FROM JUSTINIAN TO LUTHER

XIII

SOME SCHOOLMEN

 

THE philosophic and theological systems of the Middle Ages have received the name of Scholasticism from the cathedral and monastic schools in which they originated. With the exception of John Scotus Erigena, the first writers and teachers of the Carolingian age were of a practical turn of mind. But in the eleventh century practical interests gave way to a pure love of science, and scholars strove to give a perfectly logical form to the doctrines of the Church. Soon after 1100 we already find a sharp distinction between two different schools of thought, the Nominalists and the Realists, though some germs of their different theories can be found in the ninth century. The Nominalists maintained that 'general notions' or 'universals' are mere abstractions of the understanding, to which we give names in order to describe the qualities of particular things. The Realists held that these 'universals' have a substantial reality, they are objective ideal existences before and apart from human thinking, and are more real than individual things. The universals were believed to inhere in the individuals and to constitute their 'form' or essence. Thus, according to the Realists, humanity is real; according to the Nominalists men are real, each man is real, but humanity is not real. The difference was one of serious importance, for Realism was linked with a spiritual view of the universe, and Nominalism with an unspiritual view, and might fairly be described as skeptical and rationalistic in tendency, if not in intention.

Roscellinus (d.c. 1125) represented this rationalistic school of thought and his tritheistic doctrine concerning the Trinity was opposed by St. Anselm, whose guiding principle in the philosophy of religion was 'Believe in order that you may understand'. Condemned at Reims, Roscellinus was received at Rome and then returned to teach in France. Nearly contemporary with him we find several notable Schoolmen. Among the most important of them were John of Salisbury and Peter Abelard, a pupil of Roscellinus.

John of Salisbury, an Englishman who became Bishop of Chartres, may be called a forerunner of the Renaissance of the next century. He is an Academician and reproduces the style and thought of Cicero. He is a Christian humanist, believing that the love of God is the true philosophy. But he hesitates to make affirmations where he sees no absolute certainty: he is cautious and knows that we must often be content with probabilities.

The celebrated Abelard (1079-1142) was a thinker of a different type. He was a born fighter. The basis of his doctrine was Nominalist, and he had assimilated the Aristotelian theory of knowledge more completely than any of his contemporaries. He compelled his Parisian teacher, William of Champeaux, to change his views, and he then proceeded to attack another distinguished teacher, Anselm of Laon. He left Laon for Paris, where his lectures on theology and philosophy enjoyed an extraordinary vogue. At this time he seduced and was secretly married to the beautiful and talented Heloise. For his sake she unselfishly denied the marriage, while he was cruelly mutilated in a way which disqualified him for ecclesiastical preferment. He fled to the monastery of St. Denis, but had to leave it when he maliciously announced the historical fact that St. Denis of Paris was not Dionysius the Areopagite. He next lived for a short time at an oratory named the Paraclete, leaving it to become abbot of a monastery in Brittany; he again lectured in Paris, and was excommunicated by Pope Innocent II. He found a refuge with the Abbot, Peter the Venerable, of Cluny, who not only effected a reconciliation of Abelard with Bernard, but obtained permission from the Pope for him to pass his last days in peace at Cluny. He died in 1142 near Chalon-sur-Saône whither he had gone in quest of health. His remains were carried off in secrecy to the Paraclete, where Heloise was laid to rest in 1164. Their bones still lie united in the cemetery of Père-la-Chaise.

Abelard's influence, both during his life and in later days, has been the result rather of his force of character than of any originality of ideas. The notion that he was an apostle of free thought who deliberately intended to wreck the principle of authority must be seriously questioned. It cannot be denied that in opposing the tritheism of Roscellinus he taught a Sabellian doctrine of the Trinity, and his doctrine of the Atonement fails to do justice to the propitiatory character of Christ's death. But he wished to understand in order that he might believe. And his famous Sic et Non, in which he put together the conflicting opinions of the Fathers, was written to promote the solution of religious problems, and not the dissolution of faith. He says, “I do not want to be a philosopher by contradicting St. Paul, nor to be an Aristotle so as to separate from Christ”. The extent of his learning was not vast, but what he studied he studied deeply; his mind was penetrating and his dialectic was formidable.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) was Abelard's most persistent antagonist. He was genuinely disturbed by the effects of Abelard's teaching. The discussions which had begun in the schools were now taken up in the universities, where famous teachers were able to gather together large and enthusiastic bands of followers. And his letters are full of lament over the loss of faith arising from attempts to apply the canons of our limited reason to truths which in a great measure belong to a sphere beyond our grasp. Abelard, he maintains, is suspicious of God's word, and his disciples debate in the streets about the Virgin birth of Christ and the Sacrament of the altar. The arguments on such questions were not very different then from what they are now; and the uniformity of nature was invoked with equal assurance by the skeptics, though impressed upon the student's imagination with less wealth of detail than in modern times.

