XXXIV. SCHOLASTICISM: SPIRIT, SCOPE, AND METHOD
The religious philosophy or theology of the Middle Ages is commonly called scholasticism, and its exponents are called the scholastics. The name applies most properly to the respectable academic thinkers. These, in the early Middle Ages, usually were monks living in monasteries, like St. Anselm, for instance, who was Abbot of Bec in Normandy before, to his sorrow, he was made Archbishop of Canterbury. In the thirteenth century, however, while these respected thinkers still were monks, or rather mendicant friars, they were also university professors. Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominicans, and their friend St. Bonaventura, who became the head of the Franciscan Order, all lectured at the University of Paris, the chief university of the Middle Ages in the domain of philosophy and theology. Moreover, as the scholastics were respectable and academic, so they were usually orthodox Churchmen, good Roman Catholics. The conduct or opinions of some of them, Abaelard for example, became suspect to the Church authorities; yet Abaelard, although his book had been condemned, kept within the Church’s pale, and died a monk of Cluny. There were plenty of obdurate heretics in the Middle Ages; but their bizarre ideas, sometimes coming down from Manichaean sources, were scarcely germane to the central lines of mediaeval thought.[419]
One hears of scholastic philosophy and scholastic theology; and assuredly these mediaeval theologian-philosophers endeavoured to distinguish between the one and the other phase of the matters which occupied their minds. The distinction was intelligibly drawn and, in many treatises, doubtless affected the choice and ordering of topics. Whether it was consistently observed in the handling of those topics, is another question, which perhaps should be answered in the negative. At all events, to attempt to observe this distinction in considering the ultimate intellectual interests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, might sap the matter of the human interest attaching to it, to wit, that interest and validity possessed by all serious effort to know--and to be saved. These were the motives of the scholastics, whether they used their reason, or clung to revelation, or did both, as they always did.
Mediaeval methods of thinking and topics of thought are no longer in vogue. For the time, men have turned from the discussion of universals and the common unity or separate individuality of mind, and are as little concerned with transubstantiation as with the old dispute over investitures. But the scholastics were men and so are we. Our humanity is one with theirs. Men are still under the necessity of reflecting upon their own existence and the world without, and still feel the need to reach conclusions and the impulse to formulate consistently what seem to them vital propositions. Herein we are blood kin to Gerbert and Anselm, to Abaelard and Hugo of St. Victor, to Thomas Aquinas as well as Roger Bacon: and our highest nature is one with theirs in the intellectual fellowship of human endeavour to think out and present that which shall appease the mind. Because of this kinship with the scholastics, and the sympathy which we feel for the struggle which is the same in us and them, their intellectual endeavours, their achieved conclusions, although now appearing as but apt or necessitated phrases, may have for us the immortal interest of the eternal human.
Let us then approach mediaeval thought as man meets man, and seek in it for what may still be valid, or at least real to us, because agreeing with what we find within ourselves. Being men as well as scholars, we would win from its parchment-covered tomes those elements which if they do not represent everlasting verities, are at least symbols of the permanent necessities of the human mind. Whatever else there is in mediaeval thought, as touching us less nearly, may be considered by way of historical setting and explanation.
In different men the impulse to know bears different relationships to the rest of life. It sometimes seems self-impelled, and again palpably inspired by a motive beyond itself. In some form, however, it winds itself into every action of our mental faculties, and no province of life appears untouched by this craving of the mind. Nevertheless to know is not the whole matter; for with knowledge comes appetition or aversion, admiration or contempt, love or abhorrence; and other impulses--emotional, desiderative, loving--impel the human creature to realize its nature in states of heightened consciousness that are not palpable modes of knowing, though they may be replete with all the knowledge that the man has gained.
These ultimate cravings which we recognize in ourselves, inspired mediaeval thought. Its course, its progress, its various phases, its contents and completed systems, all represent the operation of human faculty pressing to expression and realization under the accidental or “historical” conditions of the mediaeval period. We may be sure that many kinds of human craving and corresponding faculty realized themselves in mediaeval philosophy, theology, piety and mysticism--the last a word used provisionally, until we succeed in resolving it into terms of clearer significance. And we also note that in these provinces, realization is expression. Every faculty, every energy, in man seeks to function, to realize its power in act. The sheer body--if there be sheer body--acts bodily, operates, and so makes actual its powers. But those human energies which are informed with mind, realize themselves in ardent or rational thought, or in uttered words, or in products of the artfully devising hand. All this clearly is expression, and corresponds, if it is not one and the same, with the passing of energy from potency to the actuality which is its end and consummation. Thus love, seeking its end, thereby seeks expression, through which it is enhanced, and in which it is realized. Likewise, impelled by the desire to know, the faculties of cognition and reason realize themselves in expression; and in expression each part of rational knowledge is clarified, completed, rendered accordant with the data of observation and the laws or necessities of the mind.
Human faculties form a correlated whole; and this composite human nature seeks to act, to function. Thus the whole man strives to realize the fullest actuality of his being, and satisfy or express the whole of him, and not alone his reason, nor yet his emotions, or his appetites. This uttermost realization of human being--man’s summum bonum or summa necessitas--cannot unite the incompatible within its synthesis. It must be kept a consistent ideal, a possible whole. Here the demiurge is the discriminating and constructive intelligence, which builds together the permanent and valuable elements of being, and excludes whatever cannot coexist in concord with them. Yet the intelligence does not always set its own rational activities as man’s furthest goal of realization. It may place love above reason. And, of course, its discriminating judgment will be affected by current knowledge and by dominant beliefs as to man and his destiny, the universe and God.
Manifestly whatever the thoughtful idealizing man in any period (and our attention may at once focus itself upon the Middle Ages) adjudges to belong to the final realization of his nature, will become an object of intellectual interest for him; and he will deem it a proper subject for study and meditation. The rational, spiritual, or even physical elements, which may enter and compose this, his summum bonum, represent those intellectual interests which may be termed ultimate, for the very reason, that they relate to what the thinker deems his beatitude. These ultimate intellectual interests possess an absolute sanction, for the lack of which whatever lies outside of them tends to adjudge itself vain.
The philosophy, theology, and the profoundly felt and reasoned piety, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made up that period’s ultimate intellectual interests. We are not concerned with other matters occupying its attention, save as they bore on man’s supreme beatitude, which was held to consist in his everlasting salvation and all that might constitute his bliss in that unending state. The elements of this blessedness were not deemed to lie altogether in rational cognition and its processes; for the conception of the soul’s beatitude was catholic; and while with some men the intellectual elements were dominant, with others salvation’s summit was attained along the paths of spiritual emotion.
Obviously, from the side of the emotions, there could come no large and lasting happiness, unless emotional desire and devotion were directed to that which might also satisfy the mind, or at all events, would not conflict with its judgment. Hence the emotional side of the ultimate mediaeval ideal was pietistic; because the mediaeval dogmatic faith regarded the emotional impulses between one human being and another as distracting, if not wicked. Such mortal impulses were so very difficult to harmonize with the eternal beatitude which consisted in the cognition and love of God. This principle was proclaimed by monks and theologians, or philosophers; it was even recognized (although not followed) in the literature which glorified the love of man and woman, but in which the lover-knight so often ends a hermit, and the convent at last receives his sinful mistress. On the other hand, reason, with its practical and speculative knowledge, is sterile when unmixed with piety and love. This is the sum of Bonaventura’s fervid arguments, and is as clearly, if more quietly, recognized by Aquinas, with whom fides without caritas is informis, formless, very far indeed from its true actuality or realization.
Thus, for the full realization of man’s highest good in everlasting salvation, the two complementary phases of the human spirit had to act and function in concord. Together they must realize themselves in such catholic expression as should exclude only the froward or evil elements, non-elements rather, of man’s nature. Both represent ultimate mediaeval interests and desires; and perhaps deep down and very intimately, even inscrutably, they may be one, even as they clearly are complementary phases of the human soul. Yet with certain natures who perhaps fail to hold the balance between them, the two phases seem to draw apart, or, at least, to evince themselves in distinct expression, and indeed in all men they are usually distinguishable.
Generally speaking, the conception of man’s divinely mediated salvation, and of the elements of human being which might be carried on, and realized in a state of everlasting beatitude, prescribed the range of ultimate intellectual interests for the Middle Ages. The same had been despotically true of the patristic period. Augustine would know God and the soul; Ambrose expressed equally emphatic views upon the vanity of all knowledge that did not contribute to an understanding of the Christian Faith. This view was held with temperamental and barbarizing narrowness by Gregory the Great. It was admitted, as of course, throughout the Carolingian period, although humanistically-minded men played with the pagan literature. Nor was it seriously disputed in the eleventh or twelfth century, when men began to delight in dialectic, and some cared for pagan literature; nor yet in the thirteenth when an increasing number were asking many things from philosophy and natural knowledge, which had but distant bearing on the soul’s salvation. One of these men was Roger Bacon, whose scientific studies were pursued with ceaseless energy. But he could also state emphatically the principle of the worthlessness of whatever does not help men to understand the divine truths by which they are saved. In Bacon’s time, the love of knowledge was enlarging its compass, while, really or nominally as the individual case might be, the criterion of relevancy to the Faith still obtained, and set the topics with which men should occupy themselves. All matters of philosophy or natural science had to relate themselves to the summum bonum of salvation in order to possess ultimate human interest. Therefore, if philosophy was to preserve the strongest reason for its existence, it had to remain the handmaid of theology. Still, to be sure, the conception of man’s beatitude would become more comprehensive with the expansion and variegation of the desire for knowledge.
As the summum bonum of salvation prescribed the topics of ultimate intellectual interest for the Middle Ages, so the stress which it laid upon one topic rather than another tended to direct their ordering or classification, as well as the proportion of attention devoted to each one. Likewise the form or method of presentation was controlled by the authority of the Scriptural statement of the way and means of salvation, and the well-nigh equally authoritative interpretation of the same by the beatified Fathers. Thus the nature of the summum bonum and the character of its Scriptural statement and patristic exposition suggested the arrangement of topics, and set the method of their treatment in those works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which afford the most important presentations of the ultimate intellectual interests of that time. Obvious examples will be Abaelard’s Sic et non and his Theologia, Hugo of St. Victor’s De sacramentis, the Lombard’s Books of Sentences, and the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas.
It will be seen in the next chapter that the arrangement of topics in these comprehensive treatises differed from what would have been evolved through the requirements of a systematic presentation of human knowledge. Aquinas sets forth the reasons why one mode of treatment is suitable to philosophy and another to sacred science, and why the latter may omit matters proper for the former, or treat them from another point of view. The supremacy of sacred science is incidentally shown by the argument. In his Contra Gentiles[420] chapter four, book second, bears the title: “Quod aliter considerat de creaturis Philosophus et aliter Theologus” (“That the philosopher views the creation in one way and the theologian in another”). In the text he says:
“The science (doctrina) of Christian faith considers creatures so far as there may be in them some likeness of God, and so far as error regarding them might lead to error in things divine.... Human philosophy considers them after their own kind, and its parts are so devised as to correspond with the different classes (genera) of things; but the faith of Christ considers them, not after their own kind, as for example, fire as fire, but as representing the divine altitude.... The philosopher considers what belongs to them according to their own nature; the believer (fidelis) regards in creatures only what pertains to them in their relationship to God, as that they are created by Him and subject to Him. Wherefore the science of the Faith is not to be deemed incomplete, if it passes over many properties of things, as the shape of the heaven or the quality of motion.... It also follows that the two sciences do not proceed in the same order. With philosophy, which regards creatures in themselves, and from them draws on into a knowledge of God, the first consideration is in regard to the creatures and the last is as to God. But in the science of faith, which views creatures only in their relationship to God (in ordine ad Deum), the first consideration is of God, and next of the creatures.”
Obviously sacra doctrina, which is to say, theologia, proceeds differently from philosophia humana, and evidently it has to do with matters of ultimate importance, and therefore of ultimate intellectual interest. The passage quoted from the Contra Gentiles may be taken as introductory to the more elaborate statement at the beginning of his Summa theologiae, where Thomas sets forth the principles by which sacra doctrina is distinguished from the philosophicae disciplinae, to wit, the various sciences of human philosophy:
“It was necessary to human salvation that there should be a science (doctrina) according with divine revelation, besides the philosophical disciplines which are pursued by human reason. Because man was formed (ordinatur) toward God as toward an end exceeding reason’s comprehension. That end should be known to men, who ought to regulate their intentions and actions toward an end. Wherefore it was necessary for salvation that man should know certain matters through revelation, which surpass human reason.”
Thomas now points out that, on account of many errors, it also was necessary for man to be instructed through divine revelation as to those saving truths concerning God which human reason was capable of investigating. He next proceeds to show that sacra doctrina is science.
“But there are two kinds of sciences. There are those which proceed from the principles known by the natural light of the mind, as arithmetic and geometry. There are others which proceed from principles known by the light of a superior science: as perspective proceeds from principles made known through geometry, and music from principles known through arithmetic. And sacra doctrina is science in this way, because it proceeds from principles known by the light of a superior science or knowledge which is the knowledge belonging to God and the beatified. Thus as music believes the principles delivered to it by arithmetic, so sacred doctrine believes the principles revealed to it from God.”
The question then is raised whether sacra doctrina is one science, or many. And Thomas answers, that it is one, by reason of the unity of its formal object. For it views everything discussed by it as divinely revealed; and all things which are subjects of revelation (revelabilia) have part in the formal conception of this science; and so are comprehended under sacra doctrina, as under one science. Nevertheless it extends to subjects belonging to various departments of knowledge so far as they are knowable through divine illumination. As some of these may be practical and some speculative, it follows that sacred science includes both the practical and the speculative, even as God with the same knowledge knows himself and also the things He makes.
“Yet this science is more speculative than practical, because on principle it treats of divine things rather than human actions, which it treats in so far as man by means of them is directed (ordinatur) to perfect cognition of God, wherein eternal beatitude consists. This science in its speculative as well as practical functions transcends other sciences, speculative and practical. One speculative science is said to be worthier than another, by reason of its certitude, or the dignity of its matter. In both respects this science surpasses other speculative sciences, because the others have certitude from the natural light of human reason, which may err; but this has certitude from the light of the divine knowledge, which cannot be deceived; likewise by reason of the dignity of its matter, because primarily it relates to matters too high for reason, while other sciences consider only those which are subjected to reason. It is worthier than the practical sciences, which are ordained for an ulterior end; for so far as this science is practical, its end is eternal beatitude, unto which as an ulterior end all other ends of the practical sciences are ordained (ordinantur).
“Moreover although this science may accept something from the philosophical sciences, it requires them merely for the larger manifestation of the matters which it teaches. For it takes its principles, not from other sciences, but immediately from God through revelation. So it does not receive from them as from superiors, but uses them as servants. Even so, it uses them not because of any defect of its own, but because of the defectiveness of our intellect which is more easily conducted (manuducitur) by natural reason to the things above reason which this science teaches.”
Thomas now shows, with scholastic formalism, that God is the subjectum of this science; since all things in it are treated with reference to God (sub ratione Dei), either because they are God himself, or because they bear relationship (habent ordinem) to God as toward their cause and end (principium et finem). The final question is whether this science be argumentativa, using arguments and proofs; and Thomas thus sets forth his masterly solution:
“I reply, it should be said that as other sciences do not prove their first principles, but argue from them in order to prove other matters, so this science does not argue to prove its principles, which are articles of Faith, but proceeds from them to prove something else, as the Apostle, in 1 Corinthians xv., argues from the resurrection of Christ to prove the resurrection of us all. One should bear in mind that in the philosophic sciences the lower science neither proves its own first principles nor disputes with him who denies them, but leaves that to a higher science. But the science which is the highest among them, that is metaphysics, does dispute with him who denies its principles, if the adversary will concede anything; if he concede nothing it cannot thus argue with him, but can only overthrow his arguments. Likewise sacra Scriptura (or doctrina or sacred science, theology), since it owns no higher science, disputes with him who denies its principles, by argument indeed, if the adversary will concede any of the matters which it accepts through revelation. Thus through Scriptural authorities we dispute against heretics, and adduce one article against those who deny another. But if the adversary will give credence to nothing which is divinely revealed, sacred science has no arguments by which to prove to him the articles of faith, but has only arguments to refute his reasonings against the Faith, should he adduce any. For since faith rests on infallible truth, its contrary cannot be demonstrated: manifestly the proofs which are brought against it are not proofs, but controvertible arguments.
“To argue from authority is most appropriate to this science; for its principles rest on revelation, and it is proper to credit the authority of those to whom the revelation was made. Nor does this derogate from the dignity of this science; for although proof from authority based on human reason may be weak, yet proof from authority based on divine revelation is most effective.
“Yet sacred science also makes use of human reason; not indeed to prove the Faith, because this would take away the merit of believing; but to make manifest other things which may be treated in this science. For since grace does not annul nature, but perfects it, natural reason should serve faith, even as the natural inclination conforms itself to love (caritas). Hence sacred science uses the philosophers also as authority, where they were able to know the truth through natural reason. It uses authorities of this kind as extraneous arguments having probability. But it uses the authorities of the canonical Scriptures arguing from its own premises and with certainty. And it uses the authorities of other doctors of the Church, as arguing upon its own ground, yet only with probability. For our faith rests upon the revelation made to the Apostles and Prophets, who wrote the canonical books; and not upon the revelation, if there was any, made to other doctors.”[421]
Mediaeval thought was beset behind and before by the compulsion of its conditions. Its mighty antecedents lived in it, and wrought as moulding forces. Well we know them, two in number, the one, of course, the antique philosophy; the other, again of course, the dogmatic Christian Faith, itself shot through and through with antique metaphysics, in the terms of which it had been formulated. These two, very dual and yet joined, antagonistic and again united, constituted the form-giving principles of mediaeval thinking. They were, speaking in scholastic phrase, the substantial as well as accidental forms of mediaeval theology, philosophy, and knowledge. Which means that they set the lines of mediaeval theology or philosophy, and caused the one and the other to be what it became, rather than something else; and also that they supplied the knowledge which mediaeval men laboured to acquire, and attempted to adjust their thinking to. Thus, through the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the fourteenth centuries, they remained the inworking formal causes of mediaeval thought; while, on the other hand, the moving and efficient causes (still speaking in scholastic-Aristotelian phrase) were the human impulses which those formal causes moulded, or indeed suggested, and the faculties which they trained.
The patristic system of dogma with the antique philosophy, set the forms of mediaeval expression, fixed the distinctive qualities of mediaeval thought, furnished its topics, and even necessitated its problems--in two ways: First, through the specific substance which passed over and filled the mediaeval productions; and secondly, simply by reason of the existence of such a vast authoritative body of antique and patristic opinion, knowledge, dogma, which the Middle Ages had to accept and master, and beyond which the substance of mediaeval thinking was hardly destined to advance.
