The Mediaeval Mind (Volume 2 of 2) / A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages

The caritas with which we love God, extends to our neighbours, and even to our enemies, for God’s sake; also to ourselves, including our bodies; it embraces sinners, but not their sinfulness. It embraces the angels. There is order and grade in caritas, according to its relationship to God, the source of beatitude and voluntary love (dilectionis). God is to be loved ex caritate above all; for He is loved as the cause of beatitude, while our neighbour is loved as a participant with us in the beatitude from God. We should love God more than ourselves; because beatitude is in God as in the common and fontal source of all things that participate in beatitude.

We may love some of our neighbours more than others; for those bound to us by natural ties and proximity can be loved more and in more actual ways. The order and grades of love will endure when our natures are perfected in glory.

Love (caritas) is the supreme theological virtue. It comes to us in this life through grace; it can be perfected only when grace is consummated in glory. Likewise the highest knowledge possible in this life comes through grace, to be perfected in glory. All is from God, and that which, of all the rest, seems most freely given is the divine influence disposing the intelligence and will toward good, and illuminating these best God-given faculties. This, as par excellence, through the exceeding bounty of its free bestowal, is called gratia (grace). It is a certain habitual disposition of the soul; it is not the same as virtus, but a divinely implanted disposition, in which the virtues must be rooted; it is the imparted similitude of the divine nature, and perfects the nature of the soul, so far as that has part in likeness to the divine: it is the medial state between nature and that further consummation of the grace-illumined nature, which is glory; and so it is the beginning, the inchoatio, of our glorified beatitude. Clearly, grace is no part of our inborn nature, and does not belong to our natural faculties. It is a divinely bestowed increment, directing our natural faculties toward God and uplifting them to higher capacities of knowing and loving.

To follow Thomas’s exposition of grace a little more closely:[613] man, through his natural powers, may know truth, but not the highest; and without grace, our fallen nature cannot will all the good belonging to it (connaturale), nor love God above all else, nor merit eternal life. “Grace is something supernatural in man coming from God.” It

Grace may be conceived either as “divine aid, moving us to willing and doing right, or as a formative and abiding (habituale) gift, divinely placed in us” (Qu. cxi. Art. 2). “The gift of grace exceeds the power of any created nature; and is nothing else than a sharing (participatio) of the divine nature” (Qu. cxii. Art. 1).

So it is clear that without grace man cannot rise to the highest knowledge and the purest love of which he is capable in this life; far less can he reach that final and perfected blessedness which is expected hereafter. For this he must possess the virtue of Faith, which comes not without grace.

Within the province of the Christian Faith “it is necessary that man should accept per modum fidei not only what is above reason, but also what may be known through reason.” (Art. 4). He must believe explicitly the prima credibilia, that is to say, the Articles of Faith; it is enough if he believes other credibilia implicitly, by holding his mind prepared to accept whatever Scripture teaches (Art. 5).

And Thomas, having shown the function of will in any act of faith, passes on by the same path to connect fides with caritas:

Thomas makes his conclusion more precise:

Only the fides which is formed and completed in caritas is a virtue (Art. 5). And Thomas says concisely (Qu. vi. Art. 1) what in many ways has been made evident before: For Faith, it is necessary that the credibilia should be propounded, and then that there should be assent to them; but since man, in assenting to those things which are of the Faith, is lifted above his nature, his assent must proceed from a supernatural principle working within him, which is God moving him through grace.

It is not hard to see why two gifts (dona) of the Holy Spirit should belong to the virtue Faith, to wit, understanding and knowledge, intellectus et scientia. Thomas gives the reasons in an argument germane to his Aristotelian theory of cognition:

This gift follows grace. Grace is more perfect than nature. It does not abrogate, but perfects the natural faculties. Nor does it fail in those matters in which man’s natural power is competent (Qu. ix. Art. 1). So, besides the donum intellectus, to Faith belongs the donum scientiae also, which brings and guides knowledge of human things (Art. 2).