Bernard was a man of fervent faith and the most eminent mystical writer of this period. He inaugurated a spiritual movement which can be traced through the Middle Ages to the Reformation and beyond it. Without excluding philosophy from religion, he expresses his own conviction when he says, “My philosophy is to know Jesus and Jesus crucified”. The way to truth is Christ, and the principal thing in the teaching of Christ is humility. It is the virtue by which a man knows what he is himself and feels compassion for his neighbor, and so rises through sorrow for his sins to the contemplation of God. The Bible was his favorite reading, and his theology was a theology of the heart.

Hugo of St. Victor (d. 141) and his pupil Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173) tried from the side of mysticism to bridge the gulf between those who subordinated faith to reason and those who believed that faith is the surest path to truth. The former writer was very highly esteemed as a ripe scholar and deep thinker, and is placed by Dante among the great teachers of the Church. Side by side with a mystical reaction from the philosophy and somewhat perverted logic of the time, we find the production of learned summaries of the content of the Christian faith. Such books were written by Hugo of St. Victor himself, Robert Pullen of Oxford, who was admired by Bernard, and Peter Lombard, whose work remained for centuries a popular text-book of the schools and won for its author the title of Magister Sententiarum. But the speculative impulse was nearly exhausted by the middle of the twelfth century, and the mystics were devoting themselves to preaching and edification. A momentous change was at hand. After an interval of about half a century there came a new development of Scholasticism. It was the result of a knowledge of the complete works of Aristotle, transmitted by the Muslims and the Jews of Spain.

Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), an English archdeacon who studied and lectured in Paris and entered the order of St. Francis, was the first Schoolman who knew all the Aristotelian writings and applied the forms of Peripatetic philosophy to the elaboration of the doctrinal system of the Church. His ponderous Summa Theologiae, which Roger Bacon declared to be equal in weight to one horse, was recommended highly by Pope Alexander IV and a Roman Conclave, and it caused the Franciscans to give him the name of Doctor Irrefragabilis. It is not a book of great intrinsic value, but it is of real historical importance as marking a new stage in human knowledge. And Alexander of Hales had the honor of teaching St. Bonaventura, whom he described as 'an Israelite indeed, in whom Adam appears not to have sinned'.

It was, however, the Dominican order, and not the Franciscan, which succeeded in effecting the great revolution of which Alexander of Hales was the forerunner. The men who did this work were Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas. They presented to the world a synthesis which combined all that revelation called men to believe and all that the reason allowed them to comprehend. Before this synthesis was made, the philosophers were dialecticians who had derived from Aristotle instruments for argument, but had little matter concerning which to argue. The theologians employed the same methods of discussion, although their theology remained in its essence the Christian Platonism of St. Augustine. But when the Physics, Metaphysics, and Ethics of Aristotle were assimilated, there came a change. A clearer distinction became drawn between philosophy and theology, between what can be demonstrated and what cannot, and a new importance became attached to the experience of the senses. It became necessary to observe nature as it is.

It is in this realm of nature that Albertus Magnus (d. 128o) recognized the authority of Aristotle, and in his appeal to Aristotle and the Greeks he liberated human reason by simultaneously restricting and enlarging its domain. It was his deliberate purpose 'to make intelligible to the Latins' the treasures of knowledge accumulated by the Greeks and by their Arab and Jewish disciples. It has been well said that in his works they can be discovered like unpolished precious stones, stones which were to gain from the Latin genius of St. Thomas a brilliance and a setting which were not given to them by the German intellect of Albertus. His knowledge of physical science is considerable. And in spite of inconsistencies, his immense industry and his protracted study of Aristotle gave him a real power in digesting and expounding the philosophy of the great master and remodeling it for Christian use. He studied at Padua and Bologna, and lectured with great success at Cologne, Strasbourg, and Paris. In 1254 he became Provincial of the Dominicans and in 126o the Pope made him Bishop of Regensburg. He was an efficient provincial and an active preacher. Among his voluminous writings is a commentary on St. John and a criticism of the Muslim Averroes. His principal theological works are a commentary on the Book of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and his own Summa Theologiae, which shows the influence of both Peter Lombard and Alexander of Hales.