The first way is obvious enough, inasmuch as patristic and antique matter palpably make the substance of mediaeval theology and philosophy. The second is less obvious, but equally important. This mass of dogma, knowledge, and opinion, existed finished and complete. Men imperfectly equipped to comprehend it were brought to it by the conviction that it was necessary to their salvation, and then gradually by the persuasion also that it offered the only means of intellectual progress. The struggle to master such a volume of knowledge issuing from a more creative past, gave rise to novel problems, or promoted old ones to a novel prominence. The problem of universals was taken directly from the antique dialectic. It played a monstrous rôle in the twelfth century because it was in very essence a fundamental problem of cognition, of knowing, and so pressed upon men who were driven by the need to master continually unfolding continents of thought.[422] This is an instance of a problem transmitted from the past, but blown up to extraordinary importance by mediaeval intellectual conditions. So throughout the whole scholastic range, attitude and method alike are fixed by the fact that scholasticism was primarily an appropriation of transmitted propositions.
In considering the characteristics of mediaeval thought, it is well to bear in mind these diverse ways in which its antecedents made it what it was: through their substance transmitted to it; through the receptive attitude forced upon men by existing accumulations of authoritative doctrine, and the method entailed upon mediaeval thought by its scholastic rather than originative character. Also one will not omit to notice which elements came from the action of the patristic body of antecedents, rather than from the antique group, and vice versa.
Since the antique and patristic constituted well-nigh the whole substance of philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages, a separate consideration of what was thus transmitted would amount to a history of mediaeval thought from a somewhat unilluminating point of view. On the other hand, one may learn much as to the qualities of mediaeval thought from observing the attitudes of various men in successive centuries toward Greek philosophy and patristic theology. The Fathers had used the concepts of the former in the construction of their systems of acceptance of the Christian Faith. But the spirit of inquiry from which Greek philosophy had sprung, was very different from the spirit in which the Fathers used its concepts and arguments, in order to substantiate what they accepted on the authority of Scripture and tradition. It is true that Greek philosophy in the Neo-Platonism of Porphyry and Iamblicus was not far from the patristic attitude toward knowledge. But the spirit of these declining moods of Neo-Platonism was not the spirit which had carried the philosophy of the Greeks to its intellectual culmination in Plato and Aristotle, and to its attainment of the ethically rational in Stoicism and the system of Epicurus.
Thus patristic thinking was essentially different in purpose and method from the philosophy which it forced to serve its uses; and the two differed by every difference of method, spirit, and intent which were destined to appear among the various kinds of mediaeval thinkers. But the difference between Greek philosopher and Church Father was deeper than any that ever could exist among mediaeval men. Some of the last might be conventionally orthodox and passionately pious, while others cared more distinctly for the fruits of knowledge. But even these could not be as Greek philosophers, because they were accustomed to rely on authority, and because they who drew their knowledge from an existing store would not have the independence and originality distinguishing the Greeks, who had created so much of that store from which they drew.[423] Moreover, while neither Plato’s inquiry for truth, nor Aristotle’s catholic search for knowledge, was isolated from its bearing on either the conduct or the event of life, nevertheless with them rational inquiry was a final motive representing in itself that which was most divinely human, and so the best for man.[424] But with the philosophers of the Middle Ages, it never was quite so. For the need of salvation had worked in men’s blood for generations. And salvation, man’s highest good, did not consist in humanly-attained knowledge or in virtue won by human strength; but was divinely mediated and had to be accepted upon authority. Hence, even in the great twelfth and thirteenth centuries, intellectual inquiry was never unlimbered from bands of deference, nor ever quite dispassionately rational or unaffected by the mortal need to attain a salvation which was bestowed or withheld by God according to His plan authoritatively declared.
Accordingly all mediaeval variances of thought show common similitudes: to wit, some consciousness of need of super-rational and superhuman salvation; deference to some authority; and finally a pervasive scholasticism, since mediaeval thought was of necessity diligent, acceptant, reflective, rather than original. One will be impressed with the formal character of mediaeval thought. For being thus scholastic, it was occupied with devising forms through which to express, or re-express, the mass of knowledge proffered to it. Besides, formal logic was a prominent part of the transmitted contents of antique philosophy; and became a chief discipline for mediaeval students; because they accepted it along with all the rest, and found its training helpful for men burdened with such intellectual tasks as theirs.
Within the lines of these universal qualities wind the divergencies of mediaeval thought; and one will notice how they consist in leanings toward the ways of Greek philosophy, or a reliance more or less complete upon the contents and method of patristic theology. One common quality, of which we note the variations, is that of deference to the authority of the past. The mediaeval scholar could hardly read a classic poet without finding authoritative statements upon every topic brushed by the poet’s fancy, and of course the matter of more serious writings, history, logic, natural science, was implicitly accepted. If the pagan learning was thus regarded, how much more absolute was the deference to sacred doctrine. Here all was authority. Scripture was the primary source; next came the creed, and the dogmas established by councils; and then the expositions of the Fathers. Thus the meaning of the authoritative Scripture was pressed into authoritative dogma, and then authoritatively systematized. The process had been intellectual and rational, yet with the driven rationality of Church Fathers struggling to formulate and express the accepted import of the Faith delivered to the saints. Authority, faith, held the primacy, and in two senses, for not only was it supreme and final, but it was also prior in initiative efficiency. Tertullian’s certum est, quia impossibile est, was an extreme paradox. But Augustine’s credimus ut cognoscamus was fundamental, and remained unshaken. Anselm lays it at the basis of his arguments; with Bernard and many others it is credo first of all, let the intelligere come as it may, and as it will according to the fulness of our faith. The same principle of faith’s efficient primacy is temperamentally as well as logically fundamental with Bonaventura.
Here then was a first general quality of mediaeval thought: deference to authority. Now for the variances. Scarcely diverging, save in emphasis, from Augustine and Bonaventura, are the greatest of the schoolmen, Albert and Thomas. They defer to authority and recognize the primacy of faith, and yet they will, with abundant use of reason, deliminate the respective provinces of grace and human knowledge, and distinguish the absolute authority of Scripture from the statements even of the saints, which may be weighed and criticized. In secular philosophy, these two will, when their faith admits, accept the views of the philosophers--Aristotle above all--yet using their own reason. They are profoundly interested in knowledge and metaphysical dialectic, but follow it with deferential tempers and believing Christian souls.
Outside the company of such, are men of more independent temper, whose attitude tends to weaken the principle of acceptance of authority in sacred doctrine. The first of these was Eriugena with his explicit statement that reason is greater than authority; yet we may assume that he was not intending to impugn Scripture. Centuries later another chief example is Abaelard, whose dialectic temper leads him to wish to prove everything by reason. Not that he stated, or would have admitted this; yet the extreme rationalizing tendency of the man is projected through such a passage as the following from his Historia calamitatum, where he alludes to the circumstances of the composition of his work upon the Trinity. He had become a monk in the monastery of St. Denis, but students were still thronging to hear him, to the wrath of some of his superiors.
“Then it came about that I was brought to expound the very foundation of our faith by applying the analogies of human reason, and was led to compose for my pupils a theological treatise on the divine Unity and Trinity. They were calling for human and philosophical arguments, and insisting upon something intelligible, rather than mere words, saying that there had been more than enough of talk which the mind could not follow; that it was impossible to believe what was not understood in the first place; and that it was ridiculous for any one to set forth to others what neither he nor they could rationally conceive (intellectu capere).”
And Abaelard cites the verse from Matthew about the blind leaders of the blind, and goes on to tell of the success of his treatise, which pleased everybody, yet provoked the greater envy because of the difficulty of the questions which it elucidated; and at last envy blew up the condemnation of his book, at the Council of Soissons, in the year of grace 1121.[425]
Here one has the plain reversal. We must first understand in order to believe. Doubtless the demands of Abaelard’s students to have the principles of the Christian Faith explained, that they might be understood and accepted rationally, echoed the master’s imperative intellectual need. Not that Abaelard would breathe the faintest doubt of these verities; they were absolute and unquestionable. He accepted them upon authority just as implicitly (he might think) as St. Bernard. Herein he shows the mediaeval quality of deference. But he will understand with his mind the profoundest truths enunciated by authority; he will explain them rationally, that the mind may rationally comprehend them.
Men of an opposite cast of mind foresaw the outcome of this rationalization of dogma more surely than the subtle dialectician for whom this process was both peremptory and proper. And the Church acted with a true instinct in condemning Abaelard in spite of his protestations of belief, just as with a like true instinct Friar Bacon’s own Franciscan Order looked askance on one whose mind was suspiciously set upon observation and experiment--and cavilling at others. Celui-ci tuera cela! The ultra-scientific spirit is dangerous to faith--and Bacon’s asseverations that no knowledge was of value save as it helped the soul’s salvation, was doubtless regarded as a conventional insincerity. Yet Roger Bacon had his mediaeval deferences, as will appear.[426]
Neither one extreme view nor the other was to represent the attitude of thoughtful and believing Christendom; not William of St. Thierry and St Bernard, nor yet (on these points) Abaelard and Friar Bacon should prevail; but the all-balancing and all-considering Aquinas. He will draw the lines between faith and reason, and bulwark them with arguments which shall seem to render unto reason the things of reason, and unto faith its due. Yet it is actually Roger Bacon who accuses Thomas of making his Theology out of dialectic and very human reasonings. It was true; and we are again reminded how variant views shaded into each other in the Middle Ages, and all within certain lines of similarity. Practically all mediaeval thinkers defer to authority--more or less; and all hold to some principle of faith, to the necessity of believing something, for the soul’s salvation. There is likewise some similarity in their attitudes toward intellectual interests. For all recognized their propriety, and gave credit to the human desire to know. Likewise all saw that salvation, the summum bonum for man, included more than intellection; and felt that it held some consummation of other human impulses; that it held love--the love of God along with the intellectual ardour of contemplation; and well-nigh all recognized also that the faith held mystery, not to be solved by reason. Thus all were rational--some more, some less; and all were devotional and believing, pietistic, ardent--some more, some less; according as the intellectual nature dominated over the emotional, or the emotions quelled the conscious exercise of reason, yet reached out and upward from what knowledge and reason had given as a base to spring from.
Thus the mediaeval spirit, variant within its lines of likeness; and of a piece with it was the field it worked in, which made its range and scope. Here as well, a saving knowledge of God and the soul was central and chief among all intellectual interests. None denied this. Augustine, the universal prototype of the mediaeval mind, had cried, “God and the soul, these will I know, and these are all.” But wide had been the scope of his knowledge of God and the soul; and in the centuries which hung upon his words, wide also was the range of knowledge subsumed under those capitals. How would one know God and the soul? Might one not know God in all His universe, in the height and breadth thereof, and backwards and forwards through the reach of time? Might not one also know the soul in all its operations, all its queries and desires; would not it and they, and their activities, make up the complementary side of knowledge--complementary to the primal object, God, known in His eternity, in His temporal creation, in His everlasting governance? Wide or narrow might be the intellectual interests included within a knowledge of God and the soul. And while many men kept close to the centre and saving nexus of these potentially universal themes, others might become absorbed with data of the creature-world, or with the manifold actions of the mind of man, so as to forget to keep all duly ordered and connected with the central thought.
So the search for knowledge might roam afield. Likewise as to its motive; practically with many men it was, in itself, a joy and end; although they might continue to connect this end formally with the salvation of the soul. Roger Bacon of a surety was such a one. Another was Albertus Magnus. The laborious culling of twenty tomes of universal knowledge surely had the joy of knowing as the active motive. And Aquinas too; no one could be such an acquisitive and reasoning genius, without the love of knowledge in his soul. Yet Thomas never let this love point untrue to its goal of research and devotion, to wit, sacred doctrine, theology, the Christian Faith in its very widest compass, yet in its unity of saving purpose.
In Thomas Aquinas the certitude of faith, the sense of grace, the ardour of love, never quenched the conscious action of the reasoning and knowing mind; nor did reasoning quench devotion. A balance too, though perhaps with one scale higher than the other, was kept by Bonaventura, whose mind had reason’s faculty, but whose heart burned perpetually toward God. Another rationally ardent soul was Bonaventura’s intellectual forerunner, Hugo of St. Victor. In these men intellect did not outstrip the fervours of contemplation. But such catholic balance did not hold with Abaelard and Bacon, who lacked the pietistic temperament. With others, conversely, the strength of the pietistic and emotional nature overbore the intellect; the mind was less exacting; and devotional ardour used reason solely for its purposes. The mightiest of these were Bernard and Francis. To the same key might chime the woman, St. Hildegard of Bingen. We narrow down from these to hectic souls content with a few thoughts which serve as a basis for the heart’s fervours.
The varying attitudes of mediaeval thinkers toward reason and authority, and even their different views upon the limits of the field of salutary knowledge, are exemplified in their methods, or rather in the variations of their common method. Here the factors were again authority and the intellect which considers the authority, and in terms of its own rational processes reacts upon the proposition under view. The intellect might simply accept authority; or, on the other hand, it might, through dialectic, seek a conclusion of its own. But midway between a mere acceptance of authority, and the endeavour of dialectic for a conclusion of its own, there is the reasoning process which perceives divergence among authorities, compares, discriminates, interprets, and at last acts as umpire. This was the combined and catholic scholastic method. It contained the two factors of its necessary duality; and its variations (besides the gradual perfecting of its form from one generation to another) consisted in the predominant employment of one factor or the other.
The beginning was in the Carolingian time, when Rabanus compiled his authorities from sources sacred and profane, scarcely discriminating except to maintain the pre-eminence of the sacred matter. His younger contemporary, Eriugena, was a translator of his own chief source, Pseudo-Dionysius, him of the Hierarchies, Celestial and Ecclesiastical. Yet he composed also a veritable book, De divisione naturae, in which he put his matter together organically and with argument. And while professing to hold to the authority of Scripture and the Fathers, he not only took upon himself to select from their statements, but propounded the proposition that the authority which is not confirmed by reason appears weak. Eriugena made his authorities yield him what his reason required. His argumentative method became an independent rehandling of matter drawn from them. It was very different from the plodding excerpt-gathering of Rabanus.
We pass down the centuries to Anselm. Contemplative and religious, his reverence for authority was unimpaired by any conscious need to refashion its meaning. Though he possessed creative intellectual powers, they were incited and controlled by his deep piety. Hence his works were constructed of original and lofty arguments, but such as did not infringe upon either the efficient or the final priority of faith.
With Abaelard of many-sided fame the duality of method becomes explicit, and is, if one may say so, set by the ears. On the one hand, he advances in his constructive theological treatises toward a portentous application of reason to explain the contents of the Christian Faith; on the other, somewhat sardonically, he devises a scheme for the employment and presentation of authorities upon these sacred matters, a scheme so obviously apt that once made known it could not but be followed and perfected.
The divers works of a man are likely to bear some relation and resemblance to each other. Abaelard was a reasoner, more specifically speaking, a dialectician according to the ways of Aristotelian logic. And in categories of formal logic he sought to rationalize every matter apprehended by his mind. Swayed by the master-interest of the time, he turned to theology; and his own nature impelled him to apply a constructive dialectic to its systematic formulation. The result is exemplified in the extant portion of his Theologia (mis-called Introductio ad Theologiam), which was condemned by the Council of Sens in 1141, the year before the master’s death. The spirit of this work appears in the passage already quoted from the Historia calamitatum, referring to what was substantially an earlier form of the Theologia.[427] The Theologia argues for a free use of dialectic in expounding dogma, especially in order to refute those heretics who will not listen to authority, but demand reasons. Like Abaelard’s previous theological treatises, it is filled with citations of authority, principally Augustine; and the reader feels the author’s hesitancy to reveal that dialectic is the architect. Nor, in fact, is the work an exclusively dialectic structure; yet it illustrates (if it does not always inculcate) the application of the arguments of human reason to the exposition and substantiation of the fundamental and most deeply hidden contents of the Christian Faith. Obviously Abaelard was not an initiator here. Augustine had devoted his life to fortifying the Faith with argument and explanation; Eriugena, with a far weaker realization of its contents, had employed a more distorting metaphysics in its presentation; and saintly Anselm had flown his veritable eagle flights of reason. But Abaelard’s more systematic work represents a further stage in the application of independent dialectic to dogma, and an innovating freedom in the citation of pagan philosophers to demonstrate its philosophic reasonableness. Nevertheless his statement that he had gathered these citations from writings of the Fathers, and not from the books of the philosophers (quorum pauca novi),[428] shows that he was only using what the Fathers had made use of before him, and also indicates the slightness of his independent knowledge of Greek philosophy.
On the other hand, Abaelard’s way of presenting authorities for and against a theological proposition was more distinctly original. He seems to have been the first purposefully to systematize the method of stating the problem, and then giving in order the authorities on one side and the other--sic et non; as he entitled his famous work. But the trail of his nature lay through this apparently innocent composition, the evident intent of which was to emphasize, if not exaggerate, the opposition among the patristic authorities, and without a counterbalancing attempt to show any substantial accord among them. This, of course, is not stated in the Prologue, which however, like everything that Abaelard wrote, discloses his fatal facility of putting his hand on the raw spot in the matter; which unfortunately is likely to be the vulnerable point also. In it he remarks on the difficulty of interpreting Scripture, upon the corruption of the text (a perilous subject), and the introduction of apocryphal writings. There are discrepancies even in the sacred texts, and contradictions in the writings of the Fathers. With a profuse backing of authority he shows that the latter are not to be read cum credendi necessitate, but cum judicandi libertate. Assuredly, as to anything in the canonical Scriptures, “it is not permitted to say: ‘The Author of this book did not hold the truth’; but rather ‘the codex is false or the interpreter errs, or thou dost not understand.’ But in the works of the later ones (posteriorum, Abaelard’s inclusive designation of the Fathers), which are contained in books without number, if passages are deemed to depart from the truth, the reader is at liberty to approve or disapprove.”
This view was supported by Abaelard’s citations from the Fathers themselves; and yet, so abruptly made, it was not a pleasant statement for the ears of those to whom the writings of the holy Fathers were sacred. Nothing was sacred to the man who wrote this prologue--so it seemed to his pious contemporaries. And who among them could approve of the Prologue’s final utterance upon the method and purpose of the book?
“Wherefore we decided to collect the diverse statements of the holy Fathers, as they might occur to our memory, thus raising an issue from their apparent repugnancy, which might incite the teneros lectores to search out the truth of the matter, and render them the sharper for the investigation. For the first key to wisdom is called interrogation, diligent and unceasing.... By doubting we are led to inquiry; and from inquiry we perceive the truth.”
