The
Creed and the Scriptures became the official source alike of law and of
wisdom.
Creed and the Scriptures became the official source alike of law and of
wisdom.
Cambridge Medieval History - v5 - Contest of Empire and the Papacy
” Whatever name be preferred, the momentous fact is that
monotheism, as an intellectual and moral doctrine, arose in philosophical
circles beyond the range of civic religion, and without reference to the
authority of the State.
## p. 781 (#827) ############################################
Character of Ancient Philosophy
781
The original stamp of philosophy was preserved with some difficulty
in the respectable circumstances of the Academy and the Lyceum. The
danger now was that a brotherhood of seekers after truth would degenerate
into a school of dialecticians. Philosophy languishes sadly as the trade
of professors and the sport of impertinent boys. From this fate it was
partly delivered in Greece by the march of political events. When the
career of Alexander put an end to the reality of the city-state, without
providing a substitute, less attraction was found henceforward in the
political life and more, therefore, in the theoretic. At the same time,
philosophy began to be Hellenistic rather than Hellenic. Zeno of Citium
was a portent of many things, and the tenets of Stoicism, though they
rang a little hollow at times, sounded further abroad than the voice of
the town-crier in Aristotle's diminutive metropolis. Philosophy grew
daily more like a religion, a refuge for the disconsolate and a guide for
the perplexed. Now when there is one religion derived from a philoso-
phical valuation of life, and another bound up with the State but unsup-
ported by theology, we have before us all the elements of a revolution
which sooner or later will overturn the world. What delayed the catas-
trophe in the ancient world was the scorn of philosophers for the vulgar
and the indifference of the State to theological speculation. It remains
to consider briefly the causes which brought this mutual disregard to an
end.
The single object of this hasty glance at the ancient world being to
secure the right line of approach to the medieval period, the story of
philosophy at Rome must be passed over, until the age when the old Latin
elements of culture are well nigh lost in a medley of Greek and Oriental
ideas. Never, perhaps, would the fortunes of philosophy have been united
with those of the imperial city but for the advent of Plotinus in the third
century and the eventual adoption of Neo-Platonism as the forlorn hope
of pagan civilisation against the onset of the Christian Church. The
story of the Church in its early generations has been related many times
and with many objects. Seldom has it been presented in one of its most
genuine aspects, as a struggle with rival philosophies at a time when the
call to a spiritual life was audible to all serious men. When the Christian
society escaped from the circle of Judaism and began to grasp the full
nature of its mission, there existed only two forces sufficiently universal
to compete with it for mastery of the world, Greek philosophy and Roman
Law. The Pagan cults cannot rank as a third and equal competitor.
Neither singly nor collectively did they embody an idea capable of welding
mankind into social coherence. The imperium, on the other hand, the
whole majestic apparatus of law and sovereignty, was a visible bond of
union, and behind it lay, to all appearance, irresistible force. Yet in the
end it was to prove easier for a Christian to mount the throne of the
Caesars than for the new doctrine of the Logos to prevail against its
philosophical rivals. The last and greatest victory of the Church was over
CH. XXIII.
## p. 782 (#828) ############################################
782
Philosophy and Theology
Neo-Platonism, when the spoils of the vanquished passed to the camp of
the victor, to be handed down as part of the armour of faith.
To set Christianity among the philosophies is not fanciful, so long as
we bear in mind that philosophy meant to the Greeks a way of life be-
longing to a particular society. When we read in the Acts of the Apostles
how Paul had once persecuted “this way,” or how the convert was taken
to be further instructed in “the way,” we hear a language long familiar
to Hellenes and easily intelligible to educated Romans. Where the Chris-
tian way differed patently from the others was in making its first appeal
to the simple and in its frank abhorrence of popular religion. For these
reasons it figures in Roman authors as a kind of odium humani generis
long before it was counted worthy of intellectual opposition. But by the
age of Plotinus and Porphyry that phase was concluded. Christianity
had now taken its place as one of the proffered ways of salvation, just as
Gnosticism of a kind was a second, and Neo-Platonism a third. In the school
of Plotinus we see the climax of the tendency to theologise philosophy,
and thus to fashion an exalted religion far removed from the superstitions
of the vulgar. To this conclusion ancient philosophy had grown steadily
nearer, and this was its final legacy to the Church. No greater fiction,
then, can well be alleged as history than the assertion that the Middle
Ages corrupted the nature of philosophy by confusing it with theological
doctrine. On the contrary, the attempted distinction between theology
and philosophy was a characteristic medieval invention. For not until
the last days of Paganism did the occasion for such discrimination
arise.
For philosophy, as for political history, the arresting figure of Julian
is full of significance. Sagacious enough to learn from the Church the
secret of victory, he sought to create a bond between the religion of the
many and the lofty speculations of the few. He failed because Neo-
Platonism, however refined as theology, possessed no means of trans-
lating itself into a rule for the humble. Its solitary implement, already
dull and rusty, was the allegorising of fable and myth. But the multitude,
as Plato had foreseen, could not be saved by hidden meanings. When we
read the last book of the last Ennead, we understand how the new faith
may have failed to touch Plotinus; but when we set the unvarnished
story of the Gospel side by side with any Pagan allegory, the contrast is
almost painfully absurd. Nevertheless, we may learn from the story of
Julian that, as Pagan philosophy had grown ever more theological, so the
Pagan State, under a Neo-Platonist Emperor, might almost have assumed
the character of an authoritative Church. To look at the same facts from
the Christian point of view, we see how the Church, by her double victory
over the imperium of Rome and the philosophy of Greece, committed
herself to the two great enterprises of the Middle Ages, the search for a
distinction between philosophy and theology, and the search for a way of
reconciling the temporal with the spiritual power. As soon as those two
## p. 783 (#829) ############################################
The medieval problems. The Latin world
783
problems are in being, we may know, in fact, that the Middle Ages have
begun. To the Middle Ages, also, it fell to discover, through much toil
and tribulation, that fundamentally the two problems are one.
For the student of philosophy the result of the successive blows which
shattered the Roman Empire is almost wholly comprised in the division
of civilisation into eastern and western halves. A prophet in the age of
Marcus Aurelius, or even of Trajan, might well have foretold a time when
Hellenism would have completely submerged the Latin elements of culture
carried westward by victorious generals as far as the British Isles. Whether
such a prophecy would ever have been fulfilled it is idle to speculate. The
fact remains that it was not. For the various reasons narrated by historians
there came the great reaction, when the tide of Hellenism rolled back
eastwards, bearing with it the treasures of culture as well as the imperial
throne. Even the greatest of Roman products, jurisprudence, appeared
to forsake its proper home; and while the great codification was being
accomplished at Byzantium, Roman Law in the West was becoming an
adjunct of persons rather than the voice of an independent and sovereign
society. In this cleavage of East and West there was nevertheless, a kind
of historical justice. For between the Greek and the Latin there was, and
is, a deep and abiding antagonism. The enthusiasm of Roman authors
for Hellenic models disguised that truth for antiquity, as the ambiguity
of the term “classical” has often obscured it for ourselves. Yet the fact
persisted, and one clear function of the Middle Ages was to make a new
revelation of latinitas, barely possible until the superior light of Hellas
was at least partially eclipsed. The contrast, perpetually recurring in
medieval authors, between Graeci and Latini does not rest upon differences
of nationality or race. The true line of demarcation was always the
grammatical or literary language. The Latini were simply the miscel-
laneous assemblage of peoples who used Latin as their vehicle of literary
expression; a similar interpretation must be given to Graeci; and for the
same reason, when we arrive in due course at the philosophers of Islām,
the single and sufficient excuse for calling them “Arabs” will be that their
works were composed in the Arabic tongue. These divisions must not,
however, be interpreted too narrowly. They stood less for the interruption
of colloquial intercourse than for wide intellectual schisms and radical
diversities of mind. Nothing proves this better than a scrutiny of the
several occasions, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, when some
Greek author was newly translated into Latin. We then learn that the
famous Graccia capta ferum. . . , however true in antiquity, became conspicu-
ously false in the medieval centuries. The truth was rather that each
translated Greek became in his turn the captive of latinitas. He entered
a world where the very terminology was steeped in Latin associations, and
where there flourished a spirit of auctoritas as alien from the traditions
of Hellas as the Summa of Aquinas from the dialogues of Plato. To mark
the stages in medieval philosophy as a series of Greek invasions is not
CH. XXIII.
## p. 784 (#830) ############################################
784
The Carolingian Renaissance. John the Scot
unscientific; but we have always to add that the result was rather to
enlarge a Latin structure than to remodel it on pure Hellenic lines.
After two or three of the darkest centuries in European history the
Carolingian renaissance offers a glimmer of daylight. With Charles the
Great we see Europe awaking to the consciousness of ignorance and to
the need of regaining touch with the past. When Alcuin (ob. 804) was
summoned from England to reform the methods of school instruction,
he revived the old curriculum of the seven liberal arts, the famous Trivium
and Quadrivium, and thus incidentally renewed the study of dialectic, the
most durable element in European education. By his own writings, and
still more by his pupils, his educational influence was spread widely abroad.
An attempt has been made to claim more for him. He has been hailed
as the father of Scholasticism (most ambiguous of titles), or at least as
the progenitor of philosophy in France. It is more than doubtful, how-
ever, if the claim can be upheld. The circle of Charles the Great caught
eagerly at the threads of tradition and found novelty enough in ideas far
from original. Philosophia itself was a name that stood for the general
culture of the liberal arts, or sometimes for dialectic in particular, rather than
for the apprehension of grave intellectual problems. In spite, therefore,
of the noble work of Alcuin, and in spite of the encyclopedic learning of
his pupil Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mayence, and, as he has well
been styled, primus praeceptor Germaniae, it is not unfair to judge that
no figure of high import for philosophy emerges before the astonishing
Johannes Scottus Eriugena, court-philosopher and even, if tales be true,
court-jester to Charles the Bald.
The entrance and exit of this mysterious Irishman are swift and his-
trionic. Appearing suddenly from one wing, he remains on the stage of
France just long enough to derange the plot and bewilder the actors,
before he vanishes on the other side and is lost in “confused noise without. "
Long afterwards we learn from William of Malmesbury that the noise
was caused by his English scholars, who were busy murdering their master
with the points of their pens. Doubtless they took the hint from
John's own observation: stilus ferreus alia parte qua scribamus, alia qua
deleamus a fabro factus est? . Uncertainty about his origin and end is,
however, of small consequence. His works are with us, and the occasion
of his first and last appearance in the ecclesiastical drama is notorious.
Gottschalk, a man of noble birth and a reluctant follower of St Benedict,
had extracted from the study of St Augustine a doctrine of “double pre-
destination,” which ensured the damnation of the wicked no less firmly
than the salvation of the good. Whatever the logical difficulty of evading
that conclusion, the moral danger of fatalism was so plainly threatened
by it that Hincmar, the powerful and restless Archbishop of Rheims
(ob. 882), was roused to vigorous action. The unhappy monk was indicted,
condemned, imprisoned, and finally harried into his grave. But Gottschalk
1 MPL, CxxII, 422.
## p. 785 (#831) ############################################
John the Scot and Greek Philosophy
785
or his opinions, did not lack supporters. Assailed from many sides by
weighty rebukes, Hincmar judged it expedient to add reason to force, and
in a rash moment entrusted to John the Scot the task of demolishing
Gottschalk's position. The result was (in the year 851) the treatise on
Predestination, which defeated not only Gottschalk but Hincmar and all
parties concerned.