 

St. Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274) entered into the labors of his teacher Albertus, and may be regarded as the incarnation of medieval Christian philosophy. Born of a noble family at Rocca Secca, he was taught as a child in the monastery of Monte Cassino, and as a lad at the university of Naples. There, against the wishes of his family, he assumed the habit of St. Dominic in his seventeenth year. He then studied under Albertus at Cologne and at Paris, and became under Albertus second lecturer at Cologne. He then returned to Paris in 1252 to win his doctor's degree, and lived in intimate friendship with St. Bonaventura. He threw himself into the controversy raging between the Dominicans and the University of Paris with regard to the liberty of teaching; and it was not until 1257, when the opposition of the university to the mendicant orders had been overcome, that the two friends obtained the degree of doctor. Urban IV recalled him to Italy in 1261, and he taught successively in Rome, Bologna, Pisa, and Naples. He died on March the 7th, 1274, on his way to the second general Council of Lyons.

His works cover an enormous ground and illustrate the gradual travail of his mind. The Commentary on the Sentences manifests his thought in process of formation, influenced by Augustinian views which he afterwards abandoned. The Commentaries on Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius show two great sources on which he drew for his philosophy and his theology. The Summa Theologiae shows us his own philosophy in a form adapted to beginners. And the Summa contra Gentiles contains the same doctrine, but with an exhaustive discussion of the problems briefly solved in the Summa Theologiae.

To the contemporaries of St. Thomas the influx of new knowledge seemed to certify the truth of doctrines incompatible with the faith of the Church, and it was therefore necessary to distinguish reason and faith more carefully and to render to each its real due. St. Thomas knew what a proof is when it is solely rational, and, because he knew, he denied the possibility of demonstrating the doctrine of the Trinity or the creation of the world in time as opposed to its creation in eternity. The universe is distinct from God and has a perfect and intelligent cause, but reason does not, like revelation, tell us that it had a beginning in time. The demonstration of the existence of God is necessary and possible; and in the things of sense, that is, things whose nature is proportionate to our own, we can find a point from which our minds can rise upward to God. He is the summit of a series of causes of which the base is the reality of things perceived by the senses. The forms of things created, the ideas of things, exist in the thought of God, they are the knowledge which He has of a possible participation in His perfection on the part of things created. Our knowledge is not capable of reaching directly to the supreme good; but by a constant effort of the intellect and by choosing the things that are in necessary connection with that good, we can reach a real beatitude here, and divine that which we may reach hereafter. Now, this reduction of our knowledge of God to a knowledge which begins with the senses appeared to be directly opposed to the mystical belief that man can have direct evidence and clear intuitions of God's existence and God's presence. It might seem a dry theory to men who were conscious of an abiding “unction from the Holy One”. But it was the teaching of a man who was not only a great thinker but also a fervent saint and poet. If St. Thomas had not that passion for conformity with the Crucified that we find in St. Francis, he devoted his life to the contemplation of God, and his Eucharistic hymns are among the most precious jewels of medieval devotion.

It is to be regretted that he was ignorant of Greek, and he defended the authority of the Pope against the Greeks by quotations from the usual forgeries then current in Western Christendom.

 

Roger Bacon (1214-1294) was not only one of the most distinguished members of the Franciscan order, but also a great man in an age of great men. Popular English tradition came to regard him as a combination of the magician and the mechanician. And it is true that, like a child of his age, he believed in astrology and the philosopher's stone: and it is also true that he describes the method of constructing a telescope. But he was first of all a wise and learned man who perceived the folly of deserting the Scriptures for the works of Peter Lombard and of cultivating physical science by arguments which ignored research. His Oxford teachers gave him a bent in the direction of positive science and the knowledge of languages; he took the degree of Doctor of Theology at Paris, and returned to England about 125o. He then spent most of his time in Oxford, but his lectures roused the suspicion of his Franciscan superiors, and about 1257 he was sent back to Paris, where he was kept under strict supervision and endured great hardships. Help came to him from an unexpected quarter. In 1265 Guy de Foulques, who had acted as papal legate in England, became Pope with the name of Clement IV. He wrote to Bacon ordering him, notwithstanding any injunctions of his superiors, to send him a treatise on the sciences concerning which he had inquired when legate.

