Part 14

1. From the 10th century, almost completely destitute of any scientific movement, the so-called _Sæculum obscurum_, there sprang forth the first buds of scholarship, without, however, any distinct impress upon them of scholasticism.

2. In the 11th century scholasticism began to show itself, and that in the form of dialectic, both sceptical and dogmatic.

3. In the 12th century mysticism assumed an independent place alongside of dialectic, carried on a war of extermination against the sceptical dialectic, and finally appeared in a more peaceful aspect, contributing material to the positive dogmatic dialectic.

4. In the 13th century dialectic scholasticism gained the complete ascendency, and reached its highest glory in the form of dogmatism in league with mysticism, and never, in the persons of its greatest representatives, in opposition to it.

§ 99.5. =The Canon Law.=--After the Pseudo-Isidore (§ 87, 2) many collections of church laws appeared. They sought to render the material more complete, intentionally or unintentionally enlarging the forgeries and massing together the most contradictory statements without any attempt at comparison or sifting. The most celebrated of these were the collections of bishops Burchard of Worms about A.D. 1020, Anselm of Lucca, who died in A.D. 1086, nephew of the pope of the same name, Alexander II., and Ivo of Chartres, who died in A.D. 1116. Then the Camaldolite monk =Gratian= of Bologna undertook not only to gather together the material in a more complete form than had hitherto been done, but also to reconcile contradictory statements by scholastic argumentation. His work appeared about A.D. 1150 under the title _Concordantia discordantium canonum_, and is commonly called _Decretum Gratiani_. A great impulse was given to the study of canon law by means of this work, especially at Bologna and Paris. Besides the _Legists_, who taught the Roman law, there now arose numerous _Decretists_ teaching the canon law and writing commentaries on Gratian’s work. Gregory IX. had a new collection of Decrees of Councils and Decretals in five books, the so-called _Liber extra Decretum_, or shortly _Extra_ or _Decretum Gregorii_, drawn up by his confessor and Grand-Penitentiary, the learned Dominican Raimundus [Raimund] de Pennaforti [Pennaforte], and sent it in A.D. 1234 to the University of Bologna. Boniface VIII. in A.D. 1298 added to this collection in five parts his _Liber Sextus_, and Clement V. in A.D. 1314 added what are called after him the _Clementinæ_. From that time down to A.D. 1483 the decretals of later popes were added as an appendix under the name _Extravagantes_, and with these the _Corpus juris canonici_ was concluded. An official edition was begun in A.D. 1566 by the so-called _Correctores Romani_, which in A.D. 1580 received papal sanction as authoritative for all time to come.[292]

§ 99.6. The Schoolmen as such contributed nothing to =Historical Literature=. Histories were written not in the halls of the universities but in the cells of the monasteries. Of these there were three kinds as we have already seen in § 90, 9. For workers in the department of Biblical History, see § 105, 5; and of Legends of the Saints, § 104, 8. For ancient Church History Rufinus and Cassiodorus were the authorities and the common text books (§ 5, 1). An interesting example of the manner in which universal history was treated when mediæval culture had reached its highest point, is afforded by the _Speculum magnum s. quadruplex_ of the Dominican =Vincent of Beauvais= (_Bellovacensis_). This treatise was composed about the middle of the 13th century at the command of Louis IX. of France as a hand-book for the instruction of the royal princes. It forms an encyclopædic exposition of all the sciences of that day in four parts, _Speculum historiale_, _naturale_, _doctrinale_, and _morale_. The _Speculum doctrinale_ breaks off just at the point where it should have passed over to theology proper, and the _Speculum morale_ is a later compilation by an unknown hand.[293]

§ 100. THE _SÆCULUM OBSCURUM_: THE 10TH CENTURY.[294]