The knowledge of Greek, now a rare accomplishment, which John
brought with him from Ireland, stood for more than linguistic proficiency.
His philosophy is a genuine derivation from Greek sources, Pagan and
Christian, and must be interpreted rather by the ideas of the fifth century
than by later developments of medieval thought. In the De Praedestina
tione, it is true, he affects to rely solely on Latin authors; whence it has
been doubtfully inferred that he had not yet acknowledged the sway of
the Pseudo-Dionysius. A more likely explanation is found in the contro-
versial character of the work. John's business was to turn against Gott-
schalk the authorities, especially Augustine, to whom he had appealed.
With an ingenuity almost too subtle he carries out this programme, yet
only on the surface. The force and substance of his argument belong to
Neo-Platonism. Either, therefore, he was already familiar with the
Areopagite, or he must in some other way have mastered a body of
doctrine akin to the philosophy of Proclus. In any case, the refutation
of Gottschalk depends entirely on an account of the Divine Nature
developed by Plotinus and his school out of elements originally supplied
by Plato. The essence of God, His will, and His intellect, are one pure
and indivisible substance identical with goodness. From his eternal per-
fection no effects but what are good can proceed. If the will of the
Creator is the necessity of the creature, yet that will is the pure expression
of liberty, and man's necessity is but the appetite for goodness, in which
human liberty essentially consists. How, then, shall we distinguish the
good from the bad? And how leave room for the freedom of decision
upon which moral responsibility depends? John firmly maintains the
reality of liberum arbitrium, and denies that God compels any man to be
either good or bad; but the critical question evidently is whether the
existence of evil in any real sense can be allowed. Boldly and variously
as John wrestles with his problem, he never wavers in his belief that evil
is pure negation. Sin, death, and eternal punishment he sees as indivisible
links in a chain, but God neither knows nor wills them. What God
foreknows he predestinates; whence, if he is said to foreknow evils without
predestinating them, this can only be a modus locutionis, designed to
stimulate us to deeper understanding of the truth. Foreknowledge itself
is but a metaphor; for priority in time has no meaning in relation to
God, in whose life is neither past nor future, but only the eternal now.
To do justice to the argument in a few lines is impossible, but its
two-edged character and its threat to the orthodox view of sin and
punishment will easily be detected. The whole tone of the reasoning, too,
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. XXIII.
50
## p. 786 (#832) ############################################
786
John's view of Reason and Authority
must have been foreign to John's contemporaries, who can hardly have
failed to see how little he trusted to familiar authorities, and how much
to arguments derived from none knew where. It is a mistake, however,
to lay as much emphasis as some modern writers have done on John's
identification (in the first chapter) of vera philosophia with vera religio.
In itself this was no startling novelty, nor was it a mere ruse of debate
for John to quote the precedent of Augustine. Verus philosophus est
amator Deil was Augustine's summary of the aim of philosophy: the test
by which he had tried Socrates and Plato, and found them not far from
the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus far, in fact, John was expressing a sound
historical judgment on the meaning of philosophy in the past. It is
further to be observed that the word is religio, not theologia. A simple
identification of philosophy with theology is far from his intention.
Broadly speaking, theologia always signifies for him some measure of the
divine illumination not vouchsafed outside the Catholic Church. Johannes
theologus is his title for the author of the Fourth Gospel, and all theologi
belong to a privileged class, from which many philosophi would be excluded.
Thus philosophi saeculares is a name for the Pagan sages, and inanis
philosophia serves to describe the practice of Jews and heretics, who cling
to the letter of the scriptures and pay no heed to the spirit. On the other
hand, philosophia in its widest sense can cover the entire search for wisdom,
of which theology is the highest but not the only part. No greater libel,
certainly, can be fastened on John the Scot than to represent him as
dressing up in the garb of Christianity some Pagan philosophy in which
alone he believed. No vestige of such an intention can be traced in his
pages. He is ardently, alınost passionately, Christian. What his feelings
would have been had he learned that “Dionysius” was an author never
heard of before the sixth century, and, possibly, a pupil of Proclus (ob. 485),
it is vain to conjecture. As it is, he had probably never heard of Proclus,
nor ever read a word of Plotinus. Plato he counts the chief of philosophers
-the merest commonplace in Christian writers down to the end of the
twelfth century—but from the Platonic secta he more than once dissociates
himself, and never would he have dreamed of making Plato the equal, in his
theological knowledge, of the Greek Fathers, or Dionysius, or Augustine.
Some caution is needed, again, in describing his view of reason and
authority. For while it is common to quote from him such sayings as
auctoritas ex vera ratione processit, ratio vero nequaquam ex auctoritate",
it is no less common to ignore the qualifications of the context, and to
omit altogether many other passages of a very different colour. Ratio
itself is a difficult and ambiguous term. Sometimes it comprehends all the
operations of the mind; sometimes it means only the discursive, dialec-
tical reason, which stands on a permanently lower level than intellectus sive
animus sive mens. The last thing John would suggest is that reason, in this
narrower sense, can find out and interpret the ways of God. His point is
1 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, viii, 1.
* MPL, cxXII, 613.
## p. 787 (#833) ############################################
The charge of Pantheism
787
rather that auctoritas is valuable only in so far as it represents what the
intellect of saintly theologi has revealed. Reason itself demands our
reverence for what is above reason; it does not, however, demand blind
subservience to patristic utterances, or to the bare letter of the Scriptures,
any more than it encourages us to put our trust in petty dialectic. Vera
auctoritas, says John the Scot, rectae rationi non obsistit, neque recta ratio
verae auctoritati'. To force him into a rigid dilemma of reason and
authority is likely to be an anachronism only less regrettable than the
proposal to enlist him on the side of the Nominalists or the Realists. A
mind like his refuses to be imprisoned in any such antithesis. What he
believes in is the illumination of the mind with a heavenly radiance, as,
easily dimmed by ratio in one way as by auctoritas in another.
The traditional accusation against the De Divisione Naturae—surely
one of the most remarkable books in the world—is that of Pantheism.
The charge would be more convincing if its authors would sometimes go
so far as to tell us what Pantheism means. Presumably, it implies at least
some kind of identification or confusion of God with His creatures, some
materialisation of the Divine Nature, with loss of transcendence and the
Creator's prerogative. Now in the De Divisione Naturae there is a rich
abundance of statements that seem to point in that direction. Nothing
could be plainer, for example, than the words, proinde non duo a seipsis
distantia debemus intelligere Deum et creaturam, sed unum et id ipsumº;
and this is but one out of many such passages. Yet no one, it is reasonable
to suggest, who has striven to master the book as a whole, with due
appre-
ciation of its earlier sources, will judge “Pantheism” to be other than an
idle and empty description of the doctrines set forth by John the Scot.
The universe, as he conceived of it, is one stupendous yet graded theophania.
God is in omnibus and supra omnia, revealed in all His creatures, yet
eternally transcending them all. They who declare that God is thus
degraded below Himself must be prepared to deny that Jesus was God
as well as man. For man is the officina omnis creaturae, the perfect
microcosm; whence the Incarnation reveals, in a single flash, the whole
relation of God to the universe, even as the resurrection of Christ displays
in a moment the reditus or reversio of all things to God. John himself
was well aware of the danger to which he exposed himself. Anticipating
the charge of Pantheism, he strove by many illustrations and analogies to
accommodate his high and difficult thoughts to men of ruder understand-
ing. In this he did not succeed. When not wholly neglected, his book
was usually suspect. After lying comparatively dormant for more than
three centuries, it was brought into fresh notoriety by the heretical
Amalric of Bene. A preliminary condemnation at Paris in 1210 was
followed in 1225 by the sentence of Honorius III, who ordered all discover-
able copies to be committed to the flames. Upon this, perhaps, the fairest
comment is that, if Amalric and his friends had read John as carelessly
1 MPL, cXXII, 511.
2 Ib. CXXII, 678.
CH. XXIII.
50-2
## p. 788 (#834) ############################################
788
Character of Christendom
as some of his modern critics, the action of Honorius may easily be
excused.
The false dawn of the Carolingian renaissance faded all too soon into
a second spell of darkness. Knowledge of Greek and the power of com-
paring eastern with western traditions John the Scot did not bequeath
to the following generations. His translations of Dionysius and Maximus
Confessor-sad examples of the verbum de verbo method—may well have
been unintelligible, while his commentaries or glosses on Martianus Capella
and Boethius would distinguish him less clearly from other men. Dis-
ordered and confused by the trend of political events, the Latin world
relapsed into the confinement of a narrow circle of authors conned over
and over again, yet often imperfectly known and understood. It is possible,
however, to draw too wide an inference from the poverty of a philosophical
library. Paucity of materials alone will not account for mental stagnation.
To interpret the intellectual condition of the Middle Ages we must look
rather to the vast transformation of the world, as the notion of a civitas
Dei gradually supplanted the ideals of Pagan society. In the eyes of Au-
gustine the secular power, no less than the heathen religion, still belongs
to the civitas impiorum; to possess and wield it can never be the ambition of
the Church. Philosophy again, the property of the Greeks, though far
superior to an idolatrous religion, is only an imperfect alternative to the
Christian life. But the course of history was too strong for these older
partitions and antagonisms. Before the end of the fifth century Pope
Gelasius I was making his memorable pronouncement: duo quippe sunt
quibus principaliter mundus hic regitur, auctoritas sacrata pontificum et
regalis potestas. This royal or imperial power was henceforward to be no
Babylonish relic, but a necessary element in the life of a single, all-
embracing society. However delegated or dispersed among princes, the
temporal sovereignty must remain the sword of the spiritual, the instru-
ment for extending and protecting the Kingdom of God upon earth.
Authority of all kinds was gradually concentrated, until the thought of
a philosophy unrelated to dogmatic propositions became as intolerable as
the pretence of any secular power to stand outside the Church.
The
Creed and the Scriptures became the official source alike of law and of
wisdom. The vis coactiva was now the appurtenance of knowledge, the
knowledge divinely imparted to the Christian society. In such a society
(no matter how much the papal theory was disputed) the weight of
tradition could not fail to be overwhelming. From heresy to schism was
now the briefest of steps, and novelty had always to justify itself. “Many
men," says John the Scot, “are roused from slumber by heretics, that they
may see the day of the Lord and rejoice. "? No shrewder judgment could
be passed on the history of medieval philosophy. For most of the greater
changes were due less to original speculation, or even to the acquisition
of new materials, than to the suspicion of heresy. Opinions denounced at
IMPL, cxxii, 359.
## p. 789 (#835) ############################################
Medieval knowledge of Plato and Aristotle
789
first were often enough accepted on second thoughts. The power of
adapting and absorbing fresh ideas never wholly ceased to operate, but
all was governed by the general assumption that unchanging truth was
already revealed. Meanwhile, the habit of deference to tradition was
extended, almost unwittingly, to such records of Pagan knowledge as
fortune had preserved. None would have ranked a Greek philosopher with
the Scriptures, but when reverence for the past was combined with lack
of critical power, the result was to establish certain books or authors in a
position not easy to shake.