In spite of the want of money and other materials, Bacon in two years' time sent to the Pope two works, the Opus Majus and the Opus Minus, and began an Opus Tertium. These large works were regarded by him as introductions leading to a greater work embracing the principles of all the sciences. But these with his other writings reveal to us a keen thinker exposing the sources of error, outlining the relation between philosophy and theology, insisting on the necessity of acquiring foreign languages, and the importance of mathematics and of experimental knowledge. For a time Bacon enjoyed a breathing space in Oxford, but in 1278 his books were condemned by Jerome of Ascoli, the general of the Franciscan order, and he was again imprisoned. He was free once more in 1292 and probably died in Oxford in 1294.

 

Duns Scotus, probably a native of Scotland, became a member of the Franciscan order about 129o, studied in Oxford and Paris, and died in Cologne in 1308. He was one of the most original thinkers that Oxford has produced. An Aristotelian who had learned much from St. Thomas, he was also deeply influenced by the Augustinianism of the Franciscans and the scientific methods which had been taught by Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. With him philosophy and theology have fewer points of contact than with St. Thomas, and he makes a sharper distinction between reason and revelation. He lays the utmost stress upon the primacy of the will in both God and man, though he regards Infinity as the most essential attribute of God. To him the fact that will controls the acts of the intelligence, and is the first cause of the act, is proof of the supremacy of the will. Even when the choice of an act seems to be the irresistible result of the knowledge that we have of an object, the will is wholly responsible for the choice that is made. He repeatedly criticizes St. Thomas. And though his work is less magnificently harmonious than that of the great Dominican, he surpasses him in force and originality. The manner in which he balances together the doctrine of God's transcendence and the doctrine of His creative will, and his elucidation of certain aspects of Christ's Person, helped to safeguard some essentially Christian ideas against a mischievous logic. He was fitly named Doctor Subtilis.

Henceforth the Dominicans and the Franciscans were opposed as respectively the followers of Thomas and the followers of Scotus. The Franciscans tended to be critical and progressive, whereas the Dominicans, after the revolution effected by Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas, became conservative and the friends of tradition.

The differences between the Thomists and the Scotists extended to almost every branch of theology and intimately touched the questions of grace and sin, predestination and free will. St. Thomas, in dealing with these great questions, remained in line with the teaching of St. Augustine. The Scotists were nearer to Pelagianism. St. Thomas, like St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and many others, held that although the Blessed Virgin committed no sin, she was not conceived immaculate. Duns Scotus held that she was even in her conception free from the taint of original sin, and this theory became a darling doctrine of the Franciscans. It was erected into a dogma in 1854 by Pope Pius IX after considerable discussion and a good many misgivings. In the sixteenth century the Council of Trent strove to keep the balance between Thomists and Scotists, but inclined on the whole towards the former. The influence of the two schools can be clearly traced in the intellectual movements of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and the late medieval revival of Nominalism left its mark on Socinianism, the left wing of the theological revolt against Rome.

In spite of the differences by which they were divided, the Thomists and the Scotists were alike Realists, and for a time checked the advance of Nominalism. But the last stage of medieval philosophy was marked by a revival of Nominalism in a militant form. This revival was mainly the work of the English Franciscan William of Occam (d. c. 1349). It became widely influential, and the last of the medieval Schoolmen, Gabriel Biel (d. 1495), a professor of Tubingen, was a Nominalist. The Realists of this later period called themselves Antiqui, while the Nominalists, who prided themselves on being Moderni, showed remarkable points of contact with some modern modes of religious thought.

Occam's method proceeded on the supposition that logic deals not with things nor with thoughts, but with terms arbitrarily imposed by ourselves. Words are signs of thoughts which are signs of something else, but the relations between words and thoughts, thoughts and things, are all imperfect; and when we use certain terms we neither assert nor prove anything as to the relations aforesaid. Occam believed the Realists to be quite wrong in thinking that there is a real universal or common element in all the individuals of one class, for the individual thing is the only reality, whether it be in the outward world or in the world of mind. He distrusted abstractions and laid stress upon the objects of immediate perception. Further, Occam made a complete severance between philosophy and theology. He denied that any doctrines are rationally demonstrable. Reason can only bring forward probabilities in their favor. Thus the unity and the infinity of God are more probable than a plurality of gods, but they cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless he accepted theological truths because they are revealed: they are certain from the point of view of faith, and reason does not contradict them. Like Scotus, he held that morality is founded on the arbitrary will of God.