And now we shall not be surprised to find sapientia, the very highest gift of the Spirit, attached to the grace-given virtue caritas. For caritas is the informing principle of Faith, and the highest virtue of the grace-illumined will. The will, be it remembered, belongs to man’s intellectual nature; its object is the good which is known by the mind (bonum intellectum). “Sapientia (wisdom, right knowledge as to the highest cause, which is God) signifies rectitude of judgment in accordance with the rationes divinae,” the ideas and reasons which exist in God. Rectitude of judgment regarding things divine may arise from rational inquiry; in which case it pertains to the sapientia which is an intellectual virtue. But it may also spring from affinity to those things themselves; and then it is a gift of the Holy Spirit (II. ii., Qu. xlv. Art. 2).

Says Thomas:

But mark: the perfection of the intellectual nature does not consist merely in knowing, narrowly taken. The right action of will is also essential, of the will directed toward the highest good, which is God: and this is caritas, of which the corresponding gift from the Spirit is wisdom. In accord with this full consummation of human nature, comprising the perfection of cognition and will, Thomas outlines his conception of the vita contemplativa, the life of most perfect beatitude attainable on earth:

The moral virtues, continues Thomas, do not pertain essentially to this vita. But they may promote it, by regulating the passions and quieting the tumult of outside affairs. In principle it is fixed upon the contemplation of truth, which here we see but in a glass darkly; and so we help ourselves along by contemplating the effects of the divine cause in the world.

Thus final beatitude, and its mortal approach in the vita contemplativa of this earth, is of the mind, both in its knowledge and its love. Immateriality, spirituality, is with Thomas primarily intellectual. Yet his beatitude is not limited to the knowing faculties. It embraces will and love. The grace of God and the gifts of the Holy Spirit touch love as well as knowledge, raising one and both to final unison of aim. Thus far in this life, while in the life to come, these grace-uplifted qualities of knowledge, and that choosing love (dilectio) which rises from knowledge of the good, are perfected in gloria.

Further than this we shall not go with Thomas, nor follow him, for example, through his exposition of the means of salvation—the Incarnation and the sacraments. Nor need we further mark the prodigious range of his theology, or his metaphysics, logic, or physics. To all this many books have been devoted. We are but seeking to realise his intellectual interests and qualities, in such way as to bring them within the compass of our sympathy. A more encyclopaedic and systematic presentation of his teaching is proper for those who would trace, or perhaps attach themselves to, particular doctrines; or would find in scholasticism, even in Thomas, some special authoritativeness. For us these doctrines have but the validity of all human striving after truth. Moreover, perhaps a truer view of Thomas, the theologian and philosopher, is gained from following a few typical forms of his teaching presented in his own exposition, than by analyzing his thought with later solvents which he did not apply, and presenting his matter classified as he would not have ordered it, and in modern phrases, which have as many meanings foreign to scholasticism as scholasticism has thoughts not to be translated into modern ways of thinking.

CHAPTER XLI

Of all mediaeval men, Thomas Aquinas achieved the most organic and comprehensive union of the results of human reasoning and the data of Christian theology. He may be regarded as the final exponent of scholasticism, perfected in method, universal in scope, and still integral in purpose. The scholastic method was soon to be impugned and the scholastic universality broken. The premature attack upon the method came from Roger Bacon;[615] the fatal breach in the scholastic wholeness resulted from the constructive, as well as critical, achievements of Duns Scotus and Occam.