Some of the medieval limitations we may briefly illustrate by glancing
at the sources of their acquaintance with Aristotle and Plato. The first
name to be honoured is Boethius. To his translations of the Categories
(with the Isagoge of Porphyry) and the De Interpretatione, together with
his own commentaries and logical treatises, was due virtually the whole
knowledge of Aristotle accessible to medieval students from the sixth
century to the middle of the twelfth. Boethius had intended to introduce
the whole of Aristotle to the Latins, and some confusion has been caused
by the more than doubtful ascription to him of translations of the rest of
the Organon, the De Anima, and the Metaphysics. It is fairly certain,
however, that before the age of John of Salisbury Aristotle was directly
represented only by two of his minor logical works, supplemented by a
few fragments of information gathered from various sources. An impor-
tant consequence, too often overlooked, was the restriction of his authority
to a very narrow sphere. In dialectic he was admittedly the master, but
in philosophy as a whole the evidence is incontestable that Plato occupied
the highest place in general esteem. And yet, when we turn to the
medieval knowledge of Plato, we may well be surprised at his lofty
position. For nothing of his actual writings could be studied in Latin but
a fragment of a single dialogue, the Timaeus.
Between the cases of Plato and Aristotle there was, however, a very
wide difference. When Aristotle arrived in translations he was almost a
stranger; and even when the work of Boethius had raised him to unchal-
lenged sovereignty in the province of logic, he still was enthroned in a
certain isolation, with little historical background and with no evident
affinity to the Christian way of life. Platonism, on the other hand, was
almost inhaled with the air. Boethius himself was a Platonist, and so was
Porphyry. Augustine, too, never forgot his debt to the philosophy which
had delivered him from Manichaeism and carried him a lony stage on the
road to Christ. To indicate all the sources of Platonism would be almost
impossible. It must suffice here to notice two from outside the Christian
circle, the commentary of Chalcidius that accompanied his version of the
Timaeus, and the dissertation of Macrobius on the Somnium Scipionis.
To class Chalcidius as non-Christian is perhaps questionable, for he was
more probably a Christian than a Pagan or a Jew. His work, however,
embodies very little Christian material except an extract from Origen.
CH. XXIII.
## p. 790 (#836) ############################################
790
The Influence of Macrobius
Dating, perhaps, from the early fourth century, it is neither independent
nor critical. The substance of it, if we accept the result of Switalski's
investigation, is derived from an earlier commentary, very possibly by the
hand of the eminent Stoic, Posidonius. The outcome is an eclectic medley
or muddle of divers authorities, gathered under the sway of the infallible
Plato. The later Platonism, we must remember, was even more than
eclectic. Its aim was to absorb and to reconcile, to appear as a summary
of all previous Greek speculation. Much of the uncritical confusion of
ideas that meets us everywhere in the Middle Ages was simply a legacy
from Chalcidius and the less intelligent followers of Plotinus in the decline
of the ancient world.
Roughly similar qualities appear in the work of Macrobius, a writer
who, late in the fifth century, had contrived to remain untouched by the
Christian influence. His detachment from the Church makes it all the
more interesting to discover in him that medievalism of mind so often
rated as a purely Christian product. In him we have already the medieval
Virgil, and along with that strange invention all the baffling mixture of
science and nonsense that was to float about Europe for more than a
thousand
years. How medieval, too, is the deference of Macrobius to the
great names of the past. Neque vero tam immemor mei, he writes, aut ita
male animatus sum, ut ex ingenio meo vel Aristoteli resistam vel adsim
Platoni'. Yet Macrobius is far from contemptible, and the debt of the
Middle Ages to him was immense. To him was due what little was known
of Plotinus (inter philosophiae professores cum Platone princeps)? , the four-
fold classification of the virtues, the threefold gradation of Deus, mens,
and anima, the illumination of all creatures as in an orderly series of
mirrors by the unus fulgor, the descent of the soul to its material habita-
tion, and its yearning for restoration to its eternal home. When Christians
read in Macrobius of the soul's imprisonment in a vesture of clay (indu-
mentum testeum), of its wandering on earth as a pilgrim, of heaven as the
true patria, of philosophy as meditatio mortis, they caught the genuine
accent of religion and welcomed Platonism as a natural ally. Actual
knowledge of the original Plato Macrobius did not greatly increase. Be-
hind the Somnium Scipionis, according to Schedler's recent enquiry, lies
once more the T'imaeus, as interpreted first by Porphyry and handed on
by intermediate writers to Macrobius. If that be so, it helps to account
for the frequent difficulty of deciding, when no names are mentioned,
whether a medieval writer is using Chalcidius, or Macrobius, or sometimes
the De Consolatione of Boethius. The same brand of Platonism, with the
same tincture of new Pythagoreanism, is recognisable in all.
The lines of thought broadly indicated by Plato and Aristotle run
through the Middle Ages. From Plato came the wider inspiration and
the higher call; from Aristotle the perception of difficulties and contra-
dictions, with the demand for dialectical skill. Nowhere, as it happens,
1 Comm. in Somnium Scipionis, 11, 15.
2 Ib. 1, 8.
## p. 791 (#837) ############################################
Importance of dialectic. The tenth century
791
were the defects of medieval knowledge of history more conspicuous than
in this very matter of dialectic. The most learned doctors were unaware
that dialectic had held in Plato's estimation a far higher place than Aris-
totle would allow. They did not know why Aristotle himself had some-
times preferred and sometimes rejected it, nor how far removed was his
trivial use of it as an exercise for students from the profundity of his
dialectical analysis of moral experience. They knew just enough to warrant
the dispute whether dialectic was properly concerned with words or with
things; and enough, unfortunately, to encourage a confusion of the ars
disserendi with the total activity of reason. During the two dark centuries
after the appearance of John the Scot dialectic was, however, the beacon.
We can dimly trace the rise of factions, the growth of the contest between
dialecticians and anti-dialecticians, which was to reach its climax in the
age of Abelard. For the rest, the condition of Europe was unfriendly to
speculation, and the flagrance of moral disorders left no leisure for adven-
tures of the intellect.
The tenth century is singularly barren. Scarcely a name of distinction
is recorded in the annals of philosophy, save that of Gerbert of Aurillac
(ob. 1003), who was raised to the Papacy as Sylvester II. Even Gerbert was
more remarkable for his skill in mathematics, and for his services to humane
education, than for any direct contribution to philosophy. To his pupil
and patron, Otto III, he dedicated a logical text-book with the title
Libellus de rationali et ratione uti, and he may be the author (though the
point is disputed) of a work De Corpore et Sanguine Domini. If so, we
can credit him with a perception of the value of dialectic in harmonising
discrepant utterances of the Fathers. Some have failed, however, to note
that his most striking observation is taken directly from John the Scot.
The art which divides genera into species, and resolves species into genera,
is not (he says) the product of human machinations, but was discovered
by the wise in the very nature of things, where the Author of all the arts
had placed it. This is taken verbatim from the De Divisione Naturae',
where it stands as a comment on the work of the Creator. Gerbert's in-
Auence, however, did not depend exclusively on his books. His distinction
as a teacher is indisputable, and while his personal association was with
the cathedral-school of Rheims, he became, through his pupil Fulbert
(ob. 1028), the indirect founder of the more famous school of Chartres.
(The attribution to Gerbert of a work on the Eucharist is, in any case,
an indication of the subject which did more, perhaps, than any other in
this unproductive period to stimulate curiosity and to awaken controversy
about the use and abuse of dialectic. Already in the ninth century
Paschasius Radbert and Ratramnus had earned some notoriety by their
discussion of the Blessed Sacrament; and now a larger disturbance was
created, some while after Gerbert, by the De Caena Domini of Berengar
of Tours. Devout minds not unnaturally felt a strong distaste for the
1 MPL, cxxII, 749.
CH. XXIII.
## p. 792 (#838) ############################################
792
Lanfranc and Peter Damian
analysis of a mystery, but Berengar was less sensitive. He magnified the
function of dialectic, quia confugere ad eam ad rationem est confugere,
and thus proved himself an imperfect scholar of John the Scot, by whom
he is said to have been inspired. For if John had championed the liberty
of reason, he had also taught that even the angelic intelligences ab in-
troitu mysteriorum suos theologicos pedes, hoc est, intellectuales ingressus
retractant'. The most eminent critic of Berengar's “theological feet" was
Archbishop Lanfranc (1005-1089), himself well reputed in dialectic but
disposed to restrict the art to a subordinate position. Augustine, he allows,
had thought well of it; and, lest he should seem to be afraid of Berengar's
weapons, he will waive his own preference for trusting to the traditions
of the Church where mysteries of the faith are concerned. He accuses
Berengar of parading his skill in disputation, and suggests that a confes-
sion of ignorance is sometimes better than arrogant obstinacy. The tone
of his remonstrance is dignified and sensible. He does not look on dia-
lectic as necessarily hostile to the faith, but thinks it a perilous exercise
for shallow and contentious minds.
Another contemporary name, Peter Damian (ob. 1072), deserves to be
mentioned. Justly famed for his saintly life, Petrus peccator, as he styled
himself, stands in the main for the monastic tendency to think more
highly of practical religion than of intellectual attempts to explain and
justify the faith. He wrote, however, several works of theology, in one of
which, the De Divina Omnipotentia, he discusses the use of philosophy in
“sacred disputations. ” It is here that he introduces the celebrated phrase,
ancilla dominae, to denote the proper relation of dialectic to theology. Less
energy, perhaps, would have been spent in remonstrance against this ap-
parent degradation of reason, if more attention had been paid to the
current usage of terms. Philosophia often means no more than dialectic,
and dialectic no more than a display of captious arguments. That the
Christian position as a whole (the Christian philosophy, in fact) was ir-
rational, Peter Damian and his contemporaries would never have admitted.
The antithesis of ratio and auctoritas was then far less comprehensive
than the final problem, scarcely realised before the age of Aquinas, whether
the independence of philosophy could be reconciled with the Catholic
position. To assign to dialectic a merely ancillary office is not necessarily
obscurantism. It often meant no more than the logical commonplace,
that ratiocinatio presupposes the concession of premises. In a deeper sense,
it meant that experience must precede the attempt to explain it, and that
the testimony of many generations cannot easily be overthrown by a talent
for repartee.
With the illustrious name of Anselm a new chapter begins. As a
pupil of Lanfranc he belongs chronologically (1033–1109) to the eleventh
century, but in mind and spirit must rank as the herald of the sustained
intellectual effort which culminated two centuries later in the systems of
1 MPL, XXII, G68.
## p. 793 (#839) ############################################
The work of Anselm
793
Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. For this reason he has often been saluted
as the true founder of Scholasticism, a title we should bestow with greater
confidence, did any definition of Scholasticism command universal assent.
Unfortunately it is not so. After much pedantic and even acrimonious
discussion we are left uncertain whether "scholastic” and “medieval"
philosophy should be identified or clearly distinguished, whether “scholas-
ticism” is the name of a method or of a result, whether there was one
pre-eminently scholastic problem, and whether one particular solution has
a right to be called scholastic. Thus is medieval philosophy, so fertile in
distinctions, pursued by the shadow of itself. The wisest course, perhaps,
is to stand aside from the controversy. It is agreed that the term scholas-
ticus (applicable either to master or to pupil) meant uncommonly little;
it is agreed also that the great doctors of the thirteenth century may
rightly be called schoolmen. For the rest, it is enough to interpret, as
best one can, the course of events.
