thought. An illustration will explain their relation to theology. In the
foolish and almost irreverent attempts to explain by philosophy the nature
of the triune existence of the divine Being, the realist assuming the
reality of the one genus Deity, was prepared to allow identity of essence
in the three species, the three members of the Divine Trinity. The
nominalist, allowing only concrete existence, was obliged either to accept
unity, only in a verbal sense, and be charged with tritheism, as Roscelin;
or diversity only in a verbal sense, and incur the charge of Sabellianism,
as Abélard.
Such was Scholasticism, and such its relation to philosophy and
theology.(262) Existing for several centuries as an instinct, it became
about the end of the eleventh century an intelligent movement.(263) At
this period the problem was consciously proposed, and each of the three
centuries which are comprised in our present period exhibits a different
phase of the controversy. At first the movement was in favour of the
nominalism in Roscelin and Abélard, and reason assumed an attitude of
alleged scepticism: in the thirteenth century the victory was in the hands
of intelligent realists like Aquinas, who used reason in favour of
orthodoxy. In the fourteenth, nominalism revived in Occam; the provinces
of faith and philosophy were severed, and the final victory on the
metaphysical question remained in the hands of the nominalists.
The scientific position of Abélard will thus be clear. We must now study
his intellectual character, as embodying the sceptical aspect which
belonged to nominalism.
Abélard’s character is in many respects one of the most curious in
history.(264) The record of his trials, bodily and mental,(265) enlists
the romantic sympathy of the sentimentalist, and commands the serious
attention of the philosopher. His wonderful reputation at Paris as a
public lecturer connects him with the university life of the middle ages,
and presents him as the type of the class of great professors created by
the absence of books and consequent prevalence of oral instruction. It was
his vast influence which made his opinions of importance, and aroused the
opposition of St. Bernard. It seems to have been the application of the
nominalist philosophy to the doctrine of the Trinity, contained in
Abélard’s works on dogmatic theology,(266) which excited alarm. The
council called at Sens(267) was a theological duel, wherein those two
distinguished characters were matched, the most eloquent theologian and
preacher against the most influential professor and philosopher; the saint
against the critic. Bernard was right in his Theology; Abélard perhaps
right in his philosophy.(268) This event however presents the effects of
scholasticism in producing heresy rather than scepticism.
The great work which has laid Abélard open to the latter charge merits a
brief notice. It was entitled the _Sic et Non_, and remained unpublished
in the public documents of France till recent years.(269) It is a
collection of alleged contradictions, which exist on a series of topics,
which range over the deepest problems of theology, and descend to the
confines of casuistry in ethics.(270) In the discussion of them Abélard
collects passages from the scriptures and from the fathers in favour of
two distinctly opposite solutions. He has however prefixed a prologue to
the work, which ought to be taken as the explanation of his object.(271)
He insists in it on the difficulty of rightly understanding the scriptures
or the fathers, and refers it to eight different causes;(272) advising
that when these considerations fail to explain the apparent contradictions
of scripture, we should abandon the manuscripts as inaccurate, rather than
believe in the existence of real discrepancies. He draws also a broad
distinction between canonical scripture and other literature, strongly
affirming the authority of the former.
Is this work sceptical? Is it designed under a fair show to serve the
purpose of unbelief? Or is it merely an instance of the awakening of the
spirit of inquiry, the free criticism exercised by nominalism, the desire
to prove all dogmas by reason? In other words, was the freethinking of
Abélard rationalism, or was it merely Protestantism and theological
criticism?
These questions have met with different answers. The Benedictine editors,
viewing his condemnation by St. Bernard as parallel to that of the
biblical critic R. Simon(273) by Bossuet, declined to publish the
manuscript of his work.(274) More recent inquirers, especially the
philosophical critic Cousin, have regarded Abélard with a favourable eye.
They consider his treatises merely to be a provisional scepticism,
fortifying the mind against premature solutions. Some would even claim him
as an early protestant, as the first of the line of men whose spirits,
while fretting under the dogmatic teaching or the political centralization
of the Western church, have unhesitatingly bowed before the authority of
scripture.(275) Possibly these several views contain elements of truth.
Abélard’s character was complex, and the purpose of his book equally so.
He embodied a movement, and experience had not yet taught men to
distinguish in it the boundaries which separated the provinces of free
thought. The argument in favour of scepticism drawn from the form of his
work seems unfair. The statement of a series of paradoxes is lawful, if a
solution of them be offered, or an explanation of the reason why a
solution is impossible. The disputative, dialectical tone which assists in
the work was the ordinary mode of instruction in the mediæval
universities, and finds a parallel in the method of thought observable in
other ages. Abélard’s statement of paradoxes, of an unsolved mass of
contradictions, recalls, for example, the early paradoxes on motion which
Zeno presented for the purpose of compelling acquiescence in the Eleatic
teaching,(276) or the series of antinomies which Kant has given, as
problems insoluble theoretically, but capable of harmony when viewed on
the moral side.(277) In truth it is the mark, either, as in one of these
cases, of the first awakening of the mind to curiosity; or, as in the
other, of the last limit at which curiosity is compelled to pause.