In contrast to the brilliant theological scholarship and the activity of religious life in the 9th century, as well as to the remarkable culture and scientific attainments of the Spanish Moors with their world-renowned school at Cordova, the darkness of the 10th century seems all the more conspicuous, especially its first half, when the papacy reached its lowest depths, the clergy gave way to unblushing worldliness and the church was consumed by the foulest corruption. During this age, indeed, there were gleams of light even in Italy, but only like a will o’ the wisp rising from swampy meadows, a fanatical outburst on behalf of ancient classic paganism. The literature of this period stood in direct and avowed antagonism to Christian theology and the Christian church, and commended a godless frivolity and the most undisguised sensuality. A grammarian Wilgard of Ravenna taught openly that Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal were better and nobler than Paul, Peter, and John. The church had still so much authority as to secure his death as a heretic, but in almost all the towns of Italy he had sympathisers, and that among the clergy as well as among laymen. It was only by the influence of the monks of Clugny, the reformatory ascetic efforts of Romuald (§ 98, 1) and St. Nilus the Younger, a very famous Greek recluse of Gaeta, who died in A.D. 1005, aided by the reformatory measures for the purification of the church taken by the Saxon emperors, that this unclean spirit was gradually driven out. The famous endeavours of Alfred the Great and their temporary success were borne to the grave along with himself. From A.D. 959 however, Dunstan’s reformation awakened anew in England appreciation of a desire for theological and national culture. The connection of the imperial house of Otto with Byzantium also aroused outside of Italy a longing after old classical learning. The imperial chapel founded by the brother of Otto I., Bruno the Great (§ 97, 2), became the training school of a High-German clergy, who were there carefully trained as far as the means at the disposal of that age permitted, not only in politics, but also in theological and classical studies.

§ 100.1. The degree to which =Classical Studies= were pursued in Germany during the period of the Saxon imperial house is shown by the works of the learned nun =Roswitha= of Gandersheim, north of Göttingen, who died about A.D. 984. The first edition of her works, which comprise six dramas on biblical and ecclesiastical themes in the style of Terence, in prose interspersed with rhymes, also eight legends, a history of Otto I., and a history of the founding of her cloister in leonine hexameters, was issued by the humanist Conrad Celtes, with woodcuts by Dürer in A.D. 1501.--=Notker Labeo=, president of the cloister school of St. Gall, who died in A.D. 1022, enriched the old German literature by translations of the Psalms, of Aristotle’s _Organon_, the _Moralia_ of Gregory the Great, and various writings of Boethius [Boëthius].--In =England= the educational efforts of =St. Dunstan= (§ 97, 4) were powerfully supported by Bishop =Ethelwold= of Winchester, who quite in the spirit of Alfred the Great (§ 90, 10) wrought incessantly with his pupils for the extension and enrichment of the Anglo-Saxon literature. Of his scholars by far the most famous was =Aelfric=, surnamed Grammaticus, who flourished about A.D. 990. He wrote an Anglo-Saxon Grammar, prepared a collection of homilies for all the Sundays and festivals and a free translation from sermons of the Latin Fathers, translated also the Old Testament heptateuch, and wrote treatises on other portions of Scripture and on biblical questions.[295]

§ 100.2. =Italy= produced during the second half of the century many theologians eminent and important in their day. =Atto=, bishop of Vercelli, who died about A.D. 960, distinguished himself by his exegetical compilations on Paul’s epistles, and as a homilist and a vigorous opponent of the oppressors of the church during these rough times. Still more important was his younger contemporary =Ratherius=, bishop of Verona, afterwards of Liège, but repeatedly driven away from both, who died A.D. 974. A strict and zealous reformer of clerical morals, he insisted upon careful study of the Bible, and wrought earnestly against the unblushing paganism of the Italian scholars of his age as well as against all kinds of hypocrisy, superstition, and ecclesiastical corruptions. This, and also his attachment to the political interests of the German court, exposed him to much persecution. Among his writings may be named _De contemptu canonum_, _Meditationes cordis_, _Apologia sui ipsius_, _De discordia inter ipsum et clericos_.--In =France= we meet with =Odo of Clugny=, who died in A.D. 942, famed as a hymn writer and homilist, and, in his _Collationum Ll. iii._, as a zealous reprover of the corrupt morals of his age. In England and France, =Abbo of Fleury= taught toward the end of the century. From England, where he had been induced to go by St. Dunstan, he returned after some years to his own cloister of Fleury, and by his academic gifts raised its school to great renown. He wrote on astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, and history. He also composed a treatise on dialectics, in which he makes his appearance as the first and most eminent precursor of the Schoolmen. Chosen abbot of his monastery and exercising strict discipline over his monks, he suffered a martyr’s death by the hand of a murderer in A.D. 1004.--=Gerbert of Rheims=, afterwards Pope Sylvester II. (§ 96, 3, 4), during his active career lived partly in France, partly in Italy. Distinguished both for classical and Arabic scholarship, he shone in the firmament of this dark century as it was passing away († A.D. 1003) like a star of the first magnitude in theology, mathematics, astronomy, and natural science, while by the common people he was regarded as a magician. Under him the school of Rheims reached the summit of its fame.