In all this theory of a twofold truth we can see a reaction against the great work of Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas, which was the reconciliation of reason and faith as 'two bells of one accord'. Occam, and others like him, were believers. But their belief was built upon the very skepticism from which it was intended to be a refuge. The result was that this theory of a two­fold truth was accepted by philosophers who had no love for any religion, and on the other hand by mystics who cared little for any systematic theology. We must now consider the splendid effort to reconstruct the relation between faith and reason that was made by a great ecclesiastic, Nicholas of Cusa.

 

One of the most attractive and interesting figures of the fifteenth century is Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). He was a man endowed with rare sagacity and a passionate love of truth. He detected as frauds the Donation of Constantine and the forged Decretals, and he anticipated Copernicus by maintaining the theory of the rotation of the earth. He was conspicuous at the Council of Basel, where he proposed a scheme for concord based on a recognition of the rights of both Pope and Council. He afterwards joined the papal party; but his honesty is beyond question, and as papal legate he carried out numerous reforms in Germany. He was a many-sided philosopher, and his writings prove him to be one of the finest representatives of later medieval thought. The word Unity may be called the motto of his aspirations. He was deeply dissatisfied with the scholastic Nominalism which separated faith and knowledge, for he believed that faith must be sustained by knowledge both new and old. And he desired to heal the divisions of Christendom by a reconciliation between the Greek and the Latin Church, hoping that Western thought might be renovated by contact with Greek culture.

His theology is influenced by Pythagorean and Platonic metaphysics. From these metaphysics he borrowed formulas to express his speculations on Christian doctrine. He gave to his principal treatise the title of Docta Ignorantia, holding that, like Socrates, we must start from the knowledge that we know nothing. The man who begins with this knowledge may find in the truths which his intellect first regards as contradictory a path towards the highest and most perfect unity. The One for which he seeks must be that in which all things find their meeting point, accident and substance, body and spirit, movement and repose. It must include the greatest and the least, the highest and the lowest. It harmonizes all. Yet are we right when we say It? Should we not rather speak of Him? Nicholas of Cusa seeks a positive constructive theology in which God will appear as uniting in himself that which is scattered in all creatures, and he seeks a negative transcendent theology which distinguishes God from His creatures. He has been accused of Pantheism, but it is very doubtful whether this charge can be substantiated, in spite of phrases that suggest it. A mystical element appears in his doctrine that among those who profess religion the highest class find their delight not in sensuous things like the lowest class, nor in the understanding like the intermediate class, but in a manner which transcends everything that sense and understanding can grasp.

The highest stage can be reached by the true believer in Christ. In his third book Nicholas shows how the absolute Being of God is presented to man in the Person of our Lord. In Him God and the world find their reciprocal mediation. In the universe, which is a limited image of God, there are not infinitely many degrees of concrete being; and the universe therefore does not exhaust the absolutely greatest power of God. If we were to think of the greatest as existing concretely in a determinate species, it would in reality be all that lies within the whole possibility of that species: it would be its highest possible perfection. It would be both creature and God, the perfection of a determinate species and the absolute maximum. Now Man has the most relationship with the totality of being, and therefore is the best fitted of all things for union with God. For this union it was necessary that the likeness in God, that is the Son, should unite with Man. Through this Son, and for Him, all things exist, and nothing can attain to higher perfection without this union of the human and the divine. It has appeared in the Person of Christ. In His Person and in His death He has made up and completed what is defective in all men. His perfect humanity remained throughout hypostatically united with His Deity. He rose again with a glorified immortal body that human nature might also rise to eternal life, and the mortal body become spiritual and indestructible. So He is both the centre and the completion of all creation.

A deep and devout religion is allied with these more metaphysical doctrines. The activity of faith consists in the inward union of the believer with Christ. The possibility of this union lies in the fact that in Christ is the most perfect humanity, and all men are in Him. Faith, which is developed by knowledge, is vitalized by love. As everything that lives loves life and every thinker loves thought, so we cannot have faith in Jesus as immortal life and perfect truth without loving Him. The Church is the mystical body of Christ, and through the Word and the sacraments is the medium of union with Him; and as diverse finite things, notwithstanding their plurality, are comprehended in the concrete unity of the universe, so Christians have their concrete unity in the Church.

Nicholas believed that man had been created for unity and redeemed for unity. He held that the eternal Word had taught all nations to feel after Him and one nation to be His special messenger, that his own inquiries and the inquiries of the philosophers were directed towards the same goal, and that one Book gives to all the assurance that those who seek will find.

With Nicholas of Cusa the age of medieval scholasticism and of medieval reform ends, and ends with dignity.