Abélard’s method is like that which is observable in Socrates, and in
those early dialogues of his disciple Plato, in which the pupil is working
in his master’s manner, wherein difficulties are propounded without being
solved. The hearer is cross-questioned, with the view of being made to
feel the necessity of possessing knowledge; and a method is offered to him
by which he is to find the solution of problems for himself.(278) In this
view Abélard’s doubt is really the inquiry which is the first step to
faith; the criticism which precedes the constructive process, the negation
before affirmation.
While its form may be regarded as an embodiment of the scholastic method,
the manner of handling marks the commencement of modern biblical
criticism. The suggestions which he offers(279) in reference to false
readings of manuscripts, the spuriousness of books, and the temporary
character of the author’s sentiments, as elements in determining the
reality of a contradiction, or the necessary rejection of a passage on
grounds of dogmatic improbability, mark a sagacity which has been
perfected into a science by the growth of modern criticism. Thus far we
have only the elements of inquiry and criticism which enter into doubt;
yet it would be unfair to deny that something of unbelief may have been
found in a restless care-worn spirit like that of Abélard; and if any one
thinks that he intended in his work to leave the reader with the
impression that the solution is impossible, or that the doubter’s side is
the stronger, then we may consider him to have been an unbeliever, and
regard his teaching as an example, often witnessed in later times, of a
concealed irony, which, while pretending to accept revelation, has
represented its evidence as insufficient, and its doctrines as unprovable.
If however he be taken to be a sceptic, it is only the infancy of doubt.
It is unlike the bitter disbelief shown by the early antichristian
writers, or by the doubters of modern times. Whatever was valuable in the
free thought of Abélard outlived his time. The spirit of inquiry which
spoke through him, continued to operate in his successors.(280) His method
was even adopted by his opponents. His follower, Arnold of Brescia,
carried free thought from ideas into acts, and suffered martyrdom in a
premature struggle against the papal church.(281) Being dead, Abélard yet
spoke, both politically and philosophically; and his character remains as
a type of the spirit of mingled doubt and hope and inquiry which is
exhibited in the free thought of any of those great epochs, when knowledge
is increased, and when earnest minds are standing in doubt whether the new
wine can be placed in the old bottles.
The movement, which was beginning to be felt in every branch of life and
thought in the twelfth century, was still more manifest in the course of
the thirteenth, an age, which, whether viewed in its great men or great
deeds, its movements political, ecclesiastical, or intellectual, is the
most remarkable of the middle ages, and one of the most memorable in
history.(282) The activity of speculation is evidenced by the increasing
alarm which alleged heresy like the Albigensian was causing, and by the
establishment of the system of ecclesiastical police(283) which developed
into the inquisition. About the middle of the century, the influence of
free thought in religion is supposed to have made its appearance, in a
work which originated with one of the newly created mendicant orders. A
book which had appeared at the beginning of the century, entitled “the
Everlasting Gospel,” was now edited with an introduction by some person of
influence in the Franciscan order.(284) The idea conveyed was, that, as
there are three Persons in the Godhead, so there must be three
dispensations; that of the Father which ended at the coming of Christ,
that of the Son which was then about to conclude, and that of the Spirit,
of which the religious ideal of the Franciscans was the embodiment.
The work caused immense alarm, and was condemned by the council of
Arles,(285) on the ground that it assumed that Christianity was imperfect,
and was to be replaced by a superior revelation developing from natural
causes. It is doubtful whether the book was really intended to be
sceptical. More probably it was mystical. Claiming to be founded on an
apocalyptic idea,(286) it was a revival of the Chiliasm which haunted the
Christians of Asia Minor in the early centuries; perhaps also it was the
utterance of the spiritual yearning which marked the rise of the
Franciscan order, and a protest against the worldliness of the times. It
was connected too with the longings for political deliverance from the
temporal dominion of the Popedom which were now beginning to be felt. In
these latter aspects the idea, so far from being false, was an advance.
Christianity from time to time admits a progress, but from within rather
than from without; a deeper spiritual appreciation of old truths rather
than a reception of new ones. The demand for progress becomes a ground for
alarm only when it implies that the world has bidden farewell to
Christianity, either through the mystical expectation of a Millennial
reign which is to supersede it, or through the sceptical belief that our
religion has only an historic value, and needs remodelling to meet the
requirements of advancing civilization. If the latter was the meaning of
this utterance of the Franciscan book, the idea was the germ of the modern
conception of the function of Christianity in “the education of the race,”
the first statement of which is usually attributed to Lessing.(287)
The same century which gave birth to this _mot_, expressive of _progress
in religion_, created also another which embodied the idea of the
_comparative study of religions_. This phrase may have different meanings.