Bacon is a perplexing personality. With other mediaeval thinkers one quickly feels the point of view from which to regard them. Not so with this most disparate genius of the Middle Ages. Reading his rugged statements, and trying to form a coherent thought of him, we are puzzled at the contradictions of his mind. One may not say that he was not of his time. Every man is of his time, and cannot raise himself very far out of the mass of knowledge and opinion furnished by it, any more than a swimmer can lift himself out of the water that sustains him. Yet personal temper and inclination may aline a man with less potent tendencies, which are obscured and hampered by the dominant intellectual interests of the period. Assuredly, through all the Middle Ages, there were men who noticed such physical phenomena as bore upon their lives, even men who cared for the dumb beginnings of what eventually might lead to natural science. But they were not representative of their epoch’s master energies; and in the Middle Ages, as always, the man of evident and great achievement will be one who, like Aquinas, stands upon the whole attainment of his age. Roger Bacon, on the contrary, was as one about whose loins the currents of his time drag and pull; they did not aid him, and yet he could not extricate himself. It was his intellectual misfortune that he was held by his time so fatally, so fatally, at least, for the proper doing of the work which was to be his contribution to human enlightenment, a contribution well ignored while he lived, and for long afterward.

Bacon accepted the dominant mediaeval convictions: the entire truth of Scripture; the absolute validity of the revealed religion, with its dogmatic formulation; also (to his detriment) the universally prevailing view that the end of all the sciences is to serve their queen, theology. Yet he hated the ways of mediaeval natural selection and survival of the mediaeval fittest, and the methods by which Albert or Thomas or Vincent of Beauvais were at last presenting the sum of mediaeval knowledge and conviction. Well might he detest those ways and methods, seeing that he was Roger Bacon, one impelled by his genius to critical study, to observation and experiment. He was impassioned for linguistics, for mathematics, for astronomy, optics, chemistry, and for an experimental science which should confirm the contents of all these, and also enlarge the scope of human ingenuity. Yet he was held fast, and his thinking was confused, by what he took from his time. Especially he was obsessed by the idea that philosophy, including every branch of knowledge, must serve theology, and even in that service find its justification. But what has chemistry to do with theology? What has mathematics? And what has the physical experimental method? By maintaining the utility of these for theology, Bacon saved his mediaeval orthodoxy, and it may be, his skin from the fire. But it wrecked the working of his genius. His writings remain, such of them as are known, astounding in their originality and insight, and almost as remarkable for their inconsistencies; they are marked by a confusion of method and a distortion of purpose, which sprang from the contradictions between Bacon’s genius and the current views which he adopted.

The career of Bacon was an intellectual tragedy, conforming to the old principles of tragic art: that the hero’s character shall be large and noble, but not flawless, inasmuch as the fatal consummation must issue from character, and not happen through chance. He died an old man, as in his youth, so in his age, a devotee of tangible knowledge. His pursuit of a knowledge which was not altogether learning had been obstructed by the Order of which he was an unhappy and rebellious member; quite as fatally his achievement was deformed from within by the principles which he accepted from his time. But he was responsible for his acceptance of current opinions; and as his views roused the distrust of his brother Friars, his intractable temper drew their hostility (of which we know very little) on his head. Persuasiveness and tact were needed by one who would impress such novel views as his upon his fellows, or, in the thirteenth century, escape persecution for their divulgence. Bacon attacked dead and living worthies, tactlessly, fatuously, and unfairly. Of his life scarcely anything is known, save from his allusions to himself and others; and these are insufficient for the construction of even a slight consecutive narrative. Born; studied at Oxford; went to Paris, studied, experimented; is at Oxford again, and a Franciscan; studies, teaches, becomes suspect to his Order, is sent back to Paris, kept under surveillance, receives a letter from the pope, writes, writes, writes,—his three best-known works; is again in trouble, confined for many years, released, and dead, so very dead, body and fame alike, until partly unearthed after five centuries.