To use the discordant statements of the Fathers to sharpen the wits of the young! Was not that to uncover their shame? And the character of the work did not salve the Prologue’s sting. Abaelard selected and arranged his extracts from pagan as well as Christian writers, and prepared sardonic titles for the questions under which he ordered his material. Time and again these titles flaunt an opposition which the citations scarcely bear out. For example, title iv.: “Quod sit credendum in Deum solum, et contra”--certainly a flaming point; yet the excerpts display merely the verb credere, used in the palpably different senses borne by the word “believe.” There is no real repugnancy among the citations. And again, in title lviii.: “Quod Adam salvatus sit, et contra”--there is no citation contra. And the longest chapter in the book (cxvii.) has this bristling title: “De sacramento altaris, quod sit essentialiter ipsa veritas carnis Christi et sanguinis, et contra.”
Because of such prickly traits the Sic et non did not itself come into common use. But the suggestions of its method once made, were of too obvious utility to be abandoned. First, among Abaelard’s own pupils the result appears in Books of Sentences, which, in the arrangement of their matter, followed the topical division not of the Sic et non, but of Abaelard’s Theologia, with its threefold division of Theology into Fides, Caritas, and Sacramentum.[429] But the arrangement of the Theologia was not made use of in the best and most famous of these compositions, Peter Lombard’s Sententiarum libri quatuor. This work employed the method (not the arrangement) of the Sic et non, and expounded the contents of Faith methodically, “Distinctio” after “Distinctio,” stating the proposition, citing the authorities bearing upon it, and ending with some conciliating or distinguishing statement of the true result. In canon law the same method was applied in Gratian’s Decretum, of which the proper name was Concordia discordantium canonum.
These Books of Sentences have sometimes been called Summae, inasmuch as their scope embraced the entire contents of the Faith. But the term Summa may properly be confined to those larger and still more encyclopaedic compositions in which this scholastic method reached its final development. The chief makers of these, the veritable Summae theologiae, were, in order of time, Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas. The Books of Sentences were books of sentences. The Summa proceeded by the same method, or rather issued from it, as its consummation and perfect logical form; thus the scholastic method arrived at its highest constructive energy. In the Sentences one excerpted opinion was given and another possibly divergent, and at the end an adjustment was presented. This comparative formlessness attains in the Summa a serried syllogistic structure. Thomas, who finally perfects it, presents his connected and successive topics divided into quaestiones, which are subdivided into articuli, whose titles give the point to be discussed. He states first, and frequently in his own syllogistic terms, the successive negative arguments; and then the counter-proposition, which usually is a citation from Scripture or from Augustine. Then with clear logic he constructs the true positive conclusion in accordance with the authority which he has last adduced. He then refutes each of the adverse arguments in turn.
Thus the method of the Sentences is rendered dialectically organic; and with the perfecting of the form of quaestio and articulus, and the logical linking of successive topics, the whole composition, from a congeries, becomes a structure, organic likewise, a veritable Summa, and a Summa of a science which has unity and consistency. This science is sacra doctrina, theologia. Moreover, as compared with the Sentences, the contents of the Summa are enormously enlarged. For between the time of the Lombard and that of Thomas, there has come the whole of Aristotle, and what is more, the mastery of the whole of Aristotle, which Thomas incorporates in a complete and organic statement of the Christian scheme of salvation.[430]
XXXV. CLASSIFICATION OF TOPICS; STAGES OF EVOLUTION
I. PHILOSOPHIC CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES; THE ARRANGEMENT OF VINCENT’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA, OF THE LOMBARD’S SENTENCES, OF AQUINAS’S SUMMA THEOLOGIAE.
II. THE STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT: GRAMMAR, LOGIC, METALOGICS.
I
Having considered the spirit, the field, and the dual method, of mediaeval thought, there remain its classifications of topics. The problem of classification presented itself to Gerbert as one involved in the rational study of the ancient material.[431] But as scholasticism culminated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the problem became one of arrangement and presentation of the mass of knowledge and argument which the Middle Ages had at length made their own, and were prepared to re-express. This ordering was influenced by a twofold principle of classification; for, as abundantly shown by Aquinas,[432] theology in which all is ordered with reference to God, will properly follow an arrangement of topics quite unsuitable to the natural or human sciences, which treat of things with respect to themselves. But the mediaeval practice was more confused than the theory; because the interest in human knowledge was apt to be touched by motives sounding in the need of divine salvation; and speculation could not free itself of the moving principles of Christian theology. On the other hand, an enormous quantity of human dialectic, and a prodigious mass of what strikes us as profane information, or misinformation, was carried into the mediaeval Summa, and still more into those encyclopaedias, which attempted to include all knowledge, and still were influenced in their aim by a religious purpose.[433]
As the human sciences came from the pagan antique, the accepted classifications of them naturally were taken from Greek philosophy. They followed either the so-called Platonic division, into Physics, Ethics, and Logic,[434] or the Aristotelian division of philosophy into theoretical and practical. The former scheme, of which it is not certain that Plato was the author, passed on through the Stoic and Epicurean systems of philosophy, was recognized by the Church Fathers, and received Augustine’s approval. It was made known to the Middle Ages through Cassiodorus, Isidore, Alcuin, Rabanus, Eriugena and others.
Nevertheless the Aristotelian division of philosophy into theoretical and practical was destined to prevail. It was introduced to the western Middle Ages through Boëthius’s Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge,[435] and adopted by Gerbert; later it passed over through translations of Arabic writings. It was accepted by Hugo of St. Victor, by Albertus Magnus and by Thomas, to mention only the greatest names; and was set forth in detail with explanation and comment in a number of treatises, such as Gundissalinus’s De divisione philosophiae, and Hugo of St. Victor’s Eruditio didascalica,[436] which were formal and schematic introductions to the study of philosophy and its various branches.
The usual subdivisions of these two general parts of philosophy were as follows. Theoretica (or Theorica) was divided into (1) Physics, or scientia naturalis, (2) Mathematics, and (3) Metaphysics or Theology, or divina scientia, as it might be called. Physics and Mathematics were again divided into more special sciences. Practica was divided commonly into Ethics, Economics, Politics, or into Ethics and Artes mechanicae. There was a difference of opinion as to what to do with Logic. It had, to be sure, its position in the current Trivium, along with grammar and rhetoric. But this was merely current, and might not approve itself on deeper reflection. Gundissalinus speaks of three propaedeutic sciences, the scientiae eloquentiae, grammar, poetics, and rhetoric, and then puts Logic after them as a scientia media between these primary educational matters and philosophy, i.e. the whole range of knowledge, theoretical and practical. Again, over against philosophia realis, which contains both the theoretica (or speculativa) and the practica, Thomas Aquinas sets the philosophia rationalis, or logic; and Richard Kilwardby opposes logica, the scientia rationalis, to practica, in his division.[437]
The last-named philosopher was the pupil and then the hostile critic of Aquinas, and also became Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the author of a careful and elaborate classification of the parts of philosophy, entitled De ortu et divisione philosophiae.[438] In it, following the broad distinction between res divinae and res humanae, Kilwardby divides philosophy into speculativa and practica. Speculativa is divided into naturalis (physics), mathematica, and divina (metaphysics). He does not divide the first and third of these; but he divides mathematica into those sciences which treat of quantity in continuity and separation respectively (quantitas continua and quantitas discreta). The former embrace geometry, astronomy and astrology, and perspective; the latter, music and arithmetic. Practica, which is concerned with res humanae, is divided into activa and sermocinalis: because res humanae consist either of operationes or locutiones. The activa embraces Ethics and mechanics; the scientia sermocinalis embraces grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Such are Kilwardby’s bare captions; his treatise lengthily treats of the interrelations of these various branches of knowledge.
An idea of the scholastic discussion of the classification of sciences may be had by following Albertus Magnus’s ponderous approach to a consideration of logic: whether it be a science, and, if so, what place should be allotted it. We draw from the opening of his liber on the Predicables,[439] that is to say, his exposition of Porphyry’s Introduction. Albert will consider “what kind of a science (qualis scientia) logic may be, and whether it is any part of philosophy; what need there is of it, and what may be its use; then of what it treats, and what are its divisions.” The ancients seem to have disagreed, some saying that logic is no science, since it is rather a modus (mode, manner or method) of every science or branch of knowledge. But these, continues Albertus, have not reflected that although there are many sciences, and each has its special modus, yet there is one modus common to all sciences, pertaining to that which is common to them all: the principle, to wit, that through reason’s inquiry, from what is known one arrives at knowledge of the unknown. This mode or method common to every science may be considered in itself, and so may be the subject of a special science. After further balancing of the reasons and authorities pro and con, Albertus concludes:
“It is therefore clear that logic is a special science just as in ironworking there is the special art of making a hammer, yet its use pertains to everything made by the ironworker’s craft. So this process of discovering the unknown through the known, is something special, and may be studied as a special art and science; yet the use of it pertains to all sciences.”
He next considers whether logic is a part of philosophy. Some say no, since there are (as they say) only three divisions of philosophy, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics; others say that logic is a modus of philosophy and not one of its divisions. But, on the contrary, it is shown by others that this view of philosophy omits the practical side, for philosophy’s scope comprehends the truth of everything which man may understand, including the truth of that which is in ourselves, and strives to comprehend both truth and the process of advancing from the known to a knowledge of the unknown. These point out that
“... the Peripatetics divided philosophy first into three parts, to wit, into physicam generaliter dictam, and ethicam generaliter dictam and rationalem likewise taken broadly. I call physica generaliter dicta that which embraces scientia naturalis, disciplinalis, and divina (i.e. physics in a narrower sense, mathematics which is called scientia disciplinalis, and metaphysics which is scientia divina). And I call ethica, that which, broadly taken, contains the scientia monastica, oeconomica and civilis. And I call that the scientia rationalis, broadly taken, which includes every mode of proceeding from the known to the unknown. From which it is evident that logic is a part of philosophy.”
And finally it may be shown that
“if anything is within the scope of philosophy it must be that without which philosophy cannot reach any knowledge. He who is ignorant of logic can acquire no perfect cognition of the unknown, because he is ignorant of the way in which he should proceed from the known to the unknown.”
From these latter arguments, approved by him and in part stated as his own, Albertus advances to a classification of the parts of logic, which he makes to include rhetoric, poetics, and dialectic, and to be demonstrative, sophistical or disputatious, according to the use to which logic (broadly taken) is applied and the manner in which it may in each case proceed, in advancing from the known to some farther ascertainment or demonstration.[440] Soon after this, in discussing the subject of this science, Albertus points out how logic differs from rhetoric and poetics, although with them it may treat of sermo, or speech, and be called a scientia sermonalis; for, unlike them, it treats of sermo merely as a means of drawing conclusions, and not in and for itself.
From the purely philosophical division of the sciences we pass to the hybrid arrangement adopted by Vincent of Beauvais, who died in 1264. This man was a prodigious devourer of books, and for a sufficient pabulum, St. Louis set before him his collection of twelve hundred volumes. Thereupon Vincent compiled the most famous of mediaeval encyclopaedias, employing in that labour enormous diligence and a number of assistants. His ponderous Speculum majus is drawn from the most serviceable sources, including the works of Albertus, his contemporary, and great scholastics like Hugo of St. Victor, who were no more. It consisted of the Speculum naturale, doctrinale, and historiale; and a fourth, the Speculum morale, was added by a later hand.[441] Turning its leaves, and reading snatches here and there, especially from its Prologues, we shall gain a sufficient illustration of the arrangement of topics followed by this writer, whose faculties seem to drown in his shoreless undertaking.[442]
In his turgid generalis prologus to the Speculum naturale, Vincent presents his motives for collecting in one volume
“... certain flowers according to my modicum of faculty, gathered from every one I have been able to read, whether of our Catholic Doctors or the Gentile philosophers and poets. Especially have I drawn from them what seemed to pertain either to the building up of our dogma, or to moral instruction, or to the incitement of charity’s devotion, or to the mystic exposition of divine Scripture, or to the manifest or symbolical explanation of its truth. Thus by one grand opus I would appease my studiousness, and perchance, by my labours, profit those who, like me, try to read as many books as possible, and cull their flowers. Indeed of making many books there is no end, and neither is the eye of the curious reader satisfied, nor the ear of the auditor.”
He then refers to the evils of false copying and the ascription of extracts to the wrong author. And it seems to him that Church History has been rather neglected, while men have been intent on expounding knotty problems. And now considering how to proceed and group his various matters, Vincent could find no better method than the one he has chosen, “to wit, that after the order of Holy Scripture, I should treat first of the Creator, next of the creation, then of man’s fall and reparation, and then of events (rebus gestis) chronologically.” He proposes to give a summary of titles at the end of the work. Sometimes he may state as his own, things he has had from his teachers or from very well-known books; and he admits that he did not have time to collate the gesta martyrum, and so some of the abstracts which he gives of these are not by his own hand, but by the hand of scribes (notariorum).
Vincent proposes to call the whole work Speculum majus, a Speculum indeed, or an Imago mundi, “containing in brief whatever, from unnumbered books, I have been able to gather, worthy of consideration, admiration, or imitation as to things which have been made or done or said in the visible or invisible world from the beginning until the end, and even of things to come.” He briefly adverts to the utility of his work, and then gives his motive for including history. This he thinks will help us to understand the story of Christ; and from a perusal of the wars which took place “before the advent of our pacific King, the reader will perceive with what zeal we should fight against our spiritual foes, for our salvation and the eternal glory promised us.” From the great slaughter of men in many wars, may be realized also the severity of God against the wicked, who are slain like sheep, and perish body and soul.[443]
As to nature, Vincent says:
“Moreover I have diligently described the nature of things, which, I think, no one will deem useless, who, in the light of grace, has read of the power, wisdom and goodness of God, creator, ruler and preserver, in that same book of the Creation appointed for us to read.”
Moreover, to know about things is useful for preachers and theologians, as Augustine says. But Vincent is conscious of another motive also:
“Verily how great is even the humblest beauty of this world, and how pleasing to the eye of reason diligently considering not only the modes and numbers and orders of things, so decorously appointed throughout the universe, but also the revolving ages which are ceaselessly uncoiled through abatements and successions, and are marked by the death of what is born. I confess, sinner as I am, with mind befouled in flesh, that I am moved with spiritual sweetness toward the creator and ruler of this world, and honour Him with greater veneration, when I behold at once the magnitude, and beauty and permanence of His creation. For the mind, lifting itself from the dunghill of its affections, and rising, as it is able, into the light of speculation, sees as from a height the greatness of the universe containing in itself infinite places filled with the divers orders of creatures.”
Here Vincent feels it well to apologize for the limitlessness of his matter, being only an excerptor, and not really knowing even a single science; and he refers to the example of Isidore’s Etymologiae. He proceeds to enumerate the various sources upon which he relies, and then to summarize the headings of his work; which in brief are as follows:
The Creator.
The empyrean heaven and the nature of angels; the state of the good, and the ruin of the proud, angels.
The formless material and the making of the world, and the nature and properties of each created being, according to the order of the Works of the Six Days.
The state of the first man.
The nature and energies of the soul, and the senses and parts of the human body.
God’s rest and way of working.
The state of the first man and the felicity of Paradise.
Man’s fall and punishment.
Sin.
The reparation of the Fall.
The properties of faith and other virtues in order, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the beatitudes.
The number and matter of all the sciences.
Chronological history of events in the world, and memorable sayings, from the beginning to our time, with a consideration of the state of souls separated from their bodies, of the times to come, of Antichrist, the end of the World, the resurrection of the dead, the glorification of the saints and the punishments of the wicked.
One may stand aghast at the programme. Yet practically all of it would go into a Summa theologiae, excepting the human history, and the matter of what we should call the arts and sciences! A programme like this might be handled summarily, according to the broad captions under which it is stated; or it might be carried out in such detail as to include all available information, or opinion, touching every part of every topic included under these universal heads. The latter is Vincent’s way. Practically he tries to include all knowledge upon everything. The first of his tomes (the Speculum naturale) is to be devoted to a full description of the forms and species of created beings, which make up the visible world. Yet it includes much relating to beings commonly invisible; for Vincent begins with a treatment of the angels. He then passes to a consideration of the seven heavens; and then to the physical phenomena of nature; then on to every known species of plant, the cultivation of trees and vines, and the making of wine; then to the celestial bodies, and after this to living things, birds, fishes, savage beasts, reptiles, the anatomy of animals,--and at last comes to man. He discusses him body and soul, his psychology, and the phenomena of sleep and waking; then human anatomy--nor can he keep from considerations touching the whole creation; then human generation, and a description of the countries and regions of the earth, with a brief compendium of history until the time of Antichrist and the Last Judgment. Of course he is utterly uncritical, even the pseudo-Turpin’s fictions as to Charlemagne serving him for authority.
Vincent’s Prologue to his second tome, the Speculum doctrinale, briefly mentions the topics of the tota naturalis historia, contained in his first giant tome. In that he had brought his matter down to God’s creation of humana natura, omnium rerum finis ac summa--and its spoliation (destitutio) through sin. Humana natura as constituted by God, was a universitas of all nature or created being, corporeal and spiritual. Now
“in this second part, in like fashion we propose to treat of the plenary restitution of that destitute nature.... And since that restitution, or restoration, is effected and perfected by doctrina (imparted knowledge, science), this part not improperly is called the Speculum doctrinale. For of a surety everything pertaining to recovering or defending man’s spiritual or temporal welfare (salutem) is embraced under doctrina. In this book, the sciences (doctrinae) and arts are treated thus: First concerning all of them in general, to wit, concerning their invention, origin, and species; and concerning the method of acquiring them. Then concerning the singular arts and sciences in particular. And here first concerning those of the Trivium, which are devoted to language (grammar, rhetoric, logic); for without these, the others cannot be learned or communicated. Next concerning the practical ones (practica), because through them, the eyes of the mind being clarified, one ascends to the speculative (theorica). Then also concerning the mechanical ones; since, as they consist in making (operatio), they are joined by affinity to the practica. Finally concerning the speculative sciences (theorica), because the end and aim (finis) of all the rest is placed by the wise in them. And since (as Jerome says) one cannot know the power (vis) of the antidote unless the power of the poison first is understood, therefore to the reparatio doctrinalis of the human race, the subject of the book, something is prefixed as a brief epilogue from the former book, concerning the fall and misery of man, in which he still labours, as the penalty for his sin, in lamentable exile.”
So Vincent begins with the fall and misery of man; the peccatum and the supplicium. Then he proceeds to discuss the goods (bona) which God bestows, like the mental powers, by which man may learn wisdom, and how to strive against error and vice, and be overcome solely by the desire of the highest and immutable good. He speaks also of the corporeal goods bestowed on man, and the beauty and utility of visible things; and then of the principal evils;--ignorance which corrupts the divine image in man, concupiscence which destroys the divine similitude, sickness which destroys his original bodily immortality. “And the remedies are three by which these three evils may be repelled, and the three goods restored, to wit, Wisdom, Virtue, and Need.”
