CHRISTIANITY AND SCHOLASTICISM.
1. THE CHRISTIAN IDEA.—The Grecian intellectual life at the time of its
fairest bloom, was characterized by the immediate sacrifice of the
subject to the object (nature, the state, &c.): the full breach between
the two, between spirit and nature, had not yet arrived; the subject had
not yet so far reflected upon himself that he could apprehend his own
absolute worth. This breach came in, with the decay of Grecian life, in
the time after Alexander the Great. As the objective world lost its
influence, the thinking consciousness turned back upon itself; but even
in this very process, the bridge between subject and object was broken
down. The self-consciousness had not yet become sufficiently absorbed in
itself to look upon the true, the divine, in any other light than as
separate from itself, and belonging to an opposite world; while a
feeling of pain, of unsatisfied desire, took the place of that fair
unity between spirit and nature which had been peculiar to the better
periods of the Grecian civil and artistic life. New Platonism, by its
overleaping speculation, and, practically, by its mortification of the
sense, made a last and despairing attempt to overcome this separation,
or to bury itself within it, by bringing the two sides forcibly
together. The attempt was in vain, and the old philosophy, totally
exhausted, came to its end. Dualism is therefore the rock on which it
split. This problem, thus left without a solution, Christianity took up.
It assumed for its principle the idea which the ancient thinking had not
known how to carry out, affirming that the separation between God and
man might be overcome, and that the human and the divine could be united
in one. The speculative fundamental idea of Christianity is, that God
has become incarnate, and this had its practical exhibition (for
Christianity was a practical religion) in the idea of the atonement and
the demand of the new birth, _i. e._ the positive purifying of the sense
from its corruptions, instead of holding it, as asceticism, in a merely
negative relation.
From the introduction of Christianity, monism has been the character and
the fundamental tendency of the whole modern philosophy. In fact, the
new philosophy started from the very point at which the old had stood
still. The turning of the self-consciousness upon itself, which was the
standpoint of the post-Aristotelian speculations, forms in Descartes the
starting-point of the new philosophy, whose whole course has been the
reconciling of that opposition beyond which the old could not pass.
2. SCHOLASTICISM.—It very early resulted that Christianity came in
contact with the cotemporaneous philosophy, especially with Platonism.
This arose first with the apologists of the second century, and the
fathers of the Alexandrian church. Subsequently, in the ninth century,
Scotus Erigena made an attempt to combine Christianity with New
Platonism, though it was not till the second half of the Middle Ages,
from the eleventh century, that there was developed any thing that might
be properly termed a Christian philosophy. This was the so-called
Scholasticism.
The effort of Scholasticism was to mediate between the dogma of religion
and the reflecting self-consciousness; to reconcile faith and knowledge.
When the dogma passed over into the schools from the Church which had
given it utterance, and theology became a science of the universities,
the scientific interest asserted its rights, and undertook to bring the
dogma which had hitherto stood over against the self-consciousness as an
external power, into a closer relation to the thinking subject. A series
of attempts was now made to bring out the doctrines of the Church in the
form of scientific systems (the first complete dogmatic system was given
by _Peter Lombard_, who died 1164, in his four books of sentences, and
was voluminously commented upon by the later Scholastics), all starting
from the indisputable premise (beyond which scholastic thinking never
reached), that the faith of the church is absolute truth; but all guided
likewise by the interest to make this revealed truth intelligible, and
to show it to be rational. “_Credo ut intelligam_”—this expression of
_Anselm_, the beginner and founder of Scholasticism (he was born about
1034, and made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093), was the watchword of
this whole direction. Scholasticism applied to the solution of its
problem the most remarkable logical acumen, and brought out systems of
doctrine like the Gothic cathedrals in their architecture. The extended
study of Aristotle, called _par eminence_ “the philosopher,” whom many
of the most distinguished Scholastics wrote commentaries upon, and who
was greatly studied at the same period among the Arabians (_Avicenna_
and _Averroes_), furnished their terminology and most of their points of
view. At the summit of Scholasticism we must place the two incontestably
greatest masters of the Scholastic art and method, _Thomas Aquinas_
(Dominican, who died 1274) and _Duns Scotus_ (Franciscan, who died
1308), the founders of two schools, in which since their time the whole
Scholastic theology divides itself—the former exalting the understanding
(_intellectus_), and the latter the will (_voluntas_), as their highest
principle, both being driven into essentially differing directions by
this opposition of a theoretical and a practical principle. Even with
this began the downfall of Scholasticism; its highest point was also the
turning-point to its self-destruction. The rationality of the dogma, the
oneness of faith and knowledge, had been constantly their fundamental
premise; but this premise fell away, and the whole basis of their
metaphysics was given up in principle, the moment Duns Scotus placed the
problem of theology in the practical. When the practical and the
theoretical became divided, and still more when thought and being were
separated by Nominalism (_cf._ 3), philosophy broke loose from theology
and knowledge from faith; knowledge assumed its position above faith and
above authority (modern philosophy), and the religious consciousness
broke with the traditional dogma (the Reformation).
3. NOMINALISM AND REALISM.—Hand in hand with the whole development of
Scholasticism, there was developed the opposition between Nominalism and
Realism, an opposition whose origin is to be found in the relation of
Scholasticism to the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. The
Nominalists were those who held that the conceptions of the universal
(the universalia) were simple names, _flatus vocis_, representations
without content and without reality. According to them there are no
universal conceptions, no species, no class; every thing which is,
exists only as separate in its pure individuality; there is, therefore,
no pure thinking, but only a representation and sensuous perception. The
Realists, on the other hand, taking pattern from Plato, held fast to the
objective reality of the universals (_universalia ante rem_). These
opposite directions appeared first between _Roscellinus_, who took the
side of Nominalism, and _Anselm_, who advocated the Realistic theory,
and it is seen from this time through the whole period of Scholasticism,
though from the age of _Abelard_ (born 1079) a middle view, which was
both Nominalistic and Realistic, held with some slight modifications the
prominent place (_universalia in re_). According to this view the
universal is only something thought and represented, though as such it
is not simply a product of the representing consciousness, but has also
its objective reality in objects themselves, from which it was argued we
could not abstract it if it were not essentially contained in them. This
identity of thought and being, is the fundamental premise on which the
whole dialectic course of the Scholastics rests. All their arguments are
founded on the claim, that that which has been syllogistically proved is
in reality the same as in logical thinking. If this premise is
overthrown, so falls with it the whole basis of Scholasticism; and there
remains nothing more for the thinker to do, who has gone astray in his
objectivity, but to fall back upon himself. This self-dissolution of
Scholasticism actually appears with _William of Occam_ (died 1347), the
most influential reviver of that Nominalism which had been so mighty in
the beginning of Scholasticism, but which now, more victorious against a
decaying than then against a rising form of culture, plucked away its
foundation from the framework of Scholastic dogmatism, and brought the
whole structure into inevitable ruin.