It may signify the comparison of Christianity with ethnic creeds in its
external and internal character, without sacrificing the belief that a
divinely revealed element exists in it, which caused it to differ from
them in kind as well as degree. Or it may mean a comparison of
Christianity with other religions, as equally false with them, equally a
deliberate and conscious invention of priestcraft which was the shocking
view adopted by writers like Volney in the last century,(288) or else a
comparison of it as equally true with them, as equally a psychological
development of the religious intelligence, which is the view prevalent in
many noted works on the philosophy of history in the present.(289) It was
the second of these ideas, expressive of actual incredulity, which existed
in the thirteenth century. It is traceable in the imputation made by
Gregory IX(290) against the celebrated emperor Frederick II, that he had
spoken of Moses, Christ, and Mahomet, as the three great impostors who had
respectively deceived the Jews, the Christians, and the Arabs.
The very possibility of the existence of such a comparison presupposes
intercourse with disciples of foreign creeds. The Christians now no longer
possessed a merely vague knowledge of Jews and Mahometans. The crusades
were expiring, the danger which evoked them had subsided, and the enmity
which supported them was decaying. Europe had entered into relations of
commerce, if not of amity, with Mahometan nations; and through contact
with them had come to measure them by an altered standard, and to acquire
the idea of comparing religions. Frederick II, to whom this expression is
imputed, is stated to have manifested admiration of Mahometan literature,
and affection for his Mahometan subjects who afforded him aid in carrying
out the plans of civilization which his powerful mind had formed;(291) and
it was his indifference to a crusade, induced probably by other causes,
which led the Pope to impute to him the blasphemy just quoted. The contact
with the East, half a century later, in like manner afforded the pretext
for fastening a charge of unbelief on the Knights Templars.(292) Contact
with Mahometans had thus, we have reason to believe, created a latitude of
thought in many parts of Christendom.
The same idea of the comparison of Christianity with other creeds
reappears in a tale of Boccaccio,(293) in which the three great religions
are represented under the allegory of three rings which a father gave to
his children, so exactly alike that the judges could not decide which was
the genuine one of the three, and which the copies. It is also illustrated
by the tradition of the existence of a book, entitled “De Tribus
Impostoribus,” which has been attributed almost to every great name in the
middle ages which was conspicuous for opposition to the claims of the
church, or for uneasiness under the pressure of its dogmatic teaching. The
existence of the book is legendary: no one ever saw it: and the two
distinct works which now bear the title can be shown to have been composed
respectively in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: but the legend is
a witness to the fact of the existence of the idea which the book was said
to embody. (20)
It is perhaps in some degree to the influence of the doctrine of
absorption in the Mahometan philosophy of Averroes, a commentator on
Aristotle, who was the contemporary of Abélard, that we may attribute the
disbelief in immortality to which we find a tendency toward the close of
the thirteenth and during the fourteenth century.(294) Though it is
probable that the indirect influence of the Arabic philosophy was felt
earlier, in stimulating a demand for inquiry, a disposition to make dogmas
submit to the test of reason, which has been shown to be the earliest form
of mediæval doubt; yet it was not until the thirteenth century that the
works of Averroes definitely influenced scholasticism, through the
teaching of Michael Scot and Alexander Hales, and by means of the rapidity
of intellectual communication which forms so singular a feature in
mediæval history, spread their influence in Italy as well as in France. It
was at this time that the doctrine of Averroes was attacked by Aquinas;
and though the amount of its influence can hardly be estimated, we have
the means of tracing the growth of dislike to its author in Christian
lands, which is an incidental probability of the increasing danger to
Christianity arising from it. In the middle of the thirteenth century the
Franciscans study him without evincing hatred. About the end of it Dante
describes him still without reproaches, though he places him in the
Inferno along with other heathen philosophers:(295) but half a century
later, in the pictures of the last judgment which exist in several states
of Italy, each a little historic satire with its own peculiarities, we
find Averroes depicted as the type of incredulity and blasphemy. In a
fresco of the Campo Santo of Pisa, executed about 1335, when perhaps the
recent canonization of Aquinas as an opponent of Averroes had directed
attention to the influence of the Arabic philosopher, Orcagna has placed a
separate _bolgia_, the lowest in his hell, for three persons,—Mahomet,
Anti-christ, and Averroes.(296)
The disbelief of immortality was however too obvious a temptation in a
corrupt age, as well as too generally spread, especially in the next
century, to be wholly attributable to the subtle influence of the doctrine
of absorption of the Arabic philosophy. A mediæval English poet(297)
attributes incredulity to the higher classes of his age; and Dante, in
that poem which is a romantic picture of his contemporaries or
predecessors, when devoting one circle of the Inferno to the habitation of
the “more than a thousand” of those “who make the soul die with the body,”
attributes the cause of the sin to Epicureanism, a moral and not an