Here we touch the gist of the ordering of topics in the Speculum doctrinale, which treats of all the arts and sciences:
“For the obtaining of these three remedies every art and every disciplina was invented. In order to gain Wisdom, Theorica was devised; and Practica for the sake of virtue; and for Need’s sake, Mechanica. Theorica driving out ignorance, illuminates Wisdom; Practica shutting out vice, strengthens Virtue; Mechanica providing against penury, tempers the infirmities of the present life. Theorica, in all that is and that is not, chooses to investigate the true. Practica determines the correct way of living and the form of discipline, according to the institution of the virtues. Mechanica occupied with fleeting things, strives to provide for the needs of the body. For the end and aim of all human actions and studies, which reason regulates, ought to look either to the reparation of the integrity of our nature or to alleviating the needs to which life is subjected. The integrity of our nature is repaired by Wisdom, to which Theorica relates, and by Virtue, which Practica cultivates. Need is alleviated by the administration of temporalities, to which Mechanica attends. Last found of all is Logic, source of eloquence, through which the wise who understand the aforesaid principal sciences and disciplines, may discourse upon them more correctly, truly and elegantly; more correctly, through Grammar; more truly through Dialectic; more elegantly through Rhetoric.”[444]
Thus the entire round of arts and sciences is connected with man’s corporeal and spiritual welfare, and is made to bear directly or indirectly on his salvation. All constitutes doctrina, and by doctrina man is saved. This is the reason for including the arts and sciences in one tome, rightly called the Speculum doctrinale. We need not follow the detail, but may view as from afar the long course ploughed by Vincent through his matter. He first sketches the history of antique philosophy, and then turns to books and language, and presents a glossary of Latin synonyms. Book II. treats of Grammar, Book III. of Logic, Book IV. of Practica scientia or Ethica, first giving pagan ethics and then passing on to the virtues of the monastic life. Book V. is a continuation of this subject. Book VI. concerns the Scientia oeconomica, treating of domestic economy, then of agriculture. Books VII. and VIII. take up Politica, and, having discussed political institutions, proceed to a treatment of law--the law of persons, things, and actions, according to the canon and the civil law. Books IX. and X. consider Crimes--simony, heresy, perjury, sacrilege, homicide, rape, adultery, robbery, usury. Book XI. is more cheerful, De arte mechanica, and tells of building, the military art, navigation, alchemy, and metals. Book XII. is Medicine, and Books XIII. and XIV. discuss Physics, in connection with the healing art. Book XV. is Natural Philosophy--animals and plants. Book XVI., De mathematica, treats of arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy, and metaphysics cursorily. Book XVII. likewise thins out in a somewhat slight discussion of Theology, which was to form the topic of the tome that Vincent did not write.
But Vincent did complete another tome, the Speculum historiale. It is a loosely chronological compilation of tradition, myth, and history, with discursions upon the literary works of the characters coming under review. It would be tedious to follow its excerpted presentation of the profane and sacred matter.
We may leave Vincent, with the obvious reflection that his work is a conglomerate, both in arrangement and contents. It has the pious aim of contributing to man’s salvation, and yet is an attempted universal encyclopaedia of human knowledge, much of which is plainly secular and mundane. The monstrous scope and dual purpose of the work prevented any unity in method and arrangement. More single in aim, and better arranged in consequence, are the Sentences of Peter Lombard and the Summa theologiae of Aquinas. For although their scope, at least the scope of the Summa, is wide, all is ordered with respect to the true aim of sacra doctrina, just as Thomas explained in the passage which we have already given.
The alleged principle of the Lombard’s division strikes one as curious; yet he got it from Augustine: Signum and res--the symbol and the thing: verily an age-long play of spiritual tendency lay back of these contrasted concepts. Christian doctrina related, perhaps chiefly, to the significance of signa, signs, symbols, allegories, mysteries, sacraments. It was not so strange that the Lombard made this antithesis the ground of his arrangement. Quite as of course he begins by saying it is clear to any one who considers, with God’s grace, that the “contents of the Old and New Law are occupied either with res or signa. For as the eminent doctor Augustine says in his Doctrina Christiana, all teaching is of things or signs; but things also are learned through signs. Properly those are called res which are not employed in order to signify something; while signa are those whose use is to signify.” Then the Lombard separates the sacraments from other signa, because they not only signify, but also confer saving aid; and he points out that evidently a signum is also some sort of a thing; but not everything is a signum. He will treat first of res and then of signa.
As to res, one must bear in mind, as Augustine says, that some things are to be enjoyed (fruendum), as from love we cleave to them for their own sake; and others are to be used (utendum) as a means; and still others to be both enjoyed and used.
“Those which are to be enjoyed make us blessed (beatos); those which are to be used, aid us striving for blessedness.... We ourselves are the things which are both to be enjoyed and used, and also the angels and the saints.... The things which are to be enjoyed are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and so the Trinity is summa res.”
So the Lombard’s first two Books consider res in the descending order of their excellence; the third considers the Incarnation, which, if not itself a sacrament, and the chief and sum of all sacraments, is the source of those of the New Law, considered in the fourth Book. The scheme is single and orderly; the difficulty will be in actually arranging the various topics within it. Endeavouring to do so, the Lombard in Book I. puts together the doctrine of the Trinity, the three Persons composing it, and their attributes and qualities. Book II. considers in order, the Angels, and very briefly, the work of the Six Days down to the creation of man; then the Christian doctrina as to man is presented: his creation and its reasons; the creation of his anima; the creation of woman; the condition of man and woman before the Fall; their sin; next free-will and grace. Book III. treats of the Incarnation, in all the aspects in which it may be known, and of the nature of Christ, His saving merit, and the grace which was in Him; also of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the seven gifts of the Spirit, and the existence of them all in Christ. Book IV. considers the Sacraments of the New Law: Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, ordination to holy orders, marriage. It concludes with setting forth the Resurrection and the Last Judgment.
The first chapters of Genesis were the ultimate source of the Lombard’s actual arrangement. And the Summa will follow the same order of treatment. One may perceive how naturally the adoption of this order came to Christian theologians by glancing over Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram.[445] This Commentary was partially constructive, and not simply exegetical; and afforded a cadre, or frame, of topical ordering, which could readily be filled out with the contents of the Sentences or even of the Summa: God, in His unity and trinity, the Creation, man especially, his fall, the Incarnation as the saving means of his restoration, and then the Sacraments, and the final Judgment unto heaven and hell. One may say that this was the natural and proper order of presenting the contents of the Christian sacra doctrina.
So the great Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas adopts the same order which the Lombard had followed. The Pars prima begins with defining sacra doctrina.[446] It then proceeds to consider God--whether He exists; then treats of His simplicitas and perfectio; next of His attributes; His bonitas, infinitas, immutabilitas, aeternitas, unitas; then of our knowledge of Him; then of His knowledge, and therein of truth and falsity; thereupon are considered the divine will, love, justice, and pity; the divine providence and predestination; the divine power and beatitude.
All this pertains to the unitas of the divine essence; and now Thomas passes on to the Trinitas personarum, or the more distinctive portions of Christian theology. He treats of the processio and relationes of the divinae Personae, and then of themselves--Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and then of their essential relationship and properties. Next he discusses the missio of the divine Persons, and the relations between God and His Creation. First comes the consideration of the principle of creation, the processio creaturarum a Deo, and of the nature of created things, with some discussion of evil, whether it be a thing.
Among created beings, Thomas treats first of angels, and at great length; then of the physical creation, in its order--the work of the six days, but with no great detail. Then man, created of spiritual and corporeal substance--his complex nature is to be analysed and fathomed to its depths. Thomas discusses the union of the anima ad corpus; then the powers of the anima, in generali and in speciali--the intellectual faculties, the appetites, the will and its freedom of choice; how the anima knows--the full Aristotelian theory of cognition is given. Next, more specifically as to the creation of the soul and body of the first man, and the nature of the image and similitude of God within him; then as to man’s condition and faculties while in a state of innocence; also as to Paradise.
This closes the treatment of the creatio et distinctio rerum; and Thomas passes to their gubernatio, and the problem of how God conserves and moves the corporeal and spiritual; then concerning the action of one creature on another, and how the angels are ranged in hierarchies, and although purely spiritual beings, minister to men and guard them; then concerning the action of corporeal things, concerning fate, and the action of men upon men.
Here ends Pars prima. The first section of the second part (Prima secundae) begins. In a short Prologue Thomas says:
“Because man is made in the image of God, that is, free in his thought and will, and able to act through himself (per se potestativum), after what has been said concerning the Exemplar, God, and everything proceeding from the divine power according to His will, it remains for us to consider His image, to wit, man, in so far as he is the source or cause (principium) of his own works, having free-will and power over them.”
Hereupon Thomas takes up in order: the ultimate end of man; the nature of man’s beatitude, and wherein it consists, and how it may be attained; then voluntary and involuntary acts, and the nature and action of will; then fruition, intention, election, deliberation, consent, and actions good and bad, flowing from the will; then the passions; concupiscence and pleasure, sadness, hope and despair, fear, anger; next habits (habitus) and the virtues, intellectual, cardinal, theological; the gifts of the Spirit, and the beatitudes; the vices, and sin, and penalty. Thereupon it becomes proper to consider the external causes (principia) of acts: “The external cause (principium) moving toward good is God; who instructs us through law, and aids us through grace. Therefore we must speak, first of law, then of grace.” So Thomas discusses: the essentia of law, and the different kinds of law--lex aeterna, lex naturalis, lex humana--their effect and validity; then the precepts of the Old Law (of the Old Testament); then as to the law of the Gospel and the need of grace; and lastly, concerning grace and human merit.
The Secunda secundae (the second division of the second part) opens with a Prologue, in which the author says that, having considered generally the virtues and vices, and other things pertaining to the matter of ethics, it is needful to consider these same matters more particularly, each in turn; “for general moral statements (sermones morales universales) are less useful, inasmuch as actions are always in particularibus.” A more special statement of moral rules may proceed in two ways: the one from the side of the moral material, discussing this or that virtue or vice; the other considers what applies to special orders (speciales status) of men, for instance prelates and the lower clergy, or men devoted to the active or contemplative religious life. “We shall, therefore, consider specially, first what applies to all conditions of men, and then what applies to certain orders (determinatos status).” Thomas adds that it will be best to consider in each case the virtue and corresponding gift, and the opposing vice, together; also that “virtues are reducible to seven, the three theological,[447] and the four cardinal virtues. Of the intellectual virtues, one is Prudence, which is numbered with the cardinal virtues; but ars does not pertain to morals, which relate to what is to be done, while ars is the correct faculty of making things (recta ratio factibilium).[448] The other three intellectual virtues, sapientia, intellectus, et scientia, bear the names of certain gifts of the Holy Spirit, and are considered with them. Moral virtues are all reducible to the cardinal virtues; and therefore, in considering each cardinal virtue, all the virtues related to it are considered, and the opposite vices.”
This classification of the virtues seems anything but clear. And perhaps the weakest feature of the Summa is this scarcely successful ordering, or combination, of the Aristotelian virtues with those more germane to the Christian scheme. However this may be, the author of the Summa proceeds to consider in order: fides, and the gifts (dona) of intellectus and scientia which correspond to the virtue faith; next the opposing vices: infidelitas, haeresis, apostasia, blasphemia, and caecitas mentis (spiritual blindness). Next in order come the virtue spes, and the corresponding gift of the Spirit, timor, and the opposing vices of desperatio and praesumptio.[449] Next, caritas, with its dilectio, its gaudium, its pax, its misericordia, its beneficentia and eleemosyna, and its correctio fraterna; then the opposite vices, odium, acedia, invidia, discordia, contentio, schisma, bellum, rixa, seditio, scandalum. Next the donum sapientiae, and its opposite, stultitia; next, prudentia, and its correspondent gift, consilium; and its connected vices, imprudentia, negligentia, and its evil semblances, dolus and fraus.
Says Thomas: Consequenter post prudentiam considerandum est de Justitia. Whereupon follows a juristic treatment of jus, justitia, judicium, restitutio, acceptio personarum; then homicide and other crimes recognized by law. Then come the virtues, connected with justitia, to wit, religio, and its acts, devotio, oratio, adoratio, sacrificium, oblatio, decimae, votum, juramentum; then the vices opposed to religio: superstitio, idolatria, tentatio Dei, perjurium, sacrilegium, simonia. Next is considered the virtue of pietas; then observantia, with its parts, i.e. dulia (service), obedientia, and its opposite, inobedientia. Next, gratia (thanks) or gratitudo, and its opposite, ingratitudo; next, vindicatio (punishment); next, veritas, with its opposites, hypocrisis, jactantia (boasting), and ironia; next, amicitia, with the vices of adulatio and litigium. Next, the virtue of liberalitas, and its vices, avaritia and prodigalitas; next, epieikeia (aequitas). Finally, closing this discussion of all that is connected with Justitia, Thomas speaks of its corresponding gift of the Spirit, pietas.
Now comes the third cardinal virtue, Fortitudo--under which martyrium is the type of virtuous act; intimiditas and audacia are the two vices. Then the parts of Fortitudo, to wit, magnanimitas, magnificentia, patientia, perseverantia, and the obvious opposing vices. Next, the fourth cardinal virtue, Temperantia, its obvious opposing vices, and its parts, to wit, verecundia, honestas, abstinentia, sobrietas, castitas, clementia, modestia, humilitas, and the various appropriate acts and opposing vices related to these special virtues.
So far,[450] Thomas has been considering the virtues proper for all men; and now he comes to those specially pertaining to certain kinds of men, according to their gifts of grace, their modes of life, or the diversity of their offices, or stations. Of the special virtues related to gifts of grace, the first is prophetia, next raptus (vision), then gratia linguarum, and gratia miraculorum. After this, the vita activa and contemplativa, with their appropriate virtues, are considered. And then Thomas proceeds to speak De officiis et statibus hominum, and their respective virtues.
Here ends the Secunda secundae, and Pars tertia opens with this Prologue:
“Inasmuch as our Saviour Jesus Christ (as witnesseth the Angel, populum suum salvum faciens a peccatis eorum) has shown in himself the way of truth, through which we are able to come to the beatitude of immortal life by rising again, it is necessary, for the consummation of the whole theological matter, after the consideration of the final end of human life, and of the virtues and vices, that our attention should be fixed upon the Saviour of all and His benefactions to the human race.
“As to which, first one must consider the Saviour himself; secondly, His sacraments, by which we obtain salvation; thirdly, concerning the end (finis), immortal life, to which we come by rising again through Him.
“As to the first, one has to consider the mystery of the Incarnation, in which God was made man for our salvation, and then those things that were done and suffered by our Saviour, that is, God incarnate.”
This Prologue indicates sufficiently the order of topics in the Pars tertia of the Summa, through Quaestio xc., at which point the hand of the Angelic Doctor was folded to eternal rest. He was then considering penance, the fourth in his order of Sacraments. All that he had to say as to the person, and attributes, and acts and passion of Christ had been written; and he had considered the Sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and the eucharist; he was occupied with poenitentia; and still other sacraments remained, as well as his final treatment of the matters which lie beyond the grave. So he left his work unfinished, and, in spite of many efforts, unfinishable by any of his pupils or successors.[451]
II
Inasmuch as the matter of their thoughts was transmitted to the men of the Middle Ages, and was not drawn from their own observation or constructive reasoning, the fundamental intellectual endeavour for mediaeval men was to apprehend and make their own, and re-express. Their intellectual progress followed this process of appropriation, and falls into three stages--learning, organically appropriating, and re-expressing with added elements of thought. Logically, and generally in time, these three stages were successive. Yet, of course, they overlapped, and may be observed progressing simultaneously. Thus, for example, what was known of Aristotle at the beginning of the twelfth century was slight compared with the knowledge of his philosophy that was opened to western Europe in the latter part of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth. And while, by the middle of the twelfth century, the elements of Aristotle’s logic had been thoroughly appropriated, the substantial Aristotelian philosophy had still to be learned and mastered, before it could be reformulated and re-expressed as part of mediaeval thought.
Looking solely to the outer form, the three stages of mediaeval thought are exemplified in the Scriptural Commentary of the later Carolingian time, in the twelfth-century Books of Sentences, and at last in the more organic Summa theologiae. With this significant evolution and change of outer form, proceeded the more substantial evolution consisting in learning, appropriating, and re-expressing the inherited material. In both cases, these three stages were necessitated by the greatness of the transmitted matter; for the intellectual energies of the mediaeval period were fully occupied with mastering the data proffered so pressingly, with presenting and re-presenting this superabundant material, and recasting it in new forms of statement, which were also expressions, or realizations, of the mediaeval genius. So the mediaeval product may be regarded as given by the past, and by the same token necessitated and controlled. But, on the other hand, each stage of intellectual progress rendered possible the next one.
The first stage of learning is represented by the Carolingian period, which we have considered. It was then that the patristic material was extracted from the writings of the Fathers, and rearranged and reapplied, to meet the needs of the time. The mastery of this material had scarcely made such vital progress as to enable the men of the ninth and tenth and eleventh centuries to re-express it largely in terms of their own thinking. In the ninth century, Eriugena affords an extraordinary exception with his drastic restatement of what he had drawn from Pseudo-Dionysius and others; and at the end comes Anselm, whose genius is metaphysically constructive. But Anselm touches the coming time; and the springs of Eriugena’s genius are hidden from us.
As for the antique thought during these Carolingian centuries, Eriugena dealt in his masterful way with what he knew of it through patristic and semi-patristic channels. But let us rather seek it in the curriculum of the Trivium and Quadrivium. What progress Gerbert made in the Quadrivium, that is, in the various branches of mathematics which he taught, has been noted, and to what extent his example was followed by his pupil Fulbert, at the cathedral school of Chartres.[452] The courses of the Trivium--grammar, rhetoric, logic--demand our closer attention; for they were the key of the situation. We must keep in mind that we are approaching mediaeval thought from the side of the innate human need of intellectual expression--the impulse to know and the need to formulate one’s conceptions and express them consistently. For mediaeval men the first indispensable means to this end was grammar, including rhetoric, and the next was logic or dialectic. The Latin language contained the sum of knowledge transmitted to the Middle Ages. And it had to be learned. This was true even in Italy and Spain and France, where each year the current ways of Romance speech were departing more definitely from the parent stock; it was more patently true in the countries of Teutonic speech. Centuries before, the Roman youth had studied grammar that they might speak and write correctly. Now it was necessary to study Latin grammar, to wit, the true forms and literary usages of the Latin tongue, in order to acquire any branch of knowledge whatsoever, and express one’s corresponding thoughts. And men would not at first distinguish sharply between the mediating value of the learned tongue and the learning which it held.[453]
Thus grammar, the study of the Latin language, represented the first stage of knowledge for mediaeval men. This was to remain true through all the mediaeval centuries; since all youths who became scholars had to learn the language before they could study what was contained in it alone. One may also say, and yet not speak fantastically, that grammar, the study of the correct use of the language itself, corresponded spiritually with the main intellectual labour of the Carolingian period. Alcuin’s attention is commonly fixed upon the significance of language, Latin of course. And the labours of his pupil Rabanus, and the latter’s pupil Walafrid, are as it were devoted to the grammar of learning. That is to say, they read and endeavour to understand the works of the Fathers; they compare and collate, and make volumes of extracts, which they arrange for the most part as Scripture commentaries; commentaries, that is, upon the significance of the canonical writings which were the substance of all wisdom, but needed much explication. Such works were the very grammar of knowledge, being devoted to the exposition of the meaning of the Scriptures and the vast burden of patristic thought. A like purpose was evinced in the efforts of the great emperor himself to re-establish schools of grammar, in order that the Scriptures might be more correctly understood, and the expositions of the holy Fathers. In fine, just as knowledge of the Latin tongue was the end and aim of grammar, so a correct understanding of what was contained in Latin books was the aim of the intellectual labours of this period. It all represented the first stage in the mediaeval acquisition of knowledge, or in the presentation or expression of the same; and thus the first stage in the mediaeval endeavour to realize the human impulse to know.