§ 101. THE ELEVENTH CENTURY.

During the 11th century, with the moral and spiritual elevation of the church, eager attention was again given to theological science. It was at first mainly prosecuted in the monasteries of the Cistercians and among the monks of Clugny, but afterwards at the seminaries which arose toward the end of the century. The dialectic method won more and more the upper hand in theology, and in the Eucharist controversy between Lanfranc and Berengar, as well as in the controversy between Anselm and Gaunilo about the existence of God, and between Anselm and Roscelin about the Trinity, Dogmatism obtained its first victory over Scepticism.

§ 101.1. =The Most Celebrated Schoolmen of this Century.=

1. =Fulbert= opens the list, a pupil of Gerbert, and from A.D. 1007 Bishop of Chartres Before entering on his episcopate he had founded at Chartres a theological seminary. His fame spread over all the West, so that pupils poured in upon him from every side.

2. The most important of these was =Berengar of Tours=, afterwards a canon and teacher of the cathedral school of his native city, and then again archdeacon at Angers. He died in A.D. 1088. The school of Tours rose to great eminence under him.

3. =Lanfranc=, the celebrated opponent of the last-named, was abbot of the monastery of Bec in Normandy, and from A.D. 1070 Archbishop of Canterbury (§ 96, 8). He died in A.D. 1089. He wrote against Berengar _Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini_.

4. Bishop =Hildebert of Tours=, who died in A.D. 1134, famous as a writer of spiritual songs, was a pupil of Berengar. But he avoided the sceptical tendencies of his teacher, and, warned of the danger of dialectic and following the mystical bent of his mind, he applied himself to the cultivation of a life of faith, so that St. Bernard praised him as _tantam columnam ecclesiæ_.

5. The monastic school of Bec, which Lanfranc had rendered celebrated, reached the summit of its fame under his pupil =Anselm of Canterbury=, who far excelled his teacher in genius as well as in importance for theological science. He was born in A.D. 1033 at Aosta in Italy, educated in the monastery of Bec, became teacher and abbot there, was raised in A.D. 1093 to the archiepiscopal chair of Canterbury, and died in A.D. 1109. As a churchman he courageously defended the independence of the church according to the principles of Hildebrand (§ 96, 12). As a theologian he may be ranked in respect of acuteness and profundity, speculative talent and Christian earnestness, as a second Augustine, and on the theological positions of that Father he based his own. Though carrying dialectic even into his own private devotions, there was yet present in him a vein of religious mysticism. According to him faith is the condition of true knowledge, _Fides præcedit intellectum_; but it is also with him a sacred duty to raise faith to knowledge, _Credo ut intelligam_. Only he who in respect of endowment and culture is not capable of this intellectual activity should content himself with simple _Veneratio_. His _Monologium_ contains discussions on the nature of God, his _Proslogium_ proves the being of God; his three books, _De fide Trinitatis et de incarnatione Verbi_, develop and elaborate the doctrine of the Trinity and Christology; while the three dialogues _De veritate_, _De libero arbitrio_, and _De casu diaboli_ treat of the object, and the tract _Cur Deus homo?_ treats of the subject, of soteriology. The most able, profound, and impressive of all his writings is the last-named, which proves the necessity of the incarnation of God in Christ for the reconciliation of man with God. It was an epoch-making treatise in the historical development of the church doctrine of satisfaction on Pauline foundations.[296] Anselm took part in the controversy of the Greeks by his work _De processione Spiritus_ (§ 67, 4). He discussed the question of predestination in a moderate Augustinian form in the book, _De concordia præscientæ et prædest. et gratiæ Dei cum libero arbitrio_. In his _Meditationes_ and _Orationes_ he gives expression to the ardent piety of his soul, as also in the voluminous collection (426) of his letters.[297]