Inference and construction may fill out this sombre outline. England was the land of Bacon’s birth, and Ilchester is said to have been the natal spot. The approximate date may be guessed at from his reference to himself as senex in 1267, and his remark that he had then been studying forty years. His family seems to have been wealthy. Besides the letter of Pope Clement, hereafter to be quoted, there is one contemporary reference to him. Mathew Paris has a story of a certain clericus de curia, scilicet Rogerus Bacum, speaking up with bold wit to King Henry III. at Oxford in 1233. Bacon when a young man studied there under Robert Grosseteste and Adam of Marsh. He frequently refers to both, and always with respect. His chief enthusiasm is for the former. For years this admirable man was chancellor of Oxford; until made bishop of Lincoln in 1235. Although never a Franciscan, he was the Order’s devoted friend, and lectured in its house at Oxford. Grosseteste founded the study of Greek at Oxford, and collected treatises upon Greek grammar. Bacon, following him, wrote a Greek grammar. Grosseteste, before Bacon, devoted himself to physics and mathematics, and all that these many-branched sciences might include. Besides a taste for these studies Bacon may have had from him the idea that they were useful for theology. “No one,” says Bacon, “knew the sciences save Lord Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, from his length of life and experience, and studiousness and industry, and because he knew mathematics and optics, and was able to know all things; and he knew enough of the languages to understand the saints and philosophers of antiquity; but not enough to translate them, unless towards the end of his life when he invited Greeks, and had books of Greek grammar gathered from Greece and elsewhere.”[616] There is evidence that others at Oxford, besides Grosseteste, were interested in the study of Greek and natural science.

From Oxford Bacon went to Paris, where apparently he remained for a number of years; he was made a doctor there, and afterwards became a Franciscan. Since a monk could own nothing, one may perhaps infer that Bacon did not join the Order until after the lapse of certain twenty years of scientific research, in which he spent much money, as he says in 1267, in an often-quoted passage of the Opus tertium:

After his first stay at Paris Bacon returned to Oxford. There he doubtless continued his researches, and divulged them, or taught in some way. For he roused the suspicions of his Order, and in the course of time was sent or conducted back to Paris, where constraint seems to have been put upon his actions and utterances. Like the first, this second, possibly enforced, stay was a long one; he speaks of himself in the first chapter of the Opus tertium as “for ten years an exile.” Yet here as always, one is not quite certain how literally to take Bacon’s personal statements, either touching himself or others.

A short period of elation was at hand. He had evidently been forbidden to write, or spread his ideas; he had been disciplined at times with a diet of bread and water. All this had failed to sweeten his temper, or conform his mind to current views. In 1265, an open-minded man who had been a jurist, a warrior, and the counsellor of a king, before becoming an ecclesiastic, was made Pope Clement IV. While living in Paris he had been interested in Bacon’s work. Soon after the papal election our sore-bestead philosopher managed to communicate with him, as appears by the pope’s reply, written from Viterbo, in July 1266:

Poor Bacon! The pope’s letter roused him to ecstasy, then put him in a quandary, and elicited elaborate apologies, and the flood of persuasive exposition which he poured forth with tremulous haste in the eighteen months following. Delight at being solicited by the head of Christendom breaks out in hyperbole, not to be wondered at: he is uplifted and cast prone; that his littleness and multiple ignorance, his tongue-tied mouth and rasping pen, and himself unlistened to by all men, a buried man delivered to oblivion, should be called on by the pope’s wisdom for wisdom’s writings (sapientales scripturas)!

The word “expenditures” touches one horn of Bacon’s dilemma. He is a Franciscan; therefore penniless; and, besides that, apparently under the restraining ban of his own Order. The pope has enjoined secrecy; therefore Bacon cannot set up the papal mandate against the probable interference of his own superiors. The pope has sent no funds; sitting in culmine mundi he was too busy with high affairs to think of that.[620] And now comes the chief matter for Bacon’s apologies: his Beatitude misapprehends, has been misinformed: the work is not yet written; it is still to be composed.