The next course of the Trivium was logic; and likewise its study will represent truly the second stage in the mediaeval realization of the human impulse to know, to wit, the second stage in the appropriation and expression of the knowledge transmitted from the past. We have spoken at some length of the logical studies of Gerbert, and his endeavours to adjust his thinking and classify the branches of knowledge by means of formal logic.[454] Those discussions of his which seem somewhat puerile to us, were essential to his endeavours to formulate what he had learned, and present it as rational and ordered knowledge. Logic is properly the stage succeeding grammar in the formulation of rational knowledge. At least it was for men of Gerbert’s time, and the following centuries. Rightly enough they looked on logic as a scientia sermotionalis, which on one side touched sheer linguistics, and on the other, had for its field the further processes of reason. Thus Hugo of St. Victor, Abaelard’s very great contemporary, says:
“Logic is named from the Greek word logos, which has a twofold interpretation. For logos means either sermo or ratio; and therefore logic may be termed either a scientia sermotionalis or a scientia rationalis. Logica rationalis embraces dialectic and rhetoric, and is called discretiva (argumentative and exercising judgment); logica sermotionalis is the genus which includes grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, to wit, discursive science (disertiva).”[455]
The close connection between grammar and logic is evident. Logic treats of language used in rational expression, as well as of the reasoning processes carried on in language. Its elementary chapters teach a rational use of language, whereby men may reach a more deeply consistent expression of their thoughts than is gained from grammar. Yet grammar also is logic, and based on logical principles. All this is exemplified in the logical treatises composing the Aristotelian Organon, which the Middle Ages used. First comes Porphyry’s Isagoge, which clearly is bound up in language. Likewise Aristotle’s Categories treat of the rational and consistent use of language, or of what may be stated in language. Next it is obvious that the De interpretatione treats of language used to express thought, its generic function. The more advanced treatises of the Organon, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and Sophistical Elenchi, treat directly and elaborately of the reasoning processes themselves. So one perceives the grammatical affinities of the simpler treatises in the Organon. The more advanced ones seem to stand to them as oratorical rhetoric stands to elementary grammar. For the Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Elenchi are a kind of eristic, training the student to use the processes of thought and their expression in order to attain an end, commonly argumentative. The prior treatises have taught the elements, as it were the orthography and etymology of the rational expression of thought in language; the latter (even as syntax and rhetoric), train the student in the use of these elements. And one observes a nice historical fitness in the fact that only the simpler treatises of the Organon were in common use in the early Middle Ages, since they alone were necessary to the first stage in the appropriation of the substance of patristic and antique thought. The full Organon was rediscovered, and retaken into use in the middle or latter part of the twelfth century, when men had progressed to a more organic appropriation of the patristic material and what they knew of the antique philosophy.
Thus in mediaeval education, and in the successive order of appropriating the patristic and the antique, logic stood on grammar’s shoulders. It was grammar’s rationalized stage, and treated language as the means of expressing thought consistently and validly; that is, so as not to contravene the necessities of that whereof it was the vehicle. And since language thus treated was in accord with rational thought, it would accord with the realities to which thought corresponds; and might be taken as expressing them. This last reflection introduces metaphysics.
And properly. For the three stages in the mediaeval appropriation and expression of knowledge were grammar, logic, metaphysics. Logic has to do with the processes of thought; with the positing of premises and the drawing of the conclusion. It does not necessarily consider whether the contents of its premises represent realities. This is matter for ontology, metaphysics. Now mediaeval metaphysics, which were those of Greek philosophy, were extremely pre-Kantian, in assuming a correspondence between the necessities or conclusions of thought and the supreme realities, God and the Universe. Nor did mediaeval logic doubt that its processes could elucidate and express the veritable natures of things. So mediaeval logic readily wandered into the province of metaphysics, and ignored the line between the two.
Yet there is little metaphysics in the Organon; none in its simpler treatises. So there was none in the elementary logical instruction of the schools before the twelfth century at least.[456] One may always distinguish between logic and metaphysics; and it is to our purpose to do so here. For as we have taken logic to represent the second stage in the mediaeval appropriation of knowledge, so metaphysics, poised in turn on logic’s shoulders, is very representative of the third stage, to wit, the stage of systematic and organic re-expression of the ancient matter, with elements added by the great schoolmen.
Metaphysics was very properly the final stage. The grammatical represented an elementary learning of what the past had transmitted; the logical a further retrying of the matter, an attempt to understand and express it, formulate parts of it anew, with deeper consistency of expression. Then follows the attempt for final and universal consistency: final inasmuch as thought penetrates to the nature of things and expresses realities and the relationships of realities; and universal, in that it seeks to order and systematize all its concepts, and bring them to unity in a Summa--a perfected scheme of rational presentation of God and His creation. This will be, largely speaking, the final endeavour of the mediaeval man to ease his mind, and realize his impulse to know and express himself with uttermost consistency.
So for mediaeval men, metaphysics stood on logic’s shoulders and represented the final completion of their thought, in a universal system and scheme of God and man and things.[457] But the first part of this proposition had not been true with Greek philosophy. Metaphysics is properly occupied with being, in its ultimate essence and relationships; with the consistent putting together of things, to wit, the presentation or expression of them so as not to disagree with any of the data recognized as pertinent. The thinker considers profoundly, seeking to penetrate the ultimate reality and relationships of things, through which a universal whole is constituted. This makes ontology, metaphysics--the science of being, of causes, and so the science of the first Cause, God. Aristotle called this the “first” philosophy, because lying at the base of all branches of knowledge, and depending on nothing beyond itself. Some time after his death, the Peripatetics and then the Neo-Platonists called this first science by the name of Metaphysics, “after” or “beyond” physics, if one will, perhaps because of the actual order of treatment in the schools.
The term Metaphysics is vague enough; either “first” philosophy or “ontology” is preferable. Yet as to Greek philosophy the term has apt historical suggestiveness. For it did come after physics in time, and was in fact evoked by the imperfect method and consequent contradictions of the earlier philosophies. From the beginning, Greek philosophy drove straight at the cause or origin of things--surely the central problem of metaphysics. Thales and the other Ionians began with rational, though crude, hypotheses as to the sources of the universe. These were first attempts to reach a consistent expression of its origin and nature. Each succeeding philosopher considered further, from the vantage-ground of the recognized inconsistencies or inadequacies in the theories of his predecessors. He was thus led on to consider more profoundly the essential relationships of things, the very truth of their relationships, and on and on into the problem of their being. For the verity of relations must be according to the verity of being of the things related. The world about us consists in relationships, of antecedents and sequences, of cause and effect; and our thought of it is made up of consistencies or contradictions, which last we struggle to eliminate, or to transform to consistencies.
These early philosophers looked only to the Aristotelian material cause for the origin and cause of things; yet reflection plunged them deeper into a consideration of the nature of being and relationships. The other causes were evoked by Anaxagoras and then by Plato, and by them were led into the arena of debate; and philosophers discussed the efficient and final cause as well as the material. Such discussions are recognized by Plato, and finally by Aristotle as relating to the first principles of cognition and being, and so as constituting metaphysics. The constant search for a deeper consistency of explanation had led on and on through a manifold consideration of those palpable relationships which make up the visible world; it had disclosed the series of necessary assumptions required by those visible relationships; and thus the search for causality and origins, and essential relationships, became one and the same--metaphysics.
Metaphysics was not ineptly called so, since it had in time come after the cruder physical hypotheses. But such was not the order of mediaeval intellectual progress. The Middle Ages passed through no preliminary course of physical hypotheses, explanatory of the universe. Not physics, but logic (introduced by grammar) led up to the final construction--or rather adoption and reconstruction--of ultimate hypotheses as to God and man, led up to the all-ordering and all-compassing Theologia. Metalogics, rather than Metaphysics, would be the proper name for these final expressions or actualizations of the mediaeval impulse to know.
XXXVI. TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICISM
I. THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS: ABAELARD.
II. THE MYSTIC STRAIN: HUGO AND BERNARD.
III. THE LATER DECADES: BERNARD SILVESTRIS; GILBERT DE LA PORRÉE; WILLIAM OF CONCHES; JOHN OF SALISBURY, AND ALANUS OF LILLE.
I
From the somewhat elaborate general considerations which have occupied the last two chapters, we turn to the representative manifestations of mediaeval thought in the twelfth century. These belong in part to the second or “logical,” and in part to the third or “meta-logical,” stage of the mediaeval mind. The first or “grammatical” stage was represented by the Carolingian period; and in reviewing the mental aspects of the eleventh century, we entered upon the second stage, that of logic, or dialectic, to use the more specific mediaeval term. Toward the close of the tenth century Gerbert was found strenuously occupying himself with logic, and using it as a means of ordering the branches of knowledge. At the end of the eleventh, Anselm has not only considered certain logical problems, but has vaulted over into constructive metaphysical theology. Looking back over Anselm’s work, from the vantage-ground of the twelfth century’s further reflections, one may be conscious of a certain genial youthfulness in his reliance upon single arguments, noble and beautiful soarings of the spirit, which however pay little regard to the firmness of the premises from which they spring, and still less to a number of cognate and pertinent considerations, which the twelfth century was to analyze.
Anselm’s thoughts perhaps overleaped logic. At all events he appears only occasionally absorbed with its formal problems. Yet he lived in a time of dawning logical controversy. Roscellin was even then blowing up the problem of universals, a problem occasioned by the entering of mediaeval thought upon the “logical” stage of its appropriation of the patristic and antique.
The problem of universals, or general ideas, from the standpoint of logic, lies at the basis of consistent thinking. It reverts to the time when Aristotle’s assertion of the pre-eminently real existence of individuals broke away from the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. For the early mediaeval philosophers, it took its rise in a famous passage in Porphyry’s Introduction to the Categories, the concluding sentence of which, as translated into Latin by Boëthius, puts the question thus: “Mox de generibus et speciebus illud quidem sive subsistant sive in nudis intellectibus posita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia sint an incorporalia, et utrum separata a sensibilibus an in sensibilibus posita et circa haec consistentia, dicere recusabo.” “Next as to genera and species, do they actually exist or are they merely in thought; are they corporeal or incorporeal existences; are they separate from sensible things or only in and of them?--I refuse to answer,” says Porphyry; “it is a very lofty business, unsuited to an elementary work.”
Thus, in three pairs of crude alternatives, the question came over to the early Middle Ages. The men of the Carolingian period took one position or another, without sensing its difficulties, or observing how it lay athwart the path of knowledge. Students were not as yet attempting such a dynamic appropriation of the ancient material as would evoke this veritable problem of cognition. Even Gerbert at the close of the tenth century was still so busy with the outer forms and figments of logic that he had no time to enter on those ulterior problems where logic links itself to metaphysics. One Roscellin, living and teaching apparently at Besançon in the latter part of the eleventh century, seems to have been the first to attack the currently accepted “realism” with some sense of the matter’s thorny intricacies. With his own “nominalistic” position we are acquainted only through his adversaries, who imputed to him views which a thoughtful person could hardly have entertained--that universals were merely words and breath (flatus vocis). Roscellin seems at all events to have been a man strongly held by the reality of individuals, and one who found it difficult to ascribe a sufficient intellectual actuality to the general idea as distinguished from the perception of things and the demands of the concepts of their individual existences. His logical difficulties impelled him to theological heresy. The unity in the Trinity became an impossibility; he could only conceive of three beings, just as he might think of three angels; and he would have spoken of three Gods had usage not forbidden it, says St. Anselm.[458] As it was, he said enough to draw on him the condemnation of a Council held at Soissons in 1092, before which he quailed and recanted. For the remainder of his life he so constrained the expression of his thoughts as to ensure his safety.
One may say that Plato’s theory of ideas was a metaphysical presentation of the universe, sounding in conceptions of reality. But for the Middle Ages, the problem whether genera and species exist when abstracted from their particulars, sprang from logical controversy. It was a problem of cognition, cognizance, understanding: how should one understand and analyze the contents of a statement, e.g. Socrates is a man. Moreover, it was a fundamental and universal problem of cognition; for it was not merely occupied, like all mental processes, with bringing data to consistent formulation, but pertained to those processes themselves by which any and all data are stated or formulated. It touched every formulation of truth, asking, in fine, how are we to think our statements? The philosophers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, did not view this problem as one pertaining to the mind’s processes, and as having to do solely with the understanding of the contents of a statement. Rather, even as Plato had done, they approached it as if it were a problem of modes of existence; and for this very reason it had pushed Roscellin into theological error.
The discussion was to pass through various stages; and each stage may seem to us to represent the point reached by the thinker in his analysis of his conscious meaning in stating a proposition. Moreover, each solution may be valid for him who gives it, because of its correspondence to the meaning of his utterances so far as he has analyzed them. But mediaeval men could not take it in this way. Their intellectual task lay in appropriating, and in their own way re-expressing, all that had come to them from an authoritative past. The problem of universals had been stated by a great authority, who put it as pertaining to the objective reality of genera and species. How then might mediaeval men take it otherwise, especially when at all events it pertained in all verity to their endeavour to grasp and re-express the contents of transmitted truth? It became for a while the crucial problem, the answer to which might indicate the thinker’s general intellectual attitude. Far from keeping to logic, to the organon or instrumental part of the mediaeval endeavour to know, it wound itself through metaphysics and theology. Obviously the thinker’s answer to the problem would bear relation to his thoughts upon the transcendent reality of spiritual essences.
The men who first became impressed with the importance of this problem, gave extreme answers to it, sometimes crassly denying the real existence of universals, but more often hailing them as antecedent and all-permeating realities. If Roscellinus took the former position, a pupil of his, William of Champeaux, held the extreme opposite view, when both he and the twelfth century were still young. One may, however, bear in mind that as the views of the older nominalist are reported only by his enemies, so our knowledge of William’s lucubrations comes mainly from the exacerbated pen of Peter Abaelard.
William held apparently “that the same thing, in its totality and at the same time, existed in its single individuals, among which there was no essential difference, but merely a variety of accidents.”[459] Abaelard appears to have performed a reductio ad absurdum upon this view that the total genus exists in each individual. He pointed out that in such case the total genus homo would at the same time exist in Socrates and also in Plato, when one of them might be in Rome and the other in Athens. “At this William changed his opinion,” continues Abaelard, “and taught that the genus existed in each individual not essentialiter but indifferenter or [as some texts read] individualiter.” Which seems to mean that William no longer held that the total genus existed in each individual actually, but “indistinguishably,” or “individually.”
And the students flocked away with Abaelard, he also says; and William fled the lecture chair. William and Peter; shall we say of them arcades ambo? This would be but a harmless depreciation of Abaelard, in the face of the universal and correct tradition as to his epoch-making intellectual progressiveness. Indeed it might be well to let the phrase sound in our ears, just for the reminder’s sake, that Abaelard was, like William, a man of logic, although far more expert both in manipulating the dialectic processes and in applying them to theology.
Before endeavouring briefly to reconstruct the intellectual qualities of Abaelard from his writings, let us see how the famous open letter to a friend, in giving an apologetic story of the writer’s life, discloses the fatalities of his character. This Historia calamitatum suarum makes it plain enough why the crises of his life were all of them catastrophes--even leaving out of view his liaison with Heloïse and its penalty. A fatal impulse to annoy seems to drive him from fate to fate; the old word of Heraclitus ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων (character is a man’s genius) was so patently true of him. Much that he said was to receive orthodox approval after his time. Quite true. It has often been remarked, that the heresy of one age is the accepted doctrine of the next, even within the Church. But would the heretic have been persona grata to the later time? Perhaps not. Peter Abaelard at all events would have led others and himself a life of thorns in the thirteenth century, or the fourteenth had he been born again, when some of his methods and opinions had become accepted commonplace. Did he have an eye for logical and human truth more piercing than his twelfth-century fellows? Apparently. Was his need to speak out his truth so much the more imperative than theirs? Possibly. At all events, he was certainly possessed with an inordinate impulsion to undo his rivals. He sits down before their fortress walls by night, and when they see him there, they know not whether they look on friend or foe--in this auditor. They will find out soon enough. He studied dialectic under William of Champeaux at Paris, as all men were to know. He got what William had to teach, and moved on, to lecture in Melun and elsewhere. Then he returned and sat at William’s feet awhile to learn rhetoric, as he announced. But quickly he rose up, and assailed his master’s doctrine of universals, and overthrew him, as we have seen. The victim’s friends made Abaelard’s eristically won lecturer’s seat a prickly one. He left Paris for a while, and then returned and taught on Mount St. Geneviève, outside the city.
Up to this time he had not been known to study theology. But in 1113, at the age of thirty-four, he went to Laon to listen to a famous theologian named Anselm, who himself had studied at Bec under a greater Anselm. Says Abaelard in his Historia calamitatum: “So I came to this old man, whose repute was a tradition, rather than merited by talent or learning. Any one who brought his uncertainties to him, went away more uncertain still! He was a marvel in the eyes of his hearers, but a nobody before a questioner. He had a wonderful wordflow, but the sense was contemptible and the reasoning abject.” Well, I didn’t listen to him long, Abaelard intimates; but began to absent myself from his lectures, and was brought to task by his auditors, to whom jokingly I said, I, too, could lecture on Scripture; and I was taken up. Nothing loath, the next day I lectured to them on the passage they had chosen from Ezekiel’s obscure prophecies. So, all unprepared, and trusting in my genius, I began to lecture, at first to sparse audiences, but they quickly grew. Such is the substance of Abaelard’s own account, and he goes on to tell how “the old man aforesaid was violently moved with envy,” and shortly Abaelard had to take his lecturings elsewhere. He returned to Paris, and we have the episode of Heloïse, for whom, as his life went on, he evinced a devoted affection.[460]
Now he is monk in the abbey of St. Denis; and there again he lectures, and takes up certain themes against Roscellinus, whom he seems to resurrect from the quiet of old age to make a target of. This old man, too, hits back, and other vicious people blow up a cloud of envy, until the gifted lecturer finds himself an accused before the Council of Soissons, and his book condemned. Untaught by the burning of his book, Abaelard returns to his convent, and proceeds to unearth statements of the Venerable Bede showing that Dionysius the Areopagite who heard Paul preach, was not the St. Denis who became patron saint of France, and founder of the great abbey which even now was sheltering a certain Abaelard, and drawing power and revenue from the fame of its reputed almost apostolic founder. Its abbot and monks did not care to have the abbey walls undermined by truth, and Abaelard was hunted forth from among them.