6. =Anselm of Laon=, surnamed Scholasticus, was the pupil of Anselm of Canterbury. From A.D. 1076 he taught with brilliant success at Paris, and thus laid the first foundation of its university. Subsequently he returned to his native city Laon, was made there archdeacon and Scholasticus, and founded in that place a famous theological school. He died in A.D. 1117. He composed the _Glossa interlinearis_, a short exposition of the Vulgate between the lines, which with Walafrid’s _Glossa ordinaria_ (§ 90, 4), became the favourite exegetical handbook of the Middle Ages.

7. =William of Champeaux=, the proper founder of the University of Paris, had already taught rhetoric and dialectic for some time with great success in the cathedral school, when the fame of the theological school of Laon led him to the feet of Anselm. In A.D. 1108 he returned to Paris, and had immense crowds listening to his theological lectures. Chagrined on account of a defeat in argument at the hand of Abælard, one of his own pupils, he retired from public life into the old chapel of St. Victor near Paris, and there founded a monastery under the same name for canons of the rule of St. Augustine. He died in A.D. 1121 as Bishop of Chalons.

8. The abbot =Guibert of Nogent=, in the diocese of Laon, who died about A.D. 1124, a scholar of Anselm at Bec, was a voluminous writer and, with all his own love of the marvellous, a vigorous opponent of all the grosser absurdities of relic and saint worship. He wrote a useful history of the first crusade, and a work important in its day entitled, _Liber quo ordine sermo fieri debeat_. His great work was one in four books, _De pignoribus Sanctorum_, against the abuses of saint and relic worship, the exhibition of pretended parts of the Saviour’s body, _e.g._ teeth, pieces of the foreskin, navel cord, etc., against the translation or distribution of the bodies of saints, against the fraud of introducing new saints, relics, and legends.

§ 101.2. =Berengar’s Eucharist Controversy, A.D. 1050-1079.=--Berengar of Tours elaborated a theory of the eucharist which is directly antagonistic to the now generally prevalent theory of Radbert (§ 91, 3). He taught that while the elements are changed and Christ’s body is really present, neither the change nor the presence is substantial. The presence of His body is rather the existence of His power in the elements, and the change of the bread is the actual manifestation of this power in the form of bread. The condition however of this power-presence is not merely the consecration but also the faith of the receiver. Without this faith the bread is an empty and impotent sign. Such views were publicly expressed by him and his numerous followers for a long while without causing any offence. But when he formally stated them in a letter to his friend Lanfranc of Bec, this churchman became Berengar’s accuser at the Synod of Rome in A.D. 1050. The synod condemned him unheard. A second synod of the same year held at Vercelli, before which Berengar was to have appeared but could not because he had meanwhile been imprisoned in France, in an outburst of fanatical fury had the treatise of Ratramnus on the eucharist, wrongly ascribed to Erigena, torn up and burnt, while Berengar’s doctrine was again condemned. Meanwhile Berengar was by the intervention of influential friends set at liberty and made the acquaintance of the powerful papal legate Hildebrand, who, holding by the simple Scripture doctrine that the bread and wine of the sacrament was the body and blood of Christ, occupied probably a position intermediate between Radbert’s grossly material and Berengar’s dynamic hypothesis. Disinclined to favour the fanaticism of Berengar’s opponents, Hildebrand contented himself with exacting from him at the Synod of Tours in A.D. 1054 a solemn declaration that he did not deny the presence of Christ in the Supper, but regarded the consecrated elements as the body and blood of Christ. Emboldened by this decision and still always persecuted by his opponents as a heretic, Berengar undertook in A.D. 1059 a journey to Rome, in order, as he hoped, by Hildebrand’s influence to secure a distinct papal verdict in his favour. But there he found a powerful opposition headed by the passionate and pugnacious Cardinal Humbert (§ 67, 3). This party at the Lateran Council in Rome in A.D. 1059, compelled Berengar, who was really very deficient in strength of character, to cast his writings into the fire and to swear to a confession composed by Humbert which went beyond even Radbert’s theory in the gross corporeality of its expressions. But in France he immediately again repudiated this confession with bitter invectives against Rome, and vindicated anew against Lanfranc and others his earlier views. The bitterness of the controversy now reached its height. Hildebrand had meanwhile, in A.D. 1073, himself become pope. He vainly endeavoured to bring the controversy to an end by getting Berengar to accept a confession couched in moderate terms admitting the real presence of the body and blood in the Supper. The opposite party did not shrink from casting suspicion on the pope’s own orthodoxy, and so Hildebrand was obliged, in order to avoid the loss of his great life work in a mass of minor controversies, to insist at a second synod in Rome in A.D. 1079 upon an unequivocal and decided confession of the substantial change of the bread. Berengar was indiscreet enough to refer to his private conversations with the pope; but now Gregory commanded him at once to acknowledge and abjure his error. With fear and trembling Berengar obeyed, and the pope dismissed him with a safe conduct, distinctly prohibiting all further disputation. Bowed down under age and calamities, Berengar withdrew to the island of St. Come, near Tours, where he lived as a solitary penitent in the practice of strict asceticism, and died at a great age in peace with the church in A.D. 1088. His chief work is _De Cœna S. adv. Lanfr._--Continuation, § 102, 5.