To call Anselm an original thinker is not to deny his obligations to
others. In the preface to the Monologium he protests that nothing in his
doctrine is out of harmony with the Catholic Fathers, especially the Blessed
Augustine. The product of his mind is, however, original inasmuch as it
is the outcome of personal experience, the fruit of profound meditation
upon the nature of his faith. “Enter into the cubicle of thy mind; shut
out all things but God and whatsoever may help thee to seek for Him;
then close the door and seek. ” Thus he writes in the first chapter of the
Proslogion, before expounding his proof of God's existence; and none,
perhaps, who are deaf to the exhortation will feel any force in the proof.
Fides quaerens intellectum and nisi credideritis, non intelligetis are the
formulas that meet us everywhere on his pages. Still more clearly does
he express his position in the words of the De Fide Trinitatis: qui non
crediderit, non experietur, et qui non expertus fuerit, non intelliget. The
Church, he means, had not invented new intellectual instruments, but
rather had proclaimed the advent of a new spiritual experience, itself the
condition of understanding the meaning of life. Mere rationalism, on the
other hand, could originate nothing; for reason, as discursive and critical,
depends for its materials on a higher mode of experience. On this point
at least Christianity was at one with Platonism, and Anselm himself is, on
the whole, a kind of Platonist. His Platonism, however, is derived from
Augustine, not, as some have alleged, from John the Scot; for Anselm is
by no means committed to the negative theology of Neo-Platonism, which
is the very essence of the Irish philosopher's teaching. Well as he knows
that the names we apply to the Divine Nature are but shadows and symbols,
he is never possessed by that ecstasy of intellectual asceticism which glories
in the denial of attributes, and pays its last tribute to omniscience by
declaring that God Himself cannot know what He is.
Anselm's argument for the necessary existence of id quo maius cogitari
nequit is no plea for a negative abstraction. Read in connexion with the
CH. XXIII.
## p. 794 (#840) ############################################
794
The ontological argument
Monologium it is seen as an attempt to clothe the One, which alone par-
ticipates in nothing, but is what it is, with the attributes of an individual
spirit, unbounded by space and time, yet present everywhere and always,
without parts and qualities, yet containing in very essence life, salvation,
beatitude, and all possible perfections. Nearest to God, and best able to
serve as a mirror of His image, is mens (another link with Neo-Platonism);
and since mens is the innermost nature of man, to “enter into the cubicle
of the mind,” shutting out all lower manifestations of being, is the true
way of access. The formal weakness of the argument was at once detected
by the monk Gaunilo; whose objection, however, that the transition from
what exists only in intellectu to what exists also in re cannot thus be
effected, leaves Anselm quite unperturbed. The pretence that the same
argument might prove the existence of the most perfect island he declares
to be a misapprehension of the point. If his argument can be applied to
anything but the Supreme Being, he is ready to make Gaunilo a present
of the island, and to promise that it shall never vanish away.
The "ontological" argument, however, was always viewed with suspi-
cion. In this, as in some other respects, Anselm did not precisely anticipate
the position of later scholastics. Even his fides quaerens intellectum does
not accurately express the method of those who afterwards made a more
exact distinction between truths demonstrable by reason and truths
revealed only to faith. Tentative steps in that direction were taken by
Anselm, but he went farther than his successors in attempting, for example,
to arrive by reasoning at the doctrine of the Trinity; an image of which,
following an Augustinian tradition, he discovers in the human soul.
Anselm, in fact, was not directly interested in the question whether it
was possible to concede to philosophy a province where certain problems
could be solved by reason alone. He perceived the distinction (as he shews
in the Cur Deus homo) between seeking reasons because you do not believe,
and seeking them because you do; but it was the latter case that chiefly
inspired his arguments, and so made him, in a certain sense, more ration-
alistic than those who afterwards defined their concessions to reason.
A fuller account of Anselm would refer to his theories of sense-percep-
tion, judgment, the freedom of the will, and other psychological matters.
But these are of less importance in the history of his own time than his
controversy with Roscelin, about whose doctrines, as it happens, Anselm is
our best source of information. To call the controversy important is not
for a moment to allow that the single theme of Nominalism and Realism
is the clue to medieval philosophy. On the contrary, Roscelin is important
because he succeeded, perhaps for the first and last time, in disturbing
the ecclesiastical arena by manufacturing a heresy out of this topic of the
schools. In his famous Isagoge, or Introduction to the Organon of
Aristotle, Porphyry prepared the medieval battleground by a brief and
cautious statement which it may be worth while to quote in the Latin of
Boethius. Mox de generibus et speciebus illud quidem, sive subsistant sive
## p. 795 (#841) ############################################
Realism and Nominalism
795
in solis nudis intellectibus posita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia sint an
incorporalia, et utrum separuta a sensibilibus posita et circa haec consistentia,
dicere recusabo. The original difference between Aristotle and Plato was
not properly a controversy about genera and species, but in the Middle
Ages the extreme “realistic” doctrine of universals was identified with
the teaching of Plato. It is, in fact, one of the bewildering accidents of
history that the Platonic “idea" became the basis of medieval “realism,"
whereas the “idealism” of Berkeley and later philosophers has nothing to
do with either Plato or the medieval controversy. For in whatever sense we
attribute “conceptualism” to medieval logicians, it must certainly not be
in a sense that would bring them into line with an idealist philosophy
never clearly formulated before the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
Apart from the unabashed Platonists, the prevailing tendency of
medieval writers was to follow Aristotle or Boethius in holding that
universals could not“subsist” except in association with individual things.
At the same time it was freely allowed that the intellect had the power
of viewing them in abstraction from sensible things, and that the common
element in things, from which we derive the notions of genus and species,
was no mere fiction of the mind. What complicated the dispute between
Platonists and Aristotelians was the appearance of Nominalism; and what
has thrown the whole history of the subject into confusion is the belief,
originating mainly with some distinguished French scholars, that the war
of Nominalists and Realists began in the ninth century and persisted
until the close of the Middle Ages. Since it is impossible here to scrutinise
the evidence, nothing more can be offered than a dogmatic assertion that
this view is untenable. Nominalism was an intellectual firework of the
age of Roscelin and Abelard; for which reason, among others, it is also
an anachronism to talk of Realism in connexion with John the Scot or
other writers of that period. Even when the nominalis secta (as John of
Salisbury was perhaps the first to call it) has been rightly dated, it is no
easy task to define and explain its doctrine. The contention that only
individual things exist in their own right is no more Nominalist than
Aristotelian. Nothing characteristic of the new sect appears until the
whole stress is laid on voces or nomina. If universals are mere flatus vocis,
if their reality is only the physical reality belonging to a percussio aeris,
then indeed we have a doctrine inconsistent alike with the Platonic Realism
and with the tradition of Boethius. Absurd as the doctrine may sound
to modern ears, it was a not unnatural product of the long-established
opinion that logic, in company with grammar and rhetoric, was primarily
concerned with words. Meanwhile the importance of Nominalism for the
twelfth century was that it re-opened the whole question of universals, split
up the camp of the anti-nominalists into factions, and produced all the
varieties of doctrine enumerated by John of Salisbury and other writers.
The logical and metaphysical problems thus brought to light were per-
fectly genuine. Much the same difficulties may be found in modern books
CH. XXIII.
## p. 796 (#842) ############################################
796
Anselm and Roscelin
3
of logic, and the solutions offered do not differ fundamentally from those
current in medieval times.
According to Anselm, Roscelin presented the world with a dilemma.
Either, he argued, the three Persons of the Trinity are one res; in which
case the Father and the Spirit were incarnate together with the Son: or
they are three, like three souls or three angels; in which case only con-
vention forbids us to speak of three Gods. The second alternative, a kind
of Tritheism, Roscelin felt himself driven to prefer by his denial of reality
to universals and his reduction of them to mere flatus vocis. Much in-
genuity has been wasted in arguing that Roscelin's doctrine was not
genuine Nominalism (whatever that may happen to be), and that Anselm
must have misrepresented the case. But where is the evidence? There is
none of importance but Roscelin's letter to Abelard, which contributes
nothing to the point, a few words by Abelard himself, who speaks of
Roscelin's "insane opinion” that voces alone could have parts or species,
and a statement by John of Salisbury, who makes Roscelin the author of
the “exploded opinion,” voces ipsas genera esse et species. What little we
learn from these sources is at least consistent with the assertions of Anselm.
Anselm was no fanatical heresy-hunter, and Roscelin was doubtless sincere
in repudiating heretical intentions. But that is not the point. The
question is whether there is any ground for regarding him as a distressed
and persecuted champion of reason; and the answer, surely, must be that
there is none.
The flatus vocis theory, whether invented by Roscelin or by one John
the Sophist, was clearly a modernism, a heresy in dialectic, with no support
from tradition. To translate it into Conceptualism appears to be wholly
unwarrantable; Anselm treats it rather as a kind of stupid materialism,
and gives not the slightest hint that he and Roscelin are ranged on oppo-
site sides in an old and respectable controversy. He does not even trouble
to define his own view of universals, but leaves us to gather what we may
from scattered passages in his writings. Distressing as this may be to the
historian of logic, the historian of philosophy will find in Anselm's very
silences and omissions fresh reason for rejecting the once common opinion
that medieval thinkers exhausted themselves for centuries in trying to
define the nature of universals. It is scarcely too much to say that Anselm
does not care what they are, so long as the function of reason is not
simply confounded with sensuous perception. Neither things nor ideas
are mere words and breath, but in what sense things and ideas are iden-
tical or distinct he is at no great pains to decide. The term “Nominalism”
was not yet invented, nor the varieties of Realism yet arranged for
classification. Nevertheless, we may still find reason to doubt whether
Nominalism is exactly the right name for the doctrine propounded by
Roscelin.
Among those who once called Roscelin master was he who called no
man master for long. The stormy and romantic career of Peter Abelard
## p. 797 (#843) ############################################
The position of Abelard
797
has won for him a kind of immortality not conceded to philosophy alone.
By his side, to claim a share in that immortality, stands the partner in his
calamities and his joys:
Poeta, volentieri
Parlerei a quei due che insieme vanno.
With all his weakness, his vanity, his almost wanton pugnacity, there
must have been in Abelard some quality of greatness, something that
forbade men to gaze on him with indifference and pass by on the other
side. He had at least the virtuosity of genius; he was born to fascinate
or to repel. Wherever his tent was pitched, at Paris or on the borders
of the wilderness, thither, as an old chronicler has it, paene de tota Latini-
tate viri litterati confluebant. In vain was he driven into exile; for where
the master was there was the school.
Much the same gift of attraction and repulsion has been transmitted,
it would seem, with Abelard's writings, to perplex the judgment of modern
historians, and to fashion estimates of his worth non solum diversa verum
etiam adversa, as once he said himself of the utterances of the saints.
Unfair detraction is too apt to provoke extravagant eulogy; for to main-
tain that we have in Abelard the greatest mind of the Middle Ages is
surely extravagant. A great teacher he certainly was, a shrewd and fearless
critic, a mighty champion of dialectic, the mistress, as he declared, of all
philosophical studies. But when we look for inspiration, for profundity
of insight, for constructive power and masterly comprehension, we find
but little to justify comparison of Abelard with John the Scot or Anselm
or Thomas Aquinas.
monotheism, as an intellectual and moral doctrine, arose in philosophical
circles beyond the range of civic religion, and without reference to the
authority of the State.