It was after this that he made for himself a lonely refuge, which he named the Paraclete, not far from Troyes, and thither again his pupils followed him in swarms, and built their huts around him in the wilderness. But still mightier foes--or their phantoms--rise against this hunted head. The Historia seems to allude to St. Norbert and to St. Bernard. Whatever the storm was, it was escaped by flight to a remote Breton convent which--still for his sins!--had chosen Abaelard its abbot. There in due course they tried to murder him, and again he fled, this time back to his congenial sphere, the schools of Paris, where he lectured, now at the summit of fame, to enthusiastic multitudes of students. Some years pass, and then the pious jackal, William of St. Thierry, rouses his lion Bernard to contend with Abaelard and crush him, not with dialectic, at the Council of Sens in 1141. In a year he died, a broken man, in Cluny’s shelter. The conflict had not been of his seeking. Perhaps, had he been less vain, he might have avoided it. When it was upon him, the unhappy athlete of the schools found himself a pigmy matched against the giant of Clairvaux--the Thor and Loki of the Church! Whether or not the unequal battle raises Abaelard in our esteem, its outcome commends him to our pity; and all our sympathy stays with him to the last days of a life that was, as if physically, crushed. This accumulation of sad fortune bears witness enough to the character of the man on whose neck it did not fall by accident. Now let us try to reconstruct him intellectually.
We have heretofore observed the genius and noted the somewhat swaddling dialectic categories of a certain eager intellect bearing the name of Gerbert.[461] Abaelard’s mental processes have advanced beyond such logical stammerings. He and his time are in the fulness of youth, and feel the strength and joyful assurance of an intellectual progress, to be brought about by a new-found proficiency in dialectic. In the first half of the twelfth century, the intellectual genius of the time--and Abaelard was its quintessence--knew itself advancing by this means in truth. A like intellectual consciousness had rejoiced the disputants in Plato’s academy, under the inspiration of that beautiful reasoner’s exquisite dialectic. The one time, like the other, was justified in its confidence. For in such epochs, language, reasoning, and knowledge advance with equal step; thought clears up with linguistic and logical analysis; it becomes clear and illuminated because more distinctly conscious of the character of its processes, and the nature of statement. There is thus a veritable progress, at least in the methodology of truth.
In Abaelard’s time men had already studied grammar, the grammar of the Latin tongue, and the quasi-grammar of rearrangement and first painful learning of the knowledge which it held. They had studied logic too, its simpler elements, those which consist mainly in a further clearing up of the meanings of language. Some men--Anselm of Canterbury--had already made sudden flights beyond grammar, and out of logic’s pale. And the labour of logical and organic appropriation, with some reconstruction of the ancient material, was to go on in this first half of the twelfth century, when Hugo of St. Victor lived as well as Abaelard. Progress by means of dialectic controversy, and first attempts at systematic construction, mark this period intellectually. Abaelard lived and moved and had his being in dialectic. The further interest of Theology was lent him by the spirit of his time. Through the medium of the one he reasoned analytically; and in the province of the other he applied his reasoning constructively, using patristic materials and the fragments of Greek philosophy scattered through them. Thus Abaelard, a true man of the twelfth century, passes on through logic to theology or metaphysics.
For the completeness of his logical knowledge he lived and worked twenty or thirty years too soon. He was unacquainted with the more elaborate logical treatises of Aristotle, to wit, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and Sophistical Elenchi. The sources of his own treatises upon Dialectic are Porphyry’s Introduction, Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione, and certain treatises of Boëthius.[462] A first result of the elementary and quasi-grammatical character of the sources of logic upon which he drew, is that the connection between logic and grammar is very plain with him. Note, for example, this paragraph of his, the substance of which is drawn from Aristotle’s Categories:
“But neither can substances be compared,[463] since comparison relates to attribute, and not to substance; so it is shown that comparison lies not as to nouns, but as to their attributes. Thus we say whiter but not whitenesser. Much more are substances which have no attribute (adjacentiam) immune from comparison. More or less cannot be predicated of nouns (nomina substantiva). For one cannot say more man or less man, as more or less white.”[464]
Evidently this elementary sort of logic, whether with Aristotle or Abaelard, represents a clearing up of the mind on current modes of expression. And sometimes from such studies men make discoveries like that of Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who discovered that he had always been talking prose. Some of the points on which the minds of Abaelard’s contemporaries required clarification, would be foolish word-play to ourselves, as, for instance, whether the significance of the sentence homo est animal is contained in the subject, copula, or predicate, or only in all three; and whether when a word is spoken, the very same word and the whole of it comes to the ears of all the hearers at the same time: “utrum ipsa vox ad aures diversorum simul et tota aequaliter veniat.”[465] Such questions, as was observed regarding the problems of logical arrangement in Gerbert’s mind, may be pertinent and reasonable enough, if viewed in connection with the intellectual conditions of a period; just as many questions now make demand on us for solution, being links in the chain of our knowledge, or manner of reasoning. But future men may pass them by as not lying in their path to progressive knowledge of the universe and man.
So the problem of universals was still cardinal with Abaelard and his fellow-logicians, who through logic were advancing, as they believed, along the path of objective truth. Its solution would determine the nature of the categories into which logic was fitting whatever might be enunciated or expressed. The inquiry represented an ultimate analysis of statement, of the general nature of propositions; and also related to their assumed correspondence with realities. What William of Champeaux had unqualifiedly alleged, Abaelard tried to determine more analytically, to wit, the value of the proposition “si aliquid sit ea res quae est species, id est vel homo vel equus et caetera, sit quaelibet res quae eorum genus est, veluti animal aut corpus aut substantia,”--if species be something, as man, horse, and so forth, then that which is the genus of these may be something, as animal, body, or substance.[466]
Abaelard’s discussion of this matter is a discussion of the true content of propositions. His conclusion is not so clear as to have occasioned no dispute. One must not think of him as an Aristotelian--for he knew little of the substantial philosophy of Aristotle. Our dialectician had absorbed more of Plato, through turbid patristic channels and the current translation of the Timaeus. So his solution of the question of genus and species may prove an analytic bit of eclecticism, an imagined reconcilement of the two great masters. The universal or general is, says he, “quod natum est de pluribus praedicari,” that which is by its nature adapted to be predicated of a number of things. The universal consists neither in things as such nor in words as such; it consists rather in general predicability; it is sermo, sermo praedicabilis, that which may be stated, as a predicate, of many. As such it is not a mere word: sermo is not merely vox; that is not the true general predicable. On the other hand, one thing cannot be the predicate of another; res de re non praedicatur: therefore sermo is not res. Yet Abaelard does not limit the existence of the universal to the concept of him who thinks it. It surely exists in the individuals, since substantia specierum is not different from the essentia individuorum. But does not the general concept exist as an objective unity? Apparently Abaelard would answer: Yes, it does thus exist as a common sameness (consimilitudo).
All this is anything but clear. And the various twelfth-century opinions on universals no longer possess human interest. It is hard for us to distinguish between them, or understand them clearly, or state them intelligibly. They are bound up in a phraseology untranslatable into modern language, because the discussion no longer corresponds to modern ways of thought. But one is interested in the human need which drove Abaelard and his fellows upon the horns of this problem, and in the nature of their endeavours to formulate their thought so as to escape those opposing horns--of an extreme realism which might issue in pantheism, and an extreme nominalism which seemed to deprive predication of substance and validity.[467]
So much for Abaelard as sheer logician, formal adjuster of the instrumental processes of thinking. Dialectic was for him a first stage in the actualization of the impulse to know, and bring knowledge to consistent expression. It was also his way of approach to the further systematic presentation of his thoughts upon God and man, human society and justice, divine and human.
“A new calumny against me, have my rivals lately devised, because I write upon the dialectic art; affirming that it is not lawful for a Christian to treat of things which do not pertain to the Faith. Not only they say that this science does not prepare us for the Faith, but that it destroys faith by the implications of its arguments. But it is wonderful if I must not discuss what is permitted them to read. If they allow that the art militates against faith, surely they deem it not to be science (scientia). For the science of truth is the comprehension of things, whose species is the wisdom in which faith consists. Truth is not opposed to truth. For not as falsehood may be opposed to falsity, or evil to evil, can the true be opposed to the true, or the good to the good; but rather all good things are in accord. All knowledge is good, even that which relates to evil, because a righteous man must have it. Since he should guard against evil, it is necessary that he should know it beforehand: otherwise he could not shun it. Though an act be evil, knowledge regarding it is good; though it be evil to sin, it is good to know the sin, which otherwise we could not shun. Nor is the science mathematica to be deemed evil, whose practice (astrology) is evil. Nor is it a crime to know with what services and immolations the demons may be compelled to do our will, but to use such knowledge. For if it were evil to know this, how could God be absolved, who knows the desires and cogitations of all His creatures, and how the concurrence of demons may be obtained? If therefore it is not wrong to know, but to do, the evil is to be referred to the act and not to the knowledge. Hence we are convinced that all knowledge, which indeed comes from God alone and from His bounty, is good. Wherefore the study of every science should be conceded to be good, because that which is good comes from it; and especially one must insist upon the study of that doctrina by which the greater truth is known. This is dialectic, whose function is to distinguish between every truth and falsity: as leader in all knowledge it holds the primacy and rule of all philosophy. The same also is shown to be needful to the Catholic Faith, which cannot without its aid resist the sophistries of schismatics.”[468]
In this passage the man himself is speaking, and disclosing his innermost convictions. For Abaelard’s nature was set upon understanding all things through reason, even the mysteries of the Faith. He does not say, or quite think, that he will disbelieve whatever he cannot understand; but his reasoning and temper point to the conclusion. This was obviously true of Abaelard’s ethical opinions; his enemies said it was true of his theology. Such a man would naturally plead for freedom of discussion, even for freedom of conclusion; but within certain bounds; for who in the twelfth century could maintain that heretics or infidels did rightly in rejecting the Christian Faith? Yet Abaelard says heretics should be compelled (coercendi) by reason rather than force.[469] And he could at least conceive of the rejection of the Faith upon, say, imperfect rational grounds. In his dialogue between Philosopher, Jew, and Christian, the Christian says to the Philosopher: One cannot argue against you from the authority of Scripture, which you do not recognize; for no one can be refuted save with arguments drawn from what he admits: Nemo quippe argui nisi ex concessis potest.[470] However this sounded in Abaelard’s time, the same was enunciated by Thomas Aquinas after him, in a passage already given.[471] But it is doubtful whether Thomas would have cared to follow Abaelard in some of the arguments of his Ethics or Book called, Know Thyself, in which he maintains that no act is a sin unless the actor was conscious of its sinfulness; and therefore that killing the martyrs could not be imputed as sin to those persecutors who deemed themselves thereby to be doing a service acceptable to God.[472]
The titles given by Abaelard to his various treatises are indicative of the critical insistency of his nature. He called his Ethica, Scito te ipsum, Know Thyself: understand thy good and ill intentions, and what may be vice or virtue in thee. Through the book, the discussion of right and wrong directs itself as pertinaciously to considerations of human nature as was possible in an age when theological dogma held the final criteria of human conduct. And Abaelard is capable of a lofty insight touching the relationship between God and man.
“Penitence,” says he, “is truly fruitful when grief and contrition proceed from love of God, regarded as benignant, rather than from fear of penalties. Sin cannot endure with this groaning and contrition of heart: for sin is contempt of God, or consent to evil, and the love of God in inspiring our groaning, suffers no ill.”[473]
Possibly when reading the Scito te ipsum one is conscious of a dialectician drawing distinctions, rather than of a moralist searching the heart of the matter. Everything is set forth so reasonably. Yet Abaelard’s impartial delight in a rational view of belief and conduct shows nowhere quite as obviously as in his Dialogue between Philosopher and Jew and Christian. Each in turn is made to set forth the best arguments his position admits of. The author does his best for each, and perhaps seems temperamentally drawn to the position of the Philosopher, whom he permits to call the Jews stultos and the Christians insanos. This philosopher naturally is no Greek of Plato’s or Aristotle’s time, but a good Roman, who regards moralis philosophia as the finis omnium disciplinarum, and hangs all intellectual considerations upon a discussion of the summum bonum. His well-worn arguments are put with earnestness. He deprecates the blind acceptance of beliefs by children from their fathers, and the narrowness of mind which keeps men from perceiving the possible truth in others’ opinions:
“so that whomsoever they see differing from themselves in belief, they deem alien from the mercy of God. Thus condemning all others, they vaunt themselves alone as blessed. Long reflecting on this blindness and pride of the human race, I have unceasingly besought the Divine Pity that He would deign to draw me forth from this miserable Charibdian whirlpool of error, and guide me to a port of safety. So you [addressing both Jew and Christian] behold me solicitous and attentive as a disciple, to the documents of your arguments.”[474]
The qualities cultivated by dialectic, and the impartial rational temper, here displayed, reappear in the works of Abaelard devoted to sacred doctrine. Enough has been said of the method and somewhat captious qualities of the Sic et non.[475] Unquestionably its manner of presenting the contradictory opinions of the Fathers, without any attempt to reconcile them, tended to bring into view the difficulties inhering in the formulation of Christian belief. And indeed the book made prominent all the diabolic insoluble problems of the Faith, or rather of life itself and any view of God and man: Predestination, for example; whether God causes evil; whether He is omnipotent; whether He is free. The Lombard’s Sentences and Thomas’s Summa considered all these questions; but they strove to solve them; and Thomas did solve every one, leaving no loose ends to his theology. More potently than Abaelard did the Angelic Doctor employ dialectic in his finished scheme. With him, this propaedeutic discipline, this tool of truth, perfectly performs its task of construction. So also Abaelard intended to work with it; but his somewhat unconsidered use of the tool did not meet the approval of his contemporaries. Accordingly, in his more constructive theological treatises his impulse to know and state appears finally actualized in the systematic formulation of convictions upon topics of ultimate interest, to wit, theology, the contents of the Christian Faith, the full relationship of God and man. Did he sever theology from philosophy? Nay, rather, with him theology was ultimate philosophy.
Several times Abaelard rewrote what was substantially the same general work upon Theology. In one of its earliest forms it was burnt by the Council of Soissons in 1121.[476] In another form it exists under the title Theologia Christiana;[477] and the first part of its apparently final revision is now improperly entitled, Introductio ad theologiam.[478]
The first Book of the Theologia Christiana is an exposition of the Trinity, not clinched in syllogisms, but consisting mainly of an orderly presentation of the patristic authorities supporting the author’s view of the matter. The testimonies of profane writers are also given. Liber II. opens by saying that in the former part of the work “we have collected the testimonia of prophets and philosophers, in support of the faith of the Holy Trinity.” Hereupon, by the same method of adducing authorities, Abaelard proceeds to refute those who had blamed him for citing the pagan philosophers. He marshals his supporting excerpts from the Fathers, and remarks: “That nothing is more needful for the defence of our faith than that as against the importunities of all the infidels we should have witness from themselves wherewith to refute them.” Then he points to the moral worth of some of the philosophers, to their true teaching of the soul’s immortality, and quotes Horace’s
“Oderunt peccare boni virtutis amore.”
He continues at some length setting forth their well-nigh evangelical virtue, and speaks of the Gospel as reformatio legis naturalis.
At the beginning of Liber III. comes the statement: “We set the faith of the blessed Trinity as the foundation of all good.” Whereupon Abaelard breaks out in a denunciation of those who misuse dialectic; but again he passes to a defence of the art as an art and branch of knowledge, and shows its need as a weapon against those wranglers who will be quieted neither by the authority of the saints nor the philosophers: against whom, he, Abaelard, trusting in the divine aid, will turn this weapon as David did the sword of Goliath. He now states the true object of his work: “First then is to be set forth the theme of our whole labour, and the sum of faith; the unity of the divine substance and the Trinity of persons, which are in God, and are one God. Next we state the objections to our theses, and then the solutions of those objections.” And he gives the substance of the Athanasian Creed. From this point, his work becomes more dialectical and constructive, although of course continuing to quote authorities. He is emboldened to discuss the deepest mysteries, the very penetralia of the Trinity, and in a way which might well alarm men like Bernard, who desired acceptance of the Faith, with rhetoric, but without discussion. To be sure Abaelard pauses to justify himself by reverting to his apologetic purpose: “Heretics must be coerced with reason rather than by force.” However this may be, the work henceforth shows the passing on of logic to the exercise of its architectonic functions in constructing a systematic theological metaphysics.
The miscalled Introductio ad theologiam, as might be expected of a last revision of the author’s Theology, is a more organic work. In the Prologue, Abaelard speaks of it as a Summa sacrae eruditionis or an Introductio to Divine Scripture. And again he states the justifying purpose of his labour, or rather puts it into the mouths of his disciples who have asked for such a work from him: “Since our faith, the Christian Faith, seems entangled in such difficult questions, and to stand apart from human reason (et ab humana ratione longius absistere), it should be fortified by so much the stronger arguments, especially against the attacks of those who call themselves philosophers.” Continuing, Abaelard protests that if in any way, for his sins, he should deviate from the Catholic understanding and statement, he will on seeing his error revise the same, like the blessed Augustine.