§ 101.3. =Anselm’s Controversies.=

I. On the basis of his Platonic realism, Anselm of Canterbury constructed the ontological proof of the being of God, that there is given in man’s reason the idea of the most perfect being to whose perfection existence also belongs. When he laid this proof before the learned world in his _Monologium_ and _Proslogium_, the monk Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, who was a supporter of Aristotelian realism, opposed him, and acutely pointed out the defects of this proof in his _Liber pro insipiente_. He so named it in reference to a remark of Anselm, who had said that even the _insipiens_ who, according to Psalm xiv. 1, declares in his heart that there is no God, affords thereby a witness for the existence of the idea, and consequently also for the existence of God. Anselm replied in his _Apologeticus c. Gaunilonem_. And there the controversy ended without any definite result.

II. Of more importance was Anselm’s controversy with =Roscelin=, the Nominalist, canon of Compiègne. He in a purely nominalistic fashion understood the idea of the Godhead as a mere abstraction, and thought that the three persons of the Godhead could not be _una res_, οὐσία, as then they must all at once have been incarnate in Christ. A synod at Soissons in A.D. 1092 condemned him as a tritheist. He retracted, but afterwards reiterated his earlier views. Anselm then, in his tract _De fide Trinitatis et de incarnatione Verbi contra blasphemias Rucelini_, proved that the drift of his argumentation tended toward tritheism, and vindicated the trinitarian doctrine of the church. For more than two centuries Nominalism was branded with a suspicion of heterodoxy, until in the 14th century a reaction set in (§ 113, 3), which restored it again to honour.

§ 102. THE TWELFTH CENTURY.

In the 12th century dialectic and mysticism are seen contending for the mastery in the department of theology. On the one side stands Abælard, in whom the sceptical dialectic had its most eminent representative. Over against him stands St. Bernard as his most resolute opponent. Theological dialectic afterwards assumed a pre-eminently dogmatic and ecclesiastical character, entering into close relationship with mysticism. While this movement was mainly carried on in France, where the University of Paris attracted teachers and scholars from all lands, it passed over from thence into Germany, where Provost Gerhoch and his brother Arno gave it their active support in opposition to that destructive sort of dialectic that was then spreading around them. Although the combination of dogmatic dialectic and mysticism had for a long time no formal recognition, it ultimately secured the approval of the highest ecclesiastical authorities.

§ 102.1. =The Contest on French Soil.=