section of the reading and inquiring world. Its empire had visibly passed away-its authority was shaken. In its origin, in its objects, in its style, in its immeasurable dimensions, in its scholasticism in short, this all-ruling Theology had been monastic; it had grown up in cloisters and in schools. There, men of few wants, and those wants supplied by rich endowments, in the dignity which belonged to the acknowledged leading intellects of the age, could devote to such avocations their whole. undisturbed, undivided lives-lives, at least, in which nothing interfered with the quiet, monotonous, undistracting religious services. But Theology, before it would give up its tenacious hold on letters, must become secular; it must emancipate itself from scholasticism, from monasticism. It was not till after that first revolution that the emancipation of letters from theology was to come. a Our history, before it closes, must survey the immense, and, notwithstanding its infinite variety and complexity of detail, the harmonious edifice of Latin theology. We must behold its strife, at times successful, always obstinate, with philosophy-its active and skilful employment of the weapons of philosophy, of dialectics, against their master-its constant effort to be at once philosophy and theology; the irruption of tomes. That survey must of necessity be rapid, and, as rapid, imperfect; nor can I boast any extensive or profound acquaintance with these ponderous The two best guides which I have been able to find (both have read, studied, profited by their laborious predecessors) are Ritter, in the volumes of his Christliche Philosophie, which embrace this part of his history; and an excellent Treatise by M. Haureau, de la Philosophie Scolastique. Mémoire Couronné par l'Académie, 2 tomes, Paris, 1850. In England we have no guide. Dr. Hampden, who, from his article in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, on Thomas Aquinas, promised to be the English historian of this remarkable chapter in the history of the human mind, has sunk into a quiet Bishop. Aristotelism and of the Arabic philosophy, of which the Church did not at first apprehend all the perilous results, and in her pride supposed that she might bind them to her own service; the culmination of the whole. system in the five great schoolmen, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham. All this scholasticism was purely Latinno Teutonic element entered into the controversies of the philosophising theologians. In England, in Germany, the schools and the monasteries were Latin; the disputants spoke no other tongue. The theology which aspired to be philosophy would not condescend to, could not indeed as yet have found expression in, the undeveloped vulgar languages.b Our history has already touched on the remoter ancestors of the Scholastic theology, on the solitary Scotus Erigena, who stands as a lonely beacon in his dark and turbulent times, and left none, or but remote, followers. The philosophy of Erigena was what the empire of Charlemagne had been, a vast organisation, out of the wreck of which rose later schools. He was by anticipation or tradition (from him Berengar, as has been shown, drew his rationalising Eucharistic system), by his genius, by his Greek or Oriental acquirements, by his translation of the Pseudo-Dionysius, a Platonist, or more than a Platonist; at length by his own fearless fathoming onwards into unknown depths, a Pantheist. We have dwelt on Anselm, in our judgement the real parent of medieval theology-of that theology, which at the same time that it lets loose the reason, reins it in with a strong hand; on the intellectual insurrection, b"Die Philosophie des Mittelalters gehört nicht der Zeiten an wo das Deutsche Element die Herrschaft hatte, sie ist vorherschend Romanische Natur." -Ritter p. 37. too, under Abélard, and its suppression. Anselm's lofty enterprise, the reconciliation of divinity and philosophy, had been premature; it had ended in failure. Abelard had been compelled to submit his rebellious philosophy at the feet of authority. His fate for a time, to outward appearance at least, crushed the bold truths which lay hid in his system. Throughout the subsequent period theology and philosophy are contesting occasionally the bounds of their separate domains-bounds which it was impossible to mark with rigour and precision. Metaphysics soared into the realm of Theology; Theology when it came to Ontology, to reason on the being of God, could not but be metaphysical. At the same time, or only a few years later than Abélard, a writer, by some placed on a level, or even raised to superiority, as a philosophical thinker over Abélard, Gilbert de la Porée, through the abstruseness, perhaps obscurity of his teaching, the dignity of his position as Bishop, and his blameless character, was enabled to tread this border ground, if not without censure, without persecution. But below that transcendental region, in which the mind treated of Being in the abstract, of the primary elements of thought, of the very first conception of God, Theology, in her proper sphere, would not endure the presence of her dangerous rival. Theology, rightly so called, professed to be primarily grounded on the Scriptures, but on the Scriptures interpreted, commented on, supplemented by a succession of writers (the Fathers), by decrees of Councils, and what was called the authority of the Church. The ecclesiastical "L'entreprise de S. Anselme avait échoué; personne n'avait pu concilier la philosophie et la théologie."-Haureau, i. p. 318. law had now taken the abbreviated form of a code, rather a manual, under Ivo of Chartres. So Theology was to be cast into short authoritative sentences, which might be at once the subject and the rule of contro versy, the war-law of the schools. If Philosophy presumed to lay its profane hands on these subjects, it was warned off as trespassing on the manor of the Church. Logic might lend its humble ministrations to prove in syllogistic form those canonised truths; if it proceeded further, it became a perilous and proscribed weapon. Peter the Lombard was, as it were, the Euclid of this science. His sentences were to be the irrefragable axioms and definitions from which were to be deduced all the higher and more remote truths of divinity; on them the great theological mathematicians built what appeared their infallible demonstrations. Peter the Peter the Lombard was born near Novara, the native place of Lanfranc and of Anselm. He was Bishop of Paris in 1159. His famous book of the Sentences was intended to be, and became to a great extent, the Manual of the Schools. Peter knew not, or disdainfully threw aside, the philosophical cultivation of his day. He adhered rigidly to all which passed for Scripture, and was the authorised interpretation of the Scripture, to all which had become the creed in the traditions, and law in the decretals, of the Church. He seems to have no apprehension of doubt in his stern dogmatism; he will not recognise any of the difficulties suggested by philosophy; he cannot, or will not, perceive the weak points of his own system. He has the great merit that, opposed as he was to the prevailing Platonism, throughout the Sentences the ethical principle predominates; his excellence perspicuity, simplicity, definiteness of moral purpose. His distinctions are endless, subtle, idle; but he wrote from conflicting authorities to reconcile writers at war with each other, at war with themselves. Their quarrels had been wrought to intentional or unintentional antagonism in the "Sic et Non" of Abélard. That philosopher, whether Pyrrhonist or more than Pyrrhonist, had left them in all the confusion of strife; he had set Fathers against Fathers, each Father against himself, the Church against the Church, tradition against tradition, law against law. The Lombard announced himself and was accepted as the mediator, the final arbiter in this endless litigation; he would sternly fix the positive, proscribe the negative or sceptical view, in all these questions. The litigation might still go on, but within the limits which he had rigidly established; he had determined those ultimate results against which there was no appeal. The mode of proof might be interminably contested in the schools; the conclusion was already irrefragably fixed. On the sacramental system Peter the Lombard is loftily, severely hierarchical. Yet he is moderate on the power of the keys he holds only a declaratory power of binding and loosing-of showing how the souls of men were to be bound and loosed.d From the hard and arid system of Peter the Lombard the profound devotion of the Middle Ages took refuge in Mysticism. But it is an error to suppose Mysticism as the perpetual antagonist of Scholasticism; the Mystics were often severe Logicians; some Scholastics had all "Non autem hoc sacerdotibus concessit, quibus tamen tribuit potestatem solvendi et ligandi, i.e. ostendendi homines ligatos vel solutos." Quoted by Ritter, p. 499. Ritter's account of the Lombard appears to me, as compared with the Book of Sentences, so just and sagacious, that I have adopted implicitly his conclusions, to a certain extent his words. |