The work itself opens with a statement of its intended divisions: “In three matters, as I judge, rests the sum of human salvation: Fides, caritas, and sacramentum”; and he gives his definition of faith, which was so obnoxious to Bernard and others, as the existimatio rerum non apparentium. The three extant Books do not conclude the treatment even of the first of these three topics. But one readily sees that were the work complete, its arrangement might correspond with that of Thomas’s Summa.[479] One may reiterate that it was more constructively argumentative than the Theologia Christiana, even in the manner of using the cited authorities. For instance, Abaelard’s mind is fixed on the analogy between the Neo-Platonic Trinity of Deus, nous, and anima mundi, and that of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The nous fitly represents Christ, who is the Sapientia Dei--which Abaelard sets forth; but then with even greater insistency he identifies the Holy Spirit with the world-soul. Nothing gave a stronger warrant to the accusations of heresy brought against him than this last doctrine, with which he was obsessed. Yet what roused St. Bernard and his jackals was not so much any particular opinion of Abaelard, as his dialectic and critical spirit, which insisted upon understanding and explaining, before believing. “The faith of the righteous believes; it does not dispute. But that man, suspicious of God (Deum habens suspectum), has no mind to believe what his reason has not previously argued.”[480]
Still, when Bernard says that faith does not discuss, but believes, he states a conviction of his mind, a conviction corresponding with an inner need of his own to formulate and express his thought. Only, with Abaelard the need to consider and analyse was more consciously imperative. He could not avoid the constant query: How shall I think this thing--this thing, for example, which is declared by revelation? Just as other questioning spirits in other times might be driven upon the query: How shall we think these things which are disclosed by the variegated walls of our physical environment? Those yield data, or refuse them, and force the mind to put many queries, and come to some adjustment. So experience presents data for adjustment, just as dogma, Scripture, revelation present that which reason must bring within the action of its processes, and endeavour to find rational expression for.
II
The greatest dialectician of the early twelfth century felt no problems put him by the physical world. That did not attract his inquiry; it did not touch the reasonings evolved by his self-consciousness, any more than it impressed the fervid mind of his great adversary, St. Bernard. The natural world, however, stirred the mind of Abaelard’s contemporary, Hugo of St. Victor.[481] Its colours waved before his reveries, and its visible sublimities drew his mind aloft to the contemplation of God: for him its things were all the things of God--opus conditionis or opus restaurationis;[482] the work of foundation, whereby God created the physical world for the support and edification of its crowning creature man; and the work of restoration, to wit, the incarnation of the Word, and all its sacraments.
Hugo was a Platonic and very Christian theologian. He would reason and expound, and yet was well aware that reason could not fathom the nature of God, or bring man to salvation. “Logic, mathematics, physics teach some truth, yet do not reach that truth wherein is the soul’s safety, without which whatever is is vain.”[483] So Hugo was not primarily a logician, like Abaelard; nor did he care chiefly for the kind of truth which might be had through logic. Nevertheless the productions of his short life prove the excellence of his mind and his large enthusiasm for knowledge.
As Hugo was the head of the school of St. Victor for some years before his death, certain of his works cover topics of ordinary mediaeval education, secular and religious; while others advance to a more profound expression of the intellectual, or spiritual, interests of their author. For elementary religious instruction, he composed a veritable book of Sentences,[484] which preceded the Lombard’s in time, but was later than Abaelard’s Sic et non. Without striking features, it lucidly and amiably carried out its general purpose of setting forth the authoritative explanations of the elements of the Christian Faith. The writer did not hesitate to quote opposing views, which were not heralded, however, by such danger-signals of contradiction as flare from the chapter headings of the Sic et non.
The corresponding treatise upon profane learning--the Eruditio didascalica--is of greater interest.[485] It commences in elementary fashion, as a manual of study: “There are two things by which we gain knowledge, to wit, reading and meditation; reading comes first.” The book is to be a guide to the student in the study both of secular and divine writings; it teaches how to study the artes, and then how to study the Scriptures.[486] Even in this manual, Hugo shows himself a meditative soul, and one who seeks to base his most elementary expositions upon the nature and needs of man. The mind, says he, is distracted by things of sense, and does not know itself. It is renewed through study, so that it learns again not to look without for what itself affords. Learning is life’s solace, which he who finds is happy, and he who makes his own is blessed.[487]
For Hugo, philosophy is that which investigates the rationes of things human and divine, seeking ever the final wisdom, which is knowledge of the primaeva ratio: this distinguishes philosophy from the practical sciences, like agriculture: it follows the ratio, and they administer the matter. Again and again, Hugo returns to the thought that the object of all human actiones and studia is to restore the integrity of our nature or mitigate its weaknesses, restore the image of the divine similitude in us, or minister to the needs of life. This likeness is renewed by speculatio veritatis, or exercitium virtutis.[488]
Such is a pretty broad basis of theory for a high school manual. Hugo proceeds to set forth the scheme, rather than the substance, of the arts and sciences, pausing occasionally to admonish the reader to hold no science vile, since knowledge always is good; and he points out that all knowledge hangs together in a common coherency. He sketches[489] the true student’s life: Whoever seeks learning, must not neglect discipline! He must be humble, and not ashamed to learn from any one; he must observe decent manners, and not play the fool and make faces at lecturers on divinity, for thereby he insults God. Yea, and let him mind the example of the ancient sages, who for learning’s sake spurned honours, rejected riches, rejoiced in insults, deserted the companionship of men, and gave themselves up to philosophy in desert solitudes, that they might be more free for meditation. Diligent search for wisdom in quietude becomes a scholar; and likewise poverty, and likewise exile: he is very delicate who clings to his fatherland; “He is brave to whom every land is home (patria); and he is perfect to whom the whole world is an exile!”[490]
Hugo has much to say of the pulchritudo and the decor of the creature-world. But with him the world and its beauty point to God. One should observe it because of its suggestiveness, the visible suggesting the invisible. Hugo has already been followed in his argument that the world, in its veriest reality, is a symbol.[491] Here we follow him along his path of knowledge, which leads on and upward from cogitatio, through meditatio, to contemplatio. The steps in Hugo’s scheme are rational, though the summit lies beyond. This path to truth, leading on from the visible symbol to the unseen power, is for him the reason and justification of study; drawing to God it makes for man’s salvation.
Hugo has put perhaps his most lucid exposition of the three grades of knowledge into the first of his Nineteen Sermons on Ecclesiastes.[492] He is fond of certain numbers, and here his thought revolves in categories of the number three. Solomon composed three works, the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Canticles. In the first, he addresses his son paternally, admonishing him to pursue virtue and shun vice; in the second, he shows the grown man that nothing in the world is stable; finally, in Canticles, he brings the consummate one, who has spurned the world, to the Bridegroom’s arms.
“Three are the modes of cognition (visiones) belonging to the rational soul: cogitation, meditation, contemplation. It is cogitation when the mind is touched with the ideas of things, and the thing itself is by its image presented suddenly, either entering the mind through sense or rising from memory. Meditation is the assiduous and sagacious revision of cogitation, and strives to explain the involved, and penetrate the hidden. Contemplation is the mind’s perspicacious and free attention, diffused everywhere throughout the range of whatever may be explored. There is this difference between meditation and contemplation: meditation relates always to things hidden from our intelligence; contemplation relates to things made manifest, either according to their nature or our capacity. Meditation always is occupied with some one matter to be investigated; contemplation spreads abroad for the comprehending of many things, even the universe. Thus meditation is a certain inquisitive power of the mind, sagaciously striving to look into the obscure and unravel the perplexed. Contemplation is that acumen of intelligence which, keeping all things open to view, comprehends all with clear vision. Thus contemplation has what meditation seeks.
“There are two kinds of contemplation: the first is for beginners, and considers creatures; the kind which comes later, belongs to the perfect, and contemplates the Creator. In the Proverbs, Solomon proceeds as through meditation. In Ecclesiastes he ascends to the first grade of contemplation. In the Song of Songs he transports himself to the final grade. In meditation there is a wrestling of ignorance with knowledge; and the light of truth gleams as in a fog of error. So fire is kindled with difficulty in a heap of green wood; but then fanned with stronger breath, the flame burns higher, and we see volumes of smoke rolling up, with flame flashing through. Little by little the damp is exhausted, and the leaping fire dispels the smoke. Then victrix flamma darting through the heap of crackling wood, springs from branch to branch, and with lambent grasp catches upon every twig; nor does it rest until it penetrates everywhere and draws into itself all that it finds which is not flame. At length the whole combustible material is purged of its own nature and passes into the similitude and property of fire; then the din is hushed, and the voracious fire having subdued all, and brought all into its own likeness, composes itself to a high peace and silence, finding nothing more that is alien or opposed to itself. First there was fire with flame and smoke; then fire with flame, without smoke; and at last pure fire with neither flame nor smoke.”
So the victrix flamma achieves the three stages of spiritual insight, fighting its way through the smoke of cogitation, through the smoke and flame of meditation, and at last through the flame of creature contemplation, to the high peace of God, where all is love’s ardent vision, without flame or smoke. It is thus through the grades of knowledge that the soul reaches at last that fulness of intelligence which may be made perfect and inflamed with love, in the contemplation of God. All knowledge is good according to its grade; only let it always lead on to God, and with humility. Hugo makes his principles clear at the opening of his commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius.[493]
“The Jews seek a sign, and the Greeks wisdom. There was a certain wisdom which seemed such to them who knew not the true wisdom. The world found it, and began to be puffed up, thinking itself great in this. Confiding in its wisdom, it presumed, and boasted that it would attain the highest wisdom.... And it made itself a ladder of the face of the creation, shining toward the invisible things of the Creator.... Then those things which were seen were known, and there were other things which were not known; and through those which were manifest they expected to reach those which were hidden; and they stumbled and fell into the falsehoods of their own imaginings.... So God made foolish the wisdom of this world; and He pointed out another wisdom, which seemed foolishness, and was not. For it preached Christ crucified, in order that truth might be sought in humility. But the world despised it, wishing to contemplate the works of God, which He had made to be marvelled at, and it did not wish to venerate what He had set for imitation. Neither did it look to its own disease, and seek a medicine with piety; but presuming on a false health, it gave itself over with vain curiosity to the study of alien matters.”
This study made the wisdom of the world, whereby it devised the arts and sciences which we still learn. But the world in its pride did not read aright the great book of nature. It had not the knowledge of the true Exemplar, for the sanitation of its inner vision, to wit, the flesh of the eternal Word in the humanity of Jesus.
“There were two images (simulacra) set for man, in which he might perceive the unseen: one consisting of nature, the other of grace. The former image was the face of this world; the latter was the humanity of the Word. And God is shown in both, but He is not understood in both; since the appearance of nature discloses the artificer, but cannot illuminate the eyes of him who contemplates it.”
Hugo then classifies the sciences in the usual Aristotelian way, and shows that Christian theology is the end of all philosophy. The first part of philosophia theorica is mathematics, which speculates as to the visible forms of visible things. The second is physics, which scrutinizes the invisible causes of visible things. The third, theology, alone contemplates invisible substances and their invisible natures. Herein is a certain progression; and the mind mounts to knowledge of the true. Through the visible forms of visible things, it comes to invisible causes of visible things; and through the invisible causes of visible things, it ascends to invisible substances, and to knowing their natures. This is the summit of philosophy and the perfection of truth. In this, as already said, the wise of this world were made foolish; because proceeding by the natural document alone, making account only of the elements and appearance of the world, they missed the instructive instances of Grace: which in spite of humble guise afford the clearer insight into truth.
This is Hugo’s scheme of knowledge; it begins with cogitatio, then proceeds through meditatio to contemplatio of the creature world, and finally of the Creator. The arts and sciences, as well as the face of nature, afford a simulacrum of the unseen Power; but all this knowledge by itself will not bring man to the perfect knowledge of God. For this he needs the exemplaria of Grace, shown through the incarnation of the Word. Only by virtue of this added means, may man attain to perfect contemplation of the truth of God. That end and final summit is beyond reason’s reach; but the attainment of rational knowledge makes part of the path thither. Keen as was Hugo’s intellectual nature, his interest in reason was coupled with a deeper interest in that which reason might neither include nor understand. The intellect does not include the emotional and immediately desiderative elements of human nature; neither can it comprehend the infinite which is God; and Hugo drew toward God not only through his intellect, but likewise through his desiderative nature, with its yearnings of religious love. That love with him was rational, since its object satisfied his mind as far as his mind could comprehend it.
So Hugo’s intellectual interests were connected with the emotional side of human nature, and also led up to what transcended reason. Thus they led to what was a mystery because too great for human reason, and they included that which also was somewhat of a mystery to reason because lying partly outside its sphere. Hugo is an instance of the intellectual nature which will not rest in reason’s province, but feels equally impelled to find expression for matters that either exceed the mind, or do not altogether belong to it. Such an intellect is impelled to formulate its convictions in regard to these; its negative conviction that it cannot comprehend them, and why it cannot; and its more positive conviction of their value--of the absolute worth of God, and of man’s need of Him, and of the love and fear by which men may come close to Him, or avoid His wrath.
What Hugo has had to say as to cogitation, meditation, and contemplation, represents his analysis of the stages by which a sufficing sense may be reached of the Creator and His world of creature-kind. In this final wisdom and ardour of contemplation, both human reason and human love have part. The intellect advances along its lines, considering the world, and drawing inferences as to the unseen Being who created and sustains it. Mind’s unaided power will not reach. But by the grace of God, supremely manifested in the Incarnation, the man is humbled, and his heart is touched and drawn to love the power of the divine pity and humility. The lesson of the Incarnation and its guiding grace, emboldens the heart and enlightens the mind; and the man’s faculties are strengthened and uplifted to the contemplation of God, wherein the mind is satisfied and the heart at rest.
We have here the elements of piety, intellectual and devotional. Hugo is an example of their union; they also preserve their equal weight in Aquinas. But because Hugo emphasizes the limitations of the intellect, and so ardently recognizes the heart’s yearning and immediacy of apperception, he is what is styled a mystic; a term which we are now in a position to consider, and to some extent exchange for other phrases of more definite significance.[494]
Quite to avoid the term is not possible, inasmuch as the conception certainly includes what is mysterious because unknowable through reason. For it includes a sense of the supreme, a sense of God, who is too great for human reason to comprehend, and therefore a mystery. And it includes a yearning toward God, the desire of Him, and the feeling of love. The last is also mysterious, in that it has not exclusive part with reason, but springs as well from feeling. Yet the essence or nature of this spirit of piety which we would analyse, consists in consciousness of the reality of the object of its yearning or devotion. Not altogether through induction or deduction, but with an irrational immediacy of conviction, it feels and knows its object. In place of the knowledge which is mediated through rational processes, is substituted a conviction upheld by yearning, love’s conviction indeed, of the reality and presence of that which is all the greater and more worthy because it baffles reason. And the final goal attainable by this mystic love is, even as the goal of other love, union with the Beloved.
The mystic spirit is an essential part of all piety or religion, which relates always and forever to the rationally unknown, and therefore mysterious. Without a consciousness of mystery, there can be neither piety nor religion. Nor can there be piety without some devotion to God, nor the deepest and most ardent forms of piety, without fervent love of God. This devotion and this love supply strength of conviction, creating a realness of communion with the divine, and an assurance of the soul’s rest and peace therein. But that the intellect has part, Hugo abundantly demonstrates. One must have perceptions, and thought’s severest wrestlings--cogitatio and meditatio--before reaching that first stage of wide and sure intelligence, which relates to the creature world, and affords a broad basis of assurance, whence at last the soul shall spring to God. Intellectual perceptions and rational knowledge, and all the mind’s puttings together of its data in inductions and deductions and constructions, form a basis for contemplation, and yield material upon which the emotional side of human nature may exercise itself in yearning and devotion. Herein the constructive imagination works; which is intellectual faculty illuminated and impelled by the emotions.
This spirit actualizes itself in the power and scope of its resultant conviction, by which it makes real to itself the qualities, attributes, and actions of its object, God, and the nature of man’s relationship or union with the divine. In its final energy, when only partly conscious of its intellectual inductions, it discards syllogisms, quite dissatisfied with their devious and hesitating approach. Instead, by the power of love, it springs directly to its God. Nevertheless the soul which feels the inadequacy of reason even to voice the soul’s desires, will seek means of expression wherein reason still will play a submerged part. The soul is seeking to express what is not altogether expressible in direct and rational statement. It seeks adumbrations, partial unveilings of its sentiments, which shall perhaps make up in warmth of colour what they lack in definiteness of line. In fine, it seeks symbols. Such symbolism must be large and elastic, in order to shadow forth the soul’s relations with the Infinite; it must also be capable of carrying passion, that it may satisfy the soul’s craving to give voice to its great love.
In Greek thought as well as in the Hellenizing Judaism of a Philo, symbolism, or more specifically speaking, allegorical interpretation, was obviously apologetic, seeking to cloud in naturalistic interpretations the doings of the rather over-human gods of Greece.[495] But it sprang also from the unresting need of man to find expression for that sense of things which will not fit definite statement. This was the need which became creative, and of necessity fancifully creative, with Plato. Though he would have nothing to do with falsifying apologetics, all the more he felt the need of allegories, to suggest what his dialectic could not formulate. In the early times of the Church militant of Christ, allegorical interpretation was exploited to defend the Faith; in the later patristic period, the Faith had so far triumphed, that allegory as a sword of defence and attack might be sheathed, or just allowed to glitter now and then half-drawn. But piety’s other need, with increasing energy, compelled the use of symbols and articulate allegory to express the directly inexpressible. Thereafter through the Middle Ages, while the use of allegory as a defence against the Gentiles slumbered, so much more the other need of it, and the sense of the universal symbolism of material things, filled the minds of men; and in age-long answer to this need, allegory, symbolism, became part of the very spirit of the mediaeval time.
Thus it became the universal vehicle of pious expression: it may be said almost to have co-extended with all mediaeval piety. It was ardently loving, as with St. Bernard; it might be filled with scarlet passion, as with Mechthild of Magdeburg; or it might be used in the self-conscious, and yet inspired vision-pictures of Hildegard of Bingen. And indeed with almost any mediaeval man or woman, it might keep talking, as a way of speech, obtrusively, conventionally, ad nauseam. For indeed in treatise after treatise even of the better men, allegory seems on the one hand to become very foolish and perverse, banal, intolerably talking on and on beyond the point; or again we sense its mechanism, hear the creaking of its jaws, while no living voice emerges,--and we suspect that the mystery of life, if it may not be compassed by direct statement, also lies deeper than allegorical conventions.
Hugo’s great De sacramentis showed the equipoise of intellectual and pietistic interests in him, and the Platonic quality of his mind’s sure sense of the reality of the supersensual.[496] Other treatises of his show his yearning piety, and the Augustinian quality of his soul, “made toward thee, and unquiet till it rests in thee.” The De arca Noe morali,[497] that is to say, the Ark of Noah viewed in its moral significance, is charming in its spiritual refinement, and interesting in its catholic intellectual reflections. The Prologue presents a situation:
“As I was sitting once among the brethren, and they were asking questions, and I replying, and many matters had been cited and adduced, it came about that all of us at once began to marvel vehemently at the unstableness and disquiet of the human heart; and we began to sigh. Then they pleaded with me that I would show them the cause of such whirlings of thought in the human heart; and they besought me to set forth by what art or exercise of discipline this evil might be removed. I indeed wished to satisfy my brethren, so far as God might aid me, and untie the knot of their questions, both by authority and by argument. I knew it would please them most if I should compose my matter to read to them at table.