In spite of these obstacles the friendless but resourceful philosopher somehow obtained opportunity to write, and the means needed for the fair copy. And then in those great eighteen, or perhaps but fifteen, months, what a flood of enlightenment, of reforming criticism, of plans of study and methods of investigation, of examples and sketches of the matter to be prepared or discovered, is poured forth. Four works we know of,[621] and they may have made the greater part of all that Bacon ever actually wrote. With variations of emphasis, of abridgement and elaboration, the four have the one purpose to convince the pope of the enormous value of Bacon’s scheme of useful and saving knowledge. To a great extent they set forth the same matters; indeed the Opus tertium was intended to convey the substance of the Opus majus, should that fail to reach the pope. So there is much repetition and some disorder in these eager, hurried works, defects which emphasise the dramatic situation of the impetuous genius whose pent-up utterance was loosed at last. The Opus minus and the Vatican Fragment are as from a man overpowered by the eagerness to say everything at once, lest the night close in before he have chance of speech. And when the Opus majus was at last sent forth, accompanied by the Opus minus, as a battleship by a light armed cruiser, the Opus tertium was despatched after them, filled with the same militant exposition, for fear the former two should perish en voyage.

Did they ever reach the pope? We may presume so. Did he read any one of them? Here there is no information. Popes were the busiest men in Europe, and death was so apt to cut short their industry. Clement died the next year, and so far as known, no syllable of acknowledgement from him ever reached the feverishly expectant philosopher.

A few words will tell the rest. In 1271, apparently, Bacon wrote his Compendium studii philosophiae, taking the occasion to denounce the corruptions of Church and society in unmeasured terms. He rarely measured his vituperation! His life was setting on toward its long last trial. In 1277, Jerome of Ascoli, the General of the Franciscan Order, held a Chapter at Paris, and Bacon was condemned to imprisonment (carceri condempnatus) because of his teachings, which contained aliquas novitates suspectas.[622] Jerome became Pope Nicholas IV. At a Chapter of the Order held in Paris in 1292, just after his death, certain prisoners condemned in 1277, were set free. Roger Bacon probably was among the number. If so, it was in the year of his liberation that he wrote a tract entitled Compendium theologiae; for that was written in 1292. This is the last we hear of him. But as he must now have been hard on to eighty, probably he did not live much longer.

There seems to have been nothing exceptional in Bacon’s attitude toward Scripture and the doctrines of the Church. He deemed, with other mediaeval men, that Scripture held, at least implicitly, the sum of knowledge useful or indeed possible for men. True, neither the Old Testament nor the New treats of grammar, or physics, or of minerals, or plants, or animals. Nevertheless, the statements in these revealed writings are made with complete knowledge of every topic or thing considered or referred to—bird, beast, and plant, the courses of the stars, the earth and its waters, yea, the arts of song or agriculture, and the principles of every science. Conversely (and here Bacon even gave fresh emphasis and novel pointings to the current view) all knowledge whatsoever, every art and science, is needed for the full understanding of Scripture, sacra doctrina, in a word, theology. This opinion may hold large truth; but Bacon’s advocacy of it sometimes affects us as a reductio ad absurdum, especially when he is proceeding on the assumption that the patriarchs and prophets had knowledge of all sciences, including astrology and the connection between the courses of the stars and the truth of Christianity.

There was likewise nothing startling in Bacon’s view of the Fathers, and their knowledge and authoritativeness. Thomas did not regard them as inspired. Neither did Bacon; he respects them, yet discerns limitations to their knowledge; by reason of their circumstances they may have neglected certain of the sciences; but this is no reason why we should.[623]

As for the ancient philosophers, Bacon holds to their partial inspiration. “God illuminated their minds to desire and perceive the truths of philosophy. He even disclosed the truth to them.”[624] They received their knowledge from God, indirectly as it were, through the prophets, to whom God revealed it directly. More than once and with every detail of baseless tradition, he sets forth the common view that the Greek philosophers studied the prophets, and drew their wisdom from that source.[625] But their knowledge was not complete; and it behoves us to know much that is not in Aristotle.[626]

It may be that Bacon was suspected of raising the philosophers too near the Christian level; and perhaps his argument that their knowledge had come from the prophets may have seemed a vain excuse. Says he, for example:

Possibly one is here reminded of Abaelard, and his thought of Christianity as reformatio legis naturalis. Yet Christ had said, He came not to destroy, but to fulfil; and the chief Christian theologians had followed Augustine in “despoiling the Egyptians” as he phrased it; the very process which in fact was making the authority of Aristotle supreme in Bacon’s time. So there was little that was peculiar or suspicious in Bacon’s admiration of the philosophers.