intellectual cause.(298) It is a sad and humiliating thought to reflect
also that a cause which must have increased incredulity, if it did not
create it, was to be found in the vices of the clergy, especially near the
papal court of Avignon. Most of the distinguished laymen whom history
records as evincing unbelief belonged to the political party, which strove
to repress the political centralization and temporal authority of the
church; and it is to be feared that the causes just named were the means
of repelling more deeply from religion the hearts of such persons whose
interests or whose vices already led them to hate its promoters.(299)
We have thus collected the few traces which mark the history of free
thought in the second great crisis of church history, and incidentally
illustrated its connexion with social movements as well as religious, and
shown its relation to intellectual or moral causes. On the intellectual
side we have witnessed the scholastic philosophy giving activity to the
spirit of change, and contact with Mahometan life and opinion imparting
the latitude to Christian thought which passed into incredulity. On the
moral we have noticed that the effect of social wants or of actual
viciousness gave birth respectively to religious restlessness, or to
actual disbelief of the supernatural. The church of the time was not
unaware of the movement. In part it tried to repress it by persecution and
by the Inquisition; but in part also by the lawful weapon of spiritual
contest. The grand works of defence of the thirteenth century, which
adjusted scholastic philosophy to dogmatic theology, and the spiritual
activity of the mendicant orders, were real and lawful means of victory,
appealing respectively to the intellect and heart.
The moral judgment formed on the movement seen in the whole period must
vary with the phase of it viewed. The attack is not, like those of the
early unbelievers, a struggle with which the sympathies of Christians
cannot be enlisted. The darker aspects of it partake indeed of the same
character; but it embodies a better element, a nobler form of movement,
tainted perhaps with doubt, but not with disbelief; viz. the attempt of
the human mind to assert its rights in philosophy, theology, and politics;
and as the epoch closes, the great truth has made itself felt in the world
as the result of the contest, that Christianity is supreme only within its
own sphere, which it is the problem of religious philosophy to discover;
that freedom of inquiry is to be used outside the boundary, but that
speculation must expire in adoration within it.
-------------------------------------
A new crisis may be considered to commence in the fifteenth century, in
consequence of the introduction of fresh influences through the classical
revival. Yet as the two periods are connected in time, the transition is
not sudden: the old influences gradually vanish away; the new ones had
been slowly preparing before they became distinctly evident. The
intellectual and social activity of the past period had been the means of
educating the mind of Europe for the reception of the new forces which
were now beginning to operate.(300)
The fifteenth century was a remarkable period for Europe, and preeminently
for Italy. During several ages Italy had grown great by means of commerce
and religion. The crusades, which had impoverished the rest of Europe, had
enriched her; and the subjugation of the nations to the court of Rome had
made her the treasury of Europe. Material wealth permitted the
encouragement of the study of literature, which relations of commerce or
of conquest with the Greek empire had been the means of reviving.
Manuscripts were collected, and the remains of monuments of classic art
were studied. The love of antiquity gave perfection to art, and influenced
literature. The work which centuries had slowly prepared now came to
perfection. The scholastic philosophy declined; the sources of
ecclesiastical education and of the existing religion were weakened; and
by the close of the fifteenth century the tone of the age was in all
respects changed. The devotion which had expressed itself in the great
Gothic works of devotion of early ages was expiring, at least in Italy,
and art itself gradually became secular, and expressed ideas more earthly.
When such a moment of material prosperity, combined with intellectual and
social change, ensues immediately on the movement previously sketched, we
should expect to find religion subjected to re-examination, and placed in
temporary peril. The history confirms the supposition. If we regard this
crisis as embracing about two centuries and a quarter,(301) comprehending
the classical revival, the opening of a new geographical world, and the
great religious changes of the Reformation,—a period commencing with the
Renaissance, and closed by the creation of modern philosophy;—we shall
find two principal movements of unbelief for investigation, the one caused
by literature, a return to a spirit of heathenism analogous to that
already described in Julian; the second caused by philosophy, a revival of
pantheism. The first belonged especially to the close of the fifteenth
century, and had its seat for the most part in Tuscany and Rome; the
second to the sixteenth, and was represented in the university of Padua.
In both these movements, especially in the former, the open expression of
unbelief in literature is rare, though the incidental proofs of its
existence are abundant. It was a time of the dissolution of faith, not of
overt attack. Unbelief was Epicurean indifference, rather than earnestness
in destroying the old creed.
Two of the most obvious proofs that we can select for proving the
existence of a state of unbelief(302) are, the ridicule of religion
expressed in the burlesque poetry of the time, and the antichristian
sympathies of several distinguished men.