“It was my plan to show first whence arise such violent changes in man’s heart, and then how the mind may be led to keep itself in stable peace. And although I had no doubt that this is the proper work of grace, rather than of human labour, nevertheless I know that God wishes us to co-operate. Besides it is well to know the magnitude of our weakness and the mode of its repairing, since so much the deeper will be our gratitude.
“The first man was so created, that if he had not sinned, he would always have beheld in present contemplation his Creator’s face, and by always seeing Him, would have loved Him always, and, by loving, would always have clung close to Him, and by clinging to Him who was eternal, would have possessed life without end. Evidently the one true good of man was perfect knowledge of his Creator. But he was driven from the face of the Lord, since for his sin he was struck with the blindness of ignorance, and passed from that intimate light of contemplation; and he inclined his mind to earthly desires, as he began to forget the sweetness of the divine. Thus he was made a wanderer and fugitive over the earth. A wanderer indeed, because of disordered concupiscence; and a fugitive, through guilty conscience, which feels every man’s hand against it. For every temptation will overcome the man who has lost God’s aid.
“So man’s heart which had been kept secure by divine love, and one by loving one, afterwards began to flow here and there through earthly desires. For the mind which knows not to love its true good, is never stable and never rests. Hence restlessness, and ceaseless labour, and disquiet, until the man turns and adheres to Him. The sick heart wavers and quivers; the cause of its disease is love of the world; the remedy, the love of God.”
Hugo’s object is to give rest to the restless heart, by directing its love to God. One still bears in mind his three plains of knowledge, forming perhaps the three stages of ascent, at the top of which is found the knowledge that turns to divine contemplation and love. There may be a direct and simple love of God for simple souls; but for the man of mind, knowledge precedes love.
“In two ways God dwells in the human heart, to wit, through knowledge and through love; yet the dwelling is one, since every one who knows Him, loves, and no one can love without knowing. Knowledge through cognition of the Faith erects the structure; love through virtue, paints the edifice with colour.”[498]
Then make a habitation for God in thy heart. This is the great matter, and indeed all: for this, Scripture exists, and the world was made, and God became flesh, through His humility making man sublime. The Ark of Noah is the type of this spiritual edifice, as it is also the type of the Church.
The piety and allegory of this work rise as from a basis of knowledge. The allegory indeed is drawn out and out, until it seems to become sheer circumlocution. This was the mediaeval way, and Hugo’s too, alas! We will not follow further in this treatise, nor take up his De arca Noe mystica,[499] which carries out into still further detail the symbolism of the Ark, and applies it to the Church and the people of God. Hugo has also left a colloquy between man and his soul on the true love, which lies in spiritual meditation.[500] But it is clear that the reaches of Hugo’s yearning are still grounded in intellectual considerations, though these may be no longer present in the mind of him whose consciousness is transformed to love.
One may discern the same progression, from painful thought to surer contemplation, and thence to the heart’s devoted communion, in him whom we have called the Thor and Loki of the Church. No twelfth-century soul loved God more zealously than St. Bernard. He was not strong in abstract reasoning. His mind needed the compulsion of the passions to move it to sublime conclusions. Commonly he is dubbed a mystic. But his piety and love of God poise themselves on a basis of consideration before springing to soar on other wings. In his De consideratione,[501] Bernard explains that word in the sense given by Hugo to meditatio, while he uses contemplatio very much as Hugo does. It applies to things that have become certain to the mind, while “consideratio is busy investigating. In this sense contemplatio may be defined as the true and certain intuition of the mind (intuitus animi) regarding anything, or the sure apprehension of the true: while consideratio is thought intently searching, or the mind’s endeavour to track out the true.”[502]
Contemplatio, even though it forget itself in ecstasy, must be based on prior consideration; then it may take wings of its own, or rather (with orthodox Hugo and Bernard) wings of grace, and fly to the bosom of its God. This flight is the immediacy of conviction and the ecstasy which follows. One may even perceive the thinking going on during the soul’s outpour of love. For the mind still supports the soul’s ardour with reasonings, original or borrowed, as appears in the second sermon of that long series preached by Bernard on Canticles to his own spiritual élite of Clairvaux.[503] The saintly orator is yearning, yearning for Christ Himself; he will have naught of Moses or Isaiah; nor does he desire dreams, or care for angels’ visits: ipse, ipse me osculetur, cries his soul in the words of Canticles--let Him kiss me. The phrasing seems symbolical; but the yearning is direct, and at least rhetorically overmastering. The emotion is justified by its reasons. They lie in the personality of Christ and Bernard’s love of Him, rising from all his knowledge of Him, even from his experience of Jesus’ whisperings to the soul. He knows how vastly Jesus surpasses the human prophets who prefigured or foretold Him: ipsos longe superat Jesus meus--the word meus is love’s very articulation. The orator cries: “Listen! Let the kissing mouth be the Word assuming flesh; and the mouth kissed be the flesh which is assumed; then the kiss which is consummated between them is the persona compacted of the two, to wit, the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”
This identical allegory goes back to Origen’s Commentary on Canticles. Bernard has kindled it with an intimate love of Jesus, which is not Origen’s. But the thought explains and justifies Bernard’s desire to be kissed by the kiss of His mouth, and so to be infolded in the divine love which “gave His only-begotten Son,” and also became flesh. Os osculans signifies the Incarnation: one realizes the emotional power which that saving thought would take through such a metaphor. At the end of his sermon, Bernard sums up the conclusion, so that his hearers may carry it away:
“It is plain that this holy kiss was a grace needed by the world, to give faith to the weak, and satisfy the desire of the perfect. The kiss itself is none other than the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns God, per omnia saecula saeculorum, Amen.”
III
There is small propriety in speaking of these men of the first half of the twelfth century as Platonists or Aristotelians; nor is there great interest in trying to find in Plato or Aristotle or Plotinus the specific origin of any of their thoughts. They were apt to draw on the source nearest and most convenient; and one must remember that their immediate philosophic antecedents were not the distinct systems of Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus, but rather the late pagan eras of eclecticism, followed by that strongly motived syntheticism of the Church Fathers which selected whatever might accord with their Christian scheme. So Abaelard must not be called an Aristotelian. Neither he nor his contemporaries knew what an Aristotelian was, and when they called Abaelard Peripateticus, they meant one skilled in the logic which was derived from the simpler treatises of Aristotle’s Organon. Nor will we call Hugo a Platonist, in spite of his fine affinities with Plato; for many of Hugo’s thoughts, his classification of the sciences for example, pointed back to Aristotle.
Abaelard, Hugo, St. Bernard suggest the triangulation of the epoch’s intellectual interests. Peter Lombard, somewhat their junior, presents its compend of accepted and partly digested theology. He took his method from Abaelard, and drew whole chapters of his work from Hugo; but his great source, which was also theirs, was Augustine. The Lombard was, and was to be, a representative man; for his Sentences brought together the ultimate problems which exercised the minds of the men of his time and after.
The early and central decades of the twelfth century offer other persons who may serve to round out our general notion of the character of the intellectual interests which occupied the period before the rediscovery of Aristotle, that is, of the substantial Aristotelian encyclopaedia of knowledge. Among such Adelard of Bath (England) was somewhat older than Abaelard. His keen pursuit of knowledge made him one of its early pilgrims to Spain and Greece. He compiled a book of Quaestiones naturales, and another called De eodem et diverso,[504] in which he struggled with the problem of universals, and with palpable problems of psychology. His cosmology shows a genial culling from the Timaeus fragment of Plato, and such other bits of Greek philosophy as he had access to.
Adelard was influenced by the views of men who taught or studied at Chartres. Bernard of Chartres, the first of the great Chartrian teachers of the early twelfth century,[505] wrote on Porphyry, and after his death was called by John of Salisbury perfectissimus inter Platonicos saeculi nostri. He was one of those extreme realists whose teachings might bear pantheistic fruit in his disciples; he had also a Platonistic imagination, leading him to see in Nature a living organism. Bernard’s younger brother, Thierry, also called of Chartres, extended his range of studies, and compiled numerous works on natural knowledge, indicating his wide reading and receptive nature. His realism brought him very close to pantheism, which indeed flowered poetically in his admirer or pupil, Bernard Silvestris of Tours.
If we should analyze the contents of the latter’s De mundi universitate, it might be necessary to affirm that the author was a dualistic thinker, in that he recognized two first principles, God and matter; and also that he was a pantheist, because of the way in which he sees in God the source of Nature: “This mind (nous) of the supreme God is soul (intellectus), and from its divinity Nature is born.”[506] One should not, however, drive the heterogeneous thoughts of these twelfth-century people to their opposite conclusions. A moderate degree of historical insight should prevent our interpreting their gleanings from the past by formulas of our own greater knowledge. Doubtless their books--Hugo’s as well as Thierry’s and Bernard Silvester’s--have enough of contradiction if we will probe for it with a spirit not their own. But if we will see with their eyes and perceive with their feelings, we shall find ourselves resting with each of them in some unity of personal temperament; and that, rather than any half-borrowed thought, is Hugo or Thierry or Bernard Silvestris. Silvester’s book, De mundi universitate, sive Megacosmus et microcosmus, is a half poem, like Boëthius’s De consolatione and a number of mediaeval productions to which there has been occasion to allude. It is fruitless to dissect such a composite of prose and verse. In it Natura speaks to Nous, and then Nous to Natura; the four elements come into play, and nine hierarchies of angels; the stars in their firmaments, and the genesis of things on earth; Physics and her daughters, Theorica and Practica, and all the figures of Greek mythology. An analysis of such a book will turn it to nonsense, and destroy the breath of that twelfth-century temperament which loved to gather driftwood from the wreckage of the ancient world of thought. Thus perhaps they expected to draw to themselves, even from the pagan flotsam, some congenial explanation of the universe and man.
A far more acute thinker was Gilbert de la Porrée,[507] who taught at Chartres for a number of years, before advancing upon Paris in 1141. He next became Bishop of Poictiers, and died in 1154. Like Abaelard, he was primarily a logician, and occupied himself with the problem of universals, taking a position not so different from Abaelard’s. Like Abaelard also, Gilbert was brought to task before a council, in which St Bernard sought to be the guiding, scilicet, condemning spirit. But the condemnation was confined to certain sentences, which when cut from their context and presented in distorting isolation, the author willingly sacrificed to the flames. He refused, some time afterwards, to discuss his views privately with the Abbot of Clairvaux, saying that the latter was too inexpert a theologian to understand them. Gilbert’s most famous work, De sex principiis, attempted to complete the last six of Aristotle’s ten Categories, which the philosopher had treated cursorily; it was almost to rival the work of the Stagirite in authority, for instance, with Albertus Magnus, who wrote a Commentary upon it in the same spirit with which he commented on the logical treatises of the Organon.
In the same year with Gilbert (1154) died a man of different mental tendencies, William of Conches,[508] who likewise had been a pupil of Bernard of Chartres. He was for a time the tutor of Henry Plantagenet. William was interested in natural knowledge, and something of a humanist. He made a Commentary on the Timaeus, and wrote various works on the philosophy of Nature, in which he wavered around an atomistic explanation of the world, yet held fast to the Biblical Creation, to save his orthodoxy. He also pursued the study of medicine, which was a specialty at Chartres; through the treatises of Constantinus Africanus[509] he had some knowledge of the pathological theories of Galen and Hippocrates. For his interest in physical knowledge, he may be regarded as a precursor of Roger Bacon. On the other hand, he was a humanist in his strife against those “Cornificiani” who would know no more Latin than was needful;[510] and he compiled from the pagan moralists a sort of Summa. It is called, in fact, a Summa moralium philosophorum (an interesting title, connecting it with the Christian Summae sententiarum).[511] It treats the virtues under the head of de honesto; and under that of de utile, reviews the other good things of mind, body, and estate. It also discusses whether there may be a conflict between the honestum and the utile.
These men of the first half of the twelfth century lived before the new revealing of the Aristotelian philosophy and natural knowledge coming at the century’s close. Their muster is finally completed by two younger men, the one an Englishman and the other a Lowlander. The youthful years of both synchronize with the old age of the men of whom we have been speaking. For John of Salisbury was born not far from the year 1115, and died in 1180; and Alanus de Insulis (Lille) was probably born in 1128, and lived to the beginning of the next century. They are spiritually connected with the older men because they were taught by them, and because they had small share in the coming encyclopaedic knowledge. But they close the group: John of Salisbury closing it by virtue of his critical estimate of its achievement; Alanus by virtue of his final rehandling of the body of intellectual data at its disposal, to which he may have made some slight addition. Abaelard knew and used the simpler treatises of the Aristotelian Organon of logic. He had not studied the Analytics and the Topics, and of course was unacquainted with the body of Aristotle’s philosophy outside of logic. John of Salisbury and Alanus know the entire Organon; but neither one nor the other knows the rest of Aristotle, which Alexander of Hales was the first to make large use of.
John of Salisbury, Little John, Johannes Parvus, as he was called, was the best classical scholar of his time.[512] His was an acute and active intellect, which never tired of hearing and weighing the views of other men. He was, moreover, a man of large experience, travelling much, and listening to all the teachers prominent in his youth. Also he was active in affairs, being at one time secretary to Thibaut, Archbishop of Canterbury, and then the intimate of Becket, of Henry II., and Pope Adrian IV.! A finished scholar, who knew not one thing, but whatever might be known, and was enlightened by the training of the world, Little John critically estimates the learning and philosophy of the men he learns from. Having always an independent point of view he makes acute remarks upon it all, and admirable contributions to the sum of current thought. But chiefly he seems to us as one who looks with even eye upon whatsoever comes within his vision. He knows the weaknesses of men and the limitations of branches of discipline; knows, for instance, that dialectic is sterile by itself, but efficient as an aid to other disciplines. So, as to logic, John keeps his own point of view, and is always reasonable and practical.[513] Likewise, with open mind, he considers what there may be in the alleged science of the Mathematicians, i.e. diviners and astrologers. He uses such phrases as “probabilia quidem sunt haec ... sed tamen the venom lies under the honey!” For this science sets a fatal necessity on things, and would even intrude into the knowledge of the future reserved for God’s majesty. And as John considers the order of events to come, and the diviner’s art, cornua succrescunt--the horns of more than one dilemma grow.[514]
John knew more than any man of the ancient philosophies.[515] For himself, of course he loved knowledge; yet he would not dissever it from its value in the art of living. “Wisdom indeed is a fountain, from which pour forth the streams which water the whole earth; they fill not alone the garden of delights of the divine page, but flow on to the Gentiles, and do not altogether fail even the Ethiopians.... It is certain that the faithful and wise reader, who from love keeps learning’s watch, escapes vice and draws near to life.”[516] Philosophy is the moderatrix omnium (a favourite phrase with John); the true philosopher, as Plato says, is a lover of God: and so philosophia is amor divinitatis. Its precept is to love God with all our strength, and our neighbour as ourselves: “He who by philosophizing has reached charitas, has attained philosophy’s true end.”[517] John goes on to show how deeply they err who think philosophy is but a thing of words and arguments: many of those who multiply words, by so doing burden the mind. Virtue inseparably accompanies wisdom; this is John’s sum of the matter. Clearly he is not always, or commonly, wrestling with ultimate metaphysical problems; he busies himself, acutely but not metaphysically, with the wisdom of life. He too can use the language of piety and contemplation. In the sixth chapter of his De septem septenis (The seven Sevens) he gives the seven grades of contemplation--meditatio, soliloquium, circumspectio, ascensio, revelatio, emissio, inspiratio.[518] He presents the matter succinctly, thus perhaps giving clarity to current pietistic phraseology.
Alanus de Insulis was a man of renown in his life-time, and after his death won the title of Doctor Universalis. Although the fame of scholar, philosopher, theologian, poet, may have uplifted him during his years of strength, he died a monk at Citeaux, in the year 1202. Fame came justly to him, for he was learned in the antique literature, and a gifted Latin poet, while as thinker and theologian he made skilful and catholic use of his thorough knowledge of whatever the first half of the twelfth century had achieved in thought and system. Elsewhere he has been considered as a poet;[519] here we merely observe his position and accomplishment in matters of salvation and philosophy.[520]
Alanus possessed imagination, language, and a faculty of acute exposition. His sentences, especially his definitions, are pithy, suggestive, and vivid. He projected much thought as well as fantasy into his poem, Anticlaudianus, and his cantafable, De planctu naturae. He showed himself a man of might, and insight too, in his Contra haereticos. His suggestive pithiness of diction lends interest to his encyclopaedia of definitions, Distinctiones dictionum theologicalium; and his keen power of reasoning succinctly from axiomatic premises is evinced in his De arte fidei catholicae.
The intellectual activities of Alanus fell in the latter decades of the twelfth century, when mediaeval thought seemed for the moment to be mending its nets, and preparing for a further cast in the new waters of Aristotelianism. Alanus is busy with what has already been won; he is unconscious of the new greater knowledge, which was preparing its revelations. He is not even a man of the transition from the lesser to the greater intellectual estate; but is rather a final compendium of the lesser. Himself no epoch-making reasoner, he uses the achievements of Abaelard and Hugo, of Gilbert de la Porrée and William of Conches, and others. Neither do his works unify and systematize the results of his studies. He is rather a re-phraser. Yet his refashioning is not a mere thing of words; it proceeds with the vitalizing power of the man’s plastic and creative temperament. One may speak of him as keen and acquisitive intellectually, and creative through his temperament.
Alanus shows a catholic receptivity for all the mingled strains of thought, Platonic, Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic and Pythagorean, which fed the labours of his predecessors. He has studied the older sources, the Timaeus fragment, also Apuleius and Boëthius of course. His chief blunder is his misconception of Aristotle as a logician and confuser of words (verborum turbator)--a phrase, perhaps, consciously used with poetic license. For he has made use of much that came originally from the Stagirite. Within his range of opportunity, Alanus was a universal reader, and his writings discover traces of the men of importance from Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena down to John of Salisbury and Gundissalinus.
These remarks may take the place of any specific presentation of Alanus’s work in logic, of his view of universals, of his notions of physics, of nature, of matter and form, of man’s mind and body, and of the Triune Godhead.[521] In his cosmology, however, we may note his imaginatively original employment of the conception or personification of Nature. God is the Creator, and Nature is His creature, and His vice-regent or vicarious maker, working the generation and decay of things material and changeable.[522] This thought, imaginatively treated, makes a good part of the poetry of the De planctu and the Anticlaudianus. The conception with him is full of charming fantasy, and we look back through Bernardus Silvestris and other writers to Plato’s divine fooling in the Timaeus, not as the specific, but generic, origin of such imaginative views of the contents and generation of the world. Such imaginings were as fantasy to science, when compared with the solid and comprehensive consideration of the material world which was to come a few years after Alanus’s death through the encyclopaedic Aristotelian knowledge presented in the works of Alexander of Hales and Albertus Magnus.