The trouble with Bacon becomes clearer as we turn to his views upon the state of knowledge in his time, and the methods of contemporary doctors in rendering it worse, rather than better. These doctors were largely engaged upon sacra doctrina; they were primarily theologians and expounders of the truth of revelation. Bacon’s criticism of their methods might disparage that to which those methods were applied. His caustic enumeration of the four everlasting causes of error, and the seven vices infecting the study of theology, will show reason enough why his error-stricken and infected contemporaries wished to close his mouth. The anxiousness of some might sour to enmity under the acerbity of his attack; nor would their hearts be softened by Bacon’s boasting that these various doctors, of course including Albert, could not write in ten years what he is sending to the pope.[630] Bacon declares that there is at Paris a great man (was it Albert? was it Thomas?), who is set up as an authority in the schools, like Aristotle or Averroes; and his works display merely “infinite puerile vanity,” “ineffable falsity,” superfluous verbiage, and the omission of the most needful parts of philosophy.[631] Bacon is not content with abusing members of the rival Dominican Order; but includes in his contempt the venerable Alexander of Hales, the defunct light of the Franciscans. “Nullum ordinem excludo,” cries he, in his sweeping denunciation of his epoch’s rampant sins. As for the seculars, why, they can only lecture by stealing the copy-books of the “boys” in the “aforesaid Orders.”[632] “Never,” says Bacon in the Compendium studii from which the last phrases are taken, “has there been such a show of wisdom, nor such prosecution of study in so many faculties through so many regions as in the last forty years. Doctors are spread everywhere, especially in theology, in every city, castle, and burg, chiefly through the two student Orders. Yet there was never so great ignorance and so much error—as shall appear from this writing.”[633]

Bacon never loses a chance of stating the four causes of the error and ignorance about him. These causes preyed upon his mind—he would have said they preyed upon the age. They are elaborately expounded in pars i. of the Opus majus:[634]

Therefore they think the true the false, and spend their time and money vainly, says Bacon with many strainings of phrase.

“There is no remedy,” continues Bacon, “against the first three causes of error save as with all our strength we set the sound authors above the weak ones, reason above custom, and the opinions of the wise above the humours of the crowd; and do not trust in the triple argument: this has precedent, this is customary, this is the common view.” But the fourth cause of error is the worst of all. “For this is a lone and savage beast, which devours and destroys all reason,—this desire of seeming wise, with which every man is born.” Bacon arraigns this cause of evil, through numerous witnesses, sacred and profane. It has two sides: display of pretended knowledge, and excusing of ignorance. Infinite are the verities of God and the creation: let no one boast of knowledge. It is not for man to glory in his wisdom; faith goes beyond man’s knowledge; and still much is unrevealed. In forty years we learn no more than could be taught youth in one. I have profited more from simple men “than from all my famous doctors.”

Bacon’s four universal causes of ignorance indicate his general attitude. More specific criticisms upon the academic methods of his time are contained in his septem peccata studii principalis quod est theologiae. This is given in the Opus minus.[636] Bacon, it will be remembered, says again and again that all sciences must serve theology, and find their value from that service: the science of theology includes every science, and should use each as a handmaid for its own ends. Accordingly, when Bacon speaks of the seven vices of the studium principale quod est theologia, we may expect him to point out vicious methods touching all branches of study, yet with an eye to their common service of their mistress.

Evidently, this first vice of theological study infected the method of Albert and Thomas, and of practically all other theologians! Its correction might call for a complete reversal of method. But the reversal desired by Bacon would scarcely have led back to Gospel simplicity, as may be seen from what follows.