## p. 781 (#827) ############################################
Character of Ancient Philosophy
781
The original stamp of philosophy was preserved with some difficulty
in the respectable circumstances of the Academy and the Lyceum. The
danger now was that a brotherhood of seekers after truth would degenerate
into a school of dialecticians. Philosophy languishes sadly as the trade
of professors and the sport of impertinent boys. From this fate it was
partly delivered in Greece by the march of political events. When the
career of Alexander put an end to the reality of the city-state, without
providing a substitute, less attraction was found henceforward in the
political life and more, therefore, in the theoretic. At the same time,
philosophy began to be Hellenistic rather than Hellenic. Zeno of Citium
was a portent of many things, and the tenets of Stoicism, though they
rang a little hollow at times, sounded further abroad than the voice of
the town-crier in Aristotle's diminutive metropolis. Philosophy grew
daily more like a religion, a refuge for the disconsolate and a guide for
the perplexed. Now when there is one religion derived from a philoso-
phical valuation of life, and another bound up with the State but unsup-
ported by theology, we have before us all the elements of a revolution
which sooner or later will overturn the world. What delayed the catas-
trophe in the ancient world was the scorn of philosophers for the vulgar
and the indifference of the State to theological speculation. It remains
to consider briefly the causes which brought this mutual disregard to an
end.
The single object of this hasty glance at the ancient world being to
secure the right line of approach to the medieval period, the story of
philosophy at Rome must be passed over, until the age when the old Latin
elements of culture are well nigh lost in a medley of Greek and Oriental
ideas. Never, perhaps, would the fortunes of philosophy have been united
with those of the imperial city but for the advent of Plotinus in the third
century and the eventual adoption of Neo-Platonism as the forlorn hope
of pagan civilisation against the onset of the Christian Church. The
story of the Church in its early generations has been related many times
and with many objects. Seldom has it been presented in one of its most
genuine aspects, as a struggle with rival philosophies at a time when the
call to a spiritual life was audible to all serious men. When the Christian
society escaped from the circle of Judaism and began to grasp the full
nature of its mission, there existed only two forces sufficiently universal
to compete with it for mastery of the world, Greek philosophy and Roman
Law. The Pagan cults cannot rank as a third and equal competitor.
Neither singly nor collectively did they embody an idea capable of welding
mankind into social coherence. The imperium, on the other hand, the
whole majestic apparatus of law and sovereignty, was a visible bond of
union, and behind it lay, to all appearance, irresistible force. Yet in the
end it was to prove easier for a Christian to mount the throne of the
Caesars than for the new doctrine of the Logos to prevail against its
philosophical rivals. The last and greatest victory of the Church was over
CH. XXIII.
## p. 782 (#828) ############################################
782
Philosophy and Theology
Neo-Platonism, when the spoils of the vanquished passed to the camp of
the victor, to be handed down as part of the armour of faith.
To set Christianity among the philosophies is not fanciful, so long as
we bear in mind that philosophy meant to the Greeks a way of life be-
longing to a particular society. When we read in the Acts of the Apostles
how Paul had once persecuted “this way,” or how the convert was taken
to be further instructed in “the way,” we hear a language long familiar
to Hellenes and easily intelligible to educated Romans. Where the Chris-
tian way differed patently from the others was in making its first appeal
to the simple and in its frank abhorrence of popular religion. For these
reasons it figures in Roman authors as a kind of odium humani generis
long before it was counted worthy of intellectual opposition. But by the
age of Plotinus and Porphyry that phase was concluded. Christianity
had now taken its place as one of the proffered ways of salvation, just as
Gnosticism of a kind was a second, and Neo-Platonism a third. In the school
of Plotinus we see the climax of the tendency to theologise philosophy,
and thus to fashion an exalted religion far removed from the superstitions
of the vulgar. To this conclusion ancient philosophy had grown steadily
nearer, and this was its final legacy to the Church. No greater fiction,
then, can well be alleged as history than the assertion that the Middle
Ages corrupted the nature of philosophy by confusing it with theological
doctrine. On the contrary, the attempted distinction between theology
and philosophy was a characteristic medieval invention. For not until
the last days of Paganism did the occasion for such discrimination
arise.
For philosophy, as for political history, the arresting figure of Julian
is full of significance. Sagacious enough to learn from the Church the
secret of victory, he sought to create a bond between the religion of the
many and the lofty speculations of the few. He failed because Neo-
Platonism, however refined as theology, possessed no means of trans-
lating itself into a rule for the humble. Its solitary implement, already
dull and rusty, was the allegorising of fable and myth. But the multitude,
as Plato had foreseen, could not be saved by hidden meanings. When we
read the last book of the last Ennead, we understand how the new faith
may have failed to touch Plotinus; but when we set the unvarnished
story of the Gospel side by side with any Pagan allegory, the contrast is
almost painfully absurd. Nevertheless, we may learn from the story of
Julian that, as Pagan philosophy had grown ever more theological, so the
Pagan State, under a Neo-Platonist Emperor, might almost have assumed
the character of an authoritative Church. To look at the same facts from
the Christian point of view, we see how the Church, by her double victory
over the imperium of Rome and the philosophy of Greece, committed
herself to the two great enterprises of the Middle Ages, the search for a
distinction between philosophy and theology, and the search for a way of
reconciling the temporal with the spiritual power. As soon as those two
## p. 783 (#829) ############################################
The medieval problems. The Latin world
783
problems are in being, we may know, in fact, that the Middle Ages have
begun. To the Middle Ages, also, it fell to discover, through much toil
and tribulation, that fundamentally the two problems are one.
For the student of philosophy the result of the successive blows which
shattered the Roman Empire is almost wholly comprised in the division
of civilisation into eastern and western halves. A prophet in the age of
Marcus Aurelius, or even of Trajan, might well have foretold a time when
Hellenism would have completely submerged the Latin elements of culture
carried westward by victorious generals as far as the British Isles. Whether
such a prophecy would ever have been fulfilled it is idle to speculate. The
fact remains that it was not. For the various reasons narrated by historians
there came the great reaction, when the tide of Hellenism rolled back
eastwards, bearing with it the treasures of culture as well as the imperial
throne. Even the greatest of Roman products, jurisprudence, appeared
to forsake its proper home; and while the great codification was being
accomplished at Byzantium, Roman Law in the West was becoming an
adjunct of persons rather than the voice of an independent and sovereign
society. In this cleavage of East and West there was nevertheless, a kind
of historical justice. For between the Greek and the Latin there was, and
is, a deep and abiding antagonism. The enthusiasm of Roman authors
for Hellenic models disguised that truth for antiquity, as the ambiguity
of the term “classical” has often obscured it for ourselves. Yet the fact
persisted, and one clear function of the Middle Ages was to make a new
revelation of latinitas, barely possible until the superior light of Hellas
was at least partially eclipsed. The contrast, perpetually recurring in
medieval authors, between Graeci and Latini does not rest upon differences
of nationality or race. The true line of demarcation was always the
grammatical or literary language. The Latini were simply the miscel-
laneous assemblage of peoples who used Latin as their vehicle of literary
expression; a similar interpretation must be given to Graeci; and for the
same reason, when we arrive in due course at the philosophers of Islām,
the single and sufficient excuse for calling them “Arabs” will be that their
works were composed in the Arabic tongue. These divisions must not,
however, be interpreted too narrowly. They stood less for the interruption
of colloquial intercourse than for wide intellectual schisms and radical
diversities of mind. Nothing proves this better than a scrutiny of the
several occasions, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, when some
Greek author was newly translated into Latin. We then learn that the
famous Graccia capta ferum. . . , however true in antiquity, became conspicu-
ously false in the medieval centuries. The truth was rather that each
translated Greek became in his turn the captive of latinitas. He entered
a world where the very terminology was steeped in Latin associations, and
where there flourished a spirit of auctoritas as alien from the traditions
of Hellas as the Summa of Aquinas from the dialogues of Plato. To mark
the stages in medieval philosophy as a series of Greek invasions is not
CH. XXIII.
## p. 784 (#830) ############################################
784
The Carolingian Renaissance. John the Scot
unscientific; but we have always to add that the result was rather to
enlarge a Latin structure than to remodel it on pure Hellenic lines.
After two or three of the darkest centuries in European history the
Carolingian renaissance offers a glimmer of daylight. With Charles the
Great we see Europe awaking to the consciousness of ignorance and to
the need of regaining touch with the past. When Alcuin (ob. 804) was
summoned from England to reform the methods of school instruction,
he revived the old curriculum of the seven liberal arts, the famous Trivium
and Quadrivium, and thus incidentally renewed the study of dialectic, the
most durable element in European education. By his own writings, and
still more by his pupils, his educational influence was spread widely abroad.
An attempt has been made to claim more for him. He has been hailed
as the father of Scholasticism (most ambiguous of titles), or at least as
the progenitor of philosophy in France. It is more than doubtful, how-
ever, if the claim can be upheld. The circle of Charles the Great caught
eagerly at the threads of tradition and found novelty enough in ideas far
from original. Philosophia itself was a name that stood for the general
culture of the liberal arts, or sometimes for dialectic in particular, rather than
for the apprehension of grave intellectual problems. In spite, therefore,
of the noble work of Alcuin, and in spite of the encyclopedic learning of
his pupil Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mayence, and, as he has well
been styled, primus praeceptor Germaniae, it is not unfair to judge that
no figure of high import for philosophy emerges before the astonishing
Johannes Scottus Eriugena, court-philosopher and even, if tales be true,
court-jester to Charles the Bald.
The entrance and exit of this mysterious Irishman are swift and his-
trionic. Appearing suddenly from one wing, he remains on the stage of
France just long enough to derange the plot and bewilder the actors,
before he vanishes on the other side and is lost in “confused noise without. "
Long afterwards we learn from William of Malmesbury that the noise
was caused by his English scholars, who were busy murdering their master
with the points of their pens. Doubtless they took the hint from
John's own observation: stilus ferreus alia parte qua scribamus, alia qua
deleamus a fabro factus est? . Uncertainty about his origin and end is,
however, of small consequence. His works are with us, and the occasion
of his first and last appearance in the ecclesiastical drama is notorious.
Gottschalk, a man of noble birth and a reluctant follower of St Benedict,
had extracted from the study of St Augustine a doctrine of “double pre-
destination,” which ensured the damnation of the wicked no less firmly
than the salvation of the good. Whatever the logical difficulty of evading
that conclusion, the moral danger of fatalism was so plainly threatened
by it that Hincmar, the powerful and restless Archbishop of Rheims
(ob. 882), was roused to vigorous action. The unhappy monk was indicted,
condemned, imprisoned, and finally harried into his grave. But Gottschalk
1 MPL, CxxII, 422.
## p. 785 (#831) ############################################
John the Scot and Greek Philosophy
785
or his opinions, did not lack supporters. Assailed from many sides by
weighty rebukes, Hincmar judged it expedient to add reason to force, and
in a rash moment entrusted to John the Scot the task of demolishing
Gottschalk's position. The result was (in the year 851) the treatise on
Predestination, which defeated not only Gottschalk but Hincmar and all
parties concerned.
The knowledge of Greek, now a rare accomplishment, which John
brought with him from Ireland, stood for more than linguistic proficiency.
His philosophy is a genuine derivation from Greek sources, Pagan and
Christian, and must be interpreted rather by the ideas of the fifth century
than by later developments of medieval thought. In the De Praedestina
tione, it is true, he affects to rely solely on Latin authors; whence it has
been doubtfully inferred that he had not yet acknowledged the sway of
the Pseudo-Dionysius. A more likely explanation is found in the contro-
versial character of the work. John's business was to turn against Gott-
schalk the authorities, especially Augustine, to whom he had appealed.
With an ingenuity almost too subtle he carries out this programme, yet
only on the surface. The force and substance of his argument belong to
Neo-Platonism. Either, therefore, he was already familiar with the
Areopagite, or he must in some other way have mastered a body of
doctrine akin to the philosophy of Proclus. In any case, the refutation
of Gottschalk depends entirely on an account of the Divine Nature
developed by Plotinus and his school out of elements originally supplied
by Plato. The essence of God, His will, and His intellect, are one pure
and indivisible substance identical with goodness. From his eternal per-
fection no effects but what are good can proceed. If the will of the
Creator is the necessity of the creature, yet that will is the pure expression
of liberty, and man's necessity is but the appetite for goodness, in which
human liberty essentially consists. How, then, shall we distinguish the
good from the bad? And how leave room for the freedom of decision
upon which moral responsibility depends? John firmly maintains the
reality of liberum arbitrium, and denies that God compels any man to be
either good or bad; but the critical question evidently is whether the
existence of evil in any real sense can be allowed. Boldly and variously
as John wrestles with his problem, he never wavers in his belief that evil
is pure negation. Sin, death, and eternal punishment he sees as indivisible
links in a chain, but God neither knows nor wills them. What God
foreknows he predestinates; whence, if he is said to foreknow evils without
predestinating them, this can only be a modus locutionis, designed to
stimulate us to deeper understanding of the truth. Foreknowledge itself
is but a metaphor; for priority in time has no meaning in relation to
God, in whose life is neither past nor future, but only the eternal now.
To do justice to the argument in a few lines is impossible, but its
two-edged character and its threat to the orthodox view of sin and
punishment will easily be detected. The whole tone of the reasoning, too,
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. XXIII.
50
## p. 786 (#832) ############################################
786
John's view of Reason and Authority
must have been foreign to John's contemporaries, who can hardly have
failed to see how little he trusted to familiar authorities, and how much
to arguments derived from none knew where. It is a mistake, however,
to lay as much emphasis as some modern writers have done on John's
identification (in the first chapter) of vera philosophia with vera religio.
In itself this was no startling novelty, nor was it a mere ruse of debate
for John to quote the precedent of Augustine. Verus philosophus est
amator Deil was Augustine's summary of the aim of philosophy: the test
by which he had tried Socrates and Plato, and found them not far from
the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus far, in fact, John was expressing a sound
historical judgment on the meaning of philosophy in the past. It is
further to be observed that the word is religio, not theologia. A simple
identification of philosophy with theology is far from his intention.
Broadly speaking, theologia always signifies for him some measure of the
divine illumination not vouchsafed outside the Catholic Church. Johannes
theologus is his title for the author of the Fourth Gospel, and all theologi
belong to a privileged class, from which many philosophi would be excluded.
Thus philosophi saeculares is a name for the Pagan sages, and inanis
philosophia serves to describe the practice of Jews and heretics, who cling
to the letter of the scriptures and pay no heed to the spirit. On the other
hand, philosophia in its widest sense can cover the entire search for wisdom,
of which theology is the highest but not the only part. No greater libel,
certainly, can be fastened on John the Scot than to represent him as
dressing up in the garb of Christianity some Pagan philosophy in which
alone he believed. No vestige of such an intention can be traced in his
pages. He is ardently, alınost passionately, Christian. What his feelings
would have been had he learned that “Dionysius” was an author never
heard of before the sixth century, and, possibly, a pupil of Proclus (ob. 485),
it is vain to conjecture. As it is, he had probably never heard of Proclus,
nor ever read a word of Plotinus. Plato he counts the chief of philosophers
-the merest commonplace in Christian writers down to the end of the
twelfth century—but from the Platonic secta he more than once dissociates
himself, and never would he have dreamed of making Plato the equal, in his
theological knowledge, of the Greek Fathers, or Dionysius, or Augustine.
Some caution is needed, again, in describing his view of reason and
authority. For while it is common to quote from him such sayings as
auctoritas ex vera ratione processit, ratio vero nequaquam ex auctoritate",
it is no less common to ignore the qualifications of the context, and to
omit altogether many other passages of a very different colour. Ratio
itself is a difficult and ambiguous term. Sometimes it comprehends all the
operations of the mind; sometimes it means only the discursive, dialec-
tical reason, which stands on a permanently lower level than intellectus sive
animus sive mens. The last thing John would suggest is that reason, in this
narrower sense, can find out and interpret the ways of God. His point is
1 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, viii, 1.
* MPL, cxXII, 613.
## p. 787 (#833) ############################################
The charge of Pantheism
787
rather that auctoritas is valuable only in so far as it represents what the
intellect of saintly theologi has revealed. Reason itself demands our
reverence for what is above reason; it does not, however, demand blind
subservience to patristic utterances, or to the bare letter of the Scriptures,
any more than it encourages us to put our trust in petty dialectic. Vera
auctoritas, says John the Scot, rectae rationi non obsistit, neque recta ratio
verae auctoritati'. To force him into a rigid dilemma of reason and
authority is likely to be an anachronism only less regrettable than the
proposal to enlist him on the side of the Nominalists or the Realists. A
mind like his refuses to be imprisoned in any such antithesis. What he
believes in is the illumination of the mind with a heavenly radiance, as,
easily dimmed by ratio in one way as by auctoritas in another.
The traditional accusation against the De Divisione Naturae—surely
one of the most remarkable books in the world—is that of Pantheism.
The charge would be more convincing if its authors would sometimes go
so far as to tell us what Pantheism means. Presumably, it implies at least
some kind of identification or confusion of God with His creatures, some
materialisation of the Divine Nature, with loss of transcendence and the
Creator's prerogative. Now in the De Divisione Naturae there is a rich
abundance of statements that seem to point in that direction. Nothing
could be plainer, for example, than the words, proinde non duo a seipsis
distantia debemus intelligere Deum et creaturam, sed unum et id ipsumº;
and this is but one out of many such passages. Yet no one, it is reasonable
to suggest, who has striven to master the book as a whole, with due
appre-
ciation of its earlier sources, will judge “Pantheism” to be other than an
idle and empty description of the doctrines set forth by John the Scot.
The universe, as he conceived of it, is one stupendous yet graded theophania.
God is in omnibus and supra omnia, revealed in all His creatures, yet
eternally transcending them all. They who declare that God is thus
degraded below Himself must be prepared to deny that Jesus was God
as well as man. For man is the officina omnis creaturae, the perfect
microcosm; whence the Incarnation reveals, in a single flash, the whole
relation of God to the universe, even as the resurrection of Christ displays
in a moment the reditus or reversio of all things to God. John himself
was well aware of the danger to which he exposed himself. Anticipating
the charge of Pantheism, he strove by many illustrations and analogies to
accommodate his high and difficult thoughts to men of ruder understand-
ing. In this he did not succeed. When not wholly neglected, his book
was usually suspect. After lying comparatively dormant for more than
three centuries, it was brought into fresh notoriety by the heretical
Amalric of Bene. A preliminary condemnation at Paris in 1210 was
followed in 1225 by the sentence of Honorius III, who ordered all discover-
able copies to be committed to the flames. Upon this, perhaps, the fairest
comment is that, if Amalric and his friends had read John as carelessly
1 MPL, cXXII, 511.
2 Ib. CXXII, 678.
CH. XXIII.
50-2
## p. 788 (#834) ############################################
788
Character of Christendom
as some of his modern critics, the action of Honorius may easily be
excused.
The false dawn of the Carolingian renaissance faded all too soon into
a second spell of darkness. Knowledge of Greek and the power of com-
paring eastern with western traditions John the Scot did not bequeath
to the following generations. His translations of Dionysius and Maximus
Confessor-sad examples of the verbum de verbo method—may well have
been unintelligible, while his commentaries or glosses on Martianus Capella
and Boethius would distinguish him less clearly from other men. Dis-
ordered and confused by the trend of political events, the Latin world
relapsed into the confinement of a narrow circle of authors conned over
and over again, yet often imperfectly known and understood. It is possible,
however, to draw too wide an inference from the poverty of a philosophical
library. Paucity of materials alone will not account for mental stagnation.
To interpret the intellectual condition of the Middle Ages we must look
rather to the vast transformation of the world, as the notion of a civitas
Dei gradually supplanted the ideals of Pagan society. In the eyes of Au-
gustine the secular power, no less than the heathen religion, still belongs
to the civitas impiorum; to possess and wield it can never be the ambition of
the Church. Philosophy again, the property of the Greeks, though far
superior to an idolatrous religion, is only an imperfect alternative to the
Christian life. But the course of history was too strong for these older
partitions and antagonisms. Before the end of the fifth century Pope
Gelasius I was making his memorable pronouncement: duo quippe sunt
quibus principaliter mundus hic regitur, auctoritas sacrata pontificum et
regalis potestas. This royal or imperial power was henceforward to be no
Babylonish relic, but a necessary element in the life of a single, all-
embracing society. However delegated or dispersed among princes, the
temporal sovereignty must remain the sword of the spiritual, the instru-
ment for extending and protecting the Kingdom of God upon earth.
Authority of all kinds was gradually concentrated, until the thought of
a philosophy unrelated to dogmatic propositions became as intolerable as
the pretence of any secular power to stand outside the Church.
The
Creed and the Scriptures became the official source alike of law and of
wisdom. The vis coactiva was now the appurtenance of knowledge, the
knowledge divinely imparted to the Christian society. In such a society
(no matter how much the papal theory was disputed) the weight of
tradition could not fail to be overwhelming. From heresy to schism was
now the briefest of steps, and novelty had always to justify itself. “Many
men," says John the Scot, “are roused from slumber by heretics, that they
may see the day of the Lord and rejoice. "? No shrewder judgment could
be passed on the history of medieval philosophy. For most of the greater
changes were due less to original speculation, or even to the acquisition
of new materials, than to the suspicion of heresy. Opinions denounced at
IMPL, cxxii, 359.
## p. 789 (#835) ############################################
Medieval knowledge of Plato and Aristotle
789
first were often enough accepted on second thoughts. The power of
adapting and absorbing fresh ideas never wholly ceased to operate, but
all was governed by the general assumption that unchanging truth was
already revealed. Meanwhile, the habit of deference to tradition was
extended, almost unwittingly, to such records of Pagan knowledge as
fortune had preserved. None would have ranked a Greek philosopher with
the Scriptures, but when reverence for the past was combined with lack
of critical power, the result was to establish certain books or authors in a
position not easy to shake.
Some of the medieval limitations we may briefly illustrate by glancing
at the sources of their acquaintance with Aristotle and Plato. The first
name to be honoured is Boethius. To his translations of the Categories
(with the Isagoge of Porphyry) and the De Interpretatione, together with
his own commentaries and logical treatises, was due virtually the whole
knowledge of Aristotle accessible to medieval students from the sixth
century to the middle of the twelfth. Boethius had intended to introduce
the whole of Aristotle to the Latins, and some confusion has been caused
by the more than doubtful ascription to him of translations of the rest of
the Organon, the De Anima, and the Metaphysics. It is fairly certain,
however, that before the age of John of Salisbury Aristotle was directly
represented only by two of his minor logical works, supplemented by a
few fragments of information gathered from various sources. An impor-
tant consequence, too often overlooked, was the restriction of his authority
to a very narrow sphere. In dialectic he was admittedly the master, but
in philosophy as a whole the evidence is incontestable that Plato occupied
the highest place in general esteem. And yet, when we turn to the
medieval knowledge of Plato, we may well be surprised at his lofty
position. For nothing of his actual writings could be studied in Latin but
a fragment of a single dialogue, the Timaeus.
Between the cases of Plato and Aristotle there was, however, a very
wide difference. When Aristotle arrived in translations he was almost a
stranger; and even when the work of Boethius had raised him to unchal-
lenged sovereignty in the province of logic, he still was enthroned in a
certain isolation, with little historical background and with no evident
affinity to the Christian way of life. Platonism, on the other hand, was
almost inhaled with the air. Boethius himself was a Platonist, and so was
Porphyry. Augustine, too, never forgot his debt to the philosophy which
had delivered him from Manichaeism and carried him a lony stage on the
road to Christ. To indicate all the sources of Platonism would be almost
impossible. It must suffice here to notice two from outside the Christian
circle, the commentary of Chalcidius that accompanied his version of the
Timaeus, and the dissertation of Macrobius on the Somnium Scipionis.
To class Chalcidius as non-Christian is perhaps questionable, for he was
more probably a Christian than a Pagan or a Jew. His work, however,
embodies very little Christian material except an extract from Origen.
CH. XXIII.
## p. 790 (#836) ############################################
790
The Influence of Macrobius
Dating, perhaps, from the early fourth century, it is neither independent
nor critical. The substance of it, if we accept the result of Switalski's
investigation, is derived from an earlier commentary, very possibly by the
hand of the eminent Stoic, Posidonius. The outcome is an eclectic medley
or muddle of divers authorities, gathered under the sway of the infallible
Plato. The later Platonism, we must remember, was even more than
eclectic. Its aim was to absorb and to reconcile, to appear as a summary
of all previous Greek speculation. Much of the uncritical confusion of
ideas that meets us everywhere in the Middle Ages was simply a legacy
from Chalcidius and the less intelligent followers of Plotinus in the decline
of the ancient world.
Roughly similar qualities appear in the work of Macrobius, a writer
who, late in the fifth century, had contrived to remain untouched by the
Christian influence. His detachment from the Church makes it all the
more interesting to discover in him that medievalism of mind so often
rated as a purely Christian product. In him we have already the medieval
Virgil, and along with that strange invention all the baffling mixture of
science and nonsense that was to float about Europe for more than a
thousand
years. How medieval, too, is the deference of Macrobius to the
great names of the past. Neque vero tam immemor mei, he writes, aut ita
male animatus sum, ut ex ingenio meo vel Aristoteli resistam vel adsim
Platoni'. Yet Macrobius is far from contemptible, and the debt of the
Middle Ages to him was immense. To him was due what little was known
of Plotinus (inter philosophiae professores cum Platone princeps)? , the four-
fold classification of the virtues, the threefold gradation of Deus, mens,
and anima, the illumination of all creatures as in an orderly series of
mirrors by the unus fulgor, the descent of the soul to its material habita-
tion, and its yearning for restoration to its eternal home. When Christians
read in Macrobius of the soul's imprisonment in a vesture of clay (indu-
mentum testeum), of its wandering on earth as a pilgrim, of heaven as the
true patria, of philosophy as meditatio mortis, they caught the genuine
accent of religion and welcomed Platonism as a natural ally. Actual
knowledge of the original Plato Macrobius did not greatly increase. Be-
hind the Somnium Scipionis, according to Schedler's recent enquiry, lies
once more the T'imaeus, as interpreted first by Porphyry and handed on
by intermediate writers to Macrobius. If that be so, it helps to account
for the frequent difficulty of deciding, when no names are mentioned,
whether a medieval writer is using Chalcidius, or Macrobius, or sometimes
the De Consolatione of Boethius. The same brand of Platonism, with the
same tincture of new Pythagoreanism, is recognisable in all.
The lines of thought broadly indicated by Plato and Aristotle run
through the Middle Ages. From Plato came the wider inspiration and
the higher call; from Aristotle the perception of difficulties and contra-
dictions, with the demand for dialectical skill. Nowhere, as it happens,
1 Comm. in Somnium Scipionis, 11, 15.
2 Ib. 1, 8.
## p. 791 (#837) ############################################
Importance of dialectic. The tenth century
791
were the defects of medieval knowledge of history more conspicuous than
in this very matter of dialectic. The most learned doctors were unaware
that dialectic had held in Plato's estimation a far higher place than Aris-
totle would allow. They did not know why Aristotle himself had some-
times preferred and sometimes rejected it, nor how far removed was his
trivial use of it as an exercise for students from the profundity of his
dialectical analysis of moral experience. They knew just enough to warrant
the dispute whether dialectic was properly concerned with words or with
things; and enough, unfortunately, to encourage a confusion of the ars
disserendi with the total activity of reason. During the two dark centuries
after the appearance of John the Scot dialectic was, however, the beacon.
We can dimly trace the rise of factions, the growth of the contest between
dialecticians and anti-dialecticians, which was to reach its climax in the
age of Abelard. For the rest, the condition of Europe was unfriendly to
speculation, and the flagrance of moral disorders left no leisure for adven-
tures of the intellect.
The tenth century is singularly barren. Scarcely a name of distinction
is recorded in the annals of philosophy, save that of Gerbert of Aurillac
(ob. 1003), who was raised to the Papacy as Sylvester II. Even Gerbert was
more remarkable for his skill in mathematics, and for his services to humane
education, than for any direct contribution to philosophy. To his pupil
and patron, Otto III, he dedicated a logical text-book with the title
Libellus de rationali et ratione uti, and he may be the author (though the
point is disputed) of a work De Corpore et Sanguine Domini. If so, we
can credit him with a perception of the value of dialectic in harmonising
discrepant utterances of the Fathers. Some have failed, however, to note
that his most striking observation is taken directly from John the Scot.
The art which divides genera into species, and resolves species into genera,
is not (he says) the product of human machinations, but was discovered
by the wise in the very nature of things, where the Author of all the arts
had placed it. This is taken verbatim from the De Divisione Naturae',
where it stands as a comment on the work of the Creator. Gerbert's in-
Auence, however, did not depend exclusively on his books. His distinction
as a teacher is indisputable, and while his personal association was with
the cathedral-school of Rheims, he became, through his pupil Fulbert
(ob. 1028), the indirect founder of the more famous school of Chartres.
(The attribution to Gerbert of a work on the Eucharist is, in any case,
an indication of the subject which did more, perhaps, than any other in
this unproductive period to stimulate curiosity and to awaken controversy
about the use and abuse of dialectic. Already in the ninth century
Paschasius Radbert and Ratramnus had earned some notoriety by their
discussion of the Blessed Sacrament; and now a larger disturbance was
created, some while after Gerbert, by the De Caena Domini of Berengar
of Tours. Devout minds not unnaturally felt a strong distaste for the
1 MPL, cxxII, 749.
CH. XXIII.
## p. 792 (#838) ############################################
792
Lanfranc and Peter Damian
analysis of a mystery, but Berengar was less sensitive. He magnified the
function of dialectic, quia confugere ad eam ad rationem est confugere,
and thus proved himself an imperfect scholar of John the Scot, by whom
he is said to have been inspired. For if John had championed the liberty
of reason, he had also taught that even the angelic intelligences ab in-
troitu mysteriorum suos theologicos pedes, hoc est, intellectuales ingressus
retractant'. The most eminent critic of Berengar's “theological feet" was
Archbishop Lanfranc (1005-1089), himself well reputed in dialectic but
disposed to restrict the art to a subordinate position. Augustine, he allows,
had thought well of it; and, lest he should seem to be afraid of Berengar's
weapons, he will waive his own preference for trusting to the traditions
of the Church where mysteries of the faith are concerned. He accuses
Berengar of parading his skill in disputation, and suggests that a confes-
sion of ignorance is sometimes better than arrogant obstinacy. The tone
of his remonstrance is dignified and sensible. He does not look on dia-
lectic as necessarily hostile to the faith, but thinks it a perilous exercise
for shallow and contentious minds.
Another contemporary name, Peter Damian (ob. 1072), deserves to be
mentioned. Justly famed for his saintly life, Petrus peccator, as he styled
himself, stands in the main for the monastic tendency to think more
highly of practical religion than of intellectual attempts to explain and
justify the faith. He wrote, however, several works of theology, in one of
which, the De Divina Omnipotentia, he discusses the use of philosophy in
“sacred disputations. ” It is here that he introduces the celebrated phrase,
ancilla dominae, to denote the proper relation of dialectic to theology. Less
energy, perhaps, would have been spent in remonstrance against this ap-
parent degradation of reason, if more attention had been paid to the
current usage of terms. Philosophia often means no more than dialectic,
and dialectic no more than a display of captious arguments. That the
Christian position as a whole (the Christian philosophy, in fact) was ir-
rational, Peter Damian and his contemporaries would never have admitted.
The antithesis of ratio and auctoritas was then far less comprehensive
than the final problem, scarcely realised before the age of Aquinas, whether
the independence of philosophy could be reconciled with the Catholic
position. To assign to dialectic a merely ancillary office is not necessarily
obscurantism. It often meant no more than the logical commonplace,
that ratiocinatio presupposes the concession of premises. In a deeper sense,
it meant that experience must precede the attempt to explain it, and that
the testimony of many generations cannot easily be overthrown by a talent
for repartee.
With the illustrious name of Anselm a new chapter begins. As a
pupil of Lanfranc he belongs chronologically (1033–1109) to the eleventh
century, but in mind and spirit must rank as the herald of the sustained
intellectual effort which culminated two centuries later in the systems of
1 MPL, XXII, G68.
## p. 793 (#839) ############################################
The work of Anselm
793
Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. For this reason he has often been saluted
as the true founder of Scholasticism, a title we should bestow with greater
confidence, did any definition of Scholasticism command universal assent.
Unfortunately it is not so. After much pedantic and even acrimonious
discussion we are left uncertain whether "scholastic” and “medieval"
philosophy should be identified or clearly distinguished, whether “scholas-
ticism” is the name of a method or of a result, whether there was one
pre-eminently scholastic problem, and whether one particular solution has
a right to be called scholastic. Thus is medieval philosophy, so fertile in
distinctions, pursued by the shadow of itself. The wisest course, perhaps,
is to stand aside from the controversy. It is agreed that the term scholas-
ticus (applicable either to master or to pupil) meant uncommonly little;
it is agreed also that the great doctors of the thirteenth century may
rightly be called schoolmen. For the rest, it is enough to interpret, as
best one can, the course of events.
To call Anselm an original thinker is not to deny his obligations to
others. In the preface to the Monologium he protests that nothing in his
doctrine is out of harmony with the Catholic Fathers, especially the Blessed
Augustine. The product of his mind is, however, original inasmuch as it
is the outcome of personal experience, the fruit of profound meditation
upon the nature of his faith. “Enter into the cubicle of thy mind; shut
out all things but God and whatsoever may help thee to seek for Him;
then close the door and seek. ” Thus he writes in the first chapter of the
Proslogion, before expounding his proof of God's existence; and none,
perhaps, who are deaf to the exhortation will feel any force in the proof.
Fides quaerens intellectum and nisi credideritis, non intelligetis are the
formulas that meet us everywhere on his pages. Still more clearly does
he express his position in the words of the De Fide Trinitatis: qui non
crediderit, non experietur, et qui non expertus fuerit, non intelliget. The
Church, he means, had not invented new intellectual instruments, but
rather had proclaimed the advent of a new spiritual experience, itself the
condition of understanding the meaning of life. Mere rationalism, on the
other hand, could originate nothing; for reason, as discursive and critical,
depends for its materials on a higher mode of experience. On this point
at least Christianity was at one with Platonism, and Anselm himself is, on
the whole, a kind of Platonist. His Platonism, however, is derived from
Augustine, not, as some have alleged, from John the Scot; for Anselm is
by no means committed to the negative theology of Neo-Platonism, which
is the very essence of the Irish philosopher's teaching. Well as he knows
that the names we apply to the Divine Nature are but shadows and symbols,
he is never possessed by that ecstasy of intellectual asceticism which glories
in the denial of attributes, and pays its last tribute to omniscience by
declaring that God Himself cannot know what He is.
Anselm's argument for the necessary existence of id quo maius cogitari
nequit is no plea for a negative abstraction. Read in connexion with the
CH. XXIII.
## p. 794 (#840) ############################################
794
The ontological argument
Monologium it is seen as an attempt to clothe the One, which alone par-
ticipates in nothing, but is what it is, with the attributes of an individual
spirit, unbounded by space and time, yet present everywhere and always,
without parts and qualities, yet containing in very essence life, salvation,
beatitude, and all possible perfections. Nearest to God, and best able to
serve as a mirror of His image, is mens (another link with Neo-Platonism);
and since mens is the innermost nature of man, to “enter into the cubicle
of the mind,” shutting out all lower manifestations of being, is the true
way of access. The formal weakness of the argument was at once detected
by the monk Gaunilo; whose objection, however, that the transition from
what exists only in intellectu to what exists also in re cannot thus be
effected, leaves Anselm quite unperturbed. The pretence that the same
argument might prove the existence of the most perfect island he declares
to be a misapprehension of the point. If his argument can be applied to
anything but the Supreme Being, he is ready to make Gaunilo a present
of the island, and to promise that it shall never vanish away.
The "ontological" argument, however, was always viewed with suspi-
cion. In this, as in some other respects, Anselm did not precisely anticipate
the position of later scholastics. Even his fides quaerens intellectum does
not accurately express the method of those who afterwards made a more
exact distinction between truths demonstrable by reason and truths
revealed only to faith. Tentative steps in that direction were taken by
Anselm, but he went farther than his successors in attempting, for example,
to arrive by reasoning at the doctrine of the Trinity; an image of which,
following an Augustinian tradition, he discovers in the human soul.
Anselm, in fact, was not directly interested in the question whether it
was possible to concede to philosophy a province where certain problems
could be solved by reason alone. He perceived the distinction (as he shews
in the Cur Deus homo) between seeking reasons because you do not believe,
and seeking them because you do; but it was the latter case that chiefly
inspired his arguments, and so made him, in a certain sense, more ration-
alistic than those who afterwards defined their concessions to reason.
A fuller account of Anselm would refer to his theories of sense-percep-
tion, judgment, the freedom of the will, and other psychological matters.
But these are of less importance in the history of his own time than his
controversy with Roscelin, about whose doctrines, as it happens, Anselm is
our best source of information. To call the controversy important is not
for a moment to allow that the single theme of Nominalism and Realism
is the clue to medieval philosophy. On the contrary, Roscelin is important
because he succeeded, perhaps for the first and last time, in disturbing
the ecclesiastical arena by manufacturing a heresy out of this topic of the
schools. In his famous Isagoge, or Introduction to the Organon of
Aristotle, Porphyry prepared the medieval battleground by a brief and
cautious statement which it may be worth while to quote in the Latin of
Boethius. Mox de generibus et speciebus illud quidem, sive subsistant sive
## p. 795 (#841) ############################################
Realism and Nominalism
795
in solis nudis intellectibus posita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia sint an
incorporalia, et utrum separuta a sensibilibus posita et circa haec consistentia,
dicere recusabo. The original difference between Aristotle and Plato was
not properly a controversy about genera and species, but in the Middle
Ages the extreme “realistic” doctrine of universals was identified with
the teaching of Plato. It is, in fact, one of the bewildering accidents of
history that the Platonic “idea" became the basis of medieval “realism,"
whereas the “idealism” of Berkeley and later philosophers has nothing to
do with either Plato or the medieval controversy. For in whatever sense we
attribute “conceptualism” to medieval logicians, it must certainly not be
in a sense that would bring them into line with an idealist philosophy
never clearly formulated before the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
Apart from the unabashed Platonists, the prevailing tendency of
medieval writers was to follow Aristotle or Boethius in holding that
universals could not“subsist” except in association with individual things.
At the same time it was freely allowed that the intellect had the power
of viewing them in abstraction from sensible things, and that the common
element in things, from which we derive the notions of genus and species,
was no mere fiction of the mind. What complicated the dispute between
Platonists and Aristotelians was the appearance of Nominalism; and what
has thrown the whole history of the subject into confusion is the belief,
originating mainly with some distinguished French scholars, that the war
of Nominalists and Realists began in the ninth century and persisted
until the close of the Middle Ages. Since it is impossible here to scrutinise
the evidence, nothing more can be offered than a dogmatic assertion that
this view is untenable. Nominalism was an intellectual firework of the
age of Roscelin and Abelard; for which reason, among others, it is also
an anachronism to talk of Realism in connexion with John the Scot or
other writers of that period. Even when the nominalis secta (as John of
Salisbury was perhaps the first to call it) has been rightly dated, it is no
easy task to define and explain its doctrine. The contention that only
individual things exist in their own right is no more Nominalist than
Aristotelian. Nothing characteristic of the new sect appears until the
whole stress is laid on voces or nomina. If universals are mere flatus vocis,
if their reality is only the physical reality belonging to a percussio aeris,
then indeed we have a doctrine inconsistent alike with the Platonic Realism
and with the tradition of Boethius. Absurd as the doctrine may sound
to modern ears, it was a not unnatural product of the long-established
opinion that logic, in company with grammar and rhetoric, was primarily
concerned with words. Meanwhile the importance of Nominalism for the
twelfth century was that it re-opened the whole question of universals, split
up the camp of the anti-nominalists into factions, and produced all the
varieties of doctrine enumerated by John of Salisbury and other writers.
The logical and metaphysical problems thus brought to light were per-
fectly genuine. Much the same difficulties may be found in modern books
CH. XXIII.
## p. 796 (#842) ############################################
796
Anselm and Roscelin
3
of logic, and the solutions offered do not differ fundamentally from those
current in medieval times.
According to Anselm, Roscelin presented the world with a dilemma.
Either, he argued, the three Persons of the Trinity are one res; in which
case the Father and the Spirit were incarnate together with the Son: or
they are three, like three souls or three angels; in which case only con-
vention forbids us to speak of three Gods. The second alternative, a kind
of Tritheism, Roscelin felt himself driven to prefer by his denial of reality
to universals and his reduction of them to mere flatus vocis. Much in-
genuity has been wasted in arguing that Roscelin's doctrine was not
genuine Nominalism (whatever that may happen to be), and that Anselm
must have misrepresented the case. But where is the evidence? There is
none of importance but Roscelin's letter to Abelard, which contributes
nothing to the point, a few words by Abelard himself, who speaks of
Roscelin's "insane opinion” that voces alone could have parts or species,
and a statement by John of Salisbury, who makes Roscelin the author of
the “exploded opinion,” voces ipsas genera esse et species. What little we
learn from these sources is at least consistent with the assertions of Anselm.
Anselm was no fanatical heresy-hunter, and Roscelin was doubtless sincere
in repudiating heretical intentions. But that is not the point. The
question is whether there is any ground for regarding him as a distressed
and persecuted champion of reason; and the answer, surely, must be that
there is none.
The flatus vocis theory, whether invented by Roscelin or by one John
the Sophist, was clearly a modernism, a heresy in dialectic, with no support
from tradition. To translate it into Conceptualism appears to be wholly
unwarrantable; Anselm treats it rather as a kind of stupid materialism,
and gives not the slightest hint that he and Roscelin are ranged on oppo-
site sides in an old and respectable controversy. He does not even trouble
to define his own view of universals, but leaves us to gather what we may
from scattered passages in his writings. Distressing as this may be to the
historian of logic, the historian of philosophy will find in Anselm's very
silences and omissions fresh reason for rejecting the once common opinion
that medieval thinkers exhausted themselves for centuries in trying to
define the nature of universals. It is scarcely too much to say that Anselm
does not care what they are, so long as the function of reason is not
simply confounded with sensuous perception. Neither things nor ideas
are mere words and breath, but in what sense things and ideas are iden-
tical or distinct he is at no great pains to decide. The term “Nominalism”
was not yet invented, nor the varieties of Realism yet arranged for
classification. Nevertheless, we may still find reason to doubt whether
Nominalism is exactly the right name for the doctrine propounded by
Roscelin.
Among those who once called Roscelin master was he who called no
man master for long. The stormy and romantic career of Peter Abelard
## p. 797 (#843) ############################################
The position of Abelard
797
has won for him a kind of immortality not conceded to philosophy alone.
By his side, to claim a share in that immortality, stands the partner in his
calamities and his joys:
Poeta, volentieri
Parlerei a quei due che insieme vanno.
With all his weakness, his vanity, his almost wanton pugnacity, there
must have been in Abelard some quality of greatness, something that
forbade men to gaze on him with indifference and pass by on the other
side. He had at least the virtuosity of genius; he was born to fascinate
or to repel. Wherever his tent was pitched, at Paris or on the borders
of the wilderness, thither, as an old chronicler has it, paene de tota Latini-
tate viri litterati confluebant. In vain was he driven into exile; for where
the master was there was the school.
Much the same gift of attraction and repulsion has been transmitted,
it would seem, with Abelard's writings, to perplex the judgment of modern
historians, and to fashion estimates of his worth non solum diversa verum
etiam adversa, as once he said himself of the utterances of the saints.
Unfair detraction is too apt to provoke extravagant eulogy; for to main-
tain that we have in Abelard the greatest mind of the Middle Ages is
surely extravagant. A great teacher he certainly was, a shrewd and fearless
critic, a mighty champion of dialectic, the mistress, as he declared, of all
philosophical studies. But when we look for inspiration, for profundity
of insight, for constructive power and masterly comprehension, we find
but little to justify comparison of Abelard with John the Scot or Anselm
or Thomas Aquinas.
