even to philosophical doctrines which conflicted with the
orthodox belief, on which, as they thought, the salvation of
mankind rested.
But Anselm did not rest with combating the Nominalism of Roscelin. In
the course of his inquiries and arguments he felt it necessary to
establish the belief in God--the one great thing from which all other
questions radiated--by a new argument, and on firmer ground than that on
which it had hitherto rested. He was profoundly devotional as well as
logical, and original as he was learned. Beyond all the monks of his age
he lived in the contemplation of God. God was to him the essence of all
good, the end of all inquiries, the joy and repose of his soul He could
not understand unless he _first_ believed; knowledge was the _fruit_ of
faith, not its _cause_. The idea of God in the mind of man is the
highest proof of the existence of God. That only is real which appeals
to consciousness. He did not care to reason about a thing when reasoning
would not strengthen his convictions, perhaps involve him in doubts and
perplexities. Reason is finite and clouded and warped. But that which
directly appeals to consciousness (as all that is eternal must appeal),
and to that alone, like beauty and justice and love,--ultimate ideas to
which reasoning and definitions add nothing,--is to be received as a
final certitude. Hence, absolute certainty of the existence of God, as
it appeals to consciousness,--like the "_Cogito, ergo sum_." In this
argument he anticipated Descartes, and proved himself the profoundest
thinker of his century, perhaps of five centuries.
The deductions which Anselm made from the attributes of God and his
moral government seem to have strengthened the belief of the Middle Ages
in some theological aspects which are repulsive to consciousness,--his
stronghold; thereby showing how one-sided any deductions are apt to be
when pushed out to their utmost logical consequences; how they may even
become a rebuke to human reason in those grand efforts of which reason
is most proud, for theology, it must be borne in mind, is a science of
deductions from acknowledged truths of revelation. Hence, from the
imperfections of reason, or from disregard of other established truths,
deductions may be pushed to absurdity even when logical, and may be made
to conflict with the obvious meaning of primal truths from which these
deductions are made, or at least with those intuitions which are hard to
be distinguished from consciousness itself. There may be no flaw in the
argument, but the argument may land one in absurdity and contradiction.
For instance, from the acknowledged sinfulness of human nature--one of
the cardinal declarations of Scripture, and confirmed by universal
experience--and the equally fundamental truth that God is infinite,
Anselm assumed the dogma that the guilt of men as sinners against an
infinite God is infinitely great. From this premise, which few in his
age were disposed to deny, for it was in accordance with Saint
Augustine, it follows that infinite sin, according to eternal justice,
could only be atoned for by an infinite punishment. Hence all men
deserve eternal punishment, and must receive it, unless there be made an
infinite satisfaction or atonement, since not otherwise can divine love
be harmonized with divine justice. Hence it was necessary that the
eternal Son should become man, and make, by his voluntary death on the
cross, the necessary atonement for human sins. Pushed out to the
severest logical consequences, it would follow, that, as an infinite
satisfaction has atoned for sin, _all_ sinners are pardoned. But the
Church shrank from such a conclusion, although logical, and included in
the benefits of the atonement only the _believing_ portion of mankind.
The discrepancy between the logical deductions and consciousness, and I
may add Scripture, lies in assuming that human guilt _is infinitely_
great. It is thus that theology became complicated, even gloomy, and in
some points false, by metaphysical reasonings, which had such a charm
both to the Fathers and the Schoolmen. The attempt to reconcile divine
justice with divine love by metaphysics and abstruse reasoning proved as
futile as the attempt to reconcile free-will with predestination; for
divine justice was made by deduction, without reference to other
attributes, to conflict with those ideas of justice which consciousness
attests,--even as a fettered will, of which all are conscious (that is,
a will fettered by sin), was pushed out by logical deductions into
absolute slavery and impotence.
Anselm did not carry out metaphysical reasonings to such lengths as did
the Schoolmen who succeeded him,--those dialecticians who lived in
universities in the thirteenth century. He was a devout man, who
meditated on God and on revealed truth with awe and reverence, without
any desire of system-making or dialectical victories. This desire more
properly marked the Scholastic doctors of the universities in a
subsequent age, when, though philosophy had been invoked by Anselm to
support theology, they virtually made theology subordinate to philosophy.
It was his main effort to establish, on rational grounds, the existence
of God, and afterwards the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
And yet with Anselm and Roscelin the Scholastic age began. They were the
founders of the Realists and the Nominalists,--those two schools which
divided the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and which
will probably go on together, under different names, as long as men shall
believe and doubt. But this subject, on which I have only entered, must
be deferred to the next lecture.
AUTHORITIES.
Church's Life of Saint Anselm; Neander's Church History; Milman's
History of the Latin Church; Stockl's History of the Philosophy of the
Middle Ages; Ueberweg's History of Philosophy; Wordsworth's
Ecclesiastical Biography; Trench's Mediaeval Church History; Digby's
Ages of Faith; Fleury's Ecclesiastical History; Dupin's Ecclesiastical
History; Biographie Universelle; M. Rousselot's Histoire de la
Philosophic du Moyen Age; Newman's Mission of the Benedictine Order;
Dugdale's Monasticon; Hallam's Literature of Europe; Hampden's article
on the Scholastic Philosophy, in Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.
THOMAS AQUINAS.
* * * * *
A.D. 1225(7)-1274.
THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY.
We have seen how the cloister life of the Middle Ages developed
meditative habits of mind, which were followed by a spirit of inquiry on
deep theological questions. We have now to consider a great intellectual
movement, stimulated by the effort to bring philosophy to the aid of
theology, and thus more effectually to battle with insidious and rising
heresies. The most illustrious representative of this movement was
Thomas of Aquino, generally called Thomas Aquinas. With him we associate
the Scholastic Philosophy, which, though barren in the results at which
it aimed, led to a remarkable intellectual activity, and hence,
indirectly, to the emancipation of the mind. It furnished teachers who
prepared the way for the great lights of the Reformation.
Anselm had successfully battled with the rationalism of Roscelin, and
also had furnished a new argument for the existence of God. He secured
the triumph of Realism for a time and the apparent extinction of
heresy. But a new impulse to thought was given, soon after his death, by
a less profound but more popular and brilliant man, and, like him, a
monk. This was the celebrated Peter Abélard, born in the year 1079, in
Brittany, of noble parents, and a boy of remarkable precocity. He was a
sort of knight-errant of philosophy, going from convent to convent and
from school to school, disputing, while a mere youth, with learned
teachers, wherever he could find them. Having vanquished the masters in
the provincial schools, he turned his steps to Paris, at that time the
intellectual centre of Europe. The university was not yet established,
but the cathedral school of Notre Dame was presided over by William of
Champeaux, who defended the Realism of Anselm.