The Age of Reason - D. J. Medley (free novels .txt) 📗

of precious time, but an actual snare of the devil. Thus Bernard stood for all that was most uncompromising in the theological attitude of the time. Speculative discussion was an abomination; for the end of conversation was spiritual edification, not the advancement of knowledge; and what to strong minds might be mental gymnastics, in the case of weaker brethren caused the undermining of their faith. Against heretics of the commoner sort, such as the Petrobrusians, who impugned the whole system of the Church and appealed to the mere words of Scripture, there was only one line to be taken. But Bernard was no persecutor. During his preaching of the Crusade a monk perverted the popular excitement to an attack upon the Jews in the cities of the Rhineland: Bernard peremptorily interfered and crushed the rival preacher. Similarly with heretics. He trusted to his preaching—attested, as it was commonly supposed, by miracles—to convince the people; while the leaders when captured were subjected to monastic discipline.

[Sidenote: Abailard.]

But such popular forms of unbelief were merely the outcome of the speculations of subtler minds, which it was necessary to stop at the fountain-head. The arch-heretic of the time was Peter Abailard, who routed in succession two great teachers—William of Champeaux in dialectic in the great cathedral school of Paris, and Anselm of Laon, a pupil of Anselm of Canterbury, in theology. He gathered round him on the Mount of Ste. Geneviève, just outside Paris, a large band of students, in whom he inculcated his rationalistic methods. For his was a definite attempt to obtain by reason a basis for his faith. How could such teaching be allowed to continue unreproved by Bernard, who held that the sole office of the reason was to lead the mind astray? But in the height of his fame Abailard, still quite young, loved the beautiful and erudite Heloise. He abused her trust, and when she in her infatuation for his genius refused to monopolise for herself by marriage the talents which were for the service of the world, she and he both entered the monastic life. Abailard passed through several phases of this—a monk at St. Denys; a hermit gradually gathering a band of admirers round a church which they built and he dedicated to the Third Person of the Trinity, the Paraclete; and finally the abbot of a poor monastery in his own native Brittany. While an inmate of St. Denys a work of his on the Trinity was condemned at a Council at Soissons presided over by the papal legate (1121). It was twenty years before he was again subjected to the censures of the Church. But, meanwhile, he had more than once fallen foul of Bernard, and had not hesitated to flout with his gibes the one man before whom the whole of Catholic Europe bent in awestruck reverence. But the time came when Bernard, noting the spread of the Petrobrusian heresy, determined to strike at the source of these errors. He appealed for assistance to the friends of orthodoxy from the Pope downwards. Abailard determined to anticipate attack and desired to be heard before an assembly to be held at Sens (1140). Bernard reluctantly consented to take part in a public controversy. But when they met, Abailard, probably feeling himself surrounded by an unsympathetic audience, suddenly refused to speak and appealed to the Pope. On his way to Rome he fell ill at Cluny, where the saintly abbot, Peter the Venerable, received him as a monk. He made a confession which chiefly amounted to a regret that he had used words open to misconstruction, and he died in 1142 the inmate of a Cluniac house.

Bernard remained upon the alert, intent on checking any further spread of the teaching of Abailard's followers. But he had pushed matters to an extreme, and there were many in high place who resented his efforts to dictate the doctrine of the Church. Thus Gilbert de la Porrée, Bishop of Poictiers, a pupil of Abailard, was accused at the Council of Rheims (1148) of erroneous doctrines regarding the being of God and the Sacraments. Bernard tried to use his influence over Pope Eugenius in order to procure the bishop's condemnation, and stirred up the French clergy to assist him. The Cardinals addressed an indignant remonstrance to the Pope, pointing out that as he owed his elevation from a private position to the papacy to them, he belonged to them rather than to himself, that he was allowing private friendship to interfere with public duty, and that "that abbot of yours" and the Gallican Church were usurping the function of the See of Rome. Bernard had to explain away the action of his party, and the Council contented itself with exacting from the accused a general agreement with the faith of the Roman Church, and this was represented by Gilbert's friends as a triumph.

Bernard's death restored the leadership of Christendom to the official head, and the removal of several others of the chief actors of the time opened the way not only for new men, but for the emergence of new questions. In 1152 Conrad III ended his well-intentioned but somewhat ineffectual reign. In 1153 Pope Eugenius died at Rome, to which he had at length been restored a few months previously. Six weeks later St. Bernard followed him to the grave. It was not long before the papal act ratified the general opinion of Christendom, and in 1174 Alexander III placed his name among those which the Church desired to have in everlasting remembrance.

CHAPTER VII THE SCHOOLMEN AND THEOLOGY

[Sidenote: Secular Studies.]

Mediaeval learning, whether sacred or secular, was founded upon authority. The Scholasticus, who took the place of the ancient Grammaticus, was not an investigator, but merely an interpreter. On the one side the books of the sacred Scriptures as interpreted by the Fathers were the rule of faith; on the other side as the guide of reason stood the works of the Philosopher, as Aristotle was called in the Middle Ages. But until the thirteenth century few of his works were known, and those only in Latin translations. Here were the materials, slight enough, on which hung future development. The secular knowledge taught in the ordinary schools was that represented by the division of the Seven Arts into the elementary Trivium of Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, followed by the Quadrivium of Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy. The scope of the Trivium was much wider than the terms denote. Thus Grammar included the study of the classical Latin authors, which never entirely ceased; Rhetoric comprised the practice of composition in prose and verse, and even a knowledge of the elements of Roman Law; Dialectic or Logic became the centre of the whole secular education, because it was the only intellectual exercise which was supposed to be independent of pagan writers. In the Quadrivium—the scientific education of the time—Arithmetic and Astronomy were taught for the purpose of calculating the times of the Christian festivals; Music consisted chiefly of the rules of plain-song. It was the subjects of the Quadrivium which were subsequently enlarged in scope by the discoveries of the twelfth century. Apart from these subjects little attempt was made at a systematic training in theology. In so far as any such existed it was purely doctrinal, and aimed merely at enabling those in Holy Orders to read the Bible and the Fathers for themselves and to expound them to others.

[Sidenote: Scholasticism.]

Now the speculative intellect trained in dialectic had no material to work upon save what could be got from the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the dogmas of the Church; and Scholasticism is the name given to the attempt to apply the processes of logic to the systematisation and the interpretation of the Catholic faith. The movement was one which, narrow as it seems to us, yet made for ultimate freedom of human thought; for it meant the exercise of the intellect on matters which for long were regarded as beyond the reach of rationalistic explanation. There was much difference of opinion among the thinkers as to the limits to be assigned to such freedom of speculation on the mysteries of the faith, some starting from the standpoint of idealists and endeavouring to avoid the logical consequences of their speculations; while others, adopting so far as possible a position of pure empiricism, set tradition at defiance, and hoped by the aid of reason to reach the conclusions of divine revelation.

[Sidenote: Realists and Nominalists.]

The philosophical problem to which the mediæval thinkers addressed themselves is one that it is essential to the progress of human thought to solve. Whence do we derive general notions (Universals, as they were called), and do they correspond to anything which actually exists? Thus for the purpose of classifying our knowledge we use certain terms, such as genera, species, and others more technical. Do these in reality exist independently of particular individuals or substances? One school of philosophers, basing their reasoning upon Plato, maintained that such general ideas had a real existence of their own, and hence gained the name of Realists. But another school, who took Aristotle as their champion, held that reality can be asserted of the individual alone, that there is nothing real in the general idea except the name by which it is designated; while some of these Nominalists, as they came to be called, even proclaimed that the parts of an individual whole were mere words, and could not be considered as having an existence of their own. With the application of these definitions to theological dogmas we reach the beginning of Scholastic Theology. Here both sides were soon landed in difficulties. Nominalism, in its denial of reality to general notions, undermined the Catholic idea of the Church: in its recognition of none except individuals it destroyed the whole conception of the solidarity of original sin; while those of its professors who allowed no existence of their own to the parts of an individual whole, resolved the Trinity into three Gods. On the other hand, the danger of Realism was that, since individuals were regarded merely as forms or modes of some general idea, these philosophers were inclined to make no distinction between individuals and to fall into pantheism. As a result, the personality of man, and with it the immortality of the soul, disappeared, and even the personality of God threatened to lose itself in the universe which He had created. These tendencies will be clear from a short account of the chief schoolmen or writers on Scholastic Philosophy.

[Sidenote: Roscelin and Anselm.]

The first great names are those of Roscelin and Anselm of Canterbury. Roscelin (between 1050 and 1125), primarily a dialectician, rigidly applied his logic to theological dogmas. If we may judge from the accounts of his opponents, Anselm and Abailard, he took up a position of extreme individualism and denied reality alike to a whole and to the parts of which any whole is commonly said to be composed. The application of this principle to the doctrine of the Trinity landed him in tritheism, and he did not shrink from the reproach. Roscelin, a theologian by accident, was answered by Anselm who was primarily a theologian, and a dialectician by accident. If Roscelin was the founder of Nominalism Anselm identified Realism with the doctrine of the Church. But Anselm's Realism is not the result of independent thought. In his methods he has been rightly styled the "last of the Fathers." His keynote was Belief in the Christian faith as the road to understanding it. Thus his object was to give to the dogmas accepted by the Church a philosophical demonstration. To him Realism was the orthodox philosophical doctrine because it was the one most in harmony with Christian theology. He applied philosophical arguments to the explanation of those tenets of the faith which later scholastic writers placed among the mysteries to be accepted without question.

[Sidenote: Abailard.]

The reputed founder of definite Realism was William of Champeaux (1060-1121), a pupil of Roscelin himself, a teacher at Paris, and ultimately Bishop of Chalons. By the account of his enemy Abailard, he held an uncompromising Realism which maintained that the Universal was a substance or thing which was present in its entirety in each individual. It was the presence of such crude Realism as this which gave his opportunity to the greatest teacher of this early period of Scholasticism, Peter Abailard (1079-1142). A pupil of both Roscelin and William of Champeaux—the two extremes of Nominalism and Realism—he aimed in his teaching at arriving at a via media to which subsequent writers have given the name Conceptualism. According to him the individual is the only true substance, and the genus is that which is asserted of a number of individuals; it is therefore a name used as a sign—a concept, although he does not use the word. Thus he does not condemn the Realistic theory borrowed from Plato, of Universals as having an existence of their own; he regards them as ideas